Daggerheart General Thread [+]

[Vael]

I gave out my first Transformation card last session. After the party Warrior slew a group of Doppelgangers that were pretending to be his nemesis and allies, the God of Lies offered to make him also a Shapeshifter. I honestly expected him to refuse, but he now has the card and a requirement to "slay 10 souls while deceiving them" to get out of the debt to said God.

 

[zakael19]

We had a player duck out due to a medical issue last night, but one guy who has a ~50m drive was already on his way. Thankfully this game scales just fine down to 2 players, and we had a great session of reaching the Big City and starting to make inquiries towards the cult-activity they'd uncovered traces of in the previous adventure.

I prepped the city using a combination of Blades style districts/NPCs, Carved from Brindlewood "moments," and the little "hook" notes Stonetop drops over locations to think about what might happen. Worked great, everything they asked or tried I had a quick answer for.

 

[Reynard]

I am just back from the con, having run four 4-hour DH slots with 5 or 6 players per slot. I am exhausted so I will have to go into detail tomorrow, but if anyone has questions, feel free to ask before I do my write up.

The Long Story Short: the PCs were superheroes (secret IDs and all) in a magitech mega city inspired by Arcane ad Eberron. They were 5th level and I reskinned and modified Tier 3 enemies as super villains. All four sessions were episodes in the same larger story, and I had 3 players play all 4 sessions, one player play 2, and the rest were one offs.

 

[Reynard]

Some general thoughts:

5th level DH characters can definitely pass for superheroes in a setting where they (and their villains) are the only powerful entities. A lot of it is imply embracing tropes, of course, but the ease with which some PCs can fly and how we can use Hope and Fear to steer the narration definitely make it easy. Some folks say mid to high level 5E characters feel like supers, but with DH you can actually do that intentionally.

There are definitely diminishing returns on numbers of players. I feel like 5 is the max comfortable and 4 would be better. This is driven a lot by the how Hope and Fear interact with enemy spotlights and other combat uses of Fear. Under the most basic Battle Math, you need a significant enemy per PC plus a couple groups of mooks. That eats up a lot of fear just for activation, so you have less available for special moves. What I did was make my villains Solo leaders and rely on brutes as lieutenants and have hordes and minions for the Leader to activate. If I stick with the supers motif, I will continue to experiment with ways to make it feel right.

That said, i think my next con game will be something more traditionally "adventure"-y. I want to see how the game runs and feels with fewer set pieces and more exploration in strange environments. That con game is in February, so i will shortly begin the process of running playtest games to get a feel for it. I am leaning toward doing that at 2nd level with a potential level bump at the table for the final session, but we will see.

 

[Vael]

I'm prepping for what might be an almost completely combat-free session in a couple of weeks, so I'm looking up ways to spend Fear outside of combat. Partly it's building the environment, but there will also be a bunch of Social NPCs that I can entangle with the party.

The session will involve a masquerade ball. First the party need to figure out how to get in ... though a tournament with Golden Tickets as prizes is the assumed method, but I'm leaving this reasonably open for the party to plan. The ball itself is going to be warded by a divine ritual against violence ... something the party doesn't know, but will allow the Warrior to confront his nemesis. Also the Wizard's Ex is going to be there ... so again, plenty of potential drama.

 

[Reynard]

I'm prepping for what might be an almost completely combat-free session in a couple of weeks, so I'm looking up ways to spend Fear outside of combat. Partly it's building the environment, but there will also be a bunch of Social NPCs that I can entangle with the party.

The session will involve a masquerade ball. First the party need to figure out how to get in ... though a tournament with Golden Tickets as prizes is the assumed method, but I'm leaving this reasonably open for the party to plan. The ball itself is going to be warded by a divine ritual against violence ... something the party doesn't know, but will allow the Warrior to confront his nemesis. Also the Wizard's Ex is going to be there ... so again, plenty of potential drama.

Even non-adversary NPCs can have traits you can spend fear on, if I recall that section of the book correctly.

More importantly, remember that you can make a move instead of taking a fear. If the PCs roll with fear while interacting with NPCs, have bad stuff happen right then and there.

 

[zakael19]

I'm prepping for what might be an almost completely combat-free session in a couple of weeks, so I'm looking up ways to spend Fear outside of combat. Partly it's building the environment, but there will also be a bunch of Social NPCs that I can entangle with the party.

The session will involve a masquerade ball. First the party need to figure out how to get in ... though a tournament with Golden Tickets as prizes is the assumed method, but I'm leaving this reasonably open for the party to plan. The ball itself is going to be warded by a divine ritual against violence ... something the party doesn't know, but will allow the Warrior to confront his nemesis. Also the Wizard's Ex is going to be there ... so again, plenty of potential drama.

Look at the Environments in the Void, they’ve got good stuff. The heist in particular for this. Also if you want to escalate just spend a fear and say something cool. spend a fear “You turn around and bump into somebody, and it’s your ex! What flashes through your head in that instant before they recognize you?”