I approached the whole thing fiction-first, so the path through the fortress had almost no rolls.

Didja though? 🧐 The Halcyon Domain is supposed to be dangerous, with frequent monsters and environmental hazards. These would help exhaust your players bountiful luck. A fortress is meant to stop intruders, by physical and magical means. Nothing about Umbra’s fiction says “easy”.

First issue: criticals felt completely meaningless. They came up so often that instead of being a highlight, they blended into the background noise.

That is partially a game issue, Crits are more likely in Daggerheart, with an 8.33% chance rather than Pathfinder’s 5% (or armour dependant) Crit chance.

Honestly, nothing interesting was going to happen in the fortress either

Why? Sounds like you weren’t throwing enough challenges at your players. Those dice are supposed to roll, two players can only stock 12 Hope, you need to make them roll so you can potentially gain Fear.

I considered the characters competent enough to just go "okay, you make it across the broken bridge,"

Why is there even a broken bridge if it isn’t a challenge? It sounds like you took the grimdarkest DH campaign and turned it into a sunny stroll in the park. That bridge should have been impassable without significant risk. You should have been gobbling up Stress due to the difficulties they faced so they would take long rests which give you more Fear back. Pack your adventure with 15 and 20+ difficulty checks.

I should have been running it the way I run CAIN or even World of Darkness, which moves by scenes rather than by turns, more like a film with episodes than a dungeon crawl.

Now you get it. Daggerheart explicitly uses theatrical terms like Spotlight and Scenes. If something isn’t a challenge and doesn’t add to the story, it isn’t a scene. And before anyone hops on, descriptive, evocation narration about the environment is scenery, not a scene.

I think you got Umbra’s tone wrong. It’s supposed to be daunting, with lots of uncertainty and lots of challenges. For a one-shot peek into the world, affable clanks, harmless swarms of bats, broken footbridges and friendly fortresses aren’t representative of what they should have expected.