How often do you Spend a Fear to add an experience?
Heya! As per the title, I'm wondering how much other GMs spend their hard earned Fear to add a plus two or three to their adveraries' rolls?
Personally, I never tend to- there's almost always a better use, be it a more interesting contextual GM moves or simply activating more adversaries. Unless the modifier is quite beefy (say +4) or the roll really important, it falls into the 5e true strike area for me, where I'd rather just spend that Fear to act twice.
I think this is a bit of a shame! since experiences give so much flavour, and defaulting to playing to your experiences is one of my favourite quriks of Daggerheart- It's a lovely alignment of optimising and roleplay, with the added bonus of creating interesting opportunities for subversion if PCs can force adversaries to play outside of their experiences.
Here are some alternatives I'm thinking about...
- Always apply experience bonuses without spending anything, but mark a Stress when no experience is applicable
- Allow the use of Stress to apply experiences
- When acting in accordance with their experience, Spend a Fear to roll the adversary's D20 with advantage
If nothing else, I think these could make for interesting passives! Whilst 2. allows for the use of stress (which depending on the adversary can go quite unused), 1. creates some really interesting situations if every stress is marked- the adversary HAS to act according to their experiences, be they a stressed and cornered wild beast or a BBEG having a mental break and leaning into their worst tendencies... and 3. could also be interesting for competent enemies, yielding some more consistency with rolls whilst keeping it as an option for fear spends!
But what do you think? Do you find yourself Spending lots of Fear on experiences, or do you have a different work around to the ones I've suggested?