Daggerheart Passive Rolls

NOTE: Stream of consciousness game development log follows.

I mentioned this before, but I'm slowly stewing a hack to Daggerheart to give Traveller vibes with a more sword-and-laser system. One of the big gaps is skills: Traveller is all about skills, and Daggerheart doesn't have them at all. So I've been mulling that over in my spare (ha!) time. And then I had a brain wave in the shower.

Skills are basically Experiences with free invocation. So they start at +2 but can grow. Or maybe they're binary and grant Advantage on the roll. I'll figure out the mechanical bonus later. It's definitely worth a different category for skills on the character sheet, to keep them separate from Experiences.

Further rough thoughts on skills: In a perfect world, Daggerstar will only have about a dozen skills, roughly two based on each statistic. Classes and domains will offer a choice of skills, so most characters will end up with 2-3 skills available during play. Gear (skill chips, etc.) can give bonuses to skills, but they'll never quite measure up to someone actually trained in a skill. That feels right, but we'll see how it plays when I get a critical mass together for playtesting.

And then I thought about how, with a skill-heavy system, making every roll pay into the Hope/Fear economy seems like overkill. "I was just breaking into this facility. The lock took me forever to crack, and suddenly the big boss ambushed me with all its special abilities on blast." So I need a lower-stakes way of using skills.

Saves in Daggerheart don't look at Hope/Fear results, so I want something like that. Since saves are usually made anytime except on your turn, they're necessarily passive, so let's just call them Passive Rolls. Skills are Passive Rolls by default, but if you're in a tense situation like trying to start a derelict's engine before it gets crushed by meteors, then skills as regular rolls make sense.

"But how are you going to add skills into the base system?" Relax. It'll be an optional system, actually quite D&Dish with Charisma (Performance) checks and such. I'm reworking all the classes and domains, and I want every card to have a combat and non-combat use. Maybe that's a pipe dream, but I'm going to use that guiding principle and see what happens.

So I guess this is the first development log post for the Daggerstar project. Yes, it's very stream-of-consciousness, and no, I won't be editing this except to turn it into a passage in a rulebook.

What do y'all think? Good idea? Bad idea? Does adding skills into a Daggerheart concept give you hives? Do you want to playtest this thing when I get something worth playtesting? The comments are open, or you can reach out to me wherever you find me.

Stay tuned for more.