Post-APOCALYPSE #2: The Death of Tags

October 12, 2026

At the end of the first post in this (intermittent, barely-started) series, I mentioned I wanted to talk about weapons (or specifically armaments), systems, and enemies. All of them changed in the same way: I got rid of tags.

The initial approach #

This is how I was using tags, initially. For as much as I’ve fully turned around on them, the tags in LIGHT were actually a thing that drew me to the system! So I took that idea and just ran with it as far as I could.

Armaments and Enemies #

An armament in APOCALYPSE FRAME looks like the following:

• Sniper Rifle: 2 dice, 3 Harm, Far, Stationary
• Carbine: 3 dice, 2 Harm, Close/Near, Burst, Mobile
• Plasma Blade: 1 die, 5 Harm, Close, Energy, Piercing, Charge

Which is to say, it’s a combination of:

• Dice rolled. (See the previous post re: rolling dice.)
• Harm dealt. (This is the point of most attacks.)
• Range. (Close is in the same hex¹, Near is one hex away, Far is two away, Extreme is three.)
• Tags (italicized, obviously our focus here).

Tags are things that add distinct effects on attacks. For example, the ones above are:

• Stationary: +1 die if you haven’t moved this round.
• Burst: +1 Harm if you roll a 6.
• Mobile: +1 Harm if you’ve moved at least two range bands this round.
• Energy: Ignores Armor.
• Piercing: Ignores Shields.
• Charge: +1 die on your first Attack with this Armament this round.

And enemies work the same way for Attacks (thought they also have generic “Actions”, more on this later):

Velite

2 Vigor

Attacks:

• Light Sniper: 1 Harm, Far, Deliberate, Stationary
• Backup Handgun: 1 Harm, Near

Actions:

• Duck and weave
• Take a careful shot
• Launch a spotter drone

Systems #

Systems are a little different. A weapon or enemy attack does one specific thing, but systems are much more diverse. Because of that, some of them have tags, but some don’t:

• Sniper Cannon: Deal 3 Harm to a Far enemy.
• Railgun: Deal 4 Harm to a Far enemy. Ignores shields. Limited.
• Shield Generator: Gain 2 Shields.
• Plasma Cannon: Deal 3 Harm to a Near enemy. Energy.
• Targeting Radar: Your Attacks this turn gain +1 die. Limited.
• Pulse Laser: Deal 2 Harm to a Near enemy or 1 Harm to a Far enemy. Energy, Efficient.

Advancement #

Advancement’s so easy. Get a new tag! Get two new tags! Some special tags count as double! Some tags are bad so they count as negative! Couldn’t be simpler or more elegant.

On paper.

The price of “elegance” on paper #

The system I’d come up with made it very easy to write down a statblock and, in theory, make it a little better. But what are the downsides?

Keep that tags spread open, you’re going to need it #

Let’s say you have an armament with 3 tags.

• Do you know what those all mean by heart?
• How about if you upgrade it twice, adding 2 more tags for a total of 5?
• How about if you add two more AND a drawback tag, for a total of 8?
• At every point in that process, do you know how each of those tags interact?

Each tag isn’t that complicated but holy shit, that’s so much going on. And this is one weapon! You have at least 2 of those and at least 2 Systems, which can all be just as complicated!

A tag is a tag…right? #

The thing about tags is that no matter what armament or system they’re on, they have to work the same and be at about the same level because of how upgrading works. This has a lot of knock-on effects.

• Each tag can be on any armament. You can put a scope on a sword. This means that each tag has to exist completely without context.²
• If each tag has to be about the same, you have to be very careful about what any of them can do, because otherwise there’s an extremely obvious set of choices for armaments or upgrades and then 90% of what you’ve written might as well not exist. This means their effects have to be restricted in a very specific way, especially given that there will be multiple in effect at once.
• The best tags are always going to be the most boring and reliable ones. This affects both tag AND armament design because an increase in base Harm often means one attack now takes out a new class of enemy (in particular 2 to 3, 4 to 5).
• For Systems instead of armaments, tags are even MORE limited in how they can be deployed. Offensive systems can be anything from AOE to single-target to more subtle condition-bearing effects. Support systems do anything from movement to defense to helping other Aces. How do you design a generic effect that can attach to any of that? A lot of them are kind of generic as a result.

What am I even looking at? #

One of the most useful things I did in this redesign process was to make a point of writing out what each armament and system did, in plain language. I’m going to write out one of those. Pop quiz: can you get a mental picture of what each of these weapons is from the description? Answers in the footnotes.³ (I’m also just going to spoil it later because I want to make further points on this matter, so guess while you can.)

1. 4 dice, 2 Harm, Near. Once per round, gain 1 Tension when you take out an enemy.
2. 2 dice, 3 Harm, Near. Once per round, regain 1 Vigor when you take out an enemy. +1 Harm if your previous Attack was with this Armament. +1 Harm when used at maximum or greater Tension.
3. 2 dice, 4 Harm, Close. +1 Harm when used at maximum or greater Tension, and +1 die if you started your turn with maximum or greater Tension. +2 Harm at maximum Vigor. You take +1 Harm from enemies for the rest of the round when you use this (this effect stacks with itself).

The thing about constructing an end product out of a bunch of little kinds of bonuses is that you quickly lose the plot once you need to make it any level of complicated. And you do need to make it a little complicated, because the alternative is that people just go with the most boring combination of accurate and does harm possible, and also this is a game that really wants to have a ton of things to pick a loadout from.

Non-Tyrant enemies feel kind of limited #

Any given enemy just doesn’t really have an identity as a result of this: there’s only so much you can do with a combination of these tags. I can tell the difference between anything presented here but I would bet most players don’t, especially given that they mostly interact with enemy Vigor/defenses rather than attacks.

Editing this was an absolute nightmare #

This is very tertiary compared to the rest but: It was no fun to edit any armament or system entry as a result of this. I have a high-double-digit-rows, 3 sheet spreadsheet I made in 2022 to double check everything that I still think about. It was awful.

What am I doing instead? #

So tags had to go: they’re the cause of most of those issues. But in many ways they’re a load-bearing pillar of how they were set up. So what’s the goal instead?

Armaments #

As mentioned, step 1 was outlining every Armament I had and seeing if they added up to anything. And the thing is, a few of them did! Some of the less, well, transformed ones needed retooling due to the rolling changes but that’s fine.

I had 18 available Armaments in 1E at the start of the game. I narrowed it down to 12 for the 2E starter list, and then subtracted a few to add new ones. Each of those 12 has a pretty coherent identity. In addition, because of the way it’s all set up, I can do more interesting things with them. A lot of tag effects just became weapon effects, and as a result of knowing that they wouldn’t go beyond that weapon I could make them stronger. For instance, the Handcannon and the Gatling Cannon above (I told you I would spoil it!) are at this present time (prior to any further messing around):

• Revolver: 3 dice, 2 Harm, Melee/Near. Regain 1 Tension when you defeat an enemy with this.
• Gatling Cannon: 3 dice, 1 Harm, Near. +1 Harm for every attack you make with this until you do anything except attack with this or until the end of the turn.

Their more “interesting” traits were emphasized and the 1/round limitations were taken off, which is only a reasonable move because I know exactly how those effects exist in context of things like dice, harm, and range. The result is weapons that feel powerful and meaningfully different.

Backup Armaments #

They don’t exist anymore. If you forgot they existed when reading about 1E’s implementation of armaments above, well, you’ve figured out why. The juice-to-squeeze ratio was no good.

Systems #

The good news with Systems is that they were already a little disparate, but they also needed a little focusing. I also had 18 Systems and I also compressed them down to 12 - some by combining function (Shield Generator and Shield Projector became one thing, for instance) and some by just eliminating them. When picking which ones to keep vs eliminate, I made a point of trying to keep the most interesting/distinctive ones: Railgun stays (4 Harm to an enemy at far, pierces shields, can only use it once a round) while Sniper Cannon (3 Harm to an enemy at Far) goes, that sort of thing.

One thing I wanted to emphasize more in the second edition was size: mechs being light, medium, or heavy should feel like it matters more. The most obvious way I did this was by making each System do something a little extra if your mech’s a particular size, encouraging players to kit out in interesting ways. Movement tech (afterburners, etc) does better if light, support systems (the aforementioned Shield Generator, for instance) and energy weapons (both directed and rail) do better if medium, and conventional weaponry does better if heavy.

I also (mostly) got rid of fuel-efficiency abilities (the Efficient and Holdout tags) because they dominated for the very apparent reason that using something more than once is usually better than using it once but it’s a little better.

Enemies #

The biggest improvement, in my opinion, is enemies. I ditched the generic actions because in my experience they don’t add much when there isn’t much to them - experienced GMs don’t need them and inexperienced GMs don’t know what to do with them. Instead, I gave every enemy 3 meaningful/distinct actions AND a unique trait; enemies can Move (to a Near location, or Far if nothing’s around) and take one action. So for instance, that Velite above is now:

Velite

2 Vigor

Evasive: Takes -1 Harm from Weak Hits.

Actions:

• Sniper Rifle: 2 Harm, Far. +1 Harm if it doesn’t move before using this.
• Pistol: 1 Harm, Near. The Velite can move to a Near zone afterwards.
• Scout: Add a Drone at its zone.

-1 Harm from Weak Hits means you’re likely to want to use a Careful Attack or System to take them out, which means you have to either use a stronger weapon or more resources to make sure it sticks.

This of course also extends to Prime enemies, which have traits that can drastically change how you interact with the battlefield, and of course a fourth/stronger action to be used when it’s on its last legs:

Centurion

8 Vigor, 1 Armor, 1 Restoration

Tactics: The first time per round an Ace would activate an enemy, activate a second enemy. If there are multiple Centurions, this applies the second time, third time, and so on.

Actions:

• Hasta: 3 Harm, Melee. +1 Harm if the Centurion doesn’t move first.
• Machinegun: 1 Harm to all Aces at a Near zone.
• Rally: The Centurion and all Republic mechs at Close, Near, or Far regain 1 Vigor.

At 0 Restorations, may use:

• Railgun: 4 Harm, Far. Bypasses shields.

(As a side note, I also put in more of an effort to make the non-Republic factions feel more fleshed out and “real”. Republic, Claw, and Wayfarer⁴ all now have light, medium, heavy, and Prime⁵ options so they all feel like they’re mostly on similar footing as far as complement. Independents (formerly Survivalists) have light, medium, and prime as well as two kinds of infantry.)

Advancement #

So without tags, how does advancement work now?

Well, now we have a set of armaments and systems with more clarified roles, where commonalities are a matter of function rather than explicit facet. What if I chose things that emphasized that weapon’s role?

Each Armament and System now has two upgrade paths. I tried to make them both distinct from each other AND distinct from other kinds of upgrades. For example, that Revolver’s upgrade options are:

• Short Barrel: +1 Harm on Risky Attacks
• Long Barrel: +1 die, but no longer targets Melee range

And that Railgun’s upgrade options are:

• Shortened Rail: You may use this at Near as well.
• Fragmenting Rods: Enemies in the same zone as the target take 1 Harm.

Upgrade paths are exclusive, so you have to decide what in particular an armament can be doing better for your playstyle. Maybe it’s fine to lose melee range in favor of more reliable hits/good hits with that extra die, or maybe you have defenses such that mostly using risky attacks makes sense in exchange for more reliable takedowns. Maybe you need the range flexibility, or maybe you want that AOE.

Thus far in my testing, this has all worked out pretty well. It also gives me a lot of room to expand for horizontal advancement: more armaments and more systems is easier when everything’s kind of custom anyway.

Next time, we get into the Frames themselves. (Or at least the main 9.)

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