Recent content by Jacob Lewis

I think your dungeon example illustrates the distinction I was trying to get at. Yes, players have meaningful choices within the map-and-key framework—where to go, what to risk, which tools to secure first. But those choices are all still contingent on the GM having designed the structure, keyed...

I think you may be reading more into my comment than was there. I didn’t claim styles were chosen “arbitrarily,” or that GM authority is only about ego. What I said was that early RPG texts and discourse did codify a GM-centric model, and that framing has had lasting influence on how we still...

The difficulty with pinning down “railroading” is that the word isn’t just about technique—it’s about power dynamics inherited from the history of RPGs. Early RPGs established a very GM-centric model. The GM built the world, enforced the rules, and delivered the experience. Players were...

You’re misreading the table as a hard rule when it’s clearly a guideline. The book even says so in bold, on p. 155: More importantly, you’re also missing the broader context of the whole chapter. The GMing section is intentionally conversational and not a rigid ruleset. Right from the...

One thing to keep in mind is that the most reliable way to find a system’s “pitfalls” is to encounter them with your own group. Advice from other tables can be useful as perspective, but it’s shaped by their particular mix of players, pacing, and expectations—which may be very different from...

Appreciate the clarification—and I get it. The conversation around this game is already loaded with assumptions, and it doesn’t take much for a post to get slotted into one side or another, even if that’s not the intent. That’s partly what I’ve been thinking about since your reply. Not so much...

Fair, but I think you’re interpreting my post more literally than it was intended. I’m not suggesting Daggerheart is the official Critical Role RPG or that the cast dictated its design. My point is that the system reflects solutions to long-standing friction points that have been visible across...

Exactly. What’s striking isn’t just how Daggerheart is designed, but how it’s being rolled out. The team didn’t launch with a confident declaration that they’d solved tabletop design. They released something tuned for a particular style of play, and then watched how the broader community...

I don’t think the “most people who play D&D would rather be playing this” argument holds up. It reads less like a serious claim and more like a projection—personal preference extrapolated into a sweeping generalization. More importantly, it leans into a framing that keeps reappearing: that...

There’s something foundational here that tends to go unexamined: not why campaigns end early, but why the game assumes they should run all the way to level 20 in the first place. The 1–20 progression is rarely questioned because it’s baked into the DNA of D&D. That structure has been carried...

While I get what this article is going for, something about it doesn’t sit right. It frames the whole hobby as if D&D and its direct offshoots are the only meaningful throughline, and everything else is just a reaction to that. It treats D&D like the center of gravity, and anything outside that...

D&D was a hard habit for me to break. It was my main game for decades. I’ve been through every edition. By the time I stepped away, both my time and expectations had already peaked. I was always open to trying different systems, but most of the games I encountered that promised “D&D, but better”...

This is actually very close to what’s written in the Daggerheart Core Rulebook—page 20 lays it out directly in the “Creating Your Experiences” section, which is treated as a major step in character creation. What stands out to me is how the book frames this kind of advice. It’s not presented...

I think it was the Campaign Frames that finally sold me on Daggerheart—or at least convinced me to buy in and explore what it was really offering. The idea of campaign framing isn’t new. Most GMs do some form of it, whether in collaboration with their group or not. But I’d never seen it defined...

I find it interesting how often initiative has already come up in this thread as a source of inspiration. It’s ironic, considering that initiative was one of the earliest and most vocal criticisms I saw in online discussions. The language was familiar—frustration framed as certainty, a lot of...