So I love the Zelda inspiration for ICRPG hearts. Also, I like magic as a d8, and just running guns as magic, ranged weapons. I am thinking about making hearts be 4 hp (sort of like hit dice) instead of 10, and doubling the number of hearts everything has as written (so each 1 is now 2 , and what was 10hp is now 8hp). This would do a few things:
On a paper character sheet, printed or inked Hearts can visually fill in by quarter with pencil, like the red disappears in Zelda. Then the pencil can be erased with healing.
Hearts can be more adjustable and acquired more often, like after every dungeon/adventure, along with the other loot.
D8 Magic effort can still one-shot a standard, two heart thing.
Starting humanoid types could have 3 basic levels, weak=1, average=2, and tough=3, for 4hp, 8hp, and 12hp respectively.
Another effect is that assigning hearts of effort to can start lower and be fine tuned a bit more (when used).
I also like the idea of maybe starting with 3 hearts, which is what link does. Perhaps that is more of a ‘mode’ these days. 3 could be ‘beginner’, 2 could be ‘gritty’, and 1 could be ‘hard mode’. Thoughts?
I like it! I think, for me personally, I would go with 5hp per heart if i were going to change it at all. But I also prefer magic being the D10, and its easier to erase tally marks on a character sheet than colored in hearts.
I like the idea of quarters.
Personally I use 6hp per HD. D6s are the dice I have most of, and they can be stacked up into small towers, so it’s easy to place them next to the minis to track damage.
Plus 2 HD (12 hp) is close enough to one HEART to not bother with conversions.
In your case, 2 or 3 hearts of 4 hp would work well too!
I like the idea of using the quarters of a HEART as HP — it reminds me of “clocks” from Blades in the Dark. Also a big fan of awarding 1 HEART after every dungeon — it could give a nice feeling of progression.
Perhaps different character classes could start with different numbers of HEARTS: 3 for “martial” classes like fighters, 1 for “squishy” classes like wizards, 2 for everybody else. This would have to be balanced with a class’s other abilities, of course; it could help balance the fact that MAGIC uses a bigger die than WEAPONS do, if that’s something that bothers you.
is now 2