Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[overgeeked]

If people are looking for a copy and don’t want to wait for Amazon or the eventual second printing, Barnes & Noble seems to have some fairly consistently. The 3-4 near me have copies and you can order from their website.

 

[overgeeked]

Also, the SRD was updated and there’s a changelog. Addedto the OP.

https://www.daggerheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/DH-SRD-1.0-June-26-2025.pdf

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The more Daggerheart games I'm running, the more I'm coming to realize that Fear is a psychological currency to facilitate making crap up. I say this with kindness and humor. As a GM, I always have the power to make crap up in whatever form I think is both fair and fits the narrative, but the currency of Fear does a few things:

The players can see how much Fear you have and watch you spend it. This makes the nonsense you do feel both justified (because you paid for it) and limited (because you only have so much Fear). People are often more tolerant of the GM making crap up when they think there is a bounded amount or trade-off happening.

It helps absolve you of any potential guilt you might have for making crap up. If you had any lingering doubts about adding an adversary to combat just because you didn't telegraph it? You think the hallway could use a good gas trap right now even though you didn't put it in your notes ahead of time? Begone guilt, the rules of Fear say you absolutely can, AND you're spending currency to make it happen!

So Fear isn't giving you anything you didn't already have as a GM. It just pats you on the back and says "Go ahead. Spend a few of me and do that cool thing you want to do." Then it whispers in the player's ears "That thing he just did? It's cool. He paid for it."

I mean kinda, specifically from a traditional standpoint.

But from the perspective of come from a lot of non-D&D style games, the Fear mechanic is the structure by which the GM acts upon a scene once the scene has been set. Without any Fear you can’t really just make stuff up, you can only set the scene and guide pc spotlight and react to what they do. (Oversimplified)

So IMO it’s more accurate to say that Fear is what gives you the limited ability to act like a D&D DM.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So…the assassin sucks right?

Like Ambush is literally just Sneak Attack but worse. And the class lacks any stealth benefit at all! Nothing!

Even the domains irritate me. Midnight and Bone would make 8000000x more sense than Midnight and Blade.

Ambush doesn’t need to cost stress, require a failed reaction roll, or require that you moved into melee right before attacking. Those are each insane costs to just get the same damage as the rogue gets from being hidden.

Making their damage mechanic not cost stress would allow for a stealth feature to replace Grim Resolve.

But I hate to say it…but if they aren’t willing to just let the assassin do some of the same stuff the rogue does, when the rogue has “extra special stealth” and “extra damage when you’re sneaking or ganging up” and a shadow assassin style subclass, just don’t do a separate assassin, and just make more assassin subclasses for rogue and ranger instead.

I hate that I said that. I hate squishing assassin into the same class as the fast talking charlatan or the animal befriender or whatever. It sucks, and games that do it suck at having assassin PCs. (Yes, very much including 5e D&D)

Aaaanyway

The Witch is really cool.

And the Assassin subclasses are very cool.