Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[jmartkdr2]

OK, going to have to source a book.

It's in the Core Rulebook, if you can find a copy.

 

[Scribe]

Reading a review, for those who have played, do you believe this is accurate in regards to DH being 'this'?

Most people who play D&D actually want to be playing this game, as a fast, strategic, thematic experience.

 

[SteveC]

Reading a review, for those who have played, do you believe this is accurate in regards to DH being 'this'?

I think in 2025, for newer players (i.e., players who don't play from an OSR perspective) I think this is correct. I'll go further and say that DaggerHeart has the themes that WotC wants in an RPG. It is very much not "kick in the door" style play, and I think WotC wants to move in that direction.

 

[darjr]

Reading a review, for those who have played, do you believe this is accurate in regards to DH being 'this'?

I think it does indeed feel like a 5e D&D game out of the box, just better in ways. Especially the initiative system. That’s huge to me.

The book also is fantastic with great advice and cool other mechanics built in. The kaiju mechanics from one of the frames is awesome! Oh and so are the cooking mechanics from the other.

 

[darjr]

So if your games are more in the side of persistent PCs and campaign arcs, like a lot of people play D&D, this will work.

 

[overgeeked]

Reading a review, for those who have played, do you believe this is accurate in regards to DH being 'this'?

No real way to answer that generally, but I know I'd much rather play Daggerheart than 5E.

Daggerheart is faster in combat than 5E and it's far more engaging because of the freeform initiative system. If that's intimidating, use the optional spotlight tracker. It's great.

Monsters are cleaner and better designed. The combat encounter builder is nice and smooth. Not sure it's that well tuned, but it's a damned sight better than 5E's CR system.

The hope/fear dice make every roll matter so players pay more attention to individual rolls. And as a fan of fiction-first and PbtA games, the whole success with fear, failure with hope thing just sings for me.

I'm a huge fan of clocks and they provide a lot of examples on how to use them, so just about any and all non-combat thing you can think of is covered easily and simply with countdowns.

The classes are far more balanced than 5E, though there are still some issues, like the grimoire cards.

They solved the five-minute workday problem by not giving out complete refresh of everything with a long rest, players have to pick which two of five to fully refresh. Long rests also give the GM fear tokens to spend, so you're not just safe free and clear.

They solved the nova problem because instead of slots PC abilities are mostly tied to stress, a finite resource, or hope, a variable resource. There's a little more resource juggling in Daggerheart than 5E but each resource is 0-6 so a pile of color-coded tokens or poker chips and you're set.

They solved pop-up healing by having characters make death moves at zero HP. If you don't want your character to make a death move, make sure there's a healer keeping you up. Death moves give the player control over how deadly they want the game and what happens to their PC. Blaze of Glory lets you make an auto crit but your PC dies. Risk it All lets you gamble, you have a 50/50 chance of dying or healing. Avoid death lets you survive but sit out the rest of the fight with the chance of a nasty scar.

The free homebrew kit tells you how to make your own stuff for every aspect of the game. It's not perfect and there are a few "step 2. draw the rest of the owl" moments, but it's wildly more insight than we've ever got about 5E aside from fans reverse engineering things.

No system designed by someone else is going to be a perfect fit, but this comes far, far closer to my ideal than anything else on the market. If you like the idea of PC-centered, fiction-first superhero fantasy, this is an excellent game. It does that style better, with cleaner and simpler rules than the 800lbs gorilla.

 

[Vael]

I have to second everything @overgeeked just said and add ... cards. Cards are great. We only have two copies of the Daggerheart book for a table of 6. And one has stayed shut almost all the time. When leveling up and character generation, there was no passing around the books over and over. When we leveled up, each player checked off what they upgraded, I passed them their eligible domain cards and they all could look through them at the same time. There was even chatter between the players who shared a domain ... "well, if you take this card, I think I'll grab this one to vary party resources". Also putting domain powers on cards means their a lot faster to parse than some 5e spells, certainly less wordy.

Adding Experiences and Connections has also made character generation a fun roleplay activity, players were roleplaying as they built their characters!

I love 5e, I do view it as my favourite iteration (started with 3.5, so yeah, only between 3 editions, plus a little bit of whichever system OG Baldur's Gate videogame used) ... but Daggerheart did really steal my heart. I find it just works, I didn't have to work to grok it like FATE (though I still like that one), it's simple (sorry, not into crunchier fare like Pathfinder anymore) and the Hope/Fear dice have made every roll engaging. I love the look the players give my increasing stack of black poker chips I use to represent Fear.

 

[darjr]

I need to make tarot sized cards

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The hope/fear dice make every roll matter so players pay more attention to individual rolls. And as a fan of fiction-first and PbtA games, the whole success with fear, failure with hope thing just sings for me.

And another benefit at least with my group is that the players aren't so keen to roll the dice (even though 54% of rolls are with Hope), so you don't get the classic "I roll Perception" or "I roll Persuasion"-type behaviour which is kind of endemic to all but the very best-run (or weirdly run lol) 5E groups and indeed to an awful lot of RPGs (even if it's sometimes phrased as "I want to roll Persuasion < immediately rolls dice before DM can comment >".

In fact it's a double-whammy because there are no skills, players don't immediately think "I will roll X", and they also don't want to roll for nothing (generally) because of Hope/Fear and you get a lot more describing what they actually want to do and less referring to stats/skills (not that there's none, but this was pretty noticeable).

And yeah excellent post, agree with the rest too.

Reading a review, for those who have played, do you believe this is accurate in regards to DH being 'this'?

I mean, that definitely seemed to be true for my group, and it is definitely a fast, thematic, strategic experience. I'm not sure I actually agree that "most" people who play D&D want that, I think some people really some procedural elements to D&D, like the little rituals like rolling initiative, but I feel like those people generally aren't huge fans of any RPG that isn't super-trad and preferably just D&D wearing a hat.

My main issue remains that I'm kind of regretting doing an Age of Umbra campaign not a sort of "More fantastical Buffy/Angel" kind of deal, but maybe I can slooooowly transition from the former to the latter. Supernatural basically managed it, transitioning from "alarming gritty vibes jump-scare horror" in S1 to "jolly magic buddies against the apocalypse" by like, S8 maybe?!

 

[Scribe]

I need to make tarot sized cards

Are they Magic card sized?