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. Added to 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.

 

[Seramus]

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.

It's more that you could have always set the scene up ahead of time, properly telegraphing everything, right down to the adversaries waiting in the bushes, the gas trap in the hallway, and the stress draining nature of the Swamp of Sorrows. And you could always make those dangers as strong or weak as the narrative calls for. This is just being a GM.

But it's common (at least for me) to then make the scene set in stone. Once I've laid out the scene, I try to be as fair as possible with how the scene plays out, simulating the NPCs and making events go however the fickle dice decide they should go. As a general rule, I don't retcon things into the scene after I have set everything up and hit the "Play" button. It's just my own sense of fairness.

But Fear explicitly allows you to do that. It gives you tacit permission in service of the narrative. Yes, you could have made that decision ahead of time, but maybe you didn't think of it? Fear lets you say "Would the scene improve if I add X? Yes? Pay some Fear and do it."

There are other things Fear does, like giving you additional moves with your Adversaries. But the game even says you can totally break that rule too (sparingly) if it serves the greater narrative.

 

[zakael19]

I see the design as using Fear to set up and meter what are generally considered to be "hard moves" in the games it's borrowing the move structure from. It's also interesting how they've portioned out "mixed success" style outcomes into two splits. A Success with Fear is a Cost or Complication, a Failure with Hope means you don't get what you wanted but things aren't as bad as they could be - I see this as almost the "lesser success" part of most 2d6 outcomes where like "you make the jump but you lose your footing and are now hanging on by the tips of your fingers"; or "you dive forward to tackle him, but he scrambles backwards frantically yelling "guards! guards!" You can still recover, maybe - but the situation is more complex now.

On a Success with Fear for those two, maybe I'd say "yeah you make the jump, after just barely scrabbling your way up (it was further then you thought!), mark a stress from the effort (cost)" or "yeah you dive forward and tackle him, but he's like elbowing you and squirming and you make a bunch of noise tumbling into furniture - the rest of you hear a muffled "M'lord duke? Everything ok?" from outside (complication)."

 

[Neonchameleon]

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.

I've been known to refer to Fear as my "shoulder demon"; I get far more Fear than I'd consider it fair to make things up in a normal D&D game.

 

[Aldarc]

Daggerheart screams for an Eberron conversion.

 

[Reynard]

Daggerheart screams for an Eberron conversion.

Yeah. Eberron is a perfect fit for DH.

 

[overgeeked]

Daggerheart screams for an Eberron conversion.

I don't know that you'd really need much, if anything, to convert it. You already have a campaign frame inspired by Eberron (Five Banners Burning). The game encourages reskinning and reflavoring so most things could be covered there.

Ancestries. The clank (warforged) and katari (shifter) ancestries are core. You can make half-elves with the mixed ancestry rules. Which leaves the changeling and kalashtar. Uncanny Disguise (level 1 midnight) has the basics of what you'd need. Just modify that a bit and make it an ancestry trait. Kalashtar are easy to build with the mixed ancestry rules. Slightly tweak the fungril telepathy and you're 50% of the way there.

Prosthetics and disability get 3-4 pages of coverage.

Artificers could be a reskin or reflavor of just about any existing class, most likely the wizard but you could make a case for most of them really.

Dragonmarks are the only "tough" part. That could be handled any number of ways. A lot of the abilities are similar to spells in Daggerheart already. Use those. Maybe make a dragonmarked community that gives you access to those spells. Not as extras but a replacement domain card. "You can swap one domain card for..." or similar.