When I analyze an RPG, I tend to look at it through a few different lens; How does this look like it will play or run? (When I get around to playing/running it, does that match up?), How does this game appear to teach itself? Is it good for new people? Is it good if you come with X skill set?
I started this hobby learning to teach myself to GM from Red Box and trying to get a bunch of my fellow 3rd graders to play. So these ideas have always been a thing for me.
My initial partial read of Daggerheart is; “This is an unobjectionable action fantasy game, with some minor design refinements and a fair chunk of cruft to wade through.” There’s plenty of games built with a “choose the subset of tools you want to use” but in this case, I feel like they stuffed a little too much in. It presents a lot of handholding as if this was going to be people’s first RPG, then proceeds to give 8 ways to do a thing for any thing a GM might want to do… which is going to overwhelm or be ignored by a lot of folks.
Perhaps they figure most of the crowd will just learn it from watching streams, in which case… are all these words needed?
Anyway, I wanted to talk about it’s not-entirely-sorta incorporation of Powered by the Apocalypse Moves simply because it highlights some points about other games that try to do the same.
Moves are a mental framing
There’s a slick trick that happens in Apocalypse World with Moves. The players can be completely ignorant of the specifics of most of the Moves and just think “My guy does this” and the game works fine. “I’m going to shoot them” “I want to find cover” “I’m getting to that motorbike and getting out of here”. The GM, however, cannot be ignorant of the GM Moves because those aren’t subsystems, they’re direct plot turns and directives of how to twist the fiction.
In AW, GM Moves are stated simply and proactively, because a GM is going to have to try to remember them or utilize them while skimming a list quickly. “Separate them” “Capture someone” “Put someone in a spot”.
You can have missed reading the small examples/followups on what that means and probably do fine as a GM narrating based on it. And, importantly, these are fairly straightforward ideas you can put into an action scene or moment; if there’s a tense standoff and you see “Take away their stuff” you can probably think of a few ways that can happen – there’s not an abstraction layer to dig through.
There’s another thing that happens here; Moves in AW, player and GM, are designed to feed back into each other, back and forth, so it helps produce momentum in play. If the player Move has them deal with their gang and one of the options means they have to make an example of one of their followers, the GM doesn’t have to go through a list, the most obvious question is “How does the rest of the gang feel about this? Will this guy come back later angry?” – and then if you do look at the GM Moves, half of them immediately become easy possibilities.
And, most importantly is this bit of advice – you’re told to try to narrate Moves that will set you up for a more direct, more harming, more lasting consequence later, and when either the players give you a clean shot, or roll a failure, then you bring down the hammer. It’s not directly adversarial, it’s “give them lots of opportunities and THEN bring the pain”. Apocalypse World, as a setting, as a theme, as a vibe; is a place full of problems – existing is adversarial, and the GM just has to follow these rules and the right level of problems appear. The game is designed where the players, if acting together, can overcome most problems; it’s just that the problems never stop coming.
DH’s Sorta Moves
So the biggest issue actually ties into that last point; in Daggerheart, you just do some moves or whatever, it’s not directed towards setting them up for further tension and problems. The Moves don’t feed to other Moves, because it’s not built for a Move ecosystem.
Some of these also feel like awkward attempts at shoehorning basic GM stuff into a Move logic: “Show how the world reacts”, “Lean on the character’s goals to drive them to action”, “Spotlight an Adversary” (AKA have the opposition do something). The thing is, if you have a good Move collection in a game built around it, doing the Principles and Agenda and Moves together will naturally and constantly have the world changing, players finding opportunities & threats to goals, and the NPCs doing stuff.
And this points to the other issue you might have noticed just in those few examples; the language of DH’s moves are the opposite of AW’s simple and punchy Moves. They’re not catchphrases, they’re not going to be easy to remember, or easy to scan down a list in the middle of play. They’re a layer of abstraction which makes them less easy to internalize. “Clear a temporary condition or effect” sounds super neutral and isn’t clear to me what it means by itself; reading the more involved description, it’s supposed to be removing negative conditions from enemy NPCs or the environment – “Enemies recover” or “Advantages fade” would be easier and more clear ideas.
So altogether these issues combine in a bad way; we’ve cut out the Player Move side, so now it’s just GM advice, the GM advice isn’t built toward pushing momentum in a mode or genre of play specifically, the advice has been worded in ways that are abstracted and hard to roll off the tongue.
…why are we using Moves here anyway?
So…
You might take this as feeling super critical of Daggerheart, and like I said at the beginning, it’s an unobjectionable mainstream fantasy game. I’ll probably end up running it or playing it sometime in the future. What my main point is in this whole thing is; I bet most DH GMs will sort of skim the GM Moves, and some will play mostly ignoring them, and there will be little or no functional difference in how the game runs.
Whatever momentum and story drive that comes out will not be particularly aided by the mechanics in play; it will fully be the group’s work, which is a real damn shame given the desire to incorporate one of the best systems in modern RPGs to support that stuff.
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