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

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

DH064_Bard-Wordsmith-Nikki-Dawes-2560x1440.jpg


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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overgeeked

B/X Known World
Tomorrow's the big day. CR will be dropping the open beta PDFs along with four videos on Daggerheart.

How to play Daggerheart | Open Beta

Creators Matthew Mercer and Spenser Starke will walk you through the gaming mechanics of the Daggerheart system with basic dice rules, character creation processes, combat techniques, and more!
  • Releases March 12th on YouTube at 8am Pacific


How to make a character in Daggerheart | Open Beta

Game Master Matthew Mercer and Daggerheart guinea pig Travis Willingham create the Campaign Three character Bertrand Bell using the Daggerheart Character Creation System.
  • Releases March 12th on YouTube at 8am Pacific


Critical Role creates characters in Daggerheart | Open Beta

Game Master, Matthew Mercer, leads the entire cast of Critical Role in a special Daggerheart Session Zero to create a brand new band of adventures! These characters will be used in the first ever LIVE Daggerheart One-Shot.
  • Releases March 12th on YouTube at 10am Pacific


CRITICAL ROLE PLAYS DAGGERHEART | LIVE ONE SHOT | OPEN BETA

Join game master Matthew Mercer as he leads players Ashley Johnson, Laura Bailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Travis Willingham, Marisha Ray, Sam Riegel, and Liam O’Brien through a LIVE One-Shot using the Daggerheart system!

Though Daggerheart is still in Beta testing, we hope this one-shot can give insight into how the game can be played.
  • Airs Tuesday, March 12th at 7pm Pacific on Twitch and YouTube
  • VOD will be available immediately after the stream ends
  • Podcast out Wednesday, March 13th on your favorite podcast streaming service
 

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CleverNickName

Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
It’s 290m. I haven’t gotten it yet, what y’all think?
Downloading now...please stand by. :cool:

Download complete! First impressions:
  • This is the cleanest, most concise playtest I've ever seen. The organization alone shows how much thought and care went into this.
  • There is a manuscript for the Playtest, and a packaged 3-hour adventure
  • I appreciate that they separated out the supplements and handouts into two distinct folders: GM Materials and Player Materials. This makes it easy for folks to know "who gets what" when setting up and learning a brand-new game.
  • There are 9 classes and a blank multiclass sheet for the Player Materials folder.
  • Everything else (maps, rules, play guide, starting equipment, cards) is in the GM Materials folder.
 
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CleverNickName

Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
Digging through the cards folder...
  • The artwork is impressive. I expected just a bunch of place-holder shapes with Alt text on them, not watermarked art proofs! Looks like the art department and art director have been involved for a good long while in this project, so it looks more polished.
  • Action Tracking is going to take me a while to warm up to. Not that it's hard or difficult to understand; it's just so different from what I'm used to and I don't yet understand why they chose to use it.
  • The D&D terms for "Race" and "Background" have been rolled into a single card. I really like this change: it pushes the concept of "race" further away from DNA and taxonomy, and closer to a person's culture and heritage. This is something I've wanted to see for a long time, so: huge props to the design team.
  • Subclass cards look like they're going to work the same way that D&D character subclasses do. At first glance they look like a customization option, designed to stack with the Ancestry & Domain cards.
I'm gonna need to sit down and study these rules a lot more, and un-learn some old D&D terms, before things like Domains and Action Rolls make sense to me. And alas, it's time to start my work day. More later, I guess...
 


Reynard

Legend
Supporter
Also available on drivethrurpg.

Looks like a complete rulebook at 377 pages plus an intro adventure. Wasn’t expected the first packet to be that complete. Will take some time to digest
This is how an actual playtest needs to be presented if it is going to be useful for providing feedback on design, rather than just beings a marketing stunt. Games have lots of moving parts that interact with one another in unexpected ways. That is the purpose behind this scale beta testing.
 

CleverNickName

Limit Break Dancing (He/They)
This is how an actual playtest needs to be presented if it is going to be useful for providing feedback on design, rather than just beings a marketing stunt. Games have lots of moving parts that interact with one another in unexpected ways. That is the purpose behind this scale beta testing.

Say what you will about Matt Mercer and the rest of Critical Role, but this much is certain: they know what they're doing. Critical Role has been playing RPGs together for years--long before they became celebrities. They know the hobby, the industry, the audience, and the "Internet Market" better than most, and it looks like they are really putting in the work.
 
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bedir than

Full Moon Storyteller
This is how an actual playtest needs to be presented if it is going to be useful for providing feedback on design, rather than just beings a marketing stunt. Games have lots of moving parts that interact with one another in unexpected ways. That is the purpose behind this scale beta testing.
The subtext here is that it's nothing like the 5e 2024 playtest. But that should be obvious. Daggerheart is all new, not compatible with anything. 2024 5e is supposed to be fully compatible. It doesn't need a full rule set because it already has one.

Daggerheart had to be released this way
 

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