Daggerheart General Thread [+]

zakael19 said:

With the improvised damage chart and effects, traps should be easy to toss together as GM moves off fear etc. Stress as an expendable resource is really nice too for using traps to ablate lightly without weighing play down, I’d be tempted to charge them that on a success with fear for instance.

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Yeah. Traps are effectively Skulk adversaries. You could pretty easily stat one up and add it to a fight. I'm honestly surprised they didn't do that for traps and terrain like 4E considering how much else is drawn from 4E. Part of the advice is to provide dynamic, moving fights. But they seemingly glossed over terrain and traps, unless they expect you to have fights in their environments (which is absolutely supported by the adversaries listed with some environments), but that is not accounted for in their encounter math.

Kichwas said:

It's not though.

A cleric is a warrior of a religion who exists to spread their faith at the end of the threat of violence.

Using that term just peels away all attempts at making it sound better, but that is what it is. And it's a concept that isn't common in fantasy literature in the modern era and has 'aged poorly'.

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If y'all want to fight about clerics and crusaders, please take it elsewhere. It's barely even tangentially related here.

overgeeked said:

Yeah. Traps are effectively Skulk adversaries. You could pretty easily stat one up and add it to a fight. I'm honestly surprised they didn't do that for traps and terrain like 4E considering how much else is drawn from 4E. Part of the advice is to provide dynamic, moving fights. But they seemingly glossed over terrain and traps, unless they expect you to have fights in their environments (which is absolutely supported by the adversaries listed with some environments), but that is not accounted for in their encounter math.

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The Impulses/ Difficulty / Potential Adversaries / Features are all meant to communicate this. You don’t fight an environment directly usually (except in the Frame with the colossi?), but the GM can bring in Features off Fear spending instead of activating an adversary for instance. It’s still consuming a GM resource, and makes things dynamic.

I guess you could take a page from the Raging River actions for a dungeon? Turn it into a Skill Challenge of traversal Actions/scenes. Eg:

Trapped hallways - passive. Navigating the trapped halls requires the PCs to complete a Progress Counter(X). A PC who rolls a failure with Fear is immediately targeted by the “It’s A Trap!” Action without needing to spend a Fear on the feature.

It’s A Trap! - action: Spend a Fear to trigger a trap where a PC is standing. They should say what they do, and make an appropriate reaction roll (I personally hate proscriptive typing in a system like this - let them say how they react and then have them make a Reaction). On a failure, they take damage/trigger a shifting in the environment/fill a room with gas/whatever. On a success, they mark a Stress as their heart settles.

zakael19 said:

The Impulses/ Difficulty / Potential Adversaries / Features are all meant to communicate this. You don’t fight an environment directly usually (except in the Frame with the colossi?), but the GM can bring in Features off Fear spending instead of activating an adversary for instance. It’s still consuming a GM resource, and makes things dynamic.

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Right. I more mean things like terrain effects having an impact on the fight. If the fight is balanced with certain assumptions (so much incoming damage, so much outgoing damage, etc), then if you add in something that will cause more damage or stress, etc, you're throwing off that balance. So to me, it makes more sense to account for that in the encounter design. So you can have things like traps or environments be in a fight without throwing off the balance. Not that you're fighting them per se, but they are fighting you in the sense of making the actual combat encounter harder.

zakael19 said:

I guess you could take a page from the Raging River actions for a dungeon? Turn it into a Skill Challenge of traversal Actions/scenes. Eg:

Trapped hallways - passive. Navigating the trapped halls requires the PCs to complete a Progress Counter(X). A PC who rolls a failure with Fear is immediately targeted by the “It’s A Trap!” Action without needing to spend a Fear on the feature.

It’s A Trap! - action: Spend a Fear to trigger a trap where a PC is standing. They should say what they do, and make an appropriate reaction roll (I personally hate proscriptive typing in a system like this - let them say how they react and then have them make a Reaction). On a failure, they take damage/trigger a shifting in the environment/fill a room with gas/whatever. On a success, they mark a Stress as their heart settles.

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Yeah, that's basically what I was noodling before about flooded dungeons. Taking the Raging River and bringing that in. That's one thing I love about modular design and easy reskinning. Dead simple to drag and drop.

Despite being a old-school gamer at heart, I absolutely love the "well, you rolled with Fear so now there's a problem" style of play. The advice and principles etc in the book are great. Don't hold on too tight, have more than one solution, embrace creativity, etc. Stellar stuff.

Daggerheart is up to #73 in all books across Amazon. Woot.

overgeeked said:

then if you add in something that will cause more damage or stress, etc, you're throwing off that balance.

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I don’t think this is the case here, because you’re spending a resource as the GM to
Make something happen. Doesn’t matter if it’s the environment or an adversary - you’ve expended Fear.

Heck, I’d love to combo that sort of thing on a Failure with Fear with appropriate tags or Actions - the Adversary takes advantage of your poor footwork and sends you flying backwards towards a pit/fire/trap/etc, and then spend another Fear to trigger that ability and ask what they do about it.

Something that is bugging me slightly and I am not even sure why: over on the daggerheart subreddit, tons of people are going all in on homebrew and houserules while admitting to not having played the game at all.

I know that RPGs are very DIY, but this is a totally new game and it feels weird for people to just go whole hog without even having played the game.

zakael19 said:

I don’t think this is the case here, because you’re spending a resource as the GM to
Make something happen. Doesn’t matter if it’s the environment or an adversary - you’ve expended Fear.

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Yeah, that's fair. It's not an extra stat block in the 5E sense so it doesn't get to do anything "extra" outside the bounds of the PC-failure or Fear-spend economy. New game and new modes of thinking and all that. I still haven't gotten it to the table yet. Hopefully will soon.

zakael19 said:

Heck, I’d love to combo that sort of thing on a Failure with Fear with appropriate tags or Actions - the Adversary takes advantage of your poor footwork and sends you flying backwards towards a pit/fire/trap/etc, and then spend another Fear to trigger that ability and ask what they do about it.

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Absolutely. I'm a huge fan of improvised...well, just about everything. If I can run from just the Improvising Adversaries and Adapting Environments tables, I will. Having a good grasp of where the edges are by homebrewing a pile of stuff is a good place to start. I wish someone would do a Blog of Holding style "MM on a Business Card" for Daggerheart.

zakael19 said:

“Some seraphs ally themselves with an army or locale, much to the satisfaction of their rulers, but other crusaders fight in opposition to the follies of the Mortal Realm.”

I’m not sure why DH dropped Cleric / Paladin from their classes when almost the rest are direct D&D fare - but perhaps it’s to leave the religious connotations you want to bring in more open. None of the Frames are thst explicit about divinity apart from the one with the almost animistic small gods.

I’ve just gone ahead and made new cards/ subclasses off the Seraph - one Cleric, one Paladin, which fits my classic D&Dtropland better .

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The Guardian feels like a paladin/barbarian mash-up to me, what with the emphasis on a moral code.

For clerics, even though they don’t have an official setting and went with frames instead, they do have a cosmos, in which even the new/forgotten gods can’t easily cross into the mortal world. I can see using that to say that means those gods also can’t easily grant powers, and the faint divinities that inhabit the mortal world have (to use a D&Dism) more warlock patron-levels of power than full-caster cleric-levels of power.

overgeeked said:

I was more thinking Cubicle 7's Journeys and 4E's terrain and traps.

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I don’t know those, but yeah. There’s definitely a lot out there to be adapted.