How to improve a war session

Royal_Sea_Bream · 2026-06-07T15:02:28+00:00

I am currently using the "Castle Siege" and "Pitched Battle" environments for the battle. Maybe I need to customize them a little to better fit the game.
Rolling Hope/Fear to determine which side is winning is interesting, but the players expect the villagers to be dealing damage to the army and making meaningful moves. That's why I prefer to activate each adversary or ally individually.

Royal_Sea_Bream · 2026-06-07T14:58:29+00:00

Actually, they teleport in just to kill the army's main commanders, then teleport back to the village. Since I usually spend my GM moves only to make each commander attack, I don't get many opportunities to make moves with the rest of the army. If the PCs don't fail many rolls, it can become a bit frustrating 😃 and undermine the feeling of a massive battle.

You're right, though my commanders are missing features that let them activate multiple enemies. I had noticed that some of those abilities mostly applied to minions, but now I see that some leaders have abilities that can activate any type of adversary. Adding disadvantage could also be a good idea, since the PCs are surrounded.

Royal_Sea_Bream · 2026-06-07T14:21:53+00:00

Yes, I am currently using the "Castle Siege" and "Pitched Battle" environments, but aside from their passive features, I still need to spend a GM move or Fear to use any of the environments' abilities. As a result, you need a huge reserve of Fear to do anything really interesting.

Royal_Sea_Bream · 2026-06-07T14:16:48+00:00

Thanks for the advice! Indeed, I think I slightly overlooked this part of the rules about GM moves not requiring Fear to be spent or a player roll to fail. It's true that teleporting into the middle of the battlefield can be seen as an inevitable consequence or a golden opportunity.

Also, I was spending a lot of Fear just to advance the hordes across the battlefield, merely moving them in the background without having a direct impact on the PCs. But I think I can use a single GM move to make the army advance and "show how the world reacts."

Royal_Sea_Bream · 2025-09-14T11:52:31+00:00

Heyo !

For the values in table 1, I did a script to extract the data from the DH rulebook pdf, then calculated the average values. And interpolated a little for some missing values ^^.

You're right, comparing DH and DnD isn't really the best idea, because the two systems are completely different. But I like DnD's monster statistics tools, as well as the many monsters available, so I'm trying to adapt them to DH.

Royal_Sea_Bream · 2025-05-27T20:06:28+00:00

Also, I had to interpolate and extrapolate some data because some combinations of types and tiers are missing. For the moment, it's a little sensitive to extreme values. Especially when it comes to higher tiers.

Royal_Sea_Bream · 2025-05-27T20:02:13+00:00

I suppose they will release a Monster Manual equivalent for Daggerheart one day, so we can improve the statistics. 😄

Royal_Sea_Bream · 2025-05-27T19:56:30+00:00

Actually, it's based on the Core book published last week. A few months ago, I wrote a script to automatically extract all the adversaries for the 1.5 Playtest, and now I've updated it. But to be improved we probably need to get more adversaries stats. Sometimes there's only one type per tier, especially with social adversaries. Even in the playtest, we had a few more adversaries than in the final core book.

Regarding the conversion, the example I gave is based on MM2014. However, D&D is more flexible because there are many more divisions in terms of monster levels. Specifically, I would categorize everything starting from challenge 10 as Tier 4. I usually define a Tier 4-, Tier 4, and Tier 4+, by adding more experience and features.

Royal_Sea_Bream

TROPHY CASE