Have you had a chance to check out Daggerheart yet? Here’s 3 things I like about the system, and 3 things that were a miss for me. What did you think?
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I’ve been a player now in my group’s home game and it’s been really fun. I mostly agree with your sentiments on what you liked/disliked. Damage thresholds can be weird but I do see how they make HP tracking much more manageable.
We’ve been fairly lucky with our Hope rolls so far so the economy didn’t feel too stingy. I think ideally players should be given hope for in fiction actions as opposed to only generating via a duality roll. But that’s not specified in the rule book so a lot of tables won’t do that.
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I’ve played and run a bit of Daggerheart, and I like your points! I agree on armor, the Duality Dice, and the cards all being highlights.
I didn’t like damage thresholds until I considered them as a compromise between the small HP totals and the desire for big damage. A D&D 5e player might be used to rolling fistfuls of dice that get bigger as their character grows more powerful. Rather than having a hard upper limit on HP or always rolling one die for damage, damage thresholds provide a constantly increasing set of numbers (both damage and thresholds) to give players an easy sense of progression on level up. This also keeps the HP totals down, reducing the bookkeeping. The only drawback is an extra step after summing damage which does make combat a bit more clunky, but I think it’s about as clunky as large hit point totals. It also feeds directly into the armor system!
Something I’m finding surprisingly difficult is adding together both of the Duality Dice plus the extra die (or dice) from advantage, plus the modifier. One of the advantages of a d20 system is the modifiers are generally pre-baked: for a given fight, you might know you add +8 to all of your attack rolls, and that doesn’t change if you get advantage. However, players only roll the Duality Dice once when they have the spotlight, compared to multiple to-hit rolls 5e characters can make on their turn (or numerous saving throws, etc), so the overall flow may be faster.
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Your post reminds me of another miss: Daggerheart’s mechanical use of the word Advantage. Advantage being an extra d6 you roll and add on top messes me up every time, I always assume Advantage/Disadvantage means roll 2 dice take the better/worse respectively.