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.

Since one of the major ideas central to the design of the game is humanity in the face of inhumanity, this focus on selfish and self-destructive characters can make it a difficult idea to work with. After all, the characters you’re creating are flawed individuals–imperfect creatures–intent on pursuing their own ends, whatever those may be, and trying to maintain their humanity while they slowly become more and more inhuman is difficult even for people who are solely focusing on that aspect of the game. Throw in the difficulty of learning a new game and the difficulty of learning to do improvisational storytelling without the heavier framework of rules that games like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder provide and you can see how easy it might be for people to lose sight of what they’re doing with a character or how they’re supposed to go about doing it. During our conversation before our last session, as we discussed what we wanted to do as a group, the one note I got from multiple players, the ones who were struggling with directing their characters the most, is that they kept looking to their character sheet for answers when I asked them what they wanted to do and that their character sheet almost never had answers for them. After all, in Heart, you’re supposed to tell a story and let the developing narrative drive your character’s actions (or vice-versa, really, but that’s just more of the same) rather than figure out a way to best apply your mechanics so the Game Master can get back to telling you a story.

So, with one player dropping out due to becoming too busy to play multiple games, I’ve started pushing the rest of the party towards the end of this campaign. The player withdrawing from the game had already planned to change characters before ultimately deciding to withdraw, so she’s prepared to hit her character’s Zenith beat at the start of the next session and then withdraw rather than play her backup character. Everyone else will be hitting a landmark and picking new beats shortly after that (assuming they survive that long), so I’ve encouraged them to consider their own characters’ Zenith beats and moves so they can get the satisfying end they so desire. After our conversation, I’ve done what I could in the subsequent session to push their characters towards the conclusion to their stories that the players were interested in (for most of them, anyway, since one of them hasn’t really figured out where their character is going), so I think everyone’s in a good position to bring an end to things in the next few sessions. After that, we’ll figure out what we do next as a group since it sounds like everyone wants a more structured game.

Which, you know, is fair. Not everyone is built for completely making everything up as they go and figuring out what mechanics to apply along the way, so I shouldn’t force them to play a style of game they’re not up for. Still, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed since those style of games are exactly what I want to play. And sure, I can get that through Dungeons and Dragons 5e (which is what it sounds like we’ll wind up playing) since I’d been doing that for years before I stopped running it in early 2023, but I was excited to be playing games that were mechanically designed for that style of gameplay rather than one I’ve managed to shape into allowing me to do that style of gameplay.

Ultimately, though, I’d rather be playing any game than playing no game. We’ve got a couple months of Heart left, thanks to some upcoming scheduling issues and our rather slow pace through each Session, so there’s still time enough for me to find a game that is more mechanically detailed and that still provides my players with the structure they desire while giving me the narrative focus I want to continue trying out. I don’t know if such a game exists, but I’m going to look for it whenever I have the time and energy. After, you know, all the other things I have to spend a bunch of time on these days. Someday I’ll get through this ever-growing list of things I need to do and be able to slow back down to a more normal working pace in my professional and personal life, but it looks like it won’t be for at least a couple more months. Until then, though, I’ve gotta stay focused on making sure that I can bring this game of Heart: The City Beneath to a satisfying end for myself and my players. Which hopefully won’t be too difficult, but you never know. Satisfaction is a fickle target to a aim for. Just like open-ended narrative games.