The Danger of D&D
Bottom line up front, I'm not here to knock on D&D (any edition), and I think Daggerheart drawing so much inspiration from D&D is a good thing. But there's danger in that inspiration, in how it informs how you play.
Last night, I had one of the worst TTRPG experiences of my life.
I was so excited to play Daggerheart, and since my group is neck deep on anomalies with Triangle Agency, I decided to hit up a public game at an LGS. I haven't gone to a game with strangers in a hot decade or more; I don't play at conventions, I've got my good small groups of friends.
The people at the store were quite nice, friendly, welcoming. So it could have been a lot worse - we've all heard stories about creeps. This is not a story of failed social skills, but failed expectations.
As far as I could tell, the groups' experience consisted mostly of flavors of D&D and D&D-adjacent games. The GM seemed welcoming and relaxed and comfortable behind the screen, though I don't think he had read the Quickstart much.
We were Marlowe, Barnacle, Varian, and Khari (me!), and we ventured forth into Sablewood. It almost immediately became clear that this GM was used to running adventures with boxed text and defined outcomes.
I don't blame the GM entirely for this: some of this is the inherent danger of a quickstart. A quickstart starts quickly (sorry), and can only include minimal guidance. So you're going to run the game the way you expect it to be run.
Which means we got a lot of useless rolls and a lot of railroading. No matter what we did, we couldn't progress until we worked our way through the prepared list of activities we might want to partake in in the hamlet of Hush.
I knew things were going poorly when we got to the final act in the Open Vale, and while the escort NPC called the Whitefire Arcanist got set up for the ritual, we had to roll to avoid boredom or take Stress. (This is something that probably would have made me nervous in a game of D&D proper.)
About halfway through the climactic final fight, when we got into the fight with the Forest Wraiths, the GM misread the instructions, and I was Untethered until the entire countdown was over. (This felt off, but I didn't want to pull the adventure up and second-guess the GM; that's just poor form.) So I sat out the back half of the fight.
But really, the worst part was that every time the GM got a move (on a failure or a Fear), they spotlighted an adversary. Every time. And that's what you would expect to happen if you're a D&D DM: it's your turn, the monsters attack. But the Daggerheart action economy just isn't set up for that, and we got slaughtered.
I admit, I could have said something sooner. Maybe I should have, but I was a bit on egg shells, having little experience with strangers. When Marlowe died, and the player kind of slumped after getting obliterated by a quickstart adventure, I pointed out that the rule book listed a variety of possible GM moves, and that spotlighting an adversary was only one of them.
The GM listened, and after realizing we were too far gone just kind of hand-waved away the rest of the fight. It seemed obvious that he knew that wasn't how it was supposed to go.
The players seemed to want to do everything right. The woman playing Barnacle was desperate to find a shadow to do cool things in. Marlowe and Varian really leaned into the connections on their character sheet and tried to tie them into their actions. They were trying, there just wasn't enough for them.
After watching the first couple episodes of Age of Umbria, I was concerned that Critical Role wasn't really doing enough to show off the system, that they were acting too much like it was D&D. In hindsight, I should have realized they're still professional performers and it could have been so much worse.
I actually blame the quickstart for this one, a bit. Giving the table a bunch of minis is cute, but tells the table that there's really only one way to play this game: with D&D combat.
And playing Daggerheart like D&D will lead you to a complete disaster. Daggerheart is not D&D, it's just got a lot of D&DNA. And this terrifies me, because I think it's an interesting game, with the potential to be a good game with the right table, but I think a lot of tables are going to struggle.
I really hope the group at my LGS plays Daggerheart again, because their first exposure was... not good. Maybe I'll reach out and offer to run a session of my own.