Daggerheart

That’s right ladies, gentlemen and others, there’s two uploads today. I didn’t want to wait too long before talking about Frieren (check that out here) and I also already planned to talk a bit about Critical Role’s new TTRPG: Daggerheart.
Daggerheart has been developed by Critical Role and is currently in open beta. It utilizes a system with two twelve sided dice which represent hope and fear. It has a heap of class and ability cards that you can combine and mix into your own personal class. As someone who has played Dungeons and Dragons for over a decade now, I can safely admit that I don’t like change. I know one system and I tend to stick to that system. I like what D&D 5E has to offer and I’ve gotten very comfortable within the system. So what do I think about Daggerheart? Does it have any chance to succeed in this space and will it be any good? Let’s have a look. 

So what exactly is Daggerheart? It’s a system that is at its core very similar to Dungeons & Dragons. At least at a first glance. It uses dice just like D&D, has classes and races and leans towards a fantasy setting. It has a DM and several players just like most TTRPGs. It has ‘spell’ cards and deaths and loot and damage dice, a lot of it is very similar to the classic games we’re used to. That makes sense though, if things work well, why change them. Well, not everything about D&D works equally well, so Daggerheart seems to do quite a few things differently as well.

For starters, it seems to put a lot more focus on roleplaying and having less defined abilities. Coming from a background of (voice) acting this is a logical direction for Critical Role to go towards. D&D has no issues providing a playing field for roleplay, but with more loose rules and the introduction of hope, stress and fear it makes for a much more dynamic story. You can gain hope and stress through actions and use those as resources. The DM on the other hand can use fear as a resource. You gain hope if you roll your hope die (D12) higher than your fear die (D12) when doing anything in the game. This creates five outcomes. You can get a success with hope, which is very good, a success with fear which is still good but gives the DM some more tools. You can get a failure with hope, which gives you some hope, but you fail at what you wanted to do and if you get a failure with fear things go really bad. If you roll the same number on both dice you get a critical success. Honestly, I think that’s better than a D20 system, but I’ll have to play with it to really see it.

The system for defending is also cool. Your evasion is basically your AC, if an enemy rolls below that, you don’t get hit. If they do hit, they deal a certain amount of damage. Each character has damage thresholds which decide if the damage done turns into 1, 2 or 3 hit points lost. If you roll below the lowest threshold, a character just takes a level of stress and if you feel like you’re taking too much damage you can lower the damage roll by your armor, causing it to go down 1 or 2 thresholds, making for a much more dynamic system that makes instakills less likely and gives you more power over what sort of player you want to be and how you want to manage incoming damage. It’s quite cool, having seen it in action.

As for the art of the cards, races and abilities, it all looks solid. I especially love some of the weirder races they introduced here. I’m currently starting a new campaign in which I’m playing a three foot mouse that’s a witch so it’s safe to say I like the more out there choices. My last character was an elephant fighter (Loxodon). But now we have the question of will it succeed? I think so, and let me explain why.

Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Wizards of the Coast. They are in turn owned by a little known company called Hasbro. And with everything that is owned by several layers of companies that want to make a profit (rest in peace Roosterteeth) this turns the property away from care and love for the product and more towards profit margins. Both well known Wizards’ properties have fallen prey to this, both Magic the Gathering and D&D. With Hasbro trying to trademark a bunch of stuff that really shouldn’t be trademarked they’ve caused anger and mistrust among their customers. Not to mention that it seems the recent release of Baldur’s Gate 3 is the last one in the series, possibly due to similar mistrust of the large companies that hold the rights to the IP. So what better time would there be to release an alternative system to the public that – if Critical Role has any decent foresight – will release most of its content for free online, getting people hooked into the system. Once you’re in the system, it shouldn’t be a big step to start buying special dice, tokens and everything else. I know that if I get hooked on the system I’ll soon find myself buying their products and I doubt I’m the only one.

Of course that’s all dependent on if the system is any fun to actually play in. I hope they succeed, more fun games means more things to do and innovation is often good. Let’s just hope they don’t eventually get as greedy as Hasbro is. But how about you, have you tried the system already, or at least read through some of the rules. It’s probably not been out long enough yet to give it a proper go, but perhaps you have thoughts. If you do, please let me know in the comments down below and like always; thanks for reading!