Daggerheart tries to simultaneously offer a robust set of combat tools driven by high fantasy while also encouraging a collaborative storytelling environment between the player and game master. Although it's too chunky of a game system to really appeal to narrative game enthusiasts, it does offer a unique enough system to stand out more than as just another game trying to out-D&D Dungeons & Dragons. The real question is whether the Critical Role effect will be enough to propel Daggerheart into a rarified space amongst D&D or if it will get lost in the shuffle similar to Darrington Press’s previous RPG Candela Obscura.
Daggerheart is a high-fantasy RPG influenced by the likes of D&D 4th Edition, FFG’s Genesys System, Blades in the Dark, and the Cypher System. It wears most of these influences proudly on its sleeves, calling out the various RPGs that influenced its mechanics in its opening pages. For veteran RPG players, a readthrough of Daggerheart will feel a bit like that one Leonardo DeCaprio meme, as many of the secondary systems in particular feel a bit like elements grafted from other game systems.
While this might sound like a criticism, it’s really not. Many DM have used pieces of various game systems to enhance their own games for decades. So, seeing a worldbuilding system influenced by The Quiet Year or DM interruptions guided by the Cypher System isn’t as much derivative as simply doing something that many of us have already been doing at our own tables. What I can say is that Spenser Starke, lead developer of Daggerheart, clearly has good taste in RPGs, as he’s distilled a lot of great parts of other RPGs and mixed them together for a game that will still feel fresh to a lot of the game’s intended audience.
At the heart of the Daggerheart system is the duality dice, a pair of differently-colored D12s. When making checks, players roll both D12s and add any relevant modifiers (which can be represented as tokens that are tossed alongside the dice). The two dice results are added together to determine success or failure, with additional narrative effects determined by which of the two dice (which are known as the Hope Die and the Fear Die) has the higher result. A roll with Hope results in a narrative benefit of some kind, even when the result is a failure. A roll with Fear results in a narrative setback of some kind, even if the roll is successful.
Hope and Fear also act as one of several kinds of resources players are expected to manage throughout the game. The Hope resource fuels several player abilities, including a new Hope Feature for each class that wasn’t present during playtesting. Players are also expected to track Stress, HP, Armor (which is both a type of equipment and a type of resource), gold, and equipment. Some classes also have additional meta-currency, which requires further tracking. The GM meanwhile uses Fear, which can only be generated by the players through their rolls, as a way to take extra moves or activate certain features. The result is a lot of resource management over the course of a game, in addition to whatever kind of storytelling tracking or mystery solving a GM may want to throw at their party.
Character creation, coincidentally, is a lot more in line with the newest version of D&D 5th Edition, with background, ancestry, class, subclass, and domain all coming together to create a character. All of the aforementioned character options have at least one feature that feeds into the character sheet. Daggerheart solves this immense modularity through the use of cards, which come with the game’s core rulebook in a nifty box and list various kinds of features.
The cards eventually play into the game design itself, with players having a limited hand of domain abilities that they can swap out as they reach higher levels. The cards aren’t technically necessary, as all the information from the cards can also be found in the core rulebook. However, the cards are a lot more handy than writing down all that information, and frankly, the way domains work mean that the cards are more of a necessity than a bonus.
What will be interesting is how Daggerheart handles the eventual expansion of the game. Will new domain abilities or ancestries also get their own cards? And will they be included with the purchase of a physical book or left as a separate purchase? Given that the cards are one of the more unique aspects to Daggerheart, it will be interesting to see how Critical Role tackles this part of their game.
When playtesting the game last year, my players’ favorite part of the game was the way Daggerheart encouraged players to take an active part in worldbuilding. This starts from Session Zero when players are encouraged to name landmarks on a map (several pre-generated maps and location name suggestions are included in the book and are available to download) and continues through various story and idea prompts embedded into the adventures themselves. The game encourages the players to improvise upon the world, answering their own questions about what an NPC may look like or how the residents of a certain town behave. This in turn is supposed to feed story ideas to the GM to riff off of, building out a more off-the-cuff story that is built more off of vibes than meticulous planning.
At its heart, Daggerheart plays on two diametrically different game concepts. Its combat engine is a resource management system where players are encouraged to build broken character builds to live out overpowered fantasy fulfillment. However, the narrative system is built around a more freeform collaboration between players and GM, where the story grows without much impediment from rules. Much like its core dice mechanic, the duality of Daggerheart works well together, although I think this game will ultimately appeal to D&D players rather than those who enjoy lighter RPG fare.
