#thydungeongal

[cerinslair]

Heart Heist - Rules Assist the Story

This post by @thydungeongal made me want to talk about how I think my own game's rules help support the types of stories Heart Heist promises - stories of dramatic ensemble-crew heists fraught with intrigue, secret alliances, and inevitable betrayal in the name of romance. It's not just about stealing the target - it's about looking the hottest doing it in the eyes of your team's beloved monster patron!

For starters, the character's stats are also dating preferences, arranged in opposed pairs: Jock vs Nerd, Goth vs Prep, and Thicc vs Lithe. The aesthetics of these (purposefully tropey) dating preferences are directly tied to how the characters interact with the challenges of the heist, inherently connecting the heist elements to the dating competition elements.

Each thief begins the game knowing only one facet of the patron's dating preferences. The other thieves have the other pieces - information that each player wants, as it can be leveraged to win the game. This information can be bought, sold, traded, extorted, or guessed from the other thieves over the course of the game.

Unlike many other TTRPGs, Heart Heist is a game with a clear winner, placing players in direct competition with one another. A player wins the game (and the heart of their beloved patron) if their thief has more favor than any other surviving thief, but only after they have successfully pulled off the heist. If the heist is a bust, everyone loses! The primary way to gain favor is by appearing to match the monster's dating preferences as closely as possible.

Each stat has specific triggers that dictate when a thief's appearance in that stat increases. Generally, it is not enough to simply overcome a challenge - your thief has to succeed in a way that makes them look better than someone else!

But what if you find out your beloved monster prefers a stat you have a low score in? You're still incentivized to find opportunities to increase your appearance in that stat like any other thief, but it will be more difficult for your thief to upstage someone else in that stat. Not all hope is lost, however. For one, you only have to be the hottest thief alive. If someone is ahead of you, you may become keenly aware when they become expendable to your team's caper plans. 👀🔪

But there's another mechanic at play - once per heist, a thief can Fake it Till they Make It, allowing them to roll using their appearance in a stat instead of their score! Claiming small victories earlier in the heist can help you prove yourself when it really matters later on.

In addition to all the base mechanics, each type of monster the thieves might compete to impress has a different effect on the rules. The base patron included in the zine version is the dragon. Bringing weapons, armor, gadgets, and other items to help you on the heist costs favor. But you also need favor to win the game! The dragon doubles-down on only bringing what you need by rewarding bonus favor to the thief who brings the fewest items with them. In the full version, GMs will have several monsters to choose from to help fine-tune the group's desired experience.

All these mechanics incentivize and reward players for careful planning and making/breaking alliances. As they plot out their caper, thieves will look for opportunities to better their standings with their beloved monster while keeping a suspicious eye on their co-conspirators.

A well-designed heist will require a degree of teamwork. This, on top of everything else, discourages the players from just killing off the other players' characters straight away (that wouldn't be very fun). Not only will they need their help to accomplish the heist, but they have information that you want to use to win the game!

The combination of each thief starting with only partial knowledge of the patron's preferences, the mechanics of how appearances shift to earn them the monster's favor, and the fact that the thieves still have to successfully pull off the heist sets the perfect parameters for the sort of story Heart Heist aims to deliver.

[rampagingpoet]

I had a wonderful time at the first session of @thydungeongal's Rolemaster open table last Sunday!

My wood elf lay healer, Halamar, got his face savaged by weasels on the way to the dungeon and almost died. Wearing a helmet instead of a tiara might have prevented that, but his magic doesn't work when his head is obstructed.

10/10 will Rolemaster again.

[thydungeongal]

Wrath of the Righteous opinions! There was a fun little siege setpiece battle! It was fun and even somewhat tense!

[orimaswisdom]

[rampagingpoet]

Ah yes, Dungeons and Dragons. A game well-known for its consistent, complete, and immersive metaphysics of magic.

Where healing others with a touch works by summoning the power of Life from the Life Dimension, which is clearly Conjuration.

And harming people with a ouch works by summoning the power of Death from the Death Dimension, equal and opposite of the Life Dimension, itself also an Inner Plane. This is obviously Necromancy because it is spooky and has no connection to Conjuration at all.

Reading stories about people who thought they knew how magic worked in a world where magic does not work is not going to help with D&D - where magic works but each spell is its own individual rules object with no underlying mechanism.

No, you can't "do an Arcana check" to see if there's magic around. There's an actual way in the rules to see if magic is afoot, it's called the detect magic spell.

Also, ask me if you can do any kind of check again and I will bite your head off in real life.

[probablybadrpgideas]

Add Mormons to your game.

­

[rathayibacter]

thank fucking god im not big enough to have to interact with dnd people

[orimaswisdom]

Prisencolinensinainciusol is a certified hood classic

[rampagingpoet]

Dying in chargen also adds a "press your luck" element, which is an interesting tradeoff. For the most part older characters with more terms served will have more skills and therefore be more powerful than younger characters. Retirement benefits are also better the longer you last and the higher rank you achieve before retirement. However, every term brings a risk of death (and eventual aging penalties). If you're already in pretty good shape it can be worth dropping out to be a starfaring trader/adventurer "early".

it drives me insane that monsterhearts is treated as this pretentious avant garde thing by certain people who don't play games outside of 5e. it's an excellent game, it's very well designed. but it's ultimately a game with a straightforward unified mechanic, where you always know what your target number is, that uses one type of die, that emulates like... cw shows. it's extremely accessible and the way people who refuse to dip their toes past the D&D™️ talk about it you'd think it involved calculus like first edition traveler or some shit

[thydungeongal]

Musk apparently is considering the idea of buying hasbro to secure the rights to dnd. Thoughts?

I think it would be really funny if Musk managed to do to D&D what not a single "play another game" warrior could only ever dream of,

[thydungeongal]

"I just think a good DM can make it work."

Reply to a Discord post of a dm asking who to kick from a game where one guy wanted to run a shop, another a romantic adventure with a local princess and the third felt that rolling dice to decipher runes was boring and wanted some kind of minigame for it.

The fourth wanted to go into a dungeon and get some loot (as far as I can find this was also the dm's actual recruitment post or whatever)

Yeah like this is actually dire. This is what happens when people buy into the lie that D&D actually supports all kinds of play.

[thydungeongal]

sometimes i think about how one of the most common things excised from D&D-but-without-most-of-the-rules games is carry weight, which makes the bag of holding entirely worthless outside of bringing up the portable black hole fun fact. bizarre phenomena

It is funny yeah. Like, here we have an item whose very existence within the game makes it clear that this is a game that cares about logistics and carrying capacity (even though within the context of 5e carrying capacities are so huge they don't even become an issue) and then people will be like "Hmmm actually I like D&D but I hate logistics and resource management."

It is funny for the reasons you mentioned, like wow this neat magic item is only relevant when you play according to the rules, but also because it is one of the most apt examples of a disconnect between what the rules say you should care about and what people actually care about. And that's sad!

[rampagingpoet]

There's a reason one of the first ever cursed items in the game is an instant transition device - that was supposed to be a horrible and humuliating experience, something that "no one" would make on purpose except to fuck with anyone stealing their stuff. And out of character it's a punishment for knowing what a Belt of Giant Strength looks like without casting identity.

Not exactly the perspective of a caring, inclusive designer! And this perspective and presentation persists at least through the late 90s.

After this Gygax went on to say women are too bad at math to play RPGs just because for some reason they rarely liked gaming with him.

D&D is the Taylor Swift of TTRPGs by which I mean it's something with broad mainstream appeal and name recognition and also there are people out there who pretend it's gay

[thydungeongal]

He's correct

[thydungeongal]

let us not forget that brennan also published an article in which he explicitly argued "d&d 5e is the ideal system for me because it does not have any rules for the things I care about in a game, which means I can make them up myself"

Brennan is a funny guy, but he is also very silly about RPGs, basically coming up with post-hoc justifications for wanting to run mostly everything in D&D when the actual reason is pretty clearly that D&D just happens to be his comfort zone due to lack of familiarity with other games. He's cultivated a pretty good understanding of D&D as a game and its limitations and then learned to patch over those limitations, and then taken his patches as being the result of the game itself being good.

And like sure maybe for him 5e actually is the ideal game, but I think he is mixing up his personal familiarity with D&D with actual benefits of the system. But also idk, to me "I love D&D because of all the stuff it doesn't do" just sounds like. That he doesn't actually like D&D the game as it exists in the rulebooks?

[thydungeongal]

W/r/t "batman guy", while obviously that is a reasonable take I feel like there can be a sort of elitism presented by certain people in the space who have developed this sort of calvinist stance that The Popular Thing (5e) is inherently Bad, and thus they do tend to view people who (usually through no fault of their own as a player) end up playing mostly/exclusively D&D and/or Pathfinder.

Moreover, while obviously there are a lot of systems that support an ongoing campaign (Blades, VtM, or what have you) I would bet that very few people have run a Monsterhearts game that meets every week for years. Certain systems are just better at supporting an ongoing campaign, and those tend to be the more popular ones for a reason.

As someone who enjoys both D&D and other games I have very little sympathy for any argument that relies on evoking the specter of the nasty elitist indie RPG player: D&D is the most popular game there is, there is a huge community of people playing it and producing content around it; the self-consciousness about a diet of just D&D resulting in a myopic view of RPGs as a medium to me seems to arise out of a desire to get validated like one has a deep knowledge of the medium while just having a surface level knowledge of it.

Also, I feel the idea that D&D is popular because it supports longer campaigns has it all backwards. It is very easy to see that D&D's current popularity has very little to do with the game itself, because the way you'd hear people describe the appeal of the game it's either things that apply to all RPGs at large or things that can only be true if one has a very shallow understanding of the medium (i.e. "D&D can do anything"). D&D is the most popular simply due to economic realities, and very little of it has to do with what's inside the books.

And finally, games that support extended campaigns are a majority of games on the market. Like, games that support long campaigns are very much the norm. And I feel bringing up Monsterhearts here has the same energy as those "I'd rather watch a Marvel movie than a black and white art film from a country that's Slavic enough to sound weird but European enough for people not to call me racist for it" posts.