Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[zakael19]

Girl By Moonlight (Magical Girl Forged in the Dark game used to play an Escaflowne inspired mecha game)

Heck yeah

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I imagine over time probability will even this out but in the span of a single session, variance like this can definitely lead to a session that flops for the DM, the players or both.

One thing to note here is the Fear/Hope amounts are retained across sessions - they don't reset.

Which should help with excesses in one direction or another, because it's close to literally impossible that, over time, this wouldn't correct itself. The first session I played had an excess of Fear, the second an excess of Hope. I do think there is some "wonkiness" but whether that's a feature or a bug is a question - every even slightly crunchy RPG has a degree of "wonkiness" in this sense, albeit it tends to appear in different places.

@RenleyRenfield out of curiosity, were you all able to rest and use the Prepare activity together to ensure there was some hope balance going? Or did you find yourselves needing to use both activities for recovery moves?

Yeah this is an important point - if the PCs are short on Hope, but also ignore Prepare, which can give 2 Hope per Short Rest, that's a fairly significant thing to overlook. It can be worth resting just to get that Hope, if the situation isn't so narratively urgent that you can't spend an hour resting, especially if the DM is already at or close to full Fear, which seems to be what @RenleyRenfield was describing. My group used it a lot, including letting themselves retain a small amount of HP or Stress or Armour damage in order to get Hope.

And these are on all types of rolls, so investigation, persuasion, searching around... all of it generated buckets of Fear points. And getting 1 Hope every other round was not fun. (maybe if we were lucky two rounds of Hope in a row, but just as often 2 rounds of Fear in a row...)

It's a 54% chance to generate a Hope on a roll. If you were generating "buckets" of Fear but not much Hope, it might be worth double-checking the Hope/Fear rules were followed correctly. For example, my players kept forgetting 2x the same value == Crit Success. So even if you roll two 1s, that's a Crit Success, but I had players reporting stuff like two 4s as "failure", and only when I quizzed them on whether it was with Hope or Fear did we get to me realizing they were actually describing a Crit.

When you have 4 players each generating 2 to 3 Fear per turn, the GM gets lots of Fear = fast. Again, thems the maths and thems the results we witnessed in person.

Um, no.

No that's definitely not the math.

There's no "each" (my bold and colour). If that was the case you were getting the rules very seriously wrong. If that's just a typo for "total" (a pretty big typo but still, it happens) then that might kinda make sense, but still only kinda, because there's no such thing as a "turn" in Daggerheart and on average, for ever 3 Fear generated, you'll generate 3.24 Hope.

The only other explanation I can think of re: "turns" is that you were using the optional token-based action-tracking system, and you saw that as a "turn"? But then that's still wrong, because you'd be generating 1-2 Fear per "turn" (1 the majority of the time), because you get three actions each, with a 54% chance per action of generating Hope, and 46% chance of generating Fear. That just doesn't match up with "2-3 each".

So I'm slightly unsure what you're trying to say here - your position seems to be "We did all the rules right and X happened", but your description doesn't really match with the rules very well. So it kind of seems like you didn't do the rules right, it seems like you misunderstood or overlooked something pretty fundamental. I could be wrong but we need some more info, given you're going around accusing people of being difficult and dishonest with you.

What is it you mean by "per turn"?

Do you mean "total" rather than "each"?

Unless these questions can be answered, it's very hard to assess what you're saying, and I think the people uncritically accepting it might actually want to reconsider, because it doesn't make sense, and it doesn't add up.

 

[Campbell]

The fight in question was the first real scene of what was originally planned as a 2-3 session game. I went in with 4 Fear since there were 4 Player Characters and each PC had their initial 2 Hope.

 

[Scribe]

There's no "each" (my bold and colour). If that was the case you were getting the rules very seriously wrong. If that's just a typo for "total" (a pretty big typo but still, it happens) then that might kinda make sense, but still only kinda, because there's no such thing as a "turn" in Daggerheart and on average, for ever 3 Fear generated, you'll generate 3.24 Hope.

Mathematically this may be true. IS true.

However thats over N dice rolls, where N is a very large number.

How many rolls* are being made in an encounter, a session? Swings absolutely will happen.

 

[innerdude]

Just as a fun exercise, I'm continuing to monitor Amazon's projected ship dates for copies of Daggerheart core (still not a single copy available through FLGS locally in the Salt Lake City market).

For today, July 16, they've now revised delivery dates to a range of August 12 - September 10.

Which is, well .... LOL, to be honest.

Guessing what must have happened is they (Amazon) sold out of their initial inventory at a speed totally unanticipated, saw how popular an item it was, and tried backfilling stock through small, random distributors wherever they could find them.

Now even the small odds-and-ends distributions are gone, but since they're not showing it as technically "out of stock," would seem to indicate Darrington has given them a time frame for getting in copies via a second print run, so they're comfortable showing that it's not technically "out of stock," but don't really know when it will actually be shippable again.

You know, because I always love ordering stuff with projected delivery dates encompassing a full four-week window that doesn't even open until a month from now.

But really the bottom line is . . . well done, Darrington Press. I don't think anyone anticipated how popular DH would be.

 

[overgeeked]

Just as a fun exercise, I'm continuing to monitor Amazon's projected ship dates for copies of Daggerheart core (still not a single copy available through FLGS locally in the Salt Lake City market).

For today, July 16, they've now revised delivery dates to a range of August 12 - September 10.

Which is, well .... LOL, to be honest.

Guessing what must have happened is they (Amazon) sold out of their initial inventory at a speed totally unanticipated, saw how popular an item it was, and tried backfilling stock through small, random distributors wherever they could find them.

Now even the small odds-and-ends distributions are gone, but since they're not showing it as technically "out of stock," would seem to indicate Darrington has given them a time frame for getting in copies via a second print run, so they're comfortable showing that it's not technically "out of stock," but don't really know when it will actually be shippable again.

You know, because I always love ordering stuff with projected delivery dates encompassing a full four-week window that doesn't even open until a month from now.

But really the bottom line is . . . well done, Darrington Press. I don't think anyone anticipated how popular DH would be.

If you’re trying to get one Barnes & Noble has copies and ships within 1-2 days.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Mathematically this may be true. IS true.

However thats over N dice rolls, where N is a very large number.

How many rolls* are being made in an encounter, a session? Swings absolutely will happen.

Oh for sure and I've seen this with a lot of games - any game with a relatively low number of rolls (including 5E and I suspect Shadowdark) has the potential for long runs of bad or good rolls. I don't think from my mighty experience of two sessions (lol) that this causes a serious problem. Slightly gratifyingly was that the two players I met up with for drinks today were going on and on about how great Daggerheart was and how we needed to arrange regular sessions.

 

[overgeeked]

It’s also back in stock at the CR store.

https://shop.critrole.com/products/daggerheart-core-set

 

[Scribe]

Oh for sure and I've seen this with a lot of games - any game with a relatively low number of rolls (including 5E and I suspect Shadowdark) has the potential for long runs of bad or good rolls. I don't think from my mighty experience of two sessions (lol) that this causes a serious problem. Slightly gratifyingly was that the two players I met up with for drinks today were going on and on about how great Daggerheart was and how we needed to arrange regular sessions.

Yeah, I have not played DH, likely will not, but I'm reading through things and just wanted to point out the obvious, that in a game of dice, swings can and will happen, and people do not remember passing the roll/test/check by 2 or 3 or 5 all night long, but they remember the fails, and crits.

If a game adds ADDITIONAL weight behind those rolls, there's bound to be some note stored in the brain about it.

A game of 40K I have discussed on this board before points it out, and the turn 1 'I concede' as he packed up his toys due to my hot dice.

 

[overgeeked]

Yeah, I have not played DH, likely will not, but I'm reading through things and just wanted to point out the obvious, that in a game of dice, swings can and will happen, and people do not remember passing the roll/test/check by 2 or 3 or 5 all night long, but they remember the fails, and crits.

If a game adds ADDITIONAL weight behind those rolls, there's bound to be some note stored in the brain about it.

A game of 40K I have discussed on this board before points it out, and the turn 1 'I concede' as he packed up his toys due to my hot dice.

Yep. That's one big reason why D&D 5E stuck success at 65% and fixed the leveling, PC, and monster math around that. We tend to feel failure twice as much as success, so if you win 2/3 of the time and fail 1/3 of the time it feels like you're at 50/50.

I kept track of the rolls of my playtest game, success vs failure, hope vs fear. They succeeded more than failed, but felt like they failed way more often. They rolled with fear slightly more often, but felt like they "never rolled with hope." It was so bad we had to take a break because one player got properly pissed off about their dice luck. When I showed him the log after the session he accused me of lying.