So leading on from my previous post about hearts and damage reduction, our brainstorming lead us to thinking of hearts as a universal modifier for a lot of things, the question this time would be… can you use hearts as a target modifier?
For example, you set the room target 12, so any action or tasks in that room would need to beat a 12 to succeed, usual stuff we’re all familiar with. Now what if you encounter an Agnar in that room, could you use it’s rating as a target modifier? In effect you now need to beat a 15 to hit the Agnar.
If you have several different monsters in the same room, you can still have various targets to hit, but it would keep a very simple formula to creating those targets that everyone at the table would still understand. So now, a goblin Agnar rider in the same room would only be a 13 to hit.
To expand on that and continuing on from hearts as HP, hearts could also represent a monsters armour or natural protection and be used as damage reduction, so at first the mighty Agnar reduces all incoming damage by 3 because of its naturally tough hide, but as the heroes wear down the Agnar, they start to destroy its natural protective hide, opening up vulnerable parts, a good well placed blow knocks the Agnar down a heart, now it’s damage reduction is only 2 as it’s hide is less effective, another blow chips away bone plating and another heart, making the creature’s defence only 1 now, as it becomes sluggish from the beating and easier to hit.
In effect taking HP, AC and DR and rolling them into a single stat that can be easily assigned on the fly to any monster the GM wants to create.
EDITED AND EXPANDED
Now let’s take things even further, after much discussion recently on this post by @Nimlouth regarding merging ideas and mechanics from ICRPG with Dungeon World, which seems very popular although somewhat problematic, my suggestion would be to introduce hearts as a target modifier for other tasks and actions too, resulting in the addition of degrees of fail/success much in the vein of PbtA games.
Imagine if you will, combat resolved like this:
Roll 1d20 try to beat the room target TN + monster hearts
If roll is under TN = fail, enemy deals damage
If roll is above TN but below hearts = you & enemy both deal damage to each other
If roll is above TN and hearts = you deal damage and avoid the enemies attack
So the margin of a partial success would scale with the power of the monster being encountered.
Now we can use this for more than just combat, tasks and challenges too, for example leaping across a broken bridge is a challenge.
Roll 1d20 try to beat the room target TN + hearts difficulty
If roll is under TN = fail and fall into the chasm below
If roll is above TN but below hearts = you make the jump across but an item from your backpack falls out
If roll is above TN and hearts = you easily leap across the gap with grace
Again so the difficulty in hearts becomes the margin for partial success. Also the range of partial success if lower so the GM isn’t having to make up consequences constantly as the majority of rolls fall mid-range like in PbtA, which seems to be a common complaint.