I’m still grappling with the Fear mechanic in Daggerheart. I was reflecting on last week’s session and there were a few moments where I think that, rules as written, I should have spent Fear—but to me, I was just thinking of it as naturally progressing the story and introducing new elements the way a GM is meant to do, not some special epic moment I needed to justify or “buy” with my meta-currency.
Honestly, the rules itself are really unclear on this, in my opinion. It feels obvious that they decided letting the GM only act when they have Fear or when the PC rolls with Fear is too limiting, so their list of GM moves boils down to “when you have Fear, or if you feel like it.” While I’m slightly relieved they didn’t restrict it to only acting when you have Fear, I sort of which they had, both for clarity and because it would have meant really committing to the push and pull that the Hope and Fear dichotomy is meant to provide, but doesn’t totally.
This session, I set myself the challenge of seeing what happened if I got really strict about my Fear spend, and avoided using any GM moves without spending fear unless, as the rules say, I had a “golden opportunity,” they did something that demanded consequences, or they looked to me to push the story forward.
For the record, I think the consequences one is the most weaselly and confusing exception to put on the list. Basically everything the PCs do should have consequences, so when are we spending Fear if that’s considered free? There are lots of examples within the same rules section of spending Fear on things that I would interpret as natural consequences of a character’s actions, like creating collateral damage, having people notice what’s going on, or having NPCs act in accordance with their own motives.
But my aim doesn’t have to be to make the book make sense, just to make it make sense for me, so I wanted to try going all in on only acting when I had Fear to spend or when prompted by a player roll. And this felt like a good session to try it, because I’d built up at on of fear during a long fight last session.
I planned out a few big plot moves that I was going to specifically plan to spend Fear on, and I did do that. I think I did alright the rest of the session with mostly limiting myself to Fear-only reactions and escalations, though there may have been at time or two I forgot. It wasn’t quite as disruptive as I feared it would be to try and really keep track of it, but it also wasn’t as interesting.
I was hoping that really committing to Fear as my only currency would do interesting things to the story’s pace. Maybe there would be times I wanted Fear but didn’t have it to spend, or maybe there would be long runs of Hope rolls where I could let the characters really in ascendancy. But the rolls are too random for that to really happen. We definitely did have some runs of hope, but it happened to be that they came in battle so it just felt like the tide of battle was roughly turning in their favour, rather than a sort of sustained moment of triumph within the story… and in order to make sure I didn’t fill my fear Tracker, I had to spend Fear to occasionally disrupt the momentum of that triumph anyway, especially because it was a battle and frankly it’s boring and unrealistic if the Adversaries never get to attack. They still overall came out on top, but it didn’t really feel like Hope and Fear had more meaningfully permitted that feeling than rolling really well in D&D does.
I am also leaving this session lower on Fear than I have been I think at any point in the campaign, and maybe I’ll try and deliberately run out to see how long it takes me to build some back up. Maybe that will lead to an interesting change in the pace… but because you essentially get two Fear every time the players roll with Fear (you get to react immediately, and you bank Fear for later) I suspect that I’ll pretty quickly have a full track again and plenty of opportunities to act. It’s moderately interesting to imagine what would happen if I were truly out of Fear and the players just kept rolling with hope, but that situation is just too random and rare to count it as an interesting potential feature of the system.
I have a lot of friends who run Daggerheart who love Fear and the form of GM intervention it allows, but I still don’t feel like I’ve quite found my rhythm with it yet—even if I think it’s still thematically and tonally completely perfect for this campaign. Just having the Fear tracker alone, and knowing the players can see it filling and being spent, adds a great level of meta dread to the action. But is that really enough?