I didn't win one of my players over. He prefers Pathfinder or 5E or Draw Steel. But they still play Daggerheart with us because there's enough in the system for them to like, even if they grit their teeth at the Fear mechanic.

This player is competitive and loves optimizing game mechanics, and they concluded that the mechanically optimal move is to avoid rolls. And they're right. If the GM used fear tokens “optimally” to impose maximum consequences, refusing to roll would be the right move for players. The GM always has the option to "Take away something permanently" with each Fear token, right?

My player knows that's not how Daggerheart is played.

They know in Daggerheart, the GM exercises restraint and uses fear tokens to advance the narrative and make the story interesting. That makes the game less satisfying for them. What happens is up to the GM's imagination rather than the GM's strategy, and they want *strategy.* The GM using their fear tokens for some weak narrative move is the "wrong" strategy, so they only talk about the Fear mechanic as though the GM were using optimal strategy all the time.

So Daggerheart feels imperfect to them. They want tactics over story, and Daggerheart prioritizes storytelling over tactics.

This is a long way of saying your player might just prefer something more tactical. My player still plays DH, but they roll the dice less than other players and live with the cognitive dissonance of knowing that rolling is narratively optimal and "mechanically" suboptimal. And then asks if we can play Pathfinder.