As I've thought about what a Hypercast campaign would look like I realized that the direction I had set the the advancement up for it was wrong. My instinct is to make things difficult so that there is a reward for when the players achieve in the game.

In this case, I think that's wrong because Hypercast isn't intended for very long campaigns. So ideally, advancement should be very fast and you'd want the players to become highly competent very quickly.

You'd also want the players to be able to do things like buy starships, sell starships, get their own custom equipment, things that they want for their trips so that they felt more engaged in the game. To that end, I think some way for players to generate equipment is needed. I also need some way for there to be a reward in the end so I've added an advancement goal of retirement. 

I think this faster pace of advancement undermines the emotional impact that I was going for at the end of the sessions and for the general horror feel. A player could ignore the emotional pain that they went through if they're reaching a goal. I think that the fun of achievement is more important here then that emotional payoff though. I also don't expect wild levels of achievement since it's highly unlikely that anyone would play for months on end.

Players should see a very fast progression in their in their characters so they're excited to play the next session. They need to be able to increase a stat that made it difficult for them to handle their last session. I don't think that there's a real problem with super high stats in any event because there isn't a way for a character to have a perfect defense since creatures tend to be able to just attack them without any kind of interference. There's the defense move, but you can't have everybody defending or nothing happens. So there has to be somebody who's eventually exposed. A traditional system has to avoid unstoppable characters. I don't think is warranted in this case.

This has interesting implications for advancement. If you don't have to worry about runaway advancement, you don't have to worry about characters becoming too powerful so I'm going to make some changes to the game as it is right now. I'm going to speed up advancement and I'm going to try to generate some kind of method for players to define their own equipment.

That way they can have the tools that they want without waiting for acceptance from the GM. In this case, I think it's basically buying certain dice and then saying what action that it helps with. So it doesn't have to be complicated. And it doesn't have to have a million different uses. Or a million different edge cases where the rules have to support. It could simply be I want something that helps with defense and I wanted to do this much and I wanted to have these uses. We'll see where that takes us.