Daggerheart character creation: a full worked example from my table

New players drown in manuals, so here is one PC we actually built at my table, start to finish, with the things I wish I had explained sooner. This is not a paraphrase of the rulebook. It is Ratchett, the Clank Warrior that Sam built for our Motherboard campaign, which is my own version of the Motherboard campaign frame.

Concept

Ratchett is a Clank, one of the city’s worker bots. Mother is the AI at the centre of the city in my version of the frame, and on the night the green embers fell, every Clank that was not connected to her had no protection and was corrupted. Ratchett was plugged into the Network charging when the embers came down, so Mother’s connection saved him, and he has trusted her as his saviour ever since. Everything that happened before that night was programming, so Ratchett starts the campaign waking up and working out who he is, with Mother as the one thing he is sure of. Sam wanted him to hit hard and stand at the front, and he did not want to be the one who talks for the party.

Picks and why

A Clank who survived the night the others turned, only because he happened to be charging, sits right at the heart of my version, so Sam’s pick fit the campaign from the first minute. The Clank ancestry gave us the first good conversation of the build. Its Purposeful Design feature asks you to decide who made you and for what purpose, and then gives a permanent +1 to the Experience that best fits that purpose. For a bot who is only now waking up, that question is the whole character.

Sam picked the Warrior because he wanted to be the one who ends fights. The Warrior’s domains are Blade and Bone, so he took his two level 1 domain cards from those, and we did not tour every other domain in the book.

For the subclass he took the Call of the Slayer, because he wanted big hits more than the Call of the Brave’s comeback tricks. Its foundation feature gives you a pool of Slayer Dice, which you add to attack or damage rolls.

For traits, Sam put his +2 in Strength and his −1 in Presence, and spread the rest across the others. Ratchett is the door, not the diplomat.

His two Experiences were “Hauled cargo on the Embrace docks” and “Built to lift what people cannot.” The second one is his purpose, so it took the Purposeful Design bonus. We threw out “Strong” in the first minute, because a trait he already had is not an Experience.

His equipment was a Tier 1 two-handed primary weapon and armor from the starting lists, which we described as salvage from the docks.

What confused him

The Slayer Dice confused Sam the most. On a roll with Hope you can put a d6 in the pool instead of gaining a Hope, so every time he rolled with Hope he had to choose between banking a die and taking the Hope. I should have explained that choice before we looked at domain cards. He also did not realise that unspent Slayer Dice clear at the end of the session and give him a Hope each, so he hoarded them for the first two nights.

Damage thresholds needed one worked example of Major against Severe before they clicked. The connection questions felt abstract until we answered two of them out loud with the rest of the table.

Time

It took about thirty-five minutes with coaching, most of it spent on the Purposeful Design conversation and the Experiences. A pregen would have taken ten, but a campaign character was worth the extra time.

What I teach sooner next time

I now ask for the concept and the Experiences before anything else. I explain the Hope choices, including any class feature that competes with Hope like the Slayer Dice, before anyone opens the domain cards, and I show one armor threshold example before shopping. I wrote more about coaching Experiences in how I coach Experiences that are not too broad. The Dirge sheet on the character sheets page keeps the Experience lines where everyone can see them.