After so many months of preparation, it finally happened. I ran my first session of Heart: The City Beneath. As far as first sessions go, it was a bit rough at times, but considering this is the first time any of us played the game and was the first time our group was roleplaying together (since we never played our icebreaker game), I think it went pretty well. We may not have made it through the entire mission I sent them on in order to give them something to do as we all settled in to the game, but we made it through most of it. They killed a nasty beast, made it through their first delve, and started to repair a bit of magic integral to the Haven they were going to be passing through. We also learned about fallout, about stress rolls, about using the character sheet for Heart in Roll20, and about risky and dangerous actions. I’m hoping sessions will move a bit more quickly in the future, so I can attempt to stick to my goal of getting all five of my players through at least one beat per session (or one beat equivalent of progress since Major and Zenith beats take a bit more setup and work to be met than a Minor beat would). I know they’re all on track to get at least one met by the time the “session” has ended when they return from their mission, get paid, and rest up a bit, but I think it’s possible that my players might not bite at the opportunity for some of the less mechanically-oriented beats and I might need to help cajole them into it.

It remains to be seen, of course, but there was already a lot of cajoling and leading so I’m hoping I’ll need to do less in the future. Some of the players grasped the “toss subtlety aside” mentality that Heart suggests a bit more readily than others, but I think they were all getting the idea towards the end. The thing most folks struggled with was the less mechanical and defined nature of the game compared to something like Dungeons and Dragons. I had to do a bit of work to remind people that they’re supposed to narrate action, that they will always get their boosts from equipment as long as it applies to the skill they’re using. An example of this being a character had a bone dagger that inflicted a d6 of stress on an opponent, but the player couldn’t come up with a way that it would seem useful to attack the swarm of “bone mites” that was swooping towards his character. I told the player that, since he had the dagger and was using it in combat, as long as he uses the skill tag on the dagger (kill), I’d let him use the d6 even if he narrated an action that didn’t involve using the dagger, such as grabbing a large bone that had fallen on a player previously and using that to club them all out of the air as they flew at him. After all, I’m not here to punish anyone for not using their gear “properly.” I’m here to eventually break their gear so they can’t use it anymore when they roll poorly on a stress test and wind up getting a fallout that breaks their gear (which happened to one of the players this time).

By way of explanation about what all of that means, if you aren’t familiar with the way Heart is played, the entire game works based on the interplay of stress inflicted, protection reducing said stress, and the overall accumulation of that stress. For player characters, any time something bad happens (because they got a mixed success or failure on their roll) they will take stress in one of five types. Each of them have varying levels of protection to those five types of stress that reduces how much stress is inflicted on them when they mess up, see something horrific, or are hurt by a creature they’re fighting. Once they take stress, they add it to the specific type of stress it was (blood, echo, mind, fortune, or supplies) and then roll what’s called a “fallout test.” They do that by rolling a d12 and comparing the result to their current stress total. If the number on the die is higher than their total, there’s no fallout. If the number on the die is lower, then they fallout based on the type of stress they took and how much total stress they’ve got. Each fallout represents when the “bad things are happening but I’m fine” mode that is the accumulation of stress crystallizes into something specific and bad.

For example, the player character whose gear broke (an option I picked since the player had a beat that required him to undergo a minor Supplies fallout) had been shrugging off a few blows already, relying on his heavy Blood protection (a whopping 3, which is huge for a first session) to reduce the risk of protecting his allies and facing down this monster. Since the stress he took was the result of an attack, I narrated a quick sequence of actions that involved him leaping into the air, dropping his shield for a mighty two-handed attack, and then landing awkwardly on his shield in a way that bent it out of usable shape. Narratively, he’d used the shield to deflect at least one mighty blow, so his armored character landing on top of it was the last bit of damage it needed to break. Mechanically, since he was being so reckless with his stuff (and had signaled to me that he was interested in bad things happening to it using the Beats system), I described him losing track of his backpack as well. When he rolled his fallout test, the stress (a non-specific idea represented by him not being careful with his gear during that fight) coalesced into a specific negative effect in the form of his shield being rendered unusable. It’s a pretty slick system, though it’s taking some getting used to.

For my part, I only really flubbed one thing. I forgot that rolls against the creature they were fighting were supposed to be Risky until pretty much the end of the fight. Since the party rolled so many 10s, it would have made a pretty significant change if I’d remembered that. A lot fewer crits, definitely. Maybe more mixed results. They all rolled super well when it came to their actions, though, so it wouldn’t have been that different. I think there were only a couple of outright failures and more than half the rolls were complete successes. I did, intentionally, align their first adventure with skills and domains (the main methods for adding dice to the pool each player rolls when it is time to take action) that they had, so I expected things to go pretty well for them. Just not as well as they did. It was seriously a lot of 10s. It’s not like I wanted them to fail or anything, it’s just that some of them had beats for progressing their character that were the easiest to meet by them failing things and getting fallout. Things will get more intense in the future, of course, so I’m not particularly worried about it. I’m just going to need to come up with a better way of managing combat, especially when I take the kid gloves off and have the monsters start acting on their own. I left monster agency out of this first fight so we could focus on them getting used to the new dice and mechanics of this system, since I wanted them to have the space to think about their actions without feeling like any hesitation would result in the creature acting. In the future, I’ll be less restrained and I’m sure things will begin to pick up and feel more horrible (as they ought to, given that this is a horror game).

I’m excited to play again. I’m sure things will only run more and more smoothly in the future. I’m sure that, as we get used to the mechanics (of the game and the Roll20 character sheet), the gears will begin to spin more quickly. It might take some work for everyone to adjust to the more open-ended nature of this game, but I’m condifent that they’ll make the transition in time. After all, creativity is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. They more my players practice the on-the-spot imrpovisational creativity this game relies on, the better they’ll get at it and the better our game will be. Hopefully, as we play, I’ll also get better at coming up with names. That’s where I’m currently the weakest and my process for creating various Fantasy Names is not going to cut it for a game like Heart. They’re not creepy enough. I’m going to need to get my own practice in between sessions. That or make a list I can pull from. Regardless, I’m sure the game will only get better as we play and I hope that we’ll continue to have fun along the way.