RPG Geek
Latest Episodes
Road to Victory - Ep. 11 - Search & Research
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 23:09:10
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 23:09:10
A new episode has been added to the database:
Road to Victory - Ep. 11 - Search & Research
Barovia V #8 To Test a Theory
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 23:05:17
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 23:05:17
A new episode has been added to the database:
Barovia V #8 To Test a Theory
Product For Sale: Ye Booke of Tentacles (Volume 5)
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 23:03:49
Condition: Very Good
Location: United Kingdom
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 23:03:49
by Dominic Swan
£30.00 for RPG Item: Ye Booke of Tentacles (Volume 5)Condition: Very Good
Location: United Kingdom
Review: Daggerheart (Core Rulebook):: I spent almost a year trying very hard to love DH...
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 20:38:23
Things DH does well (really well):
-the artwork. Hooray!
-the inclusivity
-the many new ideas and spins it puts on old ideas
-the cards. Oh yes, the cards. They absolutely rule. I want more games to do this.
-the spin on HPs. I have no problem with some of the things other reviewers criticized as clunky.
-The rules stay light enough to make it easy to keep them all in your head and ease people new to the hobby into it. In fact, DH is a great gateway game!
-the small stat blocks. Yeah!
-the short passages that the characters get.
-short rule texts, easy to grasp, not everything predetermined
-the domain system. Awesome!
-the subclasses
-how it gives you everything you want in terms of abilities, classes and species, and never too much of it
-Hope and Fear, at least as concepts on paper. Fear is a wonderful resource for the GM. Love that.
-a fixed difficulty for encounters. Straight from the Cypher system. Nice.
-character creation and progression - a breeze!
That's a lot of really important ups; plenty of reasons to buy into it. And, I suspect playing DH would be a lot of fun. I just haven’t had to opportunity to be on the other side of the screen (I don’t actually use a screen).
But, despite all of that, at least on the GM side of things, it just doesn't quite work as it's intended. That hurts. That sucks. I really wanted it to work. I spent 9 months trying to make it work the way it’s intended to work.
When I say the intended way, I mean the idea, the promise that was advertised that it would offer you all of these wonderful features listed above + all the fun regular d20-like systems provided us with in the past WHILE also being story-driven. No number-crunching, heavily tactical, round-based shenanigans, but an immersive story in the heat of combat that would feel like a scene straight out of a fun Hollywood blockbuster. And it comes so close, man. So damn close, but stumbles a 100 yards before the finish line in a 1 mile race. Many good parts that are not more than their sum when they come together. Because, no, the core mechanisms don’t actually support this idea. Not properly. Not truly. Not to the end. It’s a fantasy that the designers convinced themselves of, and me, but once you look closely, once you put this game through the gauntlet, it stumbles, it creaks, it screeches. Painfully so.
As I said, a great getaway game, and a great game for those who want something lighter than D&D, but still kind of D&D, with an interesting spin on turn structure and hit points, while getting rid of that bloody, lousy, and antiquated pass/ fail system. A good game. Maybe even a great(ish) game, but not the genius design I had allowed myself to believe it could be.
Why?
Why does it stumble?
Because it doesn’t follow through on its core design. Because, I guess, Darrington Press wasn’t gutsy enough. They didn’t dare stray too far from D&D. If only they had made one step further across the spectrum towards Blades and Apocalypse.
Hybrids are dangerous, man. Risky.
There’s a conflict of philosophies in Daggerheart. Instead of pass/fail, an action roll can lead to 5 different outcomes, 5 different tiers of failure, success and consequences. Beautiful! However, once you enter combat the standard consequence of a partial success or a failure is usually a counter-attack by the adversary. A failure or a success with Fear means, it’s the GM’s turn and you’re suffering some consequences. You can either worsen the PC’s current situation and counter-attack, or only counter-attack and consider that the full negative effect of their roll. You won’t do the first very often because that can be very punitive; it’s reserved for an outright failure and even then, doing that too often because, say, a player’s having a bad night and keeps rolling miserably, well, it’s sometimes too punitive. So often you’ll just opt for the counter-attack. However, when you counter-attack, you’re now rolling an attack roll – which you’ll fail about a third of the time. At that point the story doesn’t make much sense anymore. Well, unless you spend a Fear – after all you just got a Fear from the player’s roll. So, I’ll admit this first point isn’t that big of a problem. I’d prefer double-duty rolls like in Blades where a failure or partial success immediately triggers an appropriate response, but you can make it work in DH. Fine.
Next up: speed. I was led to believe (or just wanted to believe) that DH combat would be noticeably faster than D&D combat. It’s not. Not much anyway. It may feel quicker because you don’t have to look up rules and spells, and it doesn’t feel mechanical. Nice. The cards and the short rules texts do the heavy lifting here. But… Wait! How many times have I used the word but in this review? This is kind of the theme here. A lot of greatness but…
On to a bigger problem: The turn structure. It’s a neat idea, going back and forth between players and GMs, GM turns triggered by player rolls, GMs being able to intervene at any point with Fear. Lovely. But it doesn’t feel like as much of an improvement to classic turn structure, and that’s partially due to the reason mentioned above, and even more due to this:
Adversary activation makes no sense. (Okey, sorry, I’m being mean; it doesn’t make as much as.) Nor does encounter building. Encounter building is easy to understand, but the point-buy system forces you to often field more singular adversaries than you want to. If you pick a SOLO creature, you’ll find yourself forced to field 3 or 4 of them to make it a balanced encounter according to that system. That makes no sense! Sometimes that works, but more often than not I have to run more adversaries…. Oh, come on, I need a shorter word for this – monsters! …I have to run more monsters than I want to and usually more than one kind. Sounds like fun on paper. But this is where the activation trap is sprung. Once it’s the monsters’ turn, you only get to activate one of them. Which one do you pick? Well, the strongest one! Again and again and again in order to keep the encounter you built challenging you pick the lead monster. And every once in a while you pick a weaker monster so you don’t break immersion. Or, ideally, you activate the monster the PC is directly engaged with because that’s what the story demands. Okey. Fine. But if I’m honest I either want the BitD approach where there’s no activation and just story that makes sense or the classic it’s-your-turn-so-you-activate-all-enemies. Some encounters work fine the DH way, others just don’t feel right. I once had my PCs face off against 80 enemies (because they are so stubborn that they believe everything adversarial must be killed instantly even if I had explained the stakes and the fact that I’m open to non-violent approaches, and even though it’s an entire settlement full of fanatical adversaries, so just storm the bloody place with zero prep or planning or considering non-suicidal forms of engagement while balking at every opportunity to flee I give them. You know. Players.) Here, the game totally fell apart. There were 80 gunmen and 5 PCs. Every time it was my turn, one bullet was fired, meaning, 79 guys were just standing around, giving the players the impression they could win this, so they kept fighting. It took an unreasonably amount of “mechanical” effort on my part to capture them and prevent a 3-session long gunfight that would inevitably have ended in a TPK. Even in more reasonably sized encounters I often felt like a handful of the monsters were activated far too rarely to make sense. And…
I spend far more Fear than recommended by the book to keep the game interesting. PCs in DH are powerful. It takes real effort and lots of Fear to make anything truly terrifying. I guess that’s why Matt Mercer had pimped his monsters in his campaign.
And, this is not an easy game to run for new GMs. New players? Great. New GMs? Not so much. I had my struggles, as explained, and I’ve been doing this for almost a quarter of a century now.
Minions don’t work either. My players went through a 100 minions like lawnmowers. I have loved the concept of minions since Matt Coville introduced it for 5e. Okey, maybe I shouldn’t have used level 1 minions for level 3 PCs. Sorry. But I thought I could balance it with a huge number.
Environments don’t work. You get walls of text, three or four times the length of a monster stat block, but what should I do with a cliff if one of them can fly and fix a rope? Okey, fair, that problem isn’t specific to DH. I used the Raging River at one point, but, while one could fly, another player could teleport and the third could grow a beanstalk across it. Fun stuff. Okey, sorry, I’m sounding more negative here than I mean too. I love the concept of environments and we had a fun session. It became a fun session because I added in electric eels that could jump out of the water and the PCs had the challenge to get a bunch of villagers across that beanstalk. But the problem remains. PCs are really powerful. Flying changes a lot. As does teleportation. And those huge walls of text aren’t justified. Just give me a terrain, a difficulty, and a few things that can go wrong. Done.
Now I’m stuck in the middle of a huge campaign, longing to play a different system.
I’m sad about this. The new player options sound like so much fun. The new subclasses domains and Hope & Fear sound like fun. I want to play Daggerheart, but I don’t want to run it anymore. Making DH story-driven takes too much effort, but story-driven games should be easier to run for somebody experienced and, may I say, not too bad at making stuff up on the fly. Instead I'm bogged down by unnecessary mechanisms.
Score: 7/10
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 20:38:23
by Elvatuar
A hybrid between traditional mechanical exercises like D&D and narrative-driven games like Blades in the Dark - yes, it does fulfil that premise and offers up a ton of great features. The core concept sounded very promising to me and DH does indeed come with a lot of good and juicy ideas. But whenever DH tries to be story-driven, it's slow and creaky and clunky like an old steam locomotive on a rusty rail, not the Japanese high-speed train I had banked on and paid the ticket for.Things DH does well (really well):
-the artwork. Hooray!
-the inclusivity
-the many new ideas and spins it puts on old ideas
-the cards. Oh yes, the cards. They absolutely rule. I want more games to do this.
-the spin on HPs. I have no problem with some of the things other reviewers criticized as clunky.
-The rules stay light enough to make it easy to keep them all in your head and ease people new to the hobby into it. In fact, DH is a great gateway game!
-the small stat blocks. Yeah!
-the short passages that the characters get.
-short rule texts, easy to grasp, not everything predetermined
-the domain system. Awesome!
-the subclasses
-how it gives you everything you want in terms of abilities, classes and species, and never too much of it
-Hope and Fear, at least as concepts on paper. Fear is a wonderful resource for the GM. Love that.
-a fixed difficulty for encounters. Straight from the Cypher system. Nice.
-character creation and progression - a breeze!
That's a lot of really important ups; plenty of reasons to buy into it. And, I suspect playing DH would be a lot of fun. I just haven’t had to opportunity to be on the other side of the screen (I don’t actually use a screen).
But, despite all of that, at least on the GM side of things, it just doesn't quite work as it's intended. That hurts. That sucks. I really wanted it to work. I spent 9 months trying to make it work the way it’s intended to work.
When I say the intended way, I mean the idea, the promise that was advertised that it would offer you all of these wonderful features listed above + all the fun regular d20-like systems provided us with in the past WHILE also being story-driven. No number-crunching, heavily tactical, round-based shenanigans, but an immersive story in the heat of combat that would feel like a scene straight out of a fun Hollywood blockbuster. And it comes so close, man. So damn close, but stumbles a 100 yards before the finish line in a 1 mile race. Many good parts that are not more than their sum when they come together. Because, no, the core mechanisms don’t actually support this idea. Not properly. Not truly. Not to the end. It’s a fantasy that the designers convinced themselves of, and me, but once you look closely, once you put this game through the gauntlet, it stumbles, it creaks, it screeches. Painfully so.
As I said, a great getaway game, and a great game for those who want something lighter than D&D, but still kind of D&D, with an interesting spin on turn structure and hit points, while getting rid of that bloody, lousy, and antiquated pass/ fail system. A good game. Maybe even a great(ish) game, but not the genius design I had allowed myself to believe it could be.
Why?
Why does it stumble?
Because it doesn’t follow through on its core design. Because, I guess, Darrington Press wasn’t gutsy enough. They didn’t dare stray too far from D&D. If only they had made one step further across the spectrum towards Blades and Apocalypse.
Hybrids are dangerous, man. Risky.
There’s a conflict of philosophies in Daggerheart. Instead of pass/fail, an action roll can lead to 5 different outcomes, 5 different tiers of failure, success and consequences. Beautiful! However, once you enter combat the standard consequence of a partial success or a failure is usually a counter-attack by the adversary. A failure or a success with Fear means, it’s the GM’s turn and you’re suffering some consequences. You can either worsen the PC’s current situation and counter-attack, or only counter-attack and consider that the full negative effect of their roll. You won’t do the first very often because that can be very punitive; it’s reserved for an outright failure and even then, doing that too often because, say, a player’s having a bad night and keeps rolling miserably, well, it’s sometimes too punitive. So often you’ll just opt for the counter-attack. However, when you counter-attack, you’re now rolling an attack roll – which you’ll fail about a third of the time. At that point the story doesn’t make much sense anymore. Well, unless you spend a Fear – after all you just got a Fear from the player’s roll. So, I’ll admit this first point isn’t that big of a problem. I’d prefer double-duty rolls like in Blades where a failure or partial success immediately triggers an appropriate response, but you can make it work in DH. Fine.
Next up: speed. I was led to believe (or just wanted to believe) that DH combat would be noticeably faster than D&D combat. It’s not. Not much anyway. It may feel quicker because you don’t have to look up rules and spells, and it doesn’t feel mechanical. Nice. The cards and the short rules texts do the heavy lifting here. But… Wait! How many times have I used the word but in this review? This is kind of the theme here. A lot of greatness but…
On to a bigger problem: The turn structure. It’s a neat idea, going back and forth between players and GMs, GM turns triggered by player rolls, GMs being able to intervene at any point with Fear. Lovely. But it doesn’t feel like as much of an improvement to classic turn structure, and that’s partially due to the reason mentioned above, and even more due to this:
Adversary activation makes no sense. (Okey, sorry, I’m being mean; it doesn’t make as much as.) Nor does encounter building. Encounter building is easy to understand, but the point-buy system forces you to often field more singular adversaries than you want to. If you pick a SOLO creature, you’ll find yourself forced to field 3 or 4 of them to make it a balanced encounter according to that system. That makes no sense! Sometimes that works, but more often than not I have to run more adversaries…. Oh, come on, I need a shorter word for this – monsters! …I have to run more monsters than I want to and usually more than one kind. Sounds like fun on paper. But this is where the activation trap is sprung. Once it’s the monsters’ turn, you only get to activate one of them. Which one do you pick? Well, the strongest one! Again and again and again in order to keep the encounter you built challenging you pick the lead monster. And every once in a while you pick a weaker monster so you don’t break immersion. Or, ideally, you activate the monster the PC is directly engaged with because that’s what the story demands. Okey. Fine. But if I’m honest I either want the BitD approach where there’s no activation and just story that makes sense or the classic it’s-your-turn-so-you-activate-all-enemies. Some encounters work fine the DH way, others just don’t feel right. I once had my PCs face off against 80 enemies (because they are so stubborn that they believe everything adversarial must be killed instantly even if I had explained the stakes and the fact that I’m open to non-violent approaches, and even though it’s an entire settlement full of fanatical adversaries, so just storm the bloody place with zero prep or planning or considering non-suicidal forms of engagement while balking at every opportunity to flee I give them. You know. Players.) Here, the game totally fell apart. There were 80 gunmen and 5 PCs. Every time it was my turn, one bullet was fired, meaning, 79 guys were just standing around, giving the players the impression they could win this, so they kept fighting. It took an unreasonably amount of “mechanical” effort on my part to capture them and prevent a 3-session long gunfight that would inevitably have ended in a TPK. Even in more reasonably sized encounters I often felt like a handful of the monsters were activated far too rarely to make sense. And…
I spend far more Fear than recommended by the book to keep the game interesting. PCs in DH are powerful. It takes real effort and lots of Fear to make anything truly terrifying. I guess that’s why Matt Mercer had pimped his monsters in his campaign.
And, this is not an easy game to run for new GMs. New players? Great. New GMs? Not so much. I had my struggles, as explained, and I’ve been doing this for almost a quarter of a century now.
Minions don’t work either. My players went through a 100 minions like lawnmowers. I have loved the concept of minions since Matt Coville introduced it for 5e. Okey, maybe I shouldn’t have used level 1 minions for level 3 PCs. Sorry. But I thought I could balance it with a huge number.
Environments don’t work. You get walls of text, three or four times the length of a monster stat block, but what should I do with a cliff if one of them can fly and fix a rope? Okey, fair, that problem isn’t specific to DH. I used the Raging River at one point, but, while one could fly, another player could teleport and the third could grow a beanstalk across it. Fun stuff. Okey, sorry, I’m sounding more negative here than I mean too. I love the concept of environments and we had a fun session. It became a fun session because I added in electric eels that could jump out of the water and the PCs had the challenge to get a bunch of villagers across that beanstalk. But the problem remains. PCs are really powerful. Flying changes a lot. As does teleportation. And those huge walls of text aren’t justified. Just give me a terrain, a difficulty, and a few things that can go wrong. Done.
Now I’m stuck in the middle of a huge campaign, longing to play a different system.
I’m sad about this. The new player options sound like so much fun. The new subclasses domains and Hope & Fear sound like fun. I want to play Daggerheart, but I don’t want to run it anymore. Making DH story-driven takes too much effort, but story-driven games should be easier to run for somebody experienced and, may I say, not too bad at making stuff up on the fly. Instead I'm bogged down by unnecessary mechanisms.
Score: 7/10
What's New September 5, 2026: Ars Magica, Be Like A Crow, Dragonbane, Everspark, Fallout, Star Trek, and pdfs!
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 20:14:48
/pic6282040.png)
A giant panda cub exhibiting the same energy level as I have...
New releases at your FLGS (sourced by Leisure Games)
Ars Magica (5th Edition)
⭐ Ars Magica 5th Edition Storyguide Screen - Atlas Games
⭐ Ars Magica Definitive Edition - Atlas Games
Be Like a Crow - A Solo RPG
⭐ Murder and Mischief Playing Cards - Critical Kit
Dragonbane
⭐ Arkand: City of Waves and Flames - Free League Publishing
⭐ Book of Magic - Free League Publishing
⭐ Dragonbane Friends & Foes Standee Set - Free League Publishing
Everspark
⭐ Everspark - A solo/multiplayer fantasy TTRPG - Penflower Ink
Fallout: The Roleplaying Game
⭐ New Vegas Setting Guide - Modiphius Entertainment
⭐ Wanderer's Guidebook - Modiphius Entertainment
Star Trek Adventures Second Edition
⭐ Star Trek Adventures Allies and Adversaries - Modiphius Entertainment
⭐ Captains Log Solo Game (2026 edition) - Modiphius Entertainment
⭐ Star Trek Adventures Second Edition The 23rd Century Campaign Guide - Modiphius Entertainment
New PDF releases @ DriveThru
Call of Cthulhu (7th Edition)
⭐ 펜들의 신부 (The Bride of Pendle) - Community Content
Daggerheart
⭐ Atlas of Adventure: Vol. 1 - Daggerheart-compatible environments - Gray Fox Literary
Generic / Universal
⭐ 100 Things Found After the Battle - Lucky Dice Games
⭐ The Book of Random Tables: Cyberpunk NPCs - Dicegeeks
Legend in the Mist
⭐ Mythborn: Heroes of Greek Myth - Ryan Winpenny
⭐ Peddler's Cart - Son of Oak Game Studio
Mythic Role Playing
⭐ Mythic Magazine Compilation 10 - Word Mill Games
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha
⭐ [French] Terre Rouge Jeunesse 1596-1602 - Community Content
Starfinder Roleplaying Game (2nd Ed)
⭐ Secrets of the Swarm Adventure Path - Paizo Publishing
Tales of the Valiant
⭐ Night Hunters - Kobold Press
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition
⭐ Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition Rulebook - Cubicle 7 Entertainment
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 20:14:48
by Bruce McG
A giant panda cub exhibiting the same energy level as I have...
New releases at your FLGS (sourced by Leisure Games)
Ars Magica (5th Edition)
⭐ Ars Magica 5th Edition Storyguide Screen - Atlas Games
⭐ Ars Magica Definitive Edition - Atlas Games
Be Like a Crow - A Solo RPG
⭐ Murder and Mischief Playing Cards - Critical Kit
Dragonbane
⭐ Arkand: City of Waves and Flames - Free League Publishing
⭐ Book of Magic - Free League Publishing
⭐ Dragonbane Friends & Foes Standee Set - Free League Publishing
Everspark
⭐ Everspark - A solo/multiplayer fantasy TTRPG - Penflower Ink
Fallout: The Roleplaying Game
⭐ New Vegas Setting Guide - Modiphius Entertainment
⭐ Wanderer's Guidebook - Modiphius Entertainment
Star Trek Adventures Second Edition
⭐ Star Trek Adventures Allies and Adversaries - Modiphius Entertainment
⭐ Captains Log Solo Game (2026 edition) - Modiphius Entertainment
⭐ Star Trek Adventures Second Edition The 23rd Century Campaign Guide - Modiphius Entertainment
New PDF releases @ DriveThru
Call of Cthulhu (7th Edition)
⭐ 펜들의 신부 (The Bride of Pendle) - Community Content
Daggerheart
⭐ Atlas of Adventure: Vol. 1 - Daggerheart-compatible environments - Gray Fox Literary
Generic / Universal
⭐ 100 Things Found After the Battle - Lucky Dice Games
⭐ The Book of Random Tables: Cyberpunk NPCs - Dicegeeks
Legend in the Mist
⭐ Mythborn: Heroes of Greek Myth - Ryan Winpenny
⭐ Peddler's Cart - Son of Oak Game Studio
Mythic Role Playing
⭐ Mythic Magazine Compilation 10 - Word Mill Games
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha
⭐ [French] Terre Rouge Jeunesse 1596-1602 - Community Content
Starfinder Roleplaying Game (2nd Ed)
⭐ Secrets of the Swarm Adventure Path - Paizo Publishing
Tales of the Valiant
⭐ Night Hunters - Kobold Press
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition
⭐ Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fifth Edition Rulebook - Cubicle 7 Entertainment
Episode 5 - Overthinking in Rough Iron Town
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 17:08:13
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 17:08:13
A new episode has been added to the database:
Episode 5 - Overthinking in Rough Iron Town
News: Crows Crowdfunder Success, Dice Crowdfunder, Jams of the Timescape 3 | August Roundup
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 11:09:22
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 11:09:22
A new episode has been added to the database:
News: Crows Crowdfunder Success, Dice Crowdfunder, Jams of the Timescape 3 | August Roundup
Folge 99 - The Iron Crypt of the Heretics
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 11:08:24
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 11:08:24
A new episode has been added to the database:
Folge 99 - The Iron Crypt of the Heretics
Dark Destinies
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 11:06:46
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 11:06:46
A new episode has been added to the database:
Dark Destinies
After Party LIVE! Episode 40
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 11:06:01
Posted: Sat, 05 Sep 11:06:01
A new episode has been added to the database:
After Party LIVE! Episode 40
