This section provides guidance for player best practices and how to get the most out of Daggerheart. When considering these best practices, remember the “Player Principles” section in this book’s introduction.

• Embrace danger.
• Use your resources.
• Tell the story.
• Discover your character.

Embrace Danger

The life of an adventurer is a dangerous one, often filled with treacherous paths, monstrous threats, and powerful foes. Along the way, you’ll face difficult choices and life-threatening peril. It’s important as adventurers to embrace this danger as part of the game. Playing it safe, not taking risks, and overthinking a plan can often slow the game to a halt.

Don’t be afraid to leap in headfirst and think like a storyteller, asking what the hero of a novel or a TV show would do here? Think about not only what choice might be obvious, but what story could be most interesting, or how your character might approach the situation differently because of their background. Remember that you are not your character and that it’s okay to put them into harm’s way, push them to their limits, and take big risks if it’s right for the story. Their trials and their failures are not yours. We might always want to win, but players win by collaborating on a compelling narrative, not by having successful dice rolls every time.

Use Your Resources

Player characters in Daggerheart have access to many resources that help them in their heroic journey. Chief among them is Hope, a resource that frequently comes and goes over the course of a session. You’ll gain a Hope roughly every other time you make an action roll, so you’re encouraged to spend it on Hope Features, to Help an Ally, to Utilize an Experience, to initiate a Tag Team Roll, and to use other features and abilities that cost Hope.

Stress, Hit Points, and Armor are your most essential other resources. They interact in varying ways that you can manipulate and optimize with domain abilities, ancestry features, class features, and more. For players excited about the crunch of interacting mechanics, look to those resources and think about how to manage them to get the most out of your character.

Tell the Story

You are an equal partner in telling the story alongside everyone else at the table. The GM presents opportunities and challenges for the party along the way, but they are not the sole author of the fiction you’re exploring together. Daggerheart is a collaborative game where everyone is responsible for bringing the tone, feel, and themes they’re interested in to the group. If you have an idea for a description or a detail to add, feel free to offer it to the table. If you want a specific emotional arc to be a part of your story, talk to your GM about finding opportunities to include it, and seize those opportunities when they show up. When you reach these moments in the story, take the time to showcase the emotions driving your character forward and the desires spurring their actions.

Your role as a player in Daggerheart is to guide your character along the best story arc you can, not necessarily to always make the most tactical or strategic moves. Think about what you’re interested in saying thematically with the narrative, and let that be expressed through your character.

Discover Your Character

It’s okay not to know everything about your character when you sit down to play for the first time, the tenth time, or even the hundredth time. When the game begins, you only have a few pieces of information to go on—such as what your character might be good at, some backstory, their relationships with a few other characters, and what kind of weapon they carry. That’s perfectly fine—because you’ll build on your character throughout the game. Think of character creation as an ongoing process. The GM might turn to you to ask something about your past that you haven’t worked out or thought of yet. You could take this opportunity to invent something on the spot, or ask them to talk through some ideas with you before you settle on one. Try to use the game’s fiction to discover the different aspects of your character, and let those discoveries flow into the decisions they make.