William Nichols offered to explain this to me, and I thought I’d take the risk of starting the conversation thread here with a larger peanut gallery.
What exactly is so hackable about AW, that it results in all these great hacks?
My main stumbling blocks are in the class system. Each class has a unique list of ‘moves’ that others don’t. They also have a unique advancement scheme.
To hack the game, you don’t just make some changes to a common skill tree and then push some values around in a mostly mathematized self-balancing system (as you might with Cortex or Fate or Unisystem). Rather, you write classes from the ground up and then write entire rule systems unique to each class. And sort of balance it by feel, or by trial and error.
Obviously I’m missing something significant, because the community is full of great AW hacks, and there is a general belief that the system is easy to hack. Because there are so many hacks, I’m willing to concede that I must be wrong and it is in fact very hackable — but I need some help understanding how.