You don’t need to change any rules or homebrew anything before you’ve run the game for the first time

Take a deep breath. Relax.

We get where you’re coming from. You’re excited to play Daggerheart. You’ve had the SRD or the CRB in your hands for a bit but you can’t play for a couple more weeks or months. So to fill the time you’ve been reading discussions here or watching videos elsewhere about the game and the rules. You’re a smart cookie and you’ve played some other systems before, so you already have some opinions of your own about this one. You’re also probably a GM at least part time, and you love tinkering with things.

But you haven’t actually played yet. You don’t really know how the whole system will land or feel when you sit down with some fun friends and experience it. You don’t need to change a bunch of things ahead of time because you’re worried about problems that may or may not be relevant to your table or even real. I’ve seen a lot of discussion from folks who haven’t played the game yet, but want to:

• Add initiative turn order.
• Get rid of armor.
• Convert damage thresholds to HP.
• Nerf druids.
• Inject passive checks into everything.
• Eliminate domain restrictions.
• Change experiences.
• Eliminate/change fear generation on duality dice rolls (please don’t).

If your GM spidey senses are going off because you see things in the rules that make you uncomfortable, don’t worry - you’re not alone. If you haven’t played in a system with similar mechanics to Daggerheart, or if you have and you didn’t like it, it’s easy to feel uneasy about what lay before you. I get it, because I’m a really picky GM myself. But the last thing you want to do is change the core rules before your first try because you saw something online that made you think you should, have a bad time, then give up on the system because it felt bad.

So I implore you - take a chill pill and experience the system as it is. After you’ve done that, if a mechanic is still really bothering you, go nuts with the homebrew.