Rob Donoghue's Daggerheart Dissection, Part II

16 Jun, 2025

This is Part 2 of my blog-scription of Rob Donoghue's Bluesky write up of Daggerheart. You can find Part 1 and the explanation here.

Oh, god, I just turned the page and ran smack into "Setting Difficulties" and it was like 1992 had smacked me with a two by for. I mean, the rules are fine. From 5 (Very easy) to 30 (Nearly impossible), it's all very by the book. It was just such a hard shift in tone as to startle me.

Also, because it's vibes, success might ALSO have degrees of success, if you feel like like it. I admit, this is one of those things (like the GM revealing difficulties when she feels like it) that I don't particularly like to see.

I'm all for flexibility and interpretation, but I feel like they need to be balanced with a degree of clarity. The GM has a lot of authority already, and I'm good with that, but that authority shouldn't create situations where players feel they can't trust the game itself. This one weighs heavily on me due to my own experience and lessons. I spent years calling for rolls without even bothering to set difficulties because I'd just adjudicate based on how the roll went and how things felt.

And the thing is, it went fine. I'm decently good at it. But I was not pushing myself. Because I could not be surprised by the dice, I was never pushed to stretch myself by them, and that was to everyone's detriment.

And to be clear, I enjoy running diceless too, and if I want to run diceless? I should do that, not half ass it.

So if it seems like I'm maybe hyper-sensitized to some of the "When the GM feels like it" rules that don't seem like that big a deal, well, I probably am. I'll own that. Anyway, that's part of why some of these bits stick in my craw. And if it seems weird that I'm all "Hell yes GMs can make moves whenever they want, but also, who the hell is letting these GMs decide whether or not they reveal difficulties?" I can only assure you that there is no conflict between those two positions, but explaining why would be its own megathread

In shortest form: one of the things that best enables powerful, fruitful authority is a robust shared foundation. I want that fruitful authority, and I perceive some of the fiddly bits as compromising the foundation.

If that makes any kind of sense. If not, sorry.

ANYWAY: one of the weird thing about difficulty tables like the ones they use for example is that the lowest difficulty tends to be full of things that seem more of the "Why would you even roll for this?" variety. In most games, I would feel like this undermines the idea that you don't need to roll for everything, but in DH I am less sure, since the undertone seems to be "Oh no, you are going to fucking roll, unless you want to pay up front".

There's a bit of text to the contrary about only rolling when it matters, but things like these examples or the "you need to roll to move" rules in combat really seem to tell a different story, and the tiebreaker seems to be that rolling more means more currency, so it's what everyone wants to do.

There's also a bit on handing out advantage and disadvantage, and full props for them just straight up speaking to the elephant in the room. If the GM controls difficulty numbers AND advantage & disadvantage, why do you need both? Why not just adjust difficulty?

And the written explanation is much more clinical in clear than this summary, but at the same time, I feel like this summary clearly expresses the beating heart of the explanation:

BECAUSE IT'S COOLER

If I unpack it more clinically, I might restate it as such: because difficulties are potentially hidden anyway, there is no direct feedback to the player if they go up and down. In contrast, ADV & DISAD are experienced by the player, helping them feel the situation, so they improve engagement.

There's some stuff on adversary rolls, but if there are any surprises in there, I missed them. A little blurb on Hope features, and then we get to Countdowns, AKA clocks.

I get the necessity of the dance of "This is a totally different mechanic!" but past a certain point it starts being a little silly. There's no shame in using clocks, but there IS shame in writing 3 pages about them without drawing a single circle or checkbox or ANYTHING. The guidance they give is great. It's all well written and valuable and the absence of any visual hooks turns something exciting and awesome into an artificially dry exercise, and that kind of breaks my heart.

Ok, now comes gold, and we at least get some rough guidelines for how much things are supposed to cost. Even with the very abstracted wealth they offer by default, there is still a "but if THAT'S too complicated, you can just handwave it all" option provided, so I guess some people just hate money

There's some guidance on running NPCs which ends up actually being an explanation of a mechanic. Apparently NPCs are written with triggered effects to make them more useful in fights and such. I infer this is supposed to simplify things, but I'll need to see real examples.

There are a couple of optional rules at the end, which boil down to:

• Rolling for Fun
• Falling
• Drowning
• PVP

I found this hilarious, but explaining it would kind of ruin it.

Session Zero

The next bit is on session zero and safety tools, two things I'm very happy to see talked about. I am, however, starting to get foggy, so this is where I drop the pin for tonight in hopes of picking up again tomorrow.

The ritual of finding my way back to the last post in the thread as begun, and largely reminded me that writing this much about a book in a single thread is a singular act of hubris, but I am committed to learning nothing from my folly, and I soldier on.

A few random things that have popped up in the interim - I bought my copy at Games & Stuff in Glen Burnie, MD, and they're one of the partner stores that let you get a PDF along with your book, so I am now PDF-equipped, and it genuinely makes the whole process easier.

In a very nice touch, the official PDF includes several extra pages at the end, including the good character sheets, and print & play versions of the cards. I appreciate this, since it spares me hunting them down separately. Also, I suspect this will be an easier way to digest the cards.

I was also reminded of something I noticed in the sample of play but did not comment on at the time. The game's use of the word "token" is tremendously jarring to me. It seems to be used to represent tokens, yes, but also in odd seeming places to refer to numbers.

To cite something specific, here's a bit from the example:

"Quinn rolls the Duality Dice and adds 2 tokens to represent their Instinct of +2."

So it kind of means bonus and kind of means points and kind of something else. Plus its usual meaning.

I have no objection to specialized jargon, and I can kind of faintly see the basis for the desire to have a term for things which are counted. I ultimately am not sure what problem it solves, but I'm genuinely curious what it might be.

Ok, back on track. Safety tools gets two full pages, which is substantial. It lays out the idea of Safety tools, goes into the CATS (Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject) framework, which was new to me. We get brief bits on Lines & Veils and the X Card. but CATS is really the star of the show. Specific elements aside, I'm happy to see Safety tools get more than passing mention, so that's nice. The Lines & Veils bit kind of gets short shrift - to be a useful technique it needs a little more unpacking. The X-Card framing is a little more robust, so it stands up a little better.

I'm trying to decide what I think about the CATS framework. It's absolutely a set of useful conversations to have at the outset of a game, but their mostly more about getting everyone on the same page, with some secondary safety elements. It's all good guidance, but I admit I would not have described it as a safety tool if I had encountered it in the wild. But perhaps I'm just jaded - compared to nothing or, worse, antipathy towards safety tools, its a huge upgrade. Perhaps it's a better tool for a less jaded audience.

Oh, wait, hang on, I Do know CATS, I had just been thinking in the wrong context. One sec. Bah. This one's one me. It's not particularly framed as a safety tool, it's just part of the general session zero context, and I recognize it in that context. Was just thinking about it wrong.

And that's probably a good sign. The safety stuff is just threaded into the session zero material, rather than in a section labeled "SAFTEY HERE", which is such a common pattern that my brain inserted it where it wasn't.

Anyway, with my brain properly reframed, the session zero stuff is solid. Good emphasis on asking clarifying questions, as well as guidelines for a fully structured session zero breakdown, which is one of those things that looks weird to me but I expect is friendly to folks new to the idea.

Running Sessions

The very first advice we get in the advice on running a session is to think in beats.

That is pretty much a guarantee to get my vote.

Back in the Dresden Files days, I went on a tear of reading every book I could find on screenwriting with an eye on find tricks that translated into GMing, and one of them (Epstein's Crafty TV Writing, maybe?) introduced me to the idea of beats, and it has been a tremendous multi-tool ever since.

The trick with beats is that they are (rather like a scene) simultaneously intuitive to grasp but difficult to explain. It's very easy to just end up waving your hands and talking about the THING, because it's just so obvious!

So while they got my vote, they also got my curiosity. How well to they express this powerful, simple, frustrating idea?

Pretty well, if interestingly. They have adopted a fairly broad definition of the term - more story beats than scene beats - but they frame it well.

Critically, they include MANY good examples, which is kind of essential for an idea like this. It's easier to illustrate than explain.

So, it's a job well done but also, oddly, something of a wasted opportunity.

As noted earlier, one of the most complicated and nuanced parts of this game is the idea of turn taking, and when the GM can and should take action. It's going to be the trickiest and potentially rewarding elements of play, and it is exactly an area where smaller, action beats, can help.

The next section is on preparing for fights, and it's fine. Emphasizes all the right things, like enemy motives, dynamic environments, thinking about abilities and the purpose of a fight in the game. Nothing earth shaking, but they commit a full page to an example, so kudos there.

The one odd bit was that it mentions balancing encounters, but there's no actual guidance on that. Apparently that's in the Adversaries chapter, which makes sense, but feels like a bit of a tease.

What follows are several pages of advice on adjudicating things, ranging from rewards to death to downtime, to more complicated fight scenes. It's all good stuff, but none of it particularly jumped out at me or made me reconsider anything, so they kind of skimmed by.

That said, I was pulled out of my daze upon hitting the guidance for running a one shot. Once again, they have hit me in a space where I am soft and week, because they construct it with Mad Libs, and I am all about that. It's only one page, but what a great page!

The guidance for running a campaign makes a nod to the Campaign Frames, but is mostly generalized, so we'll see when we get to them. It's fun advice - the opening gambit involves focusing on the map as an artifact - printing it, writing on it, passing it around and capturing things on it.

I love this for several reasons. First, because maps are awesome of course, and second because it's a good focus for drawing out player contribution. But most of all, I appreciate the value of having everyone put their hands on the map and understanding it as a physical object.

Even if it's not intended, even if the GM doesn't even realize it, that physical connection is tremendously powerful. It makes the map real to the players in a way that an abstract understanding does not, and it quietly opens doors to engagement where there might have been disinterest.

Further guidance leans into really making sure that character backgrounds are a part of the discussion, and are first class citizens in the act of setting building. Again, I cannot overstate how much I align with this approach.

As we move onto planning adventures, the main unit of adventure is the story arc - ~3-5 sessions focused on a particular objective or theme. It's a perfectly functional model, and they frame it out as a 3 act structure (Collision, Complications and Climax), which is lovely alliteration.

Then onto some guidance on structuring long term play and interleaving arcs, including a table to illustrate the idea.

Honestly, I am really curious how this reads to fresh eyes. This is all stuff I like, but it's already stuff I largely already know.

Anyway, that catches up the chapter. I'm enthused to dive into Adversaries and Enemies section next, but it's anime night, and the boy is giving me Such A Look, so I guess the journey will continue tomorrow.

Oh, though one sidebar: Some interesting discussion about tokens. Apparently I missed the guidance in the game to literally "Roll" some number of tokens alongside your dice as a stand in for a using numbers. I am instinctively repulsed by this idea, so I'm trying to better grasp it.

I think there are two prongs to it.

First: If this is easier than doing math for someone, then more power to them. Brains are weird and varied. The fact that my brain sees this as chaos is because of my own brain stuff, not because it's true.

Second: A cynical voice in my mind has suggested that this makes for better video. Maybe not "rolling" tokens per se, but maybe sliding around decorative poker chips or the like. Something with a clear visual language that communicates the math without anyone needing to actually mention it.

So, between those two prongs, I have my head around it a little better, but it's still instinctively weird to me.

Adversaries

Ok, back on my bullshit. This next chapter unfolded a little bit differently because I read the Daggerheart Adversaries, and I really liked the adversaries chapter, but it took me a while to really nail down why I liked it.

So, the first and most obvious is that it takes a very structured approach to the construction of enemies, in a manner that reminds me of 4e D&D. This is high praise. I realize that 4e at large may be a contentious subject, but the encounter building rules were one piece that worked REALLY well.

The DH encounter building rules are based on a. "budget" of points that starts at 2 points per 3 PCs. The budget is then adjusted based on some guidelines, and then spent on opposition. A standard enemy is 2 points, less dangerous ones are 1 point, more dangerous ones cost more.

The default assumption is that enemies are at the same tier as the party, but one of the budget adjustments accounts for higher or lower tier enemies.

Ok, so I mentioned types of enemies, and that's another big part of the equation.

Enemies come in a number of type with descriptive names: Bruisers, Hordes, Leaders, Minions, Ranged, Skulks, Socials, Solos, Standards & Support. Each type fails clearly communicates its role in a fight, and also provides guidance for their mechanics.

For example, Hordes will make use of the horde rules (surprise), Bruisers tend to have a lot health and do a lot of damage, but don't tend to have a lot of mobility. Skulks have mobility, stealth and general troublemaking. The idea is very straightforward, and again, recognizable to 4e players.

The game has a ton of pre-made monsters, and viewed through that lens, the types are just a shorthand for tactical guidance, but they serve two other pretty concrete features. First, perhaps obviously, they provide scaffolding for creating your own monsters. Second, they impact the budget.

Horde, Range, Skulk & Standard are "normal" adversaries, costing 2 points each. Social, support and Minions are a point, leaders are 3, bruisers are 4 and solos are 5. So, useful to know.

Now, the real trick here is that each type is given enough information to make it meaningful. The type structure isn't complicated, and a lot of games would have been content conveying it in a single page, with maybe a reference table.

DH has a full page per type.

Not only does that give more space to dig into ideas and mechanics, it means that for each type we get to see a very thorough example of creating an enemy from scratch. Once again, the depth of examples is elevating the whole experience.

The actual monster stat blocks are decent. They seem to have opted for a roughly quarter page target size, with a sentence of color/description, A small core stat block, then 1-3 features, which might be actions, reactions or passives, and which tend to be the thing that makes the enemy interesting

It's a functional structure. The design guidance and examples provided both strongly emphasize the importance of these things being interesting and playable, so thumbs up on that. However, there's a lot of freeform stuff in here, and that's double edged.

On the positive side, the model is flexible enough that you can really put whatever rules you want in a particular encounter as part of the enemy block. But on the downside, that can end up overloading the mechanic, especially for repeatable elements.

This is where we see the flipside of the VERY short list of statuses in the core rules. It's not that the game doesn't have poison or petrification rules, but rather that they show up as one offs in each enemy who makes use of them.

There are some upsides to this. It simplifies lookup, certainly. It reduces the appearance of cognitive load by removing the "rule" for the status, but since it adds new rules on the fly, that seems like a wash.

It has downsides too. For one thing, it invites inconsistency and confusion as similar effects may end up playing out completely differently. Bearing in mind that these statuses are often the most contentious or broken parts of many games, that's playing with fire.

By isolating them off to pockets, it also makes it hard for there to be mechanical interaction with the rest of the system. Keywords can feel mechanistic, yes, but knowing that something is a disease enables the use of abilities that effect disease.

As with the limited number of damage types, this seems to be a deliberate design choice to reduce potential interactions in the name of simplicity. That's a reasonable goal, but I worry that they overshot by a little in the pursuit of simplicity.

The monsters themselves are pretty fun. Curiously, for such an art heavy book, this is a surprisingly text-dense chapter, as they really set about squeezing in as many stat blocks as they possibly could, only interjecting with smaller art pieces when illustration is really called for.

It's a deliberate decision, and one I agree with. I enjoy fuller art and lore for enemies, but there is simply a lot more value in packing in enough enemies that I don't feel like I don't have enough available to start running immediately.

Plus, of course, every enemy written is one more example to draw on when you make your own, and examples are king!

There's also some nice guidelines on improvising enemies, with a functional little table which more or less says Enemies of this type and tier should be about this tough, to about this much damage and so on. Very glad it's there, and I would have felt its absence very keenly.

Ok, so it's really easy to zoom in on the range of enemy features, but as I was thinking about the chapter, the bit I really zoomed in on was the core stat block.

The Core stat block has a few key things:

• Difficulty
• Damage Thresholds
• HP
• Stress
• Attack bonus, range & Damage
• Any relevant experiences

Right off the bat, difficulty is probably the most interesting.

It's pretty much the all purpose score to roll against when doing anything against the enemy. It's the target to hit with an attack, yes, but also to effect with a spell or trick with sleight of hand or the like. Once again, applying simplicity to a wide range of things.

The existence of expertises on enemies is designed to provide a little more nuance to the one-size-fits-all stat, since they can be added to rolls or difficulties at the price of some Fear. It's still a bit broad, but consistent with the game's tilt toward simplicity.

The idea of it did send me flipping through the monsters to see if there were any examples of negative experiences, so that perhaps it's easier to sneak past that huge cyclops than to hit him. No dice, but I'm now filing that away as a potential future mechanic.

Anyway, that aside, there's a lot you can tell about what's expected in a game from a stat block, especially compared to a player, and I went into this especially curious about how it compared to D&D.

One of the first questions to ask is "How many fights do you expect between rests?"

5e puts that number around 5. If Daggerheart comes out and says the expectation, then I either missed it or haven't found it yet, so I'll have to do some inference.

Anyway, the answer to that question also tells the reader how hard a fight is supposed to be. In 5e, fights are designed to feel dangerous, because numbers go down, but are actually designed in a way that there's much less risk to them than they appear.

One trick to this is D&D's highly granular hit points. The values are constantly changing, which is satisfying, but they're also all sufficiently arbitrary that you can get big swings, sometimes very big indeed. The floor and ceiling for damage are sometimes quite broad.

Structurally, Daggerheart really tightens up that spread. If you get hit in DH, barring some other effect, you're going to take 1, 2 or 3 HP of damage (out of a maximum of 6-12).

That raises the floor, since even the smallest hit is substantial, but it also lowers the ceiling. Even with the optional massive damage rules allowing the occasional 4, you are not going to be one-shotted from full health, even if the GM roles a million damage dice.

So, with that in mind, the question becomes "How closely matched are enemies to the PCs?". Or, put differently, what would it look like to build an encounter with enemies that are statted similar to the PCs.

Ideally, that would be a VERY dangerous encounter since it is, theoretically, a coin flip.

So you turn some knobs and adjust some dials to try to make sure the fight feels good and challenging, but so that the game does not come to an abrupt and unsatisfying end.

So, it is with that lens that I peer at what the stat blocks tell me.

I'm zeroing in on the "Standard" enemies, because - as the name suggests - they're pretty much baseline. Taking a look at a handful of Tier 1 Standards, that's 3-5 hit points, with a bias towards the high end. At the same Tier characters have 6 HP, so a little less tough.

Damage ranges from d6+1 to D8+1, so as with toughness, a little lower. Difficulty & attack rolls are a bit closer in. All in all, it looks like a single standard tier 1 opponent is maybe 80% of a Tier 1 PC. And for a given 4 person party, a default encounter is two of them.

So that's definitely lopsided, but not necessarily D&D level lopsided (which is good, because 5 fights before lunch has always been more theory than practice in my experience). One fight like that is just a bit of excitement. Three fights like that will probably start taking a toll.

So, I'm going with 3 for my magic number (for expected fights between rests) right now, since even a LITTLE bit of thought going into encounter creation is going too produce better synergies than an infinite number of guard gates. And, heck, I hope it's right. It's a pretty good number.

There are a few other interesting things about the numbers in the boxes, specifically that they're a bit asymmetrical due to the dice.

That is, increasing an enemies defense from 14 to 16 is a more significant jump than a player doing the same thing (since 2d12 pulls more to the middle).

Thankfully, the stat blocks seem to be pretty conservative in that regard. I have not yet run across any "Oh god, THE MATH" kind of targets or bonuses yet, and that's good.

One organizational challenge the model presents - monsters are organized alphabetically by tier, which is the most logical way to do it, but it does mean that if you're looking for a particular category (like standard) it can be slow going.

Environments

Ok, now one other notable thing is that environments also have stat blocks.

They're not presented as adversaries per se, but the information is similarly structured - an environmental hazard has a default difficulty and a list of effects, similar to enemy features. This is not a new idea, but once again, Daggerheart shines in the depth of its examples.

When I have seen other games do this, I have felt lucky to see 3-5 examples. Daggerheart has more than 25, ranging from the mundane to the truly dramatic, and each one is written up with care to make sure it's something interesting.

The secret sauce, which the examples provide, is that Daggerheart uses a much wider (and more interesting) definition of "environment". Sure, yes, it includes firestorms and such, but it also includes ongoing events (like a castle siege) or social evironments, like the imperial court.

As with enemies, environments have types: Explorations (that is, locations), Socials, Traversals (things which must be moved through) and Events. It's a great model, and I like the ways it pushes a GM to think.

I like it enough that I feel back poking at the one thing that bugged me, but here it is: Traversals may be the best idea in the set, but they're also undercooked. They focus on immediate challenges, like getting up a cliff, but I think the idea could be much more broadly applied.

Am I talking about travel rules? Yes, that is absolutely what I'm talking about.

So with all that in mind, I think the most intriguing thing about all this is the way it's expected to be used. Structurally, the enemy and environment rules are entirely robust in terms of constructing things, but that's only half the battle. Once again, we come back to the fact that so much of this game rests upon the nuances of turn taking, and the GM's paradoxical position of being ABLE to hijack the turn system, but encouraged to do so only in accordance with the cadence of the rules. .

Some of the adversaries, leaders in particular, explicitly have abilities to highjack and manipulate the activities during the GM's turn. Some of their abilities even revealed constraints I wasn't even aware of. For example, one ability allows the GM to spend fear to act twice during a turn on the same target. That's cool, but I hadn't realized the GM couldn't do that anyway.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the focus on the cadence of play means that adversaries (and environments) are not game pieces in the normal sense, rather they are all coiled springs, awaiting opportunity, and that requires different thinking on the GM's part. Effectively, the opposition in a scene is the menu that I am ordering off as a GM. They are the things for me to spend my opportunities (and fear) on, and the boring ones might never see use at all.

This is a very weird thought, from a D&D perspective.

In D&D, if I have 7 goblins, they're going to do 7 things (so long as they're alive) because each one is an agent (of sorts) and taking action is what I do.

In DH, I may have 7 goblins, but the number of things they do and - most critically - what those things are and who does them is going to be a function of how the spotlight moves around and whatever made the most sense in that moment.

This is a weird middle ground. PBTA players are likely comfortable with the idea of GM moves, but may not be as familiar with the sheer VOLUME of explicit, mechanically supported moves. Non-PBTA players may be thrown off by the abstraction of action.

But weird does not mean bad. It is, if nothing else, ambitious in choosing to walk a line between two things which many might have considered incompatible. It's something I'm really liking to see as I read.

The way I visualize it is that, as a GM, I am used to having chess pieces, and instead I've been given a sound board. Each new element adds a few extra buttons to the board, and as a GM, my job is deciding which buttons to hit and when.

To extend the metaphor, PBTA gives me a piano and hopes I can play. GM moves have more flexibility, but less guidance.

Is Daggerheart the sweet spot for this? I dunno. But I wager it's a sweet spot.

Ok, I have game in like 5 minutes, so that's it for today. Hopefully I get to dig into the campaign frames tomorrow.

OH GOD DAMMIT

So, the actual guidance on fight budget looks like this:

I was reading off the PDF in split panel, and just based on the peculiarities of my setup, that + read like a division symbol.

Short form, my math is embarrassingly wrong.

So, in fact, those 4 adventurers are expected to fight 7 of those (~ 80% of an adventurer) guards.

Which, in turn, suggests the number of fights between rests is rather closer to "1"

many thanks to @kiwikarl.bsky.social for pointing out my error. Gonna go die of shame now.

Having recovered from death, I find new reasons to regret my life choices. The decision to do this all as one thread seemed fun at the outset, but NEVER AGAIN. Because I got delayed in coming back to this, finding the end of the old thread was an absolute nightmare

But, we're back on Daggerheart!

Campaign Frames

the fact that it's popular, which always matters more than it should

Part of the delay on this is that I had been holding out on reading the Campaign Frames section as a treat to myself. I am a deep believer that this sort of material that exists at the intersection of lore and play is both tremendously important to the hobby and also historically underserved.

Which is a fancy way to say that adventure design is a critical part of game design - possibly the most critical - but has not had the level of attention and thought that the rules part of things have.

That's a big topic, and I'll avoid the massive sidetrack, and zoom back to the topic on hand. I am delighted and excited when people do interesting things with setting and adventure design, and I was very excited to see what Daggerheart brought to the table. Let's find out.

I'm embarrassed to say, I can't remember where I first encountered the term "Campaign Frame". Probably some PBTA game. It is, frankly, an awkward term, but I don't have a better one, so I can't really complain.

What I expect, when someone says "Campaign Frame", is what I might categorize as "The Good Parts Version" (with apologies to Mr. Goldman) of an RPG setting. That is, the parts you need to create characters and to drive adventure.

It could also be framed as the parts of a campaign which actually intersect with the table.

To illustrate, I might use the Realms as a setting, but I cannot reasonably expect players (or myself) to hold all of that in our heads, so I articulate the subset we'll be using.

That is, I might say "We're playing in Waterdeep and the north and we're focusing on the secret conflicts between the various factions of the area". This sets expectations, lets everyone know what things we do and don't need to know, and generally gets us on the same page.

This is something that tables have done informally, more or less forever. Good and bad practices and habits have evolved around it, and inevitably, someone went "Y'know, if we're only using this slice of things, why not just write that slice?"

And, well, that's not unreasonable.

And that is what I generally think of when someone publishes a frame. It's that slice of setting that drives play without the other material. It can take a lot of forms, and the exact practices around it can vary, but the intent is to convey the value of setting with a focus on play.

Importantly, this is not an assertion that this is THE WAY, and that settings are dead or any such nonsense. This is a technique, and it's well suited to some kinds of play, and less well suited to others. And more, it is far from uniform in execution.

That is to say, by its nature a campaign frame expresses the intent of its framer. It's an explicit communication of the things that they think are interesting and exciting. This is GREAT, but it translates into a huge diversity of what that means.

So even if Campaign Frames were the next step in design, the next question would be "what kind?" and then the knives would come out again. So, yes, the idea is modeled after something from actual play, but that's not the same thing as it being the discussion and interaction it reflects.

So, this leads to a small, personal goal as I get into Daggerheart's Campaign Frames.

I really, really hope I don't like some of them. This is not a wish that any of them be bad. Indeed, I am confident that they are all of high quality.

Rather it is a wish that some of them be not for me. Why? Because that points to them being OPINIONATED and INTERESTING. That they avoid the Zone of Mediocrity.

There are 6 campaign frames in the book, and the absolute worst outcome I could think of would be for them all to be OK.

I would be vastly more excited if I thought 5 of them were stinkers, but one of them REALLY grabbed me. Because that latter scenario? That is the one that drives play.

I also lay this up to call out that I'm looking at the frames through and analytical lens, but I'm also looking as a player and GM. I want to see how they do these (as a designer) but I also want to see if they excite me, as a GM or Player.

Ok, so with that in mind, let's start with the structure of these frames. They take a page at the outset to present the elements:

• Pitch
• Tone
• Background
• Characters
• Principles
• Distinctions
• Inciting Incident
• Special Mechanics
• Session 0 questions

The pitch is, predictably, the pitch to players - the paragraph or so blurb laying out the core idea of this frame. This is one of those things that seems so obvious to do that it's easy to not do, then realize why you needed to have done it.

As a GM, it's really easy to feel like you know the pitch, but there are few things as clarifying as boiling it down to a single paragraph, and revealing all of the things that you don't include. So, it's maybe an obvious first step, but it's the right one.

Tone is a collection of things like descriptive words (Adventurous!), themes (Ends justify the means!, Cultural conflict!) and media touchstones.

Media touchstones are great, so no fault there, but the tones and themes are a little more mushy.

The issue is that they end up being a mix of things that are fairly clear pointers (like, Post-apocalyptic, or Comedic) and ones that are harder to pin down (Adventurous, Mysterious) . This isn't a bad thing, but I think it suggests that these are more useful as starting points of conversation.

Which is to say, asking the table what "adventurous" means, or how interested they are in "Identity & Personhood" (and what that maybe looks like to them) is probably a better use of these than just sharing them and expecting a shared understanding.

The background is the actual setting writeup, in the classically recognizable form. Flipping through these, it seems like it ranges from 1-4 pages, and I admit I raise an eyebrow at the ones that go long. As with the pitch, this is a test of focus.

That then rolls into the characters part, which is pretty much a write up on how the communities, ancestries and classes fit into the setting. This is probably most interesting in terms of the communities, because they're framed very generically, and this makes them specific.

The principles tend to be a page split into player and GM principles. This is a good idea, but tricky to implement, since it's really easy for more general guidance (like, Make supporting characters multidimensional) to slip in. Even if totally valid, it wastes an opportunity to talk about THIS.

If feels a little weird to have the inciting incident just be one bullet on the list because, to my mind, this is the bit that needs to be in 64 point type, embosses, with optional sound effects. This is the thing that is going to make or break a frame.

Because up to this point, most frames are going to be interesting, but not necessarily playable. Even in condensed form, the question of "ok, what are we supposed to do with this" often has too few (or too many) answers. What's more, as a player, the inciting incident tends to provide the most important information on the guideposts around character creation. If the Inciting Incident is that we're getting hired by some guy, we need characters this guy would hire.

If the frame has multiple factions in play, the inciting incident answers questions like "should our party cover a range of factions, or should they all be on faction?"

In a hilarious (to me) turn, the Inciting Incident is the Frame on the Frame. That is, in the same way the Frame distills a setting into the playable parts, the inciting incident distills a frame down into the parts that really matter at the table.

As with most interesting things, this is double edged.

On one hand, it can mean that the inciting incident can absolutely deflate interest in a frame. The frame might have put forward some cool ideas and themes, but the ones the Inciting Incident chose just don't grab folks.

On the other hand, it's technically swappable. That is to say, just as a given setting might have multiple frames, a given frame could have multiple inciting incidents.

Now, I don't think Daggerheart actually gives any examples of this, which is a shame, but I still give them credit for setting up a structure that allows it.

This is also going to be an additional axis on the question of which frames I don't like. In continuing to echo the frames in a smaller scale, this invites the same expectation. There will probably be frames I like with Inciting Incidents I'm lukewarm on.

Oh, god damn me. Here I am talking about the Inciting Incident as the most important part of the frame, and I haven't actually said what is is.

It's the reason this is an adventure, not a travelogue. As described in Daggerheart, I might be more inclined to describe it as "The Hook", since a big part of answer the questions of who the characters are and why they're going to be doing stuff in this context, as well as some pointer to the kind of stuff they're going to be doing.

The reason to call it an inciting incident, rather than just a hook, is that ideally it includes a "tilt" - some event which has occurred which has changed or is threatening to change the dynamics presented. That dynamic element is, hopefully, what makes it more than a hook.

Oh, and one other thing to be clear about: Daggerheart does not provide any guidance on writing any of these elements. What I'm unpacking here is my take on them, both in general, and based on the examples provided in the presented frames. So, no, there's not a lot of guidance on creating frames in the book, but (as with much of Daggerheart) there are fantastic examples provided which serve in much the same manner.

Ok, next we get into special mechanics, and while I think inciting incident is the most important element, this is probably the most interesting, if only structurally. This is, effectively, a safe space for homebrew.

This section can potentially be quite short. For a fairly by the book game, it might not even have anything. However, this section can get quite long as well, allowing games to introduce entirely new mechanical subsystems or other hacks.

Obviously, homebrew and hacks are nothing new, but what delights me most about this is the particular FRAMING of it, because it communicates a few key principles, at least to me.

1. Homebrewing is welcome
2. Rules are tied to setting
3. Hacks can be shared without conflict

Inviting homebrewing is just good sense, so right on with that. But framing them so that any new rules are explicitly tied to a setting does two things. First, it implicitly limits new rules to things that are USEFUL to the setting rather than just hacks because one felt like hacking. Second, it makes them modular. And that's what rolls into the third point, which is the real gold: by providing context, there is not conflict between these rules.

This is huge.

To unpack this a bit, I want to contrast this with Fate. If someone comes up with rules for, say, giant robots in Fate. that's great. They can share those, people can contribute. all is good. But if someone else comes up with DIFFERENT giant robot rules, there is confusion and maybe conflict.

Because these robot rules are attached to the core body of fate rules, there's a sense (even if it's not a reality) that there maybe should only be one set of rules for handling giant robots. What's more, it becomes confusing to refer to giant robot rules, because which are you talking about?

The organic solution to this confusion has been to refer to the source of the rules in order to distinguish them, and that sort of works, but it's awkward. Daggerheart end runs ALL of that by explicitly saying these rules exist in the context of a frame.

That offers several benefits.

First, there is no sense of there needing to be a "canonical" set of rules for any one thing. If one frame handles giant robots one way, and another frame handles them another way, there is no discussion of which is the "Real" way - they are both right for that frame.

Second, it is much easier to talk about these rules because, in fact, there is not much need to reference the rules when, instead, you can reference the frame.

Third - while the frame provides structure and context for the rules, it does not actually put limitations on them. When you make your frame, you can absolutely use the robot rules from another frame (assuming they're good with the rights, more on that in a second).

And, hell, if something is particularly awesome in a given frame, then maybe it just might get added onto the core rules.

But that leads to the fourth benefit - there's much less NEED to add to the core rules.

It's pretty obvious that the Daggerheart rules are expandable. The prospects of adding or recombining domains alone are huge and obvious, to say nothing of the rest. In most games there would be a pressure to add all the "missing" elements to the core, but frames reduce that. They still can expand the core, but the frames act as a safety valve, because for any new class or rule or whatever, you can ask "Would this be better suited to a frame?".

So it it's not obvious, I LOVE this. I am a big proponent of creating structures that support not just homebrewing, but the distribution and sharing of homebrewing, and I feel like this is a big step forward.

To put on a different nerd hat, this feels like good software.

In software, you often have giant programs that get called things like 'code monoliths' or 'monorepos'. The program might be great, and it might be genuinely open source, but the size and complexity of it introduces all sort of problems and the potential for unexpected results from small changes.

It also means that if you want to make a version which is just a LITTLE different, you often need to copy the whole thing, and there's no useful way for your version to work with the old version, so now they need to be updated separately, and it's all a big pain.

So, the more modern practice is to break that big program down into a lot of little programs, with names like 'modules' or 'libraries', and then build the big function by connecting those smaller things.

Even if there's a largish core program, you can customize its behavior with the specific modules you choose to load. If you want it to do something new, rather than creating a whole new version, you create a module that just does the thing you want.

That's what this reminds me of.

There are a lot of reasons why we ended up with SRDs as a standard for open games, and I'll avoid that sidetrack for now, but they tend to have a lot in common with those code monoliths. They're big, and kind of awkward to change and update.

In this model, frames function like modules in code. You can have a reasonable stripped down core (the main daggerheart rules) and then customize it based on which frame (or frames) you "load". Managing individual frames is a challenge, sure, but not an overwhelming one.

Prior to this point, I had been curious about how open Daggerheart is. I know there's an SRD, and I have conversationally heard it described as open, but I take all such things with a grain of salt until I have dug into it myself.

But now? I HUNGER to find out.

Because this model I'm putting forward? It is both totally hypothetical, but also absolutely obvious as a consequence of this sort of structure, and I really need to know if Daggerheart really supports it, or if I need to steal the idea and use it somewhere that can benefit from it.

I cannot overstate the potential value of this. We have YEARS of conversations about how to manage open content and the challenges to making it work more like the good parts of open software. It feels like they've cracked the nut and I am entirely reasonable in my VAST EXCITEMENT.

And to be clear, as much as I'm giving them credit here, it's not like these ideas existed in a vacuum. Frames are not new. Even putting rules in frames is not new. This is one of those cases where it's not the ingredients, but rather how they're prepared and presented which changes things.

There are a lot more ingredients than just the frame. They also include the fact that this is a certain sort of adventure game with the kinds of powers and widgets that people like to hack. They include the fact that it's popular, which always matters more than it should. And, of course, the biggest ingredient will be the game's engagement with open-ness, which is the bit I look forward to finding out.

I mention this because, as I've said, a lot of people have been wrestling with this for a long time, and someone else's success is always a little double edged.

On one hand, you're excited for more open content and engagement, but on the other, there will always be a voice asking why this game did it when other efforts failed.

And that's rough. Not gonna lie.

But on the flipside, I'm going to point out that DH hasn't actually done what I'm talking about yet. I am as giddy and excited as I am because I can see the possibility, and that will hopefully give some context on how important I feel it is that there be a model, whoever does it.

I am absolutely proud of the things we've done with Fate to enable open gaming, but I am also very cognizant that for all those efforts, we never got it over the top of the mountain.

I think that DH might do it, and I am beyond jazzed.

Ok, I was trying to avoid long sidebars, but that one was inescapable, so let's pull back to the content. The final part of this are session zero questions, and there's a real risk that they'll get short shrift, considering the two sections they follow.

Still, it's worth pausing and thinking about these, because they're an opportunity to take the intentions that were behind the tone section and turn them into something a little more actionable and engaging. They're also a kind of critical point for implicit setting building.

Ok, so those are the sections that make up the frame, but to muddle matters a little, there are also steps in how you use it. Mostly, this is walking through the frame from the pitch and into session zero, but there are some curious bits here.

First, the setup assumes the frame has already been chosen. That's maybe a fair assumption, but it skips over the whole question of how the frame is chosen, and that feels like a missed opportunity. As presented, it feels like frame selection is a GM Fiat sort of decision, which seems off.

Second, the process explicitly calls out the "Build the map" step, where the map is physically passed around marked up and discussed. I mentioned earlier that I LOVE this, and I'm very glad to see it reinforced.

However, it does raise the question of why the map isn't part of the frame.

The example frames have maps - very nice maps - but they're in the appendix, not in the frame itself. That's a weird choice. It was probably for organizational reasons - they're easier to find or copy in the back, maybe - but I dislike it. It runs counter to the self-contained nature of frames. It's a small thing, and I kind of hope and expect that as people create their own frames, they'll adjust the model to include maps (though where they go in the frame will likely be random, since there's no model to follow). But just because it's easily fixed doesn't mean it's not a problem. I may be giving this more weight than it deserves, but my reasoning is simple: DH has been so incredibly on point with the value of its examples throughout the book that it feels like a bigger misstep when it doesn't land.

Still, not huge. It just rankles.

There is a note, before the campaign frames start, calling out that the tonal differences between these are going to be huge, since they have a wide variety of writers and they deliberately embraced their differences in tone and style.

This is good.

Oh, I should also add that the frames have a "Complexity Rating", scored from 1-5, which kind of does double duty. Generally, it measure how complex the frame is to run (whatever that means) and that explicitly includes how many new rules elements it introduces. I like the intent of this, but I wish it had been two scores, or had been called something different, because GMing complexity and mechanical complexity do not always proceed in lockstep. It's a useful rating at 1, but above that, it just raises questions.

The Witherwild

Anyway, I mention that because the first frame, The Witherwild, is complexity 1. Between that and its positioning, this feels like it's supposed to be the default "learn the game" option, which is a very tricky position to be in.

Personally, I will be a harsher judge if I think something is supposed to be "introductory", because if that is the case, I expect a little more support than I might otherwise. That puts Witherwild in a tough position, since I'm not sure where on the curve to grade it.

As the first frame, it's also setting some of my expectations. It's 8 pages long, which is a nice, absorbable size, and without additional context, I'm going to assume that's "normal", which is an issue as some of the later ones are much longer.

Between all of these things, The Witherwild (TWW) is in a tough position, and it struggles with that. The core setup is good, and can probably be expressed in a post - I'll try in a moment - and some of the choices are introductory, but others aren't, so it jars a little.

Core idea is that the city folks have come to the magic forest and crippled its biggest god to turn on perpetual spring harvest, because they desperately need to harvest a rare flower, but in doing so, growth has become wild and dangerous, and the locals are not having a good time of it.

This is threaded with great elements, from the many gods of the forest, to the nature of the city folks and their fraught history with religion. It sets things up so the city folk's motives are entirely understandable, so there's no clean "evil empire" narrative.

In reading it, my biggest problem is that it was all interesting stuff, but I wasn't clear what the action was. There are a lot of games this could be, but which is it?

It was a great example of the importance (and risks) of the Inciting Incident.

So, the god that got crippled used to oversee cycles or growth and decay. It had one eye for each, and what the city folk did was take out the decay one, so everything is in growth mode, all the time.

So, as I read, one potential hook was "Ok, can we take out the other eye?" I mention this because part of the inciting incident is that someone else had the same idea, and you are all hired by the spymaster of the city folks to stop them, because these actions lead to (bad) unintended consequences.

This is where that double-edged thing comes in. As an introductory frame, having the driver being "One a mission for some guy" is fine. It's simple and gets to play.

As a non-introductory frame, it narrows options drastically without an obvious payoff.

It also illustrates something to be careful about with the frame vs the Inciting Incident. The frame conveys the problems and tensions in play. In this case, the two bigs problems are the runaway growth, and the divine-plague which has driven the city folk to their extremes.

The Inciting Incident will usually also have a problem, and you want that problem to feed into one or more of the Frame's problems, ideally in a fairly direct fashion. In this case, the Inciting Incident problem is kind of adjacent to the real problems, in that if the players succeed, nothing will have changed.

This is not to say that there's no way to turn this Inciting Incident into a fun game, but it would require a bit of misdirect and pivot, where the PCs start out trying to stop the minor villain, and in the arc of success, get pulled into other plots that go to the real problems.

But in the absence of any such guidance within the frame, an inexperience GM is going to be left hanging, and again, how much of a problem that is depends on how introductory you expect this one to be.

There are similar tradeoffs throughout. For example, I appreciate that it's very deliberately set up as a "no bad guys" scenario, with an emphasis on non-violent options, but the challenge with scenarios like that they still demand opportunities for action, which benefit from guidance.

So I'm left in a weird spot with this one. I like its content, but I think it suffers from its structure. With a little more room to breathe and a little more space to convey what action should look like, it could really sung, but it falls short of its promise.

This trend is going to get only more pronounced with the next one.

Five Banners Burning

Five Banners Burning (5BB) is about intrigue and politics, touching on Song of Ice and Fire, Babylon 5 and many other awesome things.

This is absolutely my jam, so I dive in with enthusiasm.

I did not realize it at first, but there's a bit of a warning sign in this being flagged as complexity 2. It's an accurate measure of extra mechanics - there are some rules for tracking factions but not much more than that - but it's absolutely off base for this type of game.

Practically speaking, there are two ways to run a Game of Thrones kind of highly political game.

1. Run a totally normal game that just happens to have those politics going on as background

2. Actually do it.

#2 is hard and complicated. And, God help them, 5BB tries to set up #2, something that I would consider very nearly a doomed cause with an 8 page budget.

I cannot say they pull it off, but it's a hell of a try.

The actual setting itself is fairly straightforward. 5 nations with a shared history, old grudges and clearly expressed themes (The new republic, the pirates, the old monarchy, the theocracy and the techno-wizards) who are recently out of war and have existing tensions and relationships. A shallow read might discount this as too generic, but that overlooks that it's job is to make things quickly understandable to allow reader/player engagement, and in that, it's a masterclass. It is a fast, effective framing.

The real muscle of this section is in the principles, which lay bare that the core engine of play is using loyalties and allegiances to push hard choices, and to tie the small actions of the party into the larger actions.

This is all good, right stuff.

But the challenge here is that the inciting incident is going to make or break this. If the game is about allegiances, what allegiances do the players have, and what conflicts to those create? How are their actions connected to the ebbs and flows of these things? Where do these things happen? And with all that build up, the actual inciting incident is...fine.

Someone in faction A was going to marry someone in Faction B, but now they've vanished, and you need to find out what's up while dealing with agents of other factions.

As I said, fine.

As presented, it ends up feeling like the guidance is for model 2, but then the actual kickoff is more for #1. The factions and politics all provide color for these things, but they're not pressing down on the PCs. Now, that said, it's probably the right choice in terms of design. It's trading off complexity in favor of playability, and that decision is one we see throughout Daggerheart.

But, man, that inciting incident COULD have been "This is Babylon 5", and it's hard to discount that.

Beast Feast

So, the next one is "Beast Feast", and I tip my hat to what they were looking to do. In the vein of "Delicious in Dungeon" and similar fare, this is all about delving into a giant dungeon full of weird monsters, and cooking and eating them.

It is deliberately silly and quirky, and that's kind of delightful in its own right. It has dedicated equipment lists, so you can legitimately arm your heroes with frying pans and the like, and a whole system for ingredients and recipes.

This knows what it is, and is all in on it.

But most importantly, it also knows what to do with it. One challenge of a kind of gimmicky frame (and while I say it with love, this is absolutely gimmicky) is the question of how play will work once the gimmick loses its novelty.

The frame speaks directly to this in the principles.

As with media of this type, the gimmick provides an opportunity for quirky, character driven stories. Because the engine of play is so straightforward, there is space to get cozy and weird, and that's absolutely necessary for something like this to stick, so I'm glad the guidance says as much.

Interestingly, the actual inciting incident to this one is quite minimal. It's literally just a reason for the PCs to start PCing, and takes up maybe less than a quarter page.

You'd think this would bother me, given previous remarks, but I think it's great.

It's an illustration of the importance of scale in a frame. This frame is super focused, so much so that there's not much question about what the game is going to be. In that case, most of the heavy lifting for the Inciting Incident has already been done.

Age of Umbra

Next up is The Age of Umbra, which is what happens when someone decides to take the "Points of Light" concept, mixes is in with the FromSoftware library (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, etc.), and shakes vigorously.

I hope that sounds delicious, because it is.

The setting is a century into divine punishment which casts everything into shadow, raises people as undead, and generally creates a haunted world where people cling to small islands of light, and you're the protectors of one such islands.

It's a good hook, but one with challenges.

Doomed/deadly settings tend to be VERY evocative, and since they're darkity-dark-dark, we don't tend to describe them as "Gimmicky", (since that seems tonally wrong) but, structurally, it is a gimmick, so the challenge is how to sustain play. Put differently, these are the kinds of settings that I have historically found that people are most excited to created, but which tend to peter out in actual play.

So, what does Umbra do about this?

The answer's mixed. Leaning into the Dark Souls influence puts an element of exploration into play which can make for a richer experience. The principle emphasize communities ties and community building, which is a good direction, but a little sparse.

Sadly, the inciting incident is a dud. By "dud" I mean it doesn't provide any useful insight or guidance into what play should be like. It is a half page of text that boils down to "A monster attacked town and stole people! You can hear them screaming for help!"

The Inciting Incident literally includes the phrase "The party must investigate the source of these cries for help and attempt to recover Okros’s lost hunters." with no framing for whys or wherefores. It's kind of ham fisted and unsatisfying.

It feels, as you read, like this frame really wants to be a setting. There's lots of details and color, and it's all good, but it's so broad in its scope that it feels like it would benefit from a frame to focus it down.

And to be clear, despite my grumbling, it's not a bad frame. It just promises more than it delivers, which is a risk with the format.

For my own two bits, the most interesting thread that pops up throughout this is about community and connection. If the Inciting Event had set the party up as mail carriers? This Frame could have been pure gold.

Motherboard

The next one is tremendously ambitious. Motherboard cites a number of influences, but reading it more or less screams "Horizon Zero Dawn", which is to say, far-post apocalyptic sci ifi where the apocalypse is forgotten, and the remnants of weird tech are just a fact of life.

As a zero magic setting, this unsurprisingly calls for a lot of shifts from the core rules. There are a few hard rules (like, no Clanks) but moistly it's guidance for re-skinning effect.
For example, and spellcasting needs to be reframed as using ancient technology.

Druids are the real winners here, because shapeshifting is reskinned into a mechanize beast-suit forming around them, and I won't pretend that isn't cool as hell.

So, if nothing else, this provides a really interesting example of a cosmetic frame. Setting aside specific names and places, there's a streak of "Just like normal, but with tech!" to this.

On one hand, that's amazing. If you're ready to go, but you want this look and feel, you're set. But the downside is that, once the cosmetics have been swapped, you then face the question of what to do.

Which is not a criticism of this - we'll get into that in a moment - but more a general consideration for a frame that offers cosmetic changes without providing a frame.

(That said, this is an interesting case for applying multiple frames to multiple purposes. If the Motherboard frame was presented purely as cosmetics, I could totally run a game with it overlaid on another frame.)

Now, that said, Motherboard comes dangerously close to being purely cosmetic (albeit very cool cosmetics). The Inciting incident is a straight dungeon mission, where "Dungeon" is "Old factory" and "monsters" are "Remants", and many of the mechanics are just further reframing.

For example, there are neat rules for "Ikonis", which is a specialized personal weapon that evolves and upgrades, instead of the usual model of acquiring and replacing weapons.

It's cool. It's fun. But it doesn't help the campaign.

Thankfully, the secret sauce is towards the end of the rules section, which reveals some fun rules for salvage, crafting and trading, with what is more or less a whole scrap based economy. As a driver of play, it's a little thin, but it's something.

All in all, it's an AMAZING frame, but one that makes me feel like I need a second frame for the actual campaign.

That said, there's a bit of weirdness here. At the end, we spend 4 pages talking through how to write in the glyph language of the setting, and it's all perfectly nice, fun stuff, but also, what the heck is it doing there?

4 pages is a LOT, especially in terms of campaign frames, and this is 4 pages going to content that is definitely "setting", not "Frame".

It's not that the content is bad. I just have no idea why it's included, especially compared to giving an extra page to some of the shorter frames. It would have been great supplemental material, but as is, it is so genuinely boggling that I feel like there must be a story there.

Colossus of the Drylands

Ok, last one is Colossus of the Drylands, and I would describe its elevator pitch as "What if Shadow of the Colossus were a western?" and that is a mighty pitch.

The description suffers from being very game-setting-y, with a little too much time spent explaining ancient powers and what lead to things and too little on where things have come to, but it's possible to extract the gist of it.

In the settings, when the old gods got beat, they got beuried in the earth, and their power leaked out as crystals, which get mined and used for, y'know, stuff. Because crystals.

The drylands are the American west, and ~40 years back, there was a huge boom of crystals, so now there are trains and such, except the god those came from was THE WORST GOD, and he has macguffins in the desert, from which he spawns collosoi in his bid to return and do bad.

This is a great setup. The Collosoi have motivations (they want to return the power of the macguffins to their boss, but can't move them) and are an obvious threat, but also one which can (and are) ignored for profit.

With all that, it's almost disappointing that the Inciting Incident is literally a "Help Wanted" sign, but ok.

Because the game does balance that out with a clear structure, that play is divided into "hunts" and "interludes", where a hunt is spent taking down a collosus, and an interlude is downtime and everything else.

Interestingly, while we get stats for some colossi, the expectation is that they will generally be created by the GM, and the guidance and tools for doing to seem pretty fun.

Mechanically, the Colossi are very reminiscent of the enemies in Iron Edda, where they are so large that they are effectively represented as maps, with each limb (or whatever) being represented as its own zone of the map.

I do note that this one has a complexity of 4, and I admit it makes me slightly afraid of what they imagine a 5 would look like.

And damn, that's the end. We're back to the Appendix, which I talked about before.

Ok, gonna bookmark this. There will be one last burst summarizing impressions and thoughts, but the best summary is that I'm enthused to run this. But, for now, I need a break.

In Conclusion

Daggerheart DGAF

Whew. Ok, so, that was a bit of a journey. Let's see where we ended up.

It's worth reiterating at this point that I do not know CR from a hole in the ground, so the idea that this game came did not spark my interest, and if anything made me more skeptical.

I would have gotten around to it eventually, in a largely academic manner. Just a game to learn enough about to understand, strip for parts, and move on. My expectations were very low.

But then cool, smart people started sounding excited.

Even this was not enough to pierce my cold, dark heart. After all, many cool, smart people who I love also have opinions that I do not share. Plus, it was hard to distinguish what was enthusiasm for CR from Enthusiasm for sticking it to the man (WOTC) from enthusiasm for the actual game.

But, eventually, you wore me down. Full props, the final tipping point was @filamena.bsky.social's enthusiasm. She has great taste, yes, but the thing that's more relevant is the kind and quality of games that she and Liv put out.

Mena sets a high bar. I was convinced.

So, thank you for that. Mena and everyone else. You were right and I, in my tired and jaded take, was very wrong. This game deserved the attention, and I hope that a million post thread puts some wood behind that assertion.

Does this mean "BEST GAME EVAR!"? or "EVERYONE SHOULD BUY THIS?"

God no.

I mean, I'm really happy with it, and my overall take is positive, but it's also complicated. No game is the game for everyone, but I think this is the game for a lot of people. Or could be.

As I was reading this, our recently concluded campaign of Shadow of the Demon Lord was on my mind, and there were a few resonances. SOTDL is a particular sort of game that I refer to as a "D&D Off Ramp". It's a game that is built on a foundation of D&D knowledge, but is not D&D. There are more than a few games of this type, but they can be hard to distinguish from more classic D&D knock offs or derivatives. After all, a huge number of RPGs in history have ultimately been rooted in "D&D, but better!" as their core motivation.

My criteria for the off ramps is a little fuzzy, but at it's heart it boils down a combination of things.

1. A genuinely interesting vision of play that is knowingly influenced by D&D, but does not seek to mimic it.
2. Interesting design choices that emphasize and support focused parts of play
3. A certain assumption of knowledge of D&D as a shared language
4. A willingness to experiment with a wider range of ideas, but still tie them back to something strongly mechanically structured

Given time, I could refine this list, but it'll do for now.

So, for example, SOTDL falls in this category, with its particular emphasis being on condensing campaign play to a focused window, and bringing in a lot of WHFRP vibe. 13th Age shortens the zero to hero arc and introduces a lot of GREAT mechanics while feeling like D&D.

There are several others, take your pick. Some are great, some are maybe not, but it's a really interesting category for two reasons. From a design perspective, it's fascinating to see really good design applied with a mindful understanding of the many legacies of D&D.

(Structurally, one could make a very good case that 4e and 5e are, functionally, D&D off ramps for the editions before them, albeit ones that had the marketing muscle of WOTC behind them)

Commercially it's also interesting because, not to put too fine a point on it, the D&D audience is the largest by so much that it's pretty good business to try to grab a slice of it by saying "If you like this in D&D, but are dissatisfied, this game may be for you!"

And, by extension, it's also a good test of what people really want. In the same way that every startup's biggest competition is Excel, every would-be D&D competitor's biggest competitor is "Or we could just play D&D a little differently". That sets the bar higher than many would like.

So, the other thing you will often see in D&D off ramps (and in other games, so it's less of a distinguishing feature) are designs that clearly communicate the designer's frustrations with D&D.

I don't mean in terms of big, sweeping things, but rather, in the small corners of the rules. You can sometimes tell that a designer just hates the way D&D handles elves or potions or stealth rules or something like that because some part of their game is so clearly a SOLUTION.

Anyway, all this is on my mind as I'm reading Daggerheart, and it definitely is throwing off all the flags for being an off ramp. D&D is still in there as a short hand. Many of the rules are clearly streamlining elements of D&D. There is absolutely a response to D&D between these pages.

But!

Something felt weird.

One thing you'll also see in off ramps is a degree of love letter. Hell, some of the folks who MAKE the off ramps are the folks who made the original games. And the thing to note is that they are mostly love letters to third edition D&D.

(Except D&D 5e, which is a love letter to D&D 2e)

It makes sense in context that most of the Off-ramps are rooted in a love of 3e, since their heyday was during 4e's rollout. 4e was contentious enough to crack the WOTC monolith, so people saw opportunity to seize on that.

Which meant there was a lot of value in some stripe of "The D&D you remember, but better!", either conceptually (the off ramps) or - at least in intent - mechanically (Pathfinder).

I mention all this because it's been a long time since that heyday.

And while Daggerheart resonates with the ideas of the off ramps, it does not quite feel the same, and it took me several rounds before I put my finger on it. I have no concrete evidence to back this up, and may be completely wrong, but I think this is a love letter too. Just not to 3e.

On some gut level, it feels like a a part of this is a love letter to fourth edition.

Which is a weird thing to say. People have a lot of impressions of 4e, and it would not be unreasonable for someone to look at my like I'm nuts because they're SO DIFFERENT.

And...yeah, that's true. From a certain perspective. 4e was over-complicated and heavy in many ways, with so many things to keep track of that it got in its own way. If software support had materialized, it might have all been different, but without it, 4e was just too much.

And that's the total opposite of Daggerheart, isn't it? DH is free-wheeling, lightweight, full of color and interpretation, not pages and pages of heavy abilities and equipment slots. They couldn't be more different, right?

Except....

So, look, I am not going to try to sell anyone on 4e. That ship has sailed. I am going to make some assertions about my experience with 4e, and if your experiences were drastically different, THAT IS OK. Accept I am wrong and move on.

I liked 4e a lot.

Some of it was the boardgame component, no question at all. 4e fights were dynamic, fun and well supported. But the thing is, there were a lot of great elements around the boardgame that ended up greatly overshadowed.

Conceptually, the classes and power sources were delightfully flavorful, and the paragon paths and epic destinies offered really wonderful narrative paths for characters to pursue. There were not a lot of sub-options to things, but the trade off is that the elements there were VIVID.

On the mechanical side, it went all in on re-skinning. Because the numbers and mechanics were all tightly buttoned down, the GM was free (encouraged, even) to drastically reskin monsters to look and act like whatever was cool, but use the same underlying mechanics.

It also did some clever things to make the mechanical overwhelm less overwhelming. While there were a LOT of powers and abilities to choose from, the number a player had in rotation - even at high level - was constrained to a reasonable level.

It was full of things like this. An emphasis on making sure every character always had something to do. A pivot to slightly more narrative timekeeping (encounters and dailies!). Setting material focused on play over lore.

While it absolutely had faults, there was a lot of really good stuff going on in 4e. And if you know about it, you can see echoes of it throughout Daggerheart, from encounter building, to the handling of Ancestries, to the cards and domains.

So, I dunno, maybe it's just coincidence, or that these elements all permeated through the design-o-sphere in different ways, but it definitely feels to me like I can see some love of 4e in there, and that makes me very happy.

One of my great sadnesses is that WOTC never opened up the 4e rules in any real way. Products like the boxed set they made for Gamma World (which was AMAZING) were something of a tease at how powerful the engine could be, and I wish we could have taken a swing at it.

In the absence of a world where we got to run with 4e's engine to make it what it could be, I am pretty content with a genuinely badass game carrying forward the good parts of its badly battered legacy. Again, maybe I'm reading in too much. But I'm an old man. Allow me this happiness.

Anyway, over and above my personal stake, the other fascinating thing about a love letter to 4e is that, frankly, that is not exactly a driving force of commercial opportunity. 3e had been popular enough to draw people back, but not many people are champing at the bit for a 4e renaissance.

(Which is not the same as no people. There have absolutely been some really great designs that call back to 4e, and I am not ignoring them as a wax nostalgic here. Rather, I still feel like loving 4e is a fringe position, so it's nice to grow the family)

The upshot of this is that while DH may be drawing from the pool of D&D players in general, it's certainly not pitching itself as a return to 4e. Most of the things I cite as 4e are, after all, not even things people associate with the game in the first place. So it's more of an easter egg.

So you get this interesting juxtaposition of a game that has recognizable trappings (classes, ancestries, swords and spells) of D&D, but appears very different from D&D, even in the ways that it very like D&D.

It's weird, but this delights me to no end.

And it also kind of works its way around to what my single biggest impression of the game is, and it boils down to this:

Daggerheart DGAF.

In the nicest way possible.

This is a game that unapologetically knows what it is and what it's trying to do. It has principles, and makes design decisions in accordance with this principles, even if some dork like me might disagree with where it ended up. That's my problem. Daggerheart DGAF.

What's truly delightful about this is that this is far from the first game to not GAF. That stance has been a defining characteristic of indie games for as long as there have been indie games. They are opinionated, and if your opinion differs, then maybe play something else.

Now, every game is opinionated, whether they acknowledge it or not. But where this gets interesting is the intersection with the post 3e D&D model of game design, which puts forward a large game with a lot of moving pieces, well structured, possibly modular, and designed to effect.

The presentation of such games skews towards the technical and does not engage much with opinion, since the answer to opinion problems is that you can adjust the rules to account for that and move on.

DH absolutely presents as such a game, but its attitude is pure ashcan indie.

It's a fascinating mix. It's not the first mechanically complicated game to have such attitude (looks meaningfully at Burning Wheel), but its proximity to D&D in trappings and presentation make it stand out. And this is magnified by one other key thing that DHDGAF about - explaining things.

Here's the thing. If I was just sort of generally talking about a D&D-ish game and I mentioned that it had 18 races (yes, they're ancestries, but they'd totally be called races in this hypothetical), I would immediately face eyerolls and strong advice.

"It's too many for a core game. You would need to explain how each one of these fits in the broader picture of the setting. That's hard enough with half a dozen playable, intelligent races, but 18? Pare it back, put the others in expansions or something."

But DHDGAF.

It's answer to that is no answer at all. There are 18 ancestries, and they're just not going to stress about it. if you want to stress about it, that sounds like a you problem.

I'm not sure if it's clear to every reader, but this is a very significant difference in mindset from a lot of the D&D and D&D adjacent audience.

To generalize, people who like applying rules and math to their imaginations like to have things MAKE SENSE, and that drives a LOT of design.

It's not a universal stance, of course, but it's a significant thread in the gaming community, especially historically. The drive for imaginary things to make sense (or, better yet, be RIGHT) is something you can see as far back as Gygax.

One could assert that this sort of completionism has been a backbone of D&D.

Now, obviously, that is far different from it being a universal truth. There have been plenty of folks who love D&D without leaning into that particular line of approach. But, historically, deviating from that kind of thinking has also meant deviating from the shape of modern D&D.

Going back to the look and feel of much older D&D products is usually the marker for "This is D&D, but it's not" :vague hand gesture: "All that" So when Daggerheart embraces that ethos, but does so in all the trappings and structure of a modern D&D-ish game? It's jarring and confusing, sure, but also exciting.

And it elevates the DGAF to a whole new level.

If it's not clear, I applaud this, if sometimes a bit warily. Opinionated games are almost always more interesting to me, and I immensely respect principled design, even in cases where I might disagree with it. And lest it sound like I'm throwing shade without explanation, I can kind of sum it up as follows - whenever presented with a choice to do the simple thing or to introduce complexity for a benefit, DH choses simplicity.

I think this is MOSTLY right, but I think some of the trade offs fall flat.

And that is, to be clear, a completely legitimate difference in taste. They're not things with right or wrong answers. But, importantly, it's clear there are reasons Daggerheart made those decisions, which is worlds better than a sense that they were just kind of faking it.

Ok, so the real window into what I think about the game is what I intend to do with it.

I intend to run it, that's not even at question. The only challenges to that are logistics, but that is always the way. But how will I run it?

Even before we get into frames and homebrewing, we have the simple question of who I would want to run this for.

The first audience are my experienced nerds. Folks who have played a wide variety of games and are generally up for anything. They're something of a gimme - we'll try anything.

My second audience are my drama and story heavy players. They play Amber or Fate and can occasionally be convinced to try mechanically heavier fare, but it takes some doing. They're not averse to the idea of D&D, but the bookkeeping diminishes their fun. They are my real test. I think I can get their interest. The trappings of D&D will kind of work against it in this regard - Daggerheart looks more complicated than it is - so I'll need to do some dedicated prep to reduce the potential overwhelm at the outset.

But if I can get them through chargen, I'm optimistic.

There is a hypothetical third audience of folks who know D&D and D&D adjacent games, but don't venture far outside the bubble. Obviously, it's very important how that audience responds to DH, but I am not in a position to judge. We just don't have enough of those locally.

The fourth audience is strangers and newbies, and for them I must defer. DH looks like it could make a good con game or pickup game, but so much of that sort of thing relies on the GM's level of comfort and flexibility that I can't really judge it yet.

So, I think I can get players. Cool. What next?

Well, I need a premise. I could use one of the presented frames, or make my own. I also suspect that there are probably already dozens, if not hundreds, of homebrew frames out there.

My instinct to make my own frame is strong, but I also realize that I could use that as an excuse to delay forever, so I will probably pick a couple of frames as possibilities, evenif I have to tune them a little.

Setting aside the prospect of finding a cool frame online, if I were working from the book, I'd probably grab 5 banners or Umbra as starting points, but alter or replace the inciting incidents to be more in line with my tastes and table. So, that works.

On the rules end, I'd definitely need to review things enough to internalize them, as well as make sure I have assets for things like tables and stuff, so as to minimize lookup time. Obviously I'd make half a dozen characters or more, until I fee familiar with the process.

Part of doing that would be familiarizing myself with the cards. As it stands, I've skimmed them, and some patterns are evident, but nothing is going to reveal that more effectively than actually going through the process of selecting some.

In the short term, I'm just going to sit on my discomfort with the domains not really existing in the fiction. Once I have my feet under me, that is something addressable with a frame.

The elephant in the room is going to be the turn taking.

I've obviously read those sections several times, and will probably read them several more times. My hunch is that I need to ignore the "Take your turn any time" as more of a fallback than a central piece of guidance.

That is, I suspect the sweet spot is "Strictly follow the rules for turn taking most of the time, but if it's really necessary to break them for rule of cool, then you can do it."

But that's just a theory, I need to test to really see if it's a multitool or a breakglass option.

I'd say I'll have to gather tokens, but who am I kidding? I have more tokens on hand than will EVER see use.

That said, this is going to lead to some experimentations in play.

Daggerheart seems tremendously averse to writing anything down in play, and instead, everything is just tracked with one set of tokens or another.

I'm willing to give it a try, but as soon as I have two piles of tokens that mean two different things, I am pretty much inviting disaster and confusion

I mean, yes, I have enough different tokens around the house that I could very literally have a different token type for every possible use, but then it becomes a game of remembering what the red glass ones means vs the yellow clay ones.

I am very good at keeping track of some things in my head, but I am also someone who writes down the values of each chip color on an index card at the start of every poker night.

So, frankly, I don't really trust myself with that level of complexity.

But I will try it before I start solutioneering. That seems like a fair compromise.

I'm also making a mental note to try inverting the language of bonuses (so as to make it X plus 2d12, not 2d12 + X). This came out of a subthread from this where some folks weighed in very thoughtfully on the use of tokens in rolling in DH.

So you don't have to search, there's a linguistic quirk in DH where the bonus on a roll is described in terms of tokens. Rather than rolling with a plus 3, you are rolling with 3 tokens. And the expectation is that they are literal, physical tokens, physically placed as part of the roll.

This struck me as very odd, and I'm not sure it's something I could ever bring myself to do, but I am somewhat more cognizant of the potential benefits of the approach, which I see as twofold.

The first is the simple fact that people process numbers differently, and physical tokens may be easier for them to process. So, rock on!

The second is a little bit more nuanced, and full credit to @kenburnside.bsky.social for his passion and research on the topic.

What Ken found is that there's a measurable increase in speed for players in going from D12 + X to X + d12, but this is hard to persuade people of because it seems so counterintuitive to those of us who have been raised on dice first.

Some of this speed improvement may be cognitive, and I'm not in a position to speak to that, but I can confidently assert that some of it is behavioral - specifically, it is a forcing function. You need to have determined the bonus before you even pick up the die.

Why does this matter? In most situations, there are multiple modifiers to a die roll, and they can be confusing under the best of circumstances. Trying to figure them out AFTER the die has rolled adds an element of performance anxiety to it - you want to do it fast and you don't want to look stupid

Even if you're not totally buying the inverse order, keep an eye out for this pattern. I think you'll find there are people who are perfectly capable at math and rules who describe themselves otherwise because they keep putting themselves in the position of needing to perform it at top speed.

All of this feeds back to the tokens idea, because takign the time to gather up the right number of tokens before rolling serves a very similar purpose. You can do the math before the anxiety stones get rolled.

And, heck, if you do it that, way, you can add them in whatever order you like.

The other reason for using tokens - that it provides a visual language for numbers - is in my awareness, but is less of a big deal. In theory, it allows someone to glance at a pile and see if it's wrong, but that's kind of an antipattern. It's real value is clarity on video, which is not a concern

Beyond that, of course, I need to familiarize myself with the SRD and general open-use policy and resources for the game. Partly to see what I can make use of, partly to see what sort of things I might make in the future.

All in all, that seems pretty doable.

So, I'm excited. Which is a nice place to be with any new game. The reality of it may delight, or it may fall apart at the table, but finding out is half the fun.

So, with that, thank you to anyone who actually made it through this whole thing. I genuinely don't know if it's more baffling that I wrote it all or that people read it all, but either way, it's been a lot of a fun (and a somewhat painful lesson that blogging is a better choice for some material)

Coda

#daggerheart