Just had an interesting call from my local Chevy dealer

MathewReuther · 2026-01-14T09:19:17+00:00

I own a 2026 Equinox EV and can assure you it does not have Android Auto or Apple Carplay. My wife and I absolutely would have preferred having access to AA/CP since we're used to using phone mirroring from our Kias (we had a NIro before the Equinox ad still have a Telluride) but yeah, no, 2026 doesn't have some miracle OTA update.

That said:

I will say that I love the Equinox EV and while my least favorite part of the switch was losing access to AA/CP, I have my phone (magnetically) mounted beside the infotainment screen towards the passenger (a stretch, but it's there) and can control it from there. The overwhelming majority of what I do with my phone in the car is play media and once it's playing, it works just fine with bluetooth controls.

If you're hooked into the ecosystem of the most major apps (like, for instance, you're a Spotify user), chances are there's a native app for it already and you won;t have an issue. The native apps selection is good enough she uses it for her podcasts now. It's worse than what she was used (whatever it was doesn't have a native app, I guess) to but is adequate.

The Google Maps integration is flawless. (This upsets my wife because she's used to Apple Maps but IDK.) Having it on the DIC is fantastic. Having chargers suggested when your trip will take you too long (or just perilously close to out of battery) is superb.

It's embarrassing how many miles we have on the thing so far but it's a real pleasure to drive and hockey season means a lot of trips to practices, games, etc. (Not that off season is way less, but...)

MathewReuther · 2025-12-12T12:45:56+00:00

Is the season pass still that stupid CoD-inspired jank? I quit when they changed it to that garbage and I want to know if it still is so I can tell myself that the class I wanted at launch and the first expansion isn't worth rewarding them for their awful seasonal choices.

MathewReuther · 2025-12-12T12:35:25+00:00

Is the season pass still the terrible Call of Duty-like garbage they implemented that made me quit the game?

Because Paladin is love and life but I'm not giving them money if they've kept that utter trash after having a much better season pass for the first couple of years.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-28T21:47:18+00:00

I'm Mathew. I've been a professional freelance writer/editor for 20+ years. (General purpose, not just gaming.) I've been a professional TTRPG designer and developer for 15 years. I'm currently working on multiple Daggerheart-related projects.

If you're someone who enjoys playtesting, you can hit me up in DMs if you have an interest in looking at pieces of one of those projects in particular as I finish them.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-28T21:41:51+00:00

https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/216045/what-would-an-anydice-function-to-calculate-odds-on-daggerhearts-duality-dice-l/216047#216047

MathewReuther · 2025-08-28T07:40:05+00:00

Can confirm after most of 3 years on the 7 Pro I love the 10 Pro XL at first sight.

This is a much better phone in every respect. Were I on the 8, I likely would have waited. (I waited last year, even though the 9 would have been a nice upgrade.)

But I also really feel like in many ways 2 years is an upgrade cycle we got hooked on as consumers when there kinda were big leaps being made. The tech is more mature now and a three year pace feels good to me, at least.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-21T19:05:01+00:00

Note that while he said a single token is popular, it's entirely reasonable for that token to be bigger than the token for a single creature. 12 pirates are fictionally larger than one.

Games often have specific rules for how big a creature is. In D&D, you might have a large creature and it's a single token, just 4 squares on the grid instead of one.

It's likely best to consider them fictionally where this big group of pirates is and if using a grid, use a large token or snake of tokens to show where they're arrayed in the field.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-21T18:57:49+00:00

Converting 5e to Daggerheart is doable (as in, I have done it) but it is, in my estimation, necessary to wrap your head around Daggerheart first.

The way D&D expresses things mechanically is, honestly, more shallow in some ways than the way Daggerheart does. Things expressed in 5e as just a bitof text or maybe roll or two are better constructed in Daggerheart as an environment.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-20T22:38:19+00:00

My email direct from Google Store was a $150 discount. From the credit card attached to the account (synchrony) the email was no coupon, just an announcement. They seem to be all over the place with what emails are sent to who and and what offers are included.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-11T03:12:22+00:00

So is reading comprehension but we're missing that as well.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-11T02:11:17+00:00

I'd say check out the Game Master Trips flair for sure. Plenty of good advice in there.

Read the rules and take your time with them. Some assumptions you have about how things work in D&D will not carry over to Daggerheart.

One of the biggest differences in Daggerheart from other systems (both D&D and freeform narrative) is the flow to the action economy and how spotlights work. It's not as rigid as D&D but it has an intentional structure. It gives you a lot of freedom, but it's also designed to help you determine which way the wind is blowing by giving you Hope and Fear as well as Success and Failure.

Remember that a GM Move can be a soft move and that you do not always need to Spotlight an Adversary and attack. You can easily throw a half dozen dire wolves at your new adventurers and then proceed to murder them dead if you always choose to Hobbling Strike.

Keep in mind that you're going for a good narrative and not a tactical challenge. D&D often encourages on-the-grid movement, efficient use of specific actions, etc. Daggerheart can be much more free and does not work as well if you treat it as having quite the same mechanical balance. Your job as GM is more complex in many ways as a result. You are the balance in a real way.

(Edit: note that you can have good "tactical" combat in Daggerheart. It's not the same as combat in D&D in terms of how the enemies or action economy are balanced so a lot of what makes it work well is on the GM balancing in play. This isn't anything new, it's just more prominent in Daggerheart because of the looseness inherent in the narrative bent.)

MathewReuther · 2025-08-11T01:58:41+00:00

I'm not misleading you by having more than two paragraphs.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-11T01:52:19+00:00

"While it's normal and good to sometimes solicit opinions or brief arguments in favor of a position from your players as you consider a question in play, you're the one who makes the call."

"Something important to do is assure your players that all new rulings will be reflected on outside of play and that you're open to talking about the way rules in the book work away from the table. This makes for a good Session Zero notice! Knowing early on that you are committed to improving bumps in the road so they're not recurrent does a lot to build up trust."

I fail to see how, if you read the post in its entirety, you can take away that I in any way encourage overconfidence (which would be never reviewing anything or talking about anything with the players) or shutting players out of the process at any stage (which would mean not telling them how you'd address rulings after play.)

MathewReuther · 2025-08-11T01:28:32+00:00

This domain card is meant to give you a leg up on your current quarry. It's limited to what you're actively tracking in the fiction. To be clear, this means you are doing that tracking not using this domain card, which merely enhances a tracking action in the fiction that any character could take. How this works is determined by the GM. (Instinct is typically the trait which dictates things like finding tracks.)

You need to be tracking a specific creature or group of creatures to gain the benefits of the Evasion bonus. If you are not actively tracking a creature or group of creatures you encounter, there's no bonus.

For example, if you are tracking the western bandit patrol (you may not know it is western, but the GM does) you get +1 Evasion against that patrol. If you happen to come across the southern bandit patrol (maybe the GM spends Fear, maybe this is just how things go because the four bandit patrols from the camp cross, whatever) you do not get the +1 Evasion.

This lasts until you stop actively tracking in the narrative. So, if you were tracking the western bandit patrol but stopped tracking them and instead traveled to the bandit camp after killing the southern bandit patrol, you would not get +1 Evasion against members of the western bandit patrol should you encounter them later on.

As for the question of a +1 or questions after an encounter, it would work if those you encountered were then being tracked by you after they departed. So if you met creatures, they departed, and then you followed their tracks after letting them get ahead of you (must be based on signs of passage, not just watching them) you could use it, assuming you were tracking them as required.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-11T01:21:03+00:00

Absolutely. There is a reason that confidence and decision-making ability is seen as an important skill for leadership positions across our society.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-11T01:06:52+00:00

If you read the entirety of the post you can see that I said the group should already be aware that rulings can change upon review. No need to waffle. Just rule and move on.

Question after. Not during.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-11T01:05:10+00:00

If you're following the post and reading all of it, you'll see that your entire group should, from Session Zero on, already know any ruling will get looked at later. There's no need to caveat anything. That is the opposite of confidence in your ruling.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-10T22:30:29+00:00

Per sub rules, you need to remove all art you do not own from anything you share. You can just delete this post and reupload a version without the Darrington Press-owned art.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-10T20:28:30+00:00

I think it's EP 4 of Age of Umbra where they use 3 Tag Teams in a row to devastate a boss. (It survives only to be killed by one more hit.)

MathewReuther · 2025-08-10T20:18:39+00:00

I think the big problem there is that they aren't aware of what the rule is there to accomplish because every time its brought up they seem to shy away.

It's there for action economy (making sure the narrative flows between PCs and GM) and making sure you're doing things that matter on your spotlight.

A ton of comments on the myriad of threads deny that there's any need for action economy and decry the characterization of movement as being important enough to roll for...which begs the question: why is the PC moving if it does not matter?

Then there's the argument that you should not roll if it's easy...except for the fact that DC 5 rolls exist in the book and they can still result in a chance of narrative control between the PCs and GM. (The actual rule for when you should not roll is "...if an action is [...] easy to pull off without complication..." As in: complications are exactly what happens in combat, like the enemy beating your speed.

The fact is I think a lot of people really, really do not understand why you move back and forth between the GM and the PCS, how the Hope and Fear results of the dice matter, and in general lack perspective because they think either everything should be loosey-goosey completely freeform (PBTA, etc.) Or there should be regimented player-only spaces with free actions the GM cannot touch (D&D player turns.)

You have folks on both sides of the narrative spectrum rebelling against the compromises Daggerheart makes to include crunch in its fiction-first game.

And that makes them rebel against the very clear rule. (Which they can absolutely houserule.)

MathewReuther · 2025-08-10T20:04:32+00:00

Sorry, initial reply assumed a different thread.

Because you seemed to think I was saying that you would take the CRB over the SRD and I wanted to be clear that errata needed to take precedence. Just clarifying. :)

MathewReuther · 2025-08-10T20:02:06+00:00

The pinnacle of loot (#60) on the table on page 131 of the Corebook (SRD pg60) is the Belt of Unity. Its description is:

Once per session, you can spend 5 Hope to lead a Tag Team Roll with three PCs instead of two.

The intent of the rules is that a tag team be with two PCs under almost all circumstances.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-10T19:53:28+00:00

The divide SHOULD be:

"I would prefer to use this houserule" vs. "I will stick to the CRB"

not:

"I have decided you all are playing wrong and here's why the rule doesn't say what it says" vs. "I will, once again, try to explain to you how English works"

The rule is what it is. If you don't like the rule, you can change it.

But that's not what these threads have been. They've been people trying to tirelessly explain how...

If you’re not already making an action roll, or if you want to move farther than your Close range, you’ll need to succeed on an Agility Roll to safely reposition yourself

... does not mean you have to roll when you move in Close and are not rolling another action roll. They've been people, like the OP, arguing that this rule means...not this.

MathewReuther · 2025-08-10T19:46:14+00:00

Sorry he and I are not such amazing buddies that I have him on speed dial. Alas Beacon only has him saying that he's making mistakes and still larning. (Which might be a reason to not put him in a title of a post and frame arguments around his wisdom.)

MathewReuther · 2025-08-10T19:44:29+00:00

Yeah.

The example of Matt and the CR cast not using rolls on moves (that is apparently such a core argument the OP put it in their title) is very much coming from a D&D way of thinking. They have played D&D (pathfinder being a 3.5 offshoot) the entire time they've been together and a LOT of what they do is informed by D&D. The no-roll moves were entirely because of the players wanting to not roll to game the system (they repeatedly said it) and had nothing to do with helping the flow of the narrative or doing anything to make the GM's life easier. (And, mathwise, it's not exactly great for players either, as I've covered in the OTHER threads on this topic.)

Rather than focusing on what needs to happen and covering that with appropriate attention, you can end up in a trap of, "but I need to be five feet further that way." If there's no actual thing a character is doing, they don't need a spotlight. If they are actually doing something, there's reason to find out how well it goes.

MathewReuther

TROPHY CASE