I am quite pleased about how the last blog post about the math of Daggerheart’s 2d12 came out. Honestly, I’m still not sure how knowing the math affects how I will play, but it was still fun to put it together.
Maybe “Microsoft Excel” would make a good Daggerheart character experience. Character sheets are like resumes, right?
Anyways, from that post, I got great followup questions and points from the community. I thought I would address a few of those.
Keep the multiples of 5?
Isaac Allen Burns (GM of the excellent DodoBorne actual play podcast) pointed out that this might change how to set difficulties. If we’re trying to match probability of success coming from 5e, then we need to adjust difficulties, too.
To be clear, I have no recommendation on this: you should run your game the way you want to. However, you should do that using the best information you can, which is why I provided so many graphs and numbers.
For my own game, I’m just using multiples of 5. Until I wrote that blog post, I actually thought that “normal” difficulty in 5e or Daggerheart was 10, not 15. So my games were about 25% too easy.
Since then, I have adjusted my difficulties up by 5… and it hasn’t made a big difference.
I think players think about rolls differently. Rolling a total below 10 is bad, and above 20 is good. Between 10 and 20 is situational, so whether a difficulty is 10 or 15 or something else roughly in that range, it probably feels okay.
D&D natural 20s aren’t always successes
Someone on Discord (unnamed since it’s a semi-private forum) pointed out that in D&D 5e, a natural 20 isn’t always a success. That’s a critical hit for attack rolls, but with the rules as written, that doesn’t generally apply for skill checks, saving throws, or otherwise.
As such, the floor for unattainable difficulties is actually 0%, not 5%.
I suspect that most DMs treat natural 20s as successes. If a natural 20 wouldn’t succeed, the DM shouldn’t be asking for a roll in the first place.
And most DMs add some extra space for natural 1s and 20s. D&D 5e doesn’t have graded success or failure by default, so those are the closest to “something interesting happens” as you get.
Comparisons to PtbA
Although I compared Daggerheart’s Duality dice to the d20 test, there are plenty of other dice resolution mechanics out there. Powered by the Apocalypse games (such as Apocalypse World, Dungeon World, and Masks) roll 2d6 and add modifiers with the following results:
- 1-6: failure (though you get XP)
- 7-9: success (either partial or at a cost)
- 10-12: complete success
Here was an interesting discussion on that.
I ran a Masks campaign for a few years, and although the game was great, it did bug me that there isn’t really a notion of “difficulty” with the rolls. The GM decides whether an action requires a roll. If it does, then regardless of the details of the action, the probability of success is always the same (because the target numbers are always the same).
I get that the difficulty is supposed to be relevant in the consequences: it just bugged me sometimes that the careful and thoughtful player was just as effective as the impulsive and whimsical player with to reward for planning.
That being said, I may still run the numbers. Perhaps we assume that we are comparing against a normal (difficulty 15) check.
Final thoughts
I was heartened by the enthusiastic response from the community about my last blog post. I do intend on writing more numbers-focused blog posts, but I don’t have a lot of ideas.
I came to Daggerheart because I was excited about the narrative focus to the game. Narrative and crunch aren’t exact tradeoffs: Daggerheart is trying to do both being solidly rules-medium. However, there’s certainly less to dig into with Daggerheart than other systems.
When I look at the character options and the adversary encounter creation rules, I see the emphasis on intuitive, easy to adjudicate systems. Daggerheart, by and large, gives you the freedom to play the character and game you want to play, so know the numbers, but just play your game.
Elsewhere in Daggerheart
We have more art!
Looks like there’s a new fan of Daggerheart over at comicbook.com.
- 7 Biggest Daggerheart Changes From Dungeons & Dragons
- Daggerheart Will Free Me From Being a Forever DM
- 10 Ancestries I Can’t Wait to Try in Daggerheart
We have a new State of the Role… which unfortunately didn’t have any Daggerheart announcements. That’s not to say that there aren’t good explanations or plenty of other stuff to be excited about, but Daggerheart will have to wait.
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