Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[Seramus]

I definitely think Stress is supposed to power slightly stronger abilities, on the grounds that it's "easy" to get Hope, but somewhat harder to recover Stress, and you're always faced with the danger of running out of Stress. In that way, it feels like the Hope/Fear theme made manifest: Hope being the literal Hope fuel, and Stress being the Fear fuel on the player side that always keeps you a little tense about using it.

And spending Stress IS tense. Monsters can make you lose it, the DM can give you the choice to spend it for benefits "You can spend 1 Stress and grab your friend as they topple off the side of the cliff", or they just just inflict it outright "Take 2 Stress as you trudge through the Swamp of Sorrows for hours after failing your Instinct check with Fear."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Or possibly there are abilities that allow Stress to be recovered?

There are - Splendor has stuff that heals Stress for example, and if you roll a crit you recover 1 Stress as well as gaining 1 Hope. There's other stuff too of course.

I do think that we'll see more people picking Stress potions given the choice after these sessions - everyone picked healing potions because of the obvious value this time around, but a lot of the party were nearly out of Stress at the end of the boss fight. Of course the Rogue managed to be out of Stress at the end of the very first fight in the first session because he was absolutely spamming the shadow teleport (and I hadn't quite processed it was "shadow-to-shadow" rather than just "to shadow" so was applying too low a bar - corrected this later on).

Eh... you can clear stress on a short rest, so I'm not sure I would declare it a daily resource.

Yeah and most of the Short Rests we saw at least half the PCs picking clearing Stress. The "do two things" on a rest works pretty well I note! Like, it actually causes players to think about their priorities and then influences how they use resources later.

Also the Rogue was very much saying "Hey guys, shall we do another Short Rest?!" after pretty much every fight lol. I was able to discourage this somewhat due to situations they were in at least. I think Age of Umbra gives you a lot of potential for er... discouraging unnecessary resting.

The other factor is that the number of Hope is really determined by the number of rolls your GM calls for and what you roll.

Yup. Combat thus generates a lot of it but the six cap is pretty low, hence people reaching for Tag Team attacks to spend it (which generally seem to be a better usage than most of the class-based 3 Hope deals).

We did start calling "Reaction rolls" just "Saving throws", because it made it easier to distinguish them from normal rolls. I was surprised how instantly the players understood they didn't generate Hope/Fear too (literally only once did someone get confused).

I note the Rogue's player was pleased when he picked up the Rogue character sheet and IMMEDIATELY saw the rules for stealth ("Cloak") and sneak attacks presented prominently on it. That's when he went from cynical about the game to more positive, and then the shadow teleport option for his subclass and that the default suggested weapons were dagger + dagger had him saying "Wow okay this game knows what I want out of a Rogue!" (he was a big 4E Rogue fan).

 

[Imaro]

I do think that we'll see more people picking Stress potions given the choice after these sessions - everyone picked healing potions because of the obvious value this time around, but a lot of the party were nearly out of Stress at the end of the boss fight.

LOL!! We did character creation on Saturday (I'm going to do a shortish Witherwild campaign to get a better handle on the game) and not a single player picked a Stress potion. Those D&D habits die hard.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I dont get any intent from DH for the sort of 5-6 minor combats a day for attrition purposes of 5e.14. IMO it has a lot more in common with 4e here, with the idea that you should have exciting and narratively appropriate combats that work in the Environments to be dynamic.

I don’t think you need to have attrition-based play, but from reviewing the rules, I suspect the ruleset would support it.

Since on a short rest PCs can only recover two of HP, Armor or stress, and even easier combats with 1-2 Fear used are likely to wear the PCs down, after 6 combats the PCs are likely quite worn down.

 

[overgeeked]

I don’t think you need to have attrition-based play, but from reviewing the rules, I suspect the ruleset would support it.

Since on a short rest PCs can only recover two of HP, Armor or stress, and even easier combats with 1-2 Fear used are likely to wear the PCs down, after 6 combats the PCs are likely quite worn down.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that you can only have three short rests before you have to have a long rest.

To the 4E correlation of hope and stress, I don’t think there is a direct 1-to-1. A vague this feels more like that, maybe. But that’s it. Stress is more limited and hope should be quite free flowing. Beyond that, nah.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don’t think you need to have attrition-based play, but from reviewing the rules, I suspect the ruleset would support it.

Since on a short rest PCs can only recover two of HP, Armor or stress, and even easier combats with 1-2 Fear used are likely to wear the PCs down, after 6 combats the PCs are likely quite worn down.

I think you could do that, and the first time you did it might be kind of interesting (and it might work if deployed very occasionally too), but I think that if you kept trying to run the game that way, the way 5E suggests, the players would "get wise" to it and the game would become a lot more boring. Particularly because "getting wise" to attrition would mean players basically deciding, on a per-PC basis, to try and metagame so as to only burn two of HP/Stress/Armor before a Short Rest, and to burn Hope primarily in ways that supported regaining or not losing those things. Also worth noting that the default encounter balance in DH is very different to D&D 5E. 5E does six encounters/day because the default "Normal" difficulty encounter is absolutely trivial (and Hard isn't Hard - unsure if 2024 has changed this), and only wears PCs down by inevitable damage/resource usage. The default DH encounter is more akin to a low-Deadly encounter in 5E terms, even if the DM isn't very aggressive with Fear usage (but equally doesn't just sit on 12 Fear). You have to burn more than 1-2 Fear per encounter because each Short Rest you gain 1d4 Fear, so you kind of need to sit at 8 Fear if the PCs are going to potentially rest, and given that 44% of non-Reaction rolls generate Fear, and encounters involve a lot of rolls, I think it'd be very hard to spend less than 3-4 Fear per encounter unless you were happy sitting on 12 Fear and wasting Fear (or you were starting out on like, 0-2 Fear - i.e. less than the normal 1 Fear per PC).

 

[FrozenNorth]

I think you could do that, and the first time you did it might be kind of interesting (and it might work if deployed very occasionally too), but I think that if you kept trying to run the game that way, the way 5E suggests, the players would "get wise" to it and the game would become a lot more boring. Particularly because "getting wise" to attrition would mean players basically deciding, on a per-PC basis, to try and metagame so as to only burn two of HP/Stress/Armor before a Short Rest, and to burn Hope primarily in ways that supported regaining or not losing those things.

I think the idea of only burning two of HP/Stress/Armor works better in theory than in practice.

Sure, you could choose not to burn Armor when you get hit and take the damage to HP, but most PCs don’t have enough HP to make this a viable strategy. Likewise, burning Armor to save HP doesn’t work if you take any Major hits, which is possible even with weaker enemies.

Finally, PCs have very little control over not spending stress. Losing 1 stress is called out in the rulebook as a consequence of succeeding with Fear, and several enemies do Stress damage.

Also worth noting that the default encounter balance in DH is very different to D&D 5E. 5E does six encounters/day because the default "Normal" difficulty encounter is absolutely trivial (and Hard isn't Hard - unsure if 2024 has changed this), and only wears PCs down by inevitable damage/resource usage. The default DH encounter is more akin to a low-Deadly encounter in 5E terms, even if the DM isn't very aggressive with Fear usage (but equally doesn't just sit on 12 Fear).

A default « Standard » DH encounter may be low-deadly, but if you are running 6 encounters per day, I would expect that you would run a mix of Incidental, Minor and Standard encounters.

You have to burn more than 1-2 Fear per encounter because each Short Rest you gain 1d4 Fear, so you kind of need to sit at 8 Fear if the PCs are going to potentially rest, and given that 44% of non-Reaction rolls generate Fear, and encounters involve a lot of rolls, I think it'd be very hard to spend less than 3-4 Fear per encounter unless you were happy sitting on 12 Fear and wasting Fear (or you were starting out on like, 0-2 Fear - i.e. less than the normal 1 Fear per PC).

I suspect that in a six encounter day you would run a mix of Incidental, Minor and Standard Encounters.

Let’s say, 4 Minors and 2 Standards. You spend 1-3 on the Minors and 2-4 on the Standards (though to be fair, I agree with you that the estimates for these encounters in the book seem low). With those assumptions, at the end of the day, you spend 14.

On the other side of the ledger, you have no. of players + 3d4 + Fear generated by rolls. I think you could get less than 26 (14 + 12) with that calculation.

 

[zakael19]

My original post was a “I don’t think the game is designed for the sort of attritional gameplay and why would you bother.”

Got 3 players lined up so far for an in-person game in my suburb (pretty good since the densest groups of players tend to be a little further away). Completed a Forged in the Dark style setting build full of anchors to orient us and lots of empty space to build on. Just need to get a map together and should be set.

 

[Reynard]

I feel like folks spending a loot of time min maxing -- hi r/daggerheart -- are missing the point. But even so it seems super common on that sub.

 

[overgeeked]

My original post was a “I don’t think the game is designed for the sort of attritional gameplay and why would you bother.”

Got 3 players lined up so far for an in-person game in my suburb (pretty good since the densest groups of players tend to be a little further away). Completed a Forged in the Dark style setting build full of anchors to orient us and lots of empty space to build on. Just need to get a map together and should be set.

If you haven’t seen it before check out Azgaar’s. There’s also Procgen. Both great resources for quick and easy maps generation.