Much of the discussion around the "children of January 2023"--fantasy ttrpgs games announced on or around Wizards of the Coast's attempt to rework/cancel the OGL at that time--has involved whether or to what extent any or all of them will be "D&D Killers." Part of the problem with this discourse is that no one can agree on what it means to be a "D&D Killer." If you take the term literally and define a "D&D Killer" as a game that will be so popular and relevant that it causes Dungeons & Dragons to be driven from the market, then I think it is pretty safe to predict that none of the games on offer will meet that standard. Nor could they, reasonably--that's an absurd standard. But I think a more reasonable definition would be a game that not only has a long run and significant product line, but one that draws a material number of people who otherwise would play D&D away, such that D&D becomes meaningfully diminished in the market. By that definition, Vampire: the Masquerade was a D&D Killer in the 90s. I think there is a strong case that Pathfinder 1st edition was a D&D Killer in the early 10s. If you expand the scope of the analysis, I think you could say World of Warcraft was a D&D Killer in the mid 00s as well.
Using that standard, if you told me that there will be only one game out of the children of January 2023 that qualifies as a D&D Killer, I would absolutely put my money on Darrington Press's Daggerheart. Many of the games in this space either are or look to be really good. But I think only Daggerheart brings with it the promise of (1) targeting an identifiable slice of the D&D player base that is or could be open to a different approach to play; (2) providing a play experience that really serves that slice far better than 5e does; and (3) being backed a marketing machine in the form of the broader Critical Role extended universe to bring people to the game. It is still in Beta, but if it continues along the lines I have seen in the current version, I think Daggerheart is going to be a home run. So much so that I, a notorious ttrpg dilettante, think that Daggerheart is going to become my primary fantasy ttrpg going forward.
Before getting into my review, I should note that the game is in beta test, and as of this writing the current version is 1.4.1. It is possible that the game will change radically, possibly in a manner that takes away the things that I think make this game great. However, the recent revisions are much smaller in scope than the early revisions, suggesting that the designers are refining as opposed to reconstructing (as compared to MCDM RPG, which based on the design notes has changed radically since the first playtest document I discussed previously). As a result, I suspect that the final form of the game will be very similar to what we have now. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the beta is free, and is fully playable--not only in terms of the state of the rules but also in terms of the game aids (more on that later). So if you are interested in the game, you can pick up what is nearly the full rules and get playing right now, for free.
Getting back to those three elements I mentioned, I want to talk about #3 first, and then work my way back to the other two. I understand that there is a dedicated and passionate crowd of Critical Role Haters out there, people who genuinely believe that both the style of play represented by Critical Role and the people brought into the hobby as a result of the rise of Critical Role has been some sort of disaster for "true RPG players" or whatever. I also know that there is a group of people who are passionate Critical Role fans, who can at times be a bit uncritical and even militant about their fandom. But in between those poles, IMO, exist the vast majority of people in the ttrpg space who have generally positive thoughts about the Critical Role enterprise and various levels of engagement with their products and activities. And, because Critical Role is by far the largest enterprise of its type, it has a reach that other producers simply don't have. I write as someone who hasn't watched a full Critical Role episode in many years, but who is generally aware of what they are doing and am generally positive about Critical Role as a whole. It was because of their prominence that I became aware of Daggerheart, and I was curious enough to try out the playtest, even though I would say going in I was less excited about Daggerheart than some of its competitors like the MCDM RPG. The point is that Critical Role got me "in the door," and the fact that there are a lot of people who will be similarly situated is a massive boost to the reach of this game. That's an enormous advantage.
This brings us to the question of who this game is for. I think the best and most direct answer to that question is "people who run games, or who want to run games, that are more or less like the games showcased on Critical Role." This means at least two different things. First, they want character-driven game play, in which players can develop rich backgrounds and have those backgrounds drive play and the course of the overall narrative. But it also means that they want a robust combat system that provides fights that are tactical and interesting in their own right, as well as story-relevant. Given that there is a large number of 5e players who were brought into the hobby via Critical Role and/or other streamed games, this style of play and sensibilities represents a significant audience for this sort of game. But, again, not just those folks--I don't fit that description in terms of how I got into this hobby, and it reflects my style as well. Not only is this a sensible audience for a fantasy game to target in general, it is also particularly sensible for a game affiliated with Critical Role.
This second piece brings me to one of most common lines of criticism of Daggerheart I have seen, and one that I think is fundamentally wrong-headed. Daggerheart is obviously (and transparently--there is a list of which games influenced the design in the first couple of pages of the rules) influenced by the Powered by the Apocalypse/Forged in the Dark line of "fiction-forward" games. More specifically, it borrows some key terminology and concepts from those games, especially the idea of "GM Moves" (which I personally don't think is a particularly helpful or explanatory term, but YMMV). But it also takes inspiration from other, more mechanically oriented games. One persistent line of criticism says that drawing from these two streams is "confused," and that Daggerheart should learn all the way in to being a fiction-forward game in the model of the PbtA/FitD family.
I think this line of criticism/advice is wrong-headed because while PbtA/FitD games can deliver the character-driven storytelling piece, I would argue that they do not, and cannot deliver on the engaging combat piece. Dungeon World, the most prominent "generic" fantasy PbtA game, says it provides the D&D experience in a fiction-forward form, but for me it never delivered on that promise. One of the core principles is that combat is just another storytelling exercise, and as a result combat lacks that fun game element of combat-as-sport. If you take that away, you have a fundamentally different experience. At the risk of generalizing the PbtA/FitD fans, they generally don't see the combat-as-sport dimension to D&D as being a positive feature, or at least a value-added element, and so the lack of this element isn't a problem. But I would say for most of the D&D fanbase, including the Critical Role and Critical Role-adjacent fans, the lack of robust combat in the PbtA/FitD games is not going to fit the bill. The crunchy elements are, in my opinion, very necessary and central to the appeal to the game.
Which brings us to the rules execution. Darrington Press could market game to the maximum degree and target it perfectly at a key slice of 5e players, but it has no chance of making a long-term impact if it doesn't execute on these ideas. And, for me, Daggerheart nails it.
The first truly exceptional element of Daggerheart is what you might call its "form factor." Keep in mind--this game is in beta test. It is not a finished product, and there are some friction points in terms of accessibility (the proto-rule book is tough to navigate, for example). But the game clearly has given enormous thought to how it is going to present information to the players and GMs, and how that information is going to be used during play. Chief among these ideas is the implementation of cards. Each subclass, Ancestry and Heritage (the same division of "race" as ToV's Lineage and Heritage and A5e's Heritage and Culture) is expressed in terms of a card that lists all the relevant abilities, along with a descriptive piece of art. Perhaps more importantly, most of the class abilities take the form of access to two different "domains," which in turn take the form of selecting discrete power cards. The player thus has a hand of cards that represent their core character abilities. Higher level characters select from among their available cards to form a "load out."
The question that this structure immediately brings to mind is "how is all of this going to work online"? To address this, Daggerheart released with a fully functional implementation on Demiplane (the competitor to D&D Beyond, made by the former D&D Beyond team). And while Demiplane is not a VTT, it provides a seamless on-ramp for folks used to using D&D Beyond or similar systems for either in-person or online games.
Beyond the cards, Daggerheart provides a series of player and GM tools. Each class has a bespoke character sheet (clearly inspired by the PbtA "playbook" format) and a "sidecar" which slides alongside the character sheet and highlights the key elements of the sheet--a kind of "cheat sheet" for the character sheet. There are also several GM cheat sheets, along with (beautiful) blank word maps that can be used to develop a campaign world, a process that is well described in the rule book. The rule book in its current form has no lay-out or art, but judging from what is there with the other components I am confident that Daggerheart is going to set new standards for ttrpg presentation and lay-out. Just A+ all around.
The second exceptional element of Daggerheart is the way it takes what I will call "risks" in its design. I talked a bit about the Hope/Fear system here, but there are other systems that at first glance seem strange and even counter-intuitive, but prove to be really thoughtful and effective in play. Perhaps the best example is the full embrace of asymmetric mechanics. At least since 3.0 D&D, and outside of D&D for far longer than that, it has been an article of faith that you want a single, consistent resolution mechanic for all actions, whether they are player actions or GM actions. Daggerheart abandons this concept completely--players roll 2d12 for their actions, while the GM rolls 1d20. At first I thought this was a bit of sop to those who might be confused and frightened by the lack of a d20, but having run the game I now see this is a very smart bit of intentional design. The use of the d20 brings with it the "chaos plateau"--outcomes are very unpredictable, because each outcome on the die is equally likely. That's fine, and even fun, when it applies to NPCs who are one of many and not necessarily repeat players. If your bad guy can't hit the broadside of a barn (as happened in my last session), that's not a big deal. But if players, with their one character, get hit with the d20 randomness curse in games like 5e, it produces a negative play experience. So, Daggerheart gives the players a nice bell-curve with results clustered in the middle, alongside a high crit chance (1 in 12 or 8.3%) to spice things up. Keeping the d20 chaos plateau for NPCs but getting rid of it for players is really inspired and clever, and brings the best of both worlds in many respects.
Another element that I think many would consider a risk, at least based on some of the early reactions online, is the "lack" of an initiative system. In Daggerheart when combat begins PCs take turns as they wish, with each time they take an Action they give the GM an "Action Token." The PCs continue until either a player rolls "with Fear" or the GM spends a Fear token to seize the initiative. Then, the GM spends Action Tokens to take actions, and when those tokens are exhausted or all of the NPCs have been activated, play passes back to the PCs. The concern that was expressed about this system is that a single player can simply continue to insist on acting at every possible opportunity, monopolizing the game and depriving the other players of a chance to do anything.
To address this, there is an optional rule that each PC gets three actions that they can make, and then their pool does not refresh until each PC has spent their three activations. This rule is perfectly fine and seems to me like it would fix the problem identified completely. But I have found it to be wholly unnecessary in our games, because no player is taking more than a couple of turns in a row. In fact, if anything, I find myself reminding players that they can take back-to-back actions if it makes sense in the context of the flow of the fight, because everyone assumes that they must take turns and share the spotlight. I hesitate to say generally reductive things like "this is only a problem if your players suck" but . . . I think Daggerheart's combat sequencing is only a problem if your players are jerks. All I can say is that I have found zero problems with it, and I would strongly encourage people who have concerns to just give it a try.
In addition, the rest of the GM-facing mechanics are exceptional. Like games such as 13th Age, and very much unlike 5e, monsters and other antagonists have only the bare minimum of stats for the GM to keep track of, focusing on the cool special abilities they can perform in combat. I love this sort of design in 13th Age, and it works equally well here. The Fear Token system also provides a very clean way of balancing monster "specials" behind a limited GM mechanic. This is matched up with extensive use of countdown timers for events, allowing the GM to both model events happening "in the background" as well as adjudicate timing events during encounters. But the piece of design that works the best is the environments system. Locations have a simple set of stats, along with activations for both Action Tokens and Fear Tokens. It makes location-based encounters both simple to run and mechanically interesting, while also making the combat encounters more dynamic (since GM gets to use both the monster activations and the environment activations), all without a complex series of rules. It is the best implementation of set-piece locations I have seen, the text provides strong samples to work from, and it is very easy to design your own. 10/10.
The final exceptional piece to Daggerheart is the way it brings in the best ideas from the fiction forward games it draws from. As much as I think Daggerheart benefits from providing a more mechanical framework for portions of play, especially the combat piece, the action-reaction "yes, and" dynamic of PbtA/FitD games does create a very satisfying narrative flow, and Daggerheart adopts that structure completely. Perhaps more importantly, I think the way the game explains how that flow is supposed to work is one of the cleanest and simplest presentations of the basic structure. PbtA/FitD games can be, IMO, somewhat opaque and jargon-heavy, making it difficult for GMs coming from more traditional games to internalize its ideas. Daggerheart keeps the basic terminology ("GM Moves"), but the explanation is very clear and very helpful to new GMs, and also people like me who have struggled a bit with applying these concepts in play.
This feeds into the character-driven style of play that Critical Role is known for. Daggerheart plants a flag on the side of shared the world-building process between the players and the GM, but more importantly gives concrete, step-by-step advice on building out that sort of campaign. To me, this is critical, because a player or GM coming into the hobby via Critical Role or similar games is going to see the end product of that sort of campaign style on the screen, but not the process of getting there. And then the products available for sale for 5e, whether Exandria-focused or not, are much more prescriptive and pre-built, and thus also provide not much in the way of guidance for this project. It is not at all intuitive how to go about build a collaborative campaign with the players, and there are a number of people out there who want to make a campaign that is inspired by Mercer and the gang as opposed to completely copying their work. Daggerheart speaks directly to those players and GMs, providing very concrete and detailed explanations of how to go about planning and executing such a campaign.
There is still some work to do on this game, both in terms of the actual design and in terms of learning how to best run the game from a GM perspective. The numbers, like difficulties and damage, could use a little bit of fine-tuning. We do not know if Daggerheart is going to be published under an open license that allows for 3rd Party content--I suspect it will, and I hope so, because I think people are going to want to fill in the "gaps" with a lot of conversions of D&D elements into Daggerheart. But what is here is exceptional, and there is every indication that it is going to continue to be refined and improved prior to its final release next year. And it is fully playable now.
Whether it proves to be the "D&D Killer" or not, Daggerheart is an exceptional game, and it is for my money right now the most exciting offering out there in the space. If you have any interest in a hybrid between the fiction-forward play of the PbtA/FitD school and more "trad" play, I really encourage you to check it out.
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