What do YOU plan on doing with Daggerheart?

There's interest among my friends to try out the system. Mind you, we've been in this "we should get together and play something" holding pattern for over a year so who knows if anything will come of it.

This is worrying for Daggerheart:




To me that reads like a built in suicide card; something that eventually kills Daggerheart in the community.

People get very loyal to their chosen platform and if they insist on only allowing one choice, that will take the wind right out of their sails.

A lot of folks will just slide the game into the 'interesting' pile and move on to something available on whatever VTT they're using.

This becomes a 'you can't do what you planned using this game'.

I know it's been discussed in the community that was developing fan based support for the game in Foundry. If that acts as a block against people using their VTT of choice, a lot of people might just move back to whatever system they were using rather than delve into a whole new platform with potential subscriptions, content access issues, and so on.

Ruin Explorer said:

That's the best use case for DM fiat/milestone levelling though, isn't it? That's one of the reasons we adopted it in 4E.

That's also one of the major reasons it's become so popular.

Likewise with the intentional vagueness re: how often they should level - by making it DM fiat/milestone, you can control the experience there.

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I'm not a fan of milestone advancement systems. Both as a player and as a GM - I like seeing a build up of progression.

I have found it hard to maintain interest as a player in the games I've been in that used milestone, and as a GM this is one of my bigger concerns with running Daggerheart, that I will not know what to do here and will start to tune out of my own game.

Very quick and dirty non-milestone thing: make a countdown for the players. Each rest/session/something, one of them rolls the duality dice. Hope, it ticks down towards level up. Fear and it ticks up as a setback. Crits ticks down two steps.

Two successes to get to level 2 and then you add +2(?) to every new level needed so spread advancement out? I don't know, something like that.

Kichwas said:

This is worrying for Daggerheart:

Daggerheart Tabletop RPG | FAQs

Daggerheart FAQs - Daggerheart is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game of brave heroics and vibrant worlds that are built together with your gaming group

www.daggerheart.com

View attachment 407488

To me that reads like a built in suicide card; something that eventually kills Daggerheart in the community.

People get very loyal to their chosen platform and if they insist on only allowing one choice, that will take the wind right out of their sails.

A lot of folks will just slide the game into the 'interesting' pile and move on to something available on whatever VTT they're using.

This becomes a 'you can't do what you planned using this game'.

I know it's been discussed in the community that was developing fan based support for the game in Foundry. If that acts as a block against people using their VTT of choice, a lot of people might just move back to whatever system they were using rather than delve into a whole new platform with potential subscriptions, content access issues, and so on.

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This is the community policy. it does not mean that it is only going to appear on one VTT. It just means that Darrington is going to make official partnerships, rather than letting anyone do it.

Kichwas said:

I'm not a fan of milestone advancement systems. Both as a player and as a GM - I like seeing a build up of progression.

I have found it hard to maintain interest as a player in the games I've been in that used milestone, and as a GM this is one of my bigger concerns with running Daggerheart, that I will not know what to do here and will start to tune out of my own game.

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Interesting!

I've literally never even seen this be an issue, let alone experienced it. And I've played since literally 1989. We tried milestone in late 3.XE (so like, 2006?) and really liked it, then in 4E we started as tracking XP for a couple of months or so but abandoned it for actual fiat (not milestone) levelling based on when I felt was right, and in 5E the DM in one group I played with was very keen to track XP and we did. For like four sessions before everyone was like, must we? Especially as tracking XP was causing us to actual level up faster than made sense for the campaign!

I will say, in practice, 70%+ of "milestone" levelling is actually fiat levelling (which is not a problem, but it's a bit of a misnomer imo). And like, if you'd told me in say, 1993, "Oh you'll level up when the DM says you do!", I'd have left your game lol. But I feel like we're a very different place now.

nyvinter said:

Very quick and dirty non-milestone thing: make a countdown for the players. Each rest/session/something, one of them rolls the duality dice. Hope, it ticks down towards level up. Fear and it ticks up as a setback. Crits ticks down two steps.

Two successes to get to level 2 and then you add +2(?) to every new level needed so spread advancement out? I don't know, something like that.

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Yeah that's decent - it does leave PCs on different levels, which personally, I find deeply obnoxious, but I know some groups like it.

However, I believe Daggerheart explicitly wants to be the same level - it's not in front of me right now but I think they even say if your PC dies-dies you make a PC of the same level.

Ruin Explorer said:

Yeah that's decent - it does leave PCs on different levels, which personally, I find deeply obnoxious, but I know some groups like it.

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Yeah no. I was thinking this is for the whole group it's just that you rotate who does to roll.

Kichwas said:

People get very loyal to their chosen platform and if they insist on only allowing one choice, that will take the wind right out of their sails.

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I will start be saying - IANAL.

Implementing DH in an existing VTT seems different from creating a VTT to run DH to me as a lay-person. Certainly, there are fan-made implementations of D&D 4e and GURPS for Fantasy Grounds, for example.

I don’t see why you couldn’t do that with DH?

dbm said:

I will start be saying - IANAL.

Implementing DH in an existing VTT seems different from creating a VTT to run DH to me as a lay-person. Certainly, there are fan-made implementations of D&D 4e and GURPS for Fantasy Grounds, for example.

I don’t see why you couldn’t do that with DH?

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They've been debating that issue over on the Daggerheart in Foundry discord, 'Foundryborne'. They've locked invites while they sort out legalities so I can't send you one - but there's a lot of uncertainty.

You have to think about whether or not it is worth risking it, even if you think you could win a lawsuit - is it worth having fans and the publisher end up in court over it like in the old TSR days?

Right now there's a LOT of goodwill, and no one wants to spoil the water. I do hope they work something out. Because even if I make my own personal hack to get it working in my VTT of choice, I know not everyone is an application developer and a lot of people would just move on to another tRPG - leaving us with an absence of players and short lived game.

There are already a dozen digital tools made by fans and posted across the net, including on the Daggerheart reddit. I've seen Spencer Starke posting there, so I know Critical Role and Darrington Press are aware of it. I guess we'll see how much they want to go after their own fans.