Redesigning DaggerSworn

...Or an exercise in Game Design

In Fall of 2025 I started working on DaggerSworn, a Sologuide for the popular TTRPG Daggerheart. In hindsight I am not happy with the result. I tried way too many things at once, some combination of Mythic, PUM, Ironsworn and Nimble. With some distance and more experience playing SoloRPGs I wanted to revisit this project, but there was one major problem.

The problem was that I didn’t like the Daggerheart Game Engine. I find it’s bad design. Why? Because in Daggerheart your character skill doesn’t matter. At least not as much as it should.

Let me explain:

In a typical d20 based game you roll your d20, add your modifier and decide about success and failure. The more skilled you are or rather the higher your modifiert, the more likely you are to succeed. Your skill matters.

In your typical PbtA game you roll 2d6 and add your modifier. On a 1-6 it’s a miss, 7-9 is a weak hit and 10+ is a strong hit. Your skill not only decides about success and failure but also the degree in which you succeed.

Both of these were inspirations for Daggerheart and they tried to appeal to both. You roll 2d12 and add your modifier. If you beat a Target Number you succeed. Your skill matters. The degree of success is determined by the relationship of the dice. If your fear die is higher it’s bad, if the hope die is higher it’s good. This ultimately creates 4 levels of success: failure with fear, failure with hope, success with fear and success with hope (and a critical which is doubles). This relationship however is decided solely by chance. Your character skill doesn’t matter.

This is not to say this cannot work. If you watched Age of Umbra, the Grimdark Actual Play of Critical Role, I think it works very well in a setting like this but for the most part I was annoyed. I want my skill to matter.

So, can it be fixed?

Sort of. I came up with a Game Engine that is inspired by Daggerheart and Loner that I am somewhat happy with. It requires some heavy homebrewing and ultimately I think it might work better as a standalone game engine. An exercise in Game Design if you will.

But why?

Turns out I like designing. But mostly, there are aspects I like about this game, most of all the accumulation of fear. It reminds me of the chaos factor in mythic and I think it’s a fun mechanic to play around with to trigger randome events and interupts. The more chaos you create the less control you have.

I also like the d12. It offers slightly more options than a d10. A little weird… liking different dice but oh well.

So how does this Engine look like. Let’s call it the DaggerSworn Engine (Is DaggerSworn a good name for a TTRPG?)

You roll your hope die, add your modifier and substract your fear die.

5+ success with hope (yes, and) +1 hope
1 to 4 success with fear (yes, but) + 1 fear
0 critical (or random event, haven’t decided)
-1 to -4 failure with hope (no, but) +1 hope
-5 failure with fear

The layout is a little clunky on substack but I think you get it. This essentially creates 4 levels of success. Your skill matters for success and also degree of success. There are a few little things that I find flavorful:
If hope is high and fear as well it’s complicated because the world pushes back hard. If fear is high and hope as well we are pushing back against failure.
A critical is also something (or random event) that can happen through skill because we could essentially turn a failure into a critical through a +1 modifier. It doesn’t change the statistic but it has some flavor.

The problem with this whole thing is that it doesn’t work with the modifiers in Daggerheart. anything beyond a +3 is pushing it. Whis is essentially why I came up with the idea of using it as a backbone for my own game.

This also can be used for your basic oracle:
Roll 2d12 and substract fear from hope, creating the 4 layers of success and triggering a RE on 0.

Some additional thoughts:

• I always like 4 stats: Strength, Agility, Mind, Presence; give one stat advantage and the other disadvantage

• loot based progression is something the ICRPG uses and Shawn Tomkin is working on for Ironsworn 2e and MCDM for their upcoming dungeoncrawler Crows. I like the idea but we will see

• Daggerheart uses an armor system which I like, creating thresholds. It’s essentially what some OSR games do to make Soloplay more feasible

• the fear check remains: Roll fear die at the beginning of the scene. Roll equal or below your fear token and the scene gets interrupted. (Depending on the game it could reset to 1). Should the fear check trigger every roll or only in scenes.

• what to do with Hope? In Daggerheart you could spend hope to add a d6 and use abilitis. This doesn’t work here. I am thinking either momentum like in Ironsworn, essentially swapping my dice for momentum or adding it to my roll. Or create one chaos meter that changes on hope and fear rolls.

• a different approach to hope would be adding a coolness factor. somehow changing the scene. I recently read a idea by Jface Games about mapping skills. And hope could be used to somehow create a path where there wasn’t one before. Sort of like a Limit Break in a JRPG maybe?

• this could work as a standalone engine that is tag based. Add +1 if a tag applies but not more than +2 and you are good. E.g. if you want to use this to play with mythic. Why +2? The engine starts to break and honestly, I think there are diminishing returns to using experiences

• Tier based damage like in Draw Steel is something I also like.
  

I rather like the backbone of the engine and I want to see where I can take this and how “crunchy” I want this to be. While thinking about this I was wondering what kind of reward structure and Gameplay loop I want or rather what kind of GM Emulation I want to create. I basically have two approaches that I like which I will share in a different email.

I rambled a bit more than usual, I apologize but it is what it is. Ramblings and ideas about designing a game.

Daniel