- Part one: Principles of play
- Part two: Character creation
- Part three: Classes and heritages
- Part four: Communities
- Part five: Rules
- Part six: Character progression, weapons and armour
- Part seven: Gear and play example
I hate Daggerheart. Of this we can, at this point, be certain.
But you know, I keep struggling to articulate just why I hate it. It’s not Aberrant, engaging in naked, mean-spirited revenge porn. It’s not Eclipse Phase, smugly preaching its libertarian politics at you. It’s not CthulhuTech, throwing gratuitous rape in your face while high-fiving itself for how edgy it is. It’s not… overt.
One way I might try to explain it is that it feels at once pushy and insincere, like a phony socialite. “Darling, it’s so good to see you, muah! Muah! Muah! However have you been, you must tell me all about it! Oh, you’ve gotten divorced, you’re being audited, you’re suffering from six terminal illnesses and your favourite chewing gum was discontinued? How terrible interesting! Well, must be off, don’t be a stranger, kiss-kiss, ta-ta!” The way it keeps throwing interesting ideas and striking visuals at me and then not committing to them makes me feel like I’m being snidely made fun of, like of course it’s all garbage but it’s not like I’ll mind because I’m too stupid to notice, right? And given that his was written by a bunch of YouTube pseudo-celebrities, who can be assumed to be experts on fostering parasocial commitment in people they don’t give a hoot about… I feel like that intuition is not terribly far-fetched.
Another way to explain it: remember how last time I complained that the game felt like ketchup on ice cream? I’ve thought about it, and that’s not quite right. Ketchup and ice cream are both tasty, they just don’t go together. It’s more like… avocado toast. Yeah, I know, complaining about avocado toast is a stereotypically uncool-old-person thing to do, and I am fully willing to cop to being an uncool old person (and when I was young I was an uncool young person, so not much has changed except for the wrinkles). But there’s a reason why it’s become a cliche, and that’s because it so perfectly encapsulates a particular aesthetic, and that aesthetic is very much the one Daggerheart adheres to.
The thing with avocado and toast is that not only do they not go together, but… they are also, in and of themselves, not terribly exciting. They’re bland things that clash – or to put it another way, the clashing between them is the only way they stand out. It’s a taste for people who don’t want an experience, not even the experience of comfortable simplicity. It’s something that’s broken and is only interesting because it’s broken. This, too, is what Daggerheart feels to me. Take out the mismatches, the contradictions, the refusal to colour inside the lines, and there is nothing left.
A third way to approach the same vague feeling of unease is that it feels like every animated series or sitcom I’ve despised for the last half a decade and more. Every Rick & Morty. Every The Dragon Prince. Every Invincible, Hazbin Hotel, The Good Place, Paradise PD, The Orville, Inside Job… ohhhhh, it’s so sad that I could go on like this much longer… But what I mean is, every piece of brainless dreck where the punchline is always that sincerity is stupid and doing things properly is contemptible and wallowing in gore and filth is the mark of a higher intellect, but which is simultaneously oddly brittle in its supposed nihilism, oddly prone to clutching its pearls whenever someone breaks one of the social norms the writers actually care about. The sort that really wants to trigger the squares, while also having HR on speed dial if you should ever come within a mile of triggering it.
Daggerheart feels like that. All the vague categories, all the finicky rules… it’s rigid in all the ways that deny me freedom of movement, yet shapeless in all the ways that deny me a solid place to stand. And on at least some level, I’m pretty sure that the designers made it that way on purpose, because again – they’re YouTubers, people who are used to selling themselves by appealing to a certain target group, and in our messed-up age that automatically translates to making yourself as unappealing as possible to whatever group the target group loves to crap on. Guess who everyone loves to crap on? Tonedeaf, rhythm-free autistic guys. You know, me. This game feels like a direct, malicious attack on me, and not even for the sake of genuine malice but just because attacking me is the best way to look good for the mindless crowds it’s pandering to.
So keep that in mind as I drag myself through another twenty pages of this garbage!
We have reached the GM section of the book, so in best PbtA tradition, we’re going to be treated to the fundamental philosophy of roleplaying that the game is meant to be run by. Only where PbtA games tend to summarise those quickly and effectively, this is Daggerheart, so it’s going to waffle on for ages without making us much wiser.
First off we have the GM Principles:
Begin and end with the fiction. Nothing is every just mechanical, mechanics are just there to represent things that are happening in-story. Yeah, great, but the problem is, there are like a thousand mechanics that have no comprehensible in-story element. Just what the hell does it mean in “the fiction” when the GM spends a point of Fear he picked up half an hour ago? “Begin and end with the fiction” works in PbtA games because PbtA games have mechanics that are hardwired to always have a fictional component. You can’t just tell me to Make It So when you’ve given me this hyper-crunchy mess to work with!
Collaborate at all times, especially during conflict. This is a common piece of roleplaying advice, but here it’s taken a step further. The GM is usually told to remember that he’s not the players’ enemy; his job is to keep the adventure going and give them a reasonable chance. Here, though, the book goes as far as insisting that the GM must “balance presenting credible threats with maintaining the trust of the players so that the collaborative process can succeed.” That sounds unpleasantly like suggesting that the players might stop “trusting” you if you make things difficult for them, which is rubbish – you can trust your GM to be fair with you even when the game is likely to end with your messy death.
Further, the traditional PbtA principle of “being a fan of the PCs” is here rephrased as “being a fan of the players and their characters.” And while the former is good advice – the PCs are the main event, you want to see them do cool stuff! – the idea that a good GM is some kind of fawning fanboy to the players rubs me the wrong way. Look, I hopefully like my players, but “being a fan”?
See what I mean here? I can’t pin it down, I can’t point to a particular point of objection, so I just keep ranting like a lunatic! But I’m telling you, there is something faintly wrong here, there’s something faintly slimy here, a sort of smarmy aversion to genuine conflict (as opposed to one-sided beatdowns on helpless opponents; the avocado-toasters tend to love those) that makes alarm bells ring in my head! “This was written by crappy people who think they’re incredibly wonderful people! Get out, get out, get out!”
Fill the world with life, wonder, and danger. Make it interesting and colourful, basically. Sure, nothing wrong with that idea.
Ask questions and incorporate the answers. Take some help from the players to flesh out the world – ask them what they think should happen sometimes. This is straight from PbtA, and it’s generally a good thing.
Make every roll important. Don’t roll the dice if the outcome doesn’t matter, or if there is only one reasonable outcome. Works for me.
Play to find out what happens. A venerable old PbtA principle, this… but there it tends to mean that you should take things one move at the time and see where the dice and the players’ actions takes you. Here, it’s phrased in a way that makes it sound more like you should “find out what happens” because the players are going to dictate a lot of it with their preferred outcomes. That’s… another one of those things that I can’t come right out and say is dead wrong, but it’s not great, either, it’s wishy-washy, it’s implying a cringing unwillingness to ever be the bad guy that risks making the whole world feel flimsy and unreal. The GM should roll with the punches, yes, but so should the players.
Hold on gently. Basically, this is the GM version of the one back in the first chapter – have some kind of plot development in mind, but don’t be married to it. And that’s still fair enough.
How far was that? Four pages. Ugh.
Next up is GM Best Practices.
Cultivate a curious table. This one means to fill the world with plot hooks and things that the players might want to explore, then see what they bite on. Sure.
Gain your players’ trust. Okay, this is another one that sounds good in theory but gets taken alarmingly too far. Of course a good campaign requires the players to know that the GM won’t arbitrarily screw them over (unless being arbitrarily screwed over is an integral part of the game being played, of course!).
But here the book goes all the way to suggesting that the players should never be allowed to be wrong about anything – if they think something is true, then it must at least be partly true. And that’s… kind of insane. Look, yes, sometimes you can pull a “sure, let’s go with that,” especially if the players’ theory is cooler than whatever it was you had in mind. But this is like the helicopter parenting of GMing. They can’t be allowed to be mistaken, or that’ll make them stop trusting you?!
Keep the story moving forward. Failure should never result in nothing happening, but always in the situation evolving in some interesting way. Sure, that’s usually good advice too.
Cut to the action. When things are dragging, move them along to the next interesting bit. Again, I have no objection there.
Help the players use the game. If a player forgets how their cool powers work or otherwise what options they have under the system, suggest something they can do. Sure, that’s often necessary.
Create a meta conversation. Be ready to stop the game and talk things out OOC. Yes, true, good. A lot of unpleasantness at the table can be caused by people feeling the need to resolve everything IC instead of recognising that they’re sitting alongside other human beings. But of course this devolves into a mention of (ungh!) sAfEtY tOlS, so I am compelled to hate it. I’ll get into just how much I hate sAfEtY tOlS next time, but for now, let’s just say that it takes a particular kind of neurotic point-missing to first note that you can just step away from the game mechanics and have an actual conversation with fellow human beings of good intent, and then introduce game mechanics for how the conversation has to run.
Tell them what they would know. The PCs live in the world and have practiced their occupations for a long time. Give them whatever context that that would logically give them, free of charge. Again, very sensible.
Ground the world in motive. Have NPCs act on what they are trying to achieve. Okay, I guess. Can’t say that so far this game has impressed me with being all about the intricate motivations and the fraught interplay between incompatable goals, but in and of itself, sure.
Bring the game’s mechanics to life. Use the mechanics to highlight the fictional elements at play. Again, this would be a lot easier if the mechanics weren’t so obtrusive and fiddly! Again again, it works for PbtA because there the mechanics are made to interlock with the fiction instead of shambling alongside it like Frankenstein’s Monster!
Reframe rather than reject. If the players absolutely can’t do something, suggest to them something similar that they might try instead. Yep, I’m down with that.
Work in moments and montages. Speed up or slow down time depending on the needs of the story. This seems to overlap with Cut to the action, but okay.
Pitfalls to avoid! Okay, this should be good…
Undermining the heroes. Don’t ever imply that the characters are bad at stuff. Always phrase things like they must have met unexpected and astonishing resistance. Hoooo boy. The example is literally an attack failing and the GM narrating how the mook who parried it is clearly some sort of swordsmaster and that there must be A Mysterious Reason why she’s guarding a random corridor in the middle of the dungeon. I, I, I, I… I can’t even…
Okay, this is not just me, right? You see it too, right? This is not sane! This is not normal! This is actively telling you to treat the players like they were made of glass, and that is AN UNREASONABLE DEMAND TO MAKE.
Always telling the players what to roll. Again, what?! Look, sure, there are times when there are different approaches a player can take, and of course you can let them roll something other than what you had in mind if they can explain why it made more sense. But putting this as a major pitfall is… strange.
Letting scenes drag. Finally a sane one. Yes, keep things moving.
Singular solutions. Yes, another good one. You shouldn’t create scenarios where there is only a single reasonable action to take. That’s boring. Make them at least a little more open-ended than that. Give the players some room to run around and knock things over, that’s where a lot of the fun lies.
Overplanning. Daggerheart is meant to be improvised wildly, apparently. Mmmmmm-hmm. I’ll want to have a look at how you represent NPCs before I make any judgment on how viable that is, but improvising is a lot easier with a simple system, and this isn’t a simple system.
Hoarding Fear. Spend it like a drunken sailor, you’ll get more before long anyway. If anything, it’s good to burn your whole stash early in a fight, because it lets the players start out on the defensive and then gradually gain ground once you’ve blown your load. Fair enough, but will be contradicted before this post is over.
Core GM mechanics! The GM rolls 1d20 for NPCs instead of 2d12 like the players do. A natural 20 is a critical success.
The GM should not always call for action rolls, but should sometimes offer the player success for a cost. Okay. If he does call for a roll, he should make the consequences clear ahead of time. Nnnnnggghhhhhh I am not entirely opposed to this, because more information is usually better for engagement, but it also plays into the ever-present sense of “players are incredibly fragile and must never get cause to be upset in any way” that grinds on my last nerve. Actually, a large part of why this is so frustrating to me is that there are so many points on which I two thirds agree, but the last third is made of PURE UNADULTERATED CRAZY, so I have to scramble like mad to express my objection to it without speaking against my own position!
If you have an Experience and an action that involves it is routine, it might just succeed. Or it might succeed at the cost of marking Stress or something, whatever. Okay, the whole “these things on your character sheet don’t matter unless you spend points to make them matter, except when they do, except when they don’t, except when they do” thing crops up in a lot of other games that tries to be “Narrative,” and they’re always annoying, but here I’m not sure I even understand what the paragraph is trying to say. It’s just waffling. Zero-information data.
GM moves! The GM should make a GM move whenever the players roll with Fear, fail a roll, look like they don’t know what to do next, do something that would logically have a consequence, or “gives her a golden opportunity.” This… this is literally the PbtA rules with some extra bits attached to ruin the elegance of it (avocado-toasters just generally tend to actively despise elegance. Because you know who like elegance? FASCISTS!!!). But… but… what about all this stuff about spending Fear? Wasn’t that supposed to be what regulated the GM’s ability to do stuff?
Every time I think I understand this crap, they add more crap to the crap…
Oh, and a “golden opportunity” apparently means things like when the players exclaim “nothing can go wrong now!”, which I’m not sure why they’d ever do given that there is an actual rule to punish them for it, but never mind…
There’s a whole page telling you not to “undermine” the players with your GM moves. Gaaaah. Okay, I suppose it might be worth pointing out that a success with Fear is a “yes, but…”, and the “but” should not be “but actually no,” but still.
Moves can be softer and harder, and the GM decides when each is appropriate. Yes, that is at least nicked from PbtA without mutilating it in the process, so fine.
There is a whole bunch of GM move examples, and they are literally just the standard PbtA list (introduce a new problem, have their actions cause unintended side effects, introduce a complication from a PC’s backstory, split up the party, etc, etc) except for “spotlight an adversary” and “have a player mark Stress,” which at least ties in with the system as previously established. Great.
See, the thing is, this doesn’t quite contradict what has gone before. Not quite. It’s more like, the book blathered a whole bunch at me about a topic, and then it ran off and blathered about another topic, and then it came back to the first topic and blathered about it some more, somehow saying roughly the same things while also coming at them from a completely different perspective. This is like an alternate paradigm for the exact same rule system. It’s like describing the same thing first in holistic terms and then in reductionistic ones. It’s just so… unnecessary.
Are… are we sure this whole game isn’t a big practical joke? Like, is this another Dungeons: the Dragoning? Is this Critical Role piling stuff onto stuff onto more stuff as a stealth parody of crappy, overly-pleased-with-itself game design? Because at this point, that theory makes more sense to me than most other ones!
Okay, no, it’s just a crappy homebrew that should have been a heartbreaker but the people making it were famous for pretending to play roleplaying games on camera so everyone bought it. The world is a dark, miserable, and deeply stupid place.
Fear points! What can you actually use them for? Okay, I feel like we’ve already been over this. But okay, you can use them to make additional GM moves in addition to any GM moves you’d already make, you can use them to activate special Fear powers in NPCs or environments, and you can use them to activate an NPC’s Experiences, same as PCs can do with Hope points.
The GM is cautioned to be veeeeery caaaaaareful with how much Fear she spends in a scene, because too much or too little can ruining the drama, don’t you know. Okay. Uh-huh. Here’s the thing. If the whole system hinges on the GM knowing when to spend and not to spend, and breaks down if she can’t be trusted to do that… then the system is meaningless. Like, you can just replace it with a single line: “the GM takes as many actions as she damn well pleases, with the purpose of neither overwhelming the players nor making it too easy for them.” Like, that’s what it boils down to anyway! THIS IS MECHANICS FOR THE SAKE OF HAVING MECHANICS. THIS IS STUPID.
Like, what do you lose if you just give the GM infinite Fear points? Nothing! You still get the “Yes, and…”, “Yes, but…”, “No, and…”, “No, but…” results from the double-d12 rolls! You still have the GM needing to carefully modulate the pressure she puts on the players! You still have the GM moves being triggered by the same things that trigger GM moves in PbtA, which works just fine without some additional abstract meta-currency! You didn’t need to do this, you just did it anyway to be freaking cute! Aaaaarrgggghhhh!
Okay, I am legitimately getting a little too worked up about this, it’s probably best that I go lie down for a bit… How much do I have left? Five pages. Oh God.
Improvised Fear moves! Basically, the GM can spend a Fear point to do anything that might otherwise make the players feel like she’s screwing them over, like introduce an inconvenient fact that had not previously been foreshadowed. Which there is already a GM move for, it’s called reveal and unwelcome truth or an unexpected danger. But who cares? Clearly not the people writing this. Clearly not the people buying it and raving about it on forums.
Roll difficulty! It’s like in D&D, basically. 5 is dead easy, 10 is average, 15 is a bit tricky, 20 is hard, 25 or more is demoralisingly impossible unless you’re super-duper-skilled. There are plenty of examples of each difficulty level for a whole bunch of different activities. That’s nice. It’s even nicer than it takes up the last of the pages and I can stop here.
Well, that was intensely unpleasant, and next time is going to be even worse. Because then we get to the section on Safety Tools. (shakes fist at the sky) SAAAAAAAAFETY TOOOOOOOOLS!!!!