An idea for a less bloated damage/health system, while keeping the good part of rolling several dice with a dice pool system.

Since I hated how Daggerheart makes you roll a lot of dice, only to end up dealing just 1 to 3 damage, which isn't the problem itself, but the whole time-consuming process is, I thought of the following proposal. Not for Daggerheart, but a generic attack rule.

I would take the attack rule from Nimble, where you roll the damage dice directly, and the leftmost die is the main die. If you roll a 1 on it, you miss, any other value means you hit. However, instead of summing all the dice to inflict damage, you will just count how many dice did not result in a 1. So, for example, if you rolled a dice pool and got the results [6, 1, 8, 7], you would hit the attack because the main die is not a 1, and you would deal a total of 3 damage, since one of the dice resulted in a 1 and therefore doesn't count.

For crit, I thought about keeping it almost the same as Nimble's exploding die mechanic with the main die. So here, a maximum result on a rolled die, for example, a 6 on a d6, would already count as +1 to the total damage, and you would roll that same die again to check if it explodes again. So for each maximum result, you get +1 and roll again until your luck runs out.

From this point on, I haven't fleshed out how much health each PC and NPC would have, I would also borrow Nimble's creation table for that adjusted to be less bloated. For armor, I'm still seriously considering if damage mitigation would be a good idea, since for NPCs it would mean calculating how much damage is reduced from every attack. And for PCs, it would be less repetitive because the defend action can only be used once outside of their turn.