I run a table. One of the people at the table insisted that I checked out Daggerheart. So I did. And I was very pleasantly surprised.
Why? Well, I admit I had some prejudices against it. First, I sort of made up my mind when I saw the whole licensing issue, Daggerheart basically doing what Wizards of the Coast did with Dungeons and Dragons. But not only that, I also saw red flags in Daggerheart itself: minis.
I saw a video for Daggerheart where the thumbnail showed minis. I was out. I find minis so frustrating. They are in my list of things that I cannot care about. I care about dramatic stories, not combat simulation. I care about intrigue and character growth, not arithmetic. I saw that and assumed that Daggerheart was a combat simulator just like Dungeons and Dragons is. I didn’t even pay attention.
But then my friend insisted that I read about Daggerheart. And so I did.
I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that minis are optional. Even more importantly, I was shocked to find a game that effectively is Powered by the Apocalypse. I was especially relieved to not find rules for movement that require trigonometry or strange approximations (unlike Dungeons and Dragons, where there are grids and numbers everywhere).
I found a game that prioritized drama. Yes, it still simulates combat, but it does so in such a simple way that makes me happy to run it.
I’m excited! This would be the first game that I ever play when the game is just released. This would be the first game in which I don’t even have to pitch to the table; the table already wants to play it.
Of course, these are my first impressions. Maybe they’ll change. For now, I’m happy.
Gotcha.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that PbtA has a narrower statistical distribution of dice rolls than games that you like. In other words, PbtA might relatively flatten the probability of everything, while other games make some things just flat out either impossible or trivial (depending on your characters’ level).
At the same time, character proficiency is not trivial. In other words, an incompetent character will definitely fail much more than a competent character. The Apocalypse World creator did the math for us:
Imagine going from 30% likelihood of success to 90% likelihood of success.
Regardless, I still concede that other games could be much more brutal or much more lenient (depending on character competence). And this, on its own, could be seen as a bug and not a feature. I happen to see it as a feature: try it out, burn the world down, rebuild it, all in one session. The story coming out of that session will be probably be interesting!
Now, as to overconstrained characters, I also agree here. However, the way that Apocalypse World does characters is decidedly not how all PbtA games do characters. Vincent Baker himself has said that his character playbooks are a sort of historical accident and that other PbtA games could be entirely different. This is not just speculation, it’s a fact. Take Ironsworn or Starforged. Both of those games have ridiculous flexibility around character creation. You don’t have playbooks: all characters start with the same blank slate of a character sheet. You build your character with combinations of cards, and there are hundreds of them.