Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[overgeeked]

When I read the Seraph class, my first instinct was that they had collapsed the cleric because the new framework eliminated the need for a class whose principal focus was on healing.

It feels that healing in combat just isn’t as important in the system.

Absolutely. Healing is less a main defining thing for a class or two and instead a flavor sprinkled broadly across several classes. The mechanics also dramatically deemphasize healing in combat with rests allowing you to heal yourself or heal others. Besides, almost no one wants to play support characters. Just standing there healing is boring. They designed the game so no one has to be the healer. And that’s great.

 

[Vael]

That said ... there's no such thing as death saves, so in combat healing is important, can't wait for a PC to drop.

 

[Faolyn]

Yeah, comparatively there’s effectively nothing as yet. But not literally nothing. There’s already a few Kickstarters and all kinds of homebrew, has been since the launch of the original playtest. The game’s a month old. It’ll have more 3PP support in no time.

Sure, why not? I was more commenting on it needing to be playtested widely before it gets to the CR table. Matt has no problem letting his player use busted stuff.

Wait, there's more Daggerheart kickstarters? I'm assuming 3pp. The only things I've heard about were some obviously AI-generated stuff that gets posted on the subreddit with warnings not to buy it.

 

[overgeeked]

Wait, there's more Daggerheart kickstarters? I'm assuming 3pp. The only things I've heard about were some obviously AI-generated stuff that gets posted on the subreddit with warnings not to buy it.

Searching on Kickstarter shows four projects. None of them look obviously “AI” generated. What’s the one to avoid?

 

[Faolyn]

Searching on Kickstarter shows four projects. None of them look obviously “AI” generated. What’s the one to avoid?

I'm sorry, I can't remember. They're not on kickstarter, that I know of--they're GM guides on Amazon.

 

[aramis erak]

I wonder if anything would break if you threw a group of leaders at the PCs?

Well, yeah, one might break it, depending upon which. Some have unlimited summons, some have activation of several at once.

Maybe that's Daggerheart's version of "just use a bear." Just use a leader.

No, that's the Solos. If the party is large, and you want them running scared, use a solo of the next tier.

 

[aramis erak]

It feels that healing in combat just isn’t as important in the system.

It's not unimportant, but yeah, it's less vital than in D&D. Throwing some healing at the Guardian can magnify their abilities.

 

[aramis erak]

Wait, there's more Daggerheart kickstarters? I'm assuming 3pp. The only things I've heard about were some obviously AI-generated stuff that gets posted on the subreddit with warnings not to buy it.

I found 3 ½ on KS: 2 bestiaries, a deck of support cards (Class abiliities, 2× 1d12 subdecks. some other cards), and a setting that's for 5E, but they're considering a Daggerheart conversion. 2 of them are not running yet. All non-Darrington, under the CGL.

None on Backerkit.
Nothing relevant on Indiegogo,

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So, reporting back as promised, ran session zero + 2 sessions of Daggerheart, with my main group, most of whom I've been playing with since the 1990s, and who have played a pretty vast range of RPGs, including all editions of D&D (they notably have a high tolerance for new systems, but two of them aren't normally good at learning them, they just don't mind trying!).

Daggerheart was a big hit with them, despite some initial skepticism largely on the basis of being skeptical of Critical Role and/or the idea that Daggerheart was simply an effort at "monetization" of CR or something. The rules worked extremely well and were quite intuitive - it was some of the least confusion I've seen with a new system, including new editions of D&D, despite some pretty different rules! I will say I think the DH rules kind of fit naturally with how they tend to play/think about playing.

Observations:

• The gradiated success/failure worked well - I found that I wasn't always putting a real complication or the like on every "with Fear", but rather where it actually mattered/made a difference, which was pretty often. Likewise "with Hope" tended to be more nuance than completely changing things, but it really helped give some colour/context to things. For example, when the Rogue was being chased by a giant undead lion, he tried to do a ridiculous parkour deal between two close-together buildings, and failed with Hope, so I narrated that as them quickly realizing they couldn't pull the parkour off, and just running and thus not losing much ground to the lion (who was having some difficulty with the narrowness of the alley).
• The PCs didn't hoard resources - neither Hope nor Stress. I was honestly surprised by this! The Rogue in particular burned through Stress extremely fast with their shadow-to-shadow teleport and was joking about how their HP were a "second Stress bar", and the Firbolg Wizard used a ton of Stress on horn-charges! Tag-team attacks proved a popular usage of Hope, which I'd hope they would.
• You don't necessarily get as much Fear as you might like - it didn't help that I kept forgetting certain monster mechanics generated Fear! Also wow you can run out of Stress real fast using some monster abilities.
• Monsters don't have a ton of HP. I kind of thought they would be tough to take down - but the PCs rarely inflicted less than 2 HP, and often 3.
• These PCs could inflict a ton of Vulnerable which meant they rarely missed against serious enemies. I could use up spotlights to drop it but often it seemed like it was better to just eat where it was narratively possible.
• Resting can pretty rapidly slam the GM to max Fear and often gets the PCs to high Hope fairly fast too. But as noted before, 12 Fear isn't a huge amount, especially if you're trying to spotlight multiple enemies.
• The damage threshold/HP mechanism attracted some "isn't that just more complicated HP?" comments but worked really well in practice, and kept both the PCs and monsters kind of on-edge in a way conventional HP tend not to.
• The most optimization-minded player somehow immediately identified Druids as "kinda OP" and so broke from his long tradition of playing mostly melee brutes to play one, and very successfully!
• We got to see the death mechanics in action! It's fairly easy to burn through the HP of the PCs - they don't have a crazy amount. Aforementioned Druid got taken out (all HP boxes crossed) by the big multi-stage boss I used when it was on 1 HP, and he went for the "Risk it all" option, rolling 10 on the Hope die and 4 on the Fear, so rose like an absolute phoenix. He was taken out by magical fire and had the "Forged in fire" experience already (from previous fire-related incidents in his character's history), so it worked out really well, and he went from dead to taking out the boss! Very exciting! Lot of cheering from the players.
• I told the players that they could keep taking actions until they failed a roll or the like, but if they did, that might give me a "Golden Opportunity" (i.e. a free action), so should probably pass to another player regularly... and this worked extremely well - they took appropriate actions then passed to another player, and saved me the trouble of having to cut between them or the like - if I saw one PC was getting less play I could always come back after my action(s) and ask them what they were doing.
• One player made a PC that was less ideal for the setup than the rest (all of whom were basically "chargers" to some extent) because he was so defensive-minded (a stoic Galapa Guardian), and the rest of the PCs rushed ahead but my repeatedly asking him what he was doing in combat we were gradually able to get him to play in a more aggressive way, and he actually made really good use of his Experiences.
• Talking of experiences, those worked out pretty well, with a mixture of fairly straightforward ones like "Itinerant" or "Healer" and more exotic ones like "Forged in fire" or "Take you down a peg" all seeing a lot of use.
• The heroic tone worked well, with the players quickly moving back towards the more heroic way they played 4E and Dungeon World, rather than the more cautious and "DM is out to get us" way they'd played 3E and 5E.
• Very oddly all the PCs were animal people! I did not see that coming from this bunch of Furry-sneerers! We had a Firbolg Wizard, a Katari Druid (we renamed that to Catfolk because Qatari is a real thing and it was too funny), a Faun Rogue (a vicious combination, I must say), and a Galapa Guardian. Everyone's abilities seemed pretty on-point, perhaps the Wizard's least but I think he actually just loved charging people (he was at the "minotaur" end of the Firbolg spectrum). The Galapa Guardian was absolutely indestructible, tanking repeated hits from the main boss down to 1 or 0 HP, the Rogue was ultra-mobile (insanely so - at one point jumping off an 800ft cliff and using shadow teleport to survive - a more calculated decision than it might sound like), the Druid shot fireballs, floated around, turned into a mountain lion and savaged people and so on.

I could go on and might later, but was genuinely pretty impressed, and the players like a lot of little things too. I was planning, previously, to switch to Draw Steel! when it came out, but I'm probably not going to do that now. I think this might actually be better for my main group.

 

[dbm]

Interesting that your optimiser thought that Druids were OP but got put down to 0HP. Does that suggest that, in actual gameplay, they are not as over powered as they seem on paper? What do you think based on your play experience?