Maintaining immersion in D&D, or pretty much any tabletop RPGs you care to mention, is among the most important (and difficult) things for a game master to manage. Every group finds a balance between in character roleplaying, tactical planning, and jokey table talk – but if you don’t stay focused, the story stops moving. One of the worst sticking points is simply travelling about; getting from one important place to another is often either jarringly instant, or a boring slog, with no in between. Yet somehow, Heart: The City Beneath – my group’s current indie TTRPG du jour – deals with this like no other game I’ve played, and it’s hugely refreshing.
If you’ve played Heart, you’re probably imagining that I mean the Delving mechanic, and yes, that’s one major way this game manages to ‘fix’ journeys. The RPG’s setting – the titular ‘Heart’ – is a dimensionally skewed hinterland of extreme strangeness. As you travel deeper, everything, right down to time and space, becomes warped by the unknowable, sentient will of the Heart itself. That means practically everywhere is unpredictable and potentially lethal, so journeying from one safe ‘Haven’ zone to another can rarely be sped up with a hand wave or a ‘yadda yadda’, as it so often is in my Dungeons & Dragons games.
Instead, each such journey is a Delve: kind of like a combat encounter, except the ‘enemy’ is the journey itself, with a total ‘Resistance’ number your heroes must whittle down by choosing how to proceed and succeeding on the relevant skill checks. When the Resistance hits zero, you’ve reached your destination – and if you complete an optional extra objective during the delve (for example, dealing with an enemy or repairing a bridge), you can turn it into a Connection: a safe route that you can use again without delving.
Like many mechanics in ‘story forward’ TTRPGs, these feel odd at first, especially if you come to the game direct from D&D. They’re mechanically similar to a pre-planned, extended sequence of DnD skill checks, which are a popular method for spicing up journeys between quest locations. But they’re more baked-in, more gamified, usually more dangerous and, crucially, player led. You’ve got to decide exactly what to do at each stage, pick which of the game’s nine fairly vague, high level skills you’re using, and narrate what happens. There’s no “roll me three acrobatics checks in a row” here.
And, in general, I like them a lot. I find them a satisfying mid point between the pure ‘yadda yadda’ approach (where the GM simply describes you journeying and tells you how long it took, with maybe a random encounter thrown in) and the full-on simulation in ‘trad’ games like Pathfinder or Dragonbane (which forces you to make skill rolls to pitch a damn tent). In general, I prefer Yadda Yadda-ing to trad-style simulation, just because it keeps the momentum up and respects my time.
But, over the course of a campaign, it also erodes my immersion in the world, because we’re effectively teleporting everywhere rather than exploring – what you might call the ‘Starfield effect’. Delves aren’t perfect, and feel clunky sometimes, but at least they inject some gameplay into journeys, without making that gameplay mind-numbingly dull.
They’re not what made me want to write this article, though. The thing about Heart’s journeying that truly impresses me is far nerdier and more pedantic: it’s about diegesis. This smarmy ten dollar word, beloved of YouTube essayists and film critics, refers to the distinction between elements of a story that both the characters and the audience experience (like the roar of a troll about to eat a helpless hero), and those that only we, the audience, get to know (like a narrator voiceover explaining that the troll is actually vegan, and there’s nothing to worry about).
This normally applies mainly to sights and sounds; something in a movie that both we and the characters see or hear is diegetic, whereas things external to the movie’s current ‘world’, like narration by a character not on screen, is non-diegetic. But the distinction is even more prevalent in games, where, inevitably, tons of our interaction with what’s happening in the game comes in non-diegetic form. Think of mini maps, quest markers, and health bars, for example.
Right, that’s dictionary corner done with – so what’s this got to do with Heart, D&D, and travelling? Well, one of the most common places we find non-diegetic storytelling is when the characters have got to travel a long distance, with not very much happening on the way. It’d be boring to sit through that in full, but confusing to just jump instantly from A to B. Movies have map montages or transitional shots of airplanes taking off and landing; videogames have fast travel and cut scenes; and TTRPGs have the GM ‘yadda yadda’ the trip.
As I’ve said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that; I like a yadda as much as the next person. But we TTRPG players, unlike movie watchers, are in control of the story, meaning that, when our party non-diegetically hops across the world in a single sentence of description, we’re temporarily having that control taken away, along with the immersion it brings. Once or twice, with good GM narration, is fine – but over time, it wears away at the feeling that this is a real world we’re exploring, rather than a movie set built for us to play through.
Heart’s Delve system offers a pretty good replacement for this, sure – but what actually fixes it is much simpler: the game just makes its fictional world so dimensionally borked that distances and time are no longer relevant. In D&D, when you make the five day trek from Oakwood to Flingleberry cave in ten seconds, it’s a non-diegetic time jump intended to get you fighting them pesky goblins without delay.
In Heart, when you climb down into a miles-deep black abyss in the middle of a blood red hellscape and emerge, minutes later, on top of a mountain, surrounded by green fields and a bright blue sky, it’s diegetic. That actually happened to the characters, in real time, exactly as you, the players, heard about it. The Heart looked into your soul and decided where it thought you ought to go, and since geography and the laws of physics serve at its pleasure, well, that’s where you ended up.
I like to think of it as dream logic: locations aren’t linked physically, but psychically and conceptually. Your subconscious (or, in Heart’s case, your character’s subconscious) swaps from the idea of one place to the idea of another, and, hey presto, now you’re there, without even noticing the tedious business of travelling between them. When you wake up and remember the dream, it all seems ridiculous, but in the dream, being in your midterm exam room one moment and unicycling with Tony Hawk the next felt totally normal.
That’s what travelling around in Heart feels like: a dreamworld that’s partially, but not totally, shaped by your character’s subconscious. It’s a pretty delicious piece of design that simultaneously allows quick travel between story beats without breaking immersion, and reinforces the game’s bizarre worldbuilding on a fundamental level. It might sound like a small, picky thing, and I suppose it is – but, with a skilled GM and a group that’s fully plugged into its warped setting, this little detail makes Heart sing where, in my experience, D&D cannot.
If you’ve sampled the delights of Heart: The City Beneath (or its sister game Spire: The City Must Fall, which I haven’t tried) then come join Wargamer’s free Discord community and share your take on my ramblings. You should also just join for the good vibes, constant tabletop games chats, competitions, giveaways, and live events. It’s almost like a dream…