this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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i've played a bit of "the heart" made by the same people, using the same system and largely compatible (from what i've heard) with "the spire" but that game is naturally a lot shorter (it's concerned with what your character wants and finding it so after like 10 sessions, pcs started either dying or leaving the adventuring life behind
i heard about the spire but sadly never got around to playing it; what do you like about it? how "deep" are you in the TTRPG rabbit hole?
I have actually played a one-shot of Spire years ago. Five sessions or so, I think, so I wouldn't necessarily say that the Heart is shorter.
From what I gather, Heart is focused on dungeon crawling, while the Spire is less combat-focused in general, and its main focus is working towards an anti-colonial revolution.
What I do like about Spire is, first and foremost, that it isn't focused on dungeon crawling, and allows for making characters that have nothing to do with combat in general. I also like the themes of the classes, the setting, some motifs (the Firebrand class has an ability called 'the Means of destruction', which I remembered on a recent reread).
However, the Spire does have things that I consider to be issues for myself. Or, rather, it has one significant issue that does bring the system down in my eyes: the way characters take stress feels kind of unavoidable, and there don't seem to be any sort of interesting ways to go around that. I can't make a clever plan, for example, to outplay a rival organisation in a way that avoids damage, for example, as I will just be hurt in some manner on anything short of a standard success - the dice will always be the sole arbiter of this, and not thoughtfulness.
And yeah, I used to be fairly deep when it came to TTRPGs.
Also, since my recent obsession with the system started, I did cook up a concept for a Masked spymaster character.
yeah, spire does seem like the wet dream of "the urban campaign"; as time went by i came to value more the games that don't suddenly pause to play a kinda mid combat miniatures game "in-between all the roleplaying"
as for stress, systems will often have some way of weighing the players down, to kind of ask them what's important enough to them that they're willing to take a gutpunch for it
funnily enough, i am interested in "getting back into GMing" which i have done only under duress years and years ago but kind of wanna start doing again