I have not yet had the opportunity to run Daggerheart, largely because life has been exhausting. It’s the busiest time of year for my wife’s job, I have just changed roles at work, and the kid’s summer activities end up requiring a lot more juggling than the school year.
But, I admit, it’s not JUST that.
I’ve been making characters and digging into the mechanics, and that’s inspired some future thoughts, so my comfort level with the RULES are in place, so the remaining friction comes from someplace unexpected: what exactly I want to run.
Now, to be clear, there’s no shortage of ideas. I’m a big fan of running things off the cuff, so if I just decided “to hell with it, let’s go” and decided to run it, I’d have everything I needed by the end of chargen.
The problem is, I’ve had time to THINK.
See, while I would not go so far as to call Daggerheart a truly generic system in the way I might describe GURPS, Fate or Savage Worlds, it’s still a fair sight mote generic than something like D&D. Not only does it lend itself to easy reskinning, it supports a wider range of modes of action (that is, it can do social and environmental hazards as well as combat hazards). As the published frames illustrate, it can cover a WIDE variety of possible games.
As a result, it shares some challenges with games like GURPS or Fate, most specifically in terms of finding answers to the question of why you want to use this particular game.
Normally, this isn’t a problem because the situation is inverted. Someone has an idea for a game and needs a system. If there’s no good published match, they will either gravitate towards their favorite system, or to a system that is explicitly designed to be customized to suit (that is, a “generic” system). However, when you start from the generic game, every ideal you come up with immediately raises the question of whether some other game system would be the right match.
It may seem like a small thing to dwell on, but I really want to do something that will allow Daggerheart to be its best. It would be almost churlish of me to use Daggerheart to run something it does not handle well. And that leads to the question: What does Daggerheart do well?
I have lots of answers to that in terms of actions. It’s flexible and supports a certain amount of high adventure fantasy, and it’s got good tools for player engagement. The problem is, those are mostly things it will do well at the table, but they don’t really answer the question of what *kind* of game would work well.
A good way to illustrate this is with the frames offered in the core book. As I’ve noted before, I like them. I like some of them quite a lot. But liking them does not automatically align them with the game. If one of the frames particularly grabbed me, why not just run it in Fate?
And to be clear, I choose Fate here as a counterexample because I know it well, but it’s really a proxy for dozens of other systems I could pick up and run. The issue is not that Fate (or anything else) is the better “go to” generic system, rather, it’s that there’s a reason I keep putting “generic” in quotes. Fate, GURPS, Risus, Champions, Savage Worlds, Lumen – these systems are not interchangeable. Each one solves problems in a different way, and is a better or worse choice for a specific goal. I can clearly articulate why I would choose GURPS for a particular game, and why I would use Risus for a different one.
The challenge is that I cannot yet articulate when I would choose Daggerheart. Or, at least, not without it being a tautology (that is, “for a game like Daggerheart”).
I don’t think this is Daggerheart’s fault. This is just part of the dance of my internalizing a game. But some of the challenges are rooted in Daggerheart’s design, and specifically the tradeoffs it made, including tradeoffs that make a lot of sense.
The single biggest trade off comes from designing things to be reskinnable. Every mechanical bit of the system, from powers to equipment, is designed to rest very lightly on the game, so it can very easily have its description or fiction changed without impacting anything else. As a result, there is very little implicit setting creation in the rules. From the perspective of flexibility, this is genuinely great. But from the perspective of figuring out what makes a Daggerheart game, it’s a challenge. Because everything is so easily redefined, it is hard to find anything concrete enough to hook onto.
Another tradeoff comes in the range of action. Daggerheart supports combat and classical adventuring, but that is only a subset of the range of action it supports. As a result, using Daggerheart to run a standard dungeon adventure would be more or less tying one hand behind the system’s back. Again, this is a genuinely good thing. It is great to have a wide range of potential actions in play. But it in the absence of the simplicity of D&D’s action model, it raises a key question of what the core loop[1] of play is supposed to be.
So far, these things are all things I think of as Daggerheart’s strengths, so I am ok with the fact that these tradeoffs are slightly complicating my life. The one remaining challenge is the one which might actually be a sticking point, and that is the fiction of powers in Daggerheart.
The mechanical model of domains and powers is slick and tidy, but I don’t know what it really looks like in a world. Magic is, after all, a big part of world building, and in a system like this I will frequently look to the logic and implications of the magic system to determine what makes for an interesting setting. The problem is that the power system – as presented – kind of doesn’t *have* any implications. Between the reskinning of specific effects and the fact that I’m really not sure if the domains even exist in fiction (and what it means if they do), it kind of feels disconnected.
Having run in circles a bit, the one pattern that suggests itself is also the one hard point of the system – the classes. Unlike the domains and powers, the classes
So, that might work, and I’ll need to think about it. In any case, I suspect that eventually my hand will be forced, and I’ll be grateful for the impetus, but until then, I shall be noodling.
1 – The “Core Loop” is a nerdy way to say “What you do in the game”, focusing on the idea that there are usually repeating patterns, like “Go to a dungeon, return to town, go to a dungeon, return to town”. Actual play always complicates this, but it’s valuable for a game to have a sense of what its core activities are going to be. One sidebar result of all this is that as I think about writing frames and taking lessons from the Daggerheart model, one unexpected lesson is the the *absence* of core activities from a frame writeup is a gap to fill. It might sometimes be implied by the principles, but it seems worth making explicit.
2 – In theory, the ancestries provide similar guidance, but there are so many of them that they resist thinking about too much. They are more of an excuse than a structural pillar.