Been losing every ranked game I've played since placements and not sure why I've been performing so badly. I feel like I play pretty well in the early-mid game and my damage breakdown tends to look OK. If someone could look at my match IDs and tell me where I'm fucking up I'd appreciate that a lot - 99478610, 99299206, 99294223
I’ve been playing TTRPGs for almost a decade at this point, and was very interested in Daggerheart ever since I saw it announced. The hope & fear mechanics piqued my interest a lot and I was hoping to run a more roleplay-focused system for my players. My RPG background is one largely populated by D&D, but I’ve also run Dread and Misspent Youth, and been a player in the One Ring TTRPG and a few others.
My players for this campaign, however, had all only played D&D 5e. Experience ranged from having completed a full-length campaign to only a couple sessions.
In total, the campaign lasted 21 sessions and the players advanced from level 1 to ending the campaign at level 8. I mainly used the Five Banners Burning frame as a basis, but also added in some elements from Age of Umbra as I pleased.
As a GM, the thing I loved the most about this system was the campaign frames. Those alone make the main book worth buying IMO. Every setting feels unique and inspired and creates a strong groundwork for the flavor and world of a campaign.
Using fear was something I really enjoyed as a GM, it gave me lot of opportunities to make combat feel more dynamic and provide direct consequences for the players’ actions, to make the world and its NPCs feel alive. Using fear out of combat took a little bit of getting used to, but by the end of the campaign I was able to do this effectively and enjoy it just as much.
In D&D, I often feel I have to do a lot of extra work as a GM to add elements to a combat to make them feel more interesting or dynamic. This was not the case in daggerheart - every enemy stat block comes with a unique set of abilities that interact with the game in creative ways, and it felt like that kind of extra prep was totally unnecessary for making combats engaging & fun.
Making homebrew for this game also felt pretty easy thanks to hope and stress both being universal resources - my players all gained a set of special abilities over the course of the campaign that required hope and stress to use, and they ended up being pretty easy to implement from my perspective.
Hope and stress as a universal resource was something both me and my players seemed to enjoy a lot. It allowed my players to get very creative with their abilities and let them try a lot of “shenanigans” that would be a lot harder for me as a GM to allow in a system like D&D. Want to backflip off the wall to get advantage on your attack? Sure, if you spend a hope. My favorite iteration of this was letting my players get away with something if they let me gain fear - offering them a “deal with the devil” of sorts.
In general my players seemed to like just how creative this system let them be. From getting custom on how they take their level ups, to features like the “nomadic pack” that let them pull something completely out of their ass once a session, there were lots of little stuff like this that they appreciated having creative agency over.
For my newer players, they also expressed this system felt easier to learn than D&D in general, that it was better as an introduction for those without prior TTRPG experience.
While enemy stat blocks do make combat more interesting by default, holy shit was it a LOT to remember. Every combat, from the beginning of the campaign to its end, I was struggling to remember and keep up with enemy abilities. Even in the very last session against the final boss, I was forgetting passive triggers, despite studying the stat blocks beforehand in an attempt to avoid this issue. While cool monsters do make for more dynamic combats, it can feel like way too much overhead for a GM, and this is worsened more when trying to grab stat blocks on-the-fly for improvised encounters. Maybe this is a skill issue on my part and my ADHD is to blame, but it was such a persistent problem in almost every session I feel like I have to mention it.
The lack of stat blocks in general was also a problem for me (although I understand they’re coming out with a lot more in the hope & fear expansion so I won’t harp on that.)
My players had some issues with how the GM takes the spotlight in combat, specifically regarding how enemies only act when a PC fails a roll or rolls with fear. They expressed multiple times that they felt punished for simply making rolls and that it would be better if they did nothing at all. I know the obvious response to this is that they should follow the narrative, to understand that conflict and failure is part of the game, and that rolls must be made to push the story forward, but it still feels as though these rules are somewhat at odds with the fantasy they are trying to portray. It often doesn’t feel so much as powerful heroes contending with equally powerful enemies as it does heroes slowly dying to their own incompetence.
There were also a number of issues with how players choose to take the spotlight in general. As GM, I like to make my campaigns have high stakes, to make each combat feel threatening and feel like the world is dangerous and potentially deadly if the players aren’t careful. Obviously everyone wants to take a turn in combat, but a lot of the time it would be hypothetically “optimal” for one player to go over and over again as their character is most effective in a given scenario. It feels bad from a player perspective to willingly make the ‘wrong’ tactical decision for the sake of giving everyone a go when combats are meant to be stacked against them to some degree. I think this kind of a grittier campaign is basically not possible to do effectively in daggerheart for this reason, players are forced to not play tactically in order for everyone to have fun. While I can understand this as part of the system, it does seem that this kind of a darker, deadlier campaign is a fantasy offered by the book in some of its campaign frames, which I find misleading.
This issue also extended to me as the GM to a much smaller degree, since I’m not really trying to “win” in the same way. It’s nice sometimes to be able to spotlight a weaker or stronger enemy depending on how a combat is going, but sometimes when a leader/solo has a better chance to hit and a stronger attack than any standard enemy, it makes me wonder why I even add standard enemies to any combat, what they’re even there for.
This is the part that will many of you will have a problem with I imagine. The co-operative storytelling element is a huge piece of daggerheart and one of the main selling points of the game, and I set out with this campaign to get my players more involved in this way. My group is not one that has a done a lot of heavy role play in the past, but I was hoping to get them a little more into it with this system, and as such I tried to slowly introduce them into creating the narrative in their own way. I started out with dream sequences, by asking them what their characters were seeing in these visions and adding omens of my own.
However, as I tried to expand this more and ask my players what they saw in the world, I got a lot of pushback and discomfort. This came to a head when before a climactic battle, I narrated a flashback to an earlier campfire scene where two of the characters were having a conversation, and asked them what they would be discussing in this moment. Both of them looked confused until one said “I don’t say anything”. I tried a little more to get this moment to work until eventually I just moved back to the combat and had them fight. From this point onward I basically abandoned having my players try to tell the story directly in this way.
By the end of the campaign, I did get my players to role play and engage with the fantasy a lot more, but I think getting players to co-narrate and shape the world is a big ask for those new to role playing games. Just getting players to speak in character in D&D is already a big enough ask, and I think people often overlook how much of a hurdle this is for this system. Maybe I should have been more direct from the beginning and tried to get my players more involved from session 1 rather than “easing them into it”, but I still think it would’ve been very difficult either way.
All in all, I enjoyed Daggerheart a lot, but it also made me appreciate a lot of what works in other systems. I came to DH in part because of the issues and frustrations I had with D&D, but I’ve come to understand a lot more of what I like about it. Simplified monster stat blocks have their advantages. The DM being the sole narrator is a valid preference for a lot of players, more agency isn’t always better in that way.
Anyways, I hope my ramblings here could be of some use to somebody. Good luck to all you other GMs out there 🫡
Just a hot tip I wanted to share from the discord - because the matchmaking still considers her a frontliner, you’ll get a worse comp if you queue silver first. But you can still swap into her in the pre-game phase - so for better comps, it’s best to queue a carry or assassin and then swap to her after. Might help you win those placement games