Daggerheart has been Officially Released

[Kichwas]

Rolling with fear gives the GM Fear currency. Trying to game the system to get Hope is a losing proposition.

Yep.

this worry popped up on reddit yesterday too and my reply there was that if you absolutely insist on rolling a die to spread jam on your toast, the GM is free to turn around and make that jam a boss adversary ooze.

Plus you'd be going against the spirit of the game insisting on rolls for everything - something that applies to the GM as well. The other day I was playing Pathfinder and watching my GM make our rogue roll to pick a lock 4 times - once for each tumbler. It totaled almost 8-10 rolls because of failures. Daggerheart literally covers this with something along the lines of (heavily paraphrasing because I read this days ago) 'if your PC is a thief, just have them open the lock and move to the actual drama'.
- This was one of the examples in a section about letting characters just do things that a person with their experiences / expertise could do.

Stop trying to handle everything in the minutia that doesn't impact drama / story. And as my Pathfinder case notes - this is as much a note to the GM as it is to the Player. Frankly in the Pathfinder game I myself am running I am going to 'import' this advice and stop making players roll for things unless it 'matters'. Last week's game I had an adventure scripted chase scene where the adventure is just blocked if the PCs don't succeed in the chase - and yet the adventure had DCs to roll for a 4 or 5 step chase with no failure results and just a 'well, now that they did it, here's the rest of the adventure'.
- So even as I made my players roll I was asking myself 'WTF am I doing, just go to the end of this'.

That becomes all the more relevant for Daggerheart where we just need to 'cold stop' attempts to game the Hope / Fear system even as those attempts will give the GM just as much fear as they give the player Hope. It's not that we're trying to stop gaming for Hope - we're trying to stop bogging down the game session with meaningless die rolling.

...
My patience with Pathfinder is starting to run extremely thin, despite it having been my favorite system only a month ago. I'm in 3 games right now (one I run). Game #3 - we've spent the last 4-5 sessions in downtime with the influence system.

The GMing advice in Daggerheart of 'skip to the action' would have cut that to a 5 minute montage in one of the sessions, and back to story.

The Influence system for that adventure (Season of Ghosts) has more or less foregone conclusions. We need to get to know 2 NPCs. So... just roleplay it in 30-60 minutes of story and people talking in character, with ZERO die rolls. But instead they have game mechanics for points of influence and that means you need to do 'on script' style of roleplay even if your thinking on your character and that NPCs doesn't align the same way - you need to do certain things to tick up a meter. But it should just be 'wing it, based on how you feel the people would relate to each other'.

I guess Daggerheart has turned me from a 'hard crunch mechanic for everything' fan to a 'just wing most of this and get back to the story beats that move plot / tension or catch player interest'.

Soon as my copy of Starfinder 2E arrives, I think my Pathfinder / Starfinder subs will end, and I'll just be looking at all that for lore mining.

 

[Reynard]

Because Hope and Fear are more immediately useful in combat, it makes sense that there are significantly more rolls in combat. It keeps that currency flowing. That isn't to say they are useless outside of combat, but you will spend less often and so rolling less often makes sense.

I am very curious to see how the attempt to create a smoother transition between combat and not actually works in play. If I had to guess it will be similar to always on initiative in Shadowdark: nice in theory, but not really practical.

 

[Stalker0]

Yep.

this worry popped up on reddit yesterday too and my reply there was that if you absolutely insist on rolling a die to spread jam on your toast, the GM is free to turn around and make that jam a boss adversary ooze.

Plus you'd be going against the spirit of the game insisting on rolls for everything - something that applies to the GM as well.

Its true, but if your incentive system encourages player to do things that are directly against the spirit of the system you are trying to make....that might mean you have a poor incentive system.

That's remains my biggest concern with the game. It tries to set itself as this freeflow narrative system but its super crunchy and has all of these currency elements directly tied in to player and Dm generated rolls. Instinctively there seems a conflict there, I will be interested to hear if that turns out to be a legitimate concern in practice or something that does not manifest in actual play.

 

[Reynard]

Its true, but if your incentive system encourages player to do things that are directly against the spirit of the system you are trying to make....that might mean you have a poor incentive system.

That's remains my biggest concern with the game. It tries to set itself as this freeflow narrative system but its super crunchy and has all of these currency elements directly tied in to player and Dm generated rolls. Instinctively there seems a conflict there, I will be interested to hear if that turns out to be a legitimate concern in practice or something that does not manifest in actual play.

I'm not sure crunchy bits and narrative tools are inherently in conflict. The bigger conflict would be a bunch of prescribed DCs for tasks and rigid reward systems that undermine natural flow. Daggerheart doesn't have those.

 

[Stormonu]

Yep.

this worry popped up on reddit yesterday too and my reply there was that if you absolutely insist on rolling a die to spread jam on your toast, the GM is free to turn around and make that jam a boss adversary ooze.

Plus you'd be going against the spirit of the game insisting on rolls for everything - something that applies to the GM as well. The other day I was playing Pathfinder and watching my GM make our rogue roll to pick a lock 4 times - once for each tumbler. It totaled almost 8-10 rolls because of failures. Daggerheart literally covers this with something along the lines of (heavily paraphrasing because I read this days ago) 'if your PC is a thief, just have them open the lock and move to the actual drama'.
- This was one of the examples in a section about letting characters just do things that a person with their experiences / expertise could do.

Stop trying to handle everything in the minutia that doesn't impact drama / story. And as my Pathfinder case notes - this is as much a note to the GM as it is to the Player. Frankly in the Pathfinder game I myself am running I am going to 'import' this advice and stop making players roll for things unless it 'matters'. Last week's game I had an adventure scripted chase scene where the adventure is just blocked if the PCs don't succeed in the chase - and yet the adventure had DCs to roll for a 4 or 5 step chase with no failure results and just a 'well, now that they did it, here's the rest of the adventure'.
- So even as I made my players roll I was asking myself 'WTF am I doing, just go to the end of this'.

I'll agree cold stops can be bad for the game, but I don't necessarily agree rolls should be just flat out be dropped like above. In Daggerheart on the lock I'd probably still have the roll (and just one), but the failure (or success) would potentially be more important beyond just getting the lock open. Could be anything from a guardian showing up because you took too long or an unexpected trap associated with the lock. But the result should be interesting one way or another, even if it wasn't expected (especially in Daggerheart, which is much more narratively focused). Throwing the dice is about being surprised by the results. If you don't want to be surprised by the results, then just narrate what happens - that's true whether in combat or exploring.

(This was one of the things that bugged me about 4E. It's advice to 'skip to the action' rubbed against my 'the journey is half (or more) of the adventure' feeling about RPGs.)

 

[Arilyn]

Its true, but if your incentive system encourages player to do things that are directly against the spirit of the system you are trying to make....that might mean you have a poor incentive system.

That's remains my biggest concern with the game. It tries to set itself as this freeflow narrative system but its super crunchy and has all of these currency elements directly tied in to player and Dm generated rolls. Instinctively there seems a conflict there, I will be interested to hear if that turns out to be a legitimate concern in practice or something that does not manifest in actual play.

I haven't played a lot yet, but so far it's running smoothly.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Instinctively there seems a conflict there, I will be interested to hear if that turns out to be a legitimate concern in practice or something that does not manifest in actual play.

So far this is not something that has come up in any people discussing the game nor in any Actual Plays. Nor was it an issue in the beta.

That doesn't mean it won't emerge in the next few weeks, but it's looking pretty good so far on that front. I do get the worry though. Also re: "super crunchy", I mean, it is definitely significantly more crunchy than say Apocalypse World or Mothership, but it's only like, 50% more crunchy than say, Dungeon World and Spire/Heart. I'd say it was comparable to City of Mist, Grimwild, and so on (also to my perceptions of Shadowdark, but I haven't actually played it). I'm not saying that makes "super crunchy" wrong because it can be relative, and for a narrative game it is fairly crunchy, but like, but I'd say it was very much in the "medium crunch" zone if we put 5E in say the lower-middle of the "high crunch" zone.

(This was one of the things that bugged me about 4E. It's advice to 'skip to the action' rubbed against my 'the journey is half (or more) of the adventure' feeling about RPGs.)

It's pretty common advice in modern TTRPGs I note, and for some can be pretty important to making them work the way they should.

I do think it's a good idea for every DM to try it out for a few sessions and see how they feel about it after having actually tried it. I say this particularly because I've seen some DMs really cramp their own style/talent and bore players rigid with what I'd call "procedural DMing", where they basically insist on playing out every little thing as if it was thrilling, and rolling for everything it's conceivably possible to roll for. There's a time and a place for that - that time and place is in an incredibly trap-filled terror dungeon. It's not right for meeting an NPC in a tavern, or a street chase, or even a normal, almost entirely trap-free dungeon, but I've seen it deployed by certain DMs in all three (and many more). The tumbler example given above is particularly grotesque and is outright bad DMing in a binary success RPG.

Also, to be clear, even rules-savvy players are not incentivized to make extra rolls for the sake of Hope, because there's 44% chance that will give the DM a Fear to work with, and those aren't good odds, at all.

Throwing the dice is about being surprised by the results.

Kinda?

It's for when there's a meaningful chance of something meaningful going wrong (whether that's an error, taking too long, failing to do something, etc.). If there isn't, there shouldn't be a roll.

That said, with that specific example, literally one of the first three Midnight Domain (i.e. Rogue) cards is one that gives them Advantage (+1d6 to your roll in DH) on picking locks, disarming traps, and stealing stuff, so it is clearly expected that sometimes, Rogues will need to roll to pick locks. Just not every time. It's funny because 5E is one of the few modern games that doesn't recognise this, even though 3E absolutely did to the point of making it a clear-cut rule (4E backpedalled a bit for no reason and made it merely DM advice - 5E doesn't really do either properly, unless 2024 changed that).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I guess Daggerheart has turned me from a 'hard crunch mechanic for everything' fan to a 'just wing most of this and get back to the story beats that move plot / tension or catch player interest'.

You don't have to permanently go either way of course! We go back and forth and play games that are all sorts of ways in my main group.

I will say though, Dungeon World made a huge difference, because after that, a one-page RPG by Grant Howitt (the name of which escapes me, but I think it was effectively in the same setting as Spire but a different city maybe) and Spire, we've completely lost any fear of low-crunch games and narrative RPGs (which we did have some of before), and instead see how cool they can be.