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.

 

[Steampunkette]

Things I really like:

Duality Dice is a nice choice. It creates a very simple bell curve to rolls making success more common when things are in the "Easy to Middling" range rather than a flat distribution, which I appreciate. Shifting to a 1 in 12 crit setup increases the odds of crits slightly (from 5% to 8.33%). And having rolls that succeed have the option of providing benefits or penalties is a REALLY clever way to provide players with "Inspiration" style mechanics. It also kills the idea of critical failures in a nice and smooth way. And it could easily be adapted for 5e or A5e using d12s or d10s without significantly damaging the game.

Death Moves are fantastic. Getting a choice of what to do at 0hp is really cool. And locking yourself into either a single awesome action before you go, giving your party a major burden, or risking it for the biscuit as your choices are really freaking cool.

Proficiency determining how many damage dice a weapon attack deals in a 4e style is pretty great for the fighty types standing next to (or up to) the wizzies.

Narrator taking turns based on Fear Rolls and Removing Action Tokens from the tracker. Making the GM run off player economy is pretty cool, conceptually! The players always go first in combat and can take more than a few actions before the enemy retaliates en masse.

Things I really don't like:

Class removal. I may not particularly like Monks or Clerics, but they also nix Warlocks and don't bother with Artificers or Psions at all. Meanwhile they make Sorcerers and Wizards separate things and still have Bards and Druids. Just a weird way to axe a bunch of concepts for no apparent reason and include the same concept twice for similar opacity.

Character Heritage/Culture. The Cultures all being "XBorne" is kinda lame. And the heritages are 7 flavors of "Furry", the traditional core races, and then Faeries, Tieflings, Warforged, and Goliaths. Okay also Goblin which is nice but holy crap do we really need cat, frog, turtle, monkey, goat, cow, and lizard people? I guess it's 'cool' to have 18 heritages to start with... It just really feels like it's going to lean heavy into furry games.

Classes basically are everything and nothing. You get a couple of features that define your character class and that's it. At higher levels you can gain 2 additional subclass abilities. Or multiclass and gain a subclass ability. Or multiclass twice. And that's it for your -entire- leveling career from 2 to 10. Everything else from leveling up is improving your basic stats like more HP, Proficiencies, Evasion, Etc. Your class does grant you access to more "Domain Cards" from your class's two domains... But you're going to share your domains with the other classes. Bards share with Rogues and Wizards. Sure that makes sense, but it means that the only thing they really do "Differently" or unique are their 1 or 2 class features and then 1 subclass feature at level 1... and then 1 more after level 5 and another after level 8.

Mechanically, characters are going to feel pretty samey unless they focus on their subclass abilities. A lot of the time when players make attacks it's going to be roughly the same bonus to attack for roughly the same amount of damage. You'll just call it a "Presence" attack rather than a "Strength" attack.

No Turn Order. I've known players who, in a system like this, would ABSOLUTELY dominate the heck out of combat. Inconsiderate and selfish players are everywhere, and this really slants things hard toward them. Of course, it's up to the narrator to reign players in and make sure other characters get a turn.

DM Turn is once action token and each enemy gets one action. Because of the "Flow of the Story" the party Giant just took 3 actions in a row and there's 6 tokens on the tracker but because there's only 1 Bad Guy in the fight they can only respond to all the actions of the whole party with a single action. Okay, yes. Solo enemies can (but don't always) have "Relentless" and take additional turns which is good... but holy crap the action economy is going to be whack.

Things I don't feel strongly about:

Pretty much everything else.

 

[Aldarc]

Things I really like:

Death Moves are fantastic. Getting a choice of what to do at 0hp is really cool. And locking yourself into either a single awesome action before you go, giving your party a major burden, or risking it for the biscuit as your choices are really freaking cool.

See Gold Ennie-winning game Fabula Ultima. Seriously, you should check it out if you have not done so already.

Things I really don't like:

Class removal. I may not particularly like Monks or Clerics, but they also nix Warlocks and don't bother with Artificers or Psions at all. Meanwhile they make Sorcerers and Wizards separate things and still have Bards and Druids. Just a weird way to axe a bunch of concepts for no apparent reason and include the same concept twice for similar opacity.

I do think that the choice of archetypes feels like a weird mix of things. Like I don't get how Sorcerers are Midnight/Arcana, when that seems like something that would potentially be Arcane Tricksters or Warlocks. But why do there need to be D&D-style Sorcerers at all? So some of the choices feel a bit arbitrary. And Seraph just feels like an odd duck out as a class name when compared to the other classes.

I think that you're right. It's transparently D&D-inspired, and I suspect that the class choices are going to annoy people when they see that some of their favorite classes are somehow excluded in this schema: e.g., monks, artificers, warlocks, barbarian, etc.

Character Heritage/Culture. The Cultures all being "XBorne" is kinda lame. And the heritages are 7 flavors of "Furry", the traditional core races, and then Faeries, Tieflings, Warforged, and Goliaths. Okay also Goblin which is nice but holy crap do we really need cat, frog, turtle, monkey, goat, cow, and lizard people? I guess it's 'cool' to have 18 heritages to start with... It just really feels like it's going to lean heavy into furry games.

I agree that this seems a bit much. I would almost prefer to see some of this in a later supplement, but with the core book focusing on a smaller core batch of heritages/cultures. I have already seen some people seething that despite having so many furry heritages, there are no canine ones.

No Turn Order. I've known players who, in a system like this, would ABSOLUTELY dominate the heck out of combat. Inconsiderate and selfish players are everywhere, and this really slants things hard toward them. Of course, it's up to the narrator to reign players in and make sure other characters get a turn.

In my experience playing other games a lack of initative or a turn order with potentially such people, this is not a big deal as you make it here.

 

[TwoSix]

See Gold Ennie-winning game Fabula Ultima. Seriously, you should check it out if you have not done so already.

Seconded!

I do think that the choice of archetypes feels like a weird mix of things. Like I don't get how Sorcerers are Midnight/Arcana, when that seems like something that would potentially be Arcane Tricksters or Warlocks. But why do there need to be D&D-style Sorcerers at all? So some of the choices feel a bit arbitrary. And Seraph just feels like an odd duck out as a class name when compared to the other classes.

I think knowing when to lean into familiar tropes and when to put your spin on a concept is a tricky path for any class-based fantasy game. Like, when I see the DH Wizard getting healing powers, I think, "Oh, that's a cool twist that makes this game different." But there will absolutely be lots of people who say "Wizards with healing powers? They could have just had Arcana, that's not right at all."

I think that you're right. It's transparently D&D-inspired, and I suspect that the class choices are going to annoy people when they see that some of their favorite classes are somehow excluded in this schema: e.g., monks, artificers, warlocks, barbarian, etc.

I do wonder how many classes we'll see in the final product. As @Steampunkette mentioned, classes are really lightweight. Only needing 1 or 2 unique features plus a small narrative hook, combined with the obvious grid-filling of the "pick 2 domains out of X" setup, makes me think this game is designed for pretty rapid crunch expansion.

I agree that this seems a bit much. I would almost prefer to see some of this in a later supplement, but with the core book focusing on a smaller core batch of heritages/cultures. I have already seen some people seething that despite having so many furry heritages, there are no canine ones.

The lightweight design, plus the high fantasy vibe, makes me think that the default tendency will just be to add even more heritages. I mean, 5e is filled to the brim with anthro races, and any "this game is for furries" vibes is relatively muted (in my experience).

I do wish they'd use some less "cutesey" names, though. I normally gloss over those kind of issues, but heritages like "Clank" and "Ribbet" are bad enough to make me wince.

In my experience playing other games a lack of initative or a turn order with potentially such people, this is not a big deal as you make it here.

I'm intrigued by the idea, but definitely have to try it out and see. At the minimum, I'd probably give a lot of monsters special abilities that consume multiple moves to avoid the "last guy goes 6 times in a row" vibe.

 

[Steampunkette]

I think @TwoSix has the right of it on class expansion... but more than that, I think the "Lets create a series of small decks" drive is the core of what classes exist or got excluded.

Rather than try to cover all the core D&D classes, they made a "Mix n' Match" class generator of action cards and made classes out of what they came up with.

We'll probably eventually see other classes when they add new decks you have to buy that add more cards to the system you can mix and match with the standard 9. Like they'll add an "Ennui" deck and 2 new Emo classes: Blood Hunter and Warlock who use Bone/Ennui and Arcana/Ennui.

Just as an example.

 

[TwoSix]

I think @TwoSix has the right of it on class expansion... but more than that, I think the "Lets create a series of small decks" drive is the core of what classes exist or got excluded.

Rather than try to cover all the core D&D classes, they made a "Mix n' Match" class generator of action cards and made classes out of what they came up with.

We'll probably eventually see other classes when they add new decks you have to buy that add more cards to the system you can mix and match with the standard 9. Like they'll add an "Ennui" deck and 2 new Emo classes: Blood Hunter and Warlock who use Bone/Ennui and Arcana/Ennui.

Just as an example.

Yea, I can definitely see them doing that. The one fly in the ointment, at least right now, is that the original offering is actually too symmetrical. They have 9 power sets, with 9 classes, each power set used exactly twice, in a closed ring.

As soon as you add power set 10, that initial symmetry becomes lost, and can't be regained without modifying at least one other class.

What they really need to for the initial core is to make the class design a bit messier. Right now, it's too clean, which makes expansion carry more of a psychological toll than it needs to. (The years of "Where's the martial controller!?" threads during the 4e era has made me very aware of how much broken symmetry and open spaces on an obvious grid bother people.)

 

[Steampunkette]

Yea, I can definitely see them doing that. The one fly in the ointment, at least right now, is that the original offering is actually too symmetrical. They have 9 power sets, with 9 classes, each power set used exactly twice, in a closed ring.

As soon as you add power set 10, that initial symmetry becomes lost, and can't be regained without modifying at least one other class.

What they really need to for the initial core is to make the class design a bit messier. Right now, it's too clean, which makes expansion carry more of a psychological toll than it needs to. (The years of "Where's the martial controller!?" threads during the 4e era has made me very aware of how much broken symmetry and open spaces on an obvious grid bother people.)

Nine more decks, nine more classes. Only way to really do it.

 

[TwoSix]

Nine more decks, nine more classes. Only way to really do it.

Well, even with just 9 decks, you should be able to make 36 classes. (I think you could do 4 closed rings of 9, but I'd have to check.) That would probably be too samey, though.

Making new decks swappable (like a new martial deck that can be used in place of Blade, for example), could be a way to add new powers without necessarily disrupting a symmetrical core.

 

[Steampunkette]

Well, even with just 9 decks, you should be able to make 36 classes. (I think you could do 4 closed rings of 9, but I'd have to check.) That would probably be too samey, though.

Making new decks swappable (like a new martial deck that can be used in place of Blade, for example), could be a way to add new powers without necessarily disrupting a symmetrical core.

It's an interesting conundrum.

Personally I'd like new classes as much as new spells/abilities because there's just so little to each class/subclass.

Though in light of -that-... how would you make a Warlock different from a Wizard or Sorcerer? In 5e/A5e/Etc you've got different spell-preparation mechanics, invocations, eldritch blasts... in this system the customization options are -vastly- fewer in number.

"Warlock" as a concept might be most easily implemented as a wizard or sorcerer subclass which is just... bleh. I truly hate that.

 

[TwoSix]

"Warlock" as a concept might be most easily implemented as a wizard or sorcerer subclass which is just... bleh. I truly hate that.

I mean, Warlock is definitely a wildly different narrative than the ones presented for Sorcerer or Wizard, and honestly doesn't fit the class features as presented. Warlock in 5e is generally presented as having variable abilities based on patron, which doesn't quite fit the DH vibe. Although I could see Fiend Patron and Fey Patron as the 2 Foundation subclasses.

I could see a Witch type class as being Sage/Midnight. Since Warlock is about forbidden knowledge, maybe Codex/Midnight?

 

[Aldarc]

I mean, Warlock is definitely a wildly different narrative than the ones presented for Sorcerer or Wizard, and honestly doesn't fit the class features as presented. Warlock in 5e is generally presented as having variable abilities based on patron, which doesn't quite fit the DH vibe. Although I could see Fiend Patron and Fey Patron as the 2 Foundation subclasses.

I could see a Witch type class as being Sage/Midnight. Since Warlock is about forbidden knowledge, maybe Codex/Midnight?

Jein. I kinda feel that no one really cared where your magic as a mage came from until D&D 3e said that it matters for the sorcerer and wizard but the sorcerer was just a side-project for non-Vancian casting. I think that there are far more interesting archetypes that amount to more than "book vs. birth."