#rulesbook

[ieatpastriesforfun]

r/daggerheart is toxic AF...and I love it

Note: This is just a rant about the subbreddit and their inability process any critique of the game that goes against their narrative of the game. The game itself has a lot of good parts, which I really like. But this post isn't about the game, but the subbreddit.

So you know, I am a nerd that like to nerd about games and probabilities. I've been interested in Daggerheart for a while because I am a fan of Critical Role, and the beta playtest rules recently came out. I was super excited, so I read through the PDF as soon as I got the chance, also started a game with my partner.

And honestly, there are some great parts to the game. But there are also some design decisions that made me scratch my head. So I shared some of my thoughts on r/daggerheart.

Oh boy did I poke a beehive. That subbreddit is pretty hostile toward anyone who dares to criticize the game. My first post critiquing the complexity of the damage system got down voted to oblivion. They told me I shouldn't have opinion on the very things I can read because I haven't played the game. So when I played the game and posted my feedback, these folks dismissed my criticisms because I was suffering from "new system syndrome."

Oh, and the comments. They were something else. The sub is dominated by a group of people who are pushing the narrative that Daggerheart is "rules-light" and "very easy" and "less math than DND."

Yes, Daggerheart is a rules-light game with a 377 page rulesbook. Because this is still beta, it is missing a ton of rules, not to mention artwork. But sure, it's a rules-light game. Because what is page count if not just a number?

Yes, Daggerheart is "very easy" if you ignore the fact that every character has HP, minor damage threshold, major damage threshold, severe damage threshold, stress, hope, and armor on top of your abilities and backstory and everything else you are trying to juggle.

Yes, Daggerheart has less math than DND because instead of just subtracting the damage from the HP, you compare the damage to each of the thresholds to decide whether or not you want to reduce the damage by armor, then determine how much you lower the HP by, unless it is below the minor threshold, in which case you take stress, but if you are filled up on stress, you take 1 HP. Oh, and you know, if you also ignore the fact that you roll two dice, add the numbers, and check to see which one is bigger to decide which one is bigger every single time you want to do something.

So yeah, if you ignore all of those very obvious things that I can see with my very own eyes, my own experience of running the game, my experience having played a rules-light RPG like Candela, they are right: Daggerheart is a rules-light game that is very easy to play with less math than DND /s.

Seriously, these folks will fight you tooth-and-nail to tell you that what you can see is wrong. They will gaslight you, tell you about how 11-years can play Daggerheart, their 73 year old mother can play Daggerheart, tell you that you are playing the game wrong, DND has taught you bad habits, and that your critique doesn't matter because all you want is the game to be more like DND.

And I love it. I love seeing the cognitive dissonance. I love going at it with these die-hard fans. And it's pretty easy on my part. I don't need to get mean—all I need to do is point out very obvious things. And you know, no foul no harm—we keep going until one or both of us get sick of arguing about whatever specific thing we are arguing about.

Anyway, enough of my rant.

I want Daggerheart to succeed. I really do. I think Matt Mercer and friends are pretty good folks, and I find their story inspiring, and I would love to see them succeed. I hope that Daggerheart developers listen to the critical feedbacks, make the game better, and not try to push any weird narratives (like they did with Candela vs FitD).

[radnewworld]

In terms of plastic, Catalyst's Mercenary Box gets you... 1 Devastator 1 Flea 1 Firefly 1 Caesar 1 Quickdraw 1 Starslayer 1 Ostsol 1 Chameleon 2 Maxim tanks 2 Galleon tanks

12 minis in a box for 75 bucks. Now yes, you get some maps, dice, and the rulesbooks, so if you want to drop 75 plus shipping (be careful there!) you could... Or, for that same amount, I can print you more than double that many minis of your choice with shipping included.

Pictured here: just shy of 20 bucks worth of minis. Slap shipping on that, and bam.

With a deal this good, I'm not even going to bother with halfway decent photography!

Don't want to paint your minis? Cool, I'll do it for you!

Give me money! I give you cheap minis!

[mimeo-tan]

your opponent is allowed to lie to you but only sometimes, check the conpletely seperate rulesbook for more info

[vatinyan]

Burrow Tales physical zines available!

A physical version of my Burrow Tales ttrpg is now available to buy! At long last!

Get a 20-page rulesbook including a small beginner adventure, to start your bunny tunnel-delving daring-do's:

Check it out on Ko-Fi shop: ko-fi.com/s/2738cc7a8a

Digital version also still up for grabs: https://ko-fi.com/s/d29019697e

[dungeondegenerates]

Over at the Battle for Brüttelburg Kickstarter! By fan request we decided to make the DIRTY DEEDS box for use with DUNGEON DEGENERATES: HAND OF DOOM. This box is influenced by The Battle For Brüttelburg! The central concept behind it is new Dirty Deeds Mini Missions that are smaller, non-campaign missions that you can do whenever you want or just as a short game of DUNGEON DEGENERATES.

The rough contents, (still being fleshed out):

4 new adventurers with their own items & abilities

New Monsters

New Settlement Encounters

New Loot & Epic Loot

New Skills cards

3 Danger cards

1 Weakness card

New Dirty Deeds Missions

Rulesbook

[keplercryptids]

reading through the rulesbooks for worlds without number and stars without number and man! the difference between a ttrpg system that actually tries to help the gm vs one that just panders to the casual player (5e....) is kind of absurd. the free editions of WWN and SWN have more useful gm supports and worldbuilding tools than anything d&d 5e has ever put out, including full setting books, combined lmao.

[laprimera]

BEEEEEEP

" ¡Feliz año nuevo! This is señora Geeta on the PA agaaain! Welcome back students and faculty to the Academy, we surely missed you! I hope you've all had a festive and relaxing holidays and feel ready to come back to learning!

I ask once again to be civil in the hallways with language in any tongue. We're adding -USSY alongside the word BABYGIRL in the updated rules, the list is available in the e-rulesbook on your rotomphone --

The League, gyms, clubs, and all of campus is once again open and operational. Thank yoou and I'll be seeing you all soon Im sure~! "

[kimnowls]

I fricken did it!!!!!!

Here are the things I've learned from this experience:

1: Stimuwrite 2 is awesome (no I will never stop singing its praises)

2: Learning to "Yes and" myself. Pregame worldbuilding just doesn't seem to work for me as well as I thought it did. For this nano, I would come up with ideas that I would just throw in for the sake of continuing the story. Normally when I'm writing from a heavily world-built setting, I would have to stop and think: "Wait, does this make sense? Can I do this? What would I have to explain to make this work? Do I have to retcon something now? Rework my world from the ground up?" Instead I would just be like, "Well, now this exists. What else can I do with it?" And I think that's more fun for me.

3: Instead of worldbuilding, I started with a concept I wanted to fulfill. In this case, the premise was a previous set of heroes beating the bad guy by falling to the dark side and giving in to their negative emotions. Thus, they become villains themselves for another generations of heroes to overcome. The emotional core of the story is how you deal with your mistakes and shortcomings not by doubling down, but being open about your weaknesses and striving to do better. Nothing too original about that concept, but it helped me shape the characters and the world. There are still a lot of things that need to be ironed out if I continue the story, but I'm going to start worrying about the bugs during the revision process.

(Just to be transparent, I was writing Animon fanfiction, so I did not by any means build this world from scratch. However, the Animon Story rulesbook is pretty lenient on what sort of lore the GM wants for their game, so there was still a lot of world for me to build.)

4: Keeping up with the habit of writing. When the story stays in my head, it's harder to conceptualize all the happenings and events that need to logistically be there. Even if I don't use most of what I write, the process of writing helps me organize my thoughts better. I'm going to try to write 800 words a day for a while.

5: I still got it, BABYYYYYYY!!!

[northwest-cryptid]

I totally realize there's someone out there who is going to be like "ugh you don't get it fucking weeb" but the soundtrack to Baldur's Gate 3 is so bland and generic and bad in my opinion. The tense moments don't feel tense, the hopeful moments don't have that sting of hope. They're just [Generic High Fantasy Battle Music.Wav] and I kinda hate it.

Like when my partner and I seamlessly worked together fighting literally back to back against a whole camp of goblins horribly outnumbered and using our wits and teamwork to come out victorious I don't want some generic high fantasy background music I want my dramatic EMOTIONAL music with the string instruments and horns section coming in with bright triumphant chords to signify that our heroes are pressing an advantage but uh-oh another wave of stronger goblins showed up and what's this? The music has now shifted to dark dramatic tones with organs and vocal choirs signifying our struggle has turned drastic, now you know our heroes have their backs to the wall, surrounded on all sides and will need to fight tooth and nail to come out in one piece. Only to have that same motif from earlier usher in a hopeful and climactic finale where the whole thing comes together to really sell the impact of this life or death situat-

What do you mean "they're just goblins calm down"? Isn't this supposed to be immersive? Isn't my character's life supposed to be on the line? We're outnumbered 4:1! They have us backed into a corner! Yea I know they only have like 8 HP a piece but- Well no you wouldn't know that if it was real would you? IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE IMMERSIVE OR NOT? PUT THE RULESBOOK DOWN THIS INSTANT! OH FUCK THIS I'M MUTING THE GAME OST AND PUTTING ON MY OWN.

[bojangos]

favourite clone?

THIS IS SUCH A HARD QUESTION oh my GOD hmmmmmmmmm.... echo, but the version of echo in my head that is not consistently shafted by the writing LMAO. i really do adore him. little rulesbook man with three whole robo-appendages aklsdjfklasj

[tvcore-productions]

When You Hyperfixate a little to much on the Worldbuilding

Adding to much for the backround of the world so my fanfic made sense, than fixation went to mlp, made so much ideas and fav ocs that I stopped and moved back to Pokemon with wanting to make a chapter and not an immediate hyperfixation on worldbuilding that I worked so hard with so much symbolism and attention. Lovely ♡

- - - - - other and about

My fixation started with Gengars. Planned to make 15 chapter fic, it started with... A lot of scrapped ideas and experimentation with how to introduce my character and which pokegods to have or those alien ones.

know I have 3 Gengars that pur outlined to make a fic about and two are ones ahd the most fun projecting onto. And one of them is basically a main protagonist in the sequel of my other Gengar self insert oc.

I put way to much thought in the backrounds that I never fully completed a draft to chapter 1- Aha! Oh I just have so many details and small information of backround characters.

(Pretty roses with complementary white mini puff flowers)

As plain as an isekai is, I think the fact that I'm happy is great and the fact I put so much thought into why and creating atleast a somewhat original yet chaotically inspired by other stuff into a pot that I'm happy with is great- For me!

Because I don't think anyone would understand it to them when I'm horrible at explaining it.

I just hope I finnish making the Osha Violations chapter it seems like so much fun. And I do already have the entire rulesbook and how ot would be made

[dracke2701]

This is especially weird to me because most of my experience playing TTRPGs has been with very simple homebrew systems, especially when me and my friends were starting out

Like we would have simple rules for how to create a character, a basic idea of what kind of check each stat was for, very simple systems for weapons, magic and elemental attacks that would let the players create their own spells and skills or just say to the GM "i use my spear/my ice magic to do X" and let them decide wether we could actually do that or not and what stat to use and how hard is the skill check

When i see people say that they play D&D but ignore/simplify most of its complicated and finicky rules and often time just let the GM wing rules decision based on the rule of cool or what makes sense on the moment... i honestly get it, it's genuinely a super fun way to play, but they're literally not playing D&D they're already playing a simple homebrew system and making it harder on themselves (and especially on the GM) by keeping around a 300 pages wide rulebook that they don't use instead of the simple 10 pages long word document that would actually contain all of the rules they're using !

And if you want to make such a simple homebrew game, using D&D as your basis is honestly very strange since even the basic rules can be pretty complicated and heavy to work with, like having to remember how many spells of each levels you've used and which specific ones you've got in your spellbook and which ones come back on a short or long rest and the components necessary to use them, even just choosing your starting spells at level 1 can already be an overwhelming chore with how specific they are and how many posssibilities you have to choose from !

And for non-magic classes you still need to remember all your passive skills and proficiencies and whatnot and remember to apply your 3 bonuses because you attacked the enemy sideways from the shadows, it's still a lot of strategy and memorywork to optimise both combat and other problem solving moments because you've got tons of very situational skills to juggle with

And if you like a complex game where you have to optimise based on your toolset and combine specific stuff together to gain a greater effect, then yeah D&D can be a pretty fun game ! But that's basically the opposite of "I just want to play with simple rules and whenever something hard comes up the GM makes a quick logical decision about it and we move on"

Even if you just want to use it as a basis to create your simpler homebrew version it's arguably not the best game for that, it's frankly easier to use other TTRPGs or make it up from scratch than it is to simplify the rules of D&D in a way that it still looks kinda like D&D at the end

And if you just like one of the settings of D&D and that's your reason for playing it, you can absolutely go to the D&D wiki, take whatever parts of the lore and worldbuilding you enjoy and homebrew your own rules based on this; there is no need to open the official rulesbook to create your own homebrew game based on Faerun or Baldur's Gate or whatever if what you want is a game with simple rules based in those settings, it will genuinely be less work if you do that rather than reverse-engineer D&D into a simple game

So, on the official D&D TikTok and YouTube accounts, they have a video where they're explicitly emphasizing that the new PHB is the "largest PHB ever", which is an interesting way of marketing towards a target demographic who think the best thing about your book is that they don't have to read it.

The latest PHB is going to be the greatest PHB for people who think learning the rules makes you the devil and that you can ignore the rules anyway which is why the game is good

[cricketsqueak]

(Youth pastor voice) You know who has a rulesbook with an open source license? That’s right,

[thelonely]

the nice dudes i play DND with, well-intentioned but also way more initiative-oriented than myself: do you want us to like, give you the Entire Rundown of combat with your rogue

me, hovering my hands over two buttons labeled ‘sneak attack’ and ‘uncanny dodge’ while using my mouth to light a molotov cocktail in my minnesotan gal’s hands: hmm. methinks not

[dexadin]

So i woke up really sad and decided to impulsively kill my bank account but hey now i own metal dice and a new d&d core rulebook

me: 1 emotions: 0

[codecicle]

thing is, I want to divide this up into the different types of portrayals of vtm before I make my points. I am required to have 3 different references for evidence, so realistically I could use the handbook/rulesbook as one, the comic books as another, and i really want to have a run game as a portrayal . which means i could use the suckening . which means i could write about shilo and edward . which means i fucking win

I GET TO WRITE ABOUT SEXUAL ASSAULT THEMES WITHIN VAMPIRE: THE MASQUERADE FOR MY RESEARCH PROJECT. I WIN EVERYTHINGGG KILLING MYSELF POSTPONED