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.

 

[SteveC]

Mechanically, it's better to choose to die though, since going out in a blaze of glory is likely to turn a TPK into a victory. And you can always get a new character.

This is another potential issue. In theory, you can choose not to die. In practice, it's self-serving and can hurt the other players.

I've seen several people say this. I've seen similar things about getting Trauma in Blades in the Dark. It's "better" to choose to die only if you don't have a connection to your character and the arc they're on. I think the attitude that "I'll just make a new character" is wildly different from the intentions of the game. You definitely can do this, but then don't wonder why your characters aren't the focus of what's happening in the game and why you feel like you're going along in someone else's story.

In one of the D&D games I'm playing, we are on Roll20 and the DM has a launch page with the tokens for all the characters who've died in the game. One player has about a dozen or so of them. Honestly, I have trouble keeping track of who they are playing. This is the player that we give want lists to for magic items when they create a new character, since we expect to take those items off of their corpse. We have fun in this game, but it's jarring to see all the characters we've lost and how they come largely from one player.

I can't imagine doing this with Daggerheart where the characters are the focus and reason for even being there.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I've seen several people say this. I've seen similar things about getting Trauma in Blades in the Dark. It's "better" to choose to die only if you don't have a connection to your character and the arc they're on. I think the attitude that "I'll just make a new character" is wildly different from the intentions of the game. You definitely can do this, but then don't wonder why your characters aren't the focus of what's happening in the game and why you feel like you're going along in someone else's story.

In one of the D&D games I'm playing, we are on Roll20 and the DM has a launch page with the tokens for all the characters who've died in the game. One player has about a dozen or so of them. Honestly, I have trouble keeping track of who they are playing. This is the player that we give want lists to for magic items when they create a new character, since we expect to take those items off of their corpse. We have fun in this game, but it's jarring to see all the characters we've lost and how they come largely from one player.

I can't imagine doing this with Daggerheart where the characters are the focus and reason for even being there.

This game is kind of designed for thespians. There is only one thing thespians love more than playing a character with physical and emotional traumas, and that is playing a heroic death scene!

But for the mere mortals, questions about wining and losing, and not screwing things up for other players, lest we make ourselves unpopular, enter into the equation.

 

[Fifth Element]

I can't imagine doing this with Daggerheart where the characters are the focus and reason for even being there.

Isn't this rather the point? If the game has a certain intent it shouldn't have mechanics that incentivize not-that-intent?

 

[FrogReaver]

Isn't this rather the point? If the game has a certain intent it shouldn't have mechanics that incentivize not-that-intent?

Not necessarily.

 

[Shardstone]

This game is kind of designed for thespians. There is only one thing thespians love more than playing a character with physical and emotional traumas, and that is playing a heroic death scene!

But for the mere mortals, questions about wining and losing, and not screwing things up for other players, lest we make ourselves unpopular, enter into the equation.

This second paragraph is nonsense. The game 100% brings up and answers questions on winning and losing, not screwing things up, etc. I'm not really sure what your post is even trying to say. Did we read the same PDF?

 

[FrogReaver]

This game is kind of designed for thespians. There is only one thing thespians love more than playing a character with physical and emotional traumas, and that is playing a heroic death scene!

But for the mere mortals, questions about wining and losing, and not screwing things up for other players, lest we make ourselves unpopular, enter into the equation.

I don’t know if this is true in daggerheart but in many more narrative games failing rolls out of combat can be just as if not more detrimental than failing them in combat.

The ‘how would this mechanic work in a d&d game with a d&d mindset’ is probably not a great lens to evaluate such games from.

 

[Stalker0]

Well, the designers themselves call it a narrative game. What do you all think they meant?

Its actually a great question. From a "mindset" and "presentation" standpoint, the system encourages collaboration and creativity, often having the DM empower the players by explaining what happens to their characters when things happen.

Mechanically there really isn't much that pushes any kind of narrative framework. The closest you could argue is the fear system, which authorizes the DM to make crazy abrupt changes and puts in a cost for them. But as others have argued before, DMs have long had the power to do what they wish in games, there is nothing new or "narrative" about that. You could also say the death system is somewhat narrative, as it gives the players a list of options of how their character goes out. While the system repeatedly mentions letting the players help shape the story, there aren't really any mechanics that push that, mostly its a mindset.

When I think about games I would call "mechanically" narrative, it would be things like the buffy system where you have metacurrency that players can spend to actually change the scene and "write the story their way".

All of that said, I don't want to discount the power of presentation and mindset, its very important. I argue to this day that 4e's biggest problem was not its mechanics but its clinical, sterile presentation. But yeah if we are talking pure design, I myself wouldn't call DH any more narrative than 5e really.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don’t know if this is true in daggerheart but in many more narrative games failing rolls out of combat can be just as if not more detrimental than failing them in combat.

The ‘how would this mechanic work in a d&d game with a d&d mindset’ is probably not a great lens to evaluate such games from.

Except it's likely that most of the potential customers for this game are coming from a 5e mindset, and may very well be using such a lens.

 

[Fifth Element]

Not necessarily.

So what you're saying is that it's worth considering, because it can be a bad idea to have such mechanics? Thus the discussion that is being had here?

 

[FrogReaver]

Except it's likely that most of the potential customers for this game are coming from a 5e mindset, and may very well be using such a lens.

Not exactly. They’ll get to watch critical roll play it ‘right’ regardless of whether they came from 5e or not.