Daggerheart Sold Out in Two Weeks, Has Three-Year Plan in Place

A recent interview with Business Insider revealed just how well Daggerheart did for Critical Role's Darrington Press when it first launched earlier this year. Ed Lopez, Critical Role's chief operating officer, revealed that Daggerheart sold out in two weeks. According to Lopez, Critical Role anticipated that their stock would last a year, but the game was forced to go into reprints in a hurry. "The amount of units that we ordered we thought was going to last us a year, and it lasted us literally two weeks," Lopez said. "It's a great problem, it's a Champagne problem, but it's now changing our view in terms of what this product can be."

Lopez also revealed that Darrington Press has a three-year plan in place for Daggerheart, which includes the already announced Hope & Fear expansion, which adds a new domain and several new classes and backgrounds to the game.

Lopez also spoke about the hires of Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins, stating that the two would be working on both Daggerheart and D&D material for Darrington Press. "We really want their creative juices brought to the world of 'Daggerheart.' That being said, we're also doing a bunch of 'D&D' stuff, and who better to bring in than the guys who used to do it?" Lopez said.

 

[TheHand]

I’m not sure if this is meets the definition of tactical, but I’ve found my players are more engaged in DH combats, partly because of the (lack of) initiative, but also because they are trying to come up with interesting synergies between their various powers and abilities (and the occasional tag team effort). The fact that the GM can interrupt their plans with Fear tokens also keeps everybody on their toes.

We play with miniatures and gridded maps.

 

[Aldarc]

I personally don't think 5E is a particularly good tactical game. it lacks a lot of reasons to reposition, and if position doesn't matter, you have failed at tactics. I actually think DH does better by being a little bit vague but only specifically for the comparison to 5E. There are tons of games that do tactical play better, from SWADE (relatively simple) to PF2E (relatively complex).

I largely agree that there are plenty of games that do tactical play better than 5e. IMHO, and people are welcome to disagree, 5e has more superficial or surface area tactics (e.g., grid, minis, spell effects, etc.) but not necessarily tactical depth, especially when a common criticism of 5e monsters is that they are mostly sacks of HP.

However, I do think that there are other ways to have tactical games without necessarily having positioning matter. Fabula Ultima, for example, emulates JRPGs. There is no positioning, movement, or anything of the sort. It's sort of the classic JRPG setup of foes lined-up on one side of the screen and PCs lined-up on the other. Unless foes are flying, it's assumed anyone can reach everyone. It's played Theater of the Mind. But players need to employ turn-by-turn and round-by-round tactical play to study enemy weaknesses, buffs and debuffs, status effects, elemental affinities and vulnerabilities, and coordinate action synergies between PCs.

But at the same time, Fabula Ultima is definitely not as tactically focused as games like 4e D&D, Lancer, Beacon, or Draw Steel, where positioning matters.

 

[djotaku]

Daggerheart does have class specific character sheets, but also a generic one as well. TBH, because a lot of design is in the subclass and domain cards, the class write-ups are tiny compared to DnD. Most of the classes in the Daggerheart Core book are a single 2 page spread, and that's everything for the class and both subclasses. So yes, it's helpful to have class-specific character sheets, it's also just Daggerheart's design is just a lot lighter on class mechanics.

If you take away all the Domain cards and Subclass cards ... this is all you need to define a Daggerheart class mechanically:

• Starting HP and Evasion
• A Hope Feature: All classes have a "Spend 3 Hope to do something awesome" feature.
• One or Two Class Features. And these have to be brief, the space for them on the character sheet is not big.

Then for flavor:

• 3 Background Questions
• 3 Connection Questions
• Starting equipment and character description prompts.

Your class writeup part of the comment definitely reminded me of something I struggle with in 5e - how much to put on the char sheet from the class actions. I've gone back and forth on different ideas for my players. On the one hand, if I just put the name of the feat - most of the time they aren't familiar enough to just know from the name. Sometimes I've written the basics of what it does and if we had to get into the nitty-gritty we'd have to pull out the rulebook. Other times I've created the equivalent of spell cards. (In fact, there's a KS campaign that was supposed to happen last year to create "placemats" with all the main D&D class feats spelled out - I wanted it, but the KS never happened) This is one thing where Daggerheart does a great job. I also like Nimble for this - the designer is all about just the most important information; where a D&D or Pathfinder stat block has paragraph(s) on how an action works, he has 1-2 lines.

 

[djotaku]

I largely agree that there are plenty of games that do tactical play better than 5e. IMHO, and people are welcome to disagree, 5e has more superficial or surface area tactics (e.g., grid, minis, spell effects, etc.) but not necessarily tactical depth, especially when a common criticism of 5e monsters is that they are mostly sacks of HP.

However, I do think that there are other ways to have tactical games without necessarily having positioning matter. Fabula Ultima, for example, emulates JRPGs. There is no positioning, movement, or anything of the sort. It's sort of the classic JRPG setup of foes lined-up on one side of the screen and PCs lined-up on the other. Unless foes are flying, it's assumed anyone can reach everyone. It's played Theater of the Mind. But players need to employ turn-by-turn and round-by-round tactical play to study enemy weaknesses, buffs and debuffs, status effects, elemental affinities and vulnerabilities, and coordinate action synergies between PCs.

But at the same time, Fabula Ultima is definitely not as tactically focused as games like 4e D&D, Lancer, Beacon, or Draw Steel, where positioning matters.

I feel half/half about this. On the one hand, if your players are into it, it's pretty cool to have positioning, terrain, etc matter. (I don't know if I would go all the way to 4e/Draw Steel) My table isn't super into it, but they have taken advantage here and there to create some very memorable moments at the table. On the other hand, we usually wave away most things like whether a spell is a cone or a line or whatever. There are a few - like Thunderwave - that I think are meant to have you measure to keep them from being OP, so for those, I do make the players have to be away from the enemies or risk damage. But just like attack of opportunity, it can be a risk/reward calculation that leads to fun at the table and great moments.

 

[zakael19]

But just like attack of opportunity, it can be a risk/reward calculation that leads to fun at the table and great moments.

Speaking of that, there’s still some fun ways to do area control / AoO in Daggerheart. The Guard profile is a good example of one, but you could easily add a similar reaction or motive/tactic (“control the space, keep them close, etc”) to any adversary you want to demonstrate the fiction of zone control / defense. Pivoting the risk to the PC via an agility reaction roll is cool - a quick and agile character is better at getting away from people without needing a Disengage type bonus, a big heavily armored character is probably worse but can just take it.

 

[dbolack]

If you must have supremacy that you are 100% correct, and cannot so much as nod to the possibility that the language wasn't uniform, I'm not gonna fight that hard - please do your victory dance and we can move on.

Just to dovetail this, I cannot recall AP being used in the hobby online as someone who came into the online space via FidoNet and other FTS-001 based networks and USENET starting in roughly 1990. There were other networks, and I wasn't in the APA scene much..

 

[Incenjucar]

I went ahead and picked up a copy at my FLGS just so I can see what the hype is about. Doubt I'll actually play it, but I may just learn something from it.

 

[djotaku]

I went ahead and picked up a copy at my FLGS just so I can see what the hype is about. Doubt I'll actually play it, but I may just learn something from it.

I'm somewhat in the same boat. I think it requires too much improv compared to what my table is prepared to do. But it has beautiful art. The hope/fear are neat meta-currency if done right. Reminds me of success/complications in Cosmere (and they both released close enough in time that it seems to be co-evolution). It's less similar, but somewhat like Luck/Doom in Tales of the Valiant in the sense that hope/success/luck give the player some kind of currency they can redeem for a future bonus and fear/complications/doom give the GM a currency they can use to rock the players a bit harder. I've heard anecdotally that for some tables it can be very fun for the GM to have a visible representation of their Fear points to build up the tension if they keep earning them, but aren't using them. You know there's a big whallop coming!

Another thing it shares with Cosmere is lack of an initiative order. I've heard this works well in person. Playing Cosmere virtually, it means turns take longer than they do in 5e.

To give a positive about Daggerheart (based on what I've heard, not yet GM'd), supposedly balancing for different party sizes is automatic and infinitely easier than 5e. Because of the way turn order works, the action economy between the heroes and the enemies works itself out. I don't know how much you know this - I learned it a few years into GMing - but action economy is way more important than number of foes. This is why the big baddies have multi-attack, layer actions, and legendary actions. They're making more attacks per turn than the little baddies. So one less elegant way to adjust for group size in 5e is to have the baddie not use their multi-attacks or skip a legendary action every few turns or whatever. (This is also why the fighter eventually can do 3-5 (or more) actions per turn when they're high level)

 

[Parmandur]

The hope/fear are neat meta-currency if done right. Reminds me of success/complications in Cosmere (and they both released close enough in time that it seems to be co-evolution)

Yeah, on the same wavelength but not similar enough that they are influencing each other directly. Inspired by similar antecedents, however: the main deisngers for Cosmere are FFG verbs who were leaders on the Genesys, Star Wars, and Warhammer system that had a similar multi-dimensional success/fail with good/bad metacurrency rider.

 

[djotaku]

Yeah, on the same wavelength but not similar enough that they are influencing each other directly. Inspired by similar antecedents, however: the main deisngers for Cosmere are FFG verbs who were leaders on the Genesys, Star Wars, and Warhammer system that had a similar multi-dimensional success/fail with good/bad metacjrrency rider.

Did any of those also have 3 action economy or did that come from mixing in a bit of PF2e?