Beat as One

Question: Why did you take the Heart of Mine spell out of the game? I thought it was really great for plot hooks.

You know, we really tried to come up with reasons to keep Heart of Mine; it was one of few high-level Magic spells in the original game, and it was trying to use some cool ideas. But we ended up removing it mostly because it was horribly abusable and because it didn't really make sense, even with itself.

Heart of Mine did two things: it allowed you to share Fatebonds with someone else, and it tied your Fates together so that if one of you died, the other kicked the bucket as well. Unfortunately, neither of these things work as intended. Nor are we entirely sure how they were intended to work in the first place.

The sharing of Fatebonds is the only useful part of this spell - at least, it would be in our system, in which Fatebonds matter. In the original system, where Fatebonds were pretty much totally negligible and you couldn't get this spell until you were Legend 10, it was a totally useless facet of the power. Nobody on earth is going to spend 10 Legend and a Willpower to get a maximum bonus of +3 dice to some stats, especially when it comes with the danger of getting slammed with the inability to spend Legend or a loss of Willpower if things go wrong for that mortal. If you happened to be using our Fatebond system or some other homebrew in which Fatebonds weren't about as important to gods as gnat sneezes, this would definitely have more of an impact, but it would be something you needed on a very specialty basis; that is, only if you knew you were going to need a Fatebond bonus (or to cancel out a negative) and knew someone else who you could bind yourself to to do that. We can see situations in which that would be useful... but it's definitely not useful enough to be a level 9 spell.

And then there's the death-binding facet of the power, which is ridiculously broken and prone to abuse. We really don't get what the writers were trying to do with this spell, because not only does it lend itself to abuse, they suggest in the spell's writeup that it should be used abusively. If you tie yourself to another person, they die when you die; you can use it at any time to force anybody to go down with you. If you know you're going to die, you can take someone else with you, no strings attached; and, as the book suggests, if you have Ultimate Stamina or Samsara or Fertility, you can actually tie yourself to someone else, kill yourself (and thus them), and then just resurrect yourself and run off consequence-free.

Now, sure, dying sucks, you're not coming out of that with all your resources intact. But anything that allows you to literally kill someone automatically is a bad, bad, unbalanced idea for the game. What makes it worse is that the spell has no resistance whatsoever - the target doesn't even get to try to shrug it off, and is instead at the mercy of your suicide attempts or stupid decisions whether or not they want to be tied to you. It may be a rare situation indeed when a god would use this spell to abuse it by murdering people without consequences from anywhere on the globe, but it's still a possible situation, and it shouldn't be in the game.

Use the If-It-Were-Me test: if it's something that you would feel was absolutely unfair, unwarranted and unbalanced if it happened to a PC, it probably shouldn't be in the game. If Freya decided she didn't like you and just offed you with no resistance, warning or possibility of escape, probably without even leaving Asgard or going anywhere near you, and then just popped back out of her Circle of Life seed good as new, that would not be cool. Even worse, a random Scion of Freya (say, in a Shinsengumi-like rival band) could do the same thing, which would be massively not cool.

And if you're not planning to abuse it, what good is it to you? If your friend dies, you die, which is really only desirable if you are so attached to them that you simply can't go on living after they're gone (and are too lazy to try to rescue them from the Underworld or carry out their legacy or anything else). If you die, you'll be killing your friend, which you probably won't want to do. And what do you get for these dangerous possible double-deaths? That +3 dice Fatebond bonus. Oh, well, hallelujah.

To be fair, the thematic idea of tying your fate and death to someone else does occur in mythology here and there; wives die when their husbands die, enemies fight until mutual death, and coincidental deceasement happens when it's dramatically necessary. But this spell isn't really encouraging those sorts of situations; it's not encouraging two Scions to fight to the death and barely kill one another, but instead allowing one Scion to get trounced but magically kill the other anyway. It's not tying spouses together so strongly that one of them chooses to die rather than live alone; it's just making her drop dead when hubby goes down with the ship. Those things are story vehicles, and while there's definitely a lot to be said for how Fate influences them, this spell is doing a terribly clumsy job of trying to mechanically illustrate that idea (if that's what it's trying to do at all, which I don't know if I really believe considering the gleeful suggestions to intentionally commit suicide to murder your enemies).

So: this is a spell that is both useless and horribly broken, somehow at the same time, and that doesn't seem to know what it's trying to do in the gameworld. We talked about trying to fix it to keep it in, but there were really no good ways to do so; you could take out the if-I-die-you-die thing, but that's the major reason anyone would bother with the spell in the first place, and while the Fatebond bonus is more useful in our system than the original, it's also very specifically situational and not particularly powerful for a level 9 spell. We could always move it to a lower level, of course...

...but then we realized we were trying too hard. Sometimes a spell needs to be taken out back and put out of its misery, and Heart of Mine is one of those spells. It's a pretty perfect example of something that is written badly and doesn't help either the game or the characters, so there was no reason to keep it instead of letting it go to bad spell hell where it belongs.