Ruin Explorer
Legend
I've never felt so smug about essentially being called "cool" yet so insulted by the same in my life lol!If you sipped your latte in the same musky cafe as they did while listening to the same open-mic poetry, you got it. If not, you weren't cool enough.
- So I tended to bounce off most of those 90s 'look at how cool our idea is' games.
But I mean I sort of agree - I definitely got most of that advice back then, but even if you got it, a lot of the advice from back then just wasn't very good! There were a lot of bad ideas bouncing around, or poorly explained ones, or just tedious focus on dealing with (often imaginary) "problem players" and so on, some of which was so overdetailed it basically pathologized normal players.
And yeah, like both of what you're saying can be true - the advice in Daggerheart is generally excellent, even if a lot of it has been seen in PtbA/FitD-style games before (including Resistance-system games which are essentially the same thing). I think it's well-expressed here, and fundamentally it's pretty cool to see it outside of one of those games, because this isn't a PtbA game, it isn't player-driven to the extent those tend to be, even if it's more player-driven than D&D is by default. It's striking a new sort of balance that is a bit closer to trad than to PtbA-style, and I think will prove more accessible to trad-experienced players as a result (and to be clear, 5E is "trad" in this context).