NerdParker’s Stuff

Rob Donoghue's Daggerheart Dissection

Over on Bluesky, Rob Donoghue did a lengthy live-post of his reading of Daggerheart (first post here). Why he did it on Bluesky instead of a post on his (truly incredible) blog, nobody knows.

With his permission, I've gathered the posts together and formatted them as a blog post. I've left the words alone, just collating things into paragraphs to make things easier to read. I've added headings as he gets to certain sections, if only to ease scrolling through this wall of text. I've pulled out some pull quotes for my own sake, so I can remember them.

(I would have just linked to something like skywriter.blue, except Donoghue's thread was too long for those apps to parse.)

The Box

Before I actually crack open Daggerheart, I want to talk about a very important related topic: THE BOX.

Because I had not been paying attention, it was only when I walked into Games & Stuff that I realized that the hardcover book came bundled with a box.

I was very curious about this.

I have a fondness for game boxes, if only out of nostalgia for utility. My old Basic & Expert D&D boxes got hauled around with all the AD&D stuff because they held all the character sheets and dice. So, I was definitely intrigued with what the intent was for this box.

It's a very nice box. Well made, with a magnetic closure flap. And upon cracking it open, I went through a series of emotions, the first of which being disappointment at the contents which had nothing to do with the contents themselves.

Picture of the Daggerheart box Picture of the Daggerheart box

It's got a big weird ghost stag thing under two moons looking down at what might be a relatively tiny adventuring party in silhouette. Big time van art vibe.

The actual topic of cards themselves is a complicated one, and I'm going to wait on that until I've read the rules. Was I a little sad that it wasn't dice or character sheets? Sure, but that's just my bias.

The negative reaction was not to the cards themselves, but rather to what cards do the box. Specifically, a box designed to hold cards can't hold anything else. To me this is a waste. Those cards are going in a card box, and this box should be used for paper sized things.

But as it turns out, the Darrington Press folks were smarter than average, and hadn't glued in the insert. So as it turns out, you can just pop out the insert and use the box as an actual box.

I don't know if this was intentional, or if it was just less expensive to not glue it in. I suspect if it was truly intentional, then the bottom would not be exposed cardboard, but I am ok with serendipity.

That same box, except the insert holding the cards is demonstrated as coming out, leaving a big empty space behind where one might put dice, pencils and character sheets, as God intended.

However, there was still one more stop on my emotional journey.

I was baffled by this.

It

So, if you're a nerd for fancy boxes (guilty), then this registers as a pull. That is, you pull on it to get something (like a drawer) out of it's niche. However, this is not attached to anything that moves. If you pull on it it hard enough, you tear the box. It's weird.

I have 3 theories.

  1. It's a pen loop. The size is right, but that seems like a terrible idea.

  2. It's something you can hold onto while pulling open the box lid. This kind of makes sense, but the ergonometrics are weird and it seems pretty unnecessary.

  3. There is also some sort of SUPER DUPER UBER DELUXE version of this game where a fancier version of this book as well as this box go into a slipcover, and this tab is so you can pull the box out (because if you pulled on another part, it would open the lid rather than move the box.

The flaw with #3 (which I suspect can be easily validated) is that the "spine" of the box (that is, the part that would face out) is the opposite side, since that's where the name and trade dress are. The net result is that it kind of looks like the box was originally designed as a drawer, but then switched to the current design without removing the tab. Or, of course, it might have some other sort of purpose that hasn't occurred to me. I'm open to suggestions.

Anyway, it's not an actual problem or anything. Just the sort of small oddity that niggles at me.

There's good money to be made in supplemental cards

More broadly, the box raises some questions that I am going to take into the book. Not just what the cards are and what they do, but how necessary they are or aren't. I'm going to bet that they're not necessary at all, but might be convenient. There's good money to be made in supplemental cards - people like them, and they're so used to buying them in other contexts that it removes the feeling of a supplement treadmill.

Put differently, offering cards and other extra bits allows fans of your games who can spend more and want to spend more to do so. This is good business, and it's not even sketchy so long as the cards and things are genuinely optional. I am definitely hoping that's the route this goes.

Between the box and the general look of the book, if you hid all of the trade dress and asked me who made this game, my first guess would be Monte Cook Games.

This is a compliment, in case that's unclear.

MCG games won't shock you with new directions in graphic design, rather, they represent a tremendously high level of polish on existing standards, paired with high quality optional components. MCG has spent years making great products that offer their fans more options to buy in. I hope that doesn't sound critical, because it's not. MCG offers a fantastic model of a game company that understands how important it is that their customers are also their fans, and as a result, they have a GREAT relationship with their community (who are, genuinely, a community).

If someone were to, hypothetically, release an RPG whose strongest driving point is that it's connected to something with a strong, enthusiastic fanbase, and they were looking to STAY CONNECTED to that fanbase, rather than just tap them for cash, then MCG is the company they'd want to model after.

So when I say this makes me think of an MCG product, and I say that's a compliment? There's a lot going into that, and it really is a compliment.

So, 20 posts and I haven't even opened the book yet. That seems on brand.

Anyway, I need to go do chores and such. I'll be cracking open the book later, and we'll see how long I go before I just have to say something.

Oh, one other thing. The cards feel a tiny bit big. I am trying to decide it this is my imagination or not, and this is absolutely going to end with my taking out a card to physically compare with others.

Ok, testing reveals they are a TINY bit big. Like, maybe a millimeter in each direction. Not a problem, mostly just an indication that humans get weirdly sensitized to some things.

The Physical Book

I have NO IDEA what it's supposed to be showing, but it looks cool

Ok, so, let's talk about the physical book. It's a nice book. Hefty, but not overwhelming (quick check says 366 pages). The cover art has a lot of stuff going one, and if I knew anything at all about CR it might mean something to me, but without that knowledge, my impression is "ACTION FANTASY". There are far worse impressions to take away. One thing I like is that they're willing to overload the cover image to give it a dynamic sense, like you might see from a movie poster. It's a deliberate choice, and they do it well, albeit in a very specific and recognizable modern RPG art style.

One interesting thing: The biggest element on the cover - the big bug worm monster - is also the most muted in color. If it had been bolder then it would be the image that sticks in the mind for the cover. As is, the picture is much harder to boil down to one image, which is a good trick.

Back cover is lovely and functional. As with the cover, I have NO IDEA what it's supposed to be showing, but it looks cool, and it's the same art used in the cover of the box, so that's handy.

Because I hang out with @deadlyfredly.bsky.social, I naturally inspected their use of spot gloss. As with most of the other elements, there are no surprises to it, but what there is has been applied elegantly and well, largely to title elements and the system icons. The one clever exception is the card images on the back. They've also been treated with spot gloss, and it really makes them pop. Super nice touch.

Ok. Speaking of icons, there are two on the spine. The dagger is, presumably, the icon for the game. Less sure about the robot hand with a quill. My first thought was Darrington Press, but their trade dress is on the back. Dunno. Maybe a CR thing.

A dagger icon, which makes sense Icon of a robot hand holding a quill maybe?

Also, an interesting font choice on the back copy. The bold copy is in exactly the sort of san serif I’d expect, but the non-bold is in a modern serif font, and that sort of decision is never accidental. Makes me very curious to explore the design language of the book.

Back cover copy from daggerheart. The text is not the point so much as the fact that the second and third paragraph have serif font, which is curious.

Cracking it open, the endpapers are a nice purple pattern done in the same style as the inside of the box. They're nice, no question, but also feel a little bit like a wasted opportunity. On a book like this, I'd have expected a colorful map. Not a bad thing, just a missed opportunity.

Solid binding. Properly stitched and hardbound, not just glued into a hardcover. Critically, they sized it correctly. On some arger books, the spine ends up a little narrower than the pages require, and you get a book that wants to puff out a little. Daggerheart is rightsized and sits well.

Also, any time I see the edge of a book that looks like this, I’m a happy camper.

You can see the chapters clearly from the side, allowing easy navigation.

Having visible chapter bleeds is great for navigating in the book, and that's one thing I like. But the other thing is that they communicate to me that someone THOUGHT about navigation. There are obvious markers like this, and it suggests there will be other smart decisions made with the layout.

The Skim

Ok, so it's always worth a stop at the credits page. Partly because it's good to see the names associated with this (and there are some really great names!), but also because it can tell you a lot about how the game was made and how it views itself.

My takeaways

The second to last bullet I something that WOTC has trained me look out for. The last bullet is not good or bad in its own right, but given the current market, it's something to check for, if only to be aware of trade war implications.

Table of contents is a single page. Also worth stopping at because it is, functionally, the book in outline form, and can offer other insights. For example, a short TOC will (hopefully) mean a robust index.

For this, we have:

The use of "Adventure" in this is clearly a deliberate choice. It suggests a certain style, but parsing it's a trick. Functionally, the three "Adventure" chapters seem to correspond to:

Now, I am revealing a little bit of an eyeroll at the terminology here, but I think my knee jerk reaction is wrong. In many books, Chapter 3 would be clearly delineated as "The GM chapter". The decision to use the same language for that chapter as the more traditionally player facing section tells us something about how the game views the GM/Player divide - specifically. It suggests that the separation is thin.

It probably looks like I'm reading a lot into some organizational choices, largely because I am, but I'm doing so for a reason. Very little gets into a book like this by accident. If something looks odd (like the choice of a word in a recurring way), there is usually some logic behind it.

This also answers a question I had about the colors on the page edges. Looking at the side of the book, it kind of looks like some of the chapters use the same color, which seemed an odd choice. You can see the intended colors on the TOC, and they are different, but some are hard to distinguish. It shouldn't be a problem, because they don't put any of the similar colors next to each other, but I admit I am going to have a hard time remembering which red is rules vs adversaries.

Individual pages have good navigation markers. Page edge has the color stripe for the chapter, page bottoms have number and chapter in a very readable graphic element.

The book is, of course, lovely. Lots of art, all integrated quite well. Again, all very much in a modern fantasy illustration style. There are some lovely pieces, but as a whole, it reinforces what I was saying before: It's not going to SURPRISE you, but the level of polish is high.

Color is used throughout. Most obviously, each chapter makes use of its signature color (which is something that makes it easier to find things when flipping through), with yellow (also the color of the introduction) used for general accent purposes. This occasionally produces combination which LOOK like the color is meaningful, but where that does not actually seem to be the case. Also, that serif font form the back cover doesn't show up again anywhere I've seen, so now I'm wondering about the story for that.

The Character Sheet

I've made enough stat system to know what kind of decisions lead to a set like this.

Hopping to the back, I skip past some summary information on cards and zero in on the other font of information: The character sheet. It's a nice looking sheet, but before I get into it, I notice there are also some interesting arts and crafts bits to it. One is the "Character Sheet Sidecar", which is a page, you print out, cut in half, and put too each side of the character sheet, offering explanation of the various elements on the sheet. You often see this view in game books, but it's delightful to see it as its own artifact. There's also a weird half sheet which is apparently used to handle multiclassing, and I'm not 100% sure how it's supposed to be used.

Ok, character sheet itself: Top line elements are Name, Pronouns, Heritage, Subclass and Level. This piques my curiosity because I'm not sure where one denotes class (though there's a class feature section further down). It's an absence that I look forward to understanding.

Stats tell their own story. Agility, Strength, Finesse, Instinct, Presence and Knowledge. I've made enough stat system to know what kind of decisions lead to a set like this. From a D&D perspective, the problems it solves are that CON is passive and DEX is overloaded. So you drop Con in favor of something active, and you split Dexterity into gross and fine dexterity, so that maybe not all acrobats are sneaky. It's got its own problems, but so does everything else. Totally functional.

Most of the right side elements are standard fare - Weapons, inventory and such. It's the left side where things start getting interesting. There are simple looking damage and stress tracks, which seem normal, but there's a section of minor/major/severe damage that suggest some complexity.

Beneath that is "Hope", which can be spent to "Use an experience or help an ally", so that sounds like a fun currency, and there's a "Hope Feature" line item that makes me curious. I assume there's some good hippie dippy storygaming stuff in this space.

Beneath that is an experience box which reminds me of the marvel Stones "Lines of Experience" system. It might be something else entirely, but Lines of Experience was REALLY GOOD, so now I'm hoping that's what it is.

The "Gold" suggestion suggests that wealth is abstracted into "Handfuls", "Bags" and "Chest". I enjoy that kind of abstraction, so we'll see how it plays.

The Skim, continued

Flipping through the index from there reveals some very utilitarian rule summaries (and an illustration of the d12s about which I have heard people talking). Lots of hints at interesting things, so I'm not looking too close, just flipping through.

Which gets me to the maps.

There are a LOT of maps. Some of them seem to be general setting, some of them seem to be for included frames/adventures. I was a little surprised that they're all black and white, but they're done in a sufficiently nice, consistent style that they're still lovely. One very interesting decision is that each map is explicitly the size of one piece of letter sized paper. Even if the content must then cover multiple maps.

I like this. As much as I love LOOKING at poster maps, having single page maps is vastly more USABLE. Excellent decision.

Which gets to the index, another mandatory stop. 5 pages long, not super dense. I confess, I'm a little underwhelmed by it. The real proof will come in using it, so I withhold judgement for now, but I'm not excited about this index (and yes, I get excited about good indexing).

Oh, I have not mentioned, but should add that the book has two of the ribbon bookmarks which are required by law in anything designated as deluxe. They're yellow and purple, in keeping with the underlying color scheme of the book (Purple endpapers, yellow for default elements).

I keep coming back to the word "polished" for this, but it is just so very much the right word. It's lovely and well put together, distinct enough to be it own thing, but not so different from mainstream RPG expectations as to be weird or confusing. As much as we might wish it to be otherwise, D&D still sets the norm for most of the market, and how recognizable and approachable an RPG is going to be to the broader market requires a balance between being enough like and enough different from D&D. This seems to hit that mark.

Anyway, that's the book as book. Next thing I need to do is get to actually, y'know, reading it.

I may need some coffee.

Addendum: Apparently the PDF character sheets available are by class, with the class rules on the sheet, which explains why there's not a space for it in the layout, but suggests there probably should have been a tweak for the generic sheet. That's good news.

Introduction

Ok, approaching the introduction, I am reminded how terrible it is that the first thing you read in most RPGs is the “what is an RPG?” Section, where the best you can hope for is that it’s not actively painful.

Daggerheart does about as well as one might hope. That’s not really praise, but it’s not criticism either. We’re all just going to acknowledge the section exists and never speak of it again.

Much more exciting is the touchstones sections, citing influential games and media. It’s great stuff, with the biggest and most pleasant surprise (for me) being the inclusion of Nix’s Sabriel among a list of heavy hitters

This is also where I get introduced to the core concept that the 2 d12s players roll are “hope” and “fear”, with some rich dice mechanics hanging off which is higher. I’m a sucker for rich dice, so heck yeah! Play apparently requires the full suite of dice, tokens and the game cards. Still not sure how I feel about the cards, but ok.

Nice to see a list of player principles up front, nicer still to see “spotlight your friends” in the second slot. It’s an okay list - some of the principles are a bit on the mushy side, but there’s more good than meh.

Ok, there’s a tiger guy polishing a sword on page 10. It’s a big, lovely picture which would be entirely forgettable were it not for the fact that he’s wearing a monocle, which just gives the image that little something extra.

Chapter One: Preparing for Adventure

Ok, we enter into the world overview, aka where we get to find out the Capitalized Words of the setting. Structurally, it’s the world, heaven, hell, and the place the squibblies come from. It’s pretty generic, but presumably the more interesting parts are in the details.

Some nice advice on reskinning the cosmetics of powers and effects. Always good to see that spoken to in a system that promises to have no shortage of fiddly bits.

Interesting chargen bits from the overview:

Stats are presented directly as their bonuses (from +2 to -1 initially)

Then gear, derived stats and so on. This is also where they casually drop in the core of the hope/fear engine. In DRYH terms, if hope dominates, you get a point. If fear dominates, the GM gets one.

At this point, I was struck by something positive. This is exactly the sort of game which I would not ally expect to have some horrible, quirky name for the GM, so it’s kind of delightful that they just…don’t.

From there it rolls into backgrounds, experiences, domains and connections. I had honestly thought we were at the tail end of chargen, just doing cleanup, but these look like they might actually be pretty meaty, so I think I’ll break here for a bit.

I had meant to just do the Intro, but it was short, and rolled so smoothly into chapter 1 that it caught me off guard. I blame the tiger guy on page 10. I have a couple minutes become poker starts.

Experiences, it turns out, are not the XP system but are, instead, the skill system (sort of). Experiences, it turns out, are free-form descriptors of background, skills and the like. You start with 2 at +2 and you get more and bigger numbers over time The trick is that you have to spend a hope to use them, so they’re clearly a big part of the currency cycle.

This seems fun, and I absolutely want to dig into it.

So, putting a pin in that as I go play poker. VERY interesting.

Ok, picking up, still mid chargen. Turns out Experiences were more interesting than I anticipated, so what about background and connection?

Background turns out to be a set of questions to answer, based on your class, which are found in your "Character guide". This lead to some confusion on my part because I had no idea what a character guide was. As it turns out, remember how there are character sheets for each class, just not in the appendix? The character guide is part of that.

So, cool. Unclear on reading, but easily addressed.

Connections are the connections with other characters in the group, and it's a bit more handwavey, though apparently there are also connections questions in the character guide, so something to look forward to, I guess.

Domains

This is also where you pick your "Domain Cards", and I want to set aside the card part of it for a moment and just talk about it as the structure for a power system, because it's fascinating and clever, though I have a few things I'm curious how they address.

So, first and foremost, it seems very odd to me that an RPG can have a diagram like this and NOT cite Brandon Sanderson as an inspiration.

The diagram is a wheel, of nine icons (which correspond to the Daggerheart Domains). Between each pair of icons is a character class. It woudl be clearer if the domains were also labeled, but they

In that diagram, each of those icons in a circle corresponds to a DOMAIN, which are more or less areas of power or capability. Each class exists at the intersection of two of them, meaning it also shares one domain with the classes to it's right and left. So, for example, the Ranger's domains are Bone (Tactics and the Body) and Sage (The Natural World). They share Bone with the Warrior (Bone and Valor), and Sage with the Druid (Sage and Arcana).

The domains provide lists of special abilities (represented as cards).

There's a LOT to this.

This would be ... a much more elegant way to introduce psionics into a game

First off, it means the neighbor classes share ability lists. This is kind of fascinating to me. It's mostly just touched on in terms of "Encourage players to pick different abilities, unless they really want to overlap", but I think it has a lot more potential than that. For example, it really seems like a fantastic design space for synergy or handoff abilities. The kind where you take some sort of action, and if the follow up action (from someone else - no self dealing) is from the same domain, there's some sort of bonus.

It's possible there are already abilities like this. All I know is that it's the first thing I thought of.

Another interesting thing is that it DRASTICALLY changes the work involved in creating a class. That is, because so much of the mechanical differentiation comes from the domain lists, the classes can't really have too many moving parts (and flipping ahead a little bit seems to confirm this).

But what intrigues me MOST is how this model works with expansion and contribution. First and foremost, creating a new domain ability seems like the a good sized piece of game design and contribution. Discrete rules bits that implicitly demand trade off for the domain abilities you don't choose.

And the fact that the new content helps two classes is maybe not any kind of HUGE opening, but it's more useful than just tweaking a single class. So that's cool, but it's only the entry point. Because the next obvious option are new character classes, which just require different combinations.

In theory, there's room for a class at the intersection of any two domains, provided you can figure out a good story for it. Want a Mage Knight? Try Valor-Codex. Paladin? Perhaps Grace-Splendor. LOTS of possible combinations.

Purely spitballing, but one could event build different thematic "Wheels" for different settings. LOTS of fun options.

(I also haven't mentioned that sub-classes are an obvious option for hacking, since there are currently only 2 per class. They are, but they're outside the domain model)

Of course, for the truly ambitious, it would be entirely possible to create a whole new domain (and, implicitly, some new character classes at the points of intersection). This would be, for example, a much more elegant way to introduce psionics into a game than by the nostalgia fiat.

In case it's not obvious, I think this is a very clever setup, and I'm eager to take to for a spin. That said, I am a little concerned. The domains are designed to handle both magical and mundane elements, and it's always a little hard to keep both of them under the same roof.

There's a bit of a resonance with D&D 4E's power sources here. On the good side, this captures many of the thematic and mechanical advantages they offered, but on the worrying side, systems like this can often end up feeling like everyone's playing a wizard with different special effects. Put differently, short of taking the Earthdawn route, where everyone really is a wizard, it's often a real challenge to have spell casters and more mundane characters using the same core engine without it feeling like a compromise for one of them. I have no idea if Daggerheart falls prey to this or not, but it's definitely something I'm keeping my eyes open for as we continue.

Oh, before we get to the classes, I should also mention that they have a sample spread of a proper character sheet here, and it GREATLY clarified a number of things that were head scratchers about the generic one. It also reinforced my sense of how much Blades in the Dark DNA is in this.

Classes

that particular distinction is ... very much a specific artifact of D&D

Ok, so the classes themselves. As the wheel showed, they're Sorcerer, Druid, Ranger, Warrior, Guardian, Seraph, Wizard, Bard & Rogue. Obviously, my first thought upon looking at that list was to map them to D&D classes. In doing so, I may be making some absolutely incorrect assumptions, and I will hopefully find out if I do.

Most of them are obvious, with only 3 exceptions. Seraph is new, but a few moments of thought suggest that it's probably the Cleric equivalent.

That leaves warrior and guardian. Again, making assumptions, I assume that means "Damage Dealer" and "Tank", since that's the most common pattern for such things. If so, I'll be very curious to check implementation. I love tanking, but it is very hard to do unless you're willing to be blatant about its mechanistic nature. Most often, it just ends up meaning "Heavier armor, and therefor higher defense and maybe some shield tricks, vs high damage and something like dual wielding or oversized weapons. I confess, I hope to be surprised, but I don't actually expect to be.

(Which is not a dig on Daggerheart. This is the core game. It's actually better for it to make recognizable choices for the core elements, like starting classes. If they had tried to be too novel in these choices, I'd be rolling my eyes hard.)

The area I'm actually more curious about is the inclusion of Sorcerer and Wizard, because that particular distinction is - frankly - very much a specific artifact of D&D. I'm really not sure what it's doing here, so it should be interesting to find out.

Also, of course, the choice to go with "Seraph" for the Life-Protection slot (rather than priest or, y'know, cleric) also suggests there may be something unexpected in there.

So, I guess it's time to find out.

Once again the bards fuck everything up

Before they start with the classes, there's a brief sidebar about the Domain cards which reveals a mechanical curiosity. There is a limit on the number of cards a character can have active at the same time, and they eventually will have enough cards that some number will need to be kept in reserve. Normally, you can swap cards in and out of reserve during downtime, but each card has a listed cost which can be paid in stress (which is sounding more and more like the stamina-style currency of play) to swap it in on the fly. This mechanic jumped out at me for two reasons.

First, it's one of those rules that feels very much like a response to a specific frustration with D&D (specifically, the lack of on the fly swapping), and second, because the example they show seems to have a zero swapping cost. That suggests there's a potentially interesting minigame here, where cards that can be swapped in for zero cost are - effectively - expanding your range of available slots (Rather like ritual spells end up behaving in 5e). Also, if I'm reading this right, someone has finally done the thing that I've been wishing for, and used the BitD inventory system as the baseline structure for organizing powers. Very cool if so.

Ok, into the actual classes, and once again the bards fuck everything up by virtue of alphabetical order. (Nothing against bards themselves, but they are usually the absolute worst character class to start with because they're usually a hybrid of other things.)

And my first impression of the character classes is that they are sparse. Each one has a two page spread with some lovely art, but the content is not exactly tightly packed in there. This is neither good nor bad, but it is important.

When I remarked earlier that most of the moving parts of a class were in the domain lists, and that the classes themselves would be pretty light? This is what that is. Each class is a tiny handful of abilities (and most of those are in the subclass). This is one of those classic tradeoffs in design. Lightweight classes means making new classes is easy, and helps other mechanical elements (Experiences, I wager) provide more character definition. However, there is also a risk of the classes not feeling terribly distinct.

Also, to be fair, some of the classes are longer because they include supplemental rules alongside the class, which is a nice touch. So, druids have several pages of animal shapes, and Rangers have an extra two pages for companion rules.

A number of the classes are pretty clearly "That thing you know they do", and fair enough. Bards inspire. Druids shapeshift and do magic. Wizards cast a bunch of spells. However, scratch the surface on a few of them, and there are things to be found.

Right off the bat, it looks like my read on Guardian was wrong, since the description seems closer to Paladins or other warriors for an ideal, though the mechanics are more of a third thing. One subclass is very tanky, one is very revengey.

The guardian ends up being an interesting point to stop and really look at what the Subclassses do. Mechanically, they offer most of the abilities of the class, but I'm talking more conceptually. That is to say, the classes themselves are loosely sketched, and subclasses seem to serve as ways to refine the idea and (ideally) bring it into line with whatever the player imagines. Which is to say, the more potentially nuanced the class, the more it needs subclasses.

To take bards, for example, the core idea is fairly straightforward, and the subclasses are largely differences in approach. Do you inspire with music or with words? It's a good and fun choice, and while you might want more options, it covers a lot of the probable ground.

The guardian is, frankly, a bit less clear cut in its core, and if you view it as this loose idea of warriors driven by ideals, the subclasses don't seem to cast nearly a wide enough net for the kind of concepts that suggests. Of course, if you just go "Forget it, Jake. They're Paladins", it comes together much more tidily, and I honestly am not sure what I think of that.

It gets even more interesting when you get to a class that has historically had something of an identity crisis, like, say, the Ranger. In this case, the differences between the subclasses are pretty dramatic. One is "I kill real gud" and the other is "WELCOME TO THE COMPANION RULES"

So, I mean, I can't fault them for not adhering to tradition.

So, tup to now, I'm definitely feeling like the game would have benefitted from a few more subclasses, if only to round out the idea of what the classes are. But then I hit the rogue, and it immediately transitions from a general feeling to an intense need.

The rogue's two subclasses manage to cast two problems in sharp relief, particularly because they are both quite thematic and cool. BECAUSE they're thematic and cool, they don't exactly cover a wide area of possible rogue concepts. The result feels VERY constrained in terms of options. The second thing it highlights is the role of magic. One of the subclasses is overtly magical, one is not (I mean, yes, you can reskin things, but there are only so many ways to reskin teleporting between shadows). So, if you want to play a non-magical rogue, you have exactly one choice.

So, yeah. That's not great. It's the sort of thing that will be less of an issue over time, but out the gate, it's kind of disappointing.

The seraph does end up being the cleric (Smashy clerics or I'M AN ANGEL clerics) with the qualifier that there's no real difference between gods. Like the rogue, this is something that will likely expand with time, but unlike the rogue, there's enough initial range to not feel too constrained.

I got to the sorcerer, then skipped ahead to the wizard, and if you asked me, I could not tell you why they are two separate classes. The differences might be in the domain lists, but otherwise, if all 4 subclasses were under one class, I wouldn't bat an eye. That's not a bad thing, but I was hoping for something a bit less "They're two classes here because they're two classes in D&D."

I was a little worried about Warrior having the same problem as Rogue, but it does not seem nearly as constrained. But it also doesn't necessarily jump off the page either. I think this is something I need to see in practice.

One of the other trade offs to make in an action/adventure game is how to handle everyone fighting. If only some classes can fight, then it tends to be uneven fun. If everyone can fight, the classes who specialize in fighting can end up feeling anemic. I'm not sure where Daggerheart ends up.

All in all, the classes section is a weird combination of clever, interesting design decisions paired with the very long shadow of D&D. Tellingly, most of the criticisms I would offer fall into the "I wish there were more of this" category, which is the best sort of problem for an RPG to have. Aside from the rogue, I think the main thing I feel like I'm missing is what the domains MEAN. Like, they clearly exist within the mechanics, but I also infer that they are something that exists within the world, but I don't know what that looks or feels like.

But that's also the sort of thing that might be spoken to later in the book, so I'll largely leave a pin in it, albeit an important pin.

To come back to the "Everyone's a wizard" thing - it is ok for a game to have every PC be dramatically magical, but I need the game to tell me that.

Ancestries and Communities

The artist got the memo

Ok, so that was kind of heavy stuff, and I am here to tell you, the Ancestry section is the absolute opposite.

Someone had fun with this.

There are a LOT of ancestries, pretty much covering the swath of D&D-familiar races. There aren't many surprises in the content, but the real magic is in the PRESENTATION.

Each Ancestry gets a singe page, of which maybe 25% is committed to text, including the two features that the ancestry grants. The rest is an absolute cornucopia of illustrations. Each ancestry has one big colorful picture, but then a dozen or so line drawings showing range and details.

Not only is this really engaging, it also means that for each ancestry you are actually seeing a wide range of options and phenotypes. For the very-not-human ancestries, this does a wonderful job of conveying the range of looks and style that it encompasses.

Also, not to put to fine a point on it: For all of the ancestries which might be, shall we say, engaged in a romantic fashion? The artist got the memo.

And just in case there's not enough variety, they explicitly allow mixed ancestry, which is mechanically trivial to represent. Since each ancestry has two features, it's pretty much just a matter of picking one from each. very slick.

After the sheer joy of the ancestries, the Community section is a bit more utilitarian. They are all Somethingborne, with the something either being a position in society or a particular sort of geography. It comes with a single feature, and the range of options is decent enough.

Most critically, the list is pretty easily expanded, in case you need to add, I dunno, Starborne, or Shadowborne or whatever as suits your game. It is, I should add, a nice trick for flavorful but still largely generic worldbuilding.

Ok, so this is a pleasant surprise. The last four pages of the section are pretty much entirely focused on, to borrow thier words, playing disability with purpose and respect, including explicitly speaking to deaf and blind characters. I am absolutely not the person to deeply judge the quality of this section, but I will note that this is not a terribly verbose game, and there are a LOT of words dedicated to the topic. They took this seriously, and at least as far as I can tell, handled it well. Hat's off.

Ok, that wraps up that chapter. Time for a break.

Oh, one thing I feel obliged to add: From what I have seen so far, I am already excited to take this game for a spin. If we were not literally on session 2 of our current Blades game, I'd be pitching this for our friday night game.

Chapter Two - Playing an Adventure

There may be some shenanigans here

Ok, let's talk some rules. Chapter two starts out with a breakdown of the cycle of play. It's contents don't really move the needle, but it's a good tool for framing things, so I'm glad to see it.

It only takes 3 pages to get weird.

So the big, in your face, swerve into flavor country comes with the straight up declaration that there's no really any initiative, hard limit on number of actions or really any constraints around turn taking at all. In or out of combat. That's a hell of a thing.

Now, there may be some shenanigans here, distinguishing "actions" from "moves", so I'm going to wait until I actually get to the moves section to say if they're really quite as loosely goosey as they're suggesting. Because if so, I (unsurprisingly) have feelings on the matter. The reason I'm looking for loopholes is that it seems that player (or GM) spotlight is a mechanically defined thing. When you have it, you can do things you can't when you don't, and it has a strong interaction with moves, but I'm not 100% sure about the direction of that interaction.

So, putting a pin in that, we get to he dice, and get the formal unpacking of the rich dice system. 2d12, one is hope, one is fear. I very much like the language the've constructed for it: You are "Rolling with hope" or "Rolling with fear", depending which is higher. It's a small thing, but it's very important that if you're using rich dice (like these), they need to be easy to talk about. Even if the richness is mechanically smooth, if it's clumsy to talk about, it'll be hard to use. So, very well done.

And for those wondering, doubles are a crit. They count as rolling with hope, and if you succeed, you get enhanced effect.

We also get some details on the hope currency cycle. You generate hope when you roll with hope, and your max capacity is 6. Since you'll get it half the time you roll, the system assumes you'll spend liberally (whether or not that's a safe assumption is another question). Spending one help lets you use an experience, getting a bonus on the roll, or granting someone else a 1d6 bonus die on their roll. SPending 3 help let's you trigger a special ability on your class (Called a "Hope Feature"), or trigger a "Tag Team Roll".

Tag Team rolls sound like something roughly equivalent to those semi-QTE's you see in some RPGs, but it'll be a few pages before we get the details.

Hope features are kind of signature moves for the classes. I know I saw them, but taking a look again now that I have context.

So, looking through these, some of them are hard for me to judge since I'm not sure how big a deal, say, +2 to evasion for a turn is, but I admit they seem...uneven? I don't so much mean mechanically. I'm sure they're fairly balanced. It's just some of them seem cooler or more fun than others. Which is probably not a big deal, except this is sort of the signature cool thing, at least as presented.

Anyway, in short, there are plenty of things to spend hope on, which is good. As to fear (The currency that goes to the GM when you roll with fear), we'll have to wait a bit to find out about that.

From there we get into combat. There's an evasion value, which sets the default target to hit, but I'm not sure what a good or bad number is. That was straightforward enough, but damage took a minute to parse.

The first thing to know is that characters don't have a lot of hit points, so taking even one HP of damage seems like a pretty significant thing. When you get hit, it will be Minor damage (1HP), Major Damage (2HP) or Severe damage (3HP). This is where the weird bar in the damage section comes in.

three boxes - Minor damage, Major Damage and Severe Damage.

You fill in numbers in the in-between boxes, and those are now your thresholds. So, if your thresholds are 8 and 16, if less than 8 damage is rolled, you take 1 HP, 8-15 would be 2HP and 16+ would be 3HP. I have no idea how damage is rolled yet, but what I do know is that the interesting part of this seems to be that this is where armor comes into account. So, Armor doesn't prevent hits, but does shape the severity of hits that land (modulo special abilities and stuff)

I have no objection to this. It's a classic method of modeling armor, though I now have a not to see how shields work, since that's always a bit of an oddity in this sort of system. As written, this would seem to suggest that no armor would be a TERRIBLE idea, since it SEEMS like no armor would mean almost everything is severe. However, I'll be that in practice, the default thresholds are, like 5 and 10, modified by armor from there.

One reason that they can have so few hit points is that most of the action takes place in the similarly sized Stress bar, which seems ot be both a fuel for effects and a lesser damage sink which eventually rolls up to health if you run completely dry.

From there, the actual mechanics of rolling dice are straightforward. Pick a stat, check for bonuses, roll and add, pass or fail, you'll get a hope of the GM gets a fear. Roll is meet or beat, and advantage/disadvantge use the SotDL boon & bane model.

(That is to say, Adv and Disad, cancel out, from what remains, roll that many d6s, keep the best one, then add or subtract it as appropriate) I'm a LITTLE sad that adv and disadv use a different die size, because it passes up interesting synergy with the duality dice.

Right, "Duality dice" is the proper name for the hope/fear thing. Worth mentioning that.

It's interesting that there's a lot of emphasis on the nature of the result (hope/fear) reflecting in the narration, but it very explicitly never touches upon the actual result, presumably with the idea that those narrated things sort of vanish in the wash of the hope and fear points. There's a little bit of having your cake and eating it too with this guidance, but its forgivable. While this has the shape of a mixed success system (like blades/PBTA) it stops short of going all the way there, which is probably good, because mixed results are very demanding on the GM.

Rather than asking GMs to constantly come up with complications on the spot, it has the mixed results turn into currency which then can be used to (presumably) do cool stuff when they GM has an idea. It's perhaps not so "in the moment", but it's a lot easer to learn and run.

Ok, from here it starts getting into special cases and things like damage, and it's becoming less and less practical to read straight through, since most of it just doesn't make a lot of sense without some context. Gonna wrap for the night, just read ahead for a while, then come back once digested.

this may get really weird if I sat down and crunched the numbers

Aaaand, digested.

One real challenge of writing any RPG is that so many rules refer to other rules that you frequently find yourself talking about rules elements before you actually explain them. Daggerheart does not escape this trap. It's nigh-universal problem, so it's not a big deal, but it means that sometimes you just need to jump around a bit before things finally make sense. And they do.

It's mostly pretty good stuff, but there's some jank in there too, It's an interesting ride.

First, A few things I have a better understanding of now.

Succeeding with Fear does allow the GM to double dip. That is, she gets to collect a fear AND she can introduce trouble (especially in combat), and there's an implicit thread of treating a success with fear as a lesser success. I was ok with it being "Gain currency with the option of introducing a complication" because I get that GMs won't always have a complication in mind, so it doesn't break anything if you just take the currency and move one.

But there's a bit in the sample of play where the GM sets up a progress clock and a success with hope would mean advancing two steps but success with fear would mean succeeding only one, along with the other mechanical effects of succeeding with fear.

It's starting to feel like a pile on.

I'm fine with having a robust set of options for success with fear, but I'm less comfortable with it being a lesser success AND a complication generator AND a GM currency generator. I kind of want at least one OR in there. I suspect this is something that a GM will mitigate in practice, but I grumble at the necessity of it.

Another thing I went back and checked is whether or not difficulty targets are transparent, and the answer is "whenever the GM feels like it". Not super happy with that answer.

The reason I went back to check is because I was looking at any number of abilities which adjust die rolls after you have made the roll. They clarify that you can use them after the GM declares success or failure, and that's fine.

But so long as the target is unknown, you kind of guarantee exchanges like:

Again: GM practices can mitigate this, but you hate to see it made necessary.

Apologies for starting out with the negative stuff, but that's more or less how the order of operations shook out. Despite those things, there really were many cool parts which I'll get to!

Ok, so, I left off getting into group rolls. Nice, straightforward mechanic for that - lead character makes a roll, everyone else makes a reaction roll (had to read ahead on those) and adds +1 to the lead on a success or -1 on a failure. Totally workable.

The more dramatic version of this is "Tag Team rolls", which are one of the things you can spend hope on. Once per session, for 3 hope, you can initiate a tag team roll where all the participants roll and you can choose which result you use (With hope or fear gathered for everyone involved). To clarify, tag team is explicitly limited to 2 characters (boo!) but it's extra awesome in combat because if you both hit, you combine damage totals (Yay!)

Damage is interesting. As I noted previously, the total roll is compared to your personal track to determine if the damage is minor, major or severe, but there hadn't been much sense of how MUCH damage was likely to be rolled.

It turns out, it scales with level, kind of.

Ok, so, assume a sword does 1d8 damage. Cool. You also have a stat called "Proficiency" which starts at 1 and increases as you level. You roll a number of dice equal to that score and tally them up. So, if I have a proficiency of 3, and I hit with that sword, I'm doing 3d8. There are other bonuses and additions that can get thrown in, but the proficiency is the heart of it.

Proficiency, as it turns out, kind of requires explaining Tier to make sense of it. So, characters have 10 levels, but those 10 levels are broken into 4 Tiers. Tier 1 is level 1, 2 is 2-4, 3 is 5-7 and 4 and 8-10. You get certain advancement things when you increase level, and a different set of advancement things when you advance tiers.

One of the things that increases is proficiency. There are other ways to increase it as well, but as a general rule of thumb, proficiency will be at least Tier level. There's some curious scaling in this, but damage resistance also scales up. I haven't run the math, but I trust they line up.

Now, that's all pretty straightforward at core, but there are a number of interesting complexities, and one or two head scratchers. Notably, magical damage doesn't use proficiency, and instead uses your casting stat in a similar role.

Or rather, it sometimes does that? I honestly am a little confused in trying to read it. This is one of those areas where the right answer is "Just sit down and read a bunch of powers to internalize them, it will make things make more sense" but I am not smart enough to do that.

Anyway, one mathematically weirdness of this is that if a weapon does, say, 1d8+3, the 1d8 is multiplied by proficiency but the +3 isn't. I re-read that bit several times to make sure I was reading it right, because that struck me as really weird.

So, to give an example, a broadsword is 1 handed, does 1d8 damage, and gives you a +1 to attack. A longsword is two handed, give no bonus, but does 1d8+3. It maybe feels a bit balanced against the Longsword, but you can at least see the logic: 2 hands, hit harder.

But once you add in proficiency, the difference starts narrowing. 1d8+3 has a pretty good advantage over 1d8, but 3d8+3 has a smaller relative advantage over 3d8, all before you even start accounting for the +1 to attack, or the benefits of having a secondary weapon.

And the system definitely incentives having something in your of hand. if it's a weapon, it tends to increase your base damage, but there some with cool effects, including GET OVER HERE.

In practice, our broadsword person will probably have a dagger or shortsword in their off hand, which will add +2 do their damage, so now it's 1d8+2 and +1 to hit vs 1d8+3. I don't know if there's a deliberate tilt against two handed weapons, but it definitely feels that way.

I am, for illustration, using the Tier 1 versions of the weapons. As the tiers go up, the weapons improve. At tier 2, it's an Improved Longsword (d8+6) vs an Improved Broadsword (d8+3, +1 to hit), probably supplemented with +3 damage from an improved small dagger or shortsword.

The tier system for weapons is actually pretty neat. In addition to increasing the quality of weapons, it's also how weird and interesting weapons get introduced. All of which is to say it's a nice, streamlined way to handle loot boxes. There's a lot more going on though. Each weapon uses a particular stat, which might be Strength, Agility, Finesse, Presence (Rapiers & Cutlasses) or Instinct (Staff). But that's just NORMAL weapons.

If you're a spellcasting class (that is, any class that's not a guardian or warrior) you also have access to MAGIC weapons, which are generally cooler and add Knowledge into the pool of combat stats.

How much cooler?

If you're a fighter, and you want to throw a knife, it can reach about 10 feet and you've lost the knife. If you're A Finesse caster, you can throw a returning knife out to 30 feet, and it, y'know, returns.

I'm really torn here, because on one hand, there's genuinely a lot of REALLY cool and REALLY stylish stuff in here, especially among the magic weapons. But at the same time, I'm really starting to wonder if the game is just trying to tell me that fighters suck and that strength is a dump stat.

And, honestly, it's not bad if that's what the games opinion is. If you really want to play a magick-y chararacter for maximum fun, then that's a valid way to build a game. It's just something to be very explicit about communicating.

Anyway, since I jumped ahead to gear, it turns out that my impression that maybe armor wasn't as absolutely necessary as it seemed was entirely off base. You are screwed without armor.

At level 1 and are not wearing armor, you will take a minor hit on a 1, a major hit on a 2 and a severe hit on anything higher, which is basically everything. In contrast, in the absolute weakest armor possible, those thresholds become 6 and 12 (9 and 18 with Plate male).

Er, mail. I am clearly getting punchy.

Oh, also armor has a numerical rating, and you can use it that many times to reduce incoming damage by a step.

So, yeah. No armor == you die a horrible, squishy death.

Which means everyone is in armor. There's explicit guidance about how you can make the armor cosmetically different (So the wizard doesn't have plate mail, he has arcane runes or some such, they just WORK like plate mail) and that's fine, but it feels a little odd.

Curiously, there doesn't seem to be anything that would keep any character from grabbing plate mail. It's not expensive, and it has no stat requirements. Rather, it's just a tradeoff of downsides.

The lowest level of armor gives you a +1 to evasion (Which is better than NOT WEARING ARMOR). The next level (leather) has no extra mods. The next level (Chain) applies a -1 to evasion. The top level for tier 1, (Plate) applies -2 to evasion and -1 to agility.

So, it's just a question of how you want to balance the damage reduction vs the other modifiers. I feel like this may get really weird if I sat down and crunched the numbers, but I'm not feeling that ambitious.

Ok, it was a big skip ahead to equipment, but it was kind of necessary to put some of the other rules in context. And with that context, if we swing back to rolls, I realize I mentioned reaction rolls but never unpacked them.

They're not REALLY saving throws, but they're kind of saving throws. They're rolls called for to avoid things, and they're simplified a bit. You can't help others with reaction rolls (boo!) and there's no hope or fear element to it. Just roll and go.

Outside of damage, conditions are VERY simple. There are only 3: Hidden, Restrained (you can't move) and Vulnerable (Everyone has advantage against you).

I gotta admit, that is a pretty short list.

On one hand, I appreciate where they're coming from. D&D has a LOT of conditions, and it can get overwhelming to keep track of them, so they cut them back. The same thinking was applied to damage types for, I presume, similar reasons (It's all just physical or magical).

But on the other hand, I admit to wondering if they cut back too far. I dunno. I think I'll be keeping this in mind when I get to monsters and spell effects and such, because the real test will be how often they come up with one offs to get around the shortness of the list.

Clocks are included. They're called countdowns, but they are so much clocks that I'm just going to keep calling them that.

Movement is abstracted, and range is broken up into bands. There's a little more granularity in the near ranges than I'd expect, but otherwise it's what you'd expect. It gets a little bit weird with movement. Default movement lets you freely move within "Close" range (10-30 feet) and then act. You can forgo acting to move, but you need to make an agility roll to do so successfully, which I admit struck me as a little odd.

My knee jerk reaction was to buck at the idea that I might fail to move successfully. Like, if there are obstacles or the like? Sure. But rolling by default seems outright draconian. Like, so draconian as to seem out of place in what have been pretty friendly rules. I suspect that this is a function of the loosey goosey nature of turn taking in the system. Introducing a die roll keeps it from just being a free large move that rolls into another action. It's weird, but there's a logic to it. I think.

The death rules are awesome.

Ok, unfair to leave it at that. When you go to zero hit points, you get to choose: Blaze of glory, survival with a risk of long term consequences, or trust it to the dice, who will either put you back in the game or shuffle you off this mortal coils.

Those are fun options. Thumbs up.

Oof. Ok, that's enough for one night. Will pick up again on this very odd journey tomorrow

This is 100% where you get those bioware side conversations on your path to getting laid

Ok, few more rules tidbits before we get to a very pleasant surprise.

As the character sheet suggests, wealth is abstracted. 10 handfuls of gold makes a bag. 10 bags make a chest. If you really like being granular about things, 10 coins makes a handful. All very tidy.

Curiously, the bit I like best about it is that while it's gold by default, it could absolutely be silver or jade or salt or whatever else you want to use in your particular setting.

Downtime rules are a slightly misleading name for short and long rests. Time-wise, they seem to align to D&D. Short rest is ~ an hour, long rest is overnight. Their primary use seems to be restocking on expended currency (Health, armor, stress or hope).

You get two moves per downtime, and they are almost all recovery, with the long rest versions being more powerful. For example, in a short rest you can "Tend to Wounds" and recover 1d4 + tier HP. In a long rest, you can "Tend to all wounds" and recover all hit points. Armor and stress are similar.

(Aside: I don't think the game ever abbreviates Hit Points as HP - it always seems to spell out the word. Happened to notice this because I abbreviate it out of long habit, and now I'm curious about other abbreviations)

Two oddballs.

First, the "Prepare" action gets you hope, whether it's a long or short rest, and it seems largely framed as the "In case you have nothing else to do" move, especially on a short rest. The real trick to it is it's only one hope on your own, but two hope if you do it with someone.

I very much like the idea of this. As presented, this is 100% where you get those bioware side conversations on your path to getting laid. I do wish it had a little more scaffolding, though. Prompts, questions, something. As is, it feels at risk of getting perfunctory quickly.

Also, I'm not totally sure if the person you do it with (who also gets two hope) needs to also use one of their downtime actions on it. It would make sense, but it's just not clear on reading.

The other curiosity is that on a long rest downtime action you can work on a project, pretty much exactly like in Blades. This is a good addition, because it doesn't add a lot mechanically, but experience shows that this kind of move is TREMENDOUSLY flexible and fun.

Rests are also when certain powers recharge and you can swap out cards, and that's all good, but they save my absolute favorite part for last. On a short or long rest, the GM recovers fear. 1d4 on a short rest, 1d4 + number of PCs (which they do abbreviate) on a long one.

This delights me.

In the grand scheme of things, I don't think it's necessarily a LOT of fear, but just having some cost to the rest is something that 5e was sorely missing, and I very much like this fix.

There remain some odds and sods clarifications. Round fraction up. When there's a question of the timing of simultaneous events, the person acting decides on order with a few logical constraints. Defining the End of scene, in as much as anyone can write "C'mon. You know" for 200 words.

And then there's a section on Player Best Practices, which summarize as:

Business-language framin aside, I feel like it's a good idea, but I also feel like there's a bit of a difference between the front and back half. Embrace Danger and Spend Your Resources are very concrete guidance. The other two are well intentioned, but a bit more loosey goosey.

I'm sympathetic to how tricky it is, because the second two points are kind of tips of much larger icebergs which cannot be so easily be boiled down to "Don't finish the game with 99 ethers, dumbass". But they're clearly ideas that are important to the designers (and I agree), and they made the decision to include them imperfectly, and I can't fault that. But I do end up wondering how much help they offer to those who aren't already bought in.

Then on through leveling up and back to equipment, which I've talked about enough that the only other bit I want to add is that I have no idea how much any of these things are supposed to cost.

The combat wheelchair makes an appearance, and while I might technically raise an eyebrow at two full pages going to something specialized, my delight at the prospect that this might enrage some assholes by its presence more than makes up for any pedantry about page count.

It ends with a "Loot" section which is actually the Miscellaneous Magic Items section. It's two 60 item tables, one for stuff, one for consumables. The idea is that you roll between 1 and 5d12 based on the "Rarity" of the loot to see what you get. The items are fun, and a number are clearly recognizable with the serial numbers filed off *cough* Immovable Rod *cough*, and while there's a little oddness to the fact that this approach makes item 01 (Premium Bedroll) surprisingly rare, it's a neat little list.

Notably, the advice also seems VERY generous, at least at the lower levels. As described, you're going to more or less be tripping over 1d12 and 2d12 loot.

Possibly the most interesting item on the list is the inclusion of recipes, which allow you to create specific items with downtime actions. The recipes are cleverly written up so they have a single requirement, such as the bone of a creature or spendign a stress. They're not onerous, but they're enough to demand a little bit of substance to the crafting actions. Very tidy.

I have two minor concerns. First, I think the low end of this list will get played out fairly quickly. Not a huge concern, since I expect the homebrewers will enthusiastically fill the gap, but something to make note of.

Second, I appreciate the connection between rarity and the dice pool size on paper, I worry about it in practice, specifically because adding dice can raise the ceiling, but it doesn't raise the floor nearly as fast. Even with 5d12, getting anything above 50 on the list is going to be a stretch.

As a general rolling method, I have no objection to it. But when it's presented that 5d12 is some legendary loot, it is not going to feel great when I roll a 10. The distribution as described and the distribution as math seem at odds. (That said, and easy fix is to make it roll and keep, so the dice kept set the cap but the extra dice rolled push the results up to be more likely to be inline with the description).

The chapter ended with the promised pleasant surprise.

This is the single best example of play that I can recall. Hands down.

The commit 5 pages to it, which is huge, and they do all the things that make something like this valuable - go through a range of situations, explain the reasoning and application of rules, separate play from the explanation of play, and even do their own post mortem on it.

My hat is off.

Reading this filled in a lot of the gaps in my understanding (and inspired some curiosity about future things), and also revealed patterns and expectations. It was clear after reading it that marking armor to reduce damage is not just some afterthought, but a KEY currency use.

It refined my understanding of how the game envisions turn taking (though I still have questions) and had players who did not make me want to punch anyone. They very clearly decided that a good example of play was very important, and went all in on it, and it's a marvel to see. And with that, we round the corner into the chapter on running the game.

Chapter Three: Running an Adventure

"The designer liked it" is a totally valid explanation

After a reminder about Rule ZerXXXXXXXXXX The Golden Rule, we open up with GM Principles, GM Best Practices and Pitfalls to avoid.

The line between principles and best practices seems pretty fuzzy at times. Some of the practices are a little more actionable, but only a little. The end result is it feels like they couldn't narrow down the list of principles to something manageable, so they created another category to fit them in. This is not a terrible thing. The principles and practices are all good stuff. Even if I might quibble in the details, there is no item on these lists I would reject.

But I'm not sure they work.

Putting on my day job hat for a second, one of the ways I spot a project or product that is failing is that they invariably have very long lists of entirely admirable priorities, every one of them clearly valuable. They fail because it is harder, but more important, to know what NOT to do.

I'd probably be less skeptical if these had been deeper into the chapter. Framed as tips and tricks maybe. But since they're front and center, it comes across as a failure to commit. Because there are so many of these, I have no idea which are most important, or which to even remember. And, again, I'm sympathetic. These are all good, reasonable, valuable points, I have no opinion on which ones to remove because that is not my opinion to have. It is the designers job to make these hard decisions.

That said, I suspect that the more likely culprit is familiarity. You read enough PBTA games and blog posts and you start thinking of these things as normal, common sense, not even worth remarking on, and you don't notice how much they have sprawled. It's like asking a fish about water.

Now, despite my absolute joykiller stance on that, I will add that the last section absolutely saves the day. The pitfalls to avoid are a welcome addition to the introduction, pivoting off in a different direction and presenting a list of very grounded, very actionable things to look out for.

Where the principles and practices all felt like things I'd read before showing up again, the pitfalls felt fresh and useful. Fantastic addition.

After that, we're onto the actual mechanics of the thing, starting with a discussion of why the GM rolls a d20 while players roll 2d12. I don't really buy the stated reason (it's more swingy) but I also don't care too much, because "The designer liked it" is a totally valid explanation in my world

Interestingly, the GM can also roll critical successes. I was surprised that this surprised me. It's absolutely in line with common RPG logic, but I guess I was expecting a a little de-emphasis on the GMs rolls as a dramatic driver, leaving that to the players. It's not a bad choice. It mostly just means there's a threat that any enemy might do bursty damage, and that can be valuable for keeping players on their toes, and I can't fault that at all. I dunno. It just sat weird.

The guidance on adjudicating action rolls is interesting, especially because the first tool offered is to not make action rolls, and instead offer the players guaranteed success in return for specific consequences. Another surprise. Not that this a surprising practice, but I definitely was surprised to see it front and center. It suggests a bias towards consequences as a default, which is definitely interesting. It is with good reason that the long list of principles did not include "Say yes, or roll the dice"

The other guidance is more what I'd expect. Establish stakes. Clearly communicate consequences. Forgoing rolls when Experiences would seem to call for it. Good, practical stuff

And this is when we get into turn taking.

I have now read this section, read the example of play, read the earlier explanation of how turns and initiative works. I've read each one multiple times, trying to get my head around how this is supposed to work, and I have found only one conclusions.

It's vibes.

This is full on "I'm not even mad..." territory. I had thought that there had maybe been some subtle cadence to it. Maybe an expectation that the players controlled the cadence most of the time until specific mechanical triggers let the GM step in (and spend fear to keep stepping).

But no.

The time that the GM makes a move really seems to boil down to "When it would be cool to do so". I mean, there'a a certain amount of guidance. Certain mechanical events, like players succeeding with fear, or failing, or otherwise queuing it up, but those really seem to just be guidelines and reminders. Ultimately, the GM makes a move when she wants to.

I am genuinely thunderstruck by the audacity of it.

Because, yeah, on one hand, that's genuinely great. If the GM has a good sense of drama and timing, and really gets that the adversity they bring is to make things better for everyone, then this is Rock Lee dropping his weights. It enables amazing things. But on the other hand, holy crap is this working without a net.

It's abusable, sure, but I'm not even worried about deliberate abuse, since that's its own thing.

But I do worry a bit about the folks who haven't built the necessary muscles yet. Is the game going to help them get there? Or is this a case fo needing to be this tall to ride the ride? And to be clear, I really resonate with the undertone of this. This is a bold faced declaration that GM skills is a meaningful and important part of a game being good, backed up with very concrete expressions of that belief.

A part of me genuinely loves that. It is a part that has spent many years reading games that were written like you could not trust the GM with anything as dangerous as a rusty spoon. Games with a supreme confidence that their mechanics were what made play great. Watching this game come in and tableflip that is kind of a hell of a thing to see.

Anyway, here's the thing. Reading the example of play, it really seems like the GM holds off on action until Fear gives her an opportunity to take a single action before handing the baton back to the players. In fact, one of the uses of Fear is that it can be spent to allow the GM to keep acting

This seems like a very clean and tidy system. Since just a little under half the rolls will me made with fear, it kind of organically create a situation where the GM takes about as many turns as the players, with an option to turn the knob for effect. This is so elegant and well constructed that if it were the rule, it would be ENTIRELY satisfactory. It would be tremendously flexible for players, but not allow them to use that flexibility to run roughshod over things. It would absolutely be sufficient.

But this is the rule:

A block of text form the book, with the relevant line highlighted: "You an make a GM move whenever you want."

As I said: The sheer audacity of it!

Whew. After that, there's a certain risk that the rest of this chapter will be a let down, no matter how good it is, but I'll try to shake it off.

The next section is about choosing moves, and there are some interesting nuances to it. The first is that it makes it clear that GM moves include doing nice things for the characters. Giving rewards or opportunities are also GM moves. They also subtly slip in examples of how a GM should TALK to various results. Specifically, it implicitly lays out which ones might end in "Tell me how it happens" and which might end in "Here's what happens"

There's a nearby sidebar which tackles Yes And/Yes But/No And/No But, more explicitly, but it just has a lot less muscle than using examples to illustrate the practice. Good lesson in that.

There's about a third of a page dedicated to not undermining player success, and I appreciate the patience that went into doing something other than just writing DON'T in 288 point type.

There's a little bit of a mention of softer and harder moves, but I honestly am not sure what it's contributing except for echoing popular terminology. The section that follows shows a lot of example moves (which is great) of increasing severity.

The nuance of the examples undercuts the simplicity of the hard & soft model. Hard and soft moves are a perfectly functional tool when they have explicit meanings, but in the context of a wide range of results and result types, I'm not sure they're a useful construct.

Next section gets into the specifics of the Fear engine, and I'm mostly curious if there are uses that haven't been touched on already. We already know about using it to interrupt a player or make more moves, so what else is there?

(Before I get there, is there a contradiction between "Make a GM move when you feel like" and "You need to spend a Fear to interject your GM move"?

Yes, but also no.

On paper, it is absolutely a contradiction. I will make my GM moves whenever I damn well please! All fear the GM! But in practice? There is a very human difference between a move that feels like a natural consequence of events and a move which is a deliberate GM force. Spending fear for this seems less about the currency cost so much as what it communicates.

By spending fear to make the move, the GM is acknowledging that they are putting their thumb of the scale. Expending a resource, even an easily replaced resource, communicates that the GM sees value in this. An entire social negotiation and dance is wrapped up into the spend.

Or at least it is if you already KNOW all that. I'm a little less sure how you learn it.

Anyway, it turns out there are other uses for fear, and in retrospect they're not surprising. The GM can spend them to trigger the "Fear Features" of adversaries or environments, which totally makes sense. Apparently it can also be spent to invoke adversary experiences too, which also makes sense.

Interestingly, there's a half a page dedicated to how much fear the GM should spend on a scene. There's a table and everything, and I'm sure it'll show up on GM screens. That's sleight of hand though - the values on the table are incidental to the valuable idea that you should tune your fear spend.

There's some guidance on using fear to press the players hard, which is good, as well as the prospect of improvised fear moves, which kind of boil down to "whatever you need".

Vibes and currency, man. Vibes and currency.

Part Two

In a twist, Donoghue's write-up is too long for Bearblog as well. Part 2 is here.

#daggerheart