Daggerheart - First impressions as a player
Not gonna lie, I never thought of myself as the target audience for this kind of game. I am not a Critical Role viewer. I also am not super into kitchen-sink, modern d20 fantasy, which is the audience this game is courting. I am also not a PbtA-head, and have only played a couple of one-shots in systems that adopt those mechanics. At no point during the game’s development did I care to follow up on its progress and see the shape it was taking. Then it dropped and I played a one-shot online.
It seemed robust and streamlined. I suggested to the other GM in my home group to take a look at it, since he likes narrative mechanics, but also loves modern fantasy games. I thought he’d find it interesting at least. And he did. Enough to plan a whole campaign while I would be on GM-hiatus during the summer. Turns out he’d been itching to run a game in Runeterra (the setting from League of Legends and Arcane), and Daggerheart was the system that made it click for him.
A few sessions into a new campaign and I gotta say, I’m really digging Daggerheart as a player.
For context, I don’t get to play nearly as much as I GM, but I felt like it was a good time to give that a break and let someone else run our home game. It further solidified something I’ve been feeling for a minute, which is that I have very different tastes and aspirations as a player than I do as a GM. The reason is simple: I love coming up with weird characters.
More specifically, I do like messing around with the bells and whistles of a character kit to come up with a unique concept. Perhaps I just haven’t had much opportunity to be a player in OSR systems, or not long enough to see meaningful character progression, diegetic or otherwise, but I do like having access to various abilities, especially if they are flavorful, like much of Daggerheart’s suite of domain cards are.
Currently in the campaign I am playing in, my character is a Clank Brawler, who is conceptually a Rock-Em-Sock-Em robot as a PC. The system does a great job of supporting this player fantasy, regardless of its specificity, and every new ability I gain lets me further tailor this character’s kit. This is a fundamentally different playstyle to the games I run, and much closer to the kind of game that was my introduction to the hobby (5E).
DISCLAIMER: At the time of writing this the Brawler class is part of a playtest packet and not part of the core rules, however it was made publicly available to test upon starting the campaign and is supported via Demiplane which is the character keeper I have been using.
As a GM, I’m fairly comfortable running a game with little to no meta-progression, since I can build diegetic progression into the campaign via faction rewards and sweet sweet loot. I like the idea of extrinsic rewards existing in the fiction, driving the players to go out and find them. It lets me focus on prepping locations and factions over plots, since stories will be generated in pursuit of those goals anyway. In Daggerheart, I don’t really have that incentive to go and obtain power from the world. I know that I will get stronger purely through levelling up. I don't mind this at all.
That said, I am less interested in the world as a result. I only really care about details that pertain to the current quest. While I feel empowered to go off-script, and our GM is certainly not railroading us, there isn’t much reason to stray from the obvious quest hook. I don’t really need to obtain any magic items. In fact I don’t need weapons or armor, period, as a Brawler.
So in lieu of an external motivation, I can come up with an internal one, or I can just admit I’m here to kick ass and level up. Part of this is motivated by the playstyle of my group, who are very much optimizers and power gamers. Used to be they would think twice about getting into a scrap, but not anymore.
Remarkably, I find Daggerheart’s combat to be really engaging. While it is slower than the average OSR battle, it feels more engaging than 5E or Pathfinder 2E combat just by employing the spotlight system. You don’t have to wait 30 minutes between turns, you can call for the spotlight at any time. It makes it much more conversational and the group is encouraged to coordinate maneuvers together. Whiffing an attack roll still sucks, and a lot of GMs aren’t going to portray what a failure with hope looks like in the fiction, but at the very least you generate currency to spend on your next action.
On the note of meta-currencies, there is a builder/spender type economy at play here that makes combat feel quite dynamic. Generating hope is always great since your best abilities will cost 2-3 points to activate. It's very gamey, but it doesn't chafe with the fiction. In a way, it kind of feels like it is emulating anime battles (from someone who doesn't really watch anime).
My biggest worry with the system is that level progression is entirely at the mercy of the GM. There is no XP reward for questing, looting or killing monsters, so it is purely based on milestones. As such, a GM might feel inclined to create a rigid campaign structure to ensure players hit those milestones. I am not a fan of milestone leveling for this reason. I think players are encouraged to take agency when they know what they need to do to level up. Here, you are gated within levels and tiers of play, so it would have been nice for some optional XP rule to be included where players can choose how to level up, or at least know how far along they are.
Then again, Daggerheart is the kind of game that asks the players to have some agency over the fiction. The worldbuilding is done in collaboration with the whole table as opposed to just the GM, so it is feasible that in that session 0, a character’s motivations could be tied directly to the world. So far, my motivation has been that I want to reclaim my glory as a prizefighter. My GM clearly paid attention, because he tied some campaign threads to an underground fighting ring. It’s worth giving GMs something to work with like this, because the fiction should motivate players just as much as the meta-rewards. Levelling up in this case is at the mercy of where the story is going.
The other players in this campaign, who were my former players, came from much lighter OSR inspired rulesets than what Daggerheart offers. As a rule, I don’t like running games with PC build-optimization as a focus, as I think it leads to some serious disappointment when characters end up dying. I like getting into the game quickly and finding characters through play. Daggerheart doesn’t have this problem like other games might. You have to opt into character death as part of a Death Move, since this game puts a focus on the narrative above all else. So if it's not a particularly satisfying moment to have your character die, then you don’t have to. There will still be consequences.
This fixes a huge problem I have with modern d20 fantasy RPGs. They ask the player to invest a lot of time, effort and emotion into their characters but still can result in a very unsatisfying end with a few unlucky rolls. Even worse is the possibility of a TPK which is often a campaign ender. OSR games streamline character creation to allow for quick re-entry into the adventure, so no one really has to sit out for long before they are back in the game. Daggerheart, I think, provides the best solution I’ve seen for a modern fantasy RPG that asks players to emotionally invest in their PCs but also needs the campaign to provide stakes. Death is not always a meaningful consequence to failure, and it is nice to see a system that mechanically understands this.
I also think that Daggerheart streamlines character building through the use of domain cards. It doesn’t limit options, but it does make the presentation and player choice a lot easier. The part that takes time is really building the character’s personality and connections. For what it’s worth, I think you are ok to skip that part if you are the type of player who wants to figure a character out through play.
I think for new GMs it can be really daunting to take a meatier system like this and use the fiction to influence the mechanical elements. That’s why a failure with hope might not do anything for the player beyond letting them keep the spotlight. At our table, it is a soft rule that failure with hope means you pass the spotlight to a teammate. But really, every roll should change the fiction in a more meaningful way. It’s just hard to improvise that stuff on the fly when you aren’t as familiar with this type of fiction-first resolution, or are still getting to grips with juggling all the mechanics at play.
I’ll also say that combat does take a while here. The pace is about the same as 5E in my experience. Combat is always a slower part of gameplay, since players are thinking through their actions in more detail. Even without strict initiative, this continues to be the case. I think when everyone gets a hang of the system it will run smoother, but it’s not going to be as expedient as Mork Borg or Into the Odd. Then again, in those games, combat is not meant to be the primary activity of an adventure, but rather an intense situation to resolve as quickly as possible. In Daggerheart, combat is not only a given, but a big part of the fiction. You are playing action heroes, after all.
All this said, it’s no small feat that Daggerheart is able to streamline so many of the clunkier elements of modern d20 systems, while introducing new mechanics to keep track of as well. It simplifies everything: hit-points, armor, stress, and even currency to trackable slots on the character sheet. Even damage gets simplified with different thresholds dictating how much HP to mark, so you aren’t subtracting huge sums of damage from an enemy’s hit point total. Do they fundamentally change the way you play the game? No. But you spend a lot less time fussing over those details. More impressive is that those systems still retain their depth, if not more so now that they are presented so clearly.
Overall, it’s been really refreshing to dive into a traditional, high-fantasy game, but one that isn’t weighed down by 50+ years of baggage. I definitely prefer GMing over being a player, but it’s been a nice change of pace for me. I can’t dedicate my time to prep this summer, so it’s been a real privilege to have one of the players step up and run their dream game. He seems to really be enjoying it, and has taken a liking to the system. The other players have also really enjoyed the opportunity to craft powerful characters and beat the shit out of monsters. I’m more than happy to be along for the ride.
I think I might give DH a stab as a GM someday. Truth be told, I don’t know if it is high on my list of games I am itching to run. However, I am intrigued by it, and I think for a modern take on the traditional fantasy heartbreaker this actually innovates on the storytelling mechanics that many people are coming to these games for. With Daggerheart, I just don’t feel the need to return to 5E. It gives me everything I want out of that system and leaves out all the bits I don’t like, while supporting a more fiction-first playstyle.
It’s perhaps not the most innovative system ever, but it does present a new way to play through the familiar. I am excited to see what comes out of this space, and more hyped to see where our campaign goes from here.