Background
Daggerheart is a new fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. It encourages adventurers to build characters and worlds together with their game master. Using two 12-sided die (d12), Daggerheart players roll to succeed or fail with Hope or Fear. A character who ‘succeeds’ with fear, may be successful in their attempt but may reap the consequences later. While a ‘failure’ with hope, allows the character to use that Hope to boost them at another time.
Players collect Hope as they ‘roll with Hope’ during all interactions. These interactions can include dialogue, investigating, travelling, combat, and more. Hope is like a currency that can be spent to power magic, boost attacks, help friends. While the players collect Hope, the GM collects Fear. Every time the players ‘roll with Fear’, the GM collects their currency to spend later.
The GM typically uses fear for big moves in combat or to take actions sooner. They also use an action tracker during combat and roll with a d20 instead of the d12 system.
To my friends who have only ever heard of Dungeons and Dragons, I’ve described Daggerheart as: It’s like D&D, but with more tools for and emphasis on the roleplaying and collaborative storytelling elements.
Session Zero – Character Building
My partner and I joined a semi-professional Game Master’s server to play in an introductory oneshot. You can check out their Daggerheart content on YouTube here. We played the quickstart adventure: The Sablewood Messengers. In this adventure, three of us played forest critters seeking out a magical object that would save their home.
I typically start my D&D character creation by selecting my class. Then I select a race (ancestry), and then I start to build my character’s backstory. With Daggerheart, I have become accustomed to choosing a class first, but it flows a differently after that.
The Daggerheart character creation process is a systematic way to building a backstory. A key part of character creation is answering stock questions about your character and their relationship with the other player characters at the table. I typically run (or take part in) session zeroes at the start of D&D adventures and campaigns. But I find them more onerus on the GM to facilitate links between characters and the story. With Daggerheart, the players guide the story building process a lot more. Sometimes, these background questions create non-player characters (NPCs) or locations. Often, these questions and relationships give the characters stake in the adventure from the start.
I think doing a session zero immediately before jumping in to an adventure session can be difficult for the GM. They need to incorporate a lot of newly created information mid-session, rather than being able to plan being pre-meditated or planned. But maybe that is fine, since anyone who GMs knows well that any plans you make almost always get thrown out the window anyway.
Playing The Sablewood Messengers Oneshot
This was the first time I played online with strangers and first time playing Daggerheart.
My simiah beastbound ranger, named Zira, shot arrows imbued with nature-influenced magic. Her loyal direwolf, Pepper, bravely pounced ahead to scout or to chase down foes. The character’s bonds and background descriptors we created at the beginning, were used in the game to help make roleplaying decisions.
I especially liked how the GM would invite us playes to describe the scenes in front of us. “What are their names?” his tavernkeeper asked us, gesturing to the weapons we carried. In a manner of minutes, all three of us had named our weapons in ways that tied in to the character backstory we had thrown together in about an hour prior.
I asked the GM if that was one of his tricks, or if it was built into the adventure. According to him, the adventure is written to prompt the players at various times. It reminds me of improv, when the actors ask the audience for specific prompts, and then incorporate them into the action. Now that I’ve played through the quickstart guide, I read some of it. I can confirm it specifically pushes the players to describe aspects of the world they are in.
The intuitiveness of the rules made the game relatively easy to pick up. Demiplane also helped a lot. It’s a very slick application. Despite having Discord, Roll20, Demiplane, and a notes app all open at once, I found it worked quite well. With Demiplane and Roll20 becoming one, I can only assume this integration will improve further.
Mechanics
Domain Cards
Playing a ranger, I enjoyed the flexibility in choosing from two very different domains. In Daggerheart, each class has access to two domains. Each domain can be accessed by two different classes. I find the ranger interesting, and more appealing than the D&D ranger class. One of the Ranger domains is ‘Bone’, leaning into the physical and tactile. Bone is a domain the Ranger shares with the Warrior class. The other domain it gets access to is the nature-based magical domain of ‘Sage’. Rangers and Druids both have access to the Sage domain.
As a Ranger, you can lean more into the agile warrior or the magic-wielding tracker. But you can play a mix of both, more similar to the half-caster D&D Ranger. You choose a certain number of domain cards when you start, and as you level up. They seem fun, and provide opportunity for some very cool art. Darrington Press takes a hard stance on using real artists, and no AI generated art, for their products.
I chose all Sage domain cards for this oneshot, playing a tactical longbow shooting nature mage.
Hope, Fear, and Stress
At level 1, we were encouraged to generate and spend hope. We did end up maxing the GM out with all of his fear slots filled, but that also meant we got to spend a lot of hope doing cool things. The GM told us that the Stress (another currency) becomes more prominent as you play higher levels. There are more opportunities to gain and use Stress with higher level domain cards and spells.
Improvising
The GM warned us that we would have to ‘unlearn’ some things, coming from D&D, and he was right.
I have to improvise a lot when I Game Master, which can be fun. I also enjoy making up my character stuff on the fly as a player. But at first, I found the way Daggerheart and the GM would prompt me a bit jarring. It put me outside of my comfort zone. I felt like I was back in grade 9, when I decided to take drama as an elective to force myself to practice something I was (am) bad at.
At the start of the session, I felt put on the spot to make things up. But, as we continued to play, I pushed through that initial discomfort. I thought to myself ‘this is excactly what you signed up for’. Play got easier as we went along and I got more used to the style. I found the background information from character creation especially helpful to come up with stuff on the spot. The way the information is laid out in the character sheet makes it quick to access, and easier to draw on than the written backstory I’m used to producing for D&D.
Optimization
After this one session, I got the sense that optimizing character builds like with D&D and other even ‘crunchier’ games, is definitely possible. But there seems to be less of an emphasis on needing to optimize. If one person is a power-player and heavily optimizes for a specific build, and another player spreads their talents out thinly to allow for more flexible roleplay, the power dynamic seems like a smaller gap than my experience with D&D. I think this is because the game is more balanced towards non-combat encounters, and that combat itself is a bit more fluid.
Another flexible tool are ‘Experiences’. You define two at level 1 and then more as you level up. Players can spend Hope to apply their Experience to rolls, which can be just about anything you and your GM agree on. I’ve found making experiences somewhat open-ended, like quotes or phrases, can be fun. You can also make them very practical, like a profession or specific skill.
Initiative
There is no initiative in Daggerheart. Instead, there is a player turn and then a GM turn. The GM turn takes place once a player fails, or when the GM spends their available currency to take their turn. I found that this allows for more collaboration during the player’s turn. We all discuss who should go first, what we want to do, and then sometimes change what we do based on someone else’s idea. Even online, with no cameras, and not knowing each other beforehand, we had pretty good communication to amount in fairly taking turns.
Finishing thoughts
Overall, I recommend trying out Daggerheart if any of the following apply:
- You want your adventures to start with a greater sense of connection with your party.
- You or some of your fellow players want a game that has more streamlined combat options.
- The power balance between power-players and players who choose sub-optimal choices, for story reasons, feels too wide in your non-Daggerheart games.
- You love to improvise while playing tabletop RPGs.
- You love collaborative storytelling, and want in-game prompts to encourage this.
Check out Daggerheart here! and GM RiceKombo here!
I’ve lost my first Beta playtest characters. But you can check out my character sheets I’ve played oneshots with, so far, on Demiplane here:
- Zira the Loreborne Simiah Ranger – Level 1
- Tarsus the Slyborne Galapa Rogue – Level 3