Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[Emerikol]

Daggerheart is not my style of game but I'm not surprised Perkins has ended up there.

 

[darjr]

Join us BEHIND THE SCENES at #GenCon! 🗡️❤️‍🔥 #daggerheart

From our team to your table: Thank you so much for all of your support at our Daggerheart panel this year! We’re just getting started!#daggerheart #gencon #t...

youtube.com

 

[zakael19]

I have to admit the one thing I would 100% pay for, for DH, is a big-ass book full of environments, traps, social situations, and so on, by someone who I actually respected the mechanical and thematic competence of, which, with love, is absolutely not the two WotC guys Darrington has hired (I think they'll do fine with creative work... mechanical... maybe get help from someone else).

I suspect I will end up doing it myself or someone online will do it for free.

What creative work have those two done that I should know about and would be a good endorsement for them building the sort of open ended PC focused gaming DH is ideal for?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What creative work have those two done that I should know about and would be a good endorsement for them building the sort of open ended PC focused gaming DH is ideal for?

I mean, they were in charge of the majority of 5E's products, one or the other of them, but I don't think that shows much.

Independent of 5E, Crawford is the original designer and creator of the Blue Rose RPG, which was an RPG for what used to be called "romantic fantasy" (not "romantasy", very different) genre, a rather sexist-ly named genre which was very underserved in fantasy RPGs because it catered primarily to women, mostly had female authors, and had a lot of LGBTQ+ themes. Unfortunately that same genre name has been reused for "romance novels with a fantasy setting" (i.e. romantasy), which is like, not the same thing, so now there's no genre name at all, so worse than a sexist name, they got nothing. I guess the haters won. But I digress! It was a really good RPG for 2005.

Chris Perkins has worked at WotC like, forever, and I don't know of any independent stuff, but he did the original 5E Strahd (yeah the one that brought back the racism, shhh, let's not talk about that), but he's also apparently responsible for a lot of 4E's cosmology, which was largely a big improvement and some of which has stuck into 5E even (particularly the Feywild and Shadowfell).

Mostly they're just extremely experienced and I think haven't had a chance to "do their own thing" for like a decade so I'm interested to see what they do.

 

[zakael19]

I mean, they were in charge of the majority of 5E's products, one or the other of them, but I don't think that shows much.

Independent of 5E, Crawford is the original designer and creator of the Blue Rose RPG, which was an RPG for what used to be called "romantic fantasy" (not "romantasy", very different) genre, a rather sexist-ly named genre which was very underserved in fantasy RPGs because it catered primarily to women, mostly had female authors, and had a lot of LGBTQ+ themes. Unfortunately that same genre name has been reused for "romance novels with a fantasy setting" (i.e. romantasy), which is like, not the same thing, so now there's no genre name at all, so worse than a sexist name, they got nothing. I guess the haters won. But I digress! It was a really good RPG for 2005.

Chris Perkins has worked at WotC like, forever, and I don't know of any independent stuff, but he did the original 5E Strahd (yeah the one that brought back the racism, shhh, let's not talk about that), but he's also apparently responsible for a lot of 4E's cosmology, which was largely a big improvement and some of which has stuck into 5E even (particularly the Feywild and Shadowfell).

Mostly they're just extremely experienced and I think haven't had a chance to "do their own thing" for like a decade so I'm interested to see what they do.

Yeah, so nothing that I’m excited by . Ran COS and knew that was mainly Perkins and boy howdy I don’t want anything like that on my DH table (others might and good for them).

 

[Scribe]

So I haven't read as much as I would have liked yet, but much of it I like.

I really like how they eft so much loosely defined, and outline the lifting which the campaign frames can do.

As some may be aware I am a fan of a game being very intentional in its design, and I think that fits for DH while it shows how flexible it can be.

Even the art shows this and the frames lean into it.

A book of frames and some adventures please.

 

[Scribe]

Yeah, flipped through some more.

I like the core mechanics, class building (class design), the 'deck building' aspect of the Domains, and the open ended 'tool kit' like design that the campaign frames show.

Like, look at the ancestry options for example.

You could easily just go 'yeah this is a Tolkien-esque frame'. Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling.
You could go full on animal world, where the various animal people are leaning hard into the actual animals they represent.
You could go into the style you see where its actually just a human, but with cat ears (JRPG style?)

The fact they do not say 'this is how X looks, period' and in fact say 'in this frame X looks like Y' is great to me and there is no reason you could not also limit classes, or domains. Great.

I want to better understand the math around encounter design, and see if its possible to have a more open world type approach (encounter tables, things like that) but as a basic tool kit, I really like what I'm reading.

 

[zakael19]

The only thing I don't like about teh Ancestries is the mixing part tbh. I've never been a big fan of the genetic mixing that seems assumed in many settings, without doing something more like "halflings / humans / dwarves are just all branches off the same root" a la Canids.

OTOH, I do like the suggestion that what you might actually be doing is making an entirely new species/ancestry - not actually a half-Galapa/Drakona, but a Dragon Turtle - something new.

 

[Scribe]

The only thing I don't like about teh Ancestries is the mixing part tbh. I've never been a big fan of the genetic mixing that seems assumed in many settings, without doing something more like "halflings / humans / dwarves are just all branches off the same root" a la Canids.

OTOH, I do like the suggestion that what you might actually be doing is making an entirely new species/ancestry - not actually a half-Galapa/Drakona, but a Dragon Turtle - something new.

Yeah I'm not generally a fan, but the "Feature 1 X + Feature 2 Y" is so simple, and I'm a sucker for simple mechanics. You just get it, instantly.

The examples having some nice sketch art (which I love throughout, more so than a lot of the full colour pieces...) also helps.

 

[overgeeked]

OTOH, I do like the suggestion that what you might actually be doing is making an entirely new species/ancestry - not actually a half-Galapa/Drakona, but a Dragon Turtle - something new.

Yeah, you can easily read it that way. And it's an incredibly dynamic system. Especially with the pages of suggestions on reskinning and reflavoring things. For example, up thread I suggested an eladrin by mixing the elf sleep feature with the faun leaping feature. Just reskin the leaping as teleporting. It's a wildly versatile system, especially with easy reskinning.

Yeah I'm not generally a fan, but the "Feature 1 X + Feature 2 Y" is so simple, and I'm a sucker for simple mechanics. You just get it, instantly.

The examples having some nice sketch art (which I love throughout, more so than a lot of the full colour pieces...) also helps.

Right? I think the dragonborn robot is one of my favorites of that section.