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.

 

[nyvinter]

Due to scars and wound thresholds, I would assume there's some balancing for higher levels there: wizards and bards have less hope to spend than fighters who mitigate damage better and don't need to take scars.

I assume, someone needs to playtest.

 

[TwoSix]

That does sound like a problem. I'll have to check out the playtest I guess.

I think we'll have to see in playtesting. I just don't grok the system enough yet to be able to tell if the 3 combined codex powers are each as useful as 1 of the normal powers.

It's definitely something to keep an eye on, but I'm not quite there at saying "3>1, so must be OP" yet.

 

[Reynard]

I think I might run a couple sessions of this at Origins.

 

[Reynard]

Having now watched the complete playtest one shot by CR, I can say there is a lot to keep on mind but it also looks like a game that is a hell of a lot of fun to run. I donknow if it will work for most CR fans or whatever, but for me it looks like a nice crunchy alternative to Dungeon World and its adjacent games

 

[Zaukrie]

We used the initiative system in our DnD game tonight. We just rolled an extra die, but only used the main die for the result. We used the extra die to see if you was fear or hope. We did have one critical success, and I ruled that the PC could do something to the opponent. They tried to push them into the sewer, and succeeded.

My group still alternated turns on their side. I felt pressure to figure out which of the three enemies acted when the turn moved away from the players. Overall, it seemed that everyone liked it and wants to try it again.

 

[pemerton]

"But everyone gets their powers in a homogenous way!"

You mean like milk?

 

[pemerton]

Narrative games, even though they allow the players opportunities to drive plot and define features, are a lot more work for the GM. The GM still has to do all the usual work of GMing, plus being "on" 100% of the time due to narrative requirements.

I don't know anything about Daggerheart other than what I've read so far on this thread, but this claim taken at face value is just bizarre to me. The amount of prep that modern D&D requires - either in preparing an adventure, or reading up on the on that you've purchased - is pretty significant. Whereas a game like (say) Agon requires you to read three pages (one island), and then you can run the session.

EDIT: Saw this just after I posted:

From a lot of the criticism it’s clear people haven’t run PbtA games before. They’re orders of magnitude less work to run than 5E. That whole “play to find out” thing means drastically less prep. But yeah, you’re improvising a lot. Which is fantastic because it means no railroading.

 

[pemerton]

Also, "play to find out" doesn't necessarily mean less prep. The prep is just different. People inclined to write up reams on information, draw detailed maps or build terrain are all going to do that regardless of whether they are playing 5E or Dungeon World. You still have to know what the world is like and who is in it and what their motivations are and how the various factions interact and on and on in order to "play to find out" in a way that has any worthwhile consistency.

This is pretty bizarre. I've done a lot of "play to find out" and it didn't require these things you say that it requires.

 

[pemerton]

It's divided by 2, because it's order-insensitive. No difference between Grace-Valor and Valor-Grace.

Choosing 2 from 9 (9C2) = 9!/(7!*2!) = 9*8/2 = 36.

Just offering another pathway to your conclusion.

 

[Nikosandros]

Choosing 2 from 9 (9C2) = 9!/(7!*2!) = 9*8/2 = 36.

Just offering another pathway to your conclusion.

Well, that factorial of 2 in the denominator is exactly not to over-count the permutations of the 2 objects, since the order does not matter.