Critical Role’s ‘Daggerheart’ RPG Changes Hope and Fear in Playtest Update
Hope and Fear both get overhauled in the latest update to Daggerheart’s playtest rules as the game undergoes another transformation.
Daggerheart is currently on version 1.3 after an update earlier this week. In the first major transformation for the game, some of the core mechanics have been reworked to try and make the game a little less rules-y. That might sound like a bad thing from the surface, but it’s the same philosophy behind 5E’s “rulings, not rules.” Loosely, this means focusing on what makes sense for your narrative and don’t get bogged down in rules-lawyering.
Of course, that’s just the sort of thing that invites even more rules lawyering and is a point of contention among some of the 5E fanbase, who would be supremely happy if they could just give 4th Edition D&D a try but never will. So they suffer. But you don’t have to because Daggerheart is still in development.
It’s still changing, still growing, and the latest update reflects the first big transformation of the game.
Daggerheart – Playtest Update 1.3
The fan surveys and feedback options have clearly been paying off. Because of the latest change, Critical Role’s Darrington Press makes some pretty sizable changes to the core mechanics of the game. First and foremost, the game’s damage and stress mechanics have been decoupled somewhat. Stress is a resource players can spend to modify their rolls, and it no longer gets consumed by damage that falls below the Minor threshold, a move that streamlines the record-keeping but also cuts out some of the more complex decisions in the game.
The same goes for Hope and Fear. Fear is a GM resource that they are prompted to spend, either to make a move or take a Fear token on rolls with Fear, which will “reduce the Fear economy” and potentially “take weight off the GM’s side of play.” This sounds an awful lot like curtailing some of the more shenanigans side of the rules. But I haven’t played or run the latest rules yet, so I can’t say.
At any rate, a lot of rebalancing and editing has gone into the 1.3 update. To the point where the starter adventure is temporarily down for changes to bring it in line with 1.3. So, if you’ve been holding off on jumping into the playtest, now’s the perfect time.
The surveys are still wide open, and as you can see, Darrington Press is running with the feedback that they get. In fact, if you want to see a stream of the updates/changes, you can click here right now to watch designers Matt Mercer and Spenser Starke take you through the changes.
