I ran what will probably be the final “downtime” session of my Heart: The City Beneath game. I put “downtime” in quotation marks because it was supposed to be a rather low-tension session that quickly became anything but that. Sure, our Descent Into The Rotting Heart campaign was split into two groups (last session, two party members stepped into a Fracture and the other two decided to stay in the haven adjacent to the Fracture), but they were both heading for some rest, some healing, and what was supposed to be a little bit of setup for their final delve. Instead, the party outside the Fracture went on a violent rampage that went so much better than it had any right to go, thanks to it being pretty much normal violence against our two tankiest characters while the group inside the Fracture started out following the program and then one of them quickly devolved into a series of bad roles and fallouts that not only sealed the Fracture off from the rest of the world but doomed their character to a cursed, ironic end. I’d planned to keep the session short, in the one to two hour zone, since I was super exhausted and didn’t want to tax myself, but then we wound up using the full length of the session instead. It was wild from start to finish and, in my opinion, the first time I, my players, and Heart were firing on all cylinders.
Continue readingTabletop Roleplaying Game
Roleplaying Magic Item Effects In Dungeons and Dragons
Last night, during the “every so often on Thursday when enough people respond affirmatively” Dungeons and Dragons campaign I play in, one of the other players commented on how reckless I was playing my character. I was a bit surprised they’d said anything, since I’m playing the party’s tank, a Barbarian with a super high AC and Hit Points to spare, but I had slowly been escalating my character’s behavior over the last few sessions. I’d gone from looking out for my allies to jumping straight into danger and even trying to get eaten by creatures large enough to do so. I had a logical explanation for all of it, most of which centered on my character’s ability to remain at a single hit point instead of falling unconscious if I passed a fairly easy constitution saving throw that got a little bit more difficult each time I made it. Behind that, though, I actually had a different reason for behaving this way at all and I finally got to spill the beans when this player started commenting on the fact that my character was betting his soul that he’d be alive after the pit fiend that he was face-to-face with had “died.” The Pit fiend didn’t take the bet and I got to explain that I was doing all of this reckless, ill-advised stuff because my character (known to the party as Sir B. F., which only one of them knows stands for Sir Biscuit Fluffington since he’s a Wizard’s cat who was awoken to consciousness by ambient magical energy and transformed into a large, beefy Cat Man when he got transported to the world we’re in) had a magic item that made him immune to fear effects. He was literally incapable of being made afraid and I decided to take it a step further by making him incapable of feeling fear.
Continue readingPreparing To Dive Back Into Heart: The City Beneath
Just in time to prepare for our upcoming session, I’ve finished running all of the smaller one-on-one sessions for all of my players from my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath. I feel like I’ve managed to at least partially maintain the game’s tension and even add to it a little bit by giving each character some focused attention (to move their personal plot forward) and by keeping up a steady (if small) stream of information in the Discord server I built for my this group. I still (as of writing this) have a lot to do to finish preparing for the session since I actually know what the group is going to do ahead of time for once, but it’s work I’m genuinely excited to do since I’ve figured out how to tie the stories of all my players together in this moment. Maybe not permanently (the improvisational nature of our game makes that impossible to claim with any confidence), but enough to give us a major inflection point in the overal game as we walk up to and past what might actually be the halfway point of this campaign.
Continue readingCelebrating The Holidays In Heart: The City Beneath
Well, there won’t be my usual “Descent Into The Rotting Heart” post this week. We didn’t play last weekend, so I have no new story of adventure, horror, and the prices of each to share. What I do have is some thoughts about my approach to creating a “holiday special” since our next session was going to be on Christmas Eve and our previous session was in the middle of Hanukkah, both of which are major winter holidays and very good reasons for my players to not attend a session of Heart: The City Beneath even if I don’t really celebrate either of those holidays myself. So, instead of starting the next leg of the game and having to stop it partway through a Session for at least twice as long as usual, I’ve decided to take advantage of the fact that the party has gotten split up to do a bunch of smaller one-off sessions with each player. It will also help me solidify the narrative since we’re now about twenty percent of the way through the first (and possibly only) arc and I need to start pulling some of the threads a bit more tightly than I have been up to now. I’ve got a pretty solid base for what I think is going to happen and I’ve sprinkled in enough stuff for each of the players that I THINK I know where they want to take their characters’ stories, but it never hurts to solidfy this stuff hand-in hand with my players [the time between writing and posting this has proven this instinct to be correct since one of my player’s goals for their characters are super different than what I expected].
Continue readingMy First Session of Heart: The City Beneath Is In The Can
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.
Continue readingWe’re Finally Starting Heart: The City Beneath Next Session
We finally finished The Ground Itself. Our final ten showed up as our second draw and then, as we wrapped up the game, I moved us into talking about what our first session of Heart: The City Beneath would look like. I checked in with my players, asked about some thematic stuff, and then pushed us into talking about characters and how to tie all the excellent worldbuilding we’d done to the systems and nouns of Heart. While Heart was in our minds the whole time we played The Ground Itself, we were still using a bunch of the nouns that I’d come up with for the core worldbuilding proposal, not to mention the plethora of nouns we produced in our game, so we had to slowly work through the mechanics of Heart and lace the disparate elements together. It required some careful work, since we were also pushing through character creation at the same time, I had a hard out an hour before our session was typically done, and I had some other stuff going on that was distracting me, but we got through most of it. I’m sure there’s plenty more that will need to be done on the fly as we play, but that’s just part of the game. Can’t have it all built out beforehand or else we’re not leaving room for us to play the game!
Continue readingThere’s a Lot of Creative Heart in My Heart: The City Beneath Group
Session 0 of the Heart: The City Beneath game went pretty well, I’d say. We got through the initial stages of character building, which has gotten us all pretty much on the same page as to what we’re expecting to see in-game. We talked through a bunch more stuff that might have made it into the Line and Veils list, since everyone now knows the sort of stuff that this game might introduce, but wound up not adding anything. I think I did a pretty good job, through my (just for the vibes, since they were originally produced for a very different game system) setting documents and explanation of the game, of setting the expectations for the group when we picked the game, since no one was surprised by what they found in the book. After that, we talked through our characters a bit more specifically, did a little bit of work to figure out what they’re all about, and then talked through the kind of game we want to play, the stories we want to tell, and what world we want to explore. It was a pretty thorough Session 0, if I do say so myself.
Continue readingI’ve Been Playing A Lot of Pathfinder, Actually
As I’ve continued to learn how to play Pathfinder Second Edition, partly because I already bought the book and partly out of a dogged desire to find the fun in a system that some of my friends enjoy immensely, I’ve begun to slowly see the patterns and rules underpinning it. I know I’m fairly late to the game, especially with the revised or remastered version of PF2e coming out sometime soon (maybe later this year, if what I saw was correct?), but I can see why people like it. Systems within system. Slowly stacking benefits as your character gains levels, eventually giving you massive numbers for everything you do and making you incredibly capable of some absolutely devastating actions. When the Fifth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons said “what if we kept all the numbers within an expected range so that very little is impossible if you’re lucky,” PF2e said “What if everyone got absolutely banana pants numbers and you could eventually do a whole bunch of stuff super well if you built your character right, but only a few things at a time because there have to be SOME limits?”
Continue readingPathfinder Second Edition Is Frying My Brain
I’ve now played two sessions of Pathfinder Second Edition with this new group of people and I’ll have to say that, so far, I’m not impressed. The group is off to a bit of a rocky start, most of which can probably be explained away by varying levels of comfort with the game system we’re playing, most folks being new to the virtual tabletop we’re using, and the as-yet unsettled group dynamics we’re all seeing. I’m also not entirely sold on Pathfinder 2E yet. There’s plenty of crunch and a ton of customization, but it’s been incredibly difficult to adapt to the rules and the way things are explained in the various texts of the game. The only reason I’m doing better than the other players and the GM (at least, as far as I can tell), is because I’ve made a habit of studying linguistic patterns in writing and language (not to mention that I studied literature in college and am good at interpreting language). I write a lot and I do my best to be aware of how Authorial Voice influences writing, which translates pretty neatly to understand the patterns of specific types of texts. Most games I’ve played were written in a way that made it as easy as possible to understand them, so I’ve rarely connected this skill to my ability to read and understand a tabletop game. Pathfinder, however, was not written to be easily understood. It has all the exacting lexiconical precision of a legal document but without the helpful definition of terms section.
Continue readingCrunching Into Pathfinder 2E
While I’ve been packing, most of my free time (aka, my breaks) has gone towards learning Pathfinder Scond Edition since I’ve joined a group as a player. We had a session 0 two weekends ago, which accounted for most of my Saturday breaks during my main packing weekend, and our session 1 is this upcoming Sunday. To be honest, learning PF2E has been more mentally draining than packing has. Not even dealing with the “box of things I don’t want to think about” was as draining as my regular dives into the incredibly dense rulebook and mechanics of the system. It is a very complex game full of proper nouns, what feels like an overwhelming number of character creation options, and an overlycomplex path from character ideation to final creation. I understand that this is probably not as true as it feels right now, since I’m learning the system as I’m trying to get ready to play it (and I remember just how incredibly obtuse and confusing learning to build characters in 3.5 and Pathfinder First Edition was back when I first played in 2010), but it is still more of a headache than I expected.
Continue reading