Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[overgeeked]

Why would the GM do this? One of the principles is to not undermine success.

You can add a complication that doesn't undermine success.

There’s also an awful lot of fairly soft moves the GM can do, and tons of ways to spend fear that aren’t “screw the players” but “add drama/excitement.” The one time the GM is supposed to spend Fear to seize the spotlight is when the players have a run of great rolls and you need to give some adversity via a GM turn.

The difference is one of perspective. What some gamers think of as "screw the players" is just "adding drama/excitement." It goes back to the notion of gamers optimizing the fun out of the game. They want the least amount of complications and drama possible, the least amount of risk and challenge with the highest possible rewards. The opposite of good and engaging stories, basically. So if people see Daggerheart as constantly forcing complications, i.e. drama and excitement, then that's an absolute win as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Faolyn]

I will try to keep this brief so that I do not take away from the '+' nature of the thread.

The group I play with does not mind steps to a process. We enjoyed a lot of sessions of 4E. 4E had steps, but those steps were usually meaningful. Similarly, Soak in Age of Rebellion involves comparing an armor value to damage, but it works.

-In Daggerheart, I am not sure that I understand generating big numbers just for the sake of generating big numbers and then including another step to make the big numbers into small numbers. Just give me the smaller numbers. Give me cool fiction-first effects or things that alter the ongoing scene to keep me interested rather than throwing a bunch of numbers at me that don't really mean anything.

I think the reasons for the big numbers is so that players can do massive amounts of damage without having HP bloat. If you kept all the numbers low, then you have your mighty, super-powerful warriors inflicting only a tiny amount of damage, which doesn't feel right.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

So it matches how stories actually work. That’s a ringing endorsement.

We disagree. It in fact, does not match any manner of story in a meaningful way. The takeaway was that in a game where dice rolls are expected, it was not fun to roll the dice = ever.

Why would the GM do this? One of the principles is to not undermine success. There’s also an awful lot of fairly soft moves the GM can do, and tons of ways to spend fear that aren’t “screw the players” but “add drama/excitement.” The one time the GM is supposed to spend Fear to seize the spotlight is when the players have a run of great rolls and you need to give some adversity via a GM turn.

Well, many of the moves the GM used were soft moves. Some not even directed at characters at all. The note in my post to highlight is = the amount of Fear generated was so high, that we had two options: ignore it and waste it as it flowed over the maximum allowed, or use it and engage with the rules as intended. We decided to engage with the rules, and found it generated too much Fear, and not enough Hope, mechanically speaking. We never had enough Hope to do much, and Stress piled on fast, so doing things to reduce that only made more Fear.

I will reiterate = it was not fun for us. The rolls resulted in less success, and more problems, and more adversarial GM habits.

We will try it again after a the dust clears, hype dies down and a few more longer form players are out there.

 

[Campbell]

I'm the GM for the game in question. I run almost exclusively Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games. That every Fear is essentially a GM Move and that about 75% of the rolls in our test combat were some form of a move meant despite spending a couple fear early on in our initial fight I was quickly up to ~10 Fear. The stuff I was spending Fear on felt a lot more potent than the stuff players could spend their Hope on.

I'm an old hand at this stuff and the snowballing felt weighted in a way it does not in Apocalypse World. I did start a countdown clock for the ceiling caving in and used environmental features of the cave as much as possible.

I'll avoid getting into much more since this is a + thread, but overall, it felt the game really wasn't adding anything and actively made things worse in a number of areas.

 

[SteveC]

The issue about failure and Fear is something we saw in our test game. I generated a lot of Fear for the GM myself! To me, what we're seeing with this issue is a small number of die rolls that go poorly. Across the time from 3.0E D&D onward, I've read dozens of posts about how some players roll poorly, and rolled poorly for an entire session. I've read stories where there is a running joke about the whole party rolling poorly. It goes back to the beginning of the hobby. I think I saw a t-shirt with a one on a D20 and "crap!" underneath it back in the 70s!

The difference with DH is that when you roll like that, you do poorly, but also give the GM resources to make things better for them. And I can see how, if it happens enough, it will create exactly the issue people are having here. A lot of systems work to address this. I remember back in the 4E discussion, designers said that when they want to give the element of a "could go either way," they didn't use 50/50, they gave a 65% chance of success. That was the attempt to deal with the poor rolling issue.

And as much as I'm excited about getting my group together to start a campaign, I see where that is coming from. What I did, and discussed it openly with my players, is that I kept track of how often the group failed with Fear. If they ever hit three in a row, I said I'd give a Hope to compensate for the universe trying to help them out. This never happened in the game I ran.

I think this is something to consider, but it doesn't dull my enthusiasm for DH. We'll have to see how it plays out over time.

 

[zakael19]

You can add a complication that doesn't undermine success.

Not on a success with hope, which is what the statement I quoted was suggesting.

 

[zakael19]

The issue about failure and Fear is something we saw in our test game. I generated a lot of Fear for the GM myself! To me, what we're seeing with this issue is a small number of die rolls that go poorly. Across the time from 3.0E D&D onward, I've read dozens of posts about how some players roll poorly, and rolled poorly for an entire session. I've read stories where there is a running joke about the whole party rolling poorly. It goes back to the beginning of the hobby. I think I saw a t-shirt with a one on a D20 and "crap!" underneath it back in the 70s!

The difference with DH is that when you roll like that, you do poorly, but also give the GM resources to make things better for them. And I can see how, if it happens enough, it will create exactly the issue people are having here. A lot of systems work to address this. I remember back in the 4E discussion, designers said that when they want to give the element of a "could go either way," they didn't use 50/50, they gave a 65% chance of success. That was the attempt to deal with the poor rolling issue.

And as much as I'm excited about getting my group together to start a campaign, I see where that is coming from. What I did, and discussed it openly with my players, is that I kept track of how often the group failed with Fear. If they ever hit three in a row, I said I'd give a Hope to compensate for the universe trying to help them out. This never happened in the game I ran.

I think this is something to consider, but it doesn't dull my enthusiasm for DH. We'll have to see how it plays out over time.

On average the GM is expected to spend 4 fear or less in most scenes, ramping up to more for large battles or character defining scenes. I'm curious to see if I'll have a similar issue with "fear capping" as my play continues (in the 4 hr one shot I played we did seem to get Hope tapped out pretty easily).

To quote from the book:

As with any GM move, spending Fear shouldn’t undermine the players’ fun. Fear is a tool for you to enhance the scene, create dramatic tension, and raise the stakes, not to shut down a PC’s heroic actions

@Campbell do you think this might be a GM/player expectation vs system mismatch? Like, I know we have super different preferences in how we run games like this (and I dont think DH has any intention whatsoever of being a snowball).

 

[jmartkdr2]

It seems like learning to use Fear in a fun way is going to be the main skill for gming Daggerheart well.

The issue about failure and Fear is something we saw in our test game. I generated a lot of Fear for the GM myself! To me, what we're seeing with this issue is a small number of die rolls that go poorly. Across the time from 3.0E D&D onward, I've read dozens of posts about how some players roll poorly, and rolled poorly for an entire session. I've read stories where there is a running joke about the whole party rolling poorly. It goes back to the beginning of the hobby. I think I saw a t-shirt with a one on a D20 and "crap!" underneath it back in the 70s!

The difference with DH is that when you roll like that, you do poorly, but also give the GM resources to make things better for them. And I can see how, if it happens enough, it will create exactly the issue people are having here. A lot of systems work to address this. I remember back in the 4E discussion, designers said that when they want to give the element of a "could go either way," they didn't use 50/50, they gave a 65% chance of success. That was the attempt to deal with the poor rolling issue.

And as much as I'm excited about getting my group together to start a campaign, I see where that is coming from. What I did, and discussed it openly with my players, is that I kept track of how often the group failed with Fear. If they ever hit three in a row, I said I'd give a Hope to compensate for the universe trying to help them out. This never happened in the game I ran.

I think this is something to consider, but it doesn't dull my enthusiasm for DH. We'll have to see how it plays out over time.

Yeah this is the main issue I see with this - unlucky rolling is potentially screwing the players three ways - more failure, more Fear, and less Hope. Any one of those wouldn't be a problem but if they start stacking it can spiral.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

I’m still working my way through the Core Rulebook, and honestly, I’m having a great time with it. But reading through this thread, I keep finding myself wondering… are we all actually reading the same book?

Not trying to be flippant—I genuinely mean that. Because a lot of the issues being raised don’t seem to come from the rules as written, but from expectations carried over from other systems. Things like action economy, resource balance, or mechanical symmetry just aren’t how Daggerheart operates.

What makes Daggerheart work isn’t a single mechanic—it’s the way the mechanics align with the intended rhythm of play. The game has structure, but not in the traditional sense of fixed cycles and codified systems. Instead, it’s procedural. Moment to moment, each action shapes the next. The game moves forward not in turns, but in momentum.

In Daggerheart, dice aren’t for pausing the narrative to check for success—they’re there to fuel drama, to quicken the pace, to make the next beat of the story inevitable. Hope and Fear aren’t just jabs for players and GMs to take swipes at each other. They’re not “who wins this round.” What they really do—what’s so easy to miss if you’re reading them like tactical advantages—is establish rhythm. In a game without structured turns or fixed initiative, this is the mechanism that gives shape to the flow of play. It tells you when the story should pivot, when tension should spike, when the GM is allowed to lean forward. Not because the players did poorly, but because the narrative demands it. It’s not punishment—it’s pacing. It’s how Daggerheart mimics the rhythm of a great novel or film: pressure building, release earned, momentum shifting with each choice. Fear doesn’t say “you failed.” It says “the story just turned.”

Importantly, Daggerheart acknowledges something most games leave implied: that rules alone can’t deliver the experience. Players and GMs must show up in good faith, with shared intent. The game says this out loud. It’s the first time I’ve seen a system declare that cooperation and buy-in aren’t nice-to-haves—they’re part of the machinery. Without them, the engine stalls.

This ties into something deeper: the system trusts its participants. The rhythm is the structure. If you follow it, improvise with it, or break it deliberately, the game still holds. That makes it viable for a wide range of playstyles—from tightly planned sessions to freeform, character-driven storytelling.

If Daggerheart has an uphill battle, it’s not against other systems—it’s against entrenched expectations. For many players, D&D (and so many other games like it) is not just the most familiar game; it’s the only frame of reference. That’s where friction will arise.

D&D teaches a particular pattern: success is optimal, failure is waste. Rolls are asks for permission. Players calculate odds, deploy the most qualified character, and expect a binary outcome—pass or fail, win or lose. The game rewards this mindset. It treats narrative as something that emerges around the mechanics, not through them.

Daggerheart challenges that. Here, failure has shape. Risk has weight. Outcomes invite reaction, not just resolution. The Hope/Fear axis doesn’t just complicate success—it reframes it. That’s going to frustrate players who are used to maximizing efficiency or scripting outcomes in advance. The system isn’t built for control. It’s built for contribution.

Some will see this as a limitation, or even a punishment. They’ll say the system discourages creativity because it doesn’t let them act without consequence. But that’s a misread. The system requires creativity—just not the kind rooted in optimization. It asks players to invest in uncertainty. To allow their characters to falter, stumble, grow.

So maybe the challenge isn’t in how the system works, but in how hard it is to let go of how we expect systems should work based on other games we played before.

This isn't the same game anymore.

 

[Campbell]

We had a fairly equal distribution between Success with Hope, Success with Fear, Failure with Hope and Failure with Fear. That distribution did not feel good to me. 3 out of every 4 rolls was some sort of GM Move. That felt like way too much, even with trying to do softer moves for like half of them. Adding Fear on top felt like overkill (I spent 4 over the course of the scene with 2 of those being spent to increase the countdown for the cave collapsing). I really felt like I had to actively pace stuff when the point of like the architecture should be to pace things for us.

It's likely just not for us anyway. Because the Hope/Fear resource economy was far from our only issues.

The way rolls worked in the beta where it was GM Move or bank a fear honestly felt better. I might go back to that if I ever try the game again.