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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8983275" data-attributes="member: 6785785">It’s hard to say for sure what’s going on here. I would imagine that it’s mostly due to the fact that it’s a convention game, which will almost always have a higher level of prep. But it’s also a case that Heart does generally involve more prep than Spire. That prep tends to be loosely structured in the form of Delves, as you mention, but these don’t require notebooks full of prep. That doesn’t mean a GM can’t do that amount of prep, though. I’d say it goes against the spirit of the game a bit… but again, convention play is different. The other big factor here is if you were using pregenerated characters of some sort, or did you make them at the start of the session? How were the Beats incorporated into play? How familiar were the players with the game? What kinds of classes and abilities were selected? It’s pretty different, actually. It’s more structured for sure. There’s a basic loop in place of Domain-> Delve-> Domain. But that structure and the mechanics that support it are designed to allow details to be determined during play, in response to what the players do and what they’ve indicated they want to see in play. It doesn’t prevent a GM from detailing everything ahead of time and prepping as much as possible. The principles in the GMing section tell GMs not to do that, but of course an individual GM can ignore that if they perceive a need. Like running a convention game. Or being a control freak. It depends, I suppose, on what we think of as system. I don’t know if you’ve read the actual book for Heart, but the GMing advice it offers would lead me to believe otherwise. The GMing advice is an important element of the system, in my opinion.But it’s more than that. Looking at the system itself and the way it’s designed… the synergy between the rules and the setting, like how the Heart tries to give people what they want in some weird way, and how players select Beats to cue the GM what they’d like to see in play… to the way Delves are structured, to class abilities… all of that stuff matters. Comparing it to a classic dungeon delve and you would see a surface similarity in the overall course of play… but the preparation would most likely be very different.</blockquote>

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