Daggerheart, a new Critical Role game, feels more complicated than D&D in a good way

Daggerheart, the new tabletop role-playing game from Critical Role’s Darrington Press imprint, entered open beta earlier this year with a bountiful playtest packet that’s free for anyone to download and play at home. While early reports were mixed, I’m pleased to say that I was delighted by my recent experience with the game — but not for the reason I expected.

At this year’s Gen Con in August, co-developers Spenser Starke and Rowan Hall ran several fast-paced introductory games for the press. The three-hour session kicked off with a lengthy look at the character generation system, and I was absolutely charmed by the ancestries and communities on offer. I ended up with a wanderborne clank ranger, a semi-sentient automaton with a furry little dog friend named Ruthie. The experience was energizing, surprisingly collaborative, and an awful lot of fun. 

But what really got my attention was the math.

What’s so interesting here is that Daggerheart runs on a 2d12 system. You’re likely familiar with the d20 system that underpins 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. In that game, players roll just one die and add their modifiers — a plus or a minus to the roll — before comparing it to a target number known as the difficulty class (DC). Meet or beat the DC and you’ve succeeded. In Daggerheart, it’s a bit more difficult.

Daggerheart maintains the concept of a DC, so there’s still a target number that players try to hit. With the 2d12 system, players always roll both dice and add the numbers together before adding their modifiers. The use of two dice, rather than one, changes the odds of a roll. It essentially fattens up that middle section — call it the five-through-20 band of results — when compared to the same band on a d20. Rolling a really high or a really low number becomes much more difficult, but as a result, player abilities are more consistent.

Meanwhile, the game master is stuck using just a single d20 for all of their rolls. That means their die rolls are more swingy — more likely to fall at the top and the bottom of the range, either landing a solid hit or missing entirely. This, in turn, gives more uncertainty to your enemies’ actions.

“As a player, if you’re missing all the time? Not very fun,” Starke said during the session. “So we try to create reliability on your side, because it makes you feel like you can lean on your abilities, and create variance on my side, so that it’s always exciting as to whether an adversary is going to hit or not.”

I can hear you asking: What about critical hits? If I can’t roll a 20, or a 24 in this case, as easily, I won’t do as much damage in combat. Well, that would be true if critical hits relied on rolling a high number. But they don’t. Instead, you land a critical hit when both your d12s come up as the same number. I’m no mathematician, but it seems like a decent trade-off odds-wise.

Not happy to rest on their clever laurels, Starke and Hall have extended the 2d12 system even further. 

For instance, one of those d12s stands for hope and the other fear. Roll higher on the fear die, and the game master adds a complication or a consequence to the action you just attempted. Roll higher on the hope die, and you receive a boon — a pip on your character sheet that you can turn in later on to do something extraordinary. My ranger could spend a hope to reroll an attack, or spend three hope to land a blow on three enemies instead of just one. There’s even a tag-team feature that allows two characters to spend hope for a single, maximum-damage attack from both characters added together.

Daggerheart is shot through with interesting innovations in a similar vein. Take the damage system, which takes into account both hit points and emotional stress; or the card-based character creation system that feels like drafting trading cards; or the thematic templating system that should easily allow the game to be ported to different settings. 

If you were looking for a less complicated take on bog-standard D&D, this ain’t it. Any player will need to do a bit of study to unlearn some of the lessons learned from other TTRPGs over the years. But if you do, I think you might have a pretty good time. And honestly, we could all use a short vacation from the Forgotten Realms… at least for a little while.

Daggerheart is still in active development. In fact, Starke and Hall ripped and replaced a major element of combat in the wee hours of the morning before our demo took place. Anyone who downloads the playtest packet can help in the development by providing feedback from at-home sessions.