So I played Daggerheart 🗡️❤️ | Luboffin 

I think the reason why CR doesn't really play the way Daggerheart proposes is mostly because Matt is a trad GM. He runs the game like it's 2002, and I really love him for it. I too, got into the hobby with 3rd edition, and I adore its grand ambitions of simulating a cohesive fantasy world, as flawed as they might have turned out to be. Turn-of-the-millennium games were very GM-focused, they revolved a lot around worldbuilding, had epic scope, a strong central plotline, and used a lot of older procedures (dungeoneering, camping, watches, random encounters, etc.). This is also why I think the Matt Mercer effect is bogus - Matt may be a great GM, but his style isn't really something people emulate nowadays. Matt's _players,_ however, are much more influential. They informed the development of the modern character-focused style of play, with a focus on growth arcs and intra-party relationships, although it existed beforehand - that's how play-by-post communities used to play. I believe C1 (and C3, albeit a bit less successfully) is the product of those two styles clashing and melding into each other, while C2 is Matt pulling back and letting the players dictate the style. So, while I think Matt would be shifting his style a bit with Daggerheart, the rest of the table would be perfectly at home. Given how involved he is in developing the game, I figure he's also personally looking at broadening the way he runs the game.

06:00 Yeah, coming up with a variety of outcomes for every single roll isn't easy; I remember playing Genesys and having to "read the bones"; i.e. figure out what 1 boon + 1 triumph + 3 failures meant in the situation. However, these being narrative games, the solution is obvious - you ask the players. "Ok, success with fear, you scale the wall, what do you think should be the consequence?" "Uuuh... I send some bricks tumbling down from the top of the wall, and a guard comes to check it out?" "Perfect, as you dive into the bushes, you hear, 'What was that?' in the distance."

As a someone in Europe with a much broader scope and experiences of different TTRPG it's interesting too see how prominent DnD is in the US and how i see critism regarding Daggerheart mechanisms that make no sense at all for me. I mean i have the feeling that everything too different from DnD really loses the players and GM. And at the same time they complain that such or such TTRPG is too much like DnD. DnD being often almost the only TTRPG people play is bad. Bad for diversity and most of all bad to developp more various GM and player skills to play and GM differently.

The way I interpret the 'spend a fear to do something big' is that the GM uses their stock of fear tokens as an indicator of how the party, as a group of characters in a story rather than as players, is feeling. When fear is mounting, narration can take on an element of tension; the environment and atmosphere becomes a little more foreboding and the focus is drawn towards the more worrying or scary aspects of whatever is happening. For example, 'You walk down the empty hallway. Flickering candles light the way and you can see a couple of doors leading into side passages. One of them is open but you can't see very far inside from here.' versus 'As you creep down the hallway, your footsteps echo off the cold, stone walls. Flicking candles cast long, shifting shadows like mischievous spirits. An open door near the end of the passage reveals nothing but inky blackness beyond the reach of the candle light.' Spending a fear token to make something tangible happen in response to that fear stockpile is literally cathartic to the characters experiencing the story as the fear token pool is now reduced, and (hopefully) they will succeed against whatever the fear made happen and generate some hope to adjust the balance. It is possible for Fear to snowball, but I believe Hope is slightly more likely to win out, especially with the changes to the Help action in 1.3 that give a full additional Hope die instead of a +1d6. If the party senses there's a tense, fearful atmosphere, it's time to cash in a bit of their personal Hope stocks to push some positive feelings back into the narrative.

I SOOOO desperately want them to make the deck of cards a part of the gameplay. It would be so cool and such a unique feature for a TTRPG

Wounds is a much better name and narrative than HP. I would go s step further and also replace "Damage Threshold" with "Wound Threshold". Light Wound =1, Moderate Wound =2, Severe Wound =3. So easy to work out how many marks for each threshold, as the severity of the wound would tell you. You can then decide to "lessen the wound" which causes armour damage (use armour slots).

It's definitely an adjustment a lot of people are going to have to make if they aren't used to these types of games. The players have to get more involved in creating things because it's too much work for any one person, unless that person happens to be Matt Mercer maybe.

I would love to see another one shot at a higher level, to see what the possibities are for players in the system. They were like level 2 in thw recent one shot, so abilities and stuff arent going to be as impressive as the higher level stuff

In response to success with fear, I have either been taking the fear for a better narrative moment or attempting increase the tension of the area because of the fear. Whether it’s true or not, example: one of my players succeeded with fear getting someone’s stolen money back from a pickpocket gang. The pickpocketers didn’t see my PC do it but now they were more alert that someone was on to them and were trying to see who was messing with their money. Hope that helps as a small example.

Yeah the "do something big" is vague and narratively stunting if we, as the gm, don't have the fear to use it. But when you do and that perfect narrative moment happens you feel the mechanics at work. The example, one of my players wanted to look through a broken floorboard to peer into the basement to see if he saw anything. He failed with fear on a perceive check and I instantly was like, "ooh, maybe cause there's a hole, maybe the floorboards weak" and I made the floor collapse under him and he fell into a basement where the monsters were.

While I haven't actually been able to play a game yet, something that has been really appealing about the game to me, is how the world doesn't seem to dictate the rules. It's the thing that really rattles me about D&D and Pathfinder (the only TTRPGS I have tried so far), where I have an idea for a character but I can't properly execute on that idea because it either 1) doesn't follow the rules, 2) follows the rules but needs additional resources that I don't have access to, or 3) it doesn't fit the hole in quite the right way, so I have to pad it out with things that I don't want or have no intention to use, but must have because the game demands I have them. And while Daggerheart isn't completely devoid of these traps, it feels like there's so much more freedom when it does come to creating characters. You don't have to follow things like "well elves only come from this specific region, so I'd need to place them there and find an explanation as to how my character got to the start of the campaign" or "This is a deity I really like the look of, however the alignment my character would need to follow them would likely conflict so heavily with the party there'd be no logical reason for me to group with them". And I know you can just eschew these, but there are often so many layers to those choices that you end up being forced to butt heads with it. It could just be because it's new, but it really feels like this game is built to break those things, so you can mould it however you'd like

9:25 - Personally I prefer the idea of not taking a fear in out-of-combat rolls and instead maybe applying some sort of a penalty to the player that rolled, like them taking a stress or losing an armor point, or even taking a point of damage depending on the type of roll (for example climbing a building).

I've yet to playtest Daggerheart myself but from what I've seen and read into it, it feels less like DnD, Pathfinder or other combat oriented games, and more like the StoryTeller system used by Vampire the Masquerade and other WoD games. The rolls, the HP, the style of play, i would go so far as to say players looking at Daggerheart to check out VTM playthroughs to get a closer idea of the mechanics of the game. Succeeding or failing with hope or fear reminds me very much of VTMs crit success, messy crits, beastial failures and succeed at a cost. It takes a bit to get used to, but for a narrative focused system it leads to so many more interesting outcomes and story beats. My short hand for this when I was adapting from Dnd was using the idea soft DCs, when you as a DM don't set an exact number for the challenge and just gage the level of success or failure based on how they rolled. Did the PC make the jump? did they fall on their face, stumbled as they crossed or break a leg trying? Success with Fear and Hope are just a mechanically supported version of that. In places where the consequences are not obvious you can also draw on the characters background or personality flaws, the over confident athlete succeeds the jump with fear, vaulting farther than intended and exposing the party's stealth approach. As for how the DM is supposed to use fear tokens, I agree that their needs to be more specific things the DM can use it for. Rolling with fear is fine for players in the narrative sense, but it happens too frequently and the DM could just stockpile it for one deadly encounter. Perhaps rather than giving the DM fear tokens, the players just incur a penalty on their next roll unless they use hope. Or to get even more out there, fear could be a player resource, certain abilities could be triggered with hope or fear, allowing them to be used even when a player is out of hope, but triggering the ability with fear has consequences, it could be weaker than normal, or even more powerful but detrimental to your companions.

After reading the playtest packet I sort of came to the same conclusion, in that the game runs very differently the Critical Role actually plays games. I think the problem a lot of people are coming up against is that they think they are suppose to be preparing things, and Daggerheart is suppose to be more improvational, so having the tokens is more a que to make something dramatic happen.

12:55 I don't have this problem. All I do when my players roll badly is follow the fiction even if it means the enemy overwhelm them and maybe even kill them. Don't drag out the fight or lessen the challange just because you want them to succed. Success is valuable only if earned.

The manuscript needed more instruction and less coaching. It was difficult to pick up as the GM! Kinda scared me away from Candela, if that book is written in the same style.

I haven’t playtested (or even read) Daggerheart yet, but I paused when you showed the Touchstones page and…is it just me or is it super weird to refer to Lord of the Rings as a “series” of books, but not of movies? And to say series for ASoIaF and LotR but not for Earthsea (unless they actually just mean the first book?) or Wheel of Time? I accept that this is a super weird copyediting quibble, but it just got under my skin immediately😅

I'm excited to hear your thoughts about this fun looking new game and how's it developing.

They really need to change "hope" and "fear" to "heart" and "daggers". That way at least the name would make sense.

On success/fail with fear/hope I feel like there needs to be more flexibility. In my view the GM should have the option of either imposing a complication OR taking a fear token. This way if there's a circumstantial detriment they can easily award, great! But if there isn't or they are having trouble thinking of one they have fear to fall back on. Similarly I think success/fail with hope doesn't need both a benefit AND hope. I'd be in favour of the GM also having agency on whether to award hope or not. Again, this gives GMs an easy default rather than encourage endless complications/benefits, which in the Powered by the Apocalypse systems the idea comes from is a known problem.

Great review. The fear dynamics and player tokens feel a little unnecessary. But to each their own, I guess.

You nailed it for me with your question right at the top of the video. I have the bandwidth for one ongoing game in my life. The five people at my table are pretty casual gamers. But, we all know how to play DnD, have been playing and world-building for years, and have invested money (in the case of us two alternating DMs hundreds of dollars) in books, bundles, etc. We'd need a game to provide an awfully compelling reason to learn a new system and throw aside our investment in DnD, especially if it's another fantasy setting with basically the same character classes and races. I really want to run Blades in the Dark, which is obviously a whole different setting and vibe. But a different fantasy game? Why? I haven't tried Daggerheart, but I've watched several review videos and it doesn't feel like people are feeling that compelling reason. People who play multiple systems at multiple tables might be up for this though and have a great time.

An issue I had with the Hope and Fear mechanic is that I couldn't see the justification in-game. With a d20 is intuitive: you role to see if you succeed in a task given the circumstances, your modifiers add your experience and ability in such task, and advantage or disadvantage show how favourable the circumstances are. But hope and fear... My only guess is that's the character being positive or pessimistic about the task, but even then it feels weird, in-universe, how it affects other aspects of the game, beyond "that's just how the rules are" Do the beta test rules explain something in that line?

I think I can safely say that Spenser isn't a game developer who works for me. This fear and hope stuff, sorry, but that's just silly to me. And even disregarding this, I think his games are aimed at only one very specific set of players and not at TTRPG Players in general.

Maybe it's just the novelty of it, but I'm LOVING Daggerheart right now. We'll see how I feel in a couple weeks, but both sessions I've played so far have been recent gaming highlights for me.

I get why they made all the classes and ancestries the same as D&D - it's so people can port their existing characters over with minimal fuss. However, it really makes it feel so much like a 5e knock-off. Why change if it is just the same thing? It would have been great if they at least removed elves, dwarves & halflings to make it *slightly* different and distance themselves from all the old Tolkien baggage.

I really don't think Daggerheart is for me. For a start I'd want any long-format game to be like an epic novel, and not "cinematic". Spenser's constant use of the language of cinema/direction was really immersion breaking (The camera is doing what now? What camera? Are you implying that precision engineering and nitrocellulose are both a thing already in our swords and sorcery world? Or are we playing Civ? You do know where nitric acid tech-tree leads, right?) and just screams frustrated person who moved to LA and never got their "break". That DH rules are written in the same way is just really offputting. They really are trying to square the circle by mixing gritty combat rules with free-flowing narrative forward ones. I highly doubt that this is going to work. Put players in a tactical combat situation where their character's life is at stake and they will act tactically. An obvious flaw in the design is (was?) that the party can limit the GM's options by *not* acting (if one member of the party is particularly effective against an opponent then it makes sense for the other party members to twiddle their thumbs so as not to give the GM the resource to act against them). Yes, that's "against the spirit" of the thing, but it is a problem *caused* by the poorly desgned mechanic that rewards this behaviour by gamifying something that didn't need to be gamified. Other initiativeless systems allow the GM to act as they wish to move things forward. Hit points have always been an abstraction (of a fighting unit's strength) since chainmail. The bucketing mechanic in DH to scale the numbers is just an added complexity that serves no real mechanical purpose. Same with AC. Having the players keep track of HP, Armour, Hope, Action tokens, Stress and other things makes it grittier than 5e - the opposite of what I'd look for in a narrative forward game. At leat 5e only has two fundamental things: HP, and resource-that-drives-your-abilities (be it rages, ki, spell slots, superiority dice, ...). For a live play this mutitude of variables makes it harder for the *audience* to follow along, something they don't seem to have considered without some kind of overlay. I'm going to point at Dork Tales, where stream points can be used to buy "Hurt them more", "Something good happens" etc. - effectively analogous to fear/hope - but they are on the overlay, and curated by people, not mechanics. I really wish they'd let a techincal author at the manuscript before the open beta. Gygax had an excuse for the "stream of consciousness" that were the early rulebooks; he was using a typewriter! It just seems disrespectful to the playtesters to not have even given it a once-over, and likely invalidates the playtest because some things remain poorly described and open to interpretation.