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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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I didn't play it yet. I was referring to the comments I saw earlier in the thread... That why I said it "seems".
This games biggest obstacle is "why should I play this instead of 5e?". As with politics, the incumbent always has the advantage - no need to learn new rules or buy new stuff. Aside form "I hate WotC", which is not a sound reason for anything, especially when non-WotC 5e clones are available.

From what I can see, Daggerheart works fine, is fun, but far from perfect. And you can say exactly the same about 5e. Daggerheart needs to do do more if it is going to beat incumbent advantage.
 

SakanaSensei

Adventurer
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.
 

Tymophil

Explorer
This games biggest obstacle is "why should I play this instead of 5e?". As with politics, the incumbent always has the advantage - no need to learn new rules or buy new stuff. Aside form "I hate WotC", which is not a sound reason for anything, especially when non-WotC 5e clones are available.

From what I can see, Daggerheart works fine, is fun, but far from perfect. And you can say exactly the same about 5e. Daggerheart needs to do do more if it is going to beat incumbent advantage.
Firstly, I don't play Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, and won't. A few years ago, I have played it a few times as a player, a Dungeon Master and I even tried to write some adventures for this edition. I did not like it, and went to other systems. So Daggerheart could be a system to please me, but not a D&D5 replacement or clone.

Secondly, I played a lot of Star Wars FFG. The Advantage/Threat system is quite similar to what Daggerheart offers with Hope/Fear (the author acknowledge Genesys, that is the generic system derived from Star Wars) as an inspiration. Producing, on the spot, interesting narrative for multiple Threat is not that easy, and quite tiresome for the Game Master. So I clearly pictured the problem that some Game Master may have with lots of of Fear results to narrate on the spot, and Fear points to spend thereafter.

Hope results narratives are to be produced by the player, so this not a problem (as long as the player is okay with the Daggerhart's proposal). On the other hand, Fear is a result of an action by player-character actions, while the narrative result is to be handled by the Game Master alone. Moreover, 5 in 6 checks will produce a Fear result. So it seems quite likely that the Game Master would be overloaded quite quickly, even without spending the Fear points.
 

Firstly, I don't play Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, and won't. A few years ago, I have played it a few times as a player, a Dungeon Master and I even tried to write some adventures for this edition. I did not like it, and went to other systems. So Daggerheart could be a system to please me, but not a D&D5 replacement or clone.
Sure, but that would make you a statistical anomaly. A business cannot make a profit on statistical anomalies.

As someone who runs a lot of narrative games with various systems, I have found this: Rules don't matter (at least, not so long as they are sufficiently simple and loose, 4e was far too inflexible). I find genre and setting matter more, and currently the Daggerheart setting is underdeveloped, and the genre is tired old generic fantasy.
 
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Daggerheart is a narrative play
I play 5e as a narrative game. It works just fine.
to find out rpg driven by metacurrency.
As I said, rules don't matter. It's just the same game with different dice.
5E is a quintessentially traditional RPG.
What do you mean by that? Daggerheart can't do non-narrative playstyles? May or may not be true, but since I don't play non-narratively, I don't consider what it can't do relevant.
 

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