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Brief foreshadowing mostly to show how the villain is Doing Stuff, far less than the usual read-aloud text you see in a D&D campaign.

Ok but what about full paragraph length read-aloud text? :P Hitting 2-3 senses to evoke the spirit of the place and drop a couple hooks for the next questions to examine the place more fully is excellent. The scent of aged lavender fills the air? Where's it coming from? Can I tell what the...

Yeah. I had to read the minion rules multiple times to fully absorb them - but basically they’re a pool of HP, and so if the total damage dealt is > then an individual’s you overkill appropriately if more are in range.

There was definitely a bit of "new game with a lot of tags/keywords/rules" to work through tonight, but we had a lot of fun wading in to teh Delian Tomb. It's not as interesting an opening as the Road to Broadhurst (or as varied), but I think the way it slowly unlocks the sheet/actions helped us...

I think that maybe we’re seeing a lot of recent games picking a narrower area of focus and designing as much rules overhead around that as they need to hit the game feel they want. If we’re defining “crunch” as “has enumerated subsystems the game expects you to use” then yeah, I think lots of...

That rat encounter looks inspired for something so early in a game experience.

I saw an interesting post over on Reddit about death move and scars/Hope loss, suggesting that it rapidly gets quite punishing and throwing out some alternative ideas that I thought were actually really solid. To @Reynard 's idea, one thing they added in there was "write down a negative...

Yeah to me that’s still way too many for a game with a lot of tactical combat. My group of pretty on the ball and dedicated players were struggling to keep all the little bits of Daggerheart abilities straight 5 sessions in, in part because it actually can have quite a few steps and maths per...

There's a lot of stuff in DS I see as trying to walk the line of "impactful without getting too complex." So you can stack things RAW in a way that say 5e may not allow, but not as far as the near-mandatory buff/debuff game I understand PF2 requires; or the hilarious maze that is 4e's +2s all...

Already answered above, but part of the goodness there is small bits of math required. +2/-2 when your core stat is unlikely to scale past +5 IIRC? is pretty easy; simply shifting your result left or right a success tier is even easier since the tier outcomes are written with your ability. I...

The upside is that DS has a bias towards always letting you do something on a turn. It’s not very cinematic to fail a Save Ends roll and then go “welp.” So most of the conditions are “take a Bane on a power roll (unless)” or “only take one action” etc.

Edit: Dupe due to server issues.

It’s a fairly direct port of the refined-through-iterations mystery moves and structure from The Gauntlet’s games (Brindlewood Bay / The Silt Verses / The Between / something else?), as also pictured in some FITD games as well (External Containment Bureau / Bump in the Dark). The clue bit...

Had our first session of my modern urban fantasy frame. So fun, the characters are all filling out so well and the dynamics shaking out are hilarious. We started with a pretty light-hearted opener, a very much "oh you all are the b-team, here's a lost pet problem (a wizard's pet cockatrice of...

Drama is the absolute standout IMO. Yes, everything that generates Drama off start of turn is dramatic.

They've kept all the classes operating under the same base conditions for balance purposes. Everybody has resource gain + spend abilities that do stuff. I do think some are more straightforward than others (eg: the Censor has really simple alternative resource gain, either when you hit your Mark...

You have Groups of monsters on initiative activations, which I think are kinda set by monster type? I'm not entirely sure on that, I only have the quick start ruleset which is focused more on running the existing adventure. FWIW, after the very first encounter the pre-designed DS! rooms have...

Yeah, “he steps up and gets in your face all aggro like, you gonna let that lie?” is a core GM move of “ask [provocative] questions.” Daggerheart thrives on pushing the players into actions with dramatic moments, leaning into the brief background items they’ve defined...

I’m looking forward to seeing how quickly rounds resolve. I find another part of keeping attention on the game is having interesting things to see & chances to contribute on a consistent order.

I mean a core super basic thing that DS! does to keep you paying attention is that your class resource has multiple “if this then gain” triggers based on things often not on your turn. If you aren’t watching out for that, you’re going to miss a lot of potential action fuel.