I leafed through the TTRPG Heart the other day. What caught my eye about it was its 'Beats' system of character advancement.
The idea, in brief, is that each character's 'Calling' -- which defines their motivation for being entangled in the strange world of the Heart -- provides a list of 'beats'. These are moments, whole scenes, or mechanical effects that contribute to the 'story' of that motivation. These are broken down into 'Minor', 'Major', and 'Zenith' beats.
So, for example, the 'Enlightenment' Calling -- those who seek hidden mysteries and knowledge within the Heart -- has beats that include the following: Minor
- Allude to the events that led you to seek forbidden knowledge to achieve an impossible task.
- Sell or sacrifice a D8 or higher resource to secure a secret.
- Release your shocking findings in a journal published in the City Above. Major
- Kill someone who is trying to stop you from claiming knowledge.
- Take Major Mind fallout. Zenith
- Find the final secret you have so desperately sought and use it to solve your impossible task.
- Find the final secret you have so desperately sought and destroy it so no one else can know of it.
Right away, I find this compelling just to read through -- it provides a very clear flavour of the gameplay and world of Heart (about which I knew nothing prior to this), of how the Callings differ from one another/the things they care about, and also a very specific hint at what play will feel like. So, as an establishing system, that's already really good. But that's not what the Beat system is actually for.
Each session, each character chooses two beats from their lists. They then tell the GM which they've chosen, and the GM is tasked with working elements that can help bring those beats about into the next session. This is a really strong, explicit feedback loop that makes GM prep clearer, and also changes the play experience, in a way I'll get to in a sec.
Players mark completed Beats to enabled character advancement and gain new abilities. They can only complete each beat in this way once -- no repeats. Minor beats are meant to be achievable within a single session. Major ones might take a few to truly set up or pay off. And Zenith beats are intended to mark the 'endgame' for that particular character, and pay off a whole arc.
There are many more Minor and Major beats that I excerpted above (and that's just for this particular Calling), but those are the only two Zenith beats. I think it provides a really nice, clear sense of story space for a character of this Calling, without prescribing one particular outcome.
The reason I find this so compelling is it makes explicit something I've only really learned implicitly in the past few years of GMing -- making players active directors of their own character's stories. That's not the only way of giving a PC a good arc, or telling a good story -- I take a lot of pleasure in figuring out what I think their arc should be, and I've seen it pay off really well when a player doesn't know how things are going to shake out.
But there's so much mileage that comes specifically from teaching players that they are also directing this story and providing explicit mechanisms to communicate that to the GM. Not only are you giving them a good arc and story, but the player knows the sorts of moments they are driving at. And that doesn't lock them down into a narrow set of options -- they can just as easily choose to work against or reject those moments when they arise, but that still happens within the context of an ongoing arc, and shapes its development from there.
A system like Heart's, where there's a specific mechanical incentive for doing this, appeals to me a whole bunch.
I think another effect of this is that it encourages clear communication of the table's creative goals. (See Kieron's newsletter for that player principle, among others.
I have not yet had the chance to leaf through the rest of Heart, but this is the kind of system that has me furiously wondering whether I have the time to run a game.