My best friend works at an afterschool program that runs D&D games for kids. As such, as a professional expense, he was able to pick up the recently-released Daggerheart Core Set. I also just watched the first episode of Age of Umbra, Critical Role's first major showcase of the final game.
I haven't actually gotten a chance to read through the rulebook (I don't think my friend has yet either, as he got it yesterday) but I am certainly curious to see.
The game is built around dualities, and one element of that is that apparently every class has two Domains, and each shares a domain with another class. The domains give certain abilities and features (again, I've got just the basic gist here - I'm reading the SRD to make sure). What this does seem to imply, though, is that it'll be very hard to add classes to the game, unless they're ok with certain domains getting more representation. That said, if they treat classes as broad archetypes like 5E does, this might not be a problem, at least in these early days.
The central dice roll is 2d12 (so if you're a 5E player and never get a chance to roll those, this will be nice), but also, you make note of which die is which, because a roll can succeed or fail based on the total rolled, but also gives Hope or Fear depending on which of your dice rolled higher. Hope is a resource your character gets to use on certain abilities, while Fear goes to the GM to use against you.
It reminds me of systems like Edge of Empire, the Star Wars TTRPG, which I believe had a similar idea of a kind of "secondary result" for die rolls.
Daggerheart does seem to be intended to tell stories like you'd tell in D&D, being generally built for heroic fantasy.
The combat system seems quite different: while you do have an Evasion value that is functionally similar to your AC, the damage you take is not the same as losing hit points - instead, depending on how hardy you are, you have certain damage thresholds - if it's below your Major threshold, you just take 1 damage, if it's equal to or higher than the Major threshold, but below your severe threshold, you take 2, and if it's equal to higher to your severe threshold, you take 3.
Functionally, this means that I think characters will have far fewer hit points than in 5E, but the real equivalent measure of having a lot of HP would be having higher thresholds. I don't yet know if you get more HP as you level up, or if it's just that your thresholds go higher (I also don't know if there's a way for a creature to inflict more than 3 HP loss at a go).
Armor, then, appears to be a way to reduce damage from one level to a lower one, but is an expended resource and must be repaired to replenish it.
This does address one of the oddities of D&D's AC, which is that there's functionally no difference between an agile monk dodging out of the way of incoming attacks and a heavily-armored fighter absorbing strikes with their shield. Given how damage is effectively simplified here, though, I wonder if that takes care of some of the crunchiness that would result in giving D&D an Evasion vs Armor system.
Anyway, I'm only scratching the surface of these rules, figuring out what kind of characters you can build and stories you can tell. But I hope I'll be able to try the game out at some point in the not-too-distant future.
No comments:
Post a Comment