Greetings adventurer! As you might have surmised from the title of this blog, I recently ran my first couple of sessions of Daggerheart, the new tabletop roleplaying game from Darrington Press, i.e. Critical Role’s publishing arm. My players were longtime members of my professional game mastering community, and they seemed to have had a good time in the end, but we all had some thoughts. I won’t necessarily explain how the game works; there's plenty of that content available online. Instead, I'll simply share my overall impressions of the experience.
I ran the Sablewood Messengers quickstart adventure, which has been out for quite a while before the full release of Daggerheart. We played on Roll20 and Demiplane, but only because there is currently no support for Foundry VTT, which is my preferred virtual tabletop. Frustratingly, there appears to be no official word on whether support will be provided for Foundry, or any other third-party digital tool for that matter, with their gaming license seemingly not making provisions for such tools to be created unofficially. Nonetheless, the hobby Foundry developer community has been busy coding their own custom systems, as they do.
Speaking of VTTs, the Daggerheart quickstart utilises art and language that seems to benefit only in-person, physical play, which can be a bit awkward when playing online, as many now do after the pandemic. There were a few moments when I had to change the wording on the fly or point out that what I had just said didn’t really apply in this context, for example, when there were no tokens to roll with or place on a card. It's plain to see that Darrington Press wrote their system and this particular quickstart in such a way as to prioritise physical merchandising, which I don’t blame them for, as they have plenty of customers wanting to buy physical things. However, it’s 2025, and digital/online play is also important.
The integration between Demi-plane and Roll20 was okay, being present right off the bat on the player side, but a bit awkward for what one would expect in 2025. Sharing sheets with players and having the permissions work was a bit clunky. It would have been nice to port character sheets natively into Roll20. There is no porting of any kind for adversary sheets, which is disappointing, considering the GM has to do the most work in this regard and is usually the one purchasing the compendium. You cannot even roll from the adversaries' demi-plane sheets - absolute madness.
In any case, as for the game itself, Daggerheart asserts itself to be a game that puts narrative storytelling first. Which, for the most part, I believe it accomplishes, particularly with combat, which tends to flow seamlessly between scenes, as is the intention. Players who are ready to go, can go, or they can plan together for the best or most meaningful outcome. If players are having a bad time meeting checks, they can still try again shortly after if they rolled Hope, which can help cut down on frustrating moments and waiting for everyone else to go before trying again.
The loosey-goosey nature of when to spotlight players, in or out of combat, seems like it could be a problem for quieter players, and thus could make the system prone to “spotlight stealing” players. This is probably not a problem for established groups who understand each other’s play-styles, but could be an issue for people who don’t play with a regular group.
On the adversary side, I enjoyed running the monsters for the most part. They got enough time in the spotlight to showcase their features and feel dangerous, which can be a weakness in other systems. The armour thresholds also help with this feeling, as they normalise over-inflated damage numbers, which is a pain to deal with for particular D&D character builds. However, this remains uncertain for higher levels. However, I can also see a counterargument to this being that even just dealing 1 point of damage can be so debilitating as to break verisimilitude.
I don’t really understand the choice of having the adversaries roll a d20 instead of 2d12 like the players, or even 2d10. I also want to have a normal distribution probability with my monster's rolls. But I suppose it’s not a big stretch to homebrew rolling 2d10 instead if I wanted to. But this will be more of a pain to do when the official GM digital tools start getting rolled out. It gives a sense that the odds are squarely in the player's favour, which makes it difficult to make an encounter feel challenging. This is particularly apparent if the players are lucky enough to roll more hope than not, as it would basically debilitate the GM's encounters right off the bat and reduce their agency. I can see this potentially being gamed by bad actors, i.e., making a run for a boss when the GM has little fear or making random checks to try to bank hope. Each player can bank six, but the GM can only bank 12. Even though the chance of acquiring hope or fear is 50/50, there will be more hope to play with on average if you have three or more players.
That being said, as a Professional Gamemaster, I am unsure yet if I will be running the system professionally in the long term. There are things I like about it, and problems with D&D that it solves. However, I am not sure that it solves the problem any better than Fabula Ultima, a system based on Japanese-style role-playing games that I like, which was released a couple of years ago. It also creates problems in certain instances for certain types of play, it has a very loose way of tracking wealth, for example, that we could not wrap our heads around at first glance.
However, Daggerheart seems to have a lot of momentum, so we’ll see how things go. All in all, I am not sure what exactly I expected; I just think I expected more. I probably need to give it a couple more tries as both a GM and a player, and give the system a full read. But also compare it with Fabula Ultima and MCDM Draw Steel, which I am also looking forward to playing and running. You can let me know if you had any similar or wildly different initial thoughts on Daggerheart on Bluesky. Safe travels adeventurer!
