Blog 17: Narrative Hitpoints- The Most Painful Mechanic to Write

Heat is the mechanic we built the whole game around. It touches everything: Social Circle, Contacts, dice rolls, Deus Ex Machina, fights, City Creation, Character Creation; every system brushes against it in some way. If you’re doing something worth watching, it’s probably generating Heat.

Writing this chapter has been brutal. Not because Heat is unclear to us. It’s the opposite. We know exactly what it’s supposed to feel like. We just keep hitting the same wall: getting that feeling out of our heads and onto the page without losing something in translation along the way. Nailing both the tone and the mechanics has been harder than anything else in the book. This will be the most rewritten chapter. Hell, it already has been rewritten at least twice.

So here it is, stripped down:

Heat is what takes the place of Hit Points in Crime Drama. It is our approach to narrative hitpoints as opposed to HP based on your current physical health.

It’s the weight of exposure, consequence, and bad choices stacking up.

It’s not just the stress from cops or rivals. It’s why your family is growing distant, why your partner is locking the bedroom door, and why your kid is getting pulled out of class by detectives. It’s the feeling that the walls are closing in.

When your Heat maxes out, you’re written out. That might mean bleeding out in an alley, flipping to the feds for witness protection, or vanishing with a new identity and a duffel bag of cash. The story decides the details. You might show up again as an NPC. But as a player character? That’s your series finale.

Heat is both mechanical and narrative. It’s how the game tracks whether the world is reacting to your choices and actions. Sometimes, Heat is purely mechanical: for example, every failed dice roll adds to it. Sometimes, it’s a judgment call: the GM weighs what just happened and decides how much Heat that scene deserved. We’ve provided a solid framework for those calls, but we’re not pretending to cover every situation. The GM's judgment will factor in frequently and often.

This is part one of our series on Heat. And honestly? By the time we publish the last post on it, some of this may change.

Next time, we’ll dig into how your character's max Heat is figured out, how Heat builds, and how GMs can assign it when the rules don’t spell it out in black and white.