lacked mechanical teeth to make it more than a narrative prompting experience
Anyone looking for a game like that is going to be overwhelmed by Daggerheart. It has plenty of crunch. But it does have an overall philosophy that "Everything you do at the table should flow from the fiction".
For what it's worth, there are definitely people using traditional initiative in Daggerheart. For one thing, the book has optional rules for an "action tracker" that limits how much an individual player can hog the spotlight. And I saw somebody on Mastodon who was borrowing a cool initiative system from Dragonbane.
Hope and Fear are more central, if that mechanic turns you off, it's probably not the game for you. Personally I love it, it gives us all improv cues when we need them, and it makes rolls more dynamic than just pass/fail.
I don't know why it's not working for you, it works fine for me even from a private browsing session where I'm not logged in. Are you using a Lemmy client that includes the trailing . in the link or something?
Anyway, I've copied it here as well: https://sandybox.neocities.org/dh
I pre-ordered the book, and ran the Quick Start adventure for my family last week. I really liked it, and wrote up my impressions here: https://gist.github.com/sandyarmstrong/0503026016dbbb0aa6408ece020010fd .
It's not a full review or anything. I don't bother explaining the core mechanics. There are other folks doing that already.
I think it's more that the mechanics take a backseat to the fiction, and largely the GM is more responsible for that than the players. It's definitely not for everyone. I run a regular 5e game and I suspect half of my players would be into it and half would very clearly say "no thanks".
That's an interesting interpretation, considering that success with fear is just as likely as failure with hope. I don't see this as primarily existing to make things easier for the players. Rather it's there to make each roll more interesting.
The communication around Fear could be better in the book. GMs can do normal GM things whenever they want. Fear is used to up the stakes by using special adversary moves, taking more "turns" than they can naturally, or interrupting the players in ways that would likely seem unfair in 5e.