Last week was our first session, and naturally I’m already thinking about where things will end.
One of the things that appealed to me about running Curse of Strahd in the Daggerheart system was Daggerheart’s claim to weight all phases of play equally. You don’t roll initiative in combat, or switch over to a different part of your rules sheet, it’s treated the same as a skill challenge or a social encounter—in theory. Unsurprisingly, there are more rules for combat, weapons, and doing damage than there are for anything else, but that’s still the underpinning philosophy.
This intrigued me for Curse of Strahd in particular thanks to my own experiences playing the module. Like many people, I played it with a group during lockdown, and it was my first time fully completing a campaign adventure, as well as my first time playing in an official setting. I’m sitting here writing this, so as you can imagine, it was a pretty positive experience for me.
One thing I’ll always remember, though, is how my party (myself included) assumed we’d be able to find a way to redeem Strahd. Why were we learning about his tragic backstory if we weren’t going to be able to use that knowledge to undo the curse on the land without, perhaps, having to fight him?
But of course that can’t happen, because D&D as written always leads to combat. People will make all kinds of cases for why this needn’t be so, but I have yet to ever be in a campaign even run by the most roleplay-focused GM that doesn’t end in some kind of fight. Even the famously roleplay-forward Dimension 20 consistently embeds combat into its seasons and culminates in a massive battle. It’s extremely difficult for anything else in D&D to feel equally hard-won and thus satisfying, in part because your progress through the story has been marked by the acquisition of new powers, so what’s the point if you don’t get to use them?
Daggerheart claims to be otherwise, but is it really? The levelling is still marked mostly by growing stronger or more powerful in ways that are most immediately applicable to combat: better Evasion, more HP, more spells and abilities that tend to be most useful in a fight. Most of the classes are flavoured and structured around their fighting capabilities.
There is one interesting exception: upon levelling up, you can also periodically add and improve the power of your Experiences, narrative tags that let you add an additional modifier to the roll. So I might begin with the ‘fisherman’ experience, which I’d use when navigating water or coast; or ‘light on my feet’ from my training as a dancing master. During my journey I might gain an ‘eye for deception,’ and so on. In theory, one could prioritise Experience above all else and maybe build to a more satisfying non-combat conclusion… but then you’re still faced with the D&D problem, which is that single-ability skill challenges simply tend to lack drama and rarely feel like you’ve had to work hard to solve a problem.
I intend to push this as far as it can possibly go in this game. I plan to make clear to my players at an early stage that Strahd can be defeated by a range of means, and I’m open to them seeking solutions that aren’t just hunting him through his castle. Whether Daggerheart can then satisfyingly support those solutions remain to be seen (and I’ll own being a little sceptical, as is probably clear), but I have a few ideas in mind for how it could work using the system’s strong rules for environments, and the always-handy clocks. As the famous 1 HP Dragon demonstrates, if the journey to actually reach the beast is significantly satisfying, a single roll to kill or defeat it can still feel fun. There’s definitely a lesson in that for how the players can have to fight through Strahd’s defences, but still have freedom to take down the man himself in a variety of ways when they get there.
This has already got me thinking about how the bones of this concept are already there within the adventure as written. Gather up your items, your ally, go to the destined location… it’s easy to see how you can tighten this structure up, make every place the characters go, the things they find, and the people they meet be tools for peeling away the layers of the dungeon that is Strahd. Adding in a more active impetus for exploration and discovery—first find out what Strahd’s defences are, then discover or invent ways to get around them—will give a bit of shape to the sandbox that I think my particular group of players will find really useful. It also opens up the possibility for more creativity than just Sunsword = burn him up, Symbol of Ravenkind = freeze him and then burn him up.
But again, that ending makes sense in a system where your primary reward throughout has been new powers and new items. It’s fun to get to use them! I love a fight. But I’m excited by the idea that if these players want something else, I have way more tools to give it to them.