First Session of Daggerheart

So I ran our first session of a TTRPG called Daggerheart. First things first, was it fun? Yes! A lot of fun! Granted, I spent quite a lot of time preparing, and given that I was erring towards zero-prep GM-ing, it was a nice surprise to see that it is really great to be somewhat prepared.

When your players are invested in your world and you give them a lot of agency (as I think you should), you WILL have to improvise. And I made it quite easy for myself by taking on the world building approach, instead of story building.

What worked well

• I made sure a lot of the system specific information, like domain cards, subclasses, ancestries were available for everyone, on paper. Digital tools are great, but it’s very easy to lose players to their phones or laptops.
• I found usage of pen & paper to be very nice! Even though I used Obsidian for myself, all my players on the table were using pencils, notebooks, and paper.
• I had to improvise big plot points because players ended up in a situation, where it only made sense add a twist. I think this is a pretty good way to make things flow in your player’s favour; having fixed hard plot points might end up resulting in players losing a lot of agency. Players losing agency I think can easily result in a bad experience.
• Taking a lot of notes helped me; I went home and structured and cleaned up my notes, which helped me tremendously with figuring out future expositions. I think it’s important to write things down, as soon as possible.
• Exposition over plot points; I think I am going to continue to let my players make their own story, I will continue to create expositions. This way players won’t lose agency, and me, as a GM can just keep flowing with my players. And I will keep expositions per session to a minimum.
• Major NPCs can end up in situations they weren’t supposed to be in, having a nice structured database of notes helped me to keep all of that in my head.
• Using Chekov’s Gun; If my players thought they might get infected, or a certain object is magical, or a dead body is of a particular important NPC, I jumped on it. If my player spot a Chekov’s gun, I shoot it on the table in front of my players.
• I also had quick access templates for all adversaries I was going to use, this was very useful for quickly preparing for encounters.
• Having a world that’s not entirely flesh out helped a lot of with having some blank pages to fill for future expositions. If the world & its aspects were fully fleshed out, it would have been much harder to improvise.
• No matter what zero-prep GMs advocate for, I think it’s great to spend time in your head building up your world, regardless of if the world is homebrew or part of official game campaigns. It’s also fun, try it!
• I really enjoyed the open-source-y nature of TTRPGs where all you need is some pen and paper.
• My players figured out the game very well very fast, thanks to the simplicity of Daggerheart, which let us get into the flow of the game rather quickly.

What did not work well

• Printing cards of paper and cutting them up is very fiddly business. It’s no fun handling the cards either, and it’s easy to lose cards between each other. I would prefer to print out domain, subclass etc. in a different paper friendly way and give it to all of my players. Easy access of information on paper is very important I feel. Buying the official Daggerheart print edition seems a little to expensive.
• Having too many physical objects; I carried dice packs, a variety of papers, figurines and minis, potential encounter maps etc. I was getting lost in papers way too much. I would try to make it leaner next time.

All on all, I am looking forward for our next session.