After less time than I expected, I’m working toward the conclusion of my Heart: The City Beneath game. As it turns out, everyone really dug the vibes of the world we built and the game as a whole, but no one other than me and a couple of my more experienced players was ready to handle the much more open-ended nature of the game’s mechanics. I’ve been struggling a bit myself, partly due to the distance between sessions over the last couple months and partly because we’ve wound up way more focused on character arcs and overall story than the punishing Stress and Fallout system of Heart really allows. With a couple exceptions (one of which I tend to discount offhand because of the unique situation of the player character involved), most of the players wouldn’t want to see their character die. They’d be disappointed if they came to any other end but achieving their Calling or exiting the game via a Zenith ability, so I was holding back a bit. We were also all incredibly new to this game as a whole and didn’t really set ourselves up for success when we were starting out. After all, Heart is incredible for one specific type of game and its a rough hack for any other type. You don’t need to use all the horror stuff, of course, since you can freely make up your own fallouts and describe things however you want, but the game is built for selfish characters bent toward goals that end in either horrible self-destruction or some kind of horrible destruction of something else. Without those, the whole system starts to feel a bit off.