Smash Cuts, from Special Appreciation
Prologue
When I first started reading Daggerheart, one of the first things I noticed was the Special Appreciation section. So many of my favorite RPGs live on that list. I had played all of them. While the authors note the key inspiration they drew from each game, there are a lot of mechanics and tools from those games that can elevate a game of Daggerheart.
The Engagement Roll, from Blades in the Dark
Blades in the Dark, by John Harper, is a game of grimy heists in a ghost haunted world with magitech akin to the Dishonored video games. It's good - if you haven't read it, the core rules are free.
Blades operates on a tight game loop - the game is broken down into free play (free form vibes base role playing) to the score (a well-defined heist structure to play an ill-defined heist) to downtime (mechanical world advancement and rest).
The score is a classic heist, consisting of the creation of a plan and then the implementation of said plan. One of Blades' key innovations was to cast aside the actual planning. Players come up with a pretty minimal checklist of things they need to know - the who, the why, the vaguest shape of the how - and then the adventure gets underway. (This is possible because of Blades' mechanics that allow for high competence characters to always have a plan, a discussion for another time.)
But that transition - from planning to heisting - is handled by way of an engagement roll. The heist doesn't start from the beginning. The players may say they're going to drive a disguised carriage in through the front door, but that's not where the heist starts.
The heist starts with the carriage on fire in the courtyard of the target. Or the carriage has crashed into the gate, the PCs engaged in a gunfight with the guards. Or the PCs are in the stables, changing costumes for Phase 2 of the heist.
The key thing is that the heist starts already under way. The GM makes a roll - called the Engagement Roll, a form of Blades' Fortune Roll, which looks a lot like Daggerheart's fate rolls - and based on that, we find out how Phase 1 already went.
Many words have been written about how adventures are best structured like stories and television - Daggerheart does a great job itself in the Thinking in Beats section - and a classic writing refrain is to start a scene as late as possible.
The Blades' Engagement Roll helps keep lulls in the adventure to a minimum. We skip the boring establishment of the status quo and jump to the thick of it. The players are already neck deep in trouble when we start playing. It reinforces Blades' high octane style of play.
In Daggerheart
Daggerheart isn't (inherently) a heist game, though like all high fantasy games there's often a lot of planning and stealing. While a proper delineation of "plan" and "score" might not make sense, you can still borrow the idea of smash cuts for your game.
When your players come up with a plan, you don't have to go through each step of the plan.
One of the GM Principles is make every roll important. If an action roll isn't interesting, don't roll it, just give it to the players. There has to be an interesting risk of failure or there's no reason to roll.
You can abstract this to entire phases of a plan. In the above example where the PCs try to bring a carriage into a closed estate, they're going to get into the estate. This is a foregone conclusion. "The guards turn you away and there's nothing you can do about it, I guess you have to go home" isn't really how that plays out. If you know the players are getting into the estate, just make a smash cut to the estate.
If they're going to find a wizard's tower in some desolate wastes, you don't need to spend fifteen minutes acting out wandering around the wastes. You can just smash cut to the player racing toward the tower to get safety from an oncoming storm.
Think of the classic story opening How We Got Here. This works wonders for adventures to keep the table excited. Anytime you see your players flagging, just smash cut to the next exciting part.
Now, if you have interesting stuff to do in the desolate wastes, absolutely roll play it out. Let rangers range and druids druid and bard sing around the campfire. But if it's perfunctory, skip it.
And if you want to escalate it, make a roll to find out how things went. Was part one of the plan more "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way To The Forum" or "Goodfellas"? The Daggerheart fate roll can tell you if we smash cut to the players outside the wizard tower, checking for traps, or dealing with the aftermath of a failed trap disarm, or surrounded by a gang of bandits who followed them through the wastes.
Players new to a more narrative playstyle might initially struggle with the loss of agency ("well, I wouldn't have crashed the carriage through the gate"), but encourage them to play through. The best adventure stories involve wild failures, and making a smash cut to the PCs in their underwear in an oarless rowboat will lead to a better adventure as your PCs struggle to explain how they got into this mess.