Heart-Breaker Synthesis Post

 Woe betide me, I find myself in a fey mood after reading others' posts. I really need to get less suggestable if I'm ever going to finish this labor of love. I read these wonderful posts over at Was it Likely's blog including their own wonderful ruleset and has me rethinking my resolution mechanics. Just as well, as I was reading over my "bibliography" I reread this gem and damn it here I am rethinking everything. 

The essence of my heartbreaker is playing vice-ridden thieves and thugs with hearts of gold. Its main conceit is about the contention between one's Vice that they feed with stealing and dungeoneering and the goodness that lurks inside their Heart under all that trauma. In fact, one of the main stats is literally called Heart of Gold. I put it right in the middle of the character sheet and everything!

So cute! I call it the HOG bc it's my fantasy heartbreaker and you can't tell me what to do. 

Otherwise, it's anyone's B/X OSR-ified retro clone with a roll under stats and an Oddlike to-hit system. There are 5 Heart Skills/Procedures you rank from 1-5 and that's how big your dice pool is for each Procedure. It has six unique saves (bc I love OD&D's so much) that are roll under on a D6 and rolling under your ability scores is called a Test which can be Hard (roll under half).  

But my favorite part, the part that made me want to write the damn thing is the Flaws. The Flaws are the three negative aspects of your character, the Vice, Hunger and Itch, that have kept your character alive:

        Vice is what makes the pain go away. The physical dependencies.

        Itch has how the pain presents. The traumas and trauma responses.

        Hunger is what pain makes you do. Like destroy, isolate and betray

Each one is represented by a playing card you draw randomly at character creation, which is anti-backstory. When you activate the Flaw you become more affected by it. For example, if your Hunger is Wrath, then you tap the card you must make a save to avoid being wrathful anytime the situation arises. While it is untapped, you have total agency. But be careful when you give in though, because your character may begin to act outside your control. Its fun! But why would you ever tap your Flaw?

Because each one holds a single D6 called Spite. You can spend Spite to checks notes... damn I've changed this a million times. Currently its "ignore negative outcomes"? What in the hell does that mean. Does this refer to saves? Damage? Wounds? Idk man it used to be "add the result to a roll" or "reroll" or "roll with advantage" but nothing ever stuck or felt right. Spite isn't something that empowers your character, at least not long-term. It's a survival mechanism. It's the behavior of hurt individuals that is sometimes useful for fighting monsters. Those are the same thing really when I introduce monsters into the game as symbolic of a problem.

Okay maybe the Heart of Gold section is better? Let's see right from the document:

"You are at war with yourself, a chrysalis in peril. Your most powerful resource is your Heart. Find and place an Ace of Hearts in front of you, and 1d12 upon it. When you would need to empower an attack, Test or Save, use this instead. To do this, tap the card, turning it sideways. It is expended when you choose one of the options below and you become Vulnerable afterwards, bearing your love brazenly on your sleeve. You may untap it later, when you are safe, fed or dead. 

• An Empowered attack can either cleave though multiple enemies or deal +1d12 damage to one. Evil creatures detest these attacks.

• An Empowered Test can either use D12 instead of a D20 or ignore the repercussions of a failed Test (the test still fails but you ignore negative effects as a result)

• An Empowered Save can either succeed automatically or be added to an ally's save.

• If tapped, you ignore the effects of a spell. If used to protect an ally, you both ignore the effects of the spell. 

Spent Heart is added to the XP Bowl and measured against unspent Spite. If it rolls higher than Spite when determining XP your heart is brimming and Threatened, ready to grow a size. If it happens again it grows in size, adding one die. If you gain new Hearts, they share this pool of dice. If you ever roll a 1 on this die, you're Heartbroken. It weighs one stone and one day you can let it go."

OK this is a little better.  Little bit less garbage. But the main issue is its not... how did Ms. Screwhead put it on her blog?

These mechanics "fundamentally distance the players from the fiction"

At the end of the day this heartbreaker is about Heart and the difficult journey of grappling with our own flaws in a non-binary system. Our Flaws including our physical dependencies never go away and frequently control us, but they aren't ever eliminated. I want to capture that feeling, the frustration and the triumph of the two in tandem. But tapping a card with a heart on it like a power up ain't it chief. And to some degree I don't know what is. 

Rules vs Design

I am tinkerer, no more no less. I tinkered with 5e combat until I got here, by own damn system, 80% yoinked bits from a million blogs, 15% hacks of hacks and like 5% ideas comma original comma good or bad TBD comma for sale never worn. While I'm happy with the system I have and it works ok from playtesting, it's not tight enough. Flaws feel tacked onto a B/X-esque chassis (they are) when they should be front and center and they don't compete with Heart the way I want them to beyond XP. That can be fixed with some better rules and not hiding apes. This goes back to Gorinich's post about Creeds. It would take some finagling (there are three tables of 13 flaws) but I think I could they could apply here:

• Wrathful
• Draw blood 
• Show mercy and restraint

         Instead of gaining XP from these actions you either gain Spite for the normal tendency and Heart for the bolded tendency. You can hold up to three Spite (one for each Flaw) or Heart equal to the size of your Heart of Gold (which goes from 1 to 5). I still need to determine what Spite and Heart do and that leads to my next point. 

The issues I mention above can be solved by rules but none of those rules will solve the issue I have with the fact that the rules feel to disconnected from the game world. They are in not diegetic yes but even more than that they don't feel evocative enough. And I think that is not a rules problem but a design problem. 

I've thinking a lot about Pyrrhic Weaselry and also Blades in the Dark and how they talk about fictional positioning. BitD is famously fiction first, as you will read ad nauseum online but often the actions you take in that weight don't feel like they have weight in the fiction and it was a hard curve for me to learn. One Wreck action could be a whole scene's worth of fighting and I suppose it's a "fictive granularity" that I'm looking for. Pyrrhic Weaselry seems to achieve that, where the inherent qualities of a character as well as their equipment and actions affect outcomes. The leap across pits because they are strong and they cannot if they are not, so they need to find another way. As far as this translates to my heartbreaker I suppose I want "emotional granularity". I want the players to consider the fragile emotional states of these characters. I do not want them doing kind deeds against their Creeds to power up before a fight add then press a heart button to add smites to every attack. That's akin to the paradox of friendship Zedeck Siew writes about that haunts me. You might argue that that's just a play style and to that I say phooey. You can write rules around games to make games about that thing. I just have to get the design right. 

Back to Blades, I've been thinking about Position and Effect and how it might be a good place to start. They are independent variables that can be summed up as "risk to you" and "what you get out of it". From their website, sniping an unalerted nearby gang has a Position of Controlled, (very little risk to you for taking the shot) and an Effect of Great; sniping an unaware target is gonna get great results. However, the second shot might be tricky when they see your position and scatter; now its Risky Position and Limited effect. This effects consequences and harm and so on and so forth. I like the structure. 

Pyrrhic Weaslry follows a similar mechanic after a fashion. An Intent is declared, and you must, in the parlance of Traveller, roll a 10+ to succeed. Whether or not the roll is even required is a measure of your traits, entirely qualitative. Dealing damage is a kind of Intent based on fictional positioning that you can either accept and compromise about, what I would call a kind of fictional parry or try to avoid entirely at the risk of taking the full Intent, what I might call a fictional dodge. 

I like both of these so here's some ideas I have:

• You have emotional positioning, the mental state of your glass cannon bastard. It's usually somewhere around "Risky" though I don't know what you would call that. Tense? Hurt? Raw? Not neutral, that's for well-adjusted peasants and priests and what not. "On Edge" maybe. At any rate, when their Vice is satisfied you're Chill and when you've been pushed over the edge you're "Craving" or perhaps more accurately "Desperate". While Chill, your predilections have no hold on you, complete agency. When On Edge, a save may be required based on your Creed. Once you're Desperate, all bets are off, your agency in tempting situations is gone! (Death to Agency!)
  
  And where Effect would go I think I want something along the lines of Deadly, Dangerous and Limited. A Deadly strike gives Mortal Wounds while a Dangerous one "only" gives Grevious Wounds. Limited effects are the cut and scrapes the OSR is obsessed with describing on a miss or near miss. 
  
  Rather than be independent of one another, I think these things should correlate closely. If you tap into a Flaw or consume your Vice, your emotional Position and Effect shift. You become Desperate (if you we're only On Edge before) but your Effect goes up. Think wounded animal, lashing out when its backed into a corner. If your Heart is in the right place, perhaps your effect can simply never be Limited. 
  
  
• Another idea I had already lines up with some of the rules I have was to make all challenges and tests Easy, Difficult or Hard with all skills being Cheap, Modest or Luxurious (in line with the rest of the game where everything falls into one of those categories and correlates to a D4, D6 or D12). Difficult Tests are your standard roll-unders while a Hard test is roll under half your Score and an Easy one might be 5+ your Score or maybe under half again (moot if you have a score higher than 14). I like the idea that dodging the blow of a powerful vampire is a Hard Test of DEX or alternatively having a Luxurious dodge skill and getting to roll D12. 
  
  
• In a peasant or magician's hands, all weapons are merely Dangerous and nothing short of certain Vices will change that. But in a mercenary's hands? Deadly. I like the idea of a fighter being able to shift combat related tests to their advantage, turning Hard maneuvers or attacks (against a vampire for example) into merely difficult ones, or impossible tasks into Hard ones with limited success. 
  
  [This actually similar to a series of posts from here I plan to do a post about I'll write next/later.]

Well that was a lot of rambling. Think I have some ideas I'll discuss later.