Hi there! As promised, v0.3 is done! This one was a more extensive change than v0.2. See the devlogs tagged as v0.2 -> v0.3 for more details on why I made any given change.

Resources

• A third resource, Ammo, has been added to Frames. Tension and Ammo are distinguished from each other as follows:
  • You may spend Tension to gain another action on your turn or reroll an attack. Tension is regained from Drops as usual (as well as from certain Build Traits). You can no longer use Tension to reroll Attribute rolls.
  • You may spend Ammo to use an Integral or Modular System. Ammo is not typically regained until the end of the mission.
• Resources on each Frame have been tweaked to account for this.

Attributes

• Attributes no longer govern attack rolls. However, they add to your Frame's maximum resources:
  • Drive adds to maximum Vigor
  • Speed adds to maximum Tension
  • Control adds to maximum Ammo
• For 3/6 kinds of Frame Damage, something that didn't take a roll now takes a specific kind of Attribute roll instead of asking for one in general.
• You can now set your Attributes to 2/2/2.

Traits

• Each Frame now has a Build Trait. In this release, this is either Light Build, Medium Build, or Heavy Build.
  • These tie into Vigor and Tension, further differentiating Heavy, Medium, and Light Frames.

Armaments

• Armaments now have a number of dice listed next to each. This is the number of dice you roll (barring any changes from traits, tags, conditions, etc) when attacking with that Armament.
  • Each Armament and Backup Armament was rebalanced with this (and general variety) in mind.
• Six new Armaments have been added, bringing the total to 18 Armaments.
• Some tags now do different things.

Systems

• Systems now use tags by default.
• Six new Modular Systems have been added, bringing the total to 18 Modular Systems.
• Some existing Modular Systems were altered.

Frame Damage

• Leg, Shoulder, and Core damage now indicate which Attribute gets rolled.
• In addition to the standard Vigor/Tension restoration and +max Tension, you regain 1 Ammo when you gain Frame Damage.

Other

• Changed the example round of combat based on the updated ruleset.
• Advancement has been tweaked slightly (you can now buy into non-random tag advancement earlier).
• Some enemies were tweaked a bit.
• I'm sure I did changed something I forgot to mention here.

Quality of Life

• Both Pages and Spreads are now available.
  • I may experiment with other formats for
• Rearranged where Frame information lives.
  • After descriptions, everything for each stock model Frame is simply listed out in one spread.
  • Traits and Integral Systems are listed in the next few pages.
  • At the end of the book, each Frame has two sheets: one that's a pregen stock model with Attributes pre-assigned and extra Resources pre-calculated (and what every tag/term does listed), and one that's empty (with dotted-line boxes for filling in your maximums based on your Attributes). Both have extra dotted lines on Tension (in a more faded gray) to account for Frame Damage.

I'm going to be rethinking the ACES HIGH content (at least the Ace-facing equipment stuff) based on these changes, but also I'm focusing on releasing my 36th Way SRD and that's going to happen first, so stay tuned.

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.

Hi there!

As noted in my last post, one of the things I'm changing in v0.3 is Attack rolls keying off Armaments. I'm going to dive deeper into that here, think out loud about the balance involved, and see where that gets us in general. There's a bunch of math ahead. You've been warned! I promise it's going somewhere though.

Dice and Probability

I covered this a bit in my first devlog about v0.2's Attributes. The most important part, though, is the probability for each number of dice (0 and 4 won't come up much, but mostly for comparison):

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.

Hi there!

Sorry for the radio silence. I've been working at ACES HIGH and also preparing a different project (to be announced shortly)! ACES HIGH is basically done pre-editing in its current incarnation. But "current incarnation" is the key.

I've been thinking about the core mechanics and I'm going to make a few major changes to how certain things work - something that'll take things further away from core LUMEN and lean a little more some mecha concepts I wanted to emphasize. I decided that it would probably be more confusing to release it as-is given that fact. So my goal is to release an update to the core book, and once those changes are settled, propagate those changes to ACES HIGH. I'll make a follow-up post detailing the concepts there.

Hi there!

Tyrants were the biggest reason I decided to fast-track this expansion over creating premade missions. If you'd been paying attention to v0.1.0, you might have noticed that Prime enemies got a downgrade between versions. This is because originally Prime enemies were supposed to fill the role that Tyrants currently fill. But as I playtested, I decided they needed to be their own thing. 

Hi there! In this post I'm going to be talking about the Campaigns section of the upcoming Aces High. Specifically, the mechanical bits: Crisis Advances and Moonshot Advances.

Crisis Advances

The idea behind Crisis Missions is that they're intended to add points of challenge and tension to an otherwise power fantasy-oriented game. But when the consequences are simply narrative, this can create a disconnect when the Aces' actions are otherwise unaffected by these encounters that are supposed to signify increasing danger to the place they call home.

Hi there! I'm going to both announce a supplement to APOCALYPSE FRAME core, tentatively titled Aces High, and also talk a little bit about one part of it. The supplement is going to be bundled in free with the core book because it contains stuff I feel is necessary to an experience that feels complete. (Also, it gives you an idea of what I'll include in future non-bundled supplements.) You can see my current overview spread for it below:

Hi there! As promised, I'm releasing an update to APOCALYPSE FRAME after some re-reading, testing, and thinking about the system. In addition to general cleanup, the changes are as follows:

Attributes

• Attributes for every character are now 3 in one Attribute, 2 in another, and 1 in a third. Between missions, you can swap your 3 for your 2 and your 2 for your 1. See the devlog here for my thoughts on the matter. Suggested Attributes for the 3 Arrow Frames have been altered to account for this.

Integral Systems and Traits

• L2-BRAWLER's Kinetic Discharge and H3-ANGLER's Net Launcher have been made slightly weaker. Kinetic Discharge in particular has had its downside made more apparent. I talked about this change a little here.
• M3-SENTINEL's Support Drones now takes effect at the end of the turn and affects the Ace as well. This is to enable the player to rely less on other people getting into position to get the effect (and hopefully reduces the need for intensive planning/quarterbacking ).

Armaments

• Shotgun and Machinegun gained Piercing. This brings them both to the same Harm/Tag parity that everything else is balanced around, gives more access to Piercing (previously only the Gauss Cannon had it) and makes attacking groups of Shielded enemies less tedious.
• Scoped and Sighted tags now only add +1 Harm if enemies aren't in the other two ranges.
• Aimed, Forceful, and Quick tags no longer exist. See here for more information. They've been replaced with 3 different tags (Critical, Distracting, Impulsive).
• Three Backup Armaments have been added: Shiv, Handgun, Revolver. These mostly come into play when the new Frame Damage option on a 4 forces you to replace an Armament with one (because it's been damaged). In addition to accessing them via Frame Damage, you can also choose to switch to one of these mid-Mission before or after making an Attack action. You can't switch back until after the Mission, though, so be careful!

Modular Systems

• Directional Reactor Vents now does extra 1 Harm (not 2) at half or less Vigor (not Tension) and ignores Armor. This separates it more fully from Metal-Piercing Blade and leaves mechanical space for both to compete. Previously, it was almost certainly better than Metal-Piercing Blade, and especially with L2-BRAWLER.

Frame Damage

• Frame Damage for 1-3 has been changed as described here.
• In addition, Frame Damage on a 4 now disables the Armament and forces a change to a Backup Weapon that matches one of its range tags.

The GM Turn

• During the Enemy Activation phase on the GM Turn, the first Activation per enemy per turn allows two Moves. This is a middle ground between one and two Activations per Ace (as discussed here) and allows enemies to do things like move into range and shoot in the same GM Turn without providing the potential for 8-10 attacks on a tactically inept party (bear in mind that any given enemy may only attack once per GM Turn).

Enemies

• Made some enemy Moves explicit to give a GM a ballpark as to what's appropriate.
• Added a few new enemies: one kind of Wildlife and four kinds of "generic" enemies that could be used in several circumstances.
• Loadouts for several enemies have changed.
• Prime enemies were rebalanced to have lower Vigor/damage. In general they've been changed to be less of a special thing for named characters and more of a general "leader" or "boss" style enemy (and guidance for how to use them has changed to match).
  
  As for mechanics for serious, named threats, well...stay tuned.

Enjoy!

Hi there! I’m going to talk about some changes to enemies, as well as two minor changes to Frame abilities.

Enemies

The biggest change to enemies is going to be the number of activations on the GM Turn. Prior to this, the GM would take a number of Moves on the GM Turn equal to the number of Aces. With the amount of tools Aces have at their disposal, however, this doesn’t end up being enough to make much of a dent relative to the number of Drops with a modicum of smart play. The solution is to double the number of Moves taken on the GM Turn. Given the restriction on any given enemy attacking more than once per GM Turn, this doesn’t have much of an impact on suboptimal play, but it makes sure something can happen. This needs more testing at high numbers of PCs, naturally, and Colossus enemies should be given another look given this change.