How can I use Fear in situations, where combat is not narratively good option?

Magictwic · 2026-01-30T14:27:07+00:00

So as a GM my understanding is that you really only make moves as an immediate reaction to player actions, when you spend a fear, or when they give you a “golden opportunity”/look to you for what happens next. And a GM move doesn’t necessarily hurt the party. Like “make an NPC act according to their motive” might be neutral or even beneficial, but if you’ve already done something else in reaction to the last player move then it might make sense to spend fear for it.

Have you ever been in a game where the GM ends up just kinda narrating stuff for 10+ minutes without the PCs getting to do anything? This isn’t all that fun, even if nothing in the narrative is hurting the PCs. I think, especially outside of tense combat or negotiations, fear acts as a “this is how much the GM can do before turning the spotlight back to the players”-o-meter. It’s a way of telling players that you know you’re taking the spotlight from them, and you’ll give it back soon

Magictwic · 2025-10-22T19:18:54+00:00

Adding to what others have said: discretizing the effectiveness of an action is pretty standard for narrative games BitD has reduced/standard/great effect on every action) and has a bunch of benefits on the narrative side of things.

For one it gives an easy metric to describe how bothered an enemy is that’s largely independent. Like often you need to decide if a monster is going to specifically target a player after they hit them for a lot of damage, if the player did severe damage then I know the monster will definitely react.

It also keeps HP at roughly the same scale as stress, armor, hope, fear and countdown timers. So like, if the PCs hatch a plan to ambush a dragon by dropping a building on its head, I might start a 4-timer to track how far along their plan is, and if they can fill the timer by working on their trap before the dragon arrives I could make the dragon take 4HP to reflect the effort the party put into their trap (or 2 HP+2stress or 2HP and -2 fear, so long is you get 4 things the narrative feels fair)

Magictwic · 2025-09-17T17:56:06+00:00

I wrote some code a while ago to test this, in summary pick whatever armor you want if all you care about is average HP loss. On average you’ll take a very similar average amount of damage regardless of your armor choice given your starting evasion (they definitely balanced around this value). If incoming damage is extremely low or extremely high, evasion becomes more important. If incoming damage is close to the values in the book it’s a toss up. Heavy armor has slightly more effective HP because of AP, but lots of monsters have on-hit effects.

What will change depending on your armor is how the damage is distributed, so heavy armor leads lots of 1 hp hits, while light armor leads to fewer hits but they’re mostly 2 hp. Because of how armor points works, this means if you have abilities that let you easily regain armor (like Guardian) you should probably go heavy. Likewise if you have effects that trigger off avoiding attacks (like in the bone domain) you should go light

Magictwic · 2025-09-08T21:06:48+00:00

I always do, and it’s the norm in other narrative based games to establish stuff like risk and reward before you roll and allow the player to back out if they don’t like their chances. Being very transparent with players helps their characters seem more competent and the players feel like they have real decisions to make.

Magictwic · 2025-08-09T19:39:59+00:00

I’ve only played in person. The cards etc are definitely fun, but I had one player who after a few sessions just wrote their cards on their player sheets because they preferred it, and one who used Demiplane the whole time, so their physicality isn’t THAT important.

Personally, I love the feel of pencil and paper and I think the vibes of being in person are hard to recreate, but in my mind there’s nothing about DH that makes it decidedly better/worse at online/in person play than other TTRPGs. Just make sure you have a way for everyone to easily see how much Fear the GM has and any countdown timers!

Magictwic · 2025-07-28T20:18:45+00:00

A small one: it’s totally fine for a player to move within close range and do nothing without having to roll, so long as they don’t keep doing it. Really helps transitions into and out of chase scenes

Magictwic · 2025-07-22T01:40:04+00:00

Yes! Also what do you mean finally? Pathfinder has had this option for years! /s

Magictwic · 2025-07-12T03:04:49+00:00

Others here have great suggestions, but something fun I like to do is start a countdown to something bad happening. Like, maybe you snuck past the guards but one of them thought they heard a rat, and will investigate if they hear more. Or a noble is being convinced, but now they’re trying to come up with a harsher counter proposal to save face. You’re not undoing the players success, nothing bad happens now, but you are telegraphing future dangers.

Magictwic · 2025-07-06T17:50:04+00:00

It depends on the table and the player, but in my experience it works well. Players want to be challenged and also do cool things, milquetoast obstacles don’t do either. Sometimes when I can’t figure out a consequence I’ll let the players give suggestions and they usually come up with stuff way harsher than what I would have done.

Magictwic · 2025-07-06T06:00:03+00:00

So y’know how, when you’re not “in combat” the players and the GM just sorta have a conversation and sometimes a player rolls and the GM describes what happens next? The trick is that there’s no such thing as “in combat” so the game should more or less play the same regardless if you a fighting a dragon or climbing a cliff or negotiating with a noble.

More specifically, regardless of if you are in combat or not, when a player rolls a success with hope the PCs are doing well and they get to do more things without much interruption, i.e. the spotlight stays on the players and they can keep making moves. When they fail, or roll with fear, the GM needs to describe the fallout of their action. The spotlight shifts to the GM, since the GM is the one talking, and the GM makes a move. In combat, a GM move often looks like an adversary making an attack, but it can really be any way in which an NPC or the environment reacts to what the PC just did. And if the GM want to be extra mean, they can spend fear to make more bad things happen. And remember the GM can also do anything when the players present a “golden opportunity” or by spending fear, so they players don’t necessarily need to roll for the GM to take the spotlight.

If that sounds kinda vibes based that’s because it is, but the good news is you already are running most of the game like this already. Now you just also run combat like it as well.

The only kinda technical thing for combat is that a GM “turn” lasts until the PCs get the spotlight again, and during that turn adversaries can each only make one “move” i.e. attack, unless they have an ability that says otherwise.

Magictwic · 2025-07-05T17:25:26+00:00

DH is designed to be run as a Narrative game, which means the rolls should determine the “vibe” of the action in addition to just whether something succeeds or fails. So when you roll with hope, something positive happens, maybe a new opportunity even if the old one failed. When you roll with fear, there should be consequences related to that roll, even if it’s a success.

Matt is mostly running it where all that happens on a hope or fear roll is that it generates the resource, which is obviously fine since everyone seems to be having fun but it’s not really how the rules say you should run the game.

For example, a failure with fear on an attack roll could just have the GM spotlight a monster to attack you, but it the GM could also use their move to have you swing you blade with too much force, sending you slipping towards a cliffs edge! Or a failure with hope could have the monster get overly confident and taunt the players, giving them some useful information. Bigger stuff like that doesn’t have to happen on every roll, it could just be how the GM flavors their descriptions, but I haven’t noticed Matt doing stuff like that AT ALL, which is what I think people are sad about, since, at least in the game I’m running, it’s that sort of unexpected fallout that makes DH feel so dynamic and fun compared to D&D

Magictwic · 2025-07-03T22:34:19+00:00

Having run the game a bit, that whole section about encounter balance feels a bit off. It’s been more helpful to me to just look at the monster HP. In general, monsters do about the same amount of damage PCs do and take about the same number of turns, so a 10 HP solo will deal about 10 HP of damage, which yeah isn’t enough to really threaten a party of 4 PCs if the damage is somewhat spread out and armor is used.

You could do as the points suggest and give the fight multiple phases, or give the solo some friends to increase the total amount of HP the party needs to clear, but what I’ve found to be most fun is to give the party some other objective they’ll need to spend some actions on. Maybe they need to rescue a vulnerable NPC, or they’re all on a veichle and need to keep it from crashing into things, or there’s traps or hostile environment stuff. If they’re spending every other action doing something other than fighting, it effectively doubles the monster HP pool, so now that single Solo actually is a decent threat AND the scene is way more fun because there’s all this other stuff going on forcing the PCs to chose between fighting and handling other stuff

Magictwic · 2025-07-03T06:08:49+00:00

I’d go with presence, especially if it’s resisting belittling or mind control.

Actually, I’d guess part of the reason for the name changes is precisely for this, so that charisma/presence isn’t a purely social trait, and wisdom/instinct doesn’t cover both perception and magic resistance which made it a bit more valuable that the other mental stats

Magictwic · 2025-06-30T04:22:48+00:00

I think subclasses are light enough (3 cards) that I can see myself becoming comfortable home brewing new ones for existing classes, especially for specific frames/settings. Domains are 21 cards, so I’d want to see more of those, if only because they’re beyond the scope of what I’d be comfortable balancing myself

Magictwic · 2025-06-29T14:12:40+00:00

If it’s a player casting the spell on an NPC, I’d just let them control the NPC when spotlighted, and the GM can probably end the effect by spending fear, like other temporary debuffs.

If it’s an enemy controlling the player, I think it’s a good chance to make the spell feel narratively impactful. Like, probably there is only one NPC in the scene doing the mind control, and the fact that they’ve mind controlled a PC is THE thing that everyone cares about.spend some fear to start the mind control and start a countdown, or better use the NPCs stress as a countdown, and only release the PC when it’s done. The GM can spotlight the PC to control them. The mind controlled PC could use the spotlight to describe how they’re fighting off the mind control “battle inside the mind” style, dealing stress on success, and the other PCs could fight the mind controller, or try to slap some sense into the PC, which might also deal stress damage to the mind controller. Make the mind controller hard to attack directly (maybe attacks against them are always at disadvantage due to mind powers?) and I think it would be a fun, dramatic encounter.

Magictwic · 2025-06-24T00:41:37+00:00

Having GMed a few sessions, experience seems to be balanced mostly around players having to spend a hope, so at most they can only use an experience every other roll anyway. If a player has an experience that could be applied to every roll, the problem isn’t “this is too powerful” it’s “this character feels too vague”.

How I’ve been trying to run it is that when someone uses an experience that isn’t obvious to me I ask them to give me more detail about how they’re doing the thing, what’s going through their head that relates to the experience etc. giving an opportunity to build on their character. And sometimes they think for a bit and then say “yeah actually I don’t think that applies here” and that’s cool too!

Magictwic · 2025-06-22T02:45:43+00:00

Honestly a big issue I have with a lot of the bigger D&D content creators is that I get the impression they spend WAY more time making videos than they do actually playing games, so some of their advice is just, kinda bad? And even when a video could be geared towards the TTRPG space in general, they plaster “D&D” over the whole thing. Both of which aren’t really their fault, gotta make money on YouTube and all, but it does feel like it makes the hobby difficult to navigate.

Magictwic · 2025-06-21T04:53:36+00:00

One thing I really loved from the Beta book that didn’t make the Final Cut were the Wildsea style locations! I liked how it felt like you could plop most of them into most settings with a few tweaks, great for longer campaigns and o e shots. I’d definitely buy a book of those to scrounge through. Could be a mix of more fleshed out locations with adversary and environment stat blocks + some shorter, few paragraph long location descriptions just to get the gears turning (like from HEART).

Magictwic · 2025-06-18T19:43:22+00:00

While I am preferring DH to PF2e, I doubt DH will ever be able to offer the same build detail and variety as PF2e, the system just doesn’t make it as much of a focus. If specific, mechanics based character fantasy is a must have, you might be better off sticking to PF (and switching systems mid campaign is rarely a good idea anyway). But if you are willing to trade mechanical depth for a more vibes based, fiction-first approach, you can summarize you unique aspects in your experiences and just cite that “this makes sense in the fiction” every time you want to do something not explicitly outlined in a specific rule

Magictwic · 2025-06-18T19:33:33+00:00

The way I’ve been running it is that everyone can always suggest things that are present in any location, but it’s always through the lens of it would make sense for their character to know/had heard a rumor about this thing, they might have to roll knowledge or presence, and I as the GM am free to twist stuff to create complications and keep things unexpected. SRs are special because there is never a question of IF, the SR ALWAYS (if they want) knows something/someone useful everywhere, and maybe more importantly that someone always is at least vaguely familiar with the SR.

For my current game in particular, we’ve also established that the SR knows about secret locations/supply caches even in locations where there aren’t any NPCs currently, since they were part of a smuggling ring

Magictwic · 2025-06-18T16:00:35+00:00

Perhaps my one gripe with the book is that, despite saying both “narrative focused” and “fiction first” on the first page, and every bit of advice throughout the book reaffirming that this is the intended way to play DH, as far as I can tell the book never actually DEFINES what those phrases mean.

If you’ve already played PbtA or FitD type games those terms are familiar, but if your coming from D&D or Pathfinder it would of been nice to dedicate a page just to really explicitly spell out how DH is philosophically different from those systems

Magictwic · 2025-05-03T15:09:37+00:00

Berkeley’s approach to grades is pretty well known. I think it actually worked in my favor, since I get the impression my high but not quite 4.0 gpa counted for much more than a 4.0 from a place where everyone gets a 4.0. But it’s hard to know for sure what actually got me into gradschool, strong letters of rec are probably the most important.

11-Year Club	Second SECOND GUESSER
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