So I got in trouble on TikTok (yes I’m using TikTok now, don’t judge me) for saying that failure in D&D is boring and no one likes it. While I deliberately phrased my thoughts in a provocative (I’d hoped funny, but clearly not) way, I was also genuinely surprised that so many people were going to bat for the idea that no, it’s fun to miss every attack and do nothing for an entire combat! Genuinely, I admire their sense of perspective. I’m a sore loser.
I think the binary failure in D&D rarely feels anything but bad. It makes characters who should be skilled look incompetent. For every time it leads to some wacky, super fun alternate option, there are two times when it just stops the story dead, or ruins your shot at carrying out some other cool, interesting, or creative idea you’d hoped to try.
If the only thing Daggerheart did differently to D&D was introduce a mixed success mechanic, then I’d already like it better. But what’s interesting about hope/fear is that unlike most systems with mixed successes, whether or not your success is ‘complete’ (in this case, rolled with hope) is random. A good modifier doesn’t make you likelier to avoid rolling with fear, in fact you can obliterate the DC and still get the game’s version of a mixed success by rolling your 30 with fear.
However, you can’t critical fail.
This occurred to me only after our most recent session, when I realised one player had critically succeeded like five times but we’d yet to have anyone critically fail. Naturally, I turned to reddit to see if there was a rule I’d missed, and instead found confirmation in the form of people complaining about the lack of crit fails and proposing ways to add one. But I think the element of randomness already present in the game would make this overkill, and I think they were really clever to recognise that. You’re already randomly likely to get an outcome that wasn’t quite what you wanted no matter how good you are at something—so adding in a second way to randomly completely fail is just repetitive.
It’s also the first thing in Daggerheart that has pointed me towards some idea of its storytelling philosophy beyond ‘D&D but not.’
Curse of Strahd has been great for really driving home the sense of the world vs the players. I think it’s a great system for antagonistic environments, even if the actual environment mechanic feels under-developed. But having fear be a symbol of the way the world itself pushes back against the PCs feels really right. (So I guess it’s not really fair to call this the first thing, but PCs vs Adversarial Landscape is a pretty limited niche that doesn’t really account for a lot of the game’s features.)
But now I can see it as a world where rolling with hope is slightly more likely than rolling with fear—crit successes but not failures—creates a sense that these should also be stories where the characters are putting a little more hope into the world than the world is pushing darkness back at them. Things might go unexpectedly wrong, but you’re not going to fall on your face for no apparent reason. You’ll triumph against the odds sometimes, and the world won’t ever kick you over at random.
Of course, there’s the other argument: that every failure with fear is a critical failure, and thus even more likely and random than in D&D. But the overall balance of hope over fear means that doesn’t feel as right. Failing and everything going wrong just feels like standard failure; failing but with hope, a mechanical and (I try, at least) narrative silver lining feels like a genuinely unusual feature, something distinctive about the system.
The world in Daggerheart is a little more good than it is bad, and it is the PCs who are the wielders of that hope. It’s a pretty bog-standard heroic fantasy story, and I’m not sure if it’s quite enough to give me any campaign ideas of my own (maybe in combination with the adversarial environment… are we just doomed to try playing Lord of the Rings or the kids in Narnia?) but it’s a lot more of a thematic purpose than I could imagine before I started actually playing the game.