Daggerheart Discussion

[Retreater]

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.

Let me get this out at the beginning: if y'all had fun, that's great. I'm not going to say you're having badwrongfun.
But I think that a pre-written adventure misses out on what makes Daggerheart breathe and risks turning it into just another "trad 20" style RPG.
By minimizing GM moves with Fear so you can follow a pre-ordained plot & by limiting the power of a PC's Hope to shape the world, I think a group really misses what's unique and awesome about the system.
The rulebook gives guidelines for creating a one shot adventure with a group, involving the players in the stakes from the beginning. There's a worksheet to walk a new GM through the process. I ran it for a group as my first time with the system. We all loved it. (And we recorded it on a podcast, if you'd like to hear me run it - I can post the link.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

My premise was that Daggerheart isn't really designed for heavily tactical combat.

Detailed, granular movement was expressly presented as an example of a design element that (I feel) is common in, and frequently is used to support tactical combat design. I was not claiming it was an absolute indicator, so a single game doesn't really dismiss my example.

And as I mentioned, the "single game" was simply an example. Movement management can be an element of a tactical combat system (and in fact, I prefer that it is) but my point was that you can have an intensely tactical game that cares little about movement, because all the tactical elements if focuses on are elsewhere. As such, a schematic movement approach doesn't actually tell you how tactically focused a game is.

If you'd like to make the argument that many games without granular movement are highly tactical, feel free to make it. That, at least, might take a bite out of my example, or lead to a discussion of what folks really feel amounts to "tactical focus", which might be interesting.

I'd be willing. It might be a bit of a side trip for this particular thread however.

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.

Having only read the SRD, I would not feel qualified to make that argument with any authority, but I will note that saying, in essence, that your game is narrative+ does not necessarily say it is tactical-, and even the designers perception on this is not infallible. Though Daggerheart appears somewhat lighter weight in general than it, Curseborne is certainly narrative-focused in many ways, but its combat engine is also pretty strongly tactical. My reading of Daggerheart does not suggest a really tactical lightweirght game, when viewed in the context of its overall mechanical weight.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah. I think there's a bit of an old habit of thought that "combat" in a game means "tactical", but we are seeing games that buck that habit.

We can look at something like Outgunned Adventure - by the name, you expect action adventure, with, well, guns. But the Outgunned engine is more focused on emulating pulp/movie action than anything else, and so aims to be fast paced and dramatic, rather than particularly tactical.

This leads to a game with potentially a lot of shooting in it, but the description of a pistol is "Pistol/Revolver: Allows you to shoot."

And that's it. There are not 17 different kinds of pistols with different ranges or magazine sizes, calibers, ammunition types, or the like. They're all just "pistol".

Isn't that because most of the tactical elements are buried in character abilities rather than the weapons themselves? (I may be admixing my memory of Outgunned proper with OA here, though).

 

[Tigris]

Let me get this out at the beginning: if y'all had fun, that's great. I'm not going to say you're having badwrongfun.
But I think that a pre-written adventure misses out on what makes Daggerheart breathe and risks turning it into just another "trad 20" style RPG.
By minimizing GM moves with Fear so you can follow a pre-ordained plot & by limiting the power of a PC's Hope to shape the world, I think a group really misses what's unique and awesome about the system.
The rulebook gives guidelines for creating a one shot adventure with a group, involving the players in the stakes from the beginning. There's a worksheet to walk a new GM through the process. I ran it for a group as my first time with the system. We all loved it. (And we recorded it on a podcast, if you'd like to hear me run it - I can post the link.)

You do not minimize GM moves with fear. You predefine the possible GM moves with fear per scene as described in my play report.


The GM made 2 really spectacular moves with the fear, but they were part of a story and thus made sense and integrated well. They were nowhere mandatory though, so I am sure for other scenes there could also have been some cool potential GM moves (prepared but not used).


In the end most people just overestimate themselves and think things they do themselves are better than they are (like in homecooking...) having a premade (ideally by a professional) adventure and story is normally just better than spontaneous improvisation by non professionals if you look at it from am objective point of view.


Also you lose nothing by providing such adventurs. You just broaden your potential audience. People who dont like to prepare can still do chaotic improvisation sessions and just not use it, the same way not use premade adventurs in D&D.


In the end such premade adventurs help new GMs immensly (and also can helo bad GMs if they dont overestimate themselves) and can make it also easier for players to know what to expect. Its a lot easier as a player to know what to expect when someone runs curse of strad than when someone runs some homebrew.


The best experiences I had with one shots where always preprepared adventurs with good well prepared GMs. And the worst where always improvised.


And even with not so good GMs running not so good systems and not so good premade adventurs, the one shots where at least ok. (5e one shots...) . Where with mostly improvisation the floor is just infinitely low.


EDIT: Also thank you about giving me the opportunity about the podcast, but I dont listen to podcast and I find it extremly boring watching or listening to other people play RPGs. I also really hate impro theater, becaus for me it feels like a waste of time to watch something not prepared as well as possible. A movie in comparison is made to be as good as possible in every second.


Edit 2: I just looked it up, and I found no rule in daggerheart where players can spend hope to influence the story. I just found reddit threats where people want to include this possibility as homebrew. https://daggerheart.org/core-mechanics/making-moves-taking-action players can only spend hope on 4 things according to this page.

 

[zakael19]

Daggerheart shines in "situation" based play, because the Hope/Fear outcomes help frame out the next scene. Very few pre-written adventures do a good job of providing situation based play, but I've seen a few for DH take the game into account and do a decent job of it.

In the end most people just overestimate themselves and think things they do themselves are better than they are (like in homecooking...) having a premade (ideally by a professional) adventure and story is normally just better than spontaneous improvisation by non professionals if you look at it from am objective point of view.

This is incredibly patronizing. My experience playing and running pre-written AP style adventures has nothing on the looseness and adaptability of even something as mild as how DH suggests doing its story-beat situational prep much less the full PBTA / FITD style play I run a lot of. Hell, a lot of "professional" adventures are bad. Go look at any roundup to see this. "But the GM can make it fun by putting in a ton of work" is not a good endorsement.

 

[Umbran]

Oh so you find facts not helpfull (like comparing the mechanics, the things which are actual there), because the facts are speaking against you?

That's a "Have you stopped beating your wife?" phrasing that I'll skip right past.

It was a more basic point of logic. I referred to a generalization - repeating one specific case does not address the generalization. If I had said that ALL tactical combat games use highly granular positioning, then one example addresses the point. When I allude to the broad tendency that tactical systems often do, and narrative systems don't, that takes more than one game to address.

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.

So you're going with, "They are lying, for marketing purposes," then?

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.

To start with, complexity and tactical depth are not the same thing.

But, even if we granted that for sake of argument, if I look at, say, D&D 3e, which is a fairly tactical game, and I look at Daggerheart, I don't find them to be on the same scale of complexity. Daggerheart seems to have intentionally flattened many of the design spaces D&D uses - types of damage, resistances, mechanical effects that can be imposed on targets, detailed movement, and so on.

 

[Agamon]

Edit 2: I just looked it up, and I found no rule in daggerheart where players can spend hope to influence the story. I just found reddit threats where people want to include this possibility as homebrew. https://daggerheart.org/core-mechanics/making-moves-taking-action players can only spend hope on 4 things according to this page.

That's true, but is kind of missing the point. You don't need hope to influence the story, you just need to, well, have your PC do something.

Having a more rigid structure does limit what a PC can do...unless the DM is willing to improvise somewhat. Besides my DH game, I'm running a TotV Odyssey of the Dragonlords game. It's a structured adventure, but I run it pretty loosey-goosey. Each arc has a beginning and end, but I let the PCs run around doing whatever they want in between.

And there's a large gap between structured adventure and no-prep winging it. I prep each session based on what happened in the last one. It gives some structure, while not marrying the GM to it. Having NPCs and factions with their own motivations makes running them without a predefined script pretty easy. Having events that happen whether the PCs interfere or not makes the world seem more alive. Having secrets not tied to a place or person means you can have them revealed wherever and however makes sense, depending on the PCs actions.I take the Hold On Gently principle to heart.

 

[Teemu]

I think that an additional layer of DH that can be missed on a more cursory read or when playing a one- shot is that the narrative and the fiction have more weight on how the rules interact compared to most other TTRPGs. For example, when you're shooting with a bow in melee -- the GM has full "power" to say that you have disadvantage on the roll, or that if the roll doesn't succeed with Hope, the enemy will then use that opportunity to make an advantageous attack on the archer. DH doesn't often define these interactions through hard coded rules, but at the same time the rules emphasize that the fiction should lead you and influence how you employ the relatively simple mechanics.

Fire or lightning or cold are not damage types in DH but PCs and adversaries can still use fire or cold to hurt their opponents, and those elements or energies can and should interact with how the world is described. If a PC has a staff whose attack they describe as being fiery, the fire could and should light flammable things on fire. If they fight a fire elemental, maybe the staff attack doesn't do much, but if the PC shoots fire at a fire-averse creature (as narrated, not defined in rules), the creature should react accordingly, even through rules such as marking Stress when marking HP from the attack, and further influenced by the degree of success of the attack roll.

What I'm trying to say is that DH has more depth to its rules than what can appear at first glance, but it's true that this depth requires buy-in from the GM and the players. If you play DH more like D&D and most other TTRPGs, you do run the risk of losing this additional layer of interactions. However, in my experience once players get this, once they understand how this works, they become more creative and are willing to try new things that would often be missed in other games because of rules codification.

 

[Reynard]

Daggerheart is not a "narrative game" but it does embrace non-binary adjudication and strongly encourages the "play to find out" model. It is a perfect game for "high prep situations; low prep plots" if that makes sense.

I am excited for the Hope and Fear supplement though: DH needs more tools in the toolbox and as usual, the 3PP stuff is uneven in quality (although I really like Incredible Creatures).