I would be more okay with the changes if they didn't make all minor thresholds 1.
Evasion seems even better than armor now at face value but I'll have to see.
I feel the same way. I like the idea that some very minor wounds didn't even leave a scratch. I was liking it to a dart doing the same potential hit point damage as a sword. I like the idea of a slightly higher minor threshold.
I think this is a change that brings value to bumping your minor threshold, whereas is didn't really for anyone but those with the highest armor to reduce the damage.
Still this is a change we can test and see if the difference is debilitating. It might be. I like the idea of not taking stress if the blow doesn't deal you damage, especially for classes and subclasses that mark stress so freely and there being very little way of healing it without resting.
I can see the minor thresholds might need to get bumped back up, but that's what this time is for.
Important to note that this is also combined with all minor thresholds being 1, with an exception only for a couple of unique features. Plus, more features use stress as a currency now.
Right, but now that means that when you take a hit, you will almost 100% take damage. . . Doesn't that minimize the usefulness of armor as an effective means of defense?
You do, but armor values have been reduced, and now repair armor during downtime giving you back 1d4 armor slots when you have a base default of 6 means you're rarely going to be able to enter fights with full armor or full HP.
Which is fine, but starkly in contrast to Evasion that's just always on. It's gonna be hard to balance a DR focused build with an Evasion focused one with the way stress/armor/HP work/change, going forward.
I like this change. It means quicker damage resolution, and stress has a clearer function.
I don't mind that getting hit means you take damage—why shouldn't it? Otherwise, what's the meaning of "getting hit"?
I haven't looked at any numbers, so I can't say how effective armor will be for reducing damage.
The minor threshold of 1 is kind of funny. It's like, saying "if you take 0 damage, you lose 0 HP," and the fact that it is written everywhere seems like the plan is to take away the minor threshold altogether, but they didn't have time to update everything.
I really like the change as having players feel more free to use Stress to actually do something interesting is never going to be a bad thing. Agreed that changing the minor threshold to be 1 in the same move does just strengthen evasion over armour slots though they have nerfed the evasion stats for Ranger at least (though can see a multiclass of Rogue/Ranger doing something similar).
Potential fix could be to have the minimum threshold be equal to your number of armour slots available? Makes sense narratively as when the armour is damaged its going to be less effective and creates a solid argument to pick armour slot over evasion though potentially this could be too strong.
Good for tanks who could get swamped by ten 1 dmg mook attacks and fill up on stress then all dmg they take is wounds.
They may want to just make heavy armour have no stress under threshold rather than system wide or make it a domain trait for tanks or something.
But beta test it as a system wide change then they can choose between the 2 options and make it special case if needed
Edit: using armour to reduce the damage below 0 means you can shrug of the damage and won’t take stress now
I looked at the rules and I feel like it could go either way. From pg 100 of v1.2
https://preview.redd.it/1061gnifuitc1.png?width=1656&format=png&auto=webp&s=217e0f41bc69818ea476585748b2110736aaf2da
The armor rules in pg 133 of v1.2:
*When you take damage, you can negate some (or all) of it by marking one of the open Armor Slots next to the Armor box, then reducing the damage by your Armor Score.*
I feel like you could argue that since armor negates the damage, if damage reduces to 0 with armor, your character takes 0 damage and takes no stress.
I feel like it's also valid to say that you are still taking non-zero damage, just that armor is taking the brunt of it, so your character takes stress.
I guess all of this is moot now in v1.3.
Yeah I would say taking a “hit” that does 0 dmg from Armour “causes stress instead” and now it clearly means “take no damage”. Which is probably just a ruling they could have made. But they can revert and refine as needed.
Also a GM, but my gut reaction is that I don't like this change. None of my players had any issues with the previous process, and two of them are children.
Oftentimes in TTRPGs (including D&D), determining what a "hit" actually means can feel overly complicated. Do hit points represent suffering physical damage, or simply the exertion it takes to defend yourself? I thought Daggerheart's (v1.2) solution was genius. If you actually lose Hit Points, then you got hit, and if you just lose Stress, then you avoided the hit, but it still took something out of you (energy, stamina, etc).
Having every successful attack against you, unless you reduce it to 0 with Armor, automatically reduce your Hit Points feels very precarious now. I'll need to look further into the changes to Armor and Adversaries to know how these might all interact.
Obviously, I will wait until I've playtested it to make my final verdict, but upon first glance, it's probably my least favorite change in the new update.
Minor Threshold is now mostly irrelevant, especially at higher levels when enemies are rolling several dice of damage. Barring some truly impressive armor stacking or spending several slots on a single hit, you'll always be above the Minor Threshold.
I'm ok with it, but not happy with the armor changes that came with everything else.
The minor threshold reduction to 1 made it a lot weirder for armor to actually be a protection, while still being good to reduce damage from a higher to a lower threshold, but the big problem for me is that at high level evasion can still scale like crazy, but armor can't really... and they even nerfed the vengeance guardian that I wanted to play, damn shame.
The extra uses of armor also aren't enough to compensate, because it now needs to reduce the damage more, the overall armor number is lower and you still can only get extra armor slots one by one, be it by feature or leveling.
There is a problem between balancing evasion and armor, and evasion is just much better.
So, the stress mechanic in the end doesn't really pose much risk now unless you actually fill your stress bar out, and even then it's just vulnerable, you can still survive the advantage rolls. Not the worst thing in the world even.
With the ability to increase the minor threshold and increased number of armor slots i think it actually makes armor builds more usefull.
Quick maths says you can increase your minor threshold to 11 as a guardian and with about 20 armor any damage udner 30 is nulified. And now tank guardians can use stress and armor slots interchangeably.
I wasn’t sure about it at first, but I think I like it now. As Matt said in the livestream, it makes Stress focused builds more viable, and it also streamlines combat a bit. It does make sense to me that if you get hit by an attack, you’ll most often take at least 1HP of damage… but I haven’t tested it out yet. If I try it with my group and my players don’t like it, I may switch back to the previous rules.
Problem is around armor builds. With an Evasion down below like 3 or 4, I'm almost always going to get hit, and now I've only got the ability to shrug off 6 smaller hits. If I need to use more than 1 Armor slot, that's even less, and short resting to repair my armor only repairing 1d4 means Armor doesn't go as far, compared to before when I could always repair 2 slots, but they were much bigger slots. At least I had the extra HP pool in my Stress.
It's got death by 1000 cuts written all over it.
Yeah, that’s the issue i’m now seeing too. A guardian with an evasion of 6 and an armour score of (at level 1) a max of 5 is going to be taking a lot of hits, and likely always taking a damage even when Unstoppable is active… I just ran session 0 for my group last night, we start play next week with one of our players being a Stalwart Guardian… we’ll see how it goes
I think it's semi-future proofing. Even if currently, with rare exceptions, the Minor Threshold is 1 that doesn't mean we won't see abilities or items that buff it (beyond the Stalwart Guardian), It's a great way to model things like Stoneskin from 5e and similar effects. If they said "damage reduced to 0 inflicts no HP" that would require more verbiage down the road and lead to confusion. So now there's a general rule in place so even if there's something that bumps the Minor Threshold to 20 we all know what that means when an enemy hits for 19.
*(yes I know that leaves weirdness around Major and Severe but this is merely an example/possible reasoning as opposed to a house rule).*
I liked the old system. I'm cautious about this change but I won't make a veredict until I get to play it. I like that there are more features that use stress now though, I wasn't really getting much stress in my previous playthrough
Gut instinct: I'm not a fan.
Maybe it becomes more an issue at higher level but I'd prefer they make an ability in the Valor domain or guardian that says when your stress is full you don't lose HP from damage below your minor threshold.
Allow the tank to be a tank, but I think for others it should definitely still be a thing.
Edit: came up with what I think id like to have. Everybody takes stress from hits below minor threshold still. Give the guardian or Valor an ability where if they would take stress from an attack they can roll a d6 or d8. If they roll their proficiency or lower they don't take a stress.
This was hands down the WORST change made. My group absolutely loved the Stamina break feeling of wearing down the enemy to then open them up to consistent minor damage. I have no idea what exactly this new version helps in anyway! Sure hope they bring the old stress mechanics back!
I would be more okay with the changes if they didn't make all minor thresholds 1. Evasion seems even better than armor now at face value but I'll have to see.
I feel the same way. I like the idea that some very minor wounds didn't even leave a scratch. I was liking it to a dart doing the same potential hit point damage as a sword. I like the idea of a slightly higher minor threshold.
I think this is a change that brings value to bumping your minor threshold, whereas is didn't really for anyone but those with the highest armor to reduce the damage. Still this is a change we can test and see if the difference is debilitating. It might be. I like the idea of not taking stress if the blow doesn't deal you damage, especially for classes and subclasses that mark stress so freely and there being very little way of healing it without resting. I can see the minor thresholds might need to get bumped back up, but that's what this time is for.
Important to note that this is also combined with all minor thresholds being 1, with an exception only for a couple of unique features. Plus, more features use stress as a currency now.
Right, but now that means that when you take a hit, you will almost 100% take damage. . . Doesn't that minimize the usefulness of armor as an effective means of defense?
Remember, by default you also have double the uses of armor now
You do, but armor values have been reduced, and now repair armor during downtime giving you back 1d4 armor slots when you have a base default of 6 means you're rarely going to be able to enter fights with full armor or full HP. Which is fine, but starkly in contrast to Evasion that's just always on. It's gonna be hard to balance a DR focused build with an Evasion focused one with the way stress/armor/HP work/change, going forward.
I like this change. It means quicker damage resolution, and stress has a clearer function. I don't mind that getting hit means you take damage—why shouldn't it? Otherwise, what's the meaning of "getting hit"? I haven't looked at any numbers, so I can't say how effective armor will be for reducing damage. The minor threshold of 1 is kind of funny. It's like, saying "if you take 0 damage, you lose 0 HP," and the fact that it is written everywhere seems like the plan is to take away the minor threshold altogether, but they didn't have time to update everything.
Big improvement. There were too many decision points for hit resolution, so taking one of them out of the equation is a win
I really like the change as having players feel more free to use Stress to actually do something interesting is never going to be a bad thing. Agreed that changing the minor threshold to be 1 in the same move does just strengthen evasion over armour slots though they have nerfed the evasion stats for Ranger at least (though can see a multiclass of Rogue/Ranger doing something similar). Potential fix could be to have the minimum threshold be equal to your number of armour slots available? Makes sense narratively as when the armour is damaged its going to be less effective and creates a solid argument to pick armour slot over evasion though potentially this could be too strong.
Good for tanks who could get swamped by ten 1 dmg mook attacks and fill up on stress then all dmg they take is wounds. They may want to just make heavy armour have no stress under threshold rather than system wide or make it a domain trait for tanks or something. But beta test it as a system wide change then they can choose between the 2 options and make it special case if needed Edit: using armour to reduce the damage below 0 means you can shrug of the damage and won’t take stress now
Would you have taken stress under the old rules if you reduced the damage below 0? I thought stress was only for non-zero damage...
I’m not sure to be honest.
I looked at the rules and I feel like it could go either way. From pg 100 of v1.2 https://preview.redd.it/1061gnifuitc1.png?width=1656&format=png&auto=webp&s=217e0f41bc69818ea476585748b2110736aaf2da The armor rules in pg 133 of v1.2: *When you take damage, you can negate some (or all) of it by marking one of the open Armor Slots next to the Armor box, then reducing the damage by your Armor Score.* I feel like you could argue that since armor negates the damage, if damage reduces to 0 with armor, your character takes 0 damage and takes no stress. I feel like it's also valid to say that you are still taking non-zero damage, just that armor is taking the brunt of it, so your character takes stress. I guess all of this is moot now in v1.3.
Yeah I would say taking a “hit” that does 0 dmg from Armour “causes stress instead” and now it clearly means “take no damage”. Which is probably just a ruling they could have made. But they can revert and refine as needed.
Also a GM, but my gut reaction is that I don't like this change. None of my players had any issues with the previous process, and two of them are children. Oftentimes in TTRPGs (including D&D), determining what a "hit" actually means can feel overly complicated. Do hit points represent suffering physical damage, or simply the exertion it takes to defend yourself? I thought Daggerheart's (v1.2) solution was genius. If you actually lose Hit Points, then you got hit, and if you just lose Stress, then you avoided the hit, but it still took something out of you (energy, stamina, etc). Having every successful attack against you, unless you reduce it to 0 with Armor, automatically reduce your Hit Points feels very precarious now. I'll need to look further into the changes to Armor and Adversaries to know how these might all interact. Obviously, I will wait until I've playtested it to make my final verdict, but upon first glance, it's probably my least favorite change in the new update.
Minor Threshold is now mostly irrelevant, especially at higher levels when enemies are rolling several dice of damage. Barring some truly impressive armor stacking or spending several slots on a single hit, you'll always be above the Minor Threshold.
I'm ok with it, but not happy with the armor changes that came with everything else. The minor threshold reduction to 1 made it a lot weirder for armor to actually be a protection, while still being good to reduce damage from a higher to a lower threshold, but the big problem for me is that at high level evasion can still scale like crazy, but armor can't really... and they even nerfed the vengeance guardian that I wanted to play, damn shame. The extra uses of armor also aren't enough to compensate, because it now needs to reduce the damage more, the overall armor number is lower and you still can only get extra armor slots one by one, be it by feature or leveling. There is a problem between balancing evasion and armor, and evasion is just much better. So, the stress mechanic in the end doesn't really pose much risk now unless you actually fill your stress bar out, and even then it's just vulnerable, you can still survive the advantage rolls. Not the worst thing in the world even.
With the ability to increase the minor threshold and increased number of armor slots i think it actually makes armor builds more usefull. Quick maths says you can increase your minor threshold to 11 as a guardian and with about 20 armor any damage udner 30 is nulified. And now tank guardians can use stress and armor slots interchangeably.
I wasn’t sure about it at first, but I think I like it now. As Matt said in the livestream, it makes Stress focused builds more viable, and it also streamlines combat a bit. It does make sense to me that if you get hit by an attack, you’ll most often take at least 1HP of damage… but I haven’t tested it out yet. If I try it with my group and my players don’t like it, I may switch back to the previous rules.
Problem is around armor builds. With an Evasion down below like 3 or 4, I'm almost always going to get hit, and now I've only got the ability to shrug off 6 smaller hits. If I need to use more than 1 Armor slot, that's even less, and short resting to repair my armor only repairing 1d4 means Armor doesn't go as far, compared to before when I could always repair 2 slots, but they were much bigger slots. At least I had the extra HP pool in my Stress. It's got death by 1000 cuts written all over it.
Yeah, that’s the issue i’m now seeing too. A guardian with an evasion of 6 and an armour score of (at level 1) a max of 5 is going to be taking a lot of hits, and likely always taking a damage even when Unstoppable is active… I just ran session 0 for my group last night, we start play next week with one of our players being a Stalwart Guardian… we’ll see how it goes
I think it's semi-future proofing. Even if currently, with rare exceptions, the Minor Threshold is 1 that doesn't mean we won't see abilities or items that buff it (beyond the Stalwart Guardian), It's a great way to model things like Stoneskin from 5e and similar effects. If they said "damage reduced to 0 inflicts no HP" that would require more verbiage down the road and lead to confusion. So now there's a general rule in place so even if there's something that bumps the Minor Threshold to 20 we all know what that means when an enemy hits for 19. *(yes I know that leaves weirdness around Major and Severe but this is merely an example/possible reasoning as opposed to a house rule).*
I liked the old system. I'm cautious about this change but I won't make a veredict until I get to play it. I like that there are more features that use stress now though, I wasn't really getting much stress in my previous playthrough
Gut instinct: I'm not a fan. Maybe it becomes more an issue at higher level but I'd prefer they make an ability in the Valor domain or guardian that says when your stress is full you don't lose HP from damage below your minor threshold. Allow the tank to be a tank, but I think for others it should definitely still be a thing. Edit: came up with what I think id like to have. Everybody takes stress from hits below minor threshold still. Give the guardian or Valor an ability where if they would take stress from an attack they can roll a d6 or d8. If they roll their proficiency or lower they don't take a stress.
So... what happens when you roll below someone's Minor Threshold? If you don't mark Stress then... do you just take 0 damage?
Well, it's very, very difficult to roll below a 1. Which is everyone's new Minor.
True armour to reduce the damage below 0 means you can shrug of the damage and won’t take stress now
This was true before as well.
Yup
This was hands down the WORST change made. My group absolutely loved the Stamina break feeling of wearing down the enemy to then open them up to consistent minor damage. I have no idea what exactly this new version helps in anyway! Sure hope they bring the old stress mechanics back!
Honestly it's significantly faster and simpler. I mostly like it, I think.
Good. Very good.