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

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.

 

[Reynard]

"Not getting in the way" is the important part. 5e doesn't get in the way. 4e did, which is why I bounced off it. The 1980s Ghostbusters RPG was really good at not getting in the way, since it hard hardly any rules.

Sure. It seemed you weren't sure of the definition and I was just trying to explain

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I don't want to come across as negative (this game has a lot to like), but it's in my nature to look for ways to break the game. So how about these:

Several PC with the daemon ancestry. Gain stress to keep the DM starved of Fear tokens, thus messing with the action economy. There seem to be a fair few ways to recover stress.

Similarly, a bunch of PCs all with the halfling ancestry. Everyone with 5 extra Hope tokens at the start of the session should give strong action economy advantage to the party.

 

[overgeeked]

Played the playtest adventure today with a party of three and myself as the GM.

We had an absolute blast!

The building of character connections and questions was a great way to start the session, especially because it was my first time meeting one of the players.

We had no issues with Fear piling up, as I made sure to use it very liberally because of comments here as well as seeing Mercer run the game in their one-shot video where he definitely wasn't pulling punches with regards to Fear use.

All three players mentioned how nice the lack of initiative was for keeping things flowing smoothly and they were great about lifting each other up. They also liked spells being tied to Hope instead of spell slots. It was easy to run on my end because I felt I had to devote very little brain power to pacing the game. The dice told us when things were going well, when they were going poorly, and when things were getting messy. We had a few great moments where I shifted "off-screen" on a Fear outcome and foreshadowed things to come during the final fight.

All three players also mentioned how elegant and easy to understand the interplay was with damage thresholds, hit points, stress, and armor. They liked experiences as a replacement for d20 system skills because they could interpret them broadly and it made them think about their characters more.

One player, with whom I've played DnD 4E, 5E, Shadowdark, B/X, Cypher System, PF2E, and Starfinder, said that Daggerheart did everything he wants out of fantasy RPG time together. Looks like this might be our core system for the foreseeable future. I'm really glad the playtest has so much; release might be next year, but we might not even need it!

All in all, fantastic. I'm excited to play more and I'm looking forward to what they do next.

Awesome review. Thanks. Anything that didn’t work so great?

 

[SteveC]

As I said, rules don't matter. It's just the same game with different dice.

If you think the rules don't matter then I'm not sure how useful what you have to say about a playtest of those rules is. That's about 95% of what we're discussing here. I see that there is some setting here, but I haven't even read that part. For me, the rules very much do matter. And the experience Daggerheart looks to produce is very different than D&D. It sounds like you are comparing the rules as written in Daggerheart to a homebrewed houseruled 5E and saying they are similar. I'll be honest and say that I don't know anyone playing D&D as a narrative system. I'm sure there are some, but ... when there are dozens of systems where the rules are designed for that kind of play, why would I?

I played through a combat with our GM who will be running this system for us and it didn't resemble a 5E combat at all. If anything, it reminded me of 2D20. I recently played Fallout using the 2D20 rules and saw a similar play style there. I just played a combat-heavy 5E session last Thursday night, and it ran nothing like the fight we did in Daggerheart.

I guess I see you have some strong opinions on the game as presented, but I don't know how transferrable they are in a general sense. I think you're arguing the "all RPGs are similar" while I'm saying "system matters." Especially as I'm playtesting it to see if I want to make it my new system.

 

[Campbell]

For me personally, one of the biggest selling points is that it seems like a game that does not feel a need to protect players from one another or to ration out characters' ability to impact the setting. Domain card abilities are straight forward, contain few caveats and do not go out of their way ration bits of awesomeness.

Examples

It's also a game that keeps magic consequential because spells still leverage the action roll mechanics so there can be consequences for failing the Spellcast roll for Final Words beyond the loss of the opportunity.

This is also where a bit of the implied setting comes out. Magic isn't a precious, reliable commodity that you tap into. It's part of the world and who you are and may not always express itself in the same ways.

 

[Reynard]

For me personally, one of the biggest selling points is that it seems like a game that does not feel a need to protect players from one another or to ration out characters' ability to impact the setting. Domain card abilities are straight forward, contain few caveats and do not go out of their way ration bits of awesomeness.

Examples
View attachment 353254View attachment 353255View attachment 353256

It's also a game that keeps magic consequential because spells still leverage the action roll mechanics so there can be consequences for failing the Spellcast roll for Final Words beyond the loss of the opportunity.

This is also where a bit of the implied setting comes out. Magic isn't a precious, reliable commodity that you tap into. It's part of the world and who you are and may not always express itself in the same ways.

Final words is a great way to get rid of a body!

::rolls with fear::
"How'd you like that dagger?"
"It sucked!"
::turns to dust::

 

[SakanaSensei]

Awesome review. Thanks. Anything that didn’t work so great?

That was one of the questions on the survey and I had to sit and think for a long time on how to answer it. Mechanically, nothing got in the way for us. On the contrary, the mechanics gave us exactly what we wanted.

I ended up putting down that in their tier 0 setting of the Sablewood, it would be very helpful to have more art or words dedicated to describing the hybrid animals, because I had a hard time picturing just what a cat squirrel or eeligator might look like.

 

[SakanaSensei]

Final words is a great way to get rid of a body!

::rolls with fear::
"How'd you like that dagger?"
"It sucked!"
::turns to dust::

That’s actually a really neat, horizontal thinking use of the spell. I love when players bust that kind of application out.

 

[Minigiant]

Has anyone play tested "high level" Daggerheart?

I see a lot of people playtesting it but playtesting low level.

D&D ran into it's many issues edition after edition because the vast focus of playtesting was at low level and the rules Broke Down from mid level on.

As I read the domain cards and simulate turns, I could see Daggerheart getting very funky with advanced characters and adversaries. The "power gamer" and "accidental joke character" controls are very light.

 

[SakanaSensei]

Has anyone play tested "high level" Daggerheart?

I see a lot of people playtesting it but playtesting low level.

D&D ran into it's many issues edition after edition because the vast focus of playtesting was at low level and the rules Broke Down from mid level on.

As I read the domain cards and simulate turns, I could see Daggerheart getting very funky with advanced characters and adversaries. The "power gamer" and "accidental joke character" controls are very light.

I’ll let you know in a few months if my players get that far. Definitely didn’t plan on just kicking off a new system at level 8 or whatever haha