Daggerheart Releases Bloodhunter Class for Playtesting

The Bloodhunter, a custom class long associated with Critical Role, is being playtested for Daggerheart. Darrington Press released playtest material for the Bloodhunter class on Daggerheart's website yesterday. The class can voluntarily take extra damage to deal extra weapon damage. While other playtested classes come with two subclass options - the Bloodhunter comes with three subclasses - the Order of the Ghost Slayer, which becomes more powerful the closer they are to death, the Order of the Mutant which can consume various mutagens for beneficial effects, and the Order of the Lycan, which gains an enhanced werewolf form.

The Bloodhunter originated as a custom class built for Vin Diesel in the Geek & Sundry one-shot D&Diesel. Created by Matt Mercer, he improved upon the class after the one-shot and changed the name to Blood Hunter after building mechanics around blood magic. It was released as a DMs Guild supplement and was used by Taliesin Jaffe for Mollymauk in Campaign Two and later by Chetney Pock'O'Pea for Campaign 3. The 5E version of the class is available on D&D Beyond.

 

[Juomari Veren]

I was never a fan of the 5e Bloodhunter. The various maledictions and crimson rites and blood curses ... it was a lot of "words for blood" soup and just seemed like a frustrating class to play.

I think the advantage of Daggerheart design is the various pieces are really cut down. A Class (aside from starting stuff and domains) is literally just 2 to 3 features ... a couple of Class abilities and a Hope feature. More complexity lies in subclasses, but they're optional and modular.

So I like this interpretation of the class better. It's not my kind of class, don't see myself playing one, but this looks interesting.

I'm also finding the Blood domain a bit more varied than I thought, more useful than I worried.

When it first came out I remember it being extremely underwhelming. I don't know how much they've iterated on it since but the fact that it didn't seem like it did much as a baseline whole being built around a mechanic that can be hard to balance without just making it bad was a big turn-off.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Yeah, the whole idea of using your own HP as a resource is a really tricky mechanic.
I've never seen it actually work well, yet so many people seem to think they're the ones who can finally make it work...

It works great in the Dragon Age CRPG, where the horror of blood magic is a core part of its mechanics and presentation. It's tempting to use as a player, but you also get why it's a criminal act in the setting.

 

[zedturtle]

The YouTube video that they dropped has some very pertinent commentary from Crawford about how the Blood Hunter actually works better in Daggerheart, because they have multiple currencies (e.g. Stress, not just HP) to manipulate. Interesting stuff.