Daggerheart and Quinns Critique
Quinn is a TTRPG reviewer based in the UK.
He recently made a very extensive and enthusiastic review of a PBtA / Dungeon World mod called Stone Top.
https://youtu.be/wH5-uQj4uOA?si=PxN-Xumush_8l2Kd
Towards the end of the review he very briefly contrasts Stone Top with popular fantasy roleplaying games. I found the comments and criticisms interesting, and I wanted to talk about them with some other Daggerheart players.
People are obviously free not to enjoy the style of review, not want to watch a two hour video about another game, or generally disagree. It is a long review and I just want to talk about 3 points because I feel like these are areas where there is the most potential for Daggerheart to improve.
- Player questions
- Community
- McDonaldification of Fantasy
The common theme is going to be that these are things which Daggerheart content particularly 3rd party and homebrew content can do better. In the sense that game gives writers the mechanicals structure to respond to Quinns critique in interesting ways.
Player Questions
Player Questions are where the GM asks the Players questions which let them colour in details of the world. Daggerheart can do this through the Environment Features, Feature Questions. rereading the core rules Its not clear from pg 241 RAW, that these are directed at the GM as prompts in describing the features, but thats how I had interpreted them.
I think that it could be an excellent idea ito try presenting these questions to players, and that environment stat blocks are written with this play style in mind. The trick is phrasing the questions in such a way that they are conveying the core information while letting players imagination fill in the scene.
If you are making a campaign frame or other content please include environments, with features. Please include the questions and structure them that they reinforce or explain crucial details of the setting, and that answers arnt going to break the game if we ask the PCs.
Community
One of the major weaknesses of TTRPG story telling has been the emotional detachment between the characters and the situations they find themselves in. Its often not narratively clear why these people are regularly engaging in this violence. This isnt about avoiding violence in TTRPGs is about providing more relatable, likeable and well motivated reasons for characters to repeatedly put themselves in exciting but dangerous situations.
An answer, which is more satisfying than tje search for treasure is that the community needs it. Daggerheart already includes this idea of characters having an existing relationship and an established community.
Campaign Frames need to have the communities section and inciting incidents. Their should always be the option of being established members of an existing community which has clear link to the inciting incident. These communities need to be fleshed out enough that they are a real option, and can accommodate multiple PCs choosing them as their heritage.
McDonaldification of Fantasy
Lore dumps are hard to manage. The amount of context you might need to understand a setting can be daunting. Some properties manage this making sure that for everything make the story part of the fanatasy genre is always what youd expect.
This makes the barrier of entry really low. But it also weakens the setting and story. This can also be called kitchen sink fantasy. This often means not explaining very much of the setting, and including tropes which dont work well because they're expected.
Daggerheart campaign Frames should be able to manage this well with specifics for Ancestries, and Classes. But creators need to be willing to subtract and push.
For example Its ok to have only 1 sentient race, or whatever works in your setting, and its OK to have Ancestries character options as a single characters direct parental lineage.
Most importantly you need to develop the campaign frame session zero questions such that in the asking they provide specific answers to the characters current understanding about the world. How much does your character know and not know about the world, and how knowable and open to understanding is the world. And the questions in this section need to not stop at session zero but be there for when you encounter whatever feature make this campaign unique and distinctive.
Quinns Critique
The thing that I was most struck by Quinns view was how Daggerheart already had all of the mechanical tools to address the issues being raised. I am sure that the people behind the core content are already thinking deeply about all the same issues. If you are going to try and make the best Daggerheart content you can, please use all the great tools that the system gives you, and make the game the best it can be.