Heart Mechanics Deep Dive

 Heart: Role Playing You Can Feel

Link to the full rulebook Here.

Heart was created with one thing in mind. How could we get the story richness of D&D without all the chaos and tedium of dice rolling? Being dice-less and thus not relying on that randomness for fun was a core principle when designing how players would interact with the world. We wanted the barbarian to always be able to smash a door, the rogue always able to sneak, and the wizard always able to cast their spell, assuming nothing else was affecting them. Along with that, we also wanted people to feel when they got hurt, not just fight and fight until they hit 0 HP and suddenly went unconscious. It took quite a bit of tolling and scratching our heads in order to really get a hold mechanics that could meet all these demands, but eventually we succeeded.

Table of Contents

The Mechanics

• Action Point System
• Character Stats
• General Skill Checks

• Combat and the Mortality System

• The Mortality System
• Person to Person Combat
• Beast Combat
• Beasts
• Armor and Flexible Checks
• Puzzle Checks       

The Mechanics

Action Points System

Each character has a base set of 10 Action Points for which to perform whatever skill checks they wish within the world. This base pool can be modified by whatever stats are involved in the check both positively and negatively. Other conditions like being Bashed or being on lower than max health can also negatively effect this base pool of points. If a character has zero or less points after calculating all these factors, they cannot perform the given skill check. Alternatively, if a player would have their base 10 Action Points reduced to 0 at any point, they're considered unconscious.

I established this system because we needed something that would above anything be flexible. We needed players to be able to interact with the world in any way they could imagine and use our mechanics to facilitate that. However, we also wanted a system that would be consistent, more consistent than dice are in a normal table top RPG. Allowing players to choose exactly how many points they wanted to put towards a specific facet of a task allows for that level of control, while the DM holding all the cards and solely knowing exactly what the difficulty of a check was still kept the outcome from being completely determined before starting.

The Mortality System, that parallels this system, is what I came up with to provide a better sense of realism. I'll talk about it more later, but basically, the lower your health, the less you're able to do things, a.k.a. the more your Action Points get lowered. This provided much more tension to combat and really pulled back the bloodthirsty nature players can so often have, given that even small wounds could lower their effectiveness at everything until healed.

Character Stats

Characters have a total of 9 stats split into three subcategories of Body, Mind, and Soul. Players use these stats in whatever skill checks they want to perform and modify the available points for that check accordingly.

• Body
• Power
• Endurance
• Finesse
• Mind
• Analysis
• Focus
• Awareness
• Soul
• Instinct
• Empathy
• Resolve

The base stat number is 5, giving +0 modifier to whatever check it's involved in. 6 is +1, 4 is -1, etc. 

(Insert example of character stats on a sheet)

A character that's newly made should have a total modifier of +2. This means that if all the modifiers from all 9 stats are added together, they should total positive 2.

These were the stats we agreed on to try and best cover all the bases of talents that can make up how well someone performs an action. Wordy I know, but basically we just wanted to have all the combinations we needed to have any action a player wanted to perform covered. Originally there were stats like "Stealth" but we soon realized that we could break that up into more parts to better describe what a player was doing when they were trying to be stealthy.

Skill Checks

Skill checks are a players main way to interact with the world. Skill checks are usually comprised of two or three stats and they all apply their modifiers to a players base AP pool before they attempt it. Then, if they've got at least 1 AP, a player splits their points across whatever stats are involved, attempting to match or exceed the points for each category as set by the DM. For example, if a player wanted to perform a Sneak check, they'd use Finesse, Analysis, and Awareness.

The Mortality System

Alongside this system we came up with, what we like to call, the Mortality System. Basically what was laid out was that as a player took damage to their health, they would start to lose points from that base 10 pool until at 1 HP they'd be knocked out (having lost all their base Action Points) and then die at 0 HP. This way, a player would actually feel when they got hurt by an enemy and feel it for awhile until they healed. We of course needed a combat system to work with this, and that came along shortly afterwards.

Combat (Against People)

Funny enough, we, for a brief moment, considered just having attack and defense as stats for a combat check. As any seasoned developer might realize, that's like taking scissors out of "Rock, Paper, Scissors", except in this case it was even worse. As it turns out, if you make two people split attack and defense with the same amount of points and then compare the checks (i.e. having attack over your opponent's defense causes damage) players do the same damage to each other. Every time. No matter how different the checks are. I laughed a lot finding that out in the first playtest.

What we settled on was a system of three scores, Attack, Defense, and Positioning. Each round players would invest the Action Points (AP) they had available into those three scores in secret and then compare them once they had decided. Damage would be calculated and then the next round would start, repeating until one player lost or chose to disengage. The first two stats make sense and are probably obvious: Whatever points you have in Attack over your opponent's Defense equaled damage to them. The third stat was were the real fun came in. The idea came partially from a mobile game I saw on some random video I was watching where you could store up to 4 points for use in the next round. The mobile game put that low cap on it and also didn't compare it to anything, so those were things we needed to change for our game, but it has a similar principle, changing the amount of points each round. The way we made it was that the Positioning score of each player was compared and whoever had the higher score was given the difference in points for the next round. If you put 3 points into Position and I put 5, I'd get 2 extra points to use in just the next round of combat. This gives a lot more fluidity to the whole fight and even a comeback mechanic for players who take the first hit and lose some of their AP as long as they were investing into Positioning.

Greater Combat (Against Beasts and Big Things)

In any general tabletop role-playing system you have to allow room for fighting fantasy creatures. Big werewolves, werebears, or owlbears my be on the menu. We could technically use the same combat system, but there's not much flexibility in terms of differing stats. A difference of 3 points can be a big deal in that combat system and is balanced based on people being pretty similar in physical ability. We can't give a big beasty 20 AP for combat because they could easy one-shot the player in any given round, and could even block all their damage while they do it. So, we either have to have to make beasts weaker so that players can fight them, or make players more powerful in order to fight bigger beasts. The former detracts from the experience of conquering a huge, powerful monster while the latter could easily make person vs person combat trivial. I wasn't a fan of either of those options, because I wanted both combat models to matter and have their own, separate feels and so I had to think outside the box and really dissect beast fighting.

Mulling it over and thinking on games that do beast fighting well, there were a few points that came out that I thought were key to pulling off the experience. Some points were pulled from the Witcher series, but other were pulled from the Dark Souls games, while others were taken from real world examples.

1. Beast fighting takes preparation in order to successfully fight a beast.
2. Fighting a big beast takes patience, waiting for the right moments to strike.
3. Beast fighting isn't as finessed as, for example, a sword fight.
4. Lots of tension based on how easily your foe can kill you, given the chance.

This meant I should be able to lengthen combat a bit and actually better hit the beast fighting feel. But how do you lengthen a round based system? I decided to add a whole new category for this system but created a two phase system within each round.

Each round of Greater Combat would be split into two phases. The first phase is the Information Phase and the second is the Combat Phase. Each phase uses a different check and provides the player with different benefits. The Combat Phase is similar to regular Combat, but I'll explain the Information Phase first.

Benefits a player can gain from succeeding against the beast in each of the stats:

1. They learn the name of the move a beast is using.
2. They learn if they are being targeted by the beast.
3. They gain additional action points for the combat round.

The Combat Phase uses Attack, Defense, and Movement (not the same as Positioning). When a beast engages in combat, it has a number of moves that are predetermined and have set stats for those moves. However, the beast has a smaller set of flexible AP that the DM can distribute as they wish. The key difference in this combat,  if a player does not at least match the beast's movement with their own, their attack misses. Attack and Defense work normally, dealing and preventing damage.

This change in how combat works was interesting and very necessary to make it as engaging as it is. In our initial testing, whenever the players found out who was the target of the beast, the others would simply dump all the points they had into attacking it, leading to a very stale combat round. With the movement mechanic, now players had to split their points between Attack and Movement in order to land the blow. Another development that was very important for this combat was the beast having a small, flexible pool of Action Points at it's disposal. This allowed for that risk/reward gameplay where a player could say, put more points into Attack hoping the beast didn't put any extra points into Movement. That uncertainty makes an enormous difference in how it feels to engage a beast and really is another pillar of the design in my eyes.

Another key distinction we rooted out early on in the testing was a players ability to discover if they are the target. Originally we had it so that if any player succeeded on this part of the check they'd learn who the target was, and that lead to more stale gameplay where one player would take up the role of always learning who was the target and everyone else would try to get as many extra action points as they could for the combat round. Changing to an individual by individual basis really put more choice in the player's hands as to how dangerous they wanted to approach the fight

Something that we learned more about later on and not directly related to this mechanic was the importance of having the boss/beast moving each round.

Puzzle Checks

Puzzle Checks are used whenever a player has to figure out a problem. Weather that's a riddle to solve, a door to unlock, or a strange contraption they're trying to open. The player has to complete a series of contested checks against the puzzle to see if they can whittle it down and eventually solve it.

The check itself uses Analysis, Focus, and Resolve and players use Concentration as their HP (Base AP + Resolve Modifier). Each stat functions as follows:

 Analysis: Counts as the number of steps to a puzzles completion. The player must exceed this value with their own Analysis to complete a step (Steps and rounds are not the same). Every time a player completes a step, the puzzle gets -1 to each of it's base stats (This also reduces the puzzle's usable Action Points).

Focus: Acts the same as Positioning does in combat. Whichever side has the higher Focus gains Action Points for the next round equal to the difference.

Resolve: Acts as Defense for the player and Attack for the puzzle. If the player has lower Resolve than the puzzle they take the difference in damage to their Concentration (Acts as mental HP if you will). As well, the puzzle gets freely usable Action Points equal to its Resolve stat to distribute on each of its checks.

The puzzle's skill check each round is equal to its base stats, plus its usable Action Points distributed at the DM's discretion. Once a player has completed enough steps to the puzzle to where the DM deems it is trivial, they can determine the player has successfully won the puzzle check.

If the player runs out of Concentration, the check is failed and they have to retry with -4 Concentration per attempt until they've had a full night's sleep.

For creating the puzzle check I really wanted to the player to feel like they were mentally struggling against a problem. I wanted to mimic the feeling of solving a puzzle cube, where you understand parts of what you're doing, but can get hung up; or when you get a few things to click in a row and the puzzle box seems to almost unmake itself. This system I think really nails those feelings. Putting the bulk of the difficulty up front really mimicked the puzzle feeling I wanted while the steps also varied the gameplay, making the mechanic feel unique and fun to play.