I do feel a little bit like the Environments in Daggerheart were made to taunt me. I wrote about them before, but they are a theoretically interesting and powerful mechanic the game uses to depict the ways the physical environment acts on the characters, in place of the hidden traps or ‘make a perception check’ style play of D&D.
I’ve started thinking of them as a kind of lair action, a representation of the way the Environment doesn’t simply exist, but acts upon the characters—in other words, that every place the characters go is an active ‘encounter’ or potential threat. This sounds very ominous, but in practice it just means what kind of obstacles a place and its people can throw in front of the characters.
My goal for this session was to use more Fear, and I realised during prep that using Environments better was key to this. The book gives you loads of examples of how to use Fear in combat, or how to use it in response to rolls with Fear, but it’s less helpful when it comes to just using the random Fear you’ve amassed during a scene, except to suggest that you use an Environment’s Fear move—ie, activate one of the obstacles inherent to that Environment (never mind that basically all the Environments in the book only have one Fear move, which is not going to get you to the 2-4 Fear spend they recommend for a standard scene).
The main thing I’m realising about Daggerheart is that it’s deceptively complicated. There’s something a bit fun about this, it means that there really is more intricacy and crunch than it seems at first… but the book and marketing are so committed to insisting it’s a narrative, roleplay-first game that I actually find the dissonance frustrating. Because they don’t want to come off as crunchy, they haven’t provided the support materials I think a beginning GM would actually need to get a game satisfyingly off the ground. The adventure frames are great if you really understand how the system works, but except for the people who are great at mastering games quickly, nobody does yet. The Adversaries, Environments, and Campaign Frames they give you are not remotely as plug-and-play as the book acts like they are. They need to be producing some structured modules and books of Environments and Adversaries, not more subclasses and expensive card sets for people to buy.
That frustration aside… I decided to create a more detailed environment for Vallaki rather than just winging it, as is my usual way when doing urban/mostly social sessions. This really just consisted of a few notes about the vibe of the place, and then four potential Fear moves that either alluded to or thrust the PCs in the way of potential quest lines within the city. Breaking it down this way helped me understand Fear a little differently. I realised I was getting thrown off by the name ‘Fear’ and its opposition to Hope: it’s basically just permission to intervene and present the PCs with a challenge. The book often frames this in a somewhat adversarial way, and I think that, too, is quite misleading, though tracks with how common that kind of competitive dynamic between GM and players is in actual plays.
Really, when you’re prepping an Environment, you’re prepping a list of things that might happen in a place, and then using your currency of Fear to choose when to make them happen, rather than just doing so randomly or when there’s a lull. The book Environments massively overcomplicate this simple fact and all the structure and flavour they pack in distracts from their function… while at the same time, this framework can also feel like it’s over-complicating the relationship between a location and a GM’s power to move the story forward. It makes session-planning about pushing the players from location to location, which is certainly one way of structuring a campaign, but a surprisingly conventional and limited one when you consider that Daggerheart definitely would not want to define itself as just a new form of hex crawl.
This could easily be more a nuanced play pattern if another option for an urban and social setting were to spend Fear on Social Adversaries, who are presented just like Combat adversaries, but with social rather than combat abilities. So you arrive in a place, spend some Fear on local challenges that drive the PCs towards an encounter with a Social Adversary, where you’ll also get to spend some Fear… but most of them don’t actually have Fear moves at all. Which is fine, easily homebrewed, but yet another example of how the official content doesn’t provide you with what you actually need to make your sessions work. And how the supposed equal balance between combat and non-combat is just not true.
So I also made some new Adversary sheets, with multiple Fear moves, for key figures I suspected they’d meet next time like Fiona Wachter, her sons, and of course, Vasili von Holtz (who I never realised isn’t actually written into the module, everyone has just universally agreed he should be). I don’t need every NPC to have them, just the ones who might place themselves in opposition to the party in some way.
Naturally, on game day, they immediately left Vallaki and went and recruited Ezmerelda instead. So I still don’t really feel like I get the right rhythm for Fear yet, but at least I got to use some to have Ezmerelda make a big entrance.