HEAT PART 2

So, let me cling to past me’s point. HEAT! central engine is it’s resources, so I’m going to break down both of the main ones! Before I do, we are going to be primarily talking about structured play, there is narrative play which is a little different, but for now you are just gonna have to trust me.

Heat: this isn’t the name of the game silly, this is your badass capacity! Whenever you take an action, you gain Heat equal to the difference between the total value of your skills, environment and equipment, and the difficulty of the challenge. When your Heat exceeds six, you leave yourself vulnerable to attacks.

Sparks: A Spark is a distinct piece of narrative control, it represents everything from a burning room, to pinning the enemy down with covering fire. You gain Spark’s from passing checks, and bonus sparks for exceeding the difficulty of a challenge.

Now you might be thinking “Brad, with your inelegant description it sounds like I am destined to hit my Heat ceiling and Overheat eventually!” You’d be right! If you insist on being cool always, you will eventually be attacked, this isn’t the end! You allow yourself to get Hit, which means an NPC gets a turn and you lose one heat..

You could also Cooldown, when you use a power1 you immediately clear heat equal to the strength of the power, and then at least one notable or several weaker NPC’s per player go. This is riskier, you do something cool and clear more than one heat, but could end up being put in a much worse position.

Now, Sparks are another resource you can use to make checks easier and take less Heat, which means whenever you succeed, you slowly draw closer to winning and make your attempts to win easier, but your Sparks get larger with every point you beat a difficulty by.

This means that your goal is to risk gaining more Heat by beating difficulties by a larger number and creating more Sparks to make beating difficulties easier, which means you are overheating and taking misses more. This creates a true action movie feel, where you do something cool and then antagonists get to do something cool, and then it repeats. This is HEAT! run through the finest sieve, a game where you get to be really cool some of the time, and build opportunities to be even cooler later on.

Read the game, make sure everyone is on board for it, and honestly, use the reference chapter as heavily as you need to, it was a great help to me and mine. Don’t be afraid to build and run a solo encounter to get a feel for the system, its easy and kind of a fun writing exercise.

HEAT! stands up well to being played slightly wrong, and I would avoid the easiest pitfall by internalizing how to use Sticky Sparks. The only other problem I ran into was remembering that Sparks decay every round of combat that somebody gains a mechanical benefit from Not every round, as I thought for a couple of rounds.

Characteristics could be another issue, but the book is laid out in such a way that they are clarified right after the big chart on them.

HEAT! stands against orthodoxy, it is a diceless game. This is a bold choice and one that raises eyebrows, a diceless action game? The fact that it works as excellently as it does, and won over me, a noted diceless disliker, is a credit to its design and means you should steal its willingness to challenge established rules.

You don’t need dice to have a helluva action game, so who really knows what you need in this art of ours? Try something weird, commit to it, and see if it sticks. I didn’t cover everything, so if this jogged your interest go support the Kickstarter, and see if there are any other wonderful ideas to steal.