I disagree that the complex resource management has anything to do with combat. Having players mark stress, armor, hope and HP are the principal means I use to enforce consequences outside of combat, whether it social contests or encountering exploration obstacles.
In fact, other systems lack of a stress mechanic is one of the principal reasons I find them more combat focussed than Daggerheart.
Of course the complex ressource management has to do with combat, because all these ressources are mainly used in combat. Especially "Armor" is just an additional health used in combat normally.
Also yes "stress" could be used for non combat in general, however, the way it is used is almost identical to Beacons use of stress, which is as a ressource for combat.
Its not like Chthulhus "insanity" or similar effects, which make non combat harder over the course of a day etc. stress literally does nothing to you, unless its full. And even then the consequence is not that severe (like even in Beacon you "die". Here its mainly that you also take some damage and are more vulnerable (mostly in combat). So outside combat it hardly has a "consequence",
For the enemies stress is literally the ressource used to limit their special abilities in combat, and thats also the most common use for player stress. Many combat abilities, which increase damage, have stress as an additional cost. Only the name kind of hints at "non combat", but it could as well be called "mana" for how it is used.
Of course you can also use combat ressources for non combat consequences. D&D 4E already did that with healing surge costs for skill challenges etc. to have the consequences for the non combat tied together with combat.
I am going to run an in-person game this year, and ran a number of test sessions for the group. Two of them were Daggerheart and 13th Age. I found that for practical purposes, both games had equivalent movement rules. The difference is that Daggerheart has some optional rules for a more traditional grid-based combat. After they played both of them, my group told me that part of the two games were exceptionally similar. The only game we tested that had less rigorous movement rules was Fabula Ultima.
I agree both 13th age and daggerheart are similar, both use abstract ranges for movement. Why I find 13th age slightly more tactical is because there are more consequences with movement.
If you are engaged with an enemy and do a ranged attack they can do an opportunity attack (opposite is true as well for everyone), which means there is an incentice to move close (as a melee) as well as move away (as a range) with the disengage. Also you can to protect allies from this "intercept" enemies when they try to move to an ally.
This adds a small layer on top which makes movement enforce different behaviour.
The key takeaway from this discussion for me is that games can be very similar, but interpretations can vary and make big differences appear to be the case.
Here I agree. People see daggerheart and see how its marketed etc. and thus want to play it as a more narrative game. (I guess also because it lacks good combat balance like 13th age, but thats not a feature and has not to do with the base mechanics).
I'm not sure the last there proves your point. Movement and distance in 13th Age are very loosey-goosey too, but I think most people with experience with its combat would still describe it as having a pretty tactical combat focus, even accounting for the big-picture focus in parts of them.
I think a view of "tactical" that limits it to tight battleboard usage is overly narrow.
Fully agree here, especially since there are also games like Fabula Ultima, which have no movement at all and still want to be tactical, they just extracted the movement layer even further.
Did you get some idea that I was picking a fight with 13th Age? Because I'm not. This thread isn't about 13th Age.
I don't find your repeated comparisons helpful, because I am happy with the idea that neither Daggerheart nor 13th Age are really aiming at tactical combat.
Oh so you find facts not helpfull (like comparing the mechanics, the things which are actual there), because the facts are speaking against you?
Of course when we speak about games we compare them with others to better understand them, that helps to show why arguments are wrong like "its not tactical because it uses not explicit ranges", because that is not necessary for tactical combat as others show. Or "there are no detailed options turn by turn" which this, as a showed, also not true (especially compared to other games which have way more abstract/less detailed mechanics in many parts.
Meanwhile, I've already also quoted the game itself noting it as narrative-focused. If you want to argue that the writers of Daggerheart are lying, incompetent, or otherwise incorrect, and have instead created a highly tactically oriented game, make that argument.
What writers/designers say is marketing, its literally part of their job to sell their product. Marketing is not an argument, else all the Kellogs stuff would be healthy. ESPECIALLY writing the "blurb" of a product is meant to sell it by sounding good.
If writers think the product sells better if marketed as narrative, then they say that.
And what does sound better: "Our game is narrative" or "we tried to do tactical combat in our game but we kinda failed doing it, so focus on the non tactical stuff"? This is not even lying its just selling the stronger parts of a product.
At least since Maro is writing regularly columns, its well known how designers can be used as strong marketing tools:
Mark Rosewater - Wikipedia
Combat mechanic wise daggerheart is as complex as tactical combat games, we can see this by looking at the facts (the mechanics) and by comparing them to other games mechanics.
You can run any game as non tactical. You can even run D&D 4E as non tactical if you want. Heck some people played 4E mainly narrative (focusing on skill challenges and non combat and only having easy combats not needing tactics and using a lot of improvised actions as covered in 4E DMG on page 42 like "Shiera the 8th-level rogue wants to try the classic swashbuckling move of swinging on a chandelier and kicking an ogre in the chest on her way down to the ground, hoping to push the ogre into the brazier of burning coals behind it. An Acrobatics check seems reasonable."). And if you give 4E to a really bad GM which did not read the DMG for it and makes stuff just up as it comes, I am sure combat also will not be too tactical.
Since
@Tigris has been bringing it up, I'm wondering what conditions you see as missing from DH baseline that would add more depth? Right now we have:
- Restrained (covers the gamut of "affects movement:" slowed/prone/immobilized/grabbed, etc)
- Vulnerable (covers the gamut of "easier to hit:" prone/flanked/blinded/weakened/etc)
We have lots of one-off conditions (Asleep, Poisoned, Dizzied/Dazed, Enveloped, etc).
We have lots of things that
would be conditions in other systems instead a rider that interacts with the Hope/Fear/Stress/Armor economy.
Well I am not sure if Daggerheart needs to have more depth, for how people play it.
I think I would rather just simplify the overcomplicated damage mechanics, etc. to remove the tactical combat mechanics from it to actually make it narrative mechanic wise.
However, if we would want to improve the tactical aspect of the game, then I would not start with the conditions but instead:
- Add the clear guidelines for rests (short rests specifically) to the book, which was forgotten to be included (but mentioned in some places online). Knowing how many combats / how strong of a combat is assumed to be per short rest is important for creating tactical challenges.
- Balance the game better. Give exact and good working guidelines on how strong a combat needs to be to be challenging (in average, good and bad rolls still affect a lot in the end) for a party. If a combat is just always a walk in the park, no tactics are needed.
- Also balance classes, races, backgrounds and and options better, if you have such a huge power disparity (druid (even ignoring the broken multiclassing) vs fighter types) you cant have tactical combat, because combat must be working even if all your characters are lorebound dwarf elemental sorcerer having taken the worst possible spells, you cant make it challenging for actual strong characters.
- Add general opportunity attacks (or making it harder to do ranged attacks if an enemy is in melee) and a"disengage" to get away from melee, like 13th age such that movement actually is more meaningfull. The game already has a more complex range system than 13th age, it just does not use it well.
- Add some form of "spotlight fairness" mechanic to make sure in combat everyone must do something, else a single druid or similar can do combat with a really high chance to not fail when attacking.
If we add more conditions, for tactical purposes, then it needs to be conditions which do actually change player behaviour:
- "pacified" an enemy will/cant attack as long as you dont attack that enemy (or X turns are over), this makes people actually need to change targets
- "burning" a condition which deals damage over time making it good to spread over different enemies, but than attack/focus down different ones.
- "damaging aura" or something similar, which makes it for characters important to get away from an enemy. This also can force to some degrees that different characters need to act (because they all might need to get away).
- "Charging" that enemies can charge really strong attacks, which can be disrupted by massive damage only or something like that. Which makes it necessarily for players to work together to make sure one of them get the massive attack (so one person might make the enemy vulnerable, than another person goes into position to aid an attacker and then the big attacker tries to do massive damage).
I think also that you can't really sell traditional RPG products for Daggerheart. Adventures are pointless because they're created at the table and supposed to be "loosey-goosey."
This was written some time ago, but I had to think about it and I am really not sure about this. The way the GM in our one shot did run daggerheart was really really similar to a premade adventure (and it was great). In hindsight I think he combined parts of some starter adventure and homebrew (I first thought it was just the starter adventure, but from what I have read since about that, it cant have just been that).
He prepared classically different scenes, and for the scenes trouble, and potential additional trouble for the use of fear.
- Like we were first in a bar, and after we spent some time there and had some bad rolls (with fear), the GM used the fear to call enemies to appear at the bar where we had a fight.
- Then we went outside and then had in the city center a scene where we could gather information, and because 2 characters of us where "on the look out" they were able to do perception rolls, and by succeeding we got some additional information (and other characters interacted with premade characters and got information from them).
- Then we were following a lead and entered a place where we needed to pass some guards to investigate further. We could freely distract guards and sneak past them etc. as we wanted, but the scene was prepared with the challenge of overcoming these guards (in non combat way).
- Then at some point during the investigation we had gathered quite a bit of clues, and where near the source of the evil, but also had accumulated a lot of fear, so the GM used a big amount of fear to trigger a huge event in this place.
- In the end we triggered a boss fight (again which was prepared) with kind of 2 phases. We triggered phase 1 because of partially the event before and how we interacted with the result. By acting differently (not rolling so much fear) and investigating as a team we could have just skipped phase 1 most likely.
This worked really well, everyone was happy, and it really felt like a well made prewritten adventure, maybe a bit linear, but many of them are. So I really dont see a reason why premade adventurers like this would not work with daggerheart, not every GM wants to improvise, and some players really appreciate it to have some well prepared adventure happening and not just improvisation.
