Finally, a Fantasy RPG
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a game you could play with friends to imagine yourselves in a fantasy world facing challenges like enchanted dungeons and fearsome dragons? Well, at last, you can!
That game?
Daggerheart.
OK, so Daggerheart may not, in fact, be the first game of its kind to exist, but it’s recently been released by Darrington Press (from the fine folks at Critical Role), and I’m pretty excited about it. And before you ask, no, this is not promoted content. I would never think to stoop so low… also no one has ever even offered, so that’s made it really easy to stick to my principles.
Overview
What makes Daggerheart different from Dungeons and Dragons and the other fantasy RPGs you may or may not have heard of?
Duality Dice: Where a lot of RPG systems use a twenty-sided die (D20) or some six-sided dice (d6s), this game primarily uses two twelve-sided dice (d12s, good you’re catching on quick). While that may not seem like a flashy difference, it’s actually kind of central to the whole game’s design. One of those dice represents Hope (a resource players use to help each other out and activate cool abilities) and the other represents Fear (the Game Master’s resource for making bad things happen to the players). You add the numbers on the dice together with any appropriate modifiers to find out if you succeeded or not, but you also keep track of which die rolled higher. Success with a high Hope die is great, and the player gets a Hope to spend later. Success with Fear may add a complication or cost, and the Game Master takes a Fear. Failure with Hope has a thin silver lining, plus the player gets Hope. Failure with Fear is really bad. It’s a mini-economy/mixed success mechanic that can help make every roll feel consequential.
Narrative-Forward: Where Dungeons and Dragons will give you a spell like “Create Water” which creates ten gallons of water or rain in a thirty-foot cube, with an additional ten gallons or an additional five feet to each side of the cube per spell level, like your Algebra II teacher snuck in and vandalized your game books in the middle of the night, Daggerheart tells you that you can pick an element to take control of and describe how it helps you attack or take action in a scene. Basically, less math, more “use your imagination” in the game about imagination.
Welcoming to Players: I’ve been playing these nerd games for years, but I think Daggerheart is a strong jumping-on point for new players. There are currently eight classes to choose from with two specialties for each class, so you can read through all the options in about twenty minutes. All classes use the same currencies Hope and Stress to do cool stuff. And almost all of your abilities come on cards that you can refer back to whenever you’re not totally sure what to do.
Welcoming to Game Masters: For D&D, you should hypothetically have access to the Dungeon Master’s Guide, The Monster Manual, and a Player’s Handbook to have access to the many rules and monsters, and if you want to run an adventure, you’ll probably want to buy one of those, too. For Daggerheart, a GM and their whole table could hypothetically share one book, which has lots of handy tools for GM’s (example difficulties for each skill in the game, advice on creating your own monsters, and lots of example scenarios for how to balance successes and failures). And the coolest thing for GM’s is the Campaign Frames section. Basically, it’s a series of guides for running different types of stories, each with setting notes, extra mechanics, and advice for making the games feel like the properties that inspired it. Among them, there’s a grim Dark Souls-y one, a light Delicious in Dungeon- one, and a high-stakes Game of Thrones-y one.
My friends and I are pretty excited about diving into this game, and I hope others will, too. There’s tons of ways to make new abilities and items that make the game feel like it’s your own, and the more people try it out, the more options we’ll find out there.