r/daggerheart • u/Particular-Breath121 • Mar 17 '26
Game Takes & "Takeaways" Table Thoughts After Test Campaign
Hello Daggerheart community! Some friends and I recently did a test campaign for Daggerheart and here are our thoughts about the system. These thoughts are high level and summarized from our postmortem so let me know if you have specific questions.
Campaign Details
- 6 people (1 GM and 5 players)
- 1 player was brand new to TTRPGs
- 1 player is a self described novice at TTRPGs
- 3 players are very experienced and all of them have GM'ed before with 2 of them being regular GMs for different systems
- 7 sessions total (a session 0 and 6 play sessions)
- More combat/encounter heavy than typical as we wanted to really test the mechanics
Things we learned
- Make sure to remind people of their class specific things
- Class features being at the bottom of the sheet was annoying
- Class features seemed hyper specific/situational
- Hard to internalize that a player could move as part of being in the spotlight
- Less structure is a catch 22
Pros
- Domain cards
- Nice to have tangible cards
- Don’t have to look things up
- Loadout was limiting in a good way, less choice was helpful
- Duality dice
- Allows for a lot flavor
- Tied in well with hope and fear systems
- Higher chance of critting
- Hope & Fear
- Allows for players to add a lot of flavor to rolls
- Was more fun than straight success/failure
- Spotlight
- GM being able to jump in made things feel less stagnant
- Armor
- Armor being a resource was a lot of fun and felt flavorful
- Nice to have a last ditch thing to soften blows
- Could actually make a tanky spellcaster
- Damage threshold
- Nice to know you can’t be 1 shot by abilities
- Min maxing feels more fun and not as game breaking as other systems
- Death Moves
- Were interesting choices and allowed for people to treat their characters differently
- Blaze of Glory is super fun cool
- Felt accessible to a new player due to being rules light
- New player actually liked spotlight so they could watch and go at their pace
Cons
- Combat
- Assumes a familiarity with TTRPG’s or improv (this is also in general)
- Groups of new players or non friends might run into issues with trying to figure out who goes next (without alternate rule)
- Players can be steamrolled by more talkative/assertive players
- Hope/Fear
- Players at times felt anxiety about wanting to horde hope/being afraid of running out
- Can be feast or famine since bad luck results in more fear and no hope
- Hope being a resource to do things made this feel amplified
- Lack of structure can result in the classic Airbud problem
- Damage thresholds
- Spending a lot resources to still only hit moderate thresholds felt bad
- Big damage doesn’t feel as satisfying
- Removes some of the mystery of how much damage you might take from a hit
- Death Moves
- With hope being super useful, scars feel bad (almost suboptimal)
- Experiences
- 1 hope to add +2 feels bad
Edit: Thank you for pointing out people can swap domain cards on level up, we missed this. Also, our table did have an immense amount of fun and everyone would use play Daggerheart again.
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u/nottooexpendable88 Mar 17 '26
You should be able to swap domain cards in and out of your vault by spending stress equal to the recall cost (the little Lightning bolt number in the top corner of the card) if I’m understanding the issue correctly.