So some background on me and the group. There’s me who has been a forever GM for close to 25 years. My group (Bard, Guardian, Seraph, and Sorcerer) and I are quite experienced both individually and together. Two things to note is that Bard and Guardian are far more active roleplayers than Seraph and Sorcerer who tend to be focused more on combat and mechanics but we all mesh well. We’ve been doing Cyberpunk: Red for a while and since we just finished an arc we decided to take a break for a one shot and possibly a short campaign with Daggerheart.

EDITED TO ADD: Daggerheart is a RPG in open beta by Darrington Press and designed by many of the Critical Role folk. The primary mechanic is rolling 2d12 with one d12 being "Hope" the other being "Fear." Rolling a higher Fear than Hope (regardless if it's a success or not) means "rolling with Fear" which either throws in a complication then and there or gives the DM a "Fear" token which they can use to trigger a complication later. Rolling a higher Hope (regardless if it's a failure or not) means "rolling with Hope" and gives the player a Hope token they can use for certain class abilities or other things like helping an ally or to use your "experience" (a sort of catchall for skills, feats and so forth) when it is narratively relevant.

For the one shot I used a heavily modified version of the Quickstart Adventure with minis but used as just a rough estimation of where everybody was in relation to one another. There’s a lot more combat and a more ‘on-rails’ plot than I normally run but no more than my usual one-shot where time is essential.

Good

• Everyone liked the Hope/Fear mechanic itself on paper. The possibility of complications is something we liked from Forged In The Dark games and succeeding with Fear was a big hit.
• Although it took up a lot of room, they enjoyed the cards on abilities for ease of reference.
• The combat mechanics went over well especially with the threshold and armor system preventing combat from getting too swingy.
• Once we got in the groove of the action tracker it seemed to run far more smooth than other variants of initiative we’ve tried. Since I absolutely DESPISE the default initiative system that D&D and Pathfinder have I’m always looking for better ideas so this was a huge win for me as well although I do have a caveat (more on that later).
• Everyone seemed to like the heritage/ancestry/subclass system and had a lot of fun roleplaying their heritage (although Seraph used the Firbolg ancestry she changed the skin of it to a polar bear). Having heritage/ancestry/subclass abilities that actually matter was also popular with Bard making a lot of jokes about his Faun kicking the skull off a skeleton.
• Fear was a good mechanic to keep the narrative interesting but without it feeling like purely DM fiat.
• Loved the way adversaries are presented and organized (with roles and tiers). Considering the thing I like the least about 5e is how awful it is with giving DMs the tools to create a balanced encounters, this was a blessing. While it’s not as mathematically precise as Pathfinder, I like this system a bit more as it’s a little easier to put together. The spread of creatures was also nice.
• Sorcerer reported loving playing a melee orc magic user with armor and slinging spells even if the spell list was quite limited. Part of this was with my lore pushing orcs to act like Klingons from Star Trek or Clanners from Battletech but overall it was a cool change from D&D.
• Speaking of which, the positives are how Daggerheart diverged from 5e with classes like Guardian and Seraph. I wish they had gone all the way.

Bad

• The biggest problem (which many of the others will be branched from) is the lack of a unifying mechanic. You have hit points, armor points, stress points, Hope tokens, and even abilities with THEIR OWN tokens. It felt ‘busy’ according to one player and everyone agreed.
• That being said, my players had a TON of Hope tokens by the end of the battle with very little to spend them on. Maybe they rolled really well or we missed something or we picked abilities and subclasses that didn’t use them very much but having so many didn’t seem like a good thing.
• There was some confusion if an Experience can be spammed for an entire battle if the objective fits. For example Guardian had “Bodyguard” and Seraph had “Holy Warrior”. Since they were protecting a wizard from evil necromancers and animated skeletons I let both players used their Experience during combat although they had to keep using Hope tokens (although as noted having enough Hope wasn’t really an issue). Not sure if this was intended but maybe some clarification could work.
• Combat was rather easy though part of this may have been short rests being too good (more on that in a bit). If I were running it again for four players, I would definitely amp up the difficulty.
• The Action Tracker worked great for our group. However, even we saw the potential for this to be a problem for others. This system is definitely not for people who aren’t interested in collaborative storytelling or want something closer to a board or war game during combat. That will be a considerable amount of 5e players I imagine.
• The players did like the cards but found the ‘cheat sheet’ that pointed to different parts of the character sheet were worthless especially with the table already crowded.
• While I’m a fan of combat with broadly defined ranges it still was hard to run theater of the mind. Halfway through we decided life was easier with figures although we used it more as a way to represent distances more than granular movement in 5e or Pathfinder.
• Short Rests felt too good. Even with three short rests before a long rest felt too powerful especially. As mentioned with players having too much Hope this is compounded with Short Rests allowing multiple players getting 2 Hope. There definitely needs to be more adjustments made here. This may be balanced with stronger adversaries.
• The flip side of Seraph and Guardian were the copies of other classes from 5e. I was hoping there would be more innovation than just two classes and importing the rest straight from 5e. Looking for this to be improved at least a little bit.

Ugly

So this being a module with my changes it could be a bit unbalanced but considering the only change I made was ADDING a combat and my players finished the adventure with only moderate damage and a short rest to spare I think the adventure is too easy. I’ll be experimenting with adventures made from scratch using their recommendations. While the Action Tracker can be an issue with some groups, the biggest problem is the lack of things to use for Hope. Again this was an on rails adventure with a focus on combat but I don’t think that fully explains the problem.

That being said, my group and I really enjoyed Daggerheart and have expressed interest in doing a short campaign at minimum. We’re also considering experimenting with some things: particularly using Hope in exchange for losing a Stress, reducing the Stress limit or eliminating it altogether since I felt this was the most extraneous stat. That could mean we go from Hope surpluses to Hope droughts but that's why we experiment.

I would say a game like Daggerheart coming from CR is going to have the "Too crazy for Boy's Town. Too much of a boy for Crazy Town" problem. 5e enthusiasts will dislike all the things that make it different than 5e while someone like me will dislike all the things that are too similar to 5e. Still the core of Daggerheart being narrative, collaborative, and rulings over rules doesn't look to be going anywhere, so I can't complain too much.

Well that’s my $0.02 and I'll be giving more as I run more sessions of Daggerheart.