Session 33 - 3rd Bimester 684
Like WW said in her report, I introduced a few changes this time around, one of the main of which was letting characters with 1 heart call one another out. Previously on the Heart Engine an NPC needed 2, and the chance was Hearts minus 1 on a d30, not it's Hearts on a d50, which made some very unorthodox choices and encounters appear.
Another big change, like she said, was focusing on the studies of the characters, but also have my "background clocks" show up with more vim. I think I had made myself too captive to my procedures and wasn't putting enough events I just think would be cool or logical according to the actions of the PCs, such as "Oh yeah why is the abbey ok with a witch teaching here?" and things of that nature, so I tried dragging this more into the limelight too.
I also incorporated the "what are they talking about" table that WW had made, chopped it from d20 to a d16 and made certain entries exclusive to certain cliques - that didn't come up as much, but it did colour a lot of the encounters. Adding "complaining" to the list was inspired by my recently reading Mansfield Park and taking notice of what were the conversations about, and a lot of them are people complaining about something or someone else. As always, I fare much better when given a spark rather than improvising out of the blue.
My last trick, which was already present in the game but did not survive the last system shakeup, is having professors influence the character's behaviour. It is my hope that this will result in a "if Muhammad doesn't go to the mountain, the mountain comes to Muhammad" situation; if the players are intent on bottling up their feelings and having brooding characters, their professor WILL attempt to beat that out of them, spiritually.
Overall, the pressure is off for me as I don't feel the need to create another elaborate fantasy adventure scenario for the summer, and that's possibly the most welcome change, as it means I can focus on the parts of the setting I actually enjoy - the city of Gabadona itself and its Kingdom Hearts 2 vibes.
I took poor notes on the actual recap of the session and don't think it's very fun to recap them, so I won't. My personal favourite encounters I came up with were Corina asking Cora out only to serve as a lookout while she flirted lesbianly with the librarian's assistant, Sister Illuminata; as well as Sylph asking Fiorello to wingman him because he didn't know anyone who also knew Hokuao (even though all of the students of his year did).
I still think hanging out with too many NPCs at once makes the Heart Engine run slower than I wanted to, and despite my efforts I still think I could do better with the focus on the classes, but I can't quite define how just yet. Something about the "Study" action being singular bothers me, or how there's no interactivity with professors when, at least in my university experience, I ended up learning a lot more about the professors than anyone else just because they were the ones talking for an hour and a half every day. Even if I can't think of anything, though, the changes made are quite good enough for me, and like WW I feel my interest in Hearts Aglow renewed to an extent.
