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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AstroCat

Adventurer
??!

Not to repeat myself, but what does that even mean? It's just some kind of weird word salad with no evident meaning.
It means there is a segment of the ttrpg TAM they are specifically addressing, in hopes of picking up a very targeted market share demographic.
 

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Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
Supporter
It means I laughed at the art because I thought it was so ridiculous and pandering to a hyper focused niche of people in a style that just oozes an overplayed throw away boring flavor of the week trend. By hey, that's just me, and it's art, with opinions and preferences.

Mod Note:

EN World has an inclusivity policy. You might want to read it before classifying folks as a "hyper-focused niche", or laughing at art that depicts heavier set people, people with darker skin tones, or folks who need assistive devices.
 






Anon Adderlan

Explorer
The initiative system is genius: Basically every action you take adds 'points' the GM can use against you on their turn, and you can take as many actions as you want until you choose to end your turn or roll with fear, at which time it becomes the GM's turn. And while I'm not a fan of the cards I can see how they would help with the conservation of player attention.

Remember what @SlyFlourish says: "It's not for me."
Ah the ol' Twisp and Catsby defense.

Remember kids, F.A.T.A.L isn't bad, it's just not for you.
 


el-remmen

Moderator Emeritus
Wow, I could not be less interested,
Sure you could. You could be not interested enough to not click on the thread. Or not interested enough to not post a response. And those are just the two levels of “less interested” I could think of off the top of my head.

As for me, I wouldn’t have thought I’d be interested but the system does intrigue me the more I hear about it.
 
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