5 Daggerheart GM Tips for D&D DMs

If you’re coming to Daggerheart from D&D (specifically 5e), you’re probably mostly in good shape. My players adapted quite quickly (and if yours don’t, we even have an article mapping between 5e and Daggerheart). If you understand D&D, you just need to layer in the idea of the Duality Dice, and you’re pretty much there.

But are you?

In addition to actual rules of the game, a big part of the game is in the principles and mindset of Daggerheart. In their own words,

Daggerheart is a heroic narrative-focused experience that features combat as a prominent aspect of play.

It goes rules-medium, but if you’re coming from D&D, you’re already familiar with the crunch. Instead, I have a few Daggerheart GM tips to open your mind to a few of the other principles in this game.

Design a hybrid adversary

This is fantasy, but make it your own. Daggerheart is very generous for allowing GMs to re-flavor items, abilities, adversaries, and more as long as it doesn’t affect the actual mechanics.

Admittedly, it can be quite intimidate to home-brew content in an interesting and balanced way. A quick way to do that for adversaries is just to do animal mashups.

Pick a stat block, two real life animals, and combine all of that into your new adversary. Re-flavor the abilities to borrow from both animals, and come up with a rough description. Now, you have made this game your own.

Also, combat is quite forgiving for managing difficulty. The damage to hit point conversion means that you’re not going to surprise kill your player characters at first level. And the fear and spotlight mechanics make it easy to ramp up or dial back the challenge of combat simply by doing more or less on your turns. Calibrate softer and harder moves for dramatic fights.

Play into your players’ Experiences

Some players naturally remember and use their Experiences throughout gameplay. However, my experience with Experiences is that they’re hard to remember. Players often only remember when they roll poorly and want to squeeze out any bonus they can find on their character sheet and, oh wow, look at that Experiences section; isn’t that handy? Does “Sticky Fingers” apply to this Presence check? No? Oh well.

One way to make Experiences matter is to create situations and incept your players into using them. This, however, requires more mental overhead.

Instead, I suggest that you have each players’ Experiences visible to you at all times as a reminder. I myself go one further than that: if I’m playing in-person, I have each player write a notecard stand placard in front of themselves with four things written on it:

1. character name
2. player name
3. evasion score
4. experiences

So not only are you looking at it, but all of the other players can also see the Experiences and suggest using it.

Let your players answer successful knowledge checks

I previously wrote a bit about collaborative worldbuilding, and I feel like I missed this one, obvious way to do it: let your players fill in the details when they ask for details.

I stand behind all of my advice in that previous post. However, I must admit that it can still be hard to apply. It’s enough work to get through improvising and narration without thinking to rope in your players. The problem is that there’s no specific cue to do anything different from usual.

That’s why I suggest reframing specifically Knowledge checks. It’s a very specific, mechanical action in the game that you just need to do a little differently. Sometimes Knowledge checks are for lore, but sometimes it’s very specific to the situation.

Don’t be scared. This is Daggerheart. Roll with it.

Don’t use a grid for combat

I previously mused on maps and minis and theater of the mind for Daggerheart, and actually, I had a slightly different takeaway: don’t use a 5-foot grid. The game just flows differently if you’re using the ranges. I personally still like having a shared, visual representation of a fight with maps and minis, but you do it your own way.

The Daggerheart rules provide some guidance using cards, pencils, and paper to measure distances. It’s a bit fuzzy, but it works for exactly the rules-medium that Daggerheart does well.

When I ran The Sablewood Messengers, I was worried that going without a grid would make distances meaningless. When we’re haphazardly dropping things on the table, how are we ensuring that we’re true to scale to 40 feet? In retrospect, that’s the beauty of using ranges: it doesn’t really matter, and in fact, you can imagine close quarters and long range combat all in the same way.

Run a one-shot

All of my advice so far has been very specific to adapting to the Daggerheart GM mindset. My last point is more general than that, but I also think it’s the most important, general-purpose advice for running TTRPGs.

Most GMs and players want to run long, epic campaigns. By the end of it, you hope to have spend hours and hours building out extensive worlds, rich storylines for each character, and tremendous investment into a big payoff of a unique, memorable experience for all involved.

But you have to start somewhere, and I think many of the best groups and campaigns start very small by agreeing to play once.

It gives everyone space to feel out the group for vibes.

It’s easy to commit to and get a foot in the door.

It allows you to immediately reset and start over with the “real campaign” if the rules, characters, world, or whatever isn’t working

In open beta, we had The Sablewood Messengers. I enjoyed running it, and it goes through a lot of the rules as well as the adventure itself. It’s probably as close to Daggerheart as the designers intended as can exist.