Daggerheart Playtesting New Transformation Mechanic

Daggerheart is testing out a new Transformation mechanic that allows players to incorporate several classic monster types into their player character. The new mechanic debuted on the game's "The Void" playtest page this afternoon. Six transformations are included, featuring werewolves, vampires, ghosts, reanimated, shapeshifters, and demigods.

Unlike ancestries or backgrounds, transformations are add-on character traits that can either be given out by the GM for narrative purposes or can be used in base character creation. Each transformation has a mechanical benefit and a drawback, both of which the player is responsible for tracking. For instance, the Vampire has to feed in order or make rolls with disadvantage, while werewolves have a Wolf form that has an extra damage dice but eventually triggers a Frenzy that attacks both friends and foes within range. Reanimated characters can only clear Hit Points if they have access to recently deceased remains, but they can permanently mark a Hit Point when they Risk It All on a death die. Shapeshifters can swap ancestries with another, but they only gain the benefit of one ancestry feature, ghosts have a Spirit Form that makes them immune to physical damage but eventually become ephemeral and dissipate, and Demigods have a higher tier Advantage die but grant the GM an additional Fear when they roll with fear unless they mark a stress.

Daggerheart has released several playtests in recent months, mostly featuring new classes and a new domain.

Players can only have one transformation per character and they do not count

 

[Seramus]

Reanimated - Never being able to regain HP except by downtime moves or Risk It All is pretty awful and not really balanced by being able to auto-win Risk It All for 1 permanent HP loss, which is literally the only benefit. Also weird because it turns HP into very literal "meat points", where there was no sign there was before. Like, if you a lost a bunch of HP because your Stress was maxed and you were suffering Stress damage, how are you going to use corpse parts to fix that? And indeed there are a ton of ways HP damage could occur without real clear injuries. I think they need to rethink this one to move away from meat points. They'd be better off making it a zombie/ghoul thing and having the flesh be eaten. That'd actually be more on-theme, I'd suggest.

Agreed. I mean, I can see eating corpses to recover HP lost from stress damage as something like Return of the Living Dead where "eating braiiinnnss makes the pain go away". But in general it's such an unnecessarily harsh penalty to block healing from other sources. I would love a Mending Touch moment where the rotting old soldier recounts a century old hazy memory, feeling more themselves by the moment.

And to top it off, Ghosts CAN heal!

 

[Neonchameleon]

Agreed. I mean, I can see eating corpses to recover HP lost from stress damage as something like Return of the Living Dead where "eating braiiinnnss makes the pain go away". But in general it's such an unnecessarily harsh penalty to block healing from other sources. I would love a Mending Touch moment where the rotting old soldier recounts a century old hazy memory, feeling more themselves by the moment.

And to top it off, Ghosts CAN heal!

Ghosts can heal - but lose permanent hp and have to blaze of glory. Both feel to me like last chances, holding on beyond death.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To be fair, the concept of damage in Daggerheart is unambiguous as it always is separate from marking hit points. You take damage, compare it to your thresholds, and only then do you mark hit points (or armour slots). With that pervasive parlance in mind, there’s not quite as much confusion as one might think.

Sure, but this game is usually pretty good about explaining new concepts in ways that are zero-confusion, and I think adding a couple of words is better than relying on 5E-esque "precise wording interpretation", which 5E demonstrated at great length does not work well for a lot of people, especially newer or less experienced TTRPGers.

Vampire my main objection is that I want to bite with finesse or presence not strength. Am suggesting the stat should be open.

For sure agree. I also think they should be able to melee for 1d8 w/o biting but that's just reflavouring so a non-issue.

For a strength build druid, maybe - but it stacks and there are reasons the druid is considered the strongest class in the game. "Isn't much more powerful than the strongest feature in the game and stacks with any melee builds" is not minor

It's not minor, but I didn't say it was - I said "less good than it sounds like", which I still think is true. Having zero Hope gain and in fact instead taking Stress damage (which potentially leads directly to HP damage and is a huge resource for many classes/domains) when you would gain it is a really serious issue, one I'd say would wildly outweigh +1d10 to attack/damage in most situations. It wouldn't be bad to pull it out when you're on low Stress anyway just to trigger the explosion though.

I'm making Reanimated and Ghost tie to death moves as cling to life options.

Yeah seems reasonable, perhaps for when someone fails a Risk It All check but then regrets it.