Reasons to hold onto armor points:
- reducing Severe damage which might (e.g.) knock you out of wildshape.
- having some hit points missing so an area heal might hit you.

Great video! I especially appreciate how you voice your critiques without positioning yourself in an anti-daggerheart camp that I've seen some youtubers do; and on the flipside you're not to apologetic about the game's faults.

Keep at it!

The "forced movement" thing came up in Age of Umbra, and turns out there's a very simple solution: some enemies have an ability (called "stable" or something, I don't remember specifically -- it probably varies by monster) that causes them to resist forced movement. So for creatures that logically shouldn't be able to be force-pushed, it turns out they can't be. Simple as. You don't have to arbitrarily deny the PCs the use of their characters' abilities, because the power to resist specific abilities is baked into certain monsters.

3:16 - FWIW, Daggerheart games at a physical table will always have cards, paper sheets, and pens/pencils. The game has you build your character using game cards to select certain options, and I think those are the cards the rules intend for you to use. Enjoying this analysis as I prep for my 5th game using the system!

With regards to armor points being a pool of hp. I'll point out (this is something to tell players) that there are a variety of adversary abilities that trigger and effect "If target marks an HP" such as the Bear's overwhelming force in which case saving armor points could be useful. Also some effects are ended if taking Severe damage, again a time that armor point have a benefit vs just extra HP.

None of this stuff bothered me at all except the armor slot being just extra hp. I came up with a solution for it though, and I think it works. I have my players add their armor slot number to their damage thresholds. Then when they get hit, regardless if they take any hp damage, they reduce it by 1. As they play their thresholds get lower and it’s easier for them to take damage, which motivates them to keep armor repaired. I’m still playing around with it to make sure the numbers work, but so far it’s a pretty good solution.

On the topic of recovering armor/HP, there's something to consider:
When you rest, you can only choose 2 options. Because HP and armor are part of different pools, you cannot recover both with the same option.
That means 3 things:
1- because they are not the same pool, recovery of one doesn't overflow into the other. That makes it so recovering them aren't as efficient if you aren't missing much of either, but is very efficient if you are missing a lot of one.
2- because they are not the same pool, it is also an opportunity. You can't choose the same option twice, which means that you can only recover 1d4+tier of your HP per short rest. But if you choose to recover both HP and Armor, because your armor's HP is separate from your HP, you can actually double down on recovering HP by recovering both, essentially doubling the recovery amount.
3- if you carry another set of armor, you essentially have a second pool of HP you can equip to save on using the armor recovery option on a short rest. It could come in handy if you're in the middle of exploring a dungeon.

So yeah, it's videogamey, but it does have a substantial effect in the resource management of the player.

EDIT: I figured I should also mention, there's a third "HP" you have to manage as well, which is Stress. Since you get 2 options, having 3 separate pools to juggle is what makes resting the resource management puzzle that they seem to have intended.
Nothing stops us from adding a mechanic to armor though. It could even be part of a campaign frame, like they do with adding mechanics to Scars in Age of Umbra and Witherwild.

17:58 I think the design is a little more involved than that.

There seems to be a difference in how you approach armor if you are a light armored hero or heavy armored. At tier 1, you heal 1d4+1 HP and fix 1d4+1 armor, but tier 1 light armor has only 3 slots, meaning you can potentially waste 2 points (in case you roll 4 on the d4) that could have healed a total of 5 HP but instead just fixed 3 armor slots. The fact you can only decrease the threshold by one with slots and that light armor have low thresholds means you want to be at max HP as much as you can, because you'll be constantly losing 2 HP per hit even when you use slots (which you only have three of). So for light armored heroes, use your slots as much as you can, but you don't necessarily want to prioritize fixing them when resting. Heal HP first.

Heavy armored heroes on the other hand are designed to use armor as much as possible. They will be hit a lot with their low evasion, but they have the thresholds and slots to mostly mark only one HP and then reduce it to zero. They need to prioritize fixing their armor, especially if you have I Am Your Shield as your domain card, which means you'll be spending A LOT of slots to protect others.

So while I do agree armor slots seem to be a second layer of HP, heroes use this extra layer differently based on their build.

For the nr.4 argument I would like to point out that being stabbes by a sword or hit by a hammer without any armour SHOULD hurt like all hell. For me it makes sense that the PC should either avoid combat in such situation or really NOT get hit at all. But also giving +1 or maybe 2 even to evasion could be a middle ground in my case. We'll see.

7:32 fiction first = dragon still holds  the barbarian when he is pushed

12:10 Good tip! I think even Matt Mercer gets this wrong in Age of Umbra. They consistently say the player already has advantage so there's no point in helping more.

Something to note: the roll for duality dice has a significant different shape than the one for a d20 (which is a flat 5% per +1). It's why advantage is a d6 instead of roll the duality dice twice. A bonus of + 3 is pretty big in this system, because adversaries only come in 4 tiers with numbers being about 2 apart per tier.

Great video!

I especially liked the discussion around armor.
The resource management between armor, hp and stress seems fun and allows different abilities for different classes, but I agree with many points you made.

I loved your solution to add the gambison thresholds as unarmored stats, especially bc you could still keep the gambison for the benefit of the armor slots.


I also agree with the assessment that DH seems to try to slot itself in somewhere between the very narrative forward games and the crunchy crawlers. It's a rope walk that they do well enough, but it certainly causes some washy definitions here and there (my biggest gripe so far are the distances, but i haven't played a longer campaign yet).

Though, for me, nothing a custom campaign frame or on-the-fly ruling can't fix.

3:19 (Sorry if this is duplicated, my  post didn't submit for some reason). From what I understand, when you use a ruler or props to measure distance, you measure from the side of your mini to the side of the enemy mini, not the center. So if you translate that to a grid, you don't actually count the square you and your enemy are in, because they expect you to fit the pencil, card or paper in the empty space between the minis, not from center to center.

To account for that when using a grid, when you are in very close range for example, the way you measure is that you start from your square, count 3 squares and place the enemy at the third square, not the forth. So you actually have two empty squares between you and your enemy, not three, meaning your side is 10ft from their side.

Same thing when you are at close range. 6 squares mean you start from your square, count 6 squares and place the enemy at the 6th square, meaning 5 empty squares between you and them or 25ft.

Their explanation is very poor on the book, probably because it's an optional rule and because they don't expect you to make the comparison between the optional and regular rule, same way you don't compare the math between characters in D&D made with rolling 4 dice with characters done with point distribution. As long as you don't mix and match optional and regular rules, you're fine.

Really good video! I just started a party in a campaign frame of my own, and its refreshing to find video resources like yours where you really disect the rules and give meaningful input! Especially about help actions, that i will have to touch base with the players in our next session.

THANK YOU. This information was terrific!

Great video, made me look into dungeon world which helped me elaborate a thought that some feeling of the oldschool games, specially the feeling of being-in-the-world, not only being in the narrative, or being in the combat can be actually found more easily in those narrative games as Daggerheart and Dungeon World than in OSR, Pathfinder2e or DnD.

Armor and HP being two separate pools comes into paly when you are doing rests because you have to make the choice to spend your time patching up your wounds vs patching your armor (or both).  If you have HP, Armor, and stress you have to figure out how to split that and pick which two you care the most about to fix.  If you used your armor to block all HP it becomes easier to just focus on your Armor and Stress.

I do agree the "math" is more here which is why I recommend everyone have some tokens handy so you can easily just add those all together and not have to remember "oh yeah, I had plus 2 from my experience... and a plus 1 from this skill... and ...." you just add that into your pool, then roll your dice.  Add the dice and your tokens and you are set.  I thought this was silly at first but on actual plays this has been very beneficial.

The best thing that I've seen that manages distance is a circle with a series of concentric circles each labeled with a distance... Close, Very Close etc.

Great thoughts and suggestions!

I think the benefit of the armor system is that it leaves room for flavor. It introduces the narrative idea of maintaining your gear in a relatively rules-light manner. A GM can ask the player what using that armor slot looks like for their character: a wizard casts an arcane barrier to negate some of the hit, a warrior’s shield is battered (absorbing most of the impact but leaving them bruised and dazed), the rogue’s leather pants were singed by a fireball (leaving them with a painful, but manageable burn where the sun don’t shine).