Every so often, I have a bad season and a series of game sessions that don’t fire how I expect them to. I’m currently in a change of life situation, so my brain is not on games as often as it could be. Suffice to say I’ve had a few moments arise this week and blindside me.
So I wanted to just take an article or two to talk about a few ideas that arose during my ‘tired adjustment period’. I know that observations from the field can be very valuable to those of us on a GM Journey, so I want to give these stumbles out so that we can all learn something.
So, I’ve been playing Daggerheart. Not a shock, I know, everyone is playing it as I write this article. I’m looking currently doing some short adventures with my players to fill a campaign break and look at new systems. It seemed like a good fit. We’d got through character creation (which we loved, one of the players is playing a clank ancestry as tree golem full of squirrels pretending to be an Ent), and the first session was fine. We found the wider scope of magic and narrative focus on actions to be really fun. And then we got to a combat.
It wasn’t really Daggerheart’s fault; the system itself was designed to deliver a specific experience. There were some amazing moments as the players desperately changed gears to keep up with the game, with one player yelling ‘He goes again? How many actions can this guy take?’ at a villain attacking twice before it got back to the heroes. One player in particular was jumping in with their actions to support the others’ cool moments. But when the combat finished, most people looked tired, and some looked stunned.
I’d known that the initiative was a difficult beast in that it follows the action and isn’t just parcelled out in rounds. I’d been happy to take the brunt of the executive function in the combat, looping back to a player I thought it was appropriate to come to but also balancing who had gone before, so it wasn’t all about one player. Sure, it was more work on my brain, but this is my wheelhouse. What I hadn’t counted on was the requirement of the players to keep the battlefield in their heads in a totally different way. In D&D, a game they’d been playing before, the focus of the game is quite simple because the combat is reasonably static. A player knows when they can zone out a little, when their turn is coming around and are quite clear the battlefield conditions won’t change. They can plan their next turn in advance.
But Daggerheart practises a different Maxim. Its combats are dynamic. If a player before you rolls in a way that passes the action to the enemy, the battlefield might look vastly different when it returns to you. Something another player does might have a greater agency on dictating events than you expected, leading to you not knowing when or how you’re going to act. There’s a lot more active listening and improv reacting required. And when you have to track four or five foes who are zipping around the trees, raining down arrows or rushing the players into bear hugs and such, it got a lot for my players to track before we even thought about game mechanics.
In the after-game discussion, I had a talk with my players, and they seemed to think that a lack of structured initiative was the problem. After an in-depth discussion with two of them, though, I’m not sure that it is the actual issue. I think they’ve been trained by a lot of roleplaying games to focus at certain times and in certain ways. And therefore, this game isn’t designed for them. After the adventure is done, maybe we should move on to something else.
This might seem like I hate the system, but that’s not true. I think if I was a player, I’d totally thrive in this environment – but I come from a devised performance background and have been picking apart game systems so I can understand them, literally in this column, for years. I’m in the mind set of the people who made the game. Others are not.
It also might seem like a defeatist attitude to be like, ‘ok, we are done with this’. But watching my players make suggestions about altering the system so it played more like D&D made me pause. If we did that, we’d no longer be paying Daggerheart; it’d be something else. I’ve always believed that if you aren’t interested in the core experience of a game, you should find a game that serves you better. So when I came to the conclusion that maybe this game, in the long run, is not going to serve this particular player group, I wasn’t just giving up. I was considering what they needed.
So we’re going to finish out the arc of this story and then move on to something new. If I try the game again with my current groups, it might be with a group who like this style of play – my Feng Shui group already play in a floating initiative, action-driven style, for example. We’ll keep plugging away at the game until we finish though. Maybe I can give the group some pointers about focus – like that the best time to pay attention outside your turn is the enemy turn. That’s where the whole field will be laid out again as I make my way through the enemy action counters. Maybe we’ll find that we love it as we get it going, and when the full game is published, we’ll make our way back to it.
For now, though, I’m going to take the lesson: sometimes it’s about knowing what type of player a game assumes is coming to the table. Just as I wouldn’t introduce that particular group to a game with finely graded weapon descriptions and minute combat rules, I need to think about how narrative focus in combat works at the other end of the scale.
And I think on a larger, community-related note, it’s worth thinking about where we go in the now its been about two years since the OGL drama. As a number of alternative games to D&D start to arrive we need to stop crowning each of them a D&D killer and expecting them to deliver the perfect experience for us. Instead we need to look at what each system expects us to be interested in and then ask ‘is that me? Am I a good fit for this game? Is my group?’ because then maybe we can find a game that acutally provides what we are looking for and start creating communities with similar interests and respecting each other. This group didn’t fit with Daggerheart, but maybe they’d fit right into the Dragonbane community.
Always remember that sometimes it’s a game isn’t working for you and that’s not a failure of you or the game. It’s just another opportunity for growth. Until my next set of field notes, good gaming, and I hope this helps you going forward when you hit a sticking point.
Creative Commons credit: Goblin Frog Hunter by Warmics and Melee in the Mud, Agincourt by FritzVicari.
