Daggerheart "Description on Demand" a GM DON'T

[Agamon]

I don't feel like having PC backstories help build the world is the same thing, from the "paint the scene" standpoint, as "You enter the tavern; what does it looks, feel and smell like?"

It's kind of part-and-parcel. In DH, you aren't supposed to come to the game with a long, thought-out backstory. One, to be more malleable during session zero world building, but also, two, so that when one "paints the scene", they can use it as an opportunity to tell the table more about their character.

 

[Kichwas]

I think this is an important point.

My gamist players want to compete against the dungeon.

I think with the narrativist players they are wanting to collaboratively craft a story.

I think it's good that the hobby now has solid offerings in both of these extreme ends of the play spectrum, and several good examples in the middle.

While running and playing PF2E I encountered a number of players who absolutely struggled with the gamist angle and kept finding themselves cycling through characters or approaches because they were looking for a different kind of experience and just hadn't figured out yet how to articulate it. I could sit at a table and see one portion of the players thriving, and the other struggling - and very clear personality differences between them. Pathfinder vacuums up a lot of narrative players because of it's rich lore that can appeal to BOTH narrative and gamist players - but the narrative players then go on the 'not get it' when the game engine has a different aim.

Back in the 90s there was a brief 'Diceless RPG' movement that attempted to make games for narrative folks but to me they all felt flat in having no good way of resolving actions / challenges / etc other than "just wing it" - which felt like passing the buck.

Mist and Daggerheart now offer narrative approaches with actual resolution mechanics. Drawsteel rests on the far end of the other side with what looks to be extremely well made gamist mechanics. In the right mood I could see myself enjoying it because I can swing back and forth between gamism and narrative.

I think Daggerheart is more in the middle than it is truly narrative. But it oddly has better narrative advice than a more purely narrative game like Mist. I think Mist would be harder for me to handle if I had NOT first read the GMing advice in Daggerheart... The Mist game does not spend enough page count on what to do with roleplaying the tags - even at it has entire extra books on actions through the tags, it doesn't talk enough about putting the narrative glue in there that turns it from tedious to engaging.

Cosmere is another entry here that I "think" sits in the middle alongside Daggerheart. But I know almost nothing about the game engine other than that is does have a plot die you do "stuff" with. Then there's DC20 which I know only the name of, and that it "probably" uses a 20-sided die somewhere.

I think 2025 has ended up being a great year for tRPGs in terms of expanding our potential choices.

 

[Agamon]

Back in the 90s there was a brief 'Diceless RPG' movement that attempted to make games for narrative folks but to me they all felt flat in having no good way of resolving actions / challenges / etc other than "just wing it" - which felt like passing the buck.

Man, Amber drpg was such a cool idea that I had so much trouble wrapping my brain around lol

 

[Kichwas]

It feels unfair because you weren’t expecting it. Somewhat arbitrary.

I dunno.

(this is still about the example where the player was asked to describe how their attack killed an NPC and they came back with 'shredded'... right? Or am I responding to the wrong thing? My response below assumes it's about that.)

Tacking on an added penalty because of the narration is "almost" the same as something directly mentioned as a 'do not do this' in Daggerheart.

In Daggerheart they specifically call out NOT using a roll with fear to negate the outcome.

So if you roll 'success with fear' - the GM needs to remember that is a success. And not change the outcome.
If you roll 'fail with fear' - the GM needs to remember that is a fail, not a critical fail. And not change the outcome.

You apply that fear downstream or as a followup.
It's less obvious but the same applies to something like a fail with hope - don't turn it into a success. Let the player use the hope downstream.

Mist has the same advice with regards to applying a 'consequence'. Especially on a success with consequence. It CANNOT undo the 'power tags' a player obtains through the success. It can be applied to set the stage for the followup, but it cannot undo the success.

So here you have a player saying
"this is how my success worked - it did this to the enemy."

And the GM is now saying "as a result, you lose access to the result of your success."

On the one hand the GM did it right: they applied the penalty to the followup, not the direct moment.

But it very much feels against the "spirit" of the idea of encouraging narrative play.

 

[Kichwas]

You seem to have contemplated not inviting him to your games. What exactly is he doing that is spoiling your fun?

I think that was more me than them. I took their example and used it to make a hypothetical of a potential player who was way out of sync with their group. But the original example was more mild.

I just used it to launch a hypothetical in order to examine handling when groups have players that don't match each other well - something that easily happens in newly formed groups.

I guess I failed to be clear enough that my hypo was both mine and a hypo rather than the actual story I started from.

 

[TheSword]

I dunno.

(this is still about the example where the player was asked to describe how their attack killed an NPC and they came back with 'shredded'... right? Or am I responding to the wrong thing? My response below assumes it's about that.)

Tacking on an added penalty because of the narration is "almost" the same as something directly mentioned as a 'do not do this' in Daggerheart.

In Daggerheart they specifically call out NOT using a roll with fear to negate the outcome.

So if you roll 'success with fear' - the GM needs to remember that is a success. And not change the outcome.
If you roll 'fail with fear' - the GM needs to remember that is a fail, not a critical fail. And not change the outcome.

You apply that fear downstream or as a followup.
It's less obvious but the same applies to something like a fail with hope - don't turn it into a success. Let the player use the hope downstream.

Mist has the same advice with regards to applying a 'consequence'. Especially on a success with consequence. It CANNOT undo the 'power tags' a player obtains through the success. It can be applied to set the stage for the followup, but it cannot undo the success.

So here you have a player saying
"this is how my success worked - it did this to the enemy."

And the GM is now saying "as a result, you lose access to the result of your success."

On the one hand the GM did it right: they applied the penalty to the followup, not the direct moment.

But it very much feels against the "spirit" of the idea of encouraging narrative play.

I think you’ve over complicated it though.

The player was asked to describe how a successful Toll the Dead spell killed an NPC. And because they didn’t say it in the way the DM wanted he reduced their loot for it.

I don’t think it’s anymore complicated than that

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I think that was more me than them. I took their example and used it to make a hypothetical of a potential player who was way out of sync with their group. But the original example was more mild.

I just used it to launch a hypothetical in order to examine handling when groups have players that don't match each other well - something that easily happens in newly formed groups.

I guess I failed to be clear enough that my hypo was both mine and a hypo rather than the actual story I started from.

So, then in practise, as long as they were not actively disrupting the dynamic of the more narrative players you would allow continued participation>