I Played Daggerheart... I have some thoughts... 

Watch our one shot here! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-kDPJSFTf_5o.htmlsi=r7V5QKQHUTK5gVhk

I'm very curious about what the DM of a game has to say, as it honestly feels like the game is far more stressful for the DM.

I found that the go to "yes but" when characters roll with fear is causing one point of stress. If nothing interesting comes to mind, saying it took effort to succeed so it caused a point of stress can be applied to a lot of situations

As far as Daggerheart roll for Stats, what we did was: 1d4 hope & 1d4 fear. Roll both subtract fear from hope. 16 outcomes four of which are 0. 6 results being positive, 6 being negative with a 3 in 16 chance of getting a +1 or -1, a two in 16 chance to get each a +2 or -2 respectively and a 1 in 16 chance to be cursed with -3 or blessed with +3. Afterwards allow to add a +1 to any one negative stat. In theory this conforms to the standard more often than not, but made for a surprising array of strength and weaknesses in our play-test. Plus it doesn't really matter as much as in a min-maxed DnD character. A -3 looks more like an opportunity than a real handicap.

I haven't gotten a chance to play Daggerheart yet, but Dungeon World has similar "You succeeded, but..." mechanics. I know it can be a lot for a DM, but maybe you can shift some of the burden of creativity to the player. "What do you think went wrong?" It's probably not for every table, but I bet it gets faster as you settle into a style as a table. And if you ever get narratively stuck, you can always fall back on giving out a Stress as the downside.

I personally have had problems with rolling for stats because ive generally had negative experiences with it as a player. Point buy or standard array lessens the gap between people, and is my preference when running games.

Yah. @7:30 I'm going to need a d100 table of hope and fear examples.

Observation so far: An emphasis on cooperative play during players turns that looks rewarding. An inventive and Fresh take on initiative that shakes things up. And the hope fear aspect just adds to the randomness of the dice results. I had the same thoughts about narrative descriptions during combat to explain the dice results but that isn't all that different to what the DM is suposed to do. And most importantly it looked fun.

DH "Experiences" remind me of Aspects from Fate - a descriptive word or phrase that you can invoke in a variety of situations for a bonus but that the GM can also use against you. In fact, Daggerheart reminds me of Fate in general, but maybe trying to be a tiny bit crunchier?

As somebody who's played a lot of more narrative focused games that feeling of the half success or success with a twist being weird clears up pretty quick. It's a bit harder in games where rolls are more common I admit but you do develop a muscle for it eventually.

The point of some players not acting in a fight is to minimize the amount of action tokens the GM has to play with. Hope and Fear will happen regardless. If you have a character who is particularly adept at fighting a specific kind of adversary, you don't want other players to make moves. They ought to stand around as meat shields for the GM to waste their limited Fear/Action pool on. That they can do without providing the GM resources.

Great video and I enjoyed hearing your point of view on the game. It was a blast playing with you and hope we can do it again! I was very pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed DH Thanks for the shout out!

I think the easiest way to roll stats would be (1d4-2) x6. And their standard array reflects an exactly average roll of that. This is the beta and they likely didn't want data skewed by characters with all 2s. I'm guessing they'll have at least one other method in the final product.

I haven't played the game, but it really sounds like Daggerheart is much closer to Forged in the Dark or Powered by the Apocalypse systems than D&D, but then tries to shoehorn D&D-style combat into that mold, which is why a lot of the combat mechanics are so clunky and math-heavy to use very FitD resource management. The hope and fear system also seems really cool but like it's designed for out-of-combat stuff and starts to struggle with D&D style combat since that involves so many dice rolls in a very short amount of in-game time and doesn't have strong notions of partial success or partial failure that aren't already built into the math. I think a lot of people, myself included, do want a game that's somewhere in between the FitD/PbtA style and D&D/Pathfinder style, but I think it really wants a more creative resource management system so that you can draw on the same pool of resources for everything but basically run combat and non-combat as separate but related games.

For fear i would not come up with a complication on the spot, the GM just gains Fear. Then when the fear is spent they describe the complication as its being used/activated on their terms not the terms of the dice.

Going through a full Session 0 and creating characters by going through the steps in the character packs together makes a huge difference in this game. Just finished a session 0 and ended up with some of the most interesting characters I have seen and a table of players deeply connected to them and the others, excited to get started.

if you like experiances then you should look at 13th age. They work the same as backgrounds in 13th age.

I disagree with revealing enemy evasion and thresholds detracting from the narrative, simply because Dimension 20 is a very narrative heavy series, and Brennan Lee Mulligan always tells the players what the monster's AC, or the Skill Check's DC is before they roll, and that doesn't take away from the narrative of the series. (Sure it's 5e, not Daggerheart, but I think the point still stands)

I personally like the chunk of making a dnd character, for for my play group my goodness is simpler a better fit. The questions, specifically relationships are fantastic. Also really love the experience bit. Very similar to core rules of Legends/City of Mist and Wildsea. The fear thing, I bet taking a page out of Wildsea and inviting the other party members to supply ideas.

Had a session zero yesterday to get a feel of the system and meet the players, and im really excited for the next session! We had a short combat and one of the players noticed i was a bit quiet and lost (as a player and a character) and gave me a cue to strike. I rolled a crit and incinerated 2 enemies, and that created a nice replaying gimmick within the party, with the character that gave me the cue realy excited and worried, leading to whole talk about forests and fires and a few come backs after as we entered a tavern on a giant tree. I think that with some time and familiarity the battles can flow really well.

Been DM'ing a regular D&D campaign for 3 years and ngl, I love the Daggerheart Character creation, I've made more characters in daggerheart already then I have ever made in 5e - and I made a lot, so I'd argue that's a matter of taste :D

Thanks for another great video. I also like the team actions (don’t know if you guys did it at the table), i feel DH encourages players to team up more and come up with interesting ways to describe how they can combine abilities.

The more I hear the less I want to play it. I like rolling for abilities. It sounds like it's harder on the GM. Thanks for the review

I tried building something similar to the Experience systems for the Backgrounds in my homebrew game system I'm building, but as I was building it, the more I hated how loose it was and it became nearly impossible to balance it due to the difference between narrow and broad skills, as well as deciding if the roll constitutes that skill or not. I ended up reverting back to a hard list Skills system because it's a lot easier on the DM to choose from a shortlist which proficiency to apply to any given roll. I've downloaded the playtest, so I'll take a look at it to see if it solves the issue I was having.

Everyone playtesting Daggerheart feels like watching people discover that other TTRPGs exist in real time.

While I do Apreciate them making the system I struggle to see myself running this - it comes with a requirement of knowing the players because I can see alot of folks bouncing off hard due to the vagueness of the turn rules

As far as stat generation goes I think I read something where the total of all six has to equal 3. There could be room for some min maxing and taking more penalties in some stats to bump up others. But personally I like the standard array, as I always roll low stats.

One problem I've heard another content creator bring up is the death system. It does feel like it take the impact of death out when you can choose to take a scar rather than die. Of course, the dm gets to decide how debilitating it is. But then if the injury is bad enough to disable the character, some of the prosthetics and magic items in the book are better than what you lost.

Its strange to hear you say character creation was not so exciting or made you feel in touch with the character, the whole section of background questions and relationships with other folks is core to the creation and engages you with the real meaning of your version of the class as well as your hertiage and background. Its the best part.

Appreicate this content! Im going to adapt the combat flow mechanism for my 5e table. Seems freeing.

Where do you get the art that you use from? I'd love to find that picture with the black spikes coming out of the ground.

From what I see, I think having a list of pre-established suggestion wrinkles for rolling with fear would help massively. That way, if the GM can't think of something off of the top of their head, they can just pull something from the list (or otherwise, look to the list for inspiration while coming up with their wrinkles).

Spot on. Everything I thought and then everything you called out as a potential issue was

Rolling with fear difficult? Nah, that would be the fun part. I've been using partial successes in my White Wolf games for years.

The armor system means that when a PC takes damage, there's 5 steps to go though, 1 of which is a decision step. Comparitively, in 5e it's 3 steps and they're all just math. So yeah, it will take longer. But on the other hand, compare how healing works, In 5e it's 2 steps with a lot of counting. In DH it's 1 step, no math. There's also generally less math happening in other parts of DH combat, because there's not the potential to stack as many buffs and bonuses as in 5e.

I haven’t had the chance to try out Daggerheart. Looks interesting

The character design process was great for my 9 and 11 year old kids.

Seems like modern OSR design theory combined with the ol White Wolf system.

I don't care for Daggerheart, but fuck rolling for stats. Good for them picking the array.

I have 3 concerns with Domain cards. First, spell casters lose a lot of flexibility in spell selection. Second, characters with overlapping domains can’t select the same abilities. Third, only having 5 cards in hand at higher levels and having to spend stress to use the other abilities you earned through advancement doesn’t feel good.

18:15 I would make the enemy lose an aditional stress or losing an armor.

This really is a game made for groups like CR, roleplay heavy, actor types, drama lovers, and people who are willing to take an active part in directing the narrative. It's not going to be for everyone. As to the point about skills, D&D didn't originally have skills, because the game was more abstract and skills were too crunchy. But 2e changed all that. And I'm still not sure the game needs them, at least not in so complex a form.

I reckon you should playtest it in bad faith, so to speak. The idea is to see what happens in edge cases.

Can you comment on character death? From what I've seen it looks like character death will be extremely rare unless it's thematically justified (i.e. the player wants it to happen).

I haven't played it, just watched the CR One-Shot of it, and yeah, just watching, the damage rolls seemed clunky and non-satisfying. Out of the new systems coming out now, I'm most excited for is DC20. I think the mechanic of rolling damage and to-hit into a single roll is very simple and satisfying. The way in D&D and Daggerheart, that you can roll amazing to-hit, and then do almost nothing with your damage... is such a let-down...

My biggest critique of the system that’s independent of types of players at the table is that GMing this system seems like quite the task.

This is a great review. I think it would be fun to play once or twice, but in general this is not my style of game. Especially players feeling like they are going to win every combat and feeling low variance on that - that sounds boring to me. People kill D&D for it's CR system, but it's HARD to try to make balanced encounters where the PCs are threatened but not immediately crushed.

A common comment I hear is that hope and fear both accumulate too quickly for the players and the GM to spend it. Also that the five outcome types is a lot to handle. Would it be a good solution, to have 'normal' rolls (2d12 but no hope/fear, just a success or fail) besides duality rolls, and have duality rolls be a little bit more exceptional rather than having it be the norm? Or would that harm the nature of the game or add too many rules stuff?

you have have a 60% chance for hope, but success is easily modified by the GM for the target evasion or DC.

You could still easily roll for stats, using the D&D scale

I think it's going to be a good game. However, I've seen narrative-forward games like this before. I doubt it'll take over D&D's space as the representative of TTRPGs. Honestly, I doubt that it would make much of a blip on most people's radars if Critical Role wasn't involved with it.

Great video, now do DC20!

My biggest issue in Daggerheart is that it basically gives every player the equivalent of ActionSurge/TwinnedSpell and Alert and a generic damage character can alphastrike every combat without actually being a jerk. Not a low level problem but... higher level with proficieny damage bonuses WEW BUDDY!

Couldn’t players spend excess hope by simply helping their allies all the time?

i have said i think daggerheart is for roleplyers and D&D is for turn base dice rollers. the problem i see is the people that have no imagination or cant think on their feet daggerheart is not for you. if you have fun when you get to a town/city this is for you.

I have a feeling there going to be talk about this game but nobody will be really playing it. What I do hear is people switching to shadowdark.

How many women were in your playtest? I am super concerned that the "whenever" initiative system will end up prioritizing groups that commonly have an easier time speaking out and taking control, and will end up making a worse game experience for people who either don't have the same level of social forwardness (or comfort) or who can be in danger of being overlooked in male-centric groups. Any thoughts?

Something that annoys me is experiences are just so meaningless most of the time, at level 1 you have a +2 to a roll (if you spend a resource) at best from background. Now i dont think 5e's skills are perfect, but any average PC at level 1 will have at least one +5 in their best ability and more slightly less than that. That makes more defined charachters as the mechanics fit. Now theres a debate about how most dms run skill checks and wizards breaking down doors barbarians couldnt, but thats a fairly system agnostic discussion imo. Its just i do all this work to make my unique backstory which grants me bonsues in places only i could get them (which i love) for a grant totaly of making my 11, a 13. WOW i feel so unique and heroic.

Is it true you can crit succeed on any dual role regardless of whether you make the DC or not, even a one one on the two d12s...... If that is so.... that is ridiculous. And there's no critical fail???? That definitely needs to change..... Say like it's a critical success if they get the dual numbers and meet the DC and get a hope..... or critical fail if they dual numbers but don't get the DC and the DM gets a fear!! . I also don't like the weapon damage, I mean a dagger and a long sword both do d8 damage i believe....WWT?? It should be small weapons do D4 damage, medium weapon's do d8 damage and large weapons do d12 damage. . Daggerheart is easy to be OP for players as it is now. . I think the only time you should get hope or fear from a dice roll is in combat and only on a critical role outside of combat! .... That's my two cents....

Ha. Winner.

So Experiences - essentially customer skill names - I love them and they are essentially 13th backgrounds - also similar the “pride” on forbidden lands Duality dice - I thought I’d love these but mechanically they horrible - they suffer from all the success - with failure mechanics in narrative games ; and if a group is having significantly more hope that’s fear roles in a game with more 20 rolls in a night, sorry there is some serious cheating going on - it’s just simple math (critical role had something like 17 hope to 2 fear) - the duality dice being paired is also an issue ; there have to be times when fear is more likely than hope and vice versa … my suggestion is weight the mechanics to d10/d10 with situational modifiers sting the dice up or down to d12-d8 - same curves, higher change of fear/hope - damage … ffs this is just stupid … call it damage and wounds and move on Stress I think is broken - it needs to be integrated into the “hit” mechanic There is no initiative - there is no action economy- there is no stepping on toes ; you can’t say go whenever the narrative makes sense then complaint some people do it more that others - there needs to be a mechanic for taking “more” turns than others and the game has it … it’s called stress - when you give the DM a monster action token, you mark that as stress … then add a rule - when you succeed with hope, if you’ve already taking a turn in a scene, you can take a DM action to replace stress list in this way - I like it but it needs work Re doing nothing - it’s 8%+46%, so 54% vs 46%… doesn’t really factor in. Re crit - monsters will crit Now the elephant … the writing is horrible , the organization atrocious and that needs attention more that wheelchair combat rules. On rules - way too many for a rules lite game, by about 350 pages This should be “boardgame” level of rules - cards should interact with the rules, but not change the rules (ie they are not exceptions to the rules) and fully contained in the cards (domain and class, background etc) Monsters likewise should just be cards and tokens and “should always activate” as they are resource dependent - get rid of the d20, it’s completely unnecessary and homage to D&D that isn’t needed. Seriously get really good editors and a new game designer I don’t want this to go the way of OC which should have been an awesome game drawing on Vaesan, Blades and CoC - I mean it took real effort to mess that up

after 1 minute of listening about combat this game is not for me

Please take this comment as a constructive one, not a critcal one. Meaning this comment is coming from someone who wants to help out, not criticise. Your content is great. Your analysis valuable. But in your script or presentation, you need to reduce the number of times you say the word "really". Down load the transcript and you'll see just how often it is used. As an adjective it adds little. There is not much difference between something being enjoyable or really enjoyable. And when you use the word as often as you do it starts to grate on the listener.

rolling with fear is only more complicated when you're used to the simplest, least interesting "you either do it or nothing happens" resolution DnD implies, you should only be rolling dice if there's risk, so when you're thinking about what might happen succeed or fail on every roll then adding success-at-a-cost is easy, you just give the player both or parts of both

The probability of a critical succes is not 8% as you mention. That’s just the probability of any number in a d12 to land, the actual probability of a critical succes is 0.08*0.08=0.006 or 0.6%. So it is definitely not higher than D&D’s 5%.

yeah i am not a fan of the loose mechanics like no initiative. it feels like it can get to messy and unbalanced.

Now try playing with six randos from your LGS or the internet.

I don't think Daggerheart is for me. The problem with the duality dice is that they turn the very concept of TTRPGs on its head. DMs create a world and a set of problems. The players make decisions to solve those problems, and they make rolls to determine how well their player interacts with the world. With duality dice, players make rolls that not only determine their effectiveness but also rewrite the world around them to an extent. Everything the DM does becomes reactionary. I don't hate anyone for liking daggerheart, but I struggle to see a world where this is ever a quality game system.

Why would you name the good one hope? Hope is evil, hope only serves to raise us up higher so that our fall shall be more devastating

Asymmetrical combat (or anything else for that matter) and I'm out. I'm not playing a game where I'm forced to bring a knife to a gun fight.

Meta currencies AND cards? hard pass.

Played at GenCon, short answer, Daggerheart sucks. If your a Critical Roll Fan boy, then go at it. So many other better games. Hope/Fear is a horrible design.

If you have experience with PbtA you won't have any difficulties playing this game. If you're strictly a 5e person, it's more of a struggle.