Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[zakael19]

As I prep for my aetherpunk superhero convention game, I am thinking about setting/house rules. After listening the the recernt Dungeon Master of None "GMing Daggerheart" podcast, I am considering a rule that lets a player who is completely out of Hope to gain one Hope in exchange for giving me a Fear. The podcast pointed out rightly that totally running out of Hope can feel bad for players, and especially in a supers game, it seems a potential problem.

Thoughts?

Why not a general ability like the community ones that all players get as a frame mechanic? “Heroes Surge: Once per session when you have no Hope and roll with Fear, you can gain one Hope” or something. Limits it, but helps them climb out of the Fear spiral.

Another option could be doing Hope donations? “In it Together: Spend 1 Hope and Mark 1 Stress to give your ally the hope to carry on - they gain a Hope.”

 

[Agamon]

Why not a general ability like the community ones that all players get as a frame mechanic? “Heroes Surge: Once per session when you have no Hope and roll with Fear, you can gain one Hope” or something. Limits it, but helps them climb out of the Fear spiral.

Another option could be doing Hope donations? “In it Together: Spend 1 Hope and Mark 1 Stress to give your ally the hope to carry on - they gain a Hope.”

Oooh, I like that In It Together. More PC interaction = more better

 

[Reynard]

For folks who have used both extensively: when do you prefer to use minions versus hordes? And for supervillains' mooks, which do you think makes more sense?

 

[Elvish Lore]

For folks who have used both extensively: when do you prefer to use minions versus hordes? And for supervillains' mooks, which do you think makes more sense?

Minions are easy to dispatch and not powerful, hordes are a lot of a thing that might be powerful and act in concert.

Super villain mooks vibe minions more than they do hordes. A horde of bad guys who aren’t necessarily high level but also kind of bad ass would be something like a cadre of AIM operatives in comics storytelling.

 

[zakael19]

Minions when you want to put tokens down and roll lots of dice or let your players see lots of tokens vanish, Hordes when you want to run ToM and describe lots of creatures but without actually doing the management. It's up to you how you describe a horde - is it a small pack of demonic dogs or 15+ zombies for that HP chunk?

THere's also a couple cases where the Hordes have an interesting secondary effect that makes them a great adjunct to a Solo. I reskinned the demonic hounds down to a T1 "Shadow Spider" horde to bring in beside the priest of shadows for my Thursday group, lets you easily say stuff like "the horde of spiders swarms around and over you, their chittering and skittering pressing at your mind and skin alike - mark a stress."

 

[Vael]

For folks who have used both extensively: when do you prefer to use minions versus hordes? And for supervillains' mooks, which do you think makes more sense?

Leaders that have an ability to activate multiple allies may find minions better as there's more targets to find. 3 or 4 minions getting individual attacks that deal half damage are just trying to chip away single HP/Armor and don't care. I also think if you're planning multiple waves, minions may be more fun.

Hordes seem to have less upkeep so they work better with Solos that won't be activating them. I did an encounter with two Solos and 2 Hordes and found it fairly intense battle.

 

[zakael19]

Leaders that have an ability to activate multiple allies may find minions better as there's more targets to find.

FWIW, I would definitely treat minions as a single activation per their group-attack ability for that sort of purpose.

 

[aramis erak]

5 Sessions in, and Daggerheart continues to work. My players have said that they feel really powerful and cool, and things just seem to be working well at the table. We use poker chips for Hope, Fear, Stress, HP and Armor, so there's less writing and scratching off as damage is taken. I do feel I need to up the ante on them a bit, I thought my difficult encounter ended up being a bit of a cakewalk (my fault, the Wizard just got Fireball, and starting an encounter with all my creatures at half health definitely reduced the challenge). But I'm cheerfully planning upcoming sessions, there's evil brewing in the ruins of a village and a tourney and masquerade party in the main city and some upcoming plot developments.

in my FTF group, I'm using small gaming stones for hope, fear, HP and SP. Except for fear, they're just placing them over the sheet. The players' stones are kept in individual pill bottles, with a soda cap as a divider between used and unused stones.

 

[aramis erak]

Ooof, I didn't know that about SoS (they're...not good).

The TV show was worse than the novels.

One thing I realized: the additional spotlight spend? It's not intended for the same character - there are specific enablers for allowing respotlighting the adversary twice in a row... which means the general spend should be for other adversaries...

I've had an issue of not remembering to spread the spotlights around the badguys. Outnumbering the PCs isn't a big advantage.

On the lighter side, I now know how to turn on spotlight tracking in the combat tracker on Foundryheart: Settings ▶︎ Game Settings ▶︎ Configure Settings ▶︎ Variant Rules ▶︎ Action Tokens Enable ☒ Tokens: 3. You then still need to turn it on in the combat pane...

 

[zakael19]

One thing I realized: the additional spotlight spend? It's not intended for the same character - there are specific enablers for allowing respotlighting the adversary twice in a row.

Wait, you didnt see the game explicitly say you’re not supposed to spotlight one adversary on the same GM turn unless it has a specific feature?

I've had an issue of not remembering to spread the spotlights around the badguys. Outnumbering the PCs isn't a big advantage

Leaders, or leader-style multi-activation abilities really help an encounter feel better IMO. With most Evasions and attack bonuses leading to roughly a 50% chance to hit on the GM side there can be a lot of “activate and nothing happens” if you just do an attack.