Quick thoughts about Heart's Resistances
After my Heart: The City Beneath game last sunday I was once again thinking about the simplest form of resource management and attrition, aka the progress track. In computer games you often have animated bars and in ttrpgs the most common occurrence is probably a number that goes down to zero or up to a certain threshold, but the main point is that it clearly indicates to the player that they have something to deal with before it reaches its end. I think Heart's implementation of this gaming staple is pretty neat, so I'm going to yap about it a little bit.
So Heart's Resistance System doesn't have a typical Hit Point counter, instead replacing it with the titular Resistances - the final evolution of Saving Throws - which are stress tracks from zero to ten that measure your grasp on some rather important things to you, such as blood, mind, echo1, fortune and supplies. Whenever you roll a failure, not only you fail, but you also add stress to a corresponding Resistance. Then, the GM rolls a d12 and if it doesn't beat your Resistance... Worse, more permanent things happen to you as well.
That all just seems rather mean2 and it might seem even meaner if you consider the game only has you succeed on d10 rolls of 8, 9 or 10. However, the neat part of it is that there is also a "success with a cost" result on 6s and 7s and you always know the cost: stress. That's right, there is no real consequence in the fiction as the "cost", you just take stress and the GM narrates some momentary dizzyness, a flesh wound or just a bad feeling about this. This means that you basically always have a 50% chance of success on anything (or more, if you have skills or domains to roll extra dice), but the consequences will eventually catch up to you.
I think Resistances are a really clever interpretation of the progress track since they abstract the idea of a partial success into a resource management problem. Not only that, it also gives your character sheet a lot of neat little indicators that make you think about what kinds of problems you can comfortably get yourself into, while also not handing you the full information since filling out the stress track is not what triggers the fallout. And I haven't even gotten to all the little abilities that let you switch around different kinds of stress and gain benefits from having Resistances emptied or filled. It is a slightly convoluted process with a few dice rolls involved, but I think it really supports the kind of story Heart is trying to tell and adds some interesting mechanical heft to the game.
I have more than once seen people complain about how games with partial successes feel like consequences are just piling up on your character and I really wish I could find these people and recommend them Heart. It directs the flow of the game towards more impacting failures and fallouts while also keeping the randomness that makes ttrpgs such fun.
anb
Echo is your resistance to the twisting weirdness of the Heart. Also, there is probably an OD&D hack somewhere using the Resistance system with stress tracks for death or poison, wands, paralysis, breath attacks, and spells, rods or staves. If there isn't, we're missing out on such a silly gag.↩
It should feel mean, by the way. Heart is a game about being a fucked up excuse of a person, looking for salvation in a cave made of flesh. It's quite fun.↩