On Your Turn

Daggerheart’s turns don’t follow a traditional, rigid format; you don’t have a set number of actions you can take or things you can do before play passes to someone else. Players should follow the natural flow of the fiction to figure out what happens next, bouncing the spotlight around the table to whoever it makes sense to focus on in that moment. However, all players should keep in mind who has recently had the spotlight and try to find opportunities to give every character a chance to act.

Optional Tool: Spotlight Tracker

If your group prefers tactical play or structured player turns, you can limit the number of actions each PC has available to them at a time. We recommend that you start with three, but you can increase or decrease the number as your table prefers. If you use this system, when a battle begins, every player places action tokens on their character sheets to represent how many actions they can take. Players then act as usual, and each time they make an action roll or perform a significant action while in the spotlight, they remove 1 token from their sheet. Collaborate with other players to pass play around the table, making moves and telling the story together. Even if you have multiple action tokens, see if any other players want a chance to act before you spend more than one in a row. Once every player has used all their available tokens, players refill their character sheet with the same number of tokens as before, then continue playing.

Making Moves

When you decide to do something in the story and the spotlight shifts to you, your PC makes a move, which you describe to the group. A move is an action a character takes to advance the story, such as talking to another character, interacting with the environment, using a class feature or spell, or anything else a character can do within the scene. Some low-stakes moves automatically succeed—it’s easy to open an unlocked door. But while heroic, high-stakes moves often require a roll to determine the outcome—it’s hard to break down a barricaded door. When you make a move and the result of that action is in question, the fiction pauses while you make an action roll to see how things play out.

Moves in Combat

Since Daggerheart is a collaborative and conversational storytelling experience between the GM and players, combat has no initiative order, no rounds, and no distinct number of actions you can take while in the spotlight. Instead, fights play out narratively from moment to moment, just like noncombat scenes. This freeform combat gives players the freedom and opportunity to team up, respond on the fly to narrative changes in the scene, and follow the fiction. If they aren’t mechanically locked into combat, players might find it easier to choose a solution other than violence, such as having their characters flee from their opponents or come to a temporary truce with their enemies.

Gm Moves and Adversary Actions

PCs aren’t the only ones who make moves—the GM can make a GM move (see the “Making Moves” section on page 149). GM moves can happen at nearly any time, but they most commonly occur when a PC rolls with Fear or fails an action roll. Typically, GM moves escalate the scene in an exciting and dangerous way. A new threat might emerge from the woods, the PCs could be separated by a sudden cave-in, or another similar action may significantly change the scene. When the GM is finished with their turn, play returns to the PCs. This creates a back-and-forth conversation as the story evolves organically between the GM and players. Many GM moves don’t require spending any resources, but the GM can spend Fear to make additional or more powerful moves, such as using an adversary or environment’s Fear move (see the “Fear” section on page 154).

Tip: When the GM has the spotlight, PCs can’t use features that require spending resources or making rolls unless those actions specifically allow for it, such as reaction rolls or features that interrupt attack or damage rolls.