Daggerheart

My regular dungeons and dragons group decided that it would be fun to try a new role-player game, named Daggerheart. This game was made by the famous Critical role team, known for Vox Machina, The Mighty Nein etc. I was looking forward to trying a new role-playing game, I only had experience with dnd, and was curious to see how it would feel any different.

Starting out, understanding the rules felt somewhat daunting. I downloaded a series of large pdfs that outlined the rules, but were daunting to get started reading. I imagine I felt similarly when starting dnd, though I remember my DM helping me along the way. After skimming through the crucial parts, I thought it would be best to see a playthrough of the game, available on youtube. My conclusions from the playthrough that it was not overly different in terms of role play to DnD, but instead of rolling a d20 for most checks, one instead rolls 2d12s.

This was when I began character design, using the demiplane website. I already had in my head that I would like to play a healer character, which I’ve found to always be useful in new games. Looking at options, it was between seraphs, that appeared in style to be more similar to paladins than clerics, or my final choice: druid.

Druids are definitely a fun class in terms of roleplay, though I didn’t know what quite to expect from Daggerheart’s implementation of this class. From the beginning, it was clear that I needed to commit to one of two implementations of a druid, either a nature based spiritual healer, or an elemental caster. At third level, there seems limited versatility between the two, hence I stuck to my initial intention as a healer. I picked spells appropriate for this purpose. I did feel like I had a wide range of abilities, though grew somewhat concerned that many of these abilities spent a large amount of hope.

When choosing my character race and origin, I thought to go basic choosing a Wildborne faerie. I saw that faeries had a flying abilities that perhaps would help with mobility to heal. Being wildborne felt thematic to being both a faerie and a druid. It should be further noted that the special faerie ability, luck bender, while powerful, also used a large amount of hope. I quickly realised that my experience in this game would be largely dependent on having a lot of hope.

And this highlights one of the big limitations that I found with the game. Almost all useful abilities this character had dependency on using a 2 or 3 Hope. To gain hope, one must roll the 2d12 dice, and either get a higher number on the assigned hope die, or roll the same number. While on average, one would expect this to occur for over half the times thsee dice are rolled, it is still highly probably that this could occur only a few times in a full session of a under a dozen rolls. Midway through the session for example, I wanted to use the “Healing Field” spell to heal all the party members, that can be cast once per long rest. There is an option to increase the healing to 2 healing points, if one spends 2 Hope. At the time, I only had 1 Hope, but did not want to use up this once per Long rest opportunity to heal all party memebers to full, due to one missing hope point. I then unconsciously found myself in a position, where I had to “farm” for Hope. When I say this, I mean the most useful thing for my character was to take the lead in asking the DM questions of the dungeon, so that I would need to make many ability checks, that could potentially gain me a Hope. This felt unnatural to my regular play style, and found that by doing so, I took these rolls away from other party members, who were also in need of Hope, or may have better ability scores to perform these tasks. In the case of “Healing Field” spell, I never got the opportunity to cast the spell, as by the time I had gained the needed Hope, we had taken a short rest.

All-in-all, perhaps the experience would be made better, by having more abilities tied to Stress insteda of Hope, or the abilities to Hope dependent characters like druids to have other ways to gain hope. I’ll definitely try again at some point soon.