Hey everybody! Long-time listener, first-time caller.

I've followed Daggerheart for some time now. I love what it's doing for the hobby in bringing together narrative mechanics with more familiar trad-gameplay for those who came into the hobby through D&D 5E. That being said, I'm a long-time TTRPG enthusiast, eternal GM, and serial homebrewer, and the game I keep coming back to the most the past decade has been Dungeon World. The PbtA style of GMing has taught me so much, and I prefer it over most alternatives.

As such, I'm looking to bring some more of this into my Daggerheart play. While I'm still testing it out, I'd love some insights from the community. I know some people don't like some of bigger changes to the system, and that's okay! I'm not trying to improve upon Daggerheart, I'm just having fun with the mechanics and finding a fit for my group and how we play. Maybe some people find something to enjoy here, too!

My current experiment

Now, Daggerheart has some roots in PbtA style of play with its GM moves and the degrees of success at the heart of its rolls, and I've been loving it for my current, more D&D 5e adjacent group. Yet the main thing I ran into on the GM side of things is the attack rolls. I personally love being able to leave the rolling to the players as a GM, since this frees me up to really focus on the fiction and the consequences of it all.

To preface this again: this is all preference! There is nothing wrong with the Daggerheart mechanics as is. I just like fiddling with rules and seeing how the experience changes. So, my current points of tension are that the attack rolls in DH combat:

• Make me roll dice: Not the end of the world, but I'd prefer not to. I could have players roll these dice for me, and I have, but this doesn't quite give the smooth experience I'm looking for, as it isn't the players acting but still me, the GM (or actually the adversaries). I want the players to be active in the face of the fiction which I use to present threats and opportunities, like I'm used to from playing Dungeon World. Having me take a mechanical 'turn' isn't really conducive to this.
• Have a binary result: Again, this is also fine for some play styles. In 5E this is the norm after all. I've seen some discussion on this particular point in the subreddit with people often arguing it is alright for these checks to just be a quick hit-or-miss, as this adds tension (will they hit?) and keeps things moving. Still, coming from a PbtA mindset, this feels like it could make use of the other parts of the system that really keep the fiction going. I'd love to be able to avoid outcomes that come down to 'nothing happens', or leave the floor 100% open to me as a GM to think of what does in fact happen. Some of that is fine, but that eventually grinds me down.

What am I trying out to change this? Bringing back player-facing action/combat.

What does that mean? That means changing the attack roll of adversaries into a defense roll by the players. For this, I'm making a couple of changes:

• Room DC

This is something I've been doing more broadly in my Daggerheart play. I might make a separate post for this, but this is just a simple concept stolen from ICRPG. Instead of each adversary having a separate difficulty for me to juggle, I have a big d20 in the middle of the table for any given scene which shows the players the current difficulty. Tough adversaries and obstacles might grant disadvantage for rolls, easy adversaries or obstacles might grant advantage. Just a bit of easing off the prep load for me. If things get tense, I might spend some fear to increase this for the remainder of the scene, and other things.

• Defense rolls

So, the big one. When a player is attacked, I ask them what they do. They are apt to choose to defend in some way, and this most often leads us to a defense roll. Players roll an action roll and add their Evasion (see Evasion), trying to meet or beat the Room DC. This is an action roll, so with Fear or Hope.

• Evasion

Now Evasion is the difficulty attacks roll against. I don't want to miscount this part of the system, so I'll make a simple change to this: Evasion - 10 is your new Evasion, which is a bonus added to your Defense rolls. This should give Evasion a similar role to what it had before.

• Attack modifiers

Some monsters are better at attacking than others. This nuance we could add by adding or subtracting from the player roll, but that feels messy. I prefer simplicity over keeping the math the exact same. So, we flatten this to some monsters being good at attacking (granting disadvantage on the Defense roll) and others being bad at attacking (granting advantage on the Defense roll).

• Damage

Rolling for damage is still pretty fun, and I don't feel the need to get rid of this. Sometimes I'll roll this, usually I'll ask the players to roll this and seal their own fate (or each other's fate)

This is what I'm currently trying out, and I'm personally having fun with it in my testing. The additional impulse of Fear and Hope in these rolls add to the dynamism of the action/combat, which I like a lot. And it also gives players the chance to describe and act out their defense, which is a lot of fun, too! Sometimes some really strange and creative things come out of this, with abilities being used in novel ways.
The math doesn't add up 100%, this I am aware of. Still, it doesn't need to as long as things don't fundamentally break down. If balance is tipping in certain different ways, I can roll with that. It'll need more playtesting than I've done so far, but I'm also interested in what you guys think of it. Have you done similar changes? Let me know!