Daggerheart General Thread [+]
- Thread starter overgeeked
- Start date
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
Well, sort of. But not really. It's more like one's a war cleric and the other is a vengeance paladin. The concepts are so close together as to be almost indistinguishable. Paladins are 75% combat, 25% magic. Clerics are 75% magic, 25% combat. Yes, I know those numbers aren't precise. The seraph just stops pretending those two concepts are not almost identical. The class abilities support both concepts. To "be a cleric" go hard on splendor powers; to "be a paladin" go hard on valor powers.
Last edited:
overgeeked
Open-World Sandbox
Looking more at environments. I think you could raid one of the many journey-travel systems for ideas and come up with a few other generic environments and simply string 2-4 of them together to have a passable travel system in Daggerheart.
I was also thinking about dungeons using environments. Something like Trapped Hallway. Use a GM move or spend a Fear to introduce a trap. I know some people really hate the idea of traps just going off, so maybe either sign-posting traps or engaging a trap with that GM move/Fear spend. I mean engaging as in something like hearing the click as you step on something. You're not automatically dead or hurt, but you're now dealing with a trap.
Or the old staple of flooded dungeons. The Raging River environment almost works, but not quite. Maybe something as simple as tweaking it to Lose Items rather than having an Undertow. Or skeletons coming up out of the water instead of a Glass Snake. A triggered trap to start flooding the dungeon, it's on a countdown, of course. I don't remember any difficult terrain equivalent in the book besides the rolling to move a longer distance. Is the closest thing crossing the Raging River?
I was also thinking about dungeons using environments. Something like Trapped Hallway. Use a GM move or spend a Fear to introduce a trap. I know some people really hate the idea of traps just going off, so maybe either sign-posting traps or engaging a trap with that GM move/Fear spend. I mean engaging as in something like hearing the click as you step on something. You're not automatically dead or hurt, but you're now dealing with a trap.
Or the old staple of flooded dungeons. The Raging River environment almost works, but not quite. Maybe something as simple as tweaking it to Lose Items rather than having an Undertow. Or skeletons coming up out of the water instead of a Glass Snake. A triggered trap to start flooding the dungeon, it's on a countdown, of course. I don't remember any difficult terrain equivalent in the book besides the rolling to move a longer distance. Is the closest thing crossing the Raging River?
Someone is going to be first with a megadungeon Campaign Frame. Might as well be Overgeeked. Get on that.
Yeah so I plan to handle exploration style scenes the way I do in a PBTA like Stonetop: a point crawl. Narrate the travel portions with some back and forth world building and character beats, and then introduce a scene not dissimilar to like the Abandoned Druid Grove or Raging River. Not always a problem, sometimes opportunities or cinematic stops, or chances to gain insight into a threat, etc.
I'll also deal with traps the way I would in a narrative system: they're a GM move. If you sign posted with environmental details and they didn't consider, they've handed you an Golden Opportunity - Reveal An Unwelcome Truth (yeah so Terwyn as you step down the hallway here there's a click under your foot as a plate depresses and you hear a rumbling in the wall, what do you do? - probably a reaction roll, maybe an ability response); Split Them Up (maybe this is on a failure of previous, maybe you want to just complicate things, so the floor drops out; or a portcullis slams down, etc). The goal here should be to prompt a player response IMO, that seems to be the core of this system.
I meant the subclass abilities and the emphasis on Oaths. One subclass is the Smiting side of the paladin fantasy (plus flying), the other is the Lay on Hands. It was just interesting to see. I agree the actual domain abilities are a split.
I'm reworking the Winged Sentinel to drop the winged part and turn them into more of a paladin who brings the light into dark places.
nyvinter
Adventurer
I would probably make a new subclass then, just to avoid confusions.
Had the same problem with the Wayfinder Ranger in that it didn't do much wayfinding, so I did a new subclass for that. Need to do the art for when the card generator is up though.
Foundation Features
Specialisation Feature
Mastery Features
Had the same problem with the Wayfinder Ranger in that it didn't do much wayfinding, so I did a new subclass for that. Need to do the art for when the card generator is up though.
Trailblazer
Spellcast Trait: InstinctFoundation Features
- Wayward Guide: You lower the tier of the traversal environment Difficulty by one for yourself.
- Nature Awareness: You have an innate sense of direction and what ground might be dangerous. Roll with Advantage when you use the landscape against Adversaries rather than attacking directly.
Specialisation Feature
- Wreck and Ruins: You roll with Advantage to for figuring out and finding traps within Exploration environments. You add +2 to your Evasion against hazards and traps.
Mastery Features
- I Told You Don’t Move: When an ally within Close range takes damage as a result of the Exploration or Traversal Environment, spend a Hope to reduce the severity of the damage by one threshold for them. Spend 3 Hope for this to apply to all allies and yourself.
- Guided Tour: Mark a Stress to include allies in your Wayward Guide feature up to Close range for the duration of the scene, mark 2 Stress to include allies up to Far range.
Kichwas
Half-breed
Daggerheart lacks a 'cleric' like class. You can do 'healer' with Druid, Sorcerer, Wizard, Bard, and Seraph in differing ways. but there's no express 'kill heretics' class - only an implied one in seraph. Personally from a fantasy conceptualization point of view I'm glad it's not there. I'm not a fan of the 'concept' behind either cleric or paladin - jihadists just don't ring the same way in 2025 as they did in 1974.
I can recontextualize a seraph to not be about being a jihadist, to not be linked to any faith or religion. But cleric is too expressly tied to the concept.
Yeah, that’s what I did, along with cards etc.
This is literally the first time I have ever seen or heard clerics and paladins referred to as "jihadists" and frankly it feels like trolling.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Agree completely. This is the right way to look at it.
But is it the first time you've heard them called "crusaders" or the like? Which essentially (I mean let's not get into it too deeply) means the same thing. Or what about zealots? I don't think it is trolling, it's just using a relevant modern term, I actually think the whole "religion as an excuse for me to beat people up thing", which a very well-worn RPG trope is, in fact... problematic. Doesn't mean we need to ban or w/e, jeez I've played PCs like that enough! Hell one of my favourite 5E PCs was a Druid who er... might have claimed some of the people he killed in battle as sacrifices to his gods... >.>
And indeed, it's not new to regard it as problematic. Earthdawn, one of the first games to really sit down and carefully and try and think about how to "fix" D&D and how to bind important D&D ideas into the gameworld, removed Clerics and Paladins, and that wasn't an accident or random I'd suggest. Nor is their absence from a lot of videogames an accident - nor the fact that when they are in videogames, they often are portrayed as dangerous fanatics.
Similar Threads
