First Impressions Of Daggerheart

i read daggerheart and i think it is kind of neat

2025-06-19

It ain’t D&D!

Here are some of the innovations / changes that D-Heart brings to the table

• An asymmetrical, 2-dimensional Action Roll. Players roll 2d12 versus a target number, which gives them reliable success, while the GM rolls 1d20 for swingy, spikey, unpredictable rolls. Also the player’s of two d12, one is a Hope die and the other a Fear die. So you suddenly have orthogonal outcomes: Success with fear, success with hope, failure with hope, failure with fear. (And doubles are criticals.) This is a little bit Genesys Narrative Dice and a little bit Swords Without Master, and I think it’s awesome.

• Hope and Fear. When you roll with hope (as above) you gain Hope, which is a currency you can spend to activate certain features or perform certain actions. When you roll with fear (as above) the GM gains Fear, which is a currency they can spend to do certain things and to introduce complications.

• Six Stats. Agility (gross motor skills), strength, finesse (fine motor skills), instinct (kind of like wisdom), presence (kind of like charisma), knowledge (kind of like intelligence). So they split Agility in two and got rid of Constitution.

• Narrative Combat. No initiative, no turns, no order. Players say what they do. GM gets to move by spending fear, or whenever a player rolls fear. When a player rolls with hope, then the players get to narrate again.

• Advantage and disadvantage. Tempered. Instead of rolling twice, you roll a d6 and add or subtract it from your 2d12.

• Health track. Okay so in combat you do an Action Roll vs Evasion. On a hit you roll damage. Now, there are three possible degrees of damage: minor, major, and severe. And you have Damage Thresholds, one minor/major threshold and one major/severe threshold. So say your thresholds are 7 and 14. If you take damage less than 7, that’s minor damage and you mark 1 hp. If you take 7 or higher but less than 14 then you take major damage and mark 2 hp. If you take 14 or greater that’s severe damage and you mark 3 hp. Starting characters have 6 hp.

• Stress Track. You have a stress track similar to your health track. Activating certain features and using certain skills costs stress. When your stress is full, you become Vulnerable and overflow is marked on your health track

• Conditions. There are three: hidden, restrained, and vulnerable. How refreshing.

• Experiences. Come up with a couple of tropes or cliches to describe your character. During play you can spend Hope to invoke an experience for a bonus to a roll. This is a little bit like how aspects work in FATE.

• Heritage. Ancestry and community give a lot of flavor and a couple features. There are very simple rules for blending any two ancestries which is really neat. Simply take the 1st trait from one and the 2nd trait from another.

• Domain Cards. This is interesting. So every class has access to two domains. Warriors are blade and bone, wizards are spendor and codex, etc. You have access to every card in both decks that is equal to your tier rating or lower. But you can only hold five active cards. (This is your “loadout”. The remaining cards are your “vault.”) You can swap cards out during downtime, or during play by marking stress equal to a card’s recall value.

• Classes. Tight. You get a class feature and a hope feature. Each class has 2 subclasses that provide three major class advancements: the foundation feature you take at level 1, and then the specialization (level 5) and mastery class (level 8) features.

• Levels and Tiers. Characters cap out at level 10. This is fine. Most D&D campaigns never see anything near level 20 anyway. Levels are organized into tiers: level 1 = Tier 1. Levels 2 - 4 = Tier 2. Levels 5 - 7 = Tier 3. Levels 8 - 10 = Tier 4. You get upgrades and bonuses each time you advance a tier.

• Multiclassing, such a hallmark of D&D, doesn’t work the same way the same way in D-Heart. It is only available at tiers 3 and 4 (levels 5 and 8). When doing so, you give up the chance to take a subclass upgrade in your starting class, but you get the foundation feature of your new class, and access to one of its domain decks, and you can only take domain cards from this new deck equal to half your level.