Ok, so this is a weird one. I actually started capturing my impressions on Daggerheart in a bluesky thread, and then just sort of….kept going. It was a terrible idea, but I was committed to the bit, and the end result was a genuinely titanic thread that was sufficiently cumbersome as to make it hard to reference. So, a few folks asked if they could compile it, and I was cool with that, since it meant I didn’t have to do to. Jake was kind enough to capture it to a google doc, which I’m pretty much just copying and pasting here. So, be warned: this is 1) long and 2) going to read a little weird due to originally being a thread. I had actually considered maybe turning into a doc but was deterred by its length. So…here’s the lot of it.

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

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

I was very curious about this.

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

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

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

The negative reaction was not to the cards themselves, but rather to what cards do the box

Specifically, a box designed to hold cards can’t hold anything else.  To me this is a waste.  Those cards are going in a card box, and this box should be used for paper sized things. 

But as it turns out, the Darrington Press folks were smarter than average, and hadn’t glued in the insert.

So as it turns out, you can just pop out the insert and use the box as an actual box.  

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

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

I was baffled by this.

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

I have 3 theories.

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

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

(cont.)

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

The flaw with #3 (which I suspect can be easily validated) is that the “spine” of the box (that is, the part that would face out) is the opposite side, since that’s where the name and trade dress are.

The net result is that it kind of looks like the box was originally designed as a drawer, but then switched to the current design without removing the tab.

Or, of course, it might have some other sort of purpose that hasn’t occurred to me. I’m open to suggestions.

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

More broadly, the box raises some questions that I am going to take into the book.  Not just what the cards are and what they do, but how necessary they are or aren’t.

I’m going to bet that they’re not necessary at all, but might be convenient.  There’s good money to be made in supplemental cards – people like them, and they’re so used to buying them in other contexts that it removes the feeling of a supplement treadmill.

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

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

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

MCG games won’t shock you with new directions in graphic design, rather, they represent a tremendously high level of polish on existing standards, paired with high quality optional components.   MCG has spent years making great products that offer their fans more options to buy in.

I hope that doesn’t sound critical, because it’s not.  MCG offers a fantastic model of a game company that understands how important it is that their customers are also their fans, and as a result, they have a GREAT relationship with their community (who are, genuinely, a community).

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

So when I say this makes me think of an MCG product, and I say that’s a compliment?

There’s a lot going into that, and it *really* is a compliment.

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

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

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

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

Ok, so, let’s talk about the physical book.  It’s a nice book.  Hefty, but not overwhelming (quick check says  366 pages).  The cover art has a lot of stuff going one, and if I knew anything at all about CR it might mean something to me, but without that knowledge, my impression is “ACTION FANTASY”

There are far worse impressions to take away.  One thing I like is that they’re willing to overload the cover image to give it a dynamic sense, like you might see from a movie poster. It’s a deliberate choice, and they do it well, albeit in a very specific and recognizable modern RPG art style.

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

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

Because I hang out with @deadlyfredly.bsky.social, I naturally inspected their use of spot gloss.  As with most of the other elements, there are no surprises to it, but what there is has been applied elegantly and well, largely to title elements and the system icons.

The one clever exception is the card images on the back.  They’ve also been treated with spot gloss, and it really makes them pop.  Super nice touch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My takeaways

* There are enough editors.  This is tremendously important

* The cartographer gets credited. 

* Lots of artists  but it’s not clear if there’s any way to  ell which art is which artists

* Inclusion of safety tools, with credit

* No hidden explosives among consultants

* Printed in China

The second to last bullet I something that WOTC has trained me look out for.

The last bullet is not good or bad in its own right, but given the current market, it’s something to check for, if only to be aware of trade war implications.

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

For this, we have:

* Introduction

* “Preparing for Adventure”

* “Playing an Adventure”

* “Running an Adventure”

* “Adversaries and Environments”

* “Campaign Frames”

* Appendix

The use of “Adventure” in this is clearly a deliberate choice. It suggests a certain style, but parsing it’s a trick.

Functionally, the three “Adventure” chapters seem to correspond to:

* Character Creation

* Rules Stuff

*GMing

Now, I am revealing a little bit of an eyeroll at the terminology here, but I think my knee jerk reaction is wrong.

In many books, Chapter 3 would be clearly delineated as “The GM chapter”.  The decision to use the same language for that chapter as the more traditionally player facing section tells us something about how the game views the GM/Player divide – specifically.  It suggests that the separation is thin.

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

This also answers a question I had about the colors on the page edges.  Looking at the side of the book, it kind of looks like some of the chapters use the same color, which seemed an odd choice.  You can see the intended colors on the TOC, and they *are* different, but some are hard to distinguish.

It shouldn’t be a problem, because they don’t put any of the similar colors next to each other, but I admit I am going to have a hard time remembering which red is rules vs adversaries.

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

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

Color is used throughout.  Most obviously, each chapter makes use of its signature color (which is something that makes it easier to find things when flipping through), with yellow (also the color of the introduction) used for general accent purposes.

This occasionally produces combination which LOOK like the color is meaningful, but where that does not actually seem to be the case. 

Also, that serif font form the back cover doesn’t show up again anywhere I’ve seen, so now I’m wondering about the story for that.

Hopping to the back, I skip past some summary information on cards and zero in on the other font of information: The character sheet. 

It’s a nice looking sheet, but before I get into it, I notice there are also some interesting arts and crafts bits to it.

One is the “Character Sheet Sidecar”, which is a page, you print out, cut in half, and put too each side of the character sheet, offering explanation of the various elements on the sheet.  You often see this view in game books, but it’s delightful to see it as its own artifact.

There’s also a weird half sheet which is apparently used to handle multiclassing, and I’m not 100% sure how it’s supposed to be used.

Ok, character sheet itself:  Top line elements are Name, Pronouns, Heritage,  Subclass and Level.   This piques my curiosity because I’m not sure where one denotes *class* (though there’s a class feature section further down).  

It’s an absence that I look forward to understanding.

Stats tell their own story.  Agility, Strength, Finesse, Instinct, Presence and Knowledge. 

I’ve made enough stat system to know what kind of decisions lead to a set like this.  From a D&D perspective, the problems it solves are that CON is passive and DEX is overloaded.

So you drop Con in favor of something active, and you split Dexterity into gross and fine dexterity, so that maybe not all acrobats are sneaky.   It’s got its own problems, but so does everything else.  Totally functional.

Most of the right side elements are standard fare – Weapons, inventory and such.  It’s the left side where things start getting interesting. 

There are simple looking damage and stress tracks, which seem normal, but there’s a section of minor/major/severe damage that suggest some complexity.

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

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

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

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

Which gets me to the maps.

There are a LOT of maps.  Some of them seem to be general setting, some of them seem to be for included frames/adventures. 

I was a little surprised that they’re all black and white, but they’re done in a sufficiently nice, consistent style that they’re still lovely.

One very interesting decision is that each map is *explicitly* the size of one piece of letter sized paper.  Even if the content must then cover multiple maps.  

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

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

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

I keep coming back to the word “polished” for this, but it is just so very much the right word.  It’s lovely and well put together, distinct enough to be it own thing, but not so different from mainstream RPG expectations as to be weird or confusing.

As much as we might wish it to be otherwise, D&D still sets the norm for most of the market, and how recognizable  and approachable an RPG is going to be to the broader market requires a balance between being enough like and enough different from D&D.  This seems to hit that mark.

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

I may need some coffee.

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

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

Daggerheart does about as well

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

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

This is also where I get introduced to the core concept that the 2 d12s players roll are “hope” and “fear”, with some rich dice mechanics hanging off which is higher.  I’m a sucker for rich dice, so heck yeah!

Play apparently requires the full suite of dice, tokens and the game cards. Still not sure how I feel about the cards, but ok.

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

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

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

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

Interesting chargen bits from the overview:

Pick class first

Pick subclass at chargen

(2 subclasses per class – clearly a space for future material)

Heritage next, comprised of ancestry (18 options) and community (9 options)

Just don’t worry about languages

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

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

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

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

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

I have a couple minutes become poker starts.  Experiences, it turns out, are not the XP system but are, instead, the skill system (sort of).

Experiences, it turns out, are free-form descriptors of background, skills and the like. You start with 2 at +2 and you get more and bigger numbers over time

The trick is that you have to spend a hope to use them, so they’re clearly a big part of the currency cycle. 

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

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

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

Background turns out to be a set of questions to answer, based on your class, which are found in your “Character guide”

This lead to some confusion on my part because I had no idea what a character guide was.  As it turns out, remember how there are character sheets for each class, just not in the appendix?  The character guide is part of that. 

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

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

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

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

In that diagram, each of those icons in a circle corresponds to a DOMAIN, which are more or less areas of power or capability.  Each class exists at the intersection of two of them, meaning it also shares one domain with the classes to it’s right and left.

So, for example, the Ranger’s domains are Bone (Tactics and the Body) and Sage (The Natural World).  They share Bone with the Warrior (Bone andValor), and Sage with the Druid (Sage and Arcana). 

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

There’s a LOT to this.

First off, it means the neighbor classes share ability lists.   This is kind of fascinating to me.  It’s mostly just touched on in terms of “Encourage players to pick different abilities, unless they really want to overlap”, but I think it has a lot more potential than that.

For example, it really seems like a fantastic design space for synergy or handoff abilities.  The kind where you take some sort of action, and if the follow up action (from someone else – no self dealing) is from the same domain, there’s some sort of bonus.

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

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

But what intrigues me MOST is how this model works with expansion and contribution. 

First and foremost, creating a new domain ability seems like the a good sized piece of game design and contribution. Discrete rules bits that implicitly demand trade off for the domain abilities you don’t choose.

And the fact that the new content helps two classes is maybe not any kind of HUGE opening, but it’s more useful than just tweaking a single class. 

So that’s cool, but it’s only the entry point. Because the next obvious option are new character classes, which just require different combinations.

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

LOTS of possible combinations.

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

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

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

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

There’s a bit of a resonance with D&D 4E’s power sources here.  On the good side, this captures many of the thematic and mechanical advantages they offered, but on the worrying side, systems like this can often end up feeling like everyone’s playing a wizard with different special effects.

Put differently, short of taking the Earthdawn route, where everyone really *is* a wizard, it’s often a real challenge to have spell casters and more mundane characters using the same core engine without it feeling like a compromise for one of them.

I have no idea if Daggerheart falls prey to this or not, but it’s definitely something I’m keeping my eyes open for as we continue.

Oh, before we get to the classes, I should also mention that they have a sample spread of a *proper* character sheet here, and it GREATLY clarified a number of things that were head scratchers about the generic one.   

It also reinforced my sense of how much Blades in the Dark DNA is in this.

Ok, so the classes themselves.  As the wheel showed, they’re Sorcerer, Druid, Ranger, Warrior, Guardian, Seraph, Wizard, Bard & Rogue. 

Obviously, my first thought upon looking at that list was to map them to D&D classes.

In doing so, I may be making some absolutely incorrect assumptions, and I will hopefully find out if I do. 

Most of them are obvious, with only 3 exceptions.  Seraph is new, but a few moments of thought suggest that it’s probably the Cleric equivalent.  That leaves warrior and guardian.

Again, making assumptions, I assume that means “Damage Dealer” and “Tank”, since that’s the most common pattern for such things.  

If so, I’ll be very curious to check implementation. I love tanking, but it is very hard to do unless you’re willing to be blatant about its mechanistic nature.

Most often, it just ends up meaning “Heavier armor, and therefor higher defense and maybe some shield tricks, vs high damage and something like dual wielding or oversized weapons. 

I confess, I *hope* to be surprised, but I don’t actually expect to be.

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

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

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

So, I guess it’s time to find out.

Before they start with the classes, there’s a brief sidebar about the Domain cards which reveals a mechanical curiosity.  There is a limit on the number of cards a character can have active at the same time, and they eventually will have enough cards that some number will need to be kept in reserve.

Normally, you can swap cards in and out of reserve during downtime, but each card has a listed cost which can be paid in stress (which is sounding more and more like the stamina-style currency of play) to swap it in on the fly.

This mechanic jumped out at me for two reasons.  First, it’s one of those rules that feels very much like a response to a specific frustration with D&D (specifically, the lack of on the fly swapping), and second, because the example they show seems to have a zero swapping cost.

That suggests there’s a potentially interesting minigame here, where cards that can be swapped in for zero cost are – effectively – expanding your range of available slots (Rather like ritual spells end up behaving in 5e).

Also, if I’m reading this right, someone has finally done the thing that I’ve been wishing for, and used the BitD inventory system as the baseline structure for organizing powers.  Very cool if so.

Ok, into the actual classes, and once again the bards fuck everything up by virtue of alphabetical order. 

(Nothing against bards themselves, but they are usually the absolute worst character class to start with because they’re usually a hybrid of other things.)

And my first impression of the character classes is that they are *sparse*.

Each one has a two page spread with some lovely art, but the content is not exactly tightly packed in there.  This is neither good nor bad, but it is important.

When I remarked earlier that most of the moving parts of a class were in the domain lists, and that the classes themselves would be pretty light?  This is what that is. Each class is a tiny handful of abilities (and most of those are in the subclass).

This is one of those classic tradeoffs in design.  Lightweight classes means making new classes is easy, and helps other mechanical elements (Experiences, I wager) provide more character definition.  However, there is also a risk of the classes not *feeling* terribly distinct.

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

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

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

The guardian ends up being an interesting point to stop and really look at what the Subclassses do.  Mechanically, they offer most of the abilities of the class, but I’m talking more conceptually.

That is to say, the classes themselves are loosely sketched, and subclasses seem to serve as ways to refine the idea and (ideally) bring it into line with whatever the player imagines.  Which is to say, the more potentially nuanced the class, the more it needs subclasses.

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

The guardian is, frankly, a bit less clear cut in its core, and if you view it as this loose idea of warriors driven by ideals, the subclasses don’t seem to cast nearly a wide enough net for the kind of concepts that suggests.

Of course, if you just go “Forget it, Jake.  They’re Paladins”, it  comes together much more tidily, and I honestly am not sure what I think of that.

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

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

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

The rogue’s two subclasses manage to cast two problems in sharp relief, particularly because they are both quite thematic and cool.  BECAUSE they’re thematic and cool, they don’t exactly cover a wide area of possible rogue concepts.  The result feels VERY constrained in terms of options.

The second thing it highlights is the role of magic.  One of the subclasses is overtly magical, one is not  (I mean, yes, you can reskin things, but there are only so many ways to reskin teleporting between shadows).    So, if you want to play a non-magical rogue, you have exactly one choice.

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

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

I got to the sorcerer, then skipped ahead to the wizard, and if you asked me, I could not tell you why they are two separate classes.  The differences might be in the domain lists, but otherwise, if all 4 subclasses were under one class, I wouldn’t bat an eye.

That’s not a *bad* thing, but I was hoping for something a bit less “They’re two classes here because they’re two classes in D&D.”

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

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

All in all, the classes section is a weird combination of clever, interesting design decisions paired with the very long shadow of D&D.    Tellingly, most of the criticisms I would offer fall into the “I wish there were more of this” category,  which is the best sort of problem for an RPG to have.

Aside from the rogue, I think the main thing I feel like I’m missing is what the domains *MEAN*.  Like, they clearly exist within the mechanics, but I also infer that they are something that exists within the world, but I don’t know what that looks or feels like.

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

To come back to the “Everyone’s a wizard” thing – it is ok for a game to have every PC be dramatically magical, but I need the game to *tell* me that.

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

Someone had *fun* with this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most critically, the list is pretty easily expanded, in case you need to add, I dunno, Starborne, or Shadowborne or whatever as suits your game.   

It is, I should add, a nice trick for flavorful but still largely generic worldbuilding.

Ok, so this is a pleasant surprise.  The last four pages of the section are pretty much entirely focused on, to borrow thier words, playing disability with purpose and respect, including explicitly speaking to deaf and blind characters.

I am absolutely not the person to deeply judge the quality of this section, but I will note that this is not a terribly verbose game, and there are a LOT of words dedicated to the topic.  They took this seriously, and at least as far as I can tell, handled it well.  Hat’s off.

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

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

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

It only takes 3 pages to get weird.

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

That’s a hell of a thing.

Now, there may be some shenanigans here, distinguishing “actions” from “moves”, so I’m going to wait until I actually get to the moves section to say if they’re really quite as loosely goosey as they’re suggesting.  Because if so, I (unsurprisingly) have feelings on the matter.

The reason I’m looking for loopholes is that it seems that player (or GM) spotlight is a mechanically defined thing.  When you have it, you can do things you can’t when you don’t, and it has a strong interaction with moves, but I’m not 100% sure about the direction of that interaction.

So, putting a pin in that, we get to he dice, and get the formal unpacking of the rich dice system.  2d12, one is hope, one is fear.  I very much like the language the’ve constructed for it:  You are “Rolling with hope” or “Rolling with fear”, depending which is higher.

It’s a small thing, but it’s very important that if you’re using rich dice (like these), they need to be easy to talk about.  Even if the richness is mechanically smooth, if it’s clumsy to talk about, it’ll be hard to use. So, very well done.

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

We also get some details on the hope currency cycle.  You generate hope when you roll with hope, and your max capacity is 6.  Since you’ll get it half the time you roll, the system assumes you’ll spend liberally (whether or not that’s a safe assumption is another question).

Spending one help lets you use an experience, getting a bonus on the roll, or granting someone else a 1d6 bonus die on their roll.  SPending 3 help let’s you trigger a special ability on your class (Called a “Hope Feature”), or trigger a “Tag Team Roll”.

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

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

The Warrior’s is “Gain +1 to your attack rolls until your next rest”.  Huh.  Ok, they gotta be more interesting than that.  One sec.

Ok, the Ranger:  When you succeed on an attack with a weapon, use the same roll against two more targets in range.  Ok, that’s a little bit more of what I expected.

Oh, hey,  the Wizard gets to make an enemy reroll an attack or damage roll.  

So, looking through these, some of them are hard for me to judge since I’m not sure how big a deal, say, +2 to evasion for a turn is, but I admit they seem…uneven?

I don’t so much mean mechanically.  I’m sure they’re fairly balanced.  It’s just some of them seem cooler or more fun  than others.  Which is probably not a big deal, except this is sort of the signature cool thing, at least as presented.

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

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

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

You fill in numbers in the in-between boxes, and those are now your thresholds.  So, if your thresholds are 8 and 16, if less than 8 damage is rolled, you take 1 HP, 8-15 would be 2HP and 16+ would be 3HP.

I have no idea how damage is rolled yet, but what I do know is that the interesting part of this seems to be that this is where armor comes into account.  So, Armor doesn’t prevent hits, but does shape the severity of hits that land (modulo special abilities and stuff)

I have no objection to this.  It’s a classic method of modeling armor, though I now have a not to see how shields work, since that’s always a bit of an oddity in this sort of system.

As written, this would seem to suggest that no armor would be a TERRIBLE idea, since it SEEMS like no armor would mean almost everything is severe. However, I’ll be that in practice, the default thresholds are, like 5 and 10, modified by armor from there.

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

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

(That is to say, Adv and Disad, cancel out, from what remains, roll that many d6s, keep the best one, then add or subtract it as appropriate)

I’m a LITTLE sad that adv and disadv use a different die size, because it passes up interesting synergy with the duality dice.

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

It’s interesting that there’s a lot of emphasis on the nature of the result (hope/fear) reflecting in the narration, but it very explicitly never touches upon the actual *result*, presumably with the idea that those narrated things sort of vanish in the wash of the hope and fear points.

There’s a little bit of having your cake and eating it too with this guidance, but its forgivable.  While this has the *shape* of a mixed success system (like blades/PBTA) it stops short of going all the way there, which is probably good, because mixed results are very demanding on the GM.

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

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

Aaaand, digested.

One real challenge of writing any RPG is that so many rules refer to other rules that you frequently find yourself talking about rules elements before you actually explain them.  Daggerheart does not escape this trap.

It’s nigh-universal problem, so it’s not a big deal, but it means that sometimes you just need to  jump around a bit before things finally make sense.  And they do.

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

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

Succeeding with Fear *does* allow the GM to double dip.  That is, she gets to collect a fear AND she can introduce trouble (especially in combat), and there’s an implicit thread of treating a success with fear as a lesser success.

I was ok with it being “Gain currency with the option of introducing a complication” because I get that GMs won’t always have a complication in mind, so it doesn’t break anything if you just take the currency and move one.

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

It’s starting to feel like a pile on.

I’m fine with having a robust set of *options* for success with fear, but I’m less comfortable with it being a lesser success AND a complication generator AND a GM currency generator.  I kind of want at least one OR in there.

I suspect this is something that a GM will mitigate in practice, but I grumble at the necessity of it. 

Another thing I went back and checked is whether or not difficulty targets are transparent, and the answer is “whenever the GM feels like it”

Not super happy with that answer.

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

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

“I rolled a 14 with Hope!”

“You failed.”

“I mark stress to use my power for a +2”

“You still fail”

“Fuck you”

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

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

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

The more dramatic version of this is “Tag Team rolls”, which are one of the things you can spend hope on.  Once per session, for 3 hope, you can initiate a tag team roll where all the participants roll and you can choose which result you use (With hope or fear gathered for everyone involved).

To clarify, tag team is explicitly limited to 2 characters (boo!) but it’s extra awesome in combat because if you both hit, you combine damage totals (Yay!)

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

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

Ok, so, assume a sword does 1d8 damage.  Cool.  You also have a stat called “Proficiency” which starts at 1 and increases as you level.  You roll a number of dice equal to that score and tally them up. So, if I have a proficiency of 3, and I hit with that sword, I’m doing 3d8.

There are other bonuses and additions that can get thrown in, but the proficiency is the heart of it.

Proficiency, as it turns out, kind of requires explaining Tier to make sense of it.

So, characters have 10 levels, but those 10 levels are broken into 4 Tiers.  Tier 1 is level 1, 2 is 2-4, 3 is 5-7 and 4 and 8-10.  You get certain advancement things when you increase level, and a different set of advancement things when you advance tiers.

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

Now, that’s all pretty straightforward at core, but there are a number of interesting complexities, and one or two head scratchers. 

Notably, magical damage *doesn’t* use proficiency, and instead uses your casting stat in a similar role.

Or rather, it *sometimes* does that?  I honestly am a ltitle confused in trying to read it.

This is one of those areas where the right answer is “Just sit down and read a bunch of powers to internalize them, it will make things make more sense” but I am not smart enough to do that.

Anyway, one mathematically weirdness of this is that if a weapon does, say, 1d8+3,  the 1d8 is multiplied by proficiency but the +3 isn’t.   

I re-read that bit several times to make sure I was reading it right, because that struck me as really weird.

So, to give an example, a broadsword is 1 handed, does 1d8 damage, and gives you a +1 to attack.

A longsword is two handed, give no bonus, but does 1d8+3. 

It maybe feels a bit balanced against the Longsword, but you can at least see the logic: 2 hands, hit harder.

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

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

In practice, our broadsword person will probably have a dagger or shortsword in their off hand, which will add +2 do their damage, so now it’s 1d8+2 and +1 to hit vs 1d8+3.

I don’t know if there’s a deliberate tilt against two handed weapons, but it definitely *feels* that way.

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

The tier system for weapons is actually pretty neat.  In addition to increasing the quality of weapons, it’s also how weird and interesting weapons get introduced.  All of which is to say it’s a nice, streamlined way to handle loot boxes.

There’s a lot more going on though.  Each weapon uses a particular stat, which might be Strength, Agility, Finesse ,Presence (Rapiers & Cutlasses) or Instinct (Staff).   But that’s just NORMAL weapons.

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

How much cooler?

If you’re a fighter, and you want to throw a knife, it can reach about 10 feet and you’ve lost the knife. 

If you’re A Finesse caster, you can throw a returning knife out to 30 feet, and it, y’know, returns.

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

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

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

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

Er, mail.  I am clearly getting punchy.  

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

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

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

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

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

So, it’s just a question of how you want to balance the damage reduction vs the other modifiers. 

I feel like this may get really weird if I sat down and crunched the numbers, but I’m not feeling that ambitious.

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

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

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

I gotta admit, that is a *pretty* short list.

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

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

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

Movement is abstracted, and range is broken up into bands.   There’s a little more granularity in the near ranges than I’d expect, but otherwise it’s what you’d expect.

It gets a little bit weird with movement.  Default movement lets you freely move within “Close” range (10-30 feet) and then act.  You can forgo acting to move, but you need to make an agility roll to do so successfully, which I admit struck me as a little odd.

My knee jerk reaction was to buck at the idea that I might fail to move successfully.  Like, if there are obstacles or the like? Sure.  But rolling by default seems outright draconian.  Like, so draconian as to seem out of place in what have been pretty friendly rules.

I *suspect* that this is a function of the loosey goosey nature of turn taking in the system.  Introducing a die roll keeps it from just being a free large move that rolls into another action.   It’s weird, but there’s a logic to it.  I think.

The death rules are awesome.

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

Those are fun options.  Thumbs up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two oddballs.  

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

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

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

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

Rests are also when certain powers recharge and you can swap out cards, and that’s all good, but they save my absolute favorite part for last.

On a short or long rest, the GM recovers *fear*.  1d4 on a short rest, 1d4 + number of PCs (which they do abbreviate) on a long one. 

This *delights* me.

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

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

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

* Embrace Danger

* Use Your Resources

* Tell the Story

* Discover your Character

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

I’m sympathetic to how tricky it is, because the second two points are kind of tips of much larger icebergs which cannot be so easily be boiled down to “Don’t finish the game with 99 ethers, dumbass”.

But they’re clearly ideas that are *important* to the designers (and I agree), and they made the decision to include them imperfectly, and I can’t fault that.  But I do end up wondering how much help they offer to those who aren’t already bought in.

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

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

It ends with a “Loot” section which is actually the Miscellaneous Magic Items section.  It’s two 60 item tables, one for stuff, one for consumables.  The idea is that you roll between 1 and 5d12 based on the “Rarity” of the loot to see what you get.

The items are fun, and a number are clearly recognizable with the serial numbers filed off *cough*Immovable Rod*cough*, and while there’s a little oddness to the fact that this approach makes item 01 (Premium Bedroll) surprisingly rare, it’s a neat little list.

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

Possibly the most interesting item on the list is the inclusion of *recipes*, which allow you to create specific items with downtime actions.

The recipes are cleverly written up so they have a single requirement, such as the bone of a creature or spendign a stress.  They’re not *onerous*, but they’re enough to demand a little bit of substance to the crafting actions.  Very tidy.

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

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

As a *general* rolling method, I have no objection to it.  But when it’s presented that 5d12 is some *legendary* loot, it is not going to feel great when I roll a 10.  The distribution as described and the distribution as math seem at odds.

(That said, and easy fix is to make it roll and keep, so the dice kept set the cap but the extra dice rolled push the results up to be more likely to be inline with the description).

The chapter ended with the promised pleasant surprise. 

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

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

My hat is off.

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

It refined my understanding of how the game envisions turn taking (though I still have questions) and had players who did not make me want to punch anyone. 

They very clearly decided that a good example of play was very important, and went all in on it, and it’s a marvel to see.

And with that, we round the corner into the chapter on *running* the game.  

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

The line between principles and best practices seems pretty fuzzy at times. Some of the practices are a little more actionable, but only a little. The end result is it feels like they couldn’t narrow down the list of principles to something manageable, so they created another category to fit them in

This is not a terrible thing.  The principles and practices are all good stuff.  Even if I might quibble in the details, there is no item on these lists I would reject. 

But I’m not sure they *work*.

Putting on my day job hat for a second, one of the ways I spot a project or product that is failing is that they invariably have very long lists of entirely admirable priorities, every one of them clearly valuable.

They fail because it is harder, but more important, to know what NOT to do.

I’d probably be less skeptical if these had been deeper into the chapter.  Framed as tips and tricks maybe.  But since they’re front and center, it comes across as a failure to commit.  Because there are so many of these, I have no idea which are most important, or which to even remember.

And, again, I’m sympathetic. These are all good, reasonable, valuable points,   I have no opinion on which ones to remove because *that is not my opinion to have*.  It is the designers job to make these hard decisions.

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

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

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

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

Interestingly, the GM can also roll critical successes.  I was surprised that this surprised me.  It’s absolutely in line with common RPG logic, but I guess I was expecting a a little de-emphasis on the GMs rolls as a dramatic driver, leaving that to the players.

It’s not a bad choice.  It mostly just means there’s a threat that any enemy might do bursty damage, and that can be valuable for keeping players on their toes, and I can’t fault that at all.  I dunno. It just sat weird.

The guidance on adjudicating action rolls is interesting, especially because the first tool offere is to *not* make action rolls, and instead offer the players guaranteed success in return for specific consequences.  Another surprise.

Not that this a surprising *practice*, but I definitely was surprised to see it front and center.  It suggests a bias towards consequences as a default, which is definitely interesting.  It is with good reason that the long list of principles did not include “Say yes, or roll the dice”

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

And this is when we get into turn taking.

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

It’s vibes.

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

But no.

The time that the GM makes a move really seems to boil down to “When it would be cool to do so”

I mean, there’a a certain amount of guidance.  Certain mechanical events, like players succeeding with fear, or failing, or otherwise queuing it up, but those really seem to just be guidelines and reminders.  Ultimately, the GM makes a move when she wants to.

I am genuinely thunderstruck by the audacity of it.

Because, yeah, on one hand, that’s genuinely great.  If the GM has a good sense of drama and timing, and really *gets* that the adversity they bring is to make things better for everyone, then this is Rock Lee dropping his weights.  It enables amazing things.

But on the other hand, holy crap is this working without a net.

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

But I do worry a bit about the folks who haven’t built the necessary muscles yet.  Is the game going to help them get there? Or is this a case fo needing to be this tall to ride the ride?

And to be clear, I really resonate with the undertone of this.  This is a bold faced declaration that GM skills is a *meaningful* and *important* part of a game being good, backed up with very concrete expressions of that belief.

A part of me genuinely loves that.  It is a part that has spent many years reading games that were written like you could not trust the GM with anything as dangerous as a rusty spoon.  Games with a supreme confidence that their mechanics were what made play great.

Watching this game come in and tableflip that is kind of a hell of a thing to see.

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

This seems like a very clean and tidy system.  Since just a little under half the rolls will me made with fear, it kind fo organically create sa situation where the GM takes about as many turns as the players, with an option to turn the knob for effect.

This is so elegant and well constructed that if it *were* the rule, it would be ENTIRELY satisfactory.   It would be tremendously flexible for players, but not allow them to use that flexibility to run roughshod over things.  It would absolutely be sufficient.

But this is the rule:

As I said:  The sheer audacity of it!

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

The next section is about choosing moves, and there are some interesting nuances to it.  The first is that it makes it clear that GM moves include doing *nice* things for the characters.  Giving rewards or opportunities are also GM moves.

They also subtly slip in examples of how a GM should TALK to various results.  Specifically, it implicitly lays out which ones might end in “Tell me how it happens” and which might end in “Here’s what happens”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, but also no. 

On paper, it is absolutely a contradiction.  I will make my GM moves whenever I damn well please!  All fear the GM!

But in *practice*?  There is a very human difference between a move that feels like a natural consequence of events and a move which is a deliberate GM force.  

Spending fear for this seems less about the currency cost so much as what it *communicates*.

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

Or at least it is if you already KNOW all that. 

I’m a little less sure how you learn it.

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

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

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

Vibes and currency, man.  Vibes and currency.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 accordence 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!

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 II 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 II 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 sfety 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.

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 II.  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 II 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 II 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 II 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 (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.

So, the next one is “Beast Feat”, 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 II has already been done.

Next up is The Age of Umbra, which is wht happens when someone decides to take the “Points of Light” concept, mixes is in with the FromSoftware* library, and shakes vigorously. 

I hope that sounds delicious, because it is.

* Dark Souls, Elden Ring etc.

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 II 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.

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 ot 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.

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 II 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.

www.drivethrurpg.com

Iron Edda: War of Metal and Bone – TheOtherDev Productions | DriveThruRPG

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.

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 overcomplicated 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 dailes!).  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)