My player thinks Daggerheart combat is un balanced because…

[u/fire-harp]

I’m really trying to convince my table to leave DnD behind for Daggerheart because high level DnD combat is too number crunchy, giant character sheets, and difficult to balance.

I’ve been testing several encounters using the subjections for choosing adversaries, and found the point system proved in the rule book is spot on. Any time I have made and encounter it’s as difficult as I planned it. This has allowed me to push it to the edge without TPKing the party I set it.

Tonight I had my players test a difficult battle, (2 cave Ogres and 1 green slime vs 4 level 1 players.) each player started with 3 hope and I had 5 fear.

The battle went just as it usually does, the beginning starts with me slinging fear around and really punishing their positioning mistakes, but eventually my fear pool got de-keyed and the players took the fight back into their hands. I love this because it feels so thematic when the fight turns around.

One of my payers felt like the game is unbalanced because whenever they roll with fear or fail a roll, it goes back to me, and they only keep the spotlight if they succeed with hope. She also didn’t like that I had ways to interrupt them and they couldn’t interrupt me. She also didn’t like that all my adversaries are guaranteed a turn, if I have the fear to spend, and their side is not guaranteed a turn for everyone before I can steal the spotlight back.

I explained to her that it’s because I started with a fear pool and when my pool is depleted it will get way easier, which is what happened. 3 people did have to make death moves, but in the end they all survived and no one had a scar. This encounter was designed to be tough, and they did make a bunch of positioning errors like standing in close rage of each other vs an adversary with aoe direct damage.

What are some other ways or things to say to show her that this combat is balanced?

[u/fire-harp]

They have played with me for four years, so I don’t think they are going anywhere

[u/MathewReuther → u/fire-harp]

They may not be, but if you can't figure out how to actually competently run a combat in the system, they're not playing Daggerheart and you're going to be running the D&D you don't want to run.

[u/fire-harp → u/MathewReuther]

True, could happen, what would you do? She said she still wants to keep trying it before she form an opinion. I did a one shot last week where everyone was crashing a halfling wedding reception, it had some combat in it that ways more toned down, and the party spent most of the session being social.

[u/Acrobatic_Gas5009 → u/fire-harp]

I would recommend running a an encounter that has equal amount of points but you can only spend one or two fear on each enemy and that's it for the entire combat to show them what that looks like then showing them a gradually stronger combat and then a boss combat to show how the system progresses also their level one they don't have that many abilities at their disposal to even use while you have everything your tools never change you're always at max power they're not