Daggerheart does Dungeons & Dragons better than Dungeons & Dragons

Earlier this year Darrington Press — Critical Role’s tabletop publisher — released Daggerheart, a high fantasy heartbreaker partially designed to be the actual play giant’s answer to Dungeons & Dragons. The complete game included a core rulebook and a set of cards in a cardholder to facilitate character creation and loadout, complete with a dust sleeve. The game quickly found its audience, almost immediately selling out online and in local game stores. The demand for the game was so great that Darrington Press began to sell an “unpackaged” version, which included the core rulebook and the cards, but not the card holder or sleeve. 

While Darrington Press doesn’t boast the Xerox-level name brand that Wizards of the Coast enjoys (D&D is still the five thousand-pound dragon in any room), for a game that did nothing to hide its inspirations or its aspirations, the public reception was marked as a massive success by the company. And, having read through the game book and played a few sessions, I have to admit that much of its praise is well earned. 

In 2019, Aaron Marks of Cannibal Halfling Games commented that “D&D is a genre, not a single game.” The idea of what Dungeons & Dragons is — a game, a lifestyle, an experience —  changes from year to year as media such as Critical Role, Stranger Things, and even Baldur’s Gate 3 influence the public’s perception of what it means to play a game of D&D. The rules of D&D 5E aren’t the game. The game is, fundamentally, what you play at the table. Earlier this year, a game designer on Bluesky concisely summarized this when he said “If [Powered by the Apocalypse] is genre emulation, Daggerheart is emulating the genre of D&D.” I don’t believe that Daggerheart is going to supplant D&D, but I do believe that it is, fundamentally, a better game.

I was curious about Daggerheart from the beginning. Spenser Starke, the lead designer on the project, had described this as his own “fantasy heartbreaker” — a term coined in 2002 by Ron Edwards to describe the swaths of D&D retroclones that attempted to supplant the venerable product. (The term has historically been used pejoratively, but it has come back into vogue as a game descriptor within the past few years.) Daggerheart was never positioned as oppositional to D&D, but it was, almost from the start of its rollout, framed as an alternative. And I hate to admit it, but I am a basic fantasy heartbreaker enjoyer. I love a storygame, but sometimes I have the urge to portray a demigod-incarnate wizard in a tower, guarding the races of men against the evils lurking within the shadow-lands of a legally-distinct Mount Doom. To this end, Daggerheart seems to be a game that is built with my exact taste in mind.

Daggerheart undermines many of the wargame foundations that are principal to D&D’s engine. In an essay titled Combat in Dungeons & Dragons  (Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons, MIT Press), Evan Torner writes that “wargame culture from the early 1970s has more or less dictated the standard terms for all physical conflict in D&D-style TTRPGs for the past fifty years,” even up to fifth edition today. Despite D&D’s reliance on combat to provide the bulk of it’s ruleset, it’s proponents — and even its designers — seem to acknowledge that most combat is a by-product of the actual game being played at the table, rather than a result of proportion of combat rules compared to any other game structures in D&D. Torner says that this division between “rules intention and actual player usage” might be a result of marketing towards what the playerbase of D&D actually wants to do, rather than what it is built to do: “D&D sells better as vehicle for exploration and storytelling than as a repackaged wargame and dice roll-off.”

Every choice made in a roleplaying game is a narrative choice.

Unlike D&D, which I have typically thought of as treating narrative as a side effect of the mechanics it offers, Daggerheart fundamentally treats storybuilding and rules as entangled, cohesive elements. Daggerheart attempts to supplant D&D’s cultural foundations largely by taking inspiration from games that place high priority on narrative positioning, not just tactical positioning within a theater of combat, in order to embody an “exploration and storytelling” game. (Besides the lead designer, the book credits a huge number of influential game designers who have designed games around these agendas — folks such as John Harper, Meguey Baker, Banana Chan, Rue Dickey, Felix Isaacs, Mike Underwood, Sebastian Yūe, Elise Rezendes, James Mendez Hodes, and Pam Punzalan, among others — who are credited as writers, designers, and/or consultants.)  To misquote Jay Dragon, D&D is built on a system of mechanics. A game like Daggerheart instead attempts to use those mechanics to develop an underlying “system of relation” where actions are made from a generative character relation to the world at large. It does not totally remove its wargame influences, but it infuses them with narrative structures that support the tactics of the combat-focused wargame. The core rulebook slides this narrative positioning within all of its segments on character building and campaign framing, providing rules to prompt all players to interact with the story itself, deepening the relational emotional connection that they have to the game. 

To be clear, I don’t think that Daggerheart will convince players who prefer highly tactical combat to play a longterm campaign, nor is it a ruleset that will encourage hardcore storygamers to turn away from more freeform or experimental games, but it is the kind of game that will be easy to hold up against D&D as an option for a better-designed, character-focused, roleplay-supportive tabletop game that still has the structural underpinnings for tactical, strategic combat encounters. It is very clearly splitting the difference and does so as well as — if not better than — any other fantasy heartbreaker that I’ve seen come across my desk. 

Many of the failures of the game to move beyond D&D (as elucidated by Chase earlier in the year after a one shot at UKGE) are, in my opinion, slightly moot. Daggerheart is not trying to move too far beyond D&D — it is not interested in designing for the next generation of gamers, but instead those suffuse in the current ecosystem. Daggerheart wears its inspirations on its sleeve, laying out touchstones in the introduction (page 6) and giving specific credit to specific games for the various design structures taken from each. The biggest difference between Daggerheart and D&D is that Daggerheart, throughout the entire book, attempts to demonstrate a different core vision of how to build a roleplaying game. Daggerheart says that the fiction is first, that the mechanics should serve and support the story, and that the players are there to leverage the game rules themselves, not just to be told how by the Dungeon Master.

In Jon Peterson’s book, The Elusive Shift, he goes through the history of tabletop RPGs as the art form conceived of itself. By the late 1970s, there was already a philosophical division between the ideologies of gamers vs. “role players,” which was helped along by the fact that the early versions of D&D failed to explain that dialogue was the warp and weft along which these games were laid (TES, pg 39), leading to insulated gaming groups who all had different conceptions of what D&D, and thus what TTRPGs were or could be. Shannon Appelcline also notes some extreme elisions in one of D&D’s early books, stating on the product page for the Players Handbook [sic] of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1e (1978): “What's astonishing is what's not in this book. For example, you won't find rules about how to actually roll your abilities! ... Instead the player only got summaries of what the rules systems were like — not the actual systems!”

I don’t think that D&D has ever fully shaken off this initial internal schism — that there are some parts of the rules and the game that are unknowable to the player themselves, and that those players should be kept in the dark regarding game generation, allowing for “invisible systems” of rules as described in chapter six of The Elusive Shift. D&D has constantly attempted to write rules for gamers that facilitate roleplayers across its contemporary iterations (third edition onward), hoping to bridge this divide. Daggerheart does not suffer this original sin. It has realized that great rules don’t necessarily encourage great roleplaying — but that great stories encourage great roleplaying. That giving all players tools to facilitate storytelling will, almost certainly, allow for games full of transactional, generative, emotional dialogue — the essential building blocks of any great tabletop RPG. 

The thing about games is that you have to meet them where they stand. You cannot read Shadowdark and opine that it should be more like Slugblaster. You cannot play Dread and wish it had the mechanics for a happy ending. You cannot create a character in Monsterhearts and refuse to deal with questions about sexuality, lust, desire, and a fundamental relationship between the player character and their body. Games are about what they are about, and ultimately, it’s up to us as players (and reviewers) to approach the game on even ground, as much as possible. With Daggerheart, you have to accept that it is not going to do anything radically new, but within the details of its ruleset, it will attempt to shift the paradigm of how players interact with the stories that they are already telling at the table. 

To that end, let’s dive into the game itself. With many playtests and betas, Daggerheart was experimenting with designing in the open, creating a loop of feedback, tweak, and release as it prepared for launch. This isn’t unique to TTRPGs, but the fact that some of this open testing happened at Critical Role’s table opened it to a much larger audience than your average playtest. Besides the playtest being advertised at the top of many episodes of Season 3, in episode 91 of the same season, Sam Reigel used a Daggerheart mechanic, “Blaze of Glory”, to help narrate the death of his character and allow for the adventuring party to defeat an exceptionally strong adversary. 

What took D&D three books, Daggerheart does in one, and better.

I am not about to get into systems matter discourse. I will say that systems matter for the game you want to play and players create that meaning during play. Daggerheart, as a system, emphasizes narrative gaming in a way that D&D does not. It does not restrict explaining narrative roleplaying to the opening segments of the rulebook that explain how to play a roleplaying game (which D&D more or less restricts to its initial explanations in the first chapter, “Playing the Game”), but it still leaves encounter-to-encounter narrative structures open-ended, much like D&D. 

To better help this comparison, let’s look back at “Blaze of Glory”: Dying in Daggerheart is given both mechanical and narrative consequences within the rules themselves. On page 106 in the core rulebook, you are given options for what happens to your character once they mark off their last hit point. Death is an option, which triggers a Death Move, such as “Blaze of Glory,” “Avoid Death,” and “Risk it All” — these allow the player to decide which story beats to play out as the result of a mechanically-triggered consequence. It also has the option for your character to take a Scar, a semi-permanent mechanical handicap that makes it more difficult for a character to store Hope (an accumulative action currency based on roles), staving off death for a little longer. Page 28 of D&D’s Player’s Handbook also explains what happens when a character’s hit points reach zero. You either die or fall unconscious, and this is determined almost entirely by the numerical damage you receive. For what many think of as a character’s climactic moment, D&D’s guidelines regarding the importance of death in the story are obviously lacking, largely because it has historically never really been that concerned with how you roleplay in your game. If it were, it would have narrative moves. It has a charisma roll, which is… about as close as it gets. 

Most players want to roleplay in their roleplaying game. It might not be a priority, but they enjoy developing a character not only through their mechanical impulses but also their motivations and connections to other characters. D&D has never fully supported this desire in the rules, allowing open-ended character interactions to unfold ad hoc, which ultimately means that its rulebooks discard opportunities to encourage its players to feel something in favor of writing about bastion rules. Daggerheart added narrative design structures to the core of its ruleset, giving mechanical weight to the desires of players to explore story and not just allowing the narrative to rest on the intermediate connective tissue between combat encounters.   

Still, within the core rulebook itself, there is enough crunch to satisfy a player’s desire to plan tactical next-moves, choose modifiers (including a narrative “Experience” modifier, which is an open-ended, player-determined +2 to the final result), roll dice, and succeed at skill checks. Utilizing a skill check with 2D12 means that Daggerheart is designed on a pyramid of success, where you are less likely to completely fail or completely succeed at any individual skill check. (This is unlike D&D’s 1d20 roll, which always has a 5% chance to roll any number, meaning you are just as likely to roll a 1 as a 20, making D&D unpredictable, random, and often frustrating, especially in combat when you swing, miss, and have to sit on your hands for fifteen minutes before you get another shot at the adversary.) With 2d12 you are more likely to roll a 13 than any other number. This means that your character is mostly likely to roll just-below the average roll difficulty (in Daggerheart “average” is recommended at 15) before modifiers. Knowing this spread allows game masters to establish a sense of fairness in the difficulty level — failing and succeeding at any extreme are big moments narratively, and the mechanics emphasize and reward those extremes. 

Daggerheart has not thrown character creation, min/max opportunities, or combat encounters into the furnace to heat the storygames forge, and there’s enough built up to satisfy players who enjoy looking at dice pools and movement rules to create a unique and well-mechanized character. I will fully admit that I am one of these players, and my current character is a close-combat spellcaster who utilizes Firbolg ancestry features and the Midnight Domain “Rain of Blades” spell to (hopefully) deal big damage with a few clever action stacks.   

I am someone who believes that every choice made in a roleplaying game is a narrative choice, and some narrative choices have mechanical consequences. The choice to attack a dragon with a dagger is fundamentally a narrative choice that results in triggering initiative and a combat game loop. The choice to comfort another character after a difficult task is also narrative but does not (typically) trigger a rule for next steps of play — this is left up to the players to determine if those characters kiss or never speak of this moment of intimacy again, or both. Daggerheart has opened up both the narrative choices that trigger mechanical consequences and the mechanical consequences that can be chosen. It’s a slick sleight of hand enmeshed into its game design that tricks players into becoming better storytellers by asking them to examine character motives and desires within mechanical movements. 

Daggerheart’s core rulebook presents plenty of moments that teach people how to do story well, or how to think about story with every new corner turned in the adventure. The two dice used in skill checks are named — Fear and Hope — and whichever dice is higher triggers mechanics either in favor of the GM or the player character, adding an extra dimension of mechanical tension (Fear) and excitement (Hope) no matter what the result on the die. A segment of the book (“Story is Consequence,” page 95) also details that the success or failure with a higher result on either the Hope or Fear die can imply a narrative positioning within the result, allowing a secondary, optional layer of narrative driven by the desire of players to roll the number rocks.  On page 241, another detail pops out; different mechanical Environments and terrain also come with “Feature Questions,” which can be asked of the GM or turned and asked of the players. The example given is for a river’s “Undertow” feature: “What trinkets and baubles like along the bottom of the riverbed? Do predators swim these rivers?” 

Then, in addition to encouraging story, there are simply incredibly well designed details on how to run a game itself. On page 184 is a very cleverly designed Mad Libs style fill-in-the-blank, one-shot adventure generator. On page 322, the game gives suggestions for how to lay out index cards to indicate different sections of a colossus to demonstrate its general structure so that player characters can track how they traverse the bulk of it. The DM’s Guide does this support structure as well, but what took D&D three books, Daggerheart does in one, and better.

Daggerheart... has realized that great rules don’t necessarily encourage great roleplaying — but that great stories encourage great roleplaying.

One of the biggest challenges of any tabletop roleplaying game is establishing the world characters inhabit. Daggerheart, like many fantasy heartbreakers, has proceeded with an amalgam, medivalish, western-inspired Factory Setting Fantasy. There is nothing particularly exciting or troubling about this. It notes George R.R. Martin, Robert Jorden, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ursula K. LeGuin among its touchstones. This sort of generic, general understanding of “high fantasy” is a shorthand storytelling tool. It is a lingua franca for roleplaying games and allows players to deploy a shared (medievalish, western-inspired) Fantasy Understanding without too many ideas getting lost in translation. However, it’s also worth noting that in Chapter 5, “Campaign Frames,” the book gives examples of how to distinguish each of the provided frames from this Factory Setting, such as culture shifts, ancestry details, and class understandings giving the GM and players tools to tell a more particularized (and probably more interesting) story. 

Much like a lingua franca, the Factory Setting Fantasy is rooted in a history of violence, colonialism, racism, and misogyny. That, sadly, does not stop me from getting excited when the hero of destiny reclaims the divine sword from the catacombs and vows to kill his evil uncle to reclaim the throne. It also helps that a roleplaying game, by its very nature as a collaborative storytelling engine, will allow players to incorporate regionalities, specifications, and unique world-ending adversaries. 

All this is to say that there is little about Daggerheart’s building blocks — combat, classes, creatures — that distinguishes itself from Dungeons & Dragons. Even much of its layout and content choices can be mapped onto the fifth edition books, and I can imagine that it will continue to produce campaign frames, adventures, and new classes much in the same way that D&D has done for the past fifteen years (a suspicion largely supported by the two ex-D&D vets that Daggerheart brought on just this month). It is when you pay attention to how those building blocks have been assembled that the differences become apparent. It is a game designed for how players want to play tabletop RPGs right now, in an age where D&D, the genre, is the most valuable asset that tabletop games have to leverage — and Daggerheart is not shy about where it finds purchase.

Truthfully, I believe that Daggerheart is doing D&D better than D&D is. The core rulebook is fundamentally better designed, more cohesive, and easier to use as an onboarding tool — arguably the exact reasons that D&D decided to release its updated 2024 ruleset. Daggerheart  is not meant to expand your roleplaying horizons, but it does attempt, rather admirably, to deepen player’s understandings of roleplaying games. It is this desire to usher narrative to the table at massive scale that has convinced me that Daggerheart, despite its undeniable roots as a fantasy heartbreaker, is a game principally and distinctly built for story.