What do YOU plan on doing with Daggerheart?

[Piperken]

I've been loosely following; if any one happens to get this to the table where the party has a good blend of ages & experience, it'd be good to hear what your and their experiences were with it!

 

[Bravesteel25]

Grab the SRD. It is very complete.

Oh, niiice! Thanks for pointing that out, Reynard.

 

[Zaukrie]

I use a variant of fear and hope sometimes for initiative in my 5e game. I'll read the srd to see how I feel about the rules, but that's more curiosity than likelihood of playing it.

 

[nyvinter]

It's one of the system among the pitches for next game to play, hopefully that gives enough time for some VTT support to show up.

But I did already make a raccoon ancestry.

 

[overgeeked]

It's one of the system among the pitches for next game to play, hopefully that gives enough time for some VTT support to show up.

But I did already make a raccoon ancestry.

I think the first thing I'm doing is making a Dragonbane-like duck ancestry.

 

[nyvinter]

As someone who started out RPGs with playing those ducks — art was a bit more Disney back then — I approve!

It will need to be playtested and all that, but this is the raccoon card. (Placeholder sketch until I draw it proper. )

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Either a player likes the crunchy rules or they like super-lightweight freeform play. Finding a group of people who like both when that Venn diagram is effectively two separate circles is going to be hard.

That is 100% not my personal experience.

Like, my main group, they've played everything from Rolemaster to Cortex Plus, and they went directly from enjoying 4E D&D, which is perhaps the second-crunchiest edition of D&D after 3.XE, and the most gamist edition by far, to enjoying Dungeon World, which is a very rules-light PtbA game. More recently, we've been playing Mothership (incredibly rules-light) and 5E (which is, by modern standards, rules-heavy), and even min-maxiest player, a reformed munchkin even, clearly has a great time in both.

Also, finding players that I feel will work well for it might be a challenge, because I don't think any of my current players are the right fit. Maybe one of them, but not sure.

I dunno. See above I guess, maybe I'm #blessed but I genuinely don't think most players have a strong preference for crunchy vs. light if they've actually played both for more than a couple of sessions. And that applies to people new to RPGs too in my experience. Hell, if anything, different RPGs can bring out different things in people. Like, when we started on 4E, suddenly one of the players who'd never been interested in optimization before, got interested and had a great time, and when we started on Dungeon World, the guy who we always saw as mostly a min-maxer pulled out some great role-playing that we didn't know was in him!

Daggerheart has nowhere near the crunch of D&D though. It's classes have, what, 4 abilities?

You have up to five Domain cards (like spells/active abilities) at once, plus maybe few basic class and subclass abilities, two racial abilities (often just passive modifiers) and so on. That said, some of the mechanics are not simple-simple, I'd say it's solidly in medium crunch, like, significantly crunchier than anything PtbA I've ever seen except from the Sons of Oak guys (i.e. City of Mists, :Otherscape etc.), crunchier than Spire/Heart, but enough less crunchy than 5E that it's clearly not in the same ballpark (even if some of the same ideas re: optimization may occur).

 

[Neonchameleon]

That's my concern as well. As mentioned at the tail end of Christian's Daggerheart review he mentions the split between the crunchy combat and almost freeform narrative elements. To get the most out of a game like this you need to find players who like both. That's going to be a huge ask. In my experience it's very much an either-or situation. Either a player likes the crunchy rules or they like super-lightweight freeform play. Finding a group of people who like both when that Venn diagram is effectively two separate circles is going to be hard.

To chime in this feels like a D&D-centric approach to me both because D&D 5e is a game with fairly crunchy and tedious combat and pretty light out of combat (as was 4e) and because there's a significant number of groups that are more than fine with this as long as the rules are good leading to combat that isn't too slow. I'm one of them and others have also signed up.

But there are numerous psychographic profiles who like that combination. People who like drama like the combination of light success-with-consequences mechanics out of combat that can lead to escalating drama - and combat that can come down to a single roll for live or die that feels narratively earned. People who play for the power fantasy of ass-kicking often like crunchy combat to kick ass, and lightweight rules to get into and link the fights. And variety is good with some people enjoying the mix.