Elvish Lore
Hero
This isn't a hit-piece against Daggerheart and it's not about going back to 5e or something. DH is an accomplished game and it's impressive. I'm just relating our experience with it at the table.
We just finished an in-person DH campaign after 20 session over the past year since release. My 5 players had a mix of rpg pedigrees… some were ‘raised on 5e’ and haven't really played other rpgs, some were more critical role fans and didn't care so much about any particular system, a couple were indie RPG/ PbtA fans who were used to narrative play.
We ended our finale on a strong narrative beat and we didn't end the campaign early. Essentially a very definitive story arc that sets up another 'season' of play that we would do down the road. Except we won't because most of us don't want to go back to the system.
No shade intended on DH. But if I had to boil it down, there weren't enough character options for the 5e people, while the PbtA people felt game play was too constraining.
If I had to boil it down, ultimately it was a feathered fish.
This group didn't bias one way or another -- they were recruited because they were curious about DH and wanted to give it a fair shot. This wasn't a 5e group that I was trying to convert.
The foundational Hope and Fear mechanic is excellent and I loved improvising results based on it; it was just enough cognitive load, I didn't have to bleed from the eyes trying to come up with something along multiple vectors compared to something like Genesys. Spending Fear was a blast. Also, I loved attriting both Hope and Stress (often in exchange to succeed at something and moving on) - that worked super well. I think certain technologies like the Environments stat blocks were great. Monster stat blocks were just complex enough to be fun and have tactics without being overwhelming to me as the GM.
There were some issues. Combat felt simultaneously too vague and yet too confining. 30% of encounters I ran with a quickly drawn map... the rest was theater of the mind. The combats that were totm were way more successful. Map combats were hobbled by the specified ranges... which I thought were going to work great but never really worked well for us. People either thought they were kind of pointless (there were too many of the ranges... should have been close, med, far) or wanted even more specificity (which DH offers as an option rule).
We overall didn't love Damage Thresholds and felt the game never authored that 'killing blow' vibe. Players felt that no matter what happened, their damage against foes was only ever going to be 0-4 (we were using the optional massive damage rule) no matter how high they rolled.
Overall, it became clear to me that running the game in a fiction-first manner as the rules suggest was incompatible with minis on a map -- it was legitimately hard to accomplish 'soft' moves, like bad guys moving into position as part of raising the tension and 'sculpting’ the scene -- without then explaining to people that I wasn’t stealing the spotlight and cheating by going out of turn. e.g. Running it TotM I would have simply explained 'the ogres on the periphery move closer and begin to threaten your ability to retreat'. On a tactical map, having to move minis outside of individual spotlights to reflect that fiction felt like I was doing something wrong.
There weren't enough damage types. Fictionally, I would explain the damage differently, but people did want that to have more mechanical impact.
The few conditions DH has were fine since many were informal and suggested by abilities (and their subsequent fiction) in play, I didn't need more specified out ahead of time.
Overall, people didn’t love that death was almost entirely up to them - they struggled to get their heads around the fact that this game wasn’t a GM vs Players thing but a ‘tell a good story’ type of game. I think that broke a lot of the immersive experience for them. They felt the stakes weren't there in a fight if they could be the ones to ultimately decide their own fate.
DH wants players to collaborate but only one of mine really cared; again, it as an immersion thing and a character perspective thing. Most of them really, really didn't want to know about things from an author's point of view and wanted to be surprised by the fiction. Fair. This isn't a DH thing exclusively - there's a whole swathe of rpgs that want players to collab worldbuild with the GM - I'm just pointing it out here as part of our DH experience.
Overall I like the game quite a bit as a GM but probably won’t pick it up again. When I do heroic fantasy again, I'd probably go back to 5e or Pathfinder 2e (as they both have more mainstream appeal and don't require the work to find players who want DH's specific mechanical and tonal approach) or jump over to Legend in the Mist or Dungeon World 2 for something truly narrative. The middle of the road approach - between tactical and narrative -- that DH takes proved to be an issue for everyone.
We just finished an in-person DH campaign after 20 session over the past year since release. My 5 players had a mix of rpg pedigrees… some were ‘raised on 5e’ and haven't really played other rpgs, some were more critical role fans and didn't care so much about any particular system, a couple were indie RPG/ PbtA fans who were used to narrative play.
We ended our finale on a strong narrative beat and we didn't end the campaign early. Essentially a very definitive story arc that sets up another 'season' of play that we would do down the road. Except we won't because most of us don't want to go back to the system.
No shade intended on DH. But if I had to boil it down, there weren't enough character options for the 5e people, while the PbtA people felt game play was too constraining.
If I had to boil it down, ultimately it was a feathered fish.
This group didn't bias one way or another -- they were recruited because they were curious about DH and wanted to give it a fair shot. This wasn't a 5e group that I was trying to convert.
The foundational Hope and Fear mechanic is excellent and I loved improvising results based on it; it was just enough cognitive load, I didn't have to bleed from the eyes trying to come up with something along multiple vectors compared to something like Genesys. Spending Fear was a blast. Also, I loved attriting both Hope and Stress (often in exchange to succeed at something and moving on) - that worked super well. I think certain technologies like the Environments stat blocks were great. Monster stat blocks were just complex enough to be fun and have tactics without being overwhelming to me as the GM.
There were some issues. Combat felt simultaneously too vague and yet too confining. 30% of encounters I ran with a quickly drawn map... the rest was theater of the mind. The combats that were totm were way more successful. Map combats were hobbled by the specified ranges... which I thought were going to work great but never really worked well for us. People either thought they were kind of pointless (there were too many of the ranges... should have been close, med, far) or wanted even more specificity (which DH offers as an option rule).
We overall didn't love Damage Thresholds and felt the game never authored that 'killing blow' vibe. Players felt that no matter what happened, their damage against foes was only ever going to be 0-4 (we were using the optional massive damage rule) no matter how high they rolled.
Overall, it became clear to me that running the game in a fiction-first manner as the rules suggest was incompatible with minis on a map -- it was legitimately hard to accomplish 'soft' moves, like bad guys moving into position as part of raising the tension and 'sculpting’ the scene -- without then explaining to people that I wasn’t stealing the spotlight and cheating by going out of turn. e.g. Running it TotM I would have simply explained 'the ogres on the periphery move closer and begin to threaten your ability to retreat'. On a tactical map, having to move minis outside of individual spotlights to reflect that fiction felt like I was doing something wrong.
There weren't enough damage types. Fictionally, I would explain the damage differently, but people did want that to have more mechanical impact.
The few conditions DH has were fine since many were informal and suggested by abilities (and their subsequent fiction) in play, I didn't need more specified out ahead of time.
Overall, people didn’t love that death was almost entirely up to them - they struggled to get their heads around the fact that this game wasn’t a GM vs Players thing but a ‘tell a good story’ type of game. I think that broke a lot of the immersive experience for them. They felt the stakes weren't there in a fight if they could be the ones to ultimately decide their own fate.
DH wants players to collaborate but only one of mine really cared; again, it as an immersion thing and a character perspective thing. Most of them really, really didn't want to know about things from an author's point of view and wanted to be surprised by the fiction. Fair. This isn't a DH thing exclusively - there's a whole swathe of rpgs that want players to collab worldbuild with the GM - I'm just pointing it out here as part of our DH experience.
Overall I like the game quite a bit as a GM but probably won’t pick it up again. When I do heroic fantasy again, I'd probably go back to 5e or Pathfinder 2e (as they both have more mainstream appeal and don't require the work to find players who want DH's specific mechanical and tonal approach) or jump over to Legend in the Mist or Dungeon World 2 for something truly narrative. The middle of the road approach - between tactical and narrative -- that DH takes proved to be an issue for everyone.
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