Hi there!

So as alluded to, I have some ideas about what I want to do next to core. I came to these conclusions both by playtesting the game (and by replaying Armored Core) to get a handle on what kind of feeling I wanted to capture. Right now AF is pretty close to LUMEN CORE in a few particular areas, and these changes would do quite a bit to push that further away. Let's get a bit weird with it.

Size and Resources

So right now Frames have two major resources: Vigor and Tension, which are pretty standard LUMEN. Light Frames have more of the latter, Heavy Frames have more of the former, Medium Frames have a mix. This obviously plays pretty well, because it's very close to LIGHT.

It's never really sat well with me for AF, though, and replaying Armored Core helped me clarify why. A resource point in a LUMEN game typically represents one awesome thing a PC can do outside of their typical actions (move/attack, two actions like AF, etc). However, that doesn't quite work in a mech setting. Ideally, Light Frames can do things like move around quickly and attack more, Heavy Frames are implacably raining down fire with enormous weapons, and Medium Frames are somewhere in between. So they should all have an equal-ish amount of cool stuff, it's just apportioned differently.

I've been thinking about two sets of non-Health Resources since I read the excellent PIONEERS, in which each PC has two resources: Impulse and Kit. Impulse is a measure of energy or momentum, while Kit is an abstract measure of loadout preparedness. I love this dichotomy! I love it so much that I'm stealing it.

Well, kind of: In PIONEERS, they're used in kind of similar ways to fuel powers of a specific type and are restored by drops (as per standard LUMEN). What I'm thinking of is a little different:

• Tension, the resource you should be familiar with, is now more constrained in scope. You can spend 1 for rerolls or to gain another action (Attack, Move, Sprint, or Interact) on your turn. It's restored as per current APOCALYPSE FRAME via Drops. (Light and maybe Medium Frames might also get a little passive regen before drops. This'll probably be counterbalanced by Heavy/Medium Frames getting some passive Vigor regen before drops.)
• Ammo (or maybe Munitions, or Fuel, or something else - I'm just going to call it Ammo for now) is the new resource. It's closer to old Tension: you can spend 1 to activate an Integral or Modular System. You might have guessed based on my Drops note for Tension, but Drops are where it differs: Ammo isn't restored until the end of a mission or unless you find some way to resupply in the field.

This has certain implications for Frame size:

• Light Frames are low-Vigor, high-Tension, low-Ammo - they can move and attack much more freely, and can avoid consequences from rolls more easily, but have less capability for heavy weaponry.
• Heavy Frames are high-Vigor, low-Tension, high-Ammo - they can't move around as much to avoid Harm but they have more capacity to unload on enemies.
• Medium Frames strike a balance between the two.

This will obviously have implications on a lot of things, like starting values and certain Integral and Modular Systems - there's going to need to be some re-balancing for various things and certain Systems (mostly those that provide movement) will need either replacement or a total change.

I mentioned consequences with Light Frames, because...

Attacks, Attributes, and Armaments

Attributes for Attacks never sat fully well with me in APOCALYPSE FRAME. They're great out of combat, but in combat every player I watched rolled whatever their maximum was, always. I tried to make this a little more interesting by tying Attribute sets to Armaments, but that mostly just constrains choice, and that's either not terribly meaningful or not terribly fun.

As in the last section, the distinction made itself more clear to me when playing Armored Core again: a lot of the things covered by Attribute rolls (hits, misses, consequences) are covered better by the weapon itself. Weapons can have properties that make them easier or harder to use effectively without trading damage - different velocity, different precision, different effective range, etc - and properties that make weapons that are harder to use effectively worth it, like higher damage, greater ability to pierce defenses, better rates of fire, and so on. This is the kind of thing that can differentiate weapons in the same class. (Armored Core ties a bit of this to Arms parts but I made a conscious decision to treat Frames as complete units rather than interchangeable parts so I'm not going there.)

The conclusion I landed on was to decouple Attributes from Attack rolls. Instead, each Armament has the amount of dice you roll listed in its entry, with less dice meaning the Armament will have more Harm/Tags. This also has a very helpful side effect: it allows for a lot more diversity among Armaments, which was something I'd flagged as a concern after some testing.

Do Attributes do anything in combat then? Well...

Attributes as Resource Emphasis

The three Attributes, Drive/Speed/Control, map decently well to our new three Resources:

• Drive is a measure of how forceful a character is. It maps to Vigor: higher Vigor allows a character to be less cautious, more direct.
• Speed is a measure of how reflexive and fast a character is. It maps to Tension: higher Tension allows more flexibility in movement and offense.
• Control is a measure of how thoughtful and prepared you are. It maps to Ammo: higher Ammo means you had the foresight and planning to stock up.

So my naive approach for the moment is adding the Attributes outright to your maximum Resource pools: thus, a character with 3 Drive, 2 Speed, and 1 Control would have +3 Vigor, +2 Tension, and +1 Ammo. This means that in combat, rather than Attributes mapping to description of actions, they map to the nature of actions you can take as defined by the expenditure of those resources. (I'll probably also re-enable 2/2/2 and 1/1/4 arrays, being split across the board or heavily slanted towards one of them feel like more meaningful choices in this paradigm.)

Those are my current plans, I'm going to give them a shot and we'll see how it comes out. Given the nature of the changes, ACES HIGH will come out after they're done and after it's been tweaked to account for them.

Until next time!