The Naturolls

Hey everyone, I'm Michael. And I'm John. And we are both a part of this show that you're listening to called The Naturals. And this is what we think you should know about Daggerheart if you want to understand the show that we're making. And Daggerheart is a tabletop RPG about heroic adventures and yeah, let's do it. Yeah, absolutely. So Daggerheart is a brand new system if you didn't know that. It just came out at the time we're recording this less than a week ago. We've been playing it for almost a year because we saw the playtest launch and we're like, oh my gosh, we got to be a part of that. So we've been playing it for a bit. A lot has changed since we started playing it. But yeah, it's a system we really love. We're really excited to be playing with it. So we thought we'd share a little bit about it with you guys. Yes. And it puts a big emphasis on narratives and stories and is a little bit less mechanically driven, although still plenty of fun mechanics for those out there who enjoy it. You can min max your heart out to go and have fun with your friends, right? It always, whatever you're doing, always drives the fiction. So one of the most important things that makes Daggerheart stand out would be our duality dice, which consists of two D12s. One is a hope die. The other is a fear die. Michael, would you tell us a little bit of what that looks like? Yeah, absolutely. So other systems, you'll see a lot of D20 systems. And if you are attempting to do something like pick a lock or attack an enemy or persuade someone to love you, anything like this, you're going to roll a D20. And Daggerheart, instead of that, you roll two D12s, the aforementioned hope and fear dice. And so what you would do is let's say I would ask my GM, hey, I'd like to try to pick this lock. The GM would then tell me to roll my dice and I would roll both of those, add those two numbers up and tell my GM what the result is and which die had a higher number. So let's say I roll a five and a six. I would then say I rolled an 11. And if the fear die was higher, I would say an 11 with fear. And if the hope die was higher, I would say an 11 with hope. Would you like to talk a little bit about what those two different things can mean? Oh, yes, indeedy. So if you roll a success and get hope, you get what is called hope in the game. It's like an in game currency. You can use it for different abilities and really cool, awesome things you can do either as an individual or to do with your group of adventuring friends. You also would just get what you want, right? And things pretty much go well for you, right? Because you both succeeded and succeeded with hope. Now you could also succeed with fear, meaning your fear die was higher. Now if you succeed but your fear die was higher, you still get what you want, but there might be a consequence. So for example, maybe you get what you want, but you suffer stress due to some emotional thing that kind of happens. Or maybe you slip and fall and take a little bit of damage or perhaps you drop or lose something and that's really at the discretion of the GM. And finally, Michael, you want to tell us what happens if you don't succeed with either hope or fear. Well, obviously, I'm going to start by saying if you don't succeed, you don't get what you want. So if you're trying to pick that lock that I mentioned previously and you don't succeed, you don't get through that door. But if you still don't succeed with hope, maybe there is something encouraging about the failure. For example, if you are trying to pick that lock quietly, maybe the hope is that you don't alert guards around you while trying to pick that lock. And so you actually take a hope on your character sheet, which will allow you to do more things in the future. Like we said, hope is a currency that you can spend to do things. You could also fail with fear, which is kind of the worst of the worst. You don't get what you want and there are other negative consequences that could happen anywhere from your character taking a stress, which we'll talk about in just a little bit. Or maybe something happens in the world. Maybe you do alert that guard. Maybe I don't know, any, anything the GM can imagine can come up from that fear. So ideally you're succeeding with hope as often as you can. There's one other thing that I would like to talk about that we should probably note is everybody's favorite thing in tabletop games. How do you roll a critical success with your hope and fear die? Oh baby. So the best thing is that you can roll a critical success anytime you get doubles on your hope and fear die. So that means whether it is double ones, double 12s, double 10s, all of those are equally a critical success, which means you not only get what you want, GM should be giving you a little bit extra on top and you get to gain a hope and clear stress, which is good for everybody except for the GM potentially depending on what the plans are. Yeah. Awesome. So that is, that is honestly the biggest thing that I think you need to know about dagger hearts. And if you know that you are going to be prepared for so many things in a session because somebody asks you to roll, you know what you're going to roll. But there are a few other pieces that I think are important. The first one I want to talk about is called evasion. And I think evasion is a really interesting way to word this. A lot of other games would call this armor class or difficulty. And it is essentially the number that the GM is rolling against to see if they are hitting you with an attack. So let's say your evasion is 13. If the GM rolls a 12, that's not a hit. If the GM rolls a 13 or above that is, I think it's very interesting thematically. Like we said, dagger heart is consistently a narrative driven game. And that means that if an enemy cannot hit the score that it takes to hit you, they don't hit if they can. If your evasion is not high enough to dodge the attack, the attack hits you. But since we're not using armor to describe if something hits or not, we actually use armor in a completely different way. I think John's going to talk about. Yeah, so every character, depending on the armor they have equipped, as well as some of the other unique abilities of their particular hero, have a certain amount of what are called armor slots. So if you, let's say, are kind of a run of the mill character, I'd say a low level, you're probably going to have something around like three. You use those armor slots to reduce the amount of damage that you are taking. And we'll hit what HP looks like in the game in just a moment. But you can only use, and this is actually a big change in the core release, one armor slot every time you're hit. And then you need to mark the appropriate amount of HP depending on how much armor you took from an enemy. But what is cool about this, combined with the way that evasion is described, there is always a definitive hit or definitive miss. And then if you are using an armor slot, you get to describe how, again, narratively, that looks for your particular character. Maybe you try to brush it off with a shield, but then they still connect as you don't maybe fully block it with the shield. Maybe you take no damage at all and your armor absorbs everything. Perhaps they grab onto you and some bear is taking a bite out of your leg and then the armor blocks part of it, but they still, you know, penetrate the skin somewhat. And then you are going to have a different amount of armor slots based off of both your level, unique abilities, and the amount of armor given to you, depending on, again, which armor that you are wearing. And that is tied directly to both your hit points as well as your stress. And I think the really interesting thing about armor in this game is that armor is essentially, for lack of a better word, a currency that you can spend if you would like to. So if you are taking an attack, you can use one of those armor slots to reduce the damage that you take. You don't have to. You can repair your armor when you are at a short or a long rest. So you can get that currency back, but it is a choice that you are making. And once again, we're going to probably keep driving this point home as often as we can. It really depends on the narrative. Maybe it makes more sense for your character to not use an armor slot mechanically. Maybe it makes sense narratively, or maybe it makes sense to use that armor slot. It's really up to you as long as your GM agrees. Just like we talked about in the armor section, Daggerheart also has hit points that you have to consider. And in order to understand hit points in Daggerheart, we do first have to talk about what is called the damage thresholds. Damage thresholds exist in Daggerheart to tell you how much damage your character is going to take from an incoming attack. There are three thresholds of damage that your character can take. They can take minor damage, which means they would mark 1 HP, major damage, which means they would mark 2 HP, and severe damage, which would mean they would mark 3 HP. Would you like to talk just a little bit, John, about how armor applies to those damage thresholds? Certainly would. And in the full release, this is again one of the big changes. And so what happens is if an attack reaches one of your thresholds, you may use up to one armor slot per attack to reduce it to the lower threshold. For example, let's say an attack hits you dealing major damage. You would be, you know, not grievously wounded, but severely wounded. You can use one armor slot to reduce that to minor damage. And again, going with the whole narrative-focused part of this game, that means that then you can describe what that looks like and how that armor prevents you from receiving major damage and going down to minor damage. Likewise, you can decide to use no armor and then describe that in the story again, pushing the fiction forward for exactly why and how you take that damage. Then as you continue to play, you're going to mark HP points based off the amount of damage that you take. And if you use armor slots, you would continue to mark those as well. Absolutely. And he said, armor is a currency that you get to choose to use when you have it to reduce the damage that you take. So with those damage thresholds, you're going to notice looking at your character sheet that your HP looks a lot different than it does in other games. Some games will have you in double digits, triple digits, depending on what type of character class you're choosing. And then you take incoming damage and subtract a different number from that. In Daggerheart, you essentially start somewhere around five or six hit points, somewhere around there. And as you are taking damage, you look to see if the number the GM tells you is in your minor threshold, your major threshold, or your severe threshold. And then you subtract one, two, or three hit points from your hit point total. It's really as simple as that. And then you can clear those hit points at a shorter long rest, just like other games. And the final part of showing your overall health and well-being is what they call stress. Stress is a currency, I guess I'd say, similar to armor slots, but you can't always use it at will, but there are a number of abilities that will use stress, both in your favor or against you. And so as the game goes on, you're going to get a certain number of stress that you can mark to either show physical or mental duress that may not rise to quite the level of marking HP. So in order to mark stress, the GM may have you do this if you have a role that goes particularly poorly. For example, failing with fear might result in receiving some sort of stress. But again, this is only done to drive the story forward and describing what that looks like. There's also, again, a plethora of abilities that you may use that utilize stress as well as enemies may inflict it upon you. And should your stress ever get maxed out? It's not something that you want to see because then you need to start marking hit points every time you would have received stress. And if you have been paying attention so far, you might know what I'm going to say next. And that is just like the other currencies that we've mentioned at long and short rests, you can actually deal with your stress, hopefully describing it narratively, the ways that you are attempting to settle down after particularly stressful situations. But you can manage that as well, reduce some of your stress points. So that way you can do other things with your stress in the future. Obviously there are so many other rules, pages and pages, 350 some pages of rule book that describe all of the different things you can do and all of the different situations that could face you as you are playing or running dagger hearts. And when I say all the situations, obviously it's not going to cover every single situation. But that's what conversations with you, your players, your GMs are all about. We just wanted to provide you guys with a quick, dirty little description of some of the things you're going to hear on our show that might be a little confusing if you don't know anything about dagger heart, if you haven't played before. And if there's anything else that you'd like to hear a deeper dive on, feel free to let us know. We'd be happy to jump into that to go over it in all the detail we can find in this beautiful, beautiful core rule book. Yeah, we are frankly at this point, I think you can say very passionate about this game. We really, really like dagger heart. We're very excited to see what comes next. We know that at the time of recording this, there's already two more classes that they're testing that I can't wait to get my hands on. So thank you for listening. Join the rest of our podcast and we'll see you guys in the Shadowlands.