Revisiting Themes and Destiny in Hammercalled

I know I've been going through a lot of really minor project updates recently, but I'm ramping up work to get Hammercalled ready for Segira: 1985 and then have it go smoothly down the road.

Today I took a second look at themes and destiny to really get them where they need to be.

A player noted that Destiny doesn't really feel like a valuable resource for pushing the story along. The reroll wasn't a guarantee, and the powers it provided weren't doing that much to really give a character much of interest narratively that couldn't be made up for with other things.

So I decided to go through and tweak things.

Destiny now offers an instant, best-possible, success on any action. This is, of course, something that has its limitations: an action must be possible for this to work. The rare rate of acquiring Destiny is also important; it does not automatically refresh, so it must be used where it is significant.

The rerolling opportunity is now part of the theme system exclusively, and only happens when a character does a thematically appropriate action.

This gives more of a boost to choosing those actions, and it applies immediately to the action. We used to say "significant and successful", which was a bit of a delayed reward, but now you can use that reroll on the action itself, which gives a much better possible outcome: "I want to do this thing that will further the plot, so I can roll twice." works better than "I did a thing to further the plot, now I can... uh?"

As always, I can always use people testing Hammercalled, and if you've got any thoughts on themes and destiny, or on our games in general, feel free to let us know in the comments!