Daggerheart GM Tools, High-Level Play, And Miniature Discussion With The Designers

With the release of Daggerheart, many fans are opening up their core rulebooks, learning how to teach their players to roll up characters, and beginning to craft a variety of adventures in the many Campaign Frames. Ahead of the Daggerheart Core Rulebook release, we got to talk with Lead Designers Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall about their ethos behind designing Environments and Adversaries and how they hope to support high-level play.

If you want to learn more about Environments in Daggerheart be sure to check out our exclusive reveal of some Environments and conversation about how to implement them.

Daggerheart has free-flowing combat, character builds with player-created experiences, and an emphasis on the adventure and narrative while trying to make sure mechanics don't get in the way. For a game that seems to lean into roleplay, I was intrigued to learn more about the tools that DMs would be offered.

How Daggerheart Helps You Build Adversaries And Encounters

"One of my favorite sections in the book is where we go through how we build different adversary types and why we make the choices that we do," Hall explained "Hopefully, it feels like a conversation with the designers. The goal there was to make it as approachable as possible with as many examples as possible so people can refer to it almost like a recipe book."

While the design of an Environment or Adversary can begin with the prompts and discussions with the designers, there's also careful math behind the balance of the game. Starke walked me through the process.

In this example, Starke discussed building a Brawler adversary type and the questions that would prompt "Why do we want a Brawler? What's the whole reason why we're making the Brawler? Why wouldn't I want a Minion here?" It's those kinds of questions that help solidify the idea of the creature in your mind. Then the GM can use the Battle Point system, like ordering off a menu, to pick what Adversaries should be present.

For those who want to make encounters easier or harder for the party, there are also rules for how you should add or remove Battle Points from your 'menu' to ensure the encounter has the level of impact you want it to.

Teaching A GM High-Level Play

While we had spoken about building encounters and Adversaries, I wanted to touch on what resources were included specifically for high-level play. This kind of play is what many TTRPG players greatly look forward to, but it's also quite frequently where the game starts to ask you, as the GM, to perform your own heavy lifting.

"There's a section in the book that charts out story structure and the way you might approach it over the course of a campaign. It's a smaller section, but we wrote it in combination with one of our designers who also has a background in novel writing, one of our game designers who has also written on many seasons of Television."

"All of these storytellers put their brains together to figure out 'what is the most basic way we can present story structure so that someone who has never tried it and never thought about it can approach it'"

Hall described a table that GMs will be able to use that should take the mystery out of creating a story from level 1 to level 10 without being intimidated by it.

For Daggerheart the level cap is 10, what the game calls Tier 4 play. There's also tips for GMs to explain what a Tier 4 Adversary would look like, what power do they have, etc. Starke explained that a lot of the feedback they got on Tier 4 play was that it was slower.

"When that armor score goes up to 14 or 17, now I'm having to do that math every time I'm getting hit. That became really crunchy and the game slowed down. [...] Armor changed that it now lowers a threshold and doesn't rely on doing heavy math in the moment and that was really core to make a game that focuses on storytelling."

Advice For New Players Getting Used To Roleplaying

It's no secret that there is a heavy emphasis on roleplay and story-telling in Daggerheart, this isn't just intrinsic of the format but it's something that Hall explained was at the core of designing Daggerheart.

"One of the things that we do when designing - whether we're looking at a class, an ancestry, an adversary - is to say 'what story are we trying to tell by presenting it as an offering'" Past that Hall described that their goal was also to make those options as open ended as possible.

If you want to play to the tropes of high-fantasy, grimdark, etc then it's easy to find those ways to play but if you're also interested in creating a character that goes against or subverts those tropes they didn't want the system to hold back that creativity.

Another way that Daggerheart welcomes new players into roleplay is with Connection Questions. "When people are making their characters in the character guide, there's a selection of background questions and a selection of connection questions. The background questions are designed to help the player create their character, but most importantly, to let the GM know what the player wants. It prompts the players to give the villain from the backstory, their hometown, and the thing that they're seeking."

Starke joked that it's a way for a GM to know "who do you care about the most?" while slyly miming writing down notes.

"For the player-to-player side, by making connections from Session Zero, saying 'I am connected to you because…', now the players also have those same tags in those notes. They can plot ways to bring it out or support the stories that each other wants to tell."

Manage Your Resources

In reviewing how the game had evolved as the open beta period had continued, I was interested in just how much there is for a player to keep track of. They have their health and abilities, but also armor that can degrade, stress that can build up, and Hope to earn.

At a lot of junctions in the game, you'll be presented with choices: do I take some extra damage or use my armor to protect myself? Should I risk more stress to unleash a powerful attack if it leaves me vulnerable?

For lack of a better term I wanted to understand what led them to decisions to include resource management that could feel so 'crunchy' and how that affected the game mechanically as well as through story.

"One of the big reasons why is that we wanted it to feel different when you were blocking with a shield versus dodging out of the way of an attack," Starke explained. "We wanted to create some flow from mechanics to narrative."

"There's a little bit more mechanically, and resources to use," referencing Hope specifically as a resource that you gain almost every roll of the dice. "All of those contribute to the genre that we're playing with here in Daggerheart which is the Heroic Fantasy genre"

Hall added "we want all of that resource management, all of that math and the dice rolling, to also feel like it's narratively aligned." Pulling from a previous session that they had been playing in Hall explained that none of their rolls were earning them Hope. "That told me the place that my character was in, I was looking more towards my abilities that require me to spend stress."

"Stress is one of my favorite mechanics because, to me, it feels like how actual stress works. You can spend your own stress to do cool things, you can decide to do things that will stress you out, and the world can inflict stress upon you."

Talking about this experience Hall not only discussed how it gave them totally different gameplay options, but also how it worked to inform the narrative of their character and how they were feeling in the moment.

Daggerheart's Beta and Live Stream Success

Daggerheart may just be releasing but it's been in the publics eye for some time, in the form of a public beta as well as being featured in multiple Critical Role mini-series and live shows. I asked Starke and Hall if they remember when during this period they really felt like Daggerheart was going to be something big.

"[Matthew] Mercer was so wonderful with us, learning mechanics as we were building them" Hall began

"He was on it, rolled with the punches of us being like 'Ok Matt, I know you're playing a game today but these things have changes'"

Recalling watching the first Menagerie stream with the development team Starke recounts, "It's live, we were all sitting there with bated breath [...] I remember the magic of watching them play and seeing them have a blast. We knew they were having fun when we were doing internal playtests but to have the relief of them on-stream just having the best time we thought 'We did it!'"

"TTRPGs at their core are about having fun with your friends and seeing people that we care so much about having fun with the game, it meant so much to us," Hall added "seeing people who were actively playing the beta also commenting on the stream and commenting on things going on at their own table was the peak version of 'your friends having fun.'"

Daggerheart Miniatures

Knowing my own table's enjoyment from seeing the game brought to life with miniatures, I did try to get some information about when we might be able to get our hands on Daggerheart Miniatures? Unfortunately Starke's response was "We don't know, but in success anything could happen"

While we didn't get to learn about any plans that didn't stop Starke from highlighting how in design he wanted a game that was narratively focused, but was also intriguing in a way that players would want to purchase or create miniatures.

Talking about miniature wishlists, Hall began casually by stating, "I really want to see the Oracle of Doom as a miniature, it's one of the Adversaries that I just think is so terrifying"

Starke however teased that he's looking forward to "all of the minis for Matt's Age of Umbra run that he's doing." The Campaign Frame, that Matt wrote for Daggerheart, will be the setting for an 8-part mini-series with the cast of Critical Role beginning on May 29th.

"It's the stuff of nightmares (Affectionate)" - Rowan Hall on Age of Umbra

Starke was able to share that the inspiration to have Age of Umbra written comes from a homegame that Starke and Mercer are in with fellow TTRPG performers, Erika Ishii, Aabria Iyengar, and Brennan Lee Mulligan, where they play Kingdom Death Monster together. When the idea of creating Campaign Frames came up Starke approached Matt to ask "Can we do a Soulsborne-inspire/Kingdom Death Monster inspired Campaign Frame for this?" and he said he was so in…