Daggerheart Discussion

[Agamon]

They are playing Daggerheart, a D&D clone a heroic adventure. They are not playing "tests and torture".

If the GM can only make the story interesting with bad things / by harrassing the players, then maybe that person should not GM heroic adventurers.



Things in real live can also not work without consequences.

If every roll has a big chance to add complications, then there is just no real progress.


Daggerheart is a D&D clone, a heroic adventure, not a teenage drama. In heroic games rolling dice is fun. If most outcomes are negative then its not fun.

Most outcomes are negative? Having actually played the game quite a bit, I can tell you that this isn't true.

 

[Agamon]

If you don't understand the difference between "ever" and "with the majority of results" I don't know what to tell you. PbtA (and Daggerheart) assume most rolls will produce complications (in Daggerheart any failure and any success with Fear). That doesn't feel good to a lot of people because the only ones that feel like success are the ones that only happen slightly more than a quarter of the time. Your dismissiveness isn't going to change that.

But also, you saying "a lot of people" doesn't mean much either.

 

[Parmandur]

Most outcomes are negative? Having actually played the game quite a bit, I can tell you that this isn't true.

Just looking at the math of the resolution mechanics, it seems like the failure to success ratio wouldn't even be all that different from D&D.

 

[Agamon]

Just looking at the math of the resolution mechanics, it seems like the failure to success ratio wouldn't even be all that different from D&D.

Yeah, plus soft GM moves aren't world shaking calamities. In D&D they're what's known as, "DMing"

 

[Thomas Shey]

Most of the time, the complication is a shift of spotlight or a GM move. I get that it can ramp up the cognitive load if folks feel like they must always come up with something creative and unexpected. But I think mot complications should not be unexpected -- they should be exactly what you think would happen given the fiction, the approach and the dice. And as others have mentioned, if you as GM do not have a clear sense of what a complication looks like, maybe don't ask for a roll yet, because the stakes are not high enough for it to matter yet. Ask for the roll when the PCs' actions strongly suggest potential consequences of failure and comlications.

I'm not talking about the GM here, but the players. Yeah, the spotlight shift isn't as bad as some of the things that would come up in a PbtA, but it still is visible as a consequence of the fear roll, and people are still going to think of that as "not a success" (this is much more true in true PbtAs because its emphasized more). After all, not only is the spotlight shifting, but the GM gets a Fear point. To some people--and by the evidence I have, a fair bit of them--that reads as a less severe failure.

I get that idea is weird to some people, but I don't think it does them any good to not acknowledge its a real thing or to be dismissive of the people who feel that way. Its probably a smaller group than with true PbtAs and offshoots because of frequency (it didn't bother my wife overly much, who very much would have that issue with a PbtA; she mostly disliked the randomness of Hope access (yes, it doesn't matter she should get them frequently when as it worked out in the session, that's not how it worked; the only Hope she got was from the crits she rolled, the rest were either Success with Fear (most of them) or Failure with Fear).

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, plus soft GM moves aren't world shaking calamities. In D&D they're what's known as, "DMing"

Yeah, just thinking in the abstract about the Fear mathematics, it seems designed to give a similar level to what challenging but non-adversarial SMing would normally amount to.

 

[Thomas Shey]

They are playing Daggerheart, a D&D clone a heroic adventure. They are not playing "tests and torture".

If the GM can only make the story interesting with bad things / by harrassing the players, then maybe that person should not GM heroic adventurers.

I'm going to take the other side of this and say most of what's interesting in other games are "bad things". The difference in most of them is that the "bad things" aren't tied to the players' rolls.

That's the only important difference here, as @Agamon references above. My disagreement with him is as to whether it does or should bother some people.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You seem to think that "complications" are synonymous with "bad things" and "nagativity." If that is the case, there is not much I can say to you.

I think if you assess "complication" as implying anything but a problem to most people, we're back to my thinking you're not understanding other perspectives.

They might not be severe problems, but, well, when you hear "there was a complication in surgery" people don't expect it went particularly well.

Finally, I think it is important to not conflate "heroic" with "easy" or "never fail." Heroism is measured directly against hardship, after all.

Like I said, the problem isn't hardship for the people I'm talking about; its that the hardship is normally directly or indirectly tied to some of their rolls.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But also, you saying "a lot of people" doesn't mean much either.

Then we don't have anything useful to say to each other, because all evidence I have is that's true and I'm not liable to change my mind because you don't think so.

 

[zakael19]

In a PBTA, your options on a roll are a Hit, a Weak Hit (one with a complication / cost), or a Miss. In DH, you’ve got 5 potential outcomes (Greater Hit, Hit, Hit with complications, Miss with softer outcome, Miss with worst outcome); but the GM always has a non-escalatory out: mark a Stress / take the Fear.

What these rolls tell us is which way the narrative is going to go. Do you cleanly get your objective, or is there a new complication to deal with? Now what do you do?

The goal of play is to always frame out a grabby scene and then see what the players do, with no preconceptions. The roll outcomes when risk and drama are involved help the table understand how the player’s risky and heroic Actions go.

My experience is that my tables really like this. I’m willing to accept that I’m just that amazing of a GM, but I think the onboarding of players to the idea of rolls-> story -> drama based on what they are helps.