Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[zakael19]

I am inclined to NOT control spotlight for PCs -- particularly a solid group of players. It might be different running the game at a convention, but with my regular D&D nerds I would honestly expect them to be able to manage their own fun. I don't tell them what to do or how to play in D&D, and I would not expect to have to do so in DH even if the initiative "rules" are different.

Managing the spotlight in an active fashion also goes hand in hand with “GM moves” and all the stuff there. Most of it works best when very pointed - put a single character in a spot and ask what they do. There's a great post over on r/daggerheart pointing out that doing this is also how you tee-up "Golden Opportunities" to negate all the worry about initiative-less combat and optimization and stuff. If you ask a Guardian what they do and they say "I stand here doing nothing" then cool, they've given you a Golden Opportunity to maneuver around and attack more fragile people, or root them in place, or whatever. It's also a great way to avoid "letting scenes drag" as the GM Pitfalls section notes.

I do think that much as games like Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark note they're designed to "fail gracefully" if you forget/neglect peripheral systems, to the point that at the very center you're just a bunch of people having an animated conversation pretending to be other people - the root of roleplaying, Daggerheart is designed to "fail gracefully to Conventional game-play." Run the game without direct spotlighting? That's fine, you're missing out on setting up certain cinematic scenes and GM moves; but the Fear economy has your back.

I have played a lot of games with this type of system. PbtA and Blades most commonly. And it was a problem with all but the very best GMs. Players who are the most vocal just do more. Quiet players do less. I don't think there is anything the more vocal players were doing wrong, but if you're an outgoing player, you tend to take the spotlight wrong.

You get the same issue in strictly roleplaying situations where there isn't any initiative order. I've found that when I'm playing, sometimes I could be the problem player until I specifically put in effort to get the less vocal players to get involved. And that's hard sometimes!

The initiative systems that most games have fix this issue and get everyone to be able to act and be a part of a combat. I'm not saying I wouldn't want to play a game like Daggerheart (far from it) but I have found that it taxes the GM. This is obviously just my experience but I've seen it in games that I've played at Cons with groups of people I've never met before and with my friends.

So I've been running "narrativist forward" games (mainly the Dungeon World descendent Stonetop, and some Blades in theDark related games) for about a year now, and I've found that the #1 most useful thing as a GM is just ask pointed questions constantly. It's the core GM move in basically all these games - including Daggerheart- for a reason, and getting good at asking questions that prompt interesting answers or pivots is I think one of the key GM skills I've worked hard on.

As Blades in the Dark says:

Ask questions

First and foremost, ask questions. You can get along very well as a GM by simply asking questions, building on the answers, asking more questions, answering them with dice rolls, and so on. Asking questions is the heart and soul of running a roleplaying game.

What I've found about this "one simple trick" is that when I ask direct spotlighted questions about a character's interiority + action prompts, people tend to a) build on each other and b) realize that no, I really care about what they have to say.

Blades does the excellent job of breaking them out into categories to help you kind of think of the various sorts of questions you might ask, and I think that's helpful for DH as well:

• Establishing Questions (who is doing what, what's your intention here, where are you directing your arguments, etc)
• Provocative Questions (aimed at encouraging expression: what are you thinking when you see that? are you really that sort of person? how are you feeling after you hurt him by accident?)
• Leading questions (helps show how you're thinking about the current situation and prompt Actions - oh, you want to do x? don't you think that Y might happen? does anybody want to make an Instinct roll here to study that thing more closely?)
• Trivial Questions - I love these. Just filling in the world and bits about teh characters together. Things like "hey as you're walking through the marketplace, what scent suddenly reminds you of home? as you're journeying through the forest, what flower catches your eye and why?"

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I am inclined to NOT control spotlight for PCs -- particularly a solid group of players. It might be different running the game at a convention, but with my regular D&D nerds I would honestly expect them to be able to manage their own fun. I don't tell them what to do or how to play in D&D, and I would not expect to have to do so in DH even if the initiative "rules" are different.

Yeah I think most groups at least used to each other won't really need managing or rules like the optional token-based spotlight thing. I can definitely see how some groups I was in as a teenager would probably have needed that though, albeit usually only to deal with 1-2 specific players.

I think I should actually think in action beats, and bank my Fear until I unleash something truly narrative-shifting.

Yup exactly. If you don't bank it, you're going to be pretty much constantly interrupting, but to do relatively smaller things - there will be times, narratively, when that does make sense, but I think banking it and then bigger spends are often going to be more interesting.

 

[overgeeked]

Blades in the Dark

That's a great post by the way. Yours and the one you linked to.

How would you do flashbacks in Daggerheart? I'm not sure just using only stress would work well. Maybe a combo of hope and stress. Maybe 0 stress, 1 stress, and 2 stress or 1 hope?

You gain a hope on about 54% of rolls and recover a stress on about 8% of rolls. So hope is the more free-flowing resource between the two.

So maybe flip that. Free, 1 hope, and 2 hope or 1 stress?

 

[overgeeked]

Daggerheart is now sold out on Amazon. At least sold out from Amazon itself.

And the sharks are already swimming with $70 core sets and $50 sets with $20 shipping.

 

[zakael19]

That's a great post by the way. Yours and the one you linked to.

How would you do flashbacks in Daggerheart? I'm not sure just using only stress would work well. Maybe a combo of hope and stress. Maybe 0 stress, 1 stress, and 2 stress or 1 hope?

You gain a hope on about 54% of rolls and recover a stress on about 8% of rolls. So hope is the more free-flowing resource between the two.

So maybe flip that. Free, 1 hope, and 2 hope or 1 stress?

I don’t think I’d bother, unless it was a Frame specifically about a premise that involves a lot of planning you want to elide - the purpose of the flashback to generally be like “a hah! We planned for this eventuality, take THIS.” One of the ancestries or communities lets you do a “have a mundane item you could use here” right? Building that into a minor mechanic could work I guess.

The FITD game I run that’s more expedition style play doesn’t use flashbacks and relies more on assists and group actions to highlight teamwork - and I think that’s where DH is leaning as well.

 

[overgeeked]

I don’t think I’d bother, unless it was a Frame specifically about a premise that involves a lot of planning you want to elide - the purpose of the flashback to generally be like “a hah! We planned for this eventuality, take THIS.” One of the ancestries or communities lets you do a “have a mundane item you could use here” right? Building that into a minor mechanic could work I guess.

The FITD game I run that’s more expedition style play doesn’t use flashbacks and relies more on assists and group actions to highlight teamwork - and I think that’s where DH is leaning as well.

That's fair. But in my experience all RPGs involve lots of tedious planning, which is why I love flashbacks.

You could also go the other way and make planning a mini game. A skill challenge, basically. Give the PCs so many "rounds" to plan and make rolls to build up resources etc before executing the plan.

It's the unstructured, meandering waste of time planning that drives me batty. I want to avoid that at all costs.

 

[zakael19]

It's the unstructured, meandering waste of time planning that drives me batty. I want to avoid that at all costs.

Absolutely, and I’d point players back to the core Player Best Practice of “Embrace Danger” which explicitly calls out overthinking plans as something to avoid.

 

[Reynard]

Daggerheart is now sold out on Amazon. At least sold out from Amazon itself.

And the sharks are already swimming with $70 core sets and $50 sets with $20 shipping.

A friend of mine was able to get it on Barnes and Noble today.

 

[Reynard]

I had a random thought on the way home: Daggerheart for urban fantasy. Specifically, the kind of urban fantasy exemplified by Dresden. While the world is modern, the tools and abilities of the characters in those kinds of stories are usually more typically fantastical. That is, you don't have to build some sort of modern gunman class, because Harry uses magic not guns. You could skin a lot of stuff as modern for narrative reasons, but a Seraph would work totally fine in the secret war with whatevers. The only thing I can think of that you would have to figure out how to skin is most ancestries. Assuming modern LA or NY, you might not want frog people hopping about.

 

[zakael19]

I had a random thought on the way home: Daggerheart for urban fantasy. Specifically, the kind of urban fantasy exemplified by Dresden. While the world is modern, the tools and abilities of the characters in those kinds of stories are usually more typically fantastical. That is, you don't have to build some sort of modern gunman class, because Harry uses magic not guns. You could skin a lot of stuff as modern for narrative reasons, but a Seraph would work totally fine in the secret war with whatevers. The only thing I can think of that you would have to figure out how to skin is most ancestries. Assuming modern LA or NY, you might not want frog people hopping about.

You're totally right! The Seraph would be perfect for a setting like that, and if you want to bring guns etc in I think Motherboard would be easy to look at.

I guess you could lean into Shifter stuff maybe, or Fae ancestries that you just hand wave narratively as being "glamoured" when you're out and about. Or go Shadowrun style, haha.

Or just line some ancestries out as not fitting!