NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jacob Lewis" data-source="post: 9708936" data-attributes="member: 6667921">I’m actually a big fan of how Daggerheart handles armor and damage, even though I know this is a point of contention for some. The way armor works here feels more grounded and more tactically engaging than in most systems.What stands out is the separation of concepts that are often collapsed into a single “defense score.” In Daggerheart, Evasion handles whether you get hit at all—dodging, parrying, etc.—while armor kicks in after that. It doesn’t prevent the hit; it mitigates the damage. That distinction creates a clearer narrative logic: you either avoid the blow, or you absorb it, but they’re not the same thing.Armor itself has two components: thresholds and slots. Thresholds are passive—recorded on your sheet, always present. Armor slots are active—they have to be declared and tracked. That means even outside your turn, you’re making decisions that affect survival. You can’t just throw on heavy armor and forget about it. It’s a resource you manage, and eventually it wears down. But it doesn’t break or vanish arbitrarily. It protects you until it’s spent.That leads to one of my favorite elements: hit points aren’t just a slow bleed. Damage has to mean something—it needs to break through a threshold to matter. That change alone reframes how we think about combat. No more whittling down a giant bag of HP with a dozen inconsequential hits. At the same time, damage dice don’t have outsized influence either. You can’t one-shot someone just by rolling high, but you also aren’t stuck chipping away endlessly.The result is a system that feels fair, tactical, and grounded—without sacrificing pace or drama. Armor feels like armor. Hits feel like hits.</blockquote>

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