I’m enjoying my campaign of Curse of Strahd, and really enjoying reflecting on it. Taking the time to think about each session, about the things that worked and didn’t and why, has seriously helped me improve my skills in what feels like a relatively short time. I feel more confident and creative about making game decisions, and it’s been really gratifying to try a lot of things I’ve long imagined doing and see them really work (at least for my players). However, ultimately, something about the campaign overall just hasn’t quite been clicking for me.
I know my players are having a good time, and I’m generally having a good time, too, so I don’t want that to come off as self-flagellation. Everyone having fun is literally all a game requires… but since I am doing all this analysis and reflection, it’s impossible not to notice when things aren’t working the way I think they could—and, for me, then impossible not to want to experiment and try to improve those things. But in this case, I’ve been struggling to pinpoint what the problem really is.
This week it really hit me that when I stop trying to think big-picture and just look practically at the things I find most difficult about the campaign, one of the key friction points is prep. In my head, I’ve been calling it my laziness: I don’t really like prep, I haven’t developed good methods for translating what’s in the book into a form that I can readily work from, and the idea of spending a lot of time trying to do so doesn’t really interest me. But I’m trying to step away from that private framing, because… well, this is my Sunday activity that I do for fun. It’s not laziness to not do a form of it that I don’t enjoy.
And that’s really the thing. The trad style of prep that D&D demands is not the only way to prepare or run a game… and while I think Daggerheart itself is in two minds about much it wants to be a trad game vs a more collaborative game, I think I can push it a lot harder in the latter direction than I have been so far.
I think the system is part of what has been holding me back from doing this, though it’s definitely the smaller part. The Fear mechanic demands a lot of improv, but interesting Adversaries are a little too complex to make up on the fly and have them feel really rich, as I’ve discussed at length. I might try doing it a little more anyway, just making up narratively appropriate Fear moves or other abilities and not worrying about the fact that it violates some invisible, theoretical statblock that the players can’t see.
Because that’s just the D&D mindset still at work, right? In D&D, it’s irritating when a GM fudges a statblock because the player’s own abilities are so rigidly defined. You’ve built your PC to have certain skills, strengths, and capabilities, and those are locked in. If the GM just gets to change things whenever they want to rather than picking something and sticking to it the way a player has to, you’re operating off of two completely different rulesets in a way that quickly begins to feel unfair, especially if you’re a player with even a mild interest in optimisation or tactics.
And that’s really the bigger problem, the thing that’s been holding me back much more than the system. I’ve been too afraid of not giving my players The Classic Curse of Strahd Experience to really let myself feel free to mess with things stylistically and structurally. While I recognise that every campaign is different, I’m still trying to hit the right beats from the book, and make sure that the game we play is something they can recognisably call Curse of Strahd when we’re done.
Set aside the fact that absolutely none of my players will care about that. We’ve already broken the ‘classic’ Curse of Strahd with our reincarnation premise. When I really started thinking about it, I began to see so much more clearly that trying to run even a sandbox-y but ultimately fairly linear D&D campaign in Daggerheart simply doesn’t work. The system resists at every turn, from my much-discussed dungeon crawls to travel to social encounters. It all needs to be imagined from a very different angle than what a D&D module provides. The module is still essential information and inspiration… but if I want to play this game in Daggerheart, not shoehorn D&D into a different system, then I need to take some big steps backwards and start with the system and the storytelling, and use the book for support as and when I need it.
For me, I think Hope and Fear remains the essential mechanic of Daggerheart, and I hope if there are future editions, they’ll double down on it and cut out some of the vestigial D&D fluff. And it’s also the reason I think the linearity of D&D campaigning just doesn’t work. A check to navigate the forest rolled with Fear and one rolled with Hope need to be able to take you to two different outcomes, not just to the next hex on the map. The world has to remain loosely defined enough to be extremely responsive on a micro level to the specific rolls, while also having enough of a shape on the macro level to provide logical consequences and interesting challenges. Thinking this way has genuinely made me fully understand the logic of the Campaign Frames for the first time. A frame is really the perfect word for it: there are boundaries, and a structure, but the details aren’t filled in.
I’ve been listening to some Daggerheart APs for a project (stay tuned to see what…) and what it has really driven home to me is how trying to play Daggerheart as if it’s D&D doesn’t work. Hearing people forcing rolls to work like D&D and structuring scenes like D&D has helped me see more clearly than anything else how different the systems really are, and how much more potential there is for collaborative, flexible storytelling within Daggerheart than I had fully realised. I just need to stop forcing myself into a Strahd-shaped box. From the start, I’ve called the campaign ‘Heart of Barovia’ because I already knew it was going to be its own story. Now I just have to let that actually happen.
Even though part of me still sometimes daydreams about running some epic campaign where everything is so elaborate and the players are all obsessed with my lore and my worldbuilding and my NPCs and I get to imagine I’m Brennan Lee Mulligan… practice has shown that I don’t actually like that style of play at all. I don’t want to be the master behind screen, I want to be playing a game with my friends where we’re all equal participants with slightly different roles. This looser approach enables that, I think.
We’re taking the month of June off from the game, so it’s the perfect time for me to reset my perspective and approach. I’m looking forward to spending this time not frantically prepping, but unlearning old habits and trying to imagine how I can use Daggerheart to find my own flexible, open-ended, collaborative style for the remainder of the campaign.