Critical Role's 'Daggerheart' Open Playtest Starts In March

System plays on 'the dualities of hope and fear'.

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On March 12th, Critical Role's Darrington Press will be launching the open playtest for Daggerheart, their new fantasy TTRPG/

Using cards and two d12s, the system plays on 'the dualities of hope and fear'. The game is slated for a 2025 release.

Almost a year ago, we announced that we’ve been working hard behind-the-scenes on Daggerheart, our contribution to the world of high-fantasy tabletop roleplaying games.

Daggerheart is a game of brave heroics and vibrant worlds that are built together with your gaming group. Create a shared story with your adventuring party, and shape your world through rich, long-term campaign play.

When it’s time for the game mechanics to control fate, players roll one HOPE die and one FEAR die (both 12-sided dice), which will ultimately impact the outcome for your characters. This duality between the forces of hope and fear on every hero drives the unique character-focused narratives in Daggerheart.

In addition to dice, Daggerheart’s card system makes it easy to get started and satisfying to grow your abilities by bringing your characters’ background and capabilities to your fingertips. Ancestry and Community cards describe where you come from and how your experience shapes your customs and values. Meanwhile, your Subclass and Domain cards grant your character plenty of tantalizing abilities to choose from as your character evolves.

And now, dear reader, we’re excited to let you know that our Daggerheart Open Beta Playtest will launch globally on our 9th anniversary, Tuesday, March 12th!

We want anyone and everyone (over the age of 18, please) to help us make Daggerheart as wonderful as possible, which means…helping us break the game. Seriously! The game is not finished or polished yet, which is why it’s critical (ha!) to gather all of your feedback ahead of Daggerheart’s public release in 2025.
 

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Daggerheart is kind of like a dagger to my heart...like at a personal level. It reduces a decade's ludotech, into a nightmarish mishmash of popular system features. I feel it's not just a step back; it's a clumsy stumble in game design, failing to harness the potential of its rich heritage.
if this were the closing line of an IGN review, it'd be accompanied by an 8/10 score.
 

Campbell

Relaxed Intensity
The thing with 5e is if you push the players hard you get a TPK. Does this game have something to prevent throwing fear at the players whipping them out? I didn’t see anything in my read through.

It’s a narrative game, slaughtering the party is undesirable, especially if it’s down to bad luck.
We'll have to see what tuning is like, but it has a fairly forgiving death mechanic that can have a lingering effect on the narrative.
Death Move

Choose one of the options below.

  • Embrace death and go out in a blaze of glory. Take one action (at GM discretion), which becomes an automatic critical success, then cross through the veil of death.
  • Avoid death and face the consequences. You drop unconscious temporarily and work with the GM to describe how the situation gets much worse because of it. Then roll your Fear die; if its value is equal to or under your Level, take a Scar. You may not take any actions while unconscious. When you have any number of your marked Hit Points cleared by an ally, or on your party’s next long rest, you will return to consciousness.
  • Risk it all. Roll your Duality Dice. If Hope is higher, you stay on your feet and clear an amount of Hit Points and/or Stress equal to the value of the Hope die (divide the Hope die value up between these however you’d prefer). If your Fear die is higher, you cross through the veil of death. If the Duality Dice are tied, you stay on your feet and clear all Hit Points and Stress.

Scars

If you choose to avoid death, you might take a scar. If you do, permanently cross out one of your Hope slots. You cannot use this slot to store Hope anymore. The narrative impact of this scar is up to you; for example, you might now bear a physical scar, a painful memory, or a deep fear.

When you put a scar on your last Hope slot, it is time to end your character’s journey. Work with the GM to find a graceful and fitting way for the party to say goodbye to them at the end of the session and prepare a new character for the next time you play.
 

Reynard

Legend
Daggerheart is kind of like a dagger to my heart...like at a personal level. It reduces a decade's ludotech, into a nightmarish mishmash of popular system features. I feel it's not just a step back; it's a clumsy stumble in game design, failing to harness the potential of its rich heritage.
What does this even mean?
 

We'll have to see what tuning is like, but it has a fairly forgiving death mechanic that can have a lingering effect on the narrative.
Scars sounds like a potential doom spiral.

Scars aught to come with some kind of advantage as well as a drawback.

Death Move: either sacrifice your character to save the team, or screw the team and make someone else sacrifice their character to save the team.
 
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andreszarta

Adventurer
I think they're making the assertion that the game borrows from too many different sources of inspiration, which makes the game incoherent? I dunno, I got a little lost after "ludotech".
That's basically it! Don't really care to defend my position too much other that to assert, if this assertion hasn't been made before, that the game borrows blindly and sloppily.
 

CleverNickName

Limit Break Dancing
That's basically it! Don't really care to defend my position too much other that to assert, if this assertion hasn't been made before, that the game borrows blindly and sloppily.
You're a tough critic, for sure. This is one of the least-sloppy playtests I've ever seen, imo. I'm curious what you must have thought about, say, Pathfinder2's playtest.
 

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