Hi there! I want to talk a bit about one of the bigger v0.3 changes: Ammo. That is to say, I'm adding it. If you haven't read my initial 0.3 post  and my Armaments and Dice post please do! But to recap, Tension is being split into Tension and Ammo: Tension handles rerolls and grants extra actions, while Ammo is used to activate Systems. Tension can be regained by Drops (and by another method - we'll get there), while Ammo is either only restored upon return or during some kind of mid-mission supply cache discovery. So that means each Frame has 3 Resources, Vigor/Tension/Ammo, which do very different things.

The Value of 1 Resource

In my initial estimation for v0.1/v0.2, 1 Tension was worth 2 Vigor. The reason for this is simple: each System activation was worth about ~2 actions, and higher Tension meant greater control over how and when to use those System Activations. (If you’re wondering why I changed from default LUMEN’s move+action to two generic actions, this is why: the System abilities felt so strong that it seemed like Armaments were taking a major backstage when they only mattered once per turn, which was a shame to me because tagging is such a cool system.) More control over powerful, unavoidable actions that exist outside of the action economy in an equally renewable resource is very good! This is where those initial values came from: 10/3 Heavy, 8/4 Medium, and 6/5 Light leads to that counterbalance.

So let's compare that to the current situation:

• 1 Vigor's value is fairly obvious, so that's our baseline.
• 1 Tension's value is worth 1 action, very literally. That's part of where I got the idea!
• 1 Ammo is worth 2 Actions for much the same reason Tension was, but it's harder to get back than the other two.

These are fairly comparable! So that makes balancing Frame Resources a lot easier - we can pick a number and distribute Resources 1:1 from there. But let's talk about Systems first.

Systems and System Changes

So now that Ammo's a more precious resource, we have to reassess which Systems are worth spending it. (Keep in mind, spending 1 Ammo is worth 2 Actions, and you can get 1 Action just by using a Tension.) I considered each Integral and Modular system, and made some adjustments.  Well, it was the same adjustment, for the most part: the weakest links were usually support actions that were offensive and did 0 Harm or did a trace amount of Harm. So as a start I increased that Harm value for a lot of them or added Harm.

I'd made a secondary decision when revamping the Armaments that I wanted to go up to 18 Modular Systems: I really liked how loadouts were starting to look when every Armament was unique. To give myself a little space for this, I reversed a previous decision and added tags in for Armaments as part of default configuration. So instead of "This ignores Armor" wording, a System could just have an Energy tag and that would be that. This led to some interesting ideas - a few of them are alternate versions of existing Systems, in that they have a lesser generic effect but have various beneficial tags that help in other ways (like usability at 0 Ammo). 

Some of them were also split in function: Jump Thrusters (move to Near, 1 Harm at the start or end) were split into two (both still move to Near, but whether you deal Harm at the beginning or end is the split, and it's increased to 2 Harm - enough to take out a light or damaged medium enemy). I ended up with a total of 6 Support and 12 Offensive Modular Systems, with a 3/6 split for Integral Systems, which seems like a perfectly healthy split.

Does Ammo make 100% sense when applying it to support systems? Probably not. Do I care? Maybe. I’ll give it some thought.

Now that we've taken that into consideration, let's talk about default loadouts for resources.

Frame Resource Loadouts and Size

My first attempt at resources was just to add an amount of Ammo opposite the amount of Tension: so 5 Heavy, 4 Medium, 3 Light. But that meant Light had a major disparity. So to make up for that, I added 3 Tension to Light and 1 to Medium and subtracted 1 from Heavy:

• Medium: 8 Vigor, 5 Tension, 4 Ammo
• Light: 6 Vigor, 8 Tension, 3 Ammo
• Heavy: 10 Vigor, 2 Tension, 5 Ammo

It's a start. But keeping in mind that we're going to be adding Attributes to these later as well (for a total of +6), that's a little high. So I ditched these general values and started over.

I started with 15 to distribute: 14 as the "base" amount, with 1 reserved for customization by Division and Attributes added on top (for a total of 21). For a starting point, I decided what the lowest Tension and Ammo I wanted was: taking into account that both would have at least 1 from Attributes, I decided that the lowest Tension on a Heavy should be 3 (so 2 + attribute) and the lowest Ammo on a Light should be 4 (so 3 + Attribute). For bare-minimum amounts this isn't too unreasonable, and you'll get quite a bit out of having them that low (because it means 5 is spread among the other attributes). By default, it was also way too much of a swing between "impossible to kill" and "extremely easy to kill". I decided I'd rather pare the Tension disparity down, leading me to:

• Medium: 6 Vigor, 4 Tension, 4 Ammo
• Light: 5 Vigor, 6 Tension, 3 Ammo
• Heavy: 7 Vigor, 2 Tension, 5 Ammo

For that extra 1, I added it to Vigor for Sword Frames, Tension for Arrow Frames, and Ammo for Shield Frames. Differentiating Divisions' favored Frames was something I wanted to do before but it didn't really make sense before this. And after that, you'd add Attributes: 6 for a total of 21. This means that the practical range for each of these is practically:

• Medium: 7-10 Vigor, 5-8 Tension, 5-8 Ammo
• Light: 6-9 Vigor, 7-10 Tension, 4-7 Ammo
• Heavy: 8-11 Vigor, 3-6 Tension, 6-9 Ammo

That feels pretty good for Tension vs Ammo - I want them to have a similar number of Cool Stuff Spending Points - but doesn’t feel terribly different for Vigor.  So I considered how to emphasize Size, and I settled on Drops (or at least the act of regaining Vigor/Tension). In playtesting, I noticed that it rarely mattered what people's maxes for Vigor and Tension were after a few rounds - eventually it was much more about how much they had left, who needed some right now, etc. So I came up with a Trait for each Size that takes this into consideration:

• Medium: Before Drops are allocated, regain 1 Vigor and 1 Tension.
• Light: Before Drops are allocated, regain 2 Tension.
• Heavy: Before Drops are allocated, regain 2 Vigor.

This is a problem that the world's most popular RPG has in a lot of editions for HP, and various editions/variants on it have solved this issue by attaching different HP recovery values to different classes. 13th Age in particular comes to mind because I'd worked on an overhaul of it prior to starting APOCALYPSE FRAME - each class has a different amount for recoveries, so when they're asked to heal using a recovery, they get more out of it - Fighters get more out of healing than Wizards and so on. I considered leaning harder into the 13A recovery concept and having those traits instead double the appropriate kind of drop the first 1-2 times they received one per round, but decided that was way slower to sort out at the table and too reliant on having ~2 drops per player per turn.

So based on this, you have something that has a little more give and take. A Heavy is more likely to get risky with Vigor to avoid moving, while a Light is much more likely to burn hot on Tension to get another attack in or get out of range, because both know they'll get theirs back - but they have to rely solely on drops for the other, which informs what they'd rather be doing. All of them are roughly in the same maximum range now, and that's good: Division tendencies and Attributes aren’t the sole determiner but they’re a huge part and that feels right to me, offhand. (I might change it later though.)

This one was a little bit of a jump-around, so thanks for sticking with me. Hopefully next time I check in I'll have v0.3 ready.

Until next time!