Show Notes
On this episode of the RPGBOT.Podcast, we’re reviewing Daggerheart Beta Playtest version 1.2, the newest release from Darrington Press, and talking about the challenges and riches it has to offer.
MATERIALS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE
- Candela Obscura: Critical Role’s Cosmic Horror TTRPG
- Daggerheart Nexus on Demiplane
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Tyler Kamstra
Ash Ely
Randall James
Producer Dan
Transcript
This transcript is a work in progress. If you would like to help improve this transcript, please contribute corrections to the accompanying Google Doc, and we will update this page periodically as corrections are made.
Randall James (05:20.35)
Welcome to the RPGBlock .podcast, I’m Randall James and with me is Tyler Kamstra… …and Ash Eli!
Tyler (05:25.374)
Hey everybody.
Ash (05:28.054)
Dagger to the heart and you’re too late You give ttrp cheese a bad name No, not really not really not really I just It was a low -hanging fruit. I had to reach for it. I had to reach for that for bit fruit, you know
Tyler (05:37.214)
You tried.
Randall James (05:38.014)
Or maybe not, like that’s not the end of the review.
Randall James (05:47.742)
Yeah. I gave my character a right name. Okay.
Ash (05:51.734)
Oh, that’s better. That’s better. Hats off. Hats off to you. Good, sir. That’s that was 100 % improvement.
Tyler (05:56.286)
Sorry.
Randall James (05:56.99)
Good, good, good.
Good. All right, now we’re workshopping and it’s great. Tyler, what’s happening?
Tyler (06:04.83)
Hey, so…
Where it’s hard.
So the folks at Pendlehaven, which is not Pendlehaven, try that again, what are they called? Thank you.
Randall James (06:19.454)
folks at Darrington Press.
Ash (06:19.574)
Yeah, where’d you get Pendle Haven is that a word that just can’t did you have a might mini stroke and just make up a name? Okay, I thought I thought you just had like a little bit struggling just like
Tyler (06:24.318)
Let’s.
That’s uh… That’s fate of the Norns.
Randall James (06:30.75)
Oh, that does make sense. Yeah, okay.
Tyler (06:36.286)
Alright.
Randall James (06:36.702)
You
like the safe word in Euro trip.
Ash (06:40.758)
I’m sorry.
Tyler (06:42.878)
Pendleheathen? Oh, like something flavin’?
Randall James (06:46.206)
Yeah.
Ash (06:47.286)
Rhybo – Rhyboflavin!
Tyler (06:49.662)
Alright, so the folks at Darrington Press have released the first public playtest of their new Daggerheart RPG. So if you’ll remember back to early 2023, the OGL thing happened. Yada yada yada, we’re just gonna yada yada that. And then…
everyone started coming out with new rules systems or announcing new games that they were working on because everyone realized like, yeah, if we want to do this long term, we can’t rely on Wizards of the Coast as a reliable partner. So, Paizo did a thing, Cold Press is doing a thing, Critical Role is doing a thing, and they announced they were doing two RPGs. The first one was Candela Obscura, which we reviewed the play test when that first came out. Like, they’ve got a whole actual play of it now. People seem to enjoy it.
And Daggerheart is their second RPG of the two that were announced. So, Candela Obscura was much more like rules light, really good for like short arc play, had some cool mechanics. I liked it a whole lot. I remember all of us liking a lot of things about it, but my memory is also notoriously poor, so go listen to that episode in case I’m wrong.
Daggerheart is intended for more long -form campaign play, more like D &D. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Ash (08:20.214)
Can’t play and play.
Ash (08:25.11)
They are.
Tyler (08:40.19)
Review it, I guess.
Randall James (08:43.326)
Sounds good. So we’re talking about this being, you know, affiliated with Critical Role from Darrington Press. Who are the actual creators of this game? Who are the designers?
Tyler (08:52.51)
Yeah, so it looks like Darrington has two folks who write their RPGs. I have it written in here. Where are my show notes?
Ash (08:59.158)
Spencer Stark and Rowan Hall.
Tyler (09:01.982)
Yeah, thank you. So they wrote Candela Obscura as well. So it looks like just those two folks do the bulk of the writing on this. Now, I have to imagine the Critical Role team is likely very involved in this. They’re credited in various roles within the credits at the front of the document.
Ash (09:18.294)
Especially especially Matt. I would imagine that Matt Matt’s hands are all over this. So, yeah.
Tyler (09:25.502)
I’m sure, yeah. Yeah, so if you watched the release videos where they explain the mechanics, it’s Matt Mercer and Spencer Stark explaining how it works. I don’t know a whole lot about this Spencer Stark guy, but every time I see him on video, he just seems really, really enthusiastic and happy to be playing games. He seems like a cool guy. I’d like to meet him.
Ash (09:54.454)
According to some YouTubers, some creators, content creators on YouTube, did they get a chance to play test with Spencer and they all said that he’s a really fun guy, really great. So yeah, he seems passionate about what he’s doing. Also, there’s the other video on YouTube, my critical role where it’s Matt Mercer helping Travis Willingham create a character he previously played in D &D in Daggerheart. And that’s a fun watch too.
So if you just want the information and you don’t want to have to read a bunch of documents, just watch those two videos and you get an immediate sense of what the system is. It’s pretty simple.
Randall James (10:34.942)
link in the show notes.
Ash (10:36.246)
Mm -hmm.
Tyler (10:37.118)
What, you guys don’t want to read a 377 page beta document?
Ash (10:42.678)
I went to 12 years of high school to end four years of college plus three years of graduate college and realized I don’t really want to read anymore. Okay. I don’t want to read anymore. I’m done. I’m done. I don’t need to read.
Tyler (10:55.806)
Ha ha ha!
Tyler (11:01.214)
I also did all of those things, and now I spend my free time writing book reports and essays.
Ash (11:10.614)
So you never graduated. Good to know. Yeah, I say that and I’m not reading, but I am writing a bunch of stuff now because being a DM necessitates me writing a bunch of stuff.
Randall James (11:10.654)
Absolutely, that’s exactly it.
Tyler (11:20.766)
Yeah.
The existential dread all right
Ash (11:29.014)
Yaaaa
Randall James (11:31.102)
Yeah, so the biggest thing that got me here, right? 377 page document, perfectly fine. Beta, likely to change in the next version. I am a person that like, if I read one rule set to the next rule set to the next rule set, I literally like, I can’t keep it all and they will all conflate. If I read the entire document, I would be ruined forever for this game. Cause I would be quoting randomly 1 .2 beta test rules six years from now after running like, you know, a hundred hours of the game.
Tyler (11:52.606)
Ha ha!
Ash (12:00.854)
To be fair, a lot of these games kind of blend together because they pull from the same source. So yeah, they’re all kind of similar at the end of the day.
Tyler (12:06.718)
Yeah.
Randall James (12:11.07)
You’re very kind and I appreciate that. But still, on the flip side, we talked about it, kind of obscure. I don’t wanna call it thin. It felt like the purpose that it served was like, let’s get together and let’s tell a story. We’re gonna do a one -shot. We’re gonna do 10 to 20 hours of storytelling together and this is gonna facilitate it versus a lot of us love our dungeon fantasy and we love, love, love our long foreign games and they’re putting together the content to enable that.
Tyler (12:12.67)
Ah.
Ash (12:12.854)
Uhhhh…
Ash (12:40.726)
Yeah, the other thing that I would say about this versus Candela Obscura is Candela Obscura is very much inseparable from its source material in terms of like the setting and all that stuff. If you’re playing Candela Obscura, you’re playing it in their world. If you’re playing Daggerheart, you don’t necessarily have to pay attention to any of the lore that they put in there and you can just do your own thing, which is appreciated. That is my biggest pet peeve with game designers.
when they come out with new RPG systems. If your system is fundamentally inseparable or you make it as hard as possible to separate it from your setting and world, that’s a problem in my eyes. So I do… that is a definite positive in this.
Randall James (13:26.142)
Okay, but like…
Randall James (13:31.902)
Okay, but like, what is Daggerheart?
Tyler (13:36.446)
Okay, alright, so what a great question. Yeah, go for it, please.
Ash (13:38.294)
Wait, can I do an elevator pitch? Yeah. It’s D &D meets Powered by the Apocalypse. That’s basically what it is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you’ve probably heard that a bunch of times, like Powered by the Apocalypse and D &D are very popular, especially when people are trying to find that make alternatives to D &D.
Tyler (13:47.262)
Yeah, okay.
Randall James (13:48.286)
All right, nailed it. Fine. All right, folks. Thank you so much for joining us tonight.
Tyler (13:52.478)
Hahaha
Ash (14:03.478)
which is probably one of my biggest criticisms of the Dagger Heart is it does stuff that I don’t feel is really all that new. It does some cool things, don’t get me wrong. It’s not like it’s completely devoid of originality. It does have some cool ideas. But at the end of the day, if you’ve played a lot of these D &D alternatives or Powerbunny Apocalypse hacks, it’s going to feel like deja vu and it’s going to feel very familiar.
Tyler (14:31.358)
Hopefully that’s a good thing, like there’s a reason so many people hack 5e instead of playing a different game and it’s usually because like, yeah.
Ash (14:36.79)
Yeah, no, that can be a good thing. Yeah, no. And I realize Critical Role isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel here. They’re just trying to create an alternative that they feel comfortable playing and selling their material so they aren’t married to the OGL anymore, which I understand. But I’m just saying they could. I mean, I’m just I’m just saying, though, that if they were worried about that, they could have just played Pathfinder 2. It’s a better game anyway.
Randall James (14:55.07)
Yeah, not just that they feel comfortable, they want to feel legally covered. That’s the…
Tyler (14:58.782)
Yeah.
Ash (15:05.75)
Hahahaha!
Tyler (15:07.678)
Yeah. I have to wonder if Pathfinder doesn’t jive with their play style or, I don’t know.
Ash (15:15.286)
I mean they started out with Pathfinder before they started streaming. They played Pathfinder 1. So I don’t know. I think they’d like it. But that’s just me.
Tyler (15:17.79)
They did.
Tyler (15:26.11)
All right, so before we go any further, I should say we are looking at version 1 .2 of the playtest, which is the original version that they released publicly. So I’m sure 1 .1 and 1 .0 were internal. As we record this, it is Sunday and version 1 .3 releases on Tuesday, two days from now. So Randall, your existential dread about change logs and all that, like immediately, yeah.
Randall James (15:53.694)
coming. Yeah.
Tyler (15:55.326)
But hey, that does mean that they’re responding to feedback quickly, which is cool. All right, so I’m going to read a paragraph from Daggerheart about what it pitches itself as, because I feel like Ash did a good job, but let’s read some marketing.
Randall James (16:10.654)
Do the big Granduos voice.
Tyler (16:13.182)
Daggerheart is a collaborative tabletop role -playing game set in a vibrant fantasy world. Create a shared story with your adventuring party and shape your world through rich character progression and long -term campaign play.
Ash (16:30.518)
Yes, yes. Bravo, good sir. Yes, that was delightful. Yes, it was quite lovely indeed.
Tyler (16:31.07)
See, I can do voices.
You
Randall James (16:34.686)
Wonderful, quite wonderful.
Tyler (16:39.23)
Alright, so uh…
Ash (16:40.278)
My lord speaks with the verbosity of one befitting his station.
Tyler (16:45.534)
Alright, so if I shave the word Daggerheart off of that paragraph, what RPG am I describing?
Ash (16:52.118)
I would have to, yeah, it’s D &D. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no. But again, that’s why this exists. If the OGL disaster didn’t occur, then Daggerheart would not be. They are literally just making, they like 5th edition so much. And again, this is why a lot of people are making D &D hacks is people like 5th edition. It’s a popular system for a reason.
Tyler (16:56.19)
Kind of, yeah. Yeah.
Randall James (16:57.246)
generic dungeon fantasy? Okay, technically, yeah.
Ash (17:20.95)
And they don’t want to keep, a lot of these people want to keep making Olivia without the threat of being sued. So they’re making something that’s basically D &D without being D &D. So.
Tyler (17:31.518)
Kind of, yeah. At the same time, I feel like they’re looking for something that… Honestly, I think they’re looking for a system that’s gonna be more fun to watch while streaming, because a lot of the crunchy tactical combat in D &D isn’t super exciting. I listen to a lot of actual play podcasts, and combat is really, really hard to do well in an actual play format. So I…
Ash (17:43.542)
Mm -hmm.
Ash (17:56.79)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.
Randall James (17:56.958)
Yes.
Tyler (18:00.222)
Yeah, I’m wondering if this will be better.
Randall James (18:00.35)
No, I mean, I, I want to 100 % agree with you. Like I enjoy actual play podcast when I have time to listen to them. I enjoy it. Like when I run, for instance, that’s a great time. I’ll just binge listen to actual plays. And as sad as it is to say, when I listen to an hour long episode that is 40 minutes of combat with a character on the other side of the combat that I don’t really care about, like we’re going to kill them, we’re going to get some item, we’re going to move on. It’s like, can, can.
Can they just slip and fall down the mountain? Like, can we get this over with? I want to advance the story, which I feel like a lot of times that’s what we’re listening to Actual Plays for.
Ash (18:38.006)
Yeah, I don’t disagree. And yeah, so the thing is, if you’re going into Daggerheart expecting it to be like 5e but different, you should probably check there’s this great game called Tales of the Valiant that I would encourage you to check out because that’s not this. This takes more from Powered by the Apocalypse than it does from D &D. Like the stats might seem a little bit familiar, but most of what it takes is Powered by the Apocalypse, which is to say that it is very, very stripped down and simple.
Tyler (18:54.046)
I
Ash (19:06.23)
and is more focused on narrative than it is on like actual mechanics. So if that’s not your cup of tea, big, big disclaimer on Daggerheart that this is not going to be a game that you’re going to enjoy. It doesn’t have hard and fast rules for things. Like if you’re looking for defined rules and that’s one of the things that frustrates you about 5e where a lot of it was left up to player and DM interpretation, Daggerheart just exacerbates that problem.
Tyler (19:34.526)
Yeah.
Randall James (19:35.326)
I think so we’re talking about, okay, it feels very similar to powered by the apocalypse games. Let’s go ahead and dive in. Let’s talk about the mechanics of dagger.
Tyler (19:46.654)
Okay, all right, so we can start in, I’ll give you guys two options. So do we wanna look at characters first or do we wanna look at the core mechanic first?
Ash (19:57.014)
Let’s look at the core mechanics so that we can understand how characters work first.
Tyler (20:01.374)
That makes sense. All right. Okay, so this is explained in the launch announcement video. The core mechanic is always one of the first things you look at when you’re learning a new system, because you’re going to be doing this a lot. So when the GM rolls dice, they roll a D20, add modifiers versus a target number. That is exactly how it works in D &D, no surprises there. When players do things, when they roll an action check, as it’s called, they roll their D20.
Duality dice you have one die for hope one die for fear and they encourage you to make them separate colors So you can tell them apart so like let’s say a white dye and a black dye you roll them If the white dye is higher you’ve rolled with hope if the black dye is higher you’ve rolled with fear you total the numbers and then like that is you total the numbers add modifiers and Then that is the result of your check. So like if I roll the five and a six and then add stuff
like 11 plus whatever and then either I rolled with hope or rolled with fear. If you succeed with hope you get everything you wanted. If you succeed with fear you succeed but something bad happens. If you fail with hope like you don’t get everything you wanted. If you fail with fear it went real bad. If you manage to roll doubles you critically succeed. It counts as rolling with hope and you recover stress which we’ll get to later.
Ash (21:24.598)
Yeah, I do like this system. I think it’s very cool, but it also sounds very familiar. It reminds me of the hunger system in Vampire. I think it really does. One of your dice is hunger, and bad things happen if you roll a success with that dice or roll a failure with that dice. So it’s, again, I think Daggerheart is…
Tyler (21:30.974)
Yeah
Ash (21:52.47)
is a great system at borrowing from other things. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But yeah, so.
Randall James (22:01.822)
This winds up feeling a little bit different. If I remember how that worked with Vampire, whatever my current hunger was, I replaced one of my D10s with the hunger diet. And so if I had three hunger…
Ash (22:10.486)
Yeah, no, it is it is different because I think the reason why I’m saying that it feels very similar is again, it’s it only you only ever use those two dice. You only ever use 2D12. Whereas in Vampire, you had pools of dice. So as a result, to keep that up, you had to add more hunger dice. And if this was adjusted to more pools, we’d probably have to split that more as fear and more fear and hope dice, depending on the system.
But they realized that they always wanted it to be a 50 -50 thing. So they just made it two dice, which again, not a criticism. They’re taking something that’s good, simplifying it and making it more elegant, I guess, or digestible is the word that I’m looking for.
Randall James (22:56.926)
I do agree with that. Actually, I want to make a comparison to a different dice set that we’ve talked about. So Fantasy Flight Star Wars. Here you had multi -dimensional success where you would add and subtract modifiers. Basically, you’re adding to the dice bowl either things that are likely to help you. You might also be adding things that are likely to hurt you and then let the chicken entrails fall where they may. Where this is still giving you that feeling of multi -dimensional success where…
I can hit the target with my modifier. And I know it’s quite likely I’m going to hit the target because I have a good modifier for something. But there’s a slightly less than 50 % chance, because Ty goes to the runner in this case, there’s a slightly less than 50 % chance that even if I succeed, I may still have increased the fear pool, which may cost me now and is almost certainly going to cost me later. So it’s.
It’s achieving that feeling of multi -dimensional success, but keeping the core mechanic super, super simple and exactly towards your point Ash, like very digestible, easy to understand. Was it bigger? Was it smaller? Tell me what you rolled. Also tell me whether it’s Hopi or a tie and then we can move on.
Ash (23:57.782)
Mm -hmm.
Ash (24:09.174)
I do just also want to go on record. It may seem like I’m criticizing Dagger Heart a bunch. I do think that is a good system that is just really easy to pick up and play. It’s one of the appeals of things that are that take a lot of inspiration from Powered by the Apocalypse. Really easy. Like the videos to introduce people how to play it are like the first one is 20 minutes and the second one is a half hour on that. And that’s character creation and leveling up. So it’s going to be a little bit. But that same stuff would be like.
hours and hours to do in Vividition. So especially if you’re trying to get friends who have never had experience with like tabletop role -playing games before, this might be a good system to sort of introduce them to, especially like a younger generation. The designs and the colors are all very attractive and fun to look at.
Tyler (24:40.702)
Yeah.
Ash (25:03.958)
and it’s really easy to pick up and play. And since it takes so much inspiration from fifth edition, when they want to get into that more crunchy stuff, you can then graduate to fifth edition. So.
Tyler (25:19.166)
Alright, so yeah, that’s the core mechanic. Randall, you hit on the metacurrencies, the hope and fear. Those come back frequently and they feature heavily throughout the game. Managing metacurrencies is actually a huge part of how the game is played as far as I can tell. I kinda like it.
Ash (25:23.126)
Mm -hmm.
Ash (25:41.462)
which I hope I can’t tell from without playing it, but I hope that doesn’t get unwieldy and confusing to track because I could. I hate you so much. I hate you so much.
Tyler (25:44.99)
Hahaha
Tyler (25:51.518)
Yeah.
Randall James (25:52.158)
Would you say that you hope that it works, but you fear that it doesn’t?
Tyler (25:54.622)
Uhhh…
Randall James (26:00.894)
Good, good.
Ash (26:01.302)
But yeah, I could see that getting in as someone who’s very disorganized in ADD. I could see that gain away from me if I’m not paying attention or I could just forget that I have those currencies because players forget that they have inspiration all the freaking time. Granted, you’re going to get far more hope and fear tokens than you ever would inspiration in fifth edition since it’s such a core part of the mechanic. But the other problem I think is the…
Randall James (26:19.486)
Yeah.
Tyler (26:19.71)
Yeah.
Ash (26:30.838)
the consumable problem that we talked about before, where it’s like, I’m going to hoard these because I want to save it for when I really need it.
Tyler (26:39.774)
Yeah.
Randall James (26:41.022)
Well, I think from the GM’s perspective, because creatures like burns the fear to activate special abilities, this sort of thing, like you’re going to be looking at that thinking, like, you will take advantage of it to create interesting combat scenarios. And my hope would be that the players would constantly see you burning the fear meta currency. And so they would likewise consistently burn the hope meta currency for things that they want to do with it.
Ash (27:05.046)
Yeah, I think that also because so much of the mechanics require you to spend hope and fear, you’re probably it’s probably not going to be as much of a problem as I think it is. Like Randall said, as a DM, you spend fear to activate cool abilities for your monsters. And as players, you spend hope to activate some of your cool abilities, which we’ll get into later.
Randall James (27:24.958)
Yeah, it actually, it reminds me a little bit of the mechanics from Final Fantasy VII Remake. The idea of like, in old games, what do you do? Like I hit and I punch, because that’s what I do to deal damage. When instead it’s now like, I hit and I punch in this game so I can accumulate hope, hopefully. And then I use hope to do the fun things that I actually want to do.
Ash (27:45.014)
Missed opportunity then. Why can’t we limit break? Give us limit break. That’s essentially what limit break is. And it’s been canonized as like it is your hope building up to where you are able to come back with a strong. We have to check out Tabula Fantasmic. I can’t remember what it’s called.
Tyler (27:49.31)
Ha ha ha!
Randall James (27:50.43)
Oh, I would have loved that.
Tyler (28:06.462)
Oh gosh, uh, it’s, it’s back here in this pile somewhere.
Ash (28:11.03)
Yeah, we need to check it out the final the final fantasy inspired to fabulous Ultima. Thank you. Yes
Tyler (28:13.694)
Fabula Ultima. Yeah.
Randall James (28:15.198)
That’s it, yes. I kept wanting to say Tabula Sonorums, like, no, that was a table, a VTT. Okay. We do need to do that. I’m with you.
Tyler (28:19.614)
No?
Ash (28:21.27)
Yeah. Yeah. Fabula. Yeah. Fabula Ultima. Yeah. We drive to land to
Tyler (28:26.846)
Okay, all right, so, yeah, actually, I totally agree with you. Like, the hoarding seems like it might be a thing, but there is a cap on how much hope and fear you can have. And since you’re generating hope and fear, like, you’re generating one or the other every time you roll dice, so they come back very quickly. So the game is intended for like a rapid get it and spend it loop. But yeah, I could definitely see a situation where everyone’s like, I will not go below three hope unless I’m…
absolutely about to die.
Ash (28:56.63)
Also, speaking of dying, I want to say I think the way that they approach death is quite awesome. I think it’s pretty brilliant. Yeah. Okay.
Tyler (29:05.534)
Okay, we’ll get there, we’ll get there. It is really cool. Yeah. All right, so let’s talk about characters. How characters work can tell you a whole lot about a system. And honestly, I think we’re gonna learn a lot about what Daggerheart is just from how characters work. So much like D &D, your character will have some fantasy ancestry species, whatever you wanna call it.
and they’ll have a class, a career, a job, whatever, some specialist training thing. So characters will feel very similar. Like there are a lot of characters in the… There are a lot of ancestries in the playtest that you could very clearly look at me like, yeah, they took that because it’s in D &D. Like there’s a turtle race, there’s a frog race, there’s a bird race that…
Ash (29:57.462)
Which apparently the ribbits are the most popular ancestry right now. Which fair, they’re very cute. They’re very cute.
Tyler (30:02.43)
Yeah, their art is adorable. Yeah. Okay, so the frog people, they’re called Ribbit. The machine people, they’re called Clank. Internet, I’m giving you exactly one month from right now, so I realize that people won’t hear this for a while, but on internet, I’m giving you one month until someone makes me a Ribbit and Clank actual play series.
Ash (30:10.486)
Yeah.
Tyler (30:30.334)
Get on it.
Ash (30:30.518)
That’s quite brilliant. That’s quite brilliant. Yes, I would listen to that. I would listen to that every day. If someone made a ribbit and clank, just two buffoons going through Daggerheart, that would be fantastic. Please do that. Please do that.
Randall James (30:31.646)
Okay, yeah.
Tyler (30:37.598)
Uh -huh.
Tyler (30:42.846)
Uh, yep. That one’s free for you, Critical Role. I don’t know. Maybe. All right. It’s free use, it’s parody.
Ash (30:49.75)
But they probably get sued, so yeah.
Randall James (30:54.462)
Wait, wait, why would they get sued?
Ash (30:56.758)
ratchet ratchet and clank that’s too close
Randall James (31:00.094)
Nah, there’s nothing similar. I don’t know what you’re talking about. These these innocent. So what if rivets a mechanic?
Tyler (31:00.126)
Yeah.
As long as the characters aren’t named Ribbit and Clank, you’d probably get away with it. It’s the working title. Characters. You have attributes, just like D &D’s ability scores, but they’ve shuffled some things around. There’s only…
Just a moment, I have to double check.
Ash (31:29.974)
It’s still six attributes. But…
Tyler (31:32.862)
Yeah, I’m trying to remember which one they got rid of.
Ash (31:35.702)
They got rid of Constitution.
Tyler (31:39.294)
That’s what I thought.
Ash (31:39.798)
Yeah, they have agility, strength, finesse, knowledge, presence. And I forget what the last one is.
Tyler (31:51.582)
Agility, strength, finesse, instinct. So, yeah.
Ash (31:54.614)
instinct. I’m struggling to understand the difference between finesse and agility. They seem like the same thing, which just get rid of finesse. That would be my, that would be my, or get rid of agility. Just get rid of one of those because it’s just, they’re too similar and they overlap way too much.
Randall James (32:11.39)
Yeah. Agility is like, agility is can you go bouldering and finesse is can you juggle rocks?
Tyler (32:19.966)
Can you pick pockets? Kinda, yeah. Yeah.
Ash (32:21.334)
Yeah, the problem is, is that finesse seems like the from what I’ve seen so far, finesse seems like the most relevant to most things. Agility feels really, really niche right now. It’s like it’s like how acrobatics is in raw, where it’s just like it’s pretty much only used for balancing and stuff like that. It’s like, OK, I get it. Do we need it, though? I know that we want to go with the classic six and you got rid of Constitution, which.
Tyler (32:38.27)
Yeah.
Randall James (32:44.701)
Yeah.
Ash (32:49.942)
also feels a little bit weird to me, but whatever. If you just want to pack that into strength, that’s fine. But you don’t have to do the six ability score. So if I was… They’re taking notes. My note to them is just get rid of either agility or finesse. You don’t need both.
Tyler (33:07.518)
I think, so in 5e, Dexterity is the god stat. Of all of the ability scores, it does the most things. Characters built around Dexterity are generally more effective than characters built around Strength. I think they looked at that issue and thought, okay, we don’t want Dexterity to run away with the game, so we’re gonna split it into gross motor skills, which is like your whole body, and fine motor skills, which is like…
your fingies.
Ash (33:39.606)
Well, then if that’s the problem, just look at the way Pathfinder 2 did it. Again, I know that they solved all the problems. I mean, it’s just like because Dexterity, it’s still good, but it’s not it’s not like the god stat like it was in 5e. You don’t use it for you don’t use it for initiative. You do use it for your armor class, but and you’d use it for to hit on some things, but you don’t get to add it to damage even with those things. So.
Tyler (33:57.022)
Yeah.
Tyler (34:07.326)
Yeah.
Ash (34:08.086)
It’s not as like overpowered as it is in 5e. So there are way and I don’t think that that was doesn’t seem like a huge issue in Daggerheart. So I don’t feel like I get why they wanted to avoid it, but.
Tyler (34:21.95)
I think I’m inclined to agree. I’m pretty sure agility doesn’t add to your evasion, which seems like a weird choice, honestly. Like that if you’re gonna do anything with agility, it should add to evasion. So like I –
Ash (34:35.03)
Yeah, I forget what agility actually contributes to, but it barely got mentioned in the videos that I watched. So I’m just like, it feels like an appendix. Let’s just get rid of it.
Tyler (34:45.47)
Mm -hmm. All right, so attributes are a thing. Ancestry is a thing. We talked about some of the ancestry options. There’s like 30 of them in the playtest, which seems like a lot when you think about like, oh, D &D, Pathfinder, every ancestry has a ton of stats. Your ancestry basically provides one thing that you can do special. Like the Ribbit, you can spend hope to attack things with your tongue, which is kind of neat.
Ash (35:15.734)
That is cool.
Randall James (35:16.542)
Sorry.
Tyler (35:17.15)
Yeah. Yeah, it does a d12 damage, so it’s like my tongue is a great axe, I guess. I don’t know.
Randall James (35:26.334)
Yeah, I’m curious to yeah, if I’m uh, if I if I’m ever attacking something with my tongue I’m probably doing it out of hope right? This is never gonna work
Ash (35:26.934)
I’m gonna tongue it.
Tyler (35:35.102)
Okay.
Ash (35:38.038)
They also have the communities, which I think is cool. It shows that, you know, it’s the division between like, what your race is doesn’t necessarily dictate your worldview, which I feel like is a trap for a lot of racial stuff in D &D and Dungeon Fantasy. Although when you look at it, community could just basically be the stand in for backgrounds. So, but…
Tyler (36:06.526)
Yeah.
Ash (36:07.03)
It’s still, it’s still cool. I like it.
Randall James (36:09.47)
I was going to make the argument it almost feels like the ancestry is the mechanical equivalent of the background. Take these two stat improvements and one other thing where mechanically you’re just getting one other thing.
Tyler (36:25.374)
Well, so you don’t get stat improvements from your ancestry. Yeah.
Randall James (36:28.062)
understood, understood, but you get one thing, like you get one thing from it and that feels very background -y.
Ash (36:28.118)
No.
Ash (36:33.366)
Yeah, but it’s more to do with your physicality, not necessarily your background. Like with ribbits, the tongue is just, you have a extended tongue. Yeah, you can’t really learn that. Yeah, exactly. Whereas community has more to do with your upbringing and your worldview and that kind of stuff.
Randall James (36:39.55)
Oh, I understand.
You can’t learn that anywhere. You gotta be a rivet.
Tyler (36:44.478)
Yeah.
Tyler (36:51.902)
Uh -huh.
Randall James (36:51.934)
Yeah. So what do you get from your community?
Tyler (36:54.59)
One thing that you can do. One more thing. Yeah.
Randall James (36:57.182)
One more thing. Okay, cool. Good. But a thing that you could learn that wouldn’t be required to have a particular physical body to make it happen. Okay.
Ash (36:57.27)
Yeah.
Ash (37:02.646)
Well, they’re all something born. So there’s Wanderborn, Nobleborn, Slyborn, Mageborn, all that kind of stuff. So yeah. Yeah.
Tyler (37:12.99)
Yeah, the only one I can remember, I think it’s Seaborn and the benefit is once per game session, you get to take an additional rest action when you rest. And like, we’ll talk about rest more later, but when you rest, you get to take two rest actions and do cool things. It’s great. So your ancestry will give you one thing you can do. Your community will give you one thing you can do.
You have attributes and everybody uses a standard array. It’s like plus two, plus one, plus one, zero, minus one, if I remember right. And then you get your class, which is most of the things you do. So classes are very, very similar to the D &D classes. Like there is a one -to -one equivalent for almost all of them. Some of them have names changed, like Paladin is the…
Ash (37:48.054)
Yeah, that’s right.
Tyler (38:09.214)
the serif and fighter is warrior, otherwise they’re pretty close. Every class is like, there’s three things you get from your class. There are two domains for each class, which is like subject matter expertise, not cleric domains. And then also you’ll have specific features from your class. And then you have a subclass, which also gives you specific features. So like you get a lot from your class.
Ash (38:37.11)
Yeah, this is where some of the similarities from Power of the Apocalypse become very blatant or very clear, I should say, is each class has its own character sheet and playbook, so to speak, where it has it has a list of what you get at specific levels. And like you don’t get as much as like, say, in D &D, you get to pick two things. And based on your class, that’s what it is. So, yeah, each.
Each class has its own character sheet in Powered by the Apocalypse. They’re called playbooks and it works very similarly. So if you’ve played Powered by the Apocalypse, this is going to feel very familiar.
Tyler (39:18.75)
sense. Okay, so I talked a bit about the domains. So every class gets two. The domains have names, and I remember a couple of them. It’s like sage, blood, bone, arcane, etc.
Ash (39:34.262)
Sword valor. Yeah.
Tyler (39:36.606)
Yeah. The names don’t always make sense. Like, if I told you one of them is Sage, what do you think it’s about?
Ash (39:45.27)
knowledge, learning stuff.
Tyler (39:48.318)
It’s either about learning or cooking. No, it’s plant magic.
Ash (39:53.078)
Okay. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I did also have that similar feeling. So, Randall, let me ask you, what do you think the bone domain is about?
Randall James (39:54.174)
Well, that, we were both right.
Tyler (39:54.59)
Yep! Kinda!
Tyler (40:03.774)
Hehehe
Randall James (40:07.902)
I wish it were necromancy and I’m certain that it isn’t.
Ash (40:11.286)
It is not. It is about movement and defense.
Tyler (40:17.118)
Yeah, that’s the right response. What? Yeah.
Ash (40:19.222)
Yep, because warriors, their domains are bone and sword. Doesn’t make any sense to me. I think that they need to take a second pass at some of the names for these domains because they are not evocative of what they are at all.
Tyler (40:25.118)
Hmm.
Randall James (40:27.006)
No.
Tyler (40:30.686)
Yeah.
Tyler (40:34.878)
No. Okay. So within the domains, there are a set of special abilities. I believe there’s two for every level and the level range is one through 10. So it’s 20 abilities within a domain. Each class gets two domain. Each domain is on exactly two classes. So.
Randall James (40:38.654)
Bone Warrior.
Tyler (41:02.91)
Every class overlaps with two other classes and it’s very very specifically called out in the playtest document saying like hey if you want a well -rounded party try to avoid overlapping domains. It’s okay to do that if you want to but if you do you might find that like the thing you have feels less special because somebody else can do it too. So the game does encourage you to diversify within the party which just like in D &D like you want to cover a broad set of skills.
Ash (41:31.19)
It does have the downside where it runs into the 4E problem where certain classes can feel very similar to each other. And it can feel like the classes are just reskins of the same abilities, which they essentially are. At the end of the day, you’re just taking different combinations of domains to create a class, which…
Tyler (41:48.926)
Hahaha.
Ash (41:57.142)
is fine, but if you do have that overlap, that’s going to become blatantly apparent and might turn off some people, especially if you have nightmares from fourth edition.
Tyler (42:07.998)
Let’s see. So classes also provide a unique feature of some kind. You will get to pick a subclass. There are two subclasses for every class in the playtest document. Subclasses provide an initial benefit and then two more benefits as you level. You can upgrade your subclass, essentially, and get more benefits. You can multiclass, which lets you add an additional domain.
but you treat it as half your level and you give up your top level subclass feature in order to do that. So there is a trade -off more than just, I have leveled, I am now a level one fighter in addition to being a cool wizard or whatever.
Ash (42:49.206)
Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend multiclassing in this system. Since there’s only 10 levels. I don’t I again I haven’t played it but just from looking at it. I don’t think it’s gonna be worth it. Just saying. Yeah, yeah.
Randall James (42:49.79)
Yeah.
Randall James (43:01.118)
What I think, you know, at your own risk, right? Like, you know your table, you know the people you’re playing with. Are you going to make it to level 10? Are you?
Tyler (43:06.462)
Yeah.
Ash (43:09.686)
Yeah. Yeah.
Tyler (43:11.998)
I mean, maybe it takes the less time to get to level 10 in this than it does to get to level 20 in D &D.
Ash (43:17.046)
It is also a lot easier to die in this system than it is in fifth edition, from what I can tell.
Randall James (43:21.982)
which is awesome, like actually one of the coolest things that they did.
Tyler (43:23.87)
Yeah.
Ash (43:25.142)
Yeah, no, I I don’t disagree like any system that makes death a real risk is a bonus in my book I know that people don’t like losing their character, but it adds stakes to the narrative when you can die I do which is why if you ask my plane scape characters, I treat as a game for when I can kill my players i’m like, ah Gotcha
Randall James (43:38.43)
I sure love killing them.
Tyler (43:40.158)
Yeah.
Randall James (43:49.598)
I do want to go back to the domains just a touch. I feel like I see what they’re going for here. And if they pull it off in the complete rules, I think it would be very fun. The ideas of almost thinking of your class, like your occupation, the thing you do, and the domain as a skill set of how you do it as being two separate things that you can combine in interesting ways. I think in order for that to really work, what you’re going to have to have is a lot of synergy between
potential domains, the potential classes, such that when I ultimately play, you know, a bone warrior that winds up feeling different than anything else, there’s potential there. Let’s see if they pull it off.
Tyler (44:34.142)
I can see it. All right, so we talked a little bit about levels. The level range goes from one to 10. You start at level one with two domain cards from your class, and then you get one more every time you gain a level. In addition, like at the bottom of your character sheet, there are three tiers, like levels one to four, five to seven, and then eight to 10. Don’t quote me on those numbers, check a character sheet. But…
There are three tiers of play. For each tier, there’s like some check boxes at the bottom of your character sheet and you get to check two of those boxes every time you gain a level and you get some benefits. So it’s like additional hit points, increase your some of your attributes, extra damage, raise your damage thresholds, things like that.
Ash (45:23.03)
Yeah, again, a system that is familiar to those who have played Power by the Apocalypse. I think it’s elegant for a reason. Instead of expanding experience points to upgrade certain features like you do in Power by the Apocalypse, you just pick two. And again, I think it really makes it simple, easy to figure out what you can and can’t do. And it doesn’t throw a bunch of features and numbers at people, especially if, again, like I said, this is a really great game to introduce your friends who don’t like math.
and are intimidated by the big book that you put in front of them when you want to get them to play D &D. This is really easy to digest. It has all of the stuff on the sheet. You don’t need to explain it to them or hand them a book to peruse over for their options. It’s just right there. It’s very handy.
Tyler (46:11.006)
Now I do think they’ve moved the complexity somewhere else more than really getting rid of it in a lot of ways.
Ash (46:17.814)
Yeah, the cards and domain features are where the complexity comes in for sure.
Tyler (46:22.654)
So as you’re building your character, as you’re adding things to it, all of these special things that you can do are represented by a card. So you have a card for your ancestry, a card for your community, two cards for your domain features, and you start the game with four cards. Every time you gain a level, you get a new ability from your class. You add another card, you add another card, you add another card, and you’re accumulating these cards. So as soon you have this hand,
Ash (46:49.206)
You can only hold five. You can only hold five.
Tyler (46:51.838)
You can only hold, yes. So you can only hold five cards from your domain. So once you have enough of those, like that’ll be level four when you get up to five domain cards. So at level five, you have to start sideboarding your cards. So you can have five domain cards in your loadout. Any extras you have to set aside and like you can spend stress to use those even though they’re set aside. But like you have a hand of cards and like you’re playing Magic,
Gathering you have these other cards over here that you can’t really use a whole lot unless like you do something weird so
Like, they’ve moved the complexity from like, I have too many things written on my character sheet to my character sheet’s nice and simple, but I’ve got all these complicated cards in my hand now.
Ash (47:40.214)
Yeah, it’s I don’t hate the system. I think it’s an interesting system, but I do think that it can get overwhelming really quick. But I think the way that they do it is pretty good, which is that it’s not like you’re getting a bunch of cards all at the beginning. You gain just a limited few and then you add at most one card per level. So it’s not like you’re just getting, oh, you’ve reached level four. Here’s 10 more cards.
Tyler (47:56.958)
Yeah.
Ash (48:08.79)
figure out what they do. And you only ever get to choose from two cards after the first level. They never get to choose from two options from each domain. So at most you’re picking from four cards. So it’s not super horrible. I will say I could see people losing those cards real quick.
Tyler (48:09.086)
You
Tyler (48:28.606)
Yeah. Yeah. Um.
I have to wonder if it works out in play similarly to Gloomhaven.
Ash (48:39.03)
I have not played Gluemave it so I can’t tell.
Randall James (48:42.046)
I can imagine that. Honestly, this seems simpler than Gloom Haven to me. I do imagine there’s going to be, when the final product is out, there’s going to be an app for your phone. You’re going to get served ads.
Tyler (48:54.224)
I hope. Well, there’s already a free character builder tool on Demiplane. They had that on launch day, which is crazy.
Randall James (49:03.87)
Yeah, link in the show notes.
Ash (49:05.654)
Yeah, that’s the other my big worry is how this is going to translate to VTT because I could see this being kind of a pain for VTT especially because they don’t have measurements for distances which I get why they did it but I kind of hate it. I’m not gonna lie. I’m a person who likes exact measurements so that I can picture stuff and just saying oh it’s like
It’s just the the short end of a card or a pencil. But I’m like, what if I sharpened my pencil a lot? How long is a pencil? And they’re trying to free up like, oh, you don’t need like checkerboard and stuff. It’s like, I like that stuff and I would like to keep it. So my hope is, is that they at least put an option of like, OK, these are the one, especially when you’re talking about BTT, which can’t you can’t really account for that stuff. You can’t be like, I’m going to put a card on the.
Tyler (49:39.614)
Yeah.
Ash (49:59.286)
virtual tabletop and see how far away you are. I hope they put actual measurements in. That would be my other big note. Please, please, please put actual measurements in because otherwise there’s going to be so many arguments at my table.
Tyler (49:59.966)
Yeah.
Tyler (50:13.278)
Yeah.
Randall James (50:13.79)
Okay, what about adopting something like the year zero engine, just range bands and giving you range bands.
Ash (50:19.99)
That’s fine. Just something that is static and easily measurable because if you give people options, there’s going to be arguments at the table. That’s just the way it’s going to be.
Randall James (50:21.15)
Good enough? Okay.
Tyler (50:21.374)
Zones, yeah.
Randall James (50:33.63)
So you’re not imagining this as just a pure theater of the mind game. You want to put tokens on boards.
Ash (50:37.846)
I mean, if you’re playing if you’re playing theater of the mind, that’s fine. I personally despise theater of the mind. I don’t like it, especially as someone who like it’s hard for me to focus already. So asking me to focus in my mind is is like torture for me. So I get that they’re trying to make it accessible for theater of the mind and tabletop, which is fine. If you want to keep the the loose measurements cool.
Tyler (50:44.957)
Heheheheh
Ash (51:05.27)
I’m not asking you to get rid of that. I’m asking you for me, please put measurements in as well. That’s all I’m asking. Just put in measurements as well. It’s an option. Let people buy into it. All right? That’s all I ask.
Tyler (51:13.694)
You
Randall James (51:20.35)
I’ll call, I’ll call them, I’ll let them know. Range Vans.
Ash (51:22.454)
Hahaha!
Tyler (51:23.07)
Okay. Alright, so on that note, why don’t we talk a bit about combat? I know we’re focusing on like the D &D style things in the game and there is more to the game than that. Oh shoot, okay, hang on. I have to go back to characters real quick. I missed one thing. Experiences. So…
Ash (51:42.71)
This is the one that makes me so nervous. I can see this getting out of hand real quick.
Tyler (51:46.046)
Yeah.
Yeah. Okay, so your character starts with two experiences. Now, these are something about your character, something about their backstory, their personal experience, which gives them, like, unique capabilities.
Randall James (52:03.102)
I am a Ribbit, I was a Pirate King, and therefore I am really good at working on ropes and knots and things like that, as well as persuading people to make trade.
Ash (52:14.614)
So then your experiences would be not tying and trading.
Tyler (52:14.91)
Um.
Tyler (52:20.574)
could be. Yeah, you could not tie in trading, you could do like Pirate King, larceny, walking planks, coercion.
Ash (52:31.062)
My worry is that people are going to be like, my experience is I’ve never lost a fight.
Tyler (52:38.046)
but yeah. Yeah, so the –
Randall James (52:42.782)
Well then, okay, but in that case, just beat the crap out of them as a GM and be like, well, now you have, that’s not your experience anymore. Good game, good game. Okay, what is the mechanic of the experience? Let’s settle that. And then I think we could use that as a guide to what a valid experience is.
Tyler (52:46.91)
I’m sorry.
Ash (52:49.494)
uhuhuhuh
Tyler (52:57.694)
Yeah, so you spend a hope point when you’re making an action check. And if one of your experiences applies, you can apply the numeric value of that experience to the check. So like, let’s say I had the experience, a bar room brawler, like I get in lots of bar fights. So that’s my experience. And I decide I am going to sucker punch somebody. And I say to the GM, like, hey,
This feels like a thing I’ve done in a bar room. Can I use my experience? The GM would say like, sure, yeah, I buy that. You spend a hope, you get a plus one or a plus two or whatever the value is.
Ash (53:34.645)
My other worry is that this becomes like the problem it is for Call of Cthulhu or vampire with specialties, which I don’t know if you guys remember that you had specialties. Did they ever once come up during our play? No, no, they did not. But still, I’ve. Yeah, yeah, like.
Tyler (53:51.518)
I mean, it was one session.
Randall James (53:53.822)
Well, or like lore in PF2.
Tyler (53:55.71)
Oh, actually, mine did. I had the gas lighting specialty.
Ash (54:02.198)
Oh, that’s right. That’s right. So, yeah, they do. They do come up. But again, it really is dependent on the game that you’re playing and your DM’s remembrance of like trying to play to what you do. So you could have some players where their experience is coming up every session and you could have some players whose experience never ever comes up. And that can be really frustrating, especially when you thought you picked something that would be good.
Randall James (54:02.622)
Oh yeah, I remember that. Well, I don’t, you know.
Tyler (54:10.526)
Yeah.
Ash (54:30.358)
But turns out it’s not. And that’s what I worry is going to be a big problem for this game. And it’s why I have a problem with like DM player fiat systems in general. I get why why they exist. I get why they’re encouraged. But in my experience, they either never come up or they just cause arguments with people.
Randall James (54:52.606)
I hear that and I’m recognizing like my whole knot tying thing is like super narrow focused and probably isn’t going to be very valuable. But maybe, you know, I spent two summers on a ship. That’s the experience. And so now, you know, if I’m working on a simple mechanism, maybe I could argue that I would have seen something like this and like the tackle on a ship. If I’m trying to work with ropes, I can make the same argument. If I’m dealing with the sea creature and I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with that, maybe I can make the same argument. You know, they
making simple repairs. Like, I feel like if you pick the right experience and have that agreement of like, what kinds of things did you do, like write me a paragraph of the work that you did during that moment, you ought to be able to come up with something that’s just going to generally apply in a lot of places.
Ash (55:36.566)
Yeah, no, I don’t disagree. But again, especially since this is a game that’s marketed at newer players, some players aren’t going to be aware of where they can argue for for that application. People who create like, oh, I had experience on a ship and then they spend the entire time in the desert. They’re not going to think, OK, what’s a creative way I can use my ship experience in the desert? They’re just going to think, oh, we’re in the desert. My ship building experience.
is absolutely fricking useless for me. So it’s and some people don’t like arguing for that stuff or they just forget to argue for that stuff. So again, I really think it’s dependent on the group you have in the sort of DM you have, which is what makes me nervous. I don’t like games where it’s really depend where systems where it’s really dependent on the individual person that’s participating in the group and the DM, which is why.
Randall James (56:34.334)
Um.
Ash (56:34.934)
Which is why I’ll prefer Pathfinder 2 because it doesn’t have as much of the DM fiat nonsense.
Randall James (56:40.446)
I’m imagining this scenario where you have a great GM and the GM is basically trying to hand it to you. It’s like, hey, we’re starting in a desert and you’re looking for water right now. You spent six months on a ship, right? Go ahead and use that experience. And then the player being, why? Answer me.
Tyler (56:57.086)
Yeah.
Ash (56:58.838)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that’s the thing is like, if the player is not going to argue for themselves, then the DM has to remember everybody’s experience. And that’s way too much information for the DM to remember. So it’s I don’t hate the system. I think there’s potential in it. But anytime there’s sort of that nebulous, like it’s up to interpretation kind of mechanic, it just makes my red flags go up.
Randall James (57:24.542)
Okay, let me ask you a question. Is this better or worse than PF2 lore?
Ash (57:30.326)
I would say it’s about the same. At least with lore, like I’ve seen lore come up more often than like say specialties in vampire, especially since like it depends on the game. Like, for instance, in my strength of thousands game, one of my players befriended this this girl who was very into what’s the term for study of insects?
Tyler (57:56.03)
No idea.
Randall James (57:56.67)
Entomology.
Ash (57:57.558)
Entomology. Yeah. So very into entomology. So I rewarded them with a lore for entomology, which unbeknownst to them, I’m like, this game involves a lot of insects. So that’s going to be very fricking useful in this game. So like, yeah, I think I’ve seen lore come up more often than I have seen, like specialties like with the gas lighting specialty.
But so again, it really depends on the game. So that’s why I would say it’s on the same level as lore, whereas I don’t think because it’s fundamental to the system, I don’t think it’s never going to come up like it does with specialties. But I also think that there is a possibility, depending on the relevance to the campaign, that it might not come up all that often.
Randall James (58:33.982)
Yeah.
Randall James (58:47.614)
I actually want to borrow from PF2. I feel like where lore comes up most in PF2 is when you’re using pre -gen characters with some campaign and they’re just matched up beautifully. It’s like, when am I ever going to need like sun -dried raisin lore? And then all of a sudden you get in the raisin factory and it’s like, oh, okay.
Ash (59:05.91)
To be fair, the –
That’s a very specific lore skill. Like, holy crap. Yeah, no, yeah. But…
Randall James (59:12.798)
I was doing a bit like I was, it was just a, you know, okay. But, but, but no way. What the reason I’m bringing this up is to say you could do something similar as a GM. If you like, you know what story you’re more or less going to tell, you know, the arc you’re going to go through. You might say, Hey folks, feel free to pick experiences you like. Um, but here’s a pool of experiences that I think, you know, if each of you took one of these might be beneficial, uh, as you, as you have this experience, that kind of structure might work really well.
Tyler (59:13.054)
Yeah. Yeah.
Ash (59:37.526)
Yeah.
Ash (59:41.686)
Yeah, that would be better. And again, the other problem with these kinds of systems is sometimes with players when they’re coming up with them, they either get too specific, like your sun dried tomato lore thing, or they get too broad. Like my experience is I’m a good walker. So whenever I’m walking anywhere, I get a bonus. So that’s the other main issues. Like if…
Tyler (59:59.038)
You
Randall James (01:00:04.03)
And you wrote for wall.
Ash (01:00:06.326)
Like when you like when you’re moving it, when you’re moving in to attack a person, you can argue, well, I’m technically walking up to him, so I should get a bonus to this attack. That’s what I’m saying. I can see that very abusable. So it really like this is a this is one of those things where it’s my pet peeve with five. It’s going to be a pet peeve if it’s if if you don’t like them five to you’re going to have to be a very good mediator as a DM to be like, no, you can’t do that.
Randall James (01:00:13.534)
That’s fair.
Ash (01:00:35.638)
So yeah, just that is a big asterisk on this system is if you don’t like those that stuff in 5e, you’re going to hate it here.
Tyler (01:00:35.774)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:00:45.886)
Maybe one more point here that I’ll throw out and then maybe, you know, if we want to talk and keep talking, probably we’ll want to move on. The fact that you have to spend hope in order to gain the benefit at least means that this won’t be like absolutely, absolutely abused. And even as a GM, you might have an attitude of more or less, I’m going to allow it because what I really care about is the meta currency. As long as you make some reasonable argument. I think that makes it better.
than it just being something you can straight up do anytime you want, because at least it’s costing you some.
Ash (01:01:20.47)
Yeah, but I think it’s marginally better than it could be. But again, it’s still just a thing that just gives me so many red flags. And I would have to play it before I really make a judgment on it. But my gut instinct is like, I don’t like this system. And I would prefer if they’d give me actual mechanics.
Tyler (01:01:31.358)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:01:41.118)
That’s fair, that’s fair.
Tyler (01:01:47.23)
Sorry, that was me, not my recording.
So I think what worries me about the experiences, yes, you guys are absolutely right. You have that horrible danger of either being way too specific or way too broad. You can also increase the value of the experiences. You start with one plus two and one plus one. And then you’ll get additional plus two experiences naturally as you level. But some of your level up benefits are that you can increase the numerical value of an experience. So what?
clever optimizers are going to say, oh yeah, I’m going to pick an incredibly broad experience, put all of my level up benefits into just maxing out that value. And then just any time I make a check, it’s like, yeah, I’m going to spend one hope for a plus five on whatever I’m doing. I don’t care what it is. Yeah.
Ash (01:02:34.038)
Yeah, it’s a game that wants to be casual is what it feels like. Like it wants to be open and casual. But the problem is that with this system, it is extremely easy to break it. It is extremely easy to the point where it’s going to make a lot of people mad if you’re playing with people who are who aren’t into the optimization, which is why they want to play this versus the person who’s always the optimizer. They’re going to.
Tyler (01:02:38.302)
Mm -hmm.
Tyler (01:02:48.286)
Yeah.
Ash (01:02:58.934)
see a system that they can easily exploit and they’re going to do so. And they’re going to be basically the strongest character in that entire game. So if yeah, it’s it’s a real easy system to exploit. By the way, time check. We’re at an hour and three minutes. I thought this would be short, too. But yeah, let’s let’s just bang out the rest of that. We don’t have much left to talk about.
Tyler (01:03:05.246)
Yeah.
Tyler (01:03:16.51)
Really? We thought this would be short. Well, eh. Okay, let’s skip the question of the week. We’ll, we’ll…
Tyler (01:03:29.694)
Okay, alright, damn, cut that for us, please.
Ash (01:03:31.926)
Yes, please.
Randall James (01:03:32.542)
Leave it in. I’m kidding.
Tyler (01:03:34.462)
Okay, all right, so let’s actually talk about combat now for reals this time. So all of those…
Randall James (01:03:40.734)
Okay, so we say we’re gonna fight and then we roll initiative, right?
Tyler (01:03:45.054)
How dare you, sir. We don’t do that here. Okay. Alright, so if you were really worried about the loosey -goosey nature of the experiences, boy, you’re gonna have a great time here. Okay.
Ash (01:03:46.23)
No.
Yeah, we don’t do initiative.
Randall James (01:03:50.206)
Ugh.
Ash (01:04:01.462)
Yeah. Yeah, I can already sense the organized people tensing up right now because oh boy, is it loose. Oh boy.
Tyler (01:04:08.062)
Yeah.
Tyler (01:04:11.87)
Yeah. Okay, so there’s no initiative. There’s no turn order. There’s no like fixed requirement for anybody to act. Play starts with the players. The players decide amongst themselves who acts, who acts when, how many times. You could…
Randall James (01:04:30.224)
We’re going to spend six minutes. I don’t know. Why don’t you go? I mean, but did you, you were really good last time when you left.
Tyler (01:04:32.83)
Yeah.
Mm -hmm.
Ash (01:04:39.414)
I will say I have played, I think I mentioned it a few times, of my active initiative where players choose who goes next in the order and stuff like that. And that, it’s not as chaotic as you’d think. Players are usually pretty, as long as you don’t have a problem table, players that are usually willing to work with each other. That being said, even in active initiative, there’s still some structure to it because…
players are choosing who goes next is not just a free for all. Yeah.
Tyler (01:05:11.71)
Yeah, yeah. Like, I absolutely see this becoming a problem at tables with mixed experience levels, like new players, shy players, quiet players, even if they’ve been there for a super long time, they might just naturally take a backseat to all of the loud boisterous, like, I wanna do a thing, players. I am a loud, I wanna do a thing player, and I play with a lot of people who are not. So like, in a lot of the groups I play in, with a lot of the people I play in, are…
with the people I play with, this would not be a good system already. Like, that alone would make combat an absolute nightmare for those people.
Ash (01:05:51.35)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:05:51.422)
Yeah, as a GM, like I would have to be almost like people managing the… No, that’s great that you think you should go first, but…
Tyler (01:05:57.182)
Mm -hmm.
Ash (01:06:04.182)
Yeah, and that’s that that is also a big red frag here is basically so just to give you a brief a brief summary of how it works is players can act as many times as they want they if you want to attack like four or five times as the same player you can do that and you can monopolize the entire tour or while your players just sit there and watch uh, the the the thing is is that whenever you miss or you hit with fear like we talked about uh, then the dm gets to have a turn
Randall James (01:06:04.542)
people.
Tyler (01:06:05.822)
You
Randall James (01:06:09.726)
Big ol’ red frag.
Ash (01:06:33.91)
Which sounds elegant, sounds like, OK, so there’s a limiting factor. You eventually it will be the DM’s turn. The problem that I can see becoming an issue and causing people to fight is when the one guy tries to monopolize the turn order and he he gets to do all the stuff. And then when he fails, you don’t get to go anymore because guess what? It’s the DM’s turn. He took three turns and he lost you guys the initiative. You’re going to hate that guy. You’re going to be so mad at that guy. And I have.
Tyler (01:07:01.31)
Yeah.
Ash (01:07:03.894)
been in games where there is that player and I see this going wrong so quickly.
Tyler (01:07:11.646)
Gosh, the discussion I’ve seen online around this mechanic is like, people saying like, this is going to cause problems at tables because of the reasons we’ve just described, and then other people saying like, wow, your tables sound like they suck. It’s like, boy, I’m super glad for you that all of your players have a roughly even amount of experience and all of them are comfortable enough at the table that they can all get along through this system. But yeah.
Ash (01:07:34.486)
Yeah, can you tell me where your group is? Because I would love that. What fantasy do you live in where every table is in sync with each other and polite to each other? I want that to… I don’t even get that at my home game and we’ve been playing together for years. So that’s why… if you have that, that’s great. I’m happy for you. Not everybody has that.
Tyler (01:07:40.83)
Yeah.
Tyler (01:07:44.382)
Yeah.
Tyler (01:07:49.438)
Yeah!
Tyler (01:07:54.238)
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, the absolute. It’s kind of a sense of privilege. Yeah. Yeah.
Ash (01:07:59.926)
Yeah. It’s like the let them eat cake thing. It’s like, I don’t understand. You’re hungry. Why don’t they just eat cake? It’s like, must be nice.
Randall James (01:08:00.958)
Yeah. So it was.
Tyler (01:08:08.286)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:08:08.51)
What? Yeah, why? Why isn’t everybody you play with just an expert and an extrovert?
Tyler (01:08:15.102)
Yeah.
Ash (01:08:16.118)
I don’t know. I don’t know. Especially as a professional DM, I come across a wide variety of play levels, experiences, extrovertedness or introvertedness. So there are just people that monopolize the conversation and the gameplay. That’s just an inevitable experience.
Randall James (01:08:33.118)
And Ash, do you find that you’re able to make the game work for that table?
Ash (01:08:37.718)
Yes, because I have an initiative tracker, because everybody gets the same amount of turns. Everybody gets a designated time in the spotlight. It’s nice. The only problem is when you’re dealing with the problems that I’ve run into is that when you have a table of introverts and there’s one extrovert person, when it comes to role playing, that person kind of monopolizes the conversation. So that can be a challenge. I don’t need that in my combat too, please.
Randall James (01:08:41.534)
Well, okay.
Randall James (01:09:05.598)
Yeah, actually, I 100 % agree with that. Like that’s, that is exactly, exactly right. And that is the problem that we’re gonna have here is like, and honestly, maybe that’s the litmus test. I think you nailed it, Ash, you have identified it. If you feel like combat goes really well at your table, but anytime you have to do role play, it winds up lopsided and you don’t think people love it, cool. This isn’t gonna go well for your table. And that’s okay, because tabletop is for everyone.
Tyler (01:09:05.918)
Yeah, yes.
Ash (01:09:07.382)
uh
Ash (01:09:29.814)
No, the only reason…
Tyler (01:09:29.982)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:09:33.214)
but not every tabletop game is for every table.
Ash (01:09:33.398)
Yeah.
Yeah, that’s why I think that people saying what kind of chaos is your table, they’re thinking that everything is organized because they have an organized system where people get to take a specific number of actions per turn and then they move on. They cede control to someone else. But as soon as that’s taken away, I’d be very surprised if that same organ that’s so -called Nirvana organized table doesn’t devolve into a bunch of screaming monkeys. But.
Tyler (01:09:41.758)
Hehehehe
Tyler (01:10:01.566)
You
Ash (01:10:02.518)
I prove me wrong. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you have a golden group, which God, I envy you so much. I envy you so much.
Tyler (01:10:09.726)
Yeah. Okay. All right. So we had earlier on how if you fail or roll with fear, play passes to the GM. So.
Randall James (01:10:20.702)
which I wanna call out some numbers here, because that’s who I am as a person. You are approximately 46 % likely to roll with fear. Okay, so 55 % of the time, you’re gonna get to keep going roundabout, we’re gonna round some numbers here, 45 % of the time, you’re gonna hand it over. What are the odds that you succeed twice in a row? That number winds up being something like 30%. So.
30 % of the time, you’re actually gonna get two actions on your own. So maybe you get to go and somebody else gets to go.
Tyler (01:10:52.574)
Well, that assumes a 50 -50 chance to succeed.
Randall James (01:10:56.766)
Well, no, it’s the 55 % chance to roll with. Oh, because it succeed or roll with fear. Oh, that’s a good point. You’re right.
Tyler (01:11:04.542)
Yeah, so it’s succeed with fear or fail. Yeah, so the odds are a little harder to predict, but it does seem like the best you can expect is probably two player turns before it passes to the GM, which seems, yeah.
Randall James (01:11:07.838)
You’re right, okay.
Randall James (01:11:18.718)
I agree, yes. And vice versa, maybe just to say one more and then I’ll stop doing math so Ash you can come back. Forget the likelihood of you succeeding, the odds of you rolling without fear for three turns in a row, it’s like 17%.
Tyler (01:11:20.638)
Uh.
Tyler (01:11:24.606)
Hehehehehe
Tyler (01:11:37.15)
Yeah. Unlikely.
Ash (01:11:39.51)
Yeah, no, and again, it is a limiting factor, but it’s it just makes me nervous, especially with players who like to monopolize the conversation already. Like I could see this going.
Tyler (01:11:45.886)
You
Tyler (01:11:52.478)
Okay, so the way GM turns work is weird. So every time a player acts, they put a token, one of their personal tokens on the action tracker, and you can use those personal tokens to be like, only this person has acted, let’s address that. But the GM then spends those tokens to activate monsters. Every token is one action for a monster. They can also use fear to activate special abilities, to activate fear actions, as they’re called.
They can also trade one fear for two action tokens. So if your GM has stacked up 10 fear, they could just be like, oh, look at all of these monsters. I realize the players failed their very first action. I have all of this fear and all of these monsters, and I’m just gonna roll over the party with all of these points.
Ash (01:12:40.598)
Yeah, and this is another issue I have with this system. As the person who likes balanced encounters, this is a nightmare because it really is dependent on luck more than anything else. It feels like the encounters are 100 % dictated by luck because…
Tyler (01:12:51.55)
Hahaha!
Randall James (01:13:03.774)
Well, wait, wait, I want to maybe clarify something just to see if this breaks this. Isn’t it true that unless the monster has a particular ability, like you can’t just burn all the actions available to you before you hand it back over.
Ash (01:13:19.19)
No, you can. You absolutely can.
Tyler (01:13:20.862)
You can only activate each monster once per GM turn unless it has a specific ability called Resilient something.
Randall James (01:13:30.814)
Exactly. Okay.
Ash (01:13:32.31)
But the issue is that, let’s say you have a group of monsters, like a group of monsters, and your players have built you up a nice pool of tokens, not only that, they’ve also built you up a nice pool of fear because they’ve been rolling really terribly. So now you can activate all of those creatures and you can also do their fear effects and suddenly, oh look, it’s a TPK. So again, like people who fought…
Tyler (01:13:37.278)
Peace.
Tyler (01:13:56.926)
Yeah.
Ash (01:14:00.342)
for the no crits for the DM thing in 2024. I don’t see how you defend that and like this system. No, no, no. I don’t know if it’s the same people, but it might might very well be because this is very luck dependent. You might be like, well, all D &D is luck dependent. Not really, because there’s we did the Dice Math episode and also you have modifiers and stuff that dictate whether you succeed or fail. So you’re going to focus on things you’re better at.
Randall James (01:14:08.414)
same people.
Tyler (01:14:09.296)
Yeah.
Ash (01:14:30.198)
This is strictly luck because it’s it’s unmodified whether you get a fear or not. So it’s just if it’s higher on one die than the other, guess what? The DM gets another fear. So if you’re just rolling a bunch of successes on fears, which I had a group on Saturday that has rolled the most not ones in any game I have ever seen to the point where it was a balanced encounter for their level was almost a TPK. I see this going very badly.
Tyler (01:14:58.622)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:15:00.222)
Yeah, so just to kind of say one more time, we’re talking there. So let’s say you’re a party of four, you come up against eight creatures. And
Randall James (01:15:14.078)
you have a giant pool of fear available to you. You can activate each of those creatures once. And so there might be eight actions against the party. And that might be a bad time. That might be the TPK we’re talking about. But at that point, the GM has to hand it back over to the players. And then they go again. Now, here’s the risk, though. If they immediately either roll with fear or fail the very next check, it’s back to the GM again. And that is that TPK scenario that you’re talking about. There’s one more thing here. And Tyler was, you know, hinting at it a moment ago.
Tyler (01:15:30.014)
Yes.
Randall James (01:15:43.71)
There’s a particular, I guess I’ll call it an attribute, tell me what it’s actually called, called Relentless, where that… Special ability. Perfect. So that creature does have the right to just burn through all the actions because they’re relentless. And that is, that’s going to be a terrible time. What’ll be interesting to me to see, like, is there a bit of meta gaming? It’s like, okay, I know what this creature is.
Tyler (01:15:48.382)
A special ability, monster ability, whatever.
Randall James (01:16:09.246)
And this seems like a creature that would likely be relentless. And so let’s not give up a bunch of the meta currency so they get to turn a bunch of actions against us and kill one of us. Yeah. Does it wind up being consistent enough that people can run it?
Ash (01:16:22.39)
Yeah, and that’s where I could see the death spiral happening. Like Randall said, you give the DM a bunch of fear and action tokens, they activate all the monsters, then it comes back to your turn, you immediately fail. And it’s like, oh, cool, just one person got to go and it was a failure. So now it’s the DM’s turn and now they’re all going to kill us. So like tables with particularly bad luck or just a bad night is going to be the difference between success and a TPK. So it’s a system that I could see going.
poorly in certain situations.
Tyler (01:16:59.23)
Yeah, there’s going to be some amount of metagaming around the metacurrencies. Like, players are going to look at how much hope everyone has and how much fear the GM has, because players can have up to five hope each, the GM can have up to 10 fear, and they’re going to look at the GM and see like, oh, they’ve got 10 fear. We’re not in a good place to have this fight. Let’s come back when we have more hope.
Maybe things will go better. Somehow maybe we can get the GM to burden some of that fear on something useless.
Randall James (01:17:30.942)
Yeah, the other thing I’d say here is that it winds up being really interesting that aside from the hope and fear dynamic, there is a strong incentive to do things that you’re highly likely to succeed at and hope you don’t roll with fear to hand the keys over. I actually think they did a good job balancing this, choosing a D12 versus like a D20 or a D10 or a D8.
Because those odds the fact that it’s like 55 to 45 you have a you have about it’s a little bit less We have about a 10 % chance more likely to roll with hope than roll with fear And then of course a crit is always awesome. So you’re willing to take that risk
Randall James (01:18:27.134)
No, I’m here. I lost my mind.
Ash (01:18:27.158)
No, no, no.
Tyler (01:18:30.878)
Now I liked as well, that was crazy.
Randall James (01:18:40.19)
I like the Dice Math, I like what they’ve done. Having that, you know, you’re slightly more likely to roll with hope. It isn’t so much like you’re always at risk of losing your turn and therefore you’re more likely to take risky actions because you’re probably gonna roll with fear anyway, like there’s a reasonable likelihood. It doesn’t lend itself to doing always safe actions, hoping you can hold the turn order for like 10 actions within the party. Because let’s face it, at any moment you’re probably gonna hand the keys over anyway, you might as well take those riskier actions.
Ash (01:19:11.19)
Well, since we’re running a bit of time, let’s hit some of the other major things. The thing that I think we all can agree on is that death is really cool. But to get to that point, we have to talk about hit points briefly. So just to briefly summarize, you have three thresholds, minor, major, and severe, that are based on numbers, and they can go up or down based on certain abilities or level ups. And if the damage…
Tyler (01:19:23.006)
Yeah.
Ash (01:19:41.11)
that the monster rolls fall somewhere between minor and major. You lose one hit point bar between major and severe. You lose two. And if it’s anything above severe, you lose three. So you most have like maybe six or seven hit point bars. So it’s. Yeah. So it’s really easy to die. You can reduce the damage done to you by using armor. You have an armor value like, say, three.
Tyler (01:19:57.95)
I think you start with six and then it maxes out at like 10.
Ash (01:20:10.742)
And you can spend like a slot of your armor to reduce it to maybe put it down to that lower tier If it falls under your minor threshold you instead it goes to stress which you use stress to as a metacurrency for certain abilities and if all of your stress bars are filled out And you would get another stress instead immediately takes out one of your health bars. So you have to be careful
Again, a system that kind of reminds me a bit of Vampire, but I like what they did. It feels cool and elegant and unique. But let’s talk about death. Because I think…
Randall James (01:20:47.952)
Well, no, okay. I want 10 seconds to say, okay, so it is cool that they’re giving you a mental stat and then doing that failover of, okay, but once you’re out of the mental stat, we’re gonna go back to the physical stat. So you can still die from this. That’s cool, and I agree. Reminiscent of vampire. Generally this whole like three tiers of you just got hit, you got hit weekly, you got hit moderately and you got hit hard, and then you’re gonna take one, two or three damage to your actual health. I hate this. Carry on, death.
Tyler (01:21:16.798)
Me too. Hit points with extra steps. Yeah.
Randall James (01:21:17.982)
I this this this sucks.
Ash (01:21:18.038)
Yeah. Wait, what do you hate about it? I’m curious.
Randall James (01:21:24.062)
It’s, it’s boring. I don’t know. Like I wanna, I dealt 40 damage from a fireball or I dealt 20 damage from, or okay. No, seriously, 14 damage from a really good sword strike or 40 damage from a fireball. But either way on this creature, it’s the hardest I can possibly hit it and they’re gonna take three damage. Boo.
Ash (01:21:26.742)
Pfft.
Tyler (01:21:29.502)
Like, yo.
Ash (01:21:35.382)
That is fair, that is fair.
Ash (01:21:45.366)
That is fair. Yeah, I didn’t even think about that. But yeah, that’s why it kind of reminds me of vampire is that you do either scratch damage or aggravated damage. But at least with vampire, it’s not like the different attacks have the same amount of do the same amount of damage. Like being hit by a werewolf claw is going to do a bunch of aggravated damage to you as opposed to a really lucky strike from a fist, which will only ever do scratch damage. So.
Tyler (01:21:49.054)
Ha ha.
Ash (01:22:14.646)
Yeah, I get why that is a feels bad moment, man. But yeah.
Randall James (01:22:20.19)
If there was one thing that we’ve talked about this entire time that I would say like, just rip this out and do it better. It’s this.
Ash (01:22:27.158)
That’s fair. No, I get that. Let’s talk about death because I think death is cool. So when you die, when your hit points are gone, you get three options. You can choose to accept death, which is you go out in a blaze of glory, you get to do one more action and it’s an automatic critical and then you die. Just cool. That’s a fun way to die. Rule of cool and all that.
Tyler (01:22:32.062)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:22:33.022)
It is, I agree.
Ash (01:22:54.774)
You can choose to deny death, which is you go unconscious instead, and then when you come back up, you permanently lose one slot of your hope. Which… Go ahead.
Tyler (01:23:06.32)
That’s not quite right. So you roll your hope die. If the value of the hope die is equal to or lower than your level, you permanently reduce your maximum hope. So at level one, almost impossible. At level 10, almost guaranteed.
Ash (01:23:19.894)
Okay, I thought it was automatic, but maybe I read that wrong.
Tyler (01:23:27.998)
No. It’s possible that it’s written different ways in the book. They haven’t given it to an editor yet, so there are some inconsistencies and some confusing.
Ash (01:23:36.63)
Yeah, they took the I may have missed something but in the video they were talking like it was guaranteed So maybe that’s something they just changed But I don’t know And then the final one is you can just bet it bet your life So you roll your you roll your duality die. If it’s fear you’re dead if it’s hope Congratulations, you get to live again So you’ve full you’ve basically put it in put your life in the hands of the gods. It’s
Tyler (01:23:43.038)
Ah.
Maybe?
Ash (01:24:06.39)
I think it’s cool. I think it gives players options to how they want to die rather than just being like well I guess I’m dead now, even though I really didn’t get a chance to have any agency in this death just rolled bad
Randall James (01:24:21.406)
And like knowing that you think you’re towards the end of some combat session or you’re doing the last thing that’s gonna be very meaningful and then having that opportunity of it’s like, you know what? I can make this happen. Everything has worked out. I just got hit with six fireballs, which luckily was just enough damage to kill me despite me anyway, we’re pushed that off to the side. I guess it won’t be a fireball in this game. It’ll be a, anyway.
Tyler (01:24:35.166)
Yeah.
Ash (01:24:46.422)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
Tyler (01:24:47.934)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:24:50.174)
Like I can jump up there and pull the lever and open the trap door and then I will die but the party will live and I have that guarantee. That’s awesome. Like that’s great storytelling. It’s it’s it is the great TTRPG experience.
Ash (01:25:09.686)
Yeah, it’s it’s like that like any great scene of the heroic sacrifice uh, like there’s a scene in the first episode delicious and dungeon minor spoilers where One of the one of the members of the party gets eaten by a dragon But she uses her last ounce of strength that she’s being eaten to teleport her party away to safety. So That’s translated into mechanics and I love that. That’s great Um, so yeah, if they keep one thing, I hope it’s this
Randall James (01:25:36.51)
Yeah, I can agree with that, definitely. I think they did a really good job with this. I think this is going to be a lot of fun for players, especially the idea that you can leave it to chance. And maybe sometimes that’s going to be great because, yeah, you do have like a 10 % more likely to survive. I…
Tyler (01:25:47.102)
Yeah.
Ash (01:25:55.094)
Yeah, it just gives players more agency in their death because they get to go out on their own terms.
Randall James (01:26:00.99)
and
And what I would say though is that like, imagine you’re in that scenario where you could have done something very meaningful and then you left it to chance and then you just died.
Tyler (01:26:15.262)
Yeah. Yeah.
Randall James (01:26:15.87)
That is going to eat at you in an amazing way.
Ash (01:26:16.054)
Yeah.
Tyler (01:26:19.134)
The feels.
Ash (01:26:20.278)
Which I honestly, I might steal this for my actual D &D games because it’s a cool system. And I like it. Like giving someone just one final moment of awesome where it’s a guaranteed crit if they are OK with their character going out. That’s cool. Rule of cool. So thoughts on the system?
Randall James (01:26:29.63)
It’s good.
Randall James (01:26:47.102)
I mean, MySpiciestTakes just came out. Death is awesome, damage is stupid, and everything else is fine.
Tyler (01:26:49.982)
Hehehe.
Ash (01:26:54.966)
Tyler?
Tyler (01:26:55.294)
I think I could play and enjoy this game with a specific subset of people that I play with and only in person. Like Ash, Randall, you guys, a couple of other folks that I play with, like if we got all of us in a room, I think this game would be awesome. I think this would be an absolute nightmare to play over video and…
like half of the people that I love to play with just would absolutely struggle with this. So I don’t see myself playing this, unfortunately.
Ash (01:27:31.19)
Yeah, time for Ash’s spicy take. Okay, I have mixed feelings. I like it in some respects. I absolutely hate it in other respects. As can be evident from our conversation. I think it’s a good starting point. I think it needs a lot of work. I’m glad this is a beta because if this was a final product, I would I’d be like, yeah, this is not for me.
Tyler (01:27:35.39)
Yeah!
Tyler (01:27:46.91)
Hehehehehe
Ash (01:27:58.614)
I hope that they address some of the issues with it. Because I do think that, like I said before, I think it is, and like Tyler said, I do foresee this being a good game for certain types of groups, especially for groups that have very limited knowledge of tabletop role -playing games. Like this is a, this will, once they refine, get the kinks out of it, this is an excellent system, I think, to introduce players that wouldn’t have gotten into TTRPGs otherwise. I do not think this is a game for seasoned RPG players.
Tyler (01:27:59.07)
Hehehe
Tyler (01:28:27.934)
Hmm.
Ash (01:28:28.374)
I just don’t. I can see people getting frustrated with it. I like I’d be down to play it even even with my frustrations. But I but for like more people who like the crunchiness, who like the options, who like things to be consistent, especially with my in -person group that I play with, they would absolutely hate this game. They would hate it with a burning passion. And so it’s just like.
Tyler (01:28:51.326)
Hahaha!
Ash (01:28:56.694)
Like like Tyler said, I think this is a good game for a certain sect of people. I don’t personally think I would run it. I don’t think I would enjoy running this game. I might enjoy playing it if if someone was writing it and I didn’t have to do any work and I just had to show up and play the game. Yeah, I’d be down to give it a try. I just I wouldn’t want to run it because it just seems it it hits on a lot of the pet peeves that I have of certain systems where it’s like very nebulous.
Things are open to interpretation, like Randall said. The health system feels bad. And the initiative system is just, it’s giving me stress just looking at it. Yeah, it’s so it’s a mixed bag for me. Like I said, I don’t think I’d run it, but I might be persuaded to play it.
Tyler (01:29:39.358)
Hehehehehe
Randall James (01:29:57.118)
All hail the leisure Illuminati. Hail.
Ash (01:30:00.15)
Hail.
Tyler (01:30:00.926)
Hell.
Randall James (01:30:04.99)
I’m Randall James, you’ll find me at amateurjack .com and on Twitter and Instagram at Jack Amateur.
Tyler (01:30:10.27)
Tyler Kamstow, you’ll find me on RPGBot .net, Facebook and Twitter, RPGBOT, DOT, NET, and most other socials as RPGBot.
Ash (01:30:20.406)
I’m Ash Eli. You can find me voicing other spicy opinions on Twitter at Graven Ashes, on YouTube at Ashraven Media. If you want me to run a game for you, not this one, on Starplane Games, just reach out to me. Sorry, guys. Sorry, Critical Role. And again, not to smear anybody who likes this game. Like I said, I think it is a great game for a certain sector of people. Just don’t ask me to run it because I will not.
Tyler (01:30:46.302)
Hahaha
Ash (01:30:48.278)
Unless you pay me really well, then I might. Yeah. If you make it worth my while, then maybe I could be persuaded to read it.
Randall James (01:30:50.462)
That’s exactly right. It’s the.
It’s like every contractor has the go away price. It’s the like, I’m gonna give you this number not because I expect you to say yes, because I expect you to go away. And then occasionally people are like, yeah, I’m here for it. Dagger Hardash, we’re playing it.
Ash (01:31:10.294)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there is a certain amount of money that would get me to run any game for you. So yeah, yeah.
Randall James (01:31:16.638)
It’s not even a particularly big number.
Ash (01:31:20.31)
No, it’s not. I need money. I need money.
Tyler (01:31:23.038)
How many commas, Ash? How many commas?
Ash (01:31:27.51)
I think it’s generous that you think there would be a comma anywhere in that number. Oh yeah. You want me to rub your feet and give you a foot massage or whatever and feed your cats while I’m writing a game for you? And you give me a number that has a comma in it? Yes, I will do that. No questions asked. Just tell me what it is.
Randall James (01:31:31.358)
I’ll run a new game for you with a comma, absolutely.
Tyler (01:31:33.15)
Ah!
Tyler (01:31:37.95)
Yeah.
Randall James (01:31:52.574)
That was a weird set of activities to put in there.
Ash (01:31:54.102)
Just tell me what it is, my liege, and I will do it for you.
Tyler (01:31:54.238)
Yeah.
Tyler (01:32:00.51)
Anyway
Ash (01:32:00.886)
Ah, capitalism isn’t it, Grant?
Tyler (01:32:04.19)
Yep.
Randall James (01:32:04.318)
Foot massages and tabletop GMing.
Ash (01:32:12.022)
It’s a certain subject of the audience that is now going to blow up my Twitter.
Randall James (01:32:19.87)
Hey, hey, Ash.
Can I get one?
Ash (01:32:25.654)
Can I get one of those foot massage DM jobs?
Randall James (01:32:32.83)
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