Daggerheart, the latest addition to an ever-increasing number of new RPG’s is the brainchild of Matt Mercer and Critical Role, perhaps the most famous DM and RPG group in the world. This new game stands as a challenge not only to modern RPG traditions but modern RPG design. In particular, given that Critical Role as an entertainment show has been using D&D 5th edition for the past several years, for them to release their own system also begs the question if Daggerheart will also attempt to challenge the grandaddy of RPG’s, Dungeons and Dragons, in the RPG space.

Today, we are going to talk about all things Daggerheart, specifically what makes it one of the most unique entries into the world of RPGs in quite a while, in my opinion.

Quick disclaimer: this is not a review. I will get to a Daggerheart review in the future, but I’m a stickler for my approach to reviewing an RPG. I need to both play it and run it in extensive campaigns before I find my footing. So this is going to be more of a theoretical approach to what Daggerheart is in the larger landscape that is the RPG hobby, based on my initial exposure. Get ready, this is going to be a thinky one!

The Modern RPG Contradiction

Role-playing games occupy a peculiar and brilliant corner of the tabletop universe. Unlike board games, card games, or miniature wargames, where rules are rigid and absolute, RPGs hand you a rulebook and say, “Use this as a starting point. The rest is up to you.” That invitation to interpret, bend, customize, or even ignore rules isn’t a loophole; it’s the soul of the hobby, one that traces its roots back to the earliest days of 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Call it playstyle, homebrewing, or house ruling. It’s a mixture of personal taste, table culture, and shared traditions; it’s the unspoken glue that binds every campaign and shapes every session. It’s how a GM and his group take an RPG and make it their own, unique thing.

More precisely, a playstyle is when you define what a game is about conceptually, and then create rules that determine how the game is about that. This is largely guided by the RPG itself, but it’s the GM and player-made adjustments to the rules and their method of execution that truly define the tabletop experience.

Rulebooks often try to guide this process of personalized adjustment, encouraging groups to shape their own experience, but the real power has always rested with the players’ imaginations and the flexibility of the rules to leave space for such dynamics.

The problem is that this tradition of flexibility rarely survives contact with modern game design. Take Pathfinder 2e as an example: its GM Guide insists you’re free to tweak and reshape the system to fit your style of play. It even identifies different styles of play in generic examples.

But the game’s intricate mechanics tell another story, one of tight design and structural complexity that resists improvisation in favor of deliberate mechanical execution. It’s a common contradiction: many RPGs preach inclusivity of adaptive playstyle and flexible, adjustable, and customizable rules, but fewer and fewer empower it. They just don’t leave sufficient room in the design for GM’s and players to deliver their own take on what it means to play an RPG at the table. In the end, what the game is about is overwhelmingly influenced, if not entirely controlled, by the rules, regardless of the sales pitch that it can “be anything you want.”

Over the years, role-playing games have grown more rigid, gradually drifting away from their improvisational roots; even modern D&D is more tactical miniature game than it is role-playing game today. What was once a living, breathing tradition of tailoring RPGs for your table has become more of a footnote, something paid lip service to in theory, but not fully embraced in practice. This stems largely from rules becoming far too heavy and far too complex to adapt, but it also stems from the acceptance by RPG culture of this gradual shift away from personalized creativity being the heart of the game and RAW (Rules as Written) being the foundation of how you play RPGs.

Put simply, they don’t make RPGs like they used to, and players have gotten used to how they make RPGs today.

Matt Mercer and his critical role cohorts seem to understand this shift and have created a game that is a sort of counterargument to how modern RPG design thinks RPG’s should work. From Daggerheart’s perspective, role-playing games are theatre, and Daggerheart embraces the ideals of narrative and personalized creativity in play as the core element of the game.

No two groups will ever play Daggerheart the same way, and that is exactly what the game intends to happen, dare I say, as did classic-old school RPG’s of the nostalgic days of 1st edition D&D.

Daggerheart, in a word, is a throwback to the old school idea that role-playing is a game of make-believe, of collaborative storytelling and having fun with our brains without the nitty gritty rules infiltration so common in the much heavier modern rules systems.

That’s exactly what makes Daggerheart such a refreshing and frankly, radical entry in the modern RPG scene. It doesn’t just tip its hat to the idea of bringing back narrative and improvisational playstyle as a central part of the game; it builds the entire game around it and it does it with the freshness of evolved modern game mechanics.

Now, I use the term modern RPG design loosely here. The truth is that in the OSR (Old School Revival) and the countless game designs it has influenced over the last couple of decades, this approach has become practically commonplace.

Amazing titles like Blades in the Dark, Dungeon World, and Forbidden Lands, just to name a couple, have shown that narrative-first is a part of modern game design, and this playstyle is alive and well.

When I complain about modern game design, I’m referring more to the mass market titles like Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons that aim to be and should be the leaders of the pack. The reality is that D&D & Pathfinder are more leaders because of brand recognition than actual design. In truth, D&D in particular as a mechanic hasn’t been relevant or contributed anything to game design worth talking about in a couple of decades. Popular, sure, good game design… hardly.

The Lost Art Of Trusting GM’s

Daggerheart gives you a flexible framework and then invites you to fill in the gaps with your group’s imagination, while being a simple enough mechanic that it leaves the much-needed room for adaptation and messing with the rules. It’s not just a set of rules, it’s a guided invitation to co-create something that’s wholly yours, with the rulebook itself acting like a veteran GM whispering, “Here’s how to make it sing.” I haven’t read something this inspiring and this motivating since the original 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide written by the original Dungeon Master, Gary Gygax himself.

This philosophy runs deep in Daggerheart, embedded in the very DNA of the game. Take Campaign Frames, for example, a mechanic that demonstrates how the system encourages you to mold the experience to your liking, rather than conforming to a preset or default adventure play style. The message is clear: Daggerheart is a rules-light RPG designed for you to build your own vision of an RPG, to create your own tabletop experience.

Yes, Daggerheart has rules. This isn’t a narrative free-for-all any more than AD&D was. The system offers real structure. But where most RPGs clamp down with mechanical rigidity in specific areas, combat being the usual culprit, Daggerheart keeps the same loose, narrative rhythm in every scene. Whether you’re in a fight, a social encounter, or exploring the unknown, you’re operating under the same flexible-open system. There’s no gear shift into “tactical mode.” Instead, mechanics serve the flow of imagination, not the other way around. In this way, it’s a massive improvement on the classic premise of GM and player empowerment.

Daggerheart is a narrative-first game, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. This isn’t a system that offers modular options for tactical-minded players or crunchy alternatives for combat purists. The foundation is story, full stop. But not in the sense of “let’s bolt a story onto a tactical mini game.” No, Daggerheart flips that. It says: you bring the story, and the mechanics will help you realize it at the table.

It shows how much Daggerheart designers trust GM’s to be the foundation of the game and assumes that the players can collaborate and tell story’s without trying to control them with mechanical boundaries.

Read any modern RPG today, and you will read a rulebook that tells you about all the things you can’t do by giving you a broad number of things that you can. Broad means tons of rules, yet it is still effectively a barrier to control. Modern RPGs proclaim to give you freedom, but their rules don’t offer it.

That does lead us to the real question: how does Daggerheart do all of this?

Duality Dice – Fear & Hope

At its core, Daggerheart revolves around a single, elegant mechanic: the duality dice, two d12s, one representing hope (good), the other fear (bad). This system isn’t just part of the game, it is the game. And for players used to the layered mechanics of D&D and its many cousins, that realization might trigger a natural question: “Is that all there is?”

The answer is both yes and no.

If you’ve read anything about Daggerheart online, you’re probably already familiar with the basic concept, but let’s recap for posterity. Whenever a character takes an action that calls for resolution, you roll both dice. The combination of the two determines success or failure. The color of the die tells you something more: was it a success tinged with hope or fear, or a failure steeped in hope or fear? Whichever side wins, hope or fear, earns a narrative and mechanical resource for the corresponding party: players gather hope, while the GM collects fear.

These resources are both fuel for mechanics and the narrative. Hope and fear are spent to power special abilities, trigger story effects, or escalate tension. Succeeding with fear, for example, often means you get what you want, but at a cost. It’s a narrative complication baked directly into the mechanics, with mechanical resources to extend that into the gameplay.

This system is incredibly straightforward, and intentionally so. Its job isn’t to simulate reality, it’s to drive the story forward with risk, reward, and consequences. And it demands storytelling in both directions: before the roll, to frame the action, and after the roll, to interpret the result.

Now, on the surface, that may seem familiar; most RPG’s do something similar, D&D included. But it’s only when you dive into the mechanical use of hope and fear that the game’s true nature reveals itself and, perhaps more importantly, when you realize that this is it, it’s the whole game. Because of this, you might wonder about how different the experience will be as a result.

Everything in Daggerheart flows from this system, social encounters, adventuring encounters, combat, all of it. There are no modes or shifts into alternative resolution systems for specific types of scenes.

Hope gives players the tools to act boldly. Fear gives the GM power to twist the knife. That back-and-forth narrative direction drives the entire game, and there is not much mechanically beyond that. This is essentially where all the “crunch” lives, not in complex subsystems or stacks of rules, or modes of play, but in how these emotional resources interact to build tension and excitement scene by scene, action by action. The game expects you, the player, to fill in the blanks. It’s your story, and how you tell it is the game.

Again, this is not a new concept. Games have been doing this for years, but this is the first time a company with real clout in the RPG world has done that in the modern era, and that’s important. You have to realize that there is an entire generation of gamers out there that only know RPG’s from what 5th edition D&D offers, and that is an extremely limited scope.

For me, it worked in the same way it worked in the 80s and 90s with classic D&D or Vampire The Masquerade. After just two sessions, I won’t pretend I’ve got a complete grasp of it, or even know if it has the long-term legs over a more traditional system. But it felt right, and I suspect that not only will Daggerheart be a thing, it may just very well become THE thing for me because of this simple yet robust and informative dice mechanic. It reminded me so much of all the reasons I got into RPG’s to begin with and how in the modern era the signals of what it means to play an RPG have become mixed up.

That’s because my preferred playstyle is about doing what feels right for the character and for the scene in the moment, rather than letting the system be the filter that defines what is possible or optimal. I don’t want to scan a character sheet looking for efficient moves or actions, I want to act, narrate, and let the dice add to the drama. In that respect, the hope-fear mechanic felt like it had my back. In the spirit of full disclosure, I would describe myself as a theatre kid if I were to categorize my RPG preferences. I write stories, I read stories, and when I play an RPG, I want to live the story.

What I don’t enjoy is being restricted by what my character can do or might be optimally expected to do on paper. If I want to “sweep the leg” because it fits the scene, I don’t want to be told I need a specific feat, class, or ability to do it well. I want the story to lead and the rules to follow. That sort of more structured crunch I like in my board games, card games, and miniature games, that rigid “here are your options” play style fits better with such games. In an RPG, I need freedom, and I don’t want the rules to punish me for exercising my imagination because I failed to make the optimized mechanical choice during some character creation step or advancement.

That’s the bones of Daggerheart’s dice system: a narrative-first system, where every scene, combat, conversation, and exploration flows through the same lens. It’s driven by pure imagination, a pair of dice, and a mechanic that listens and responds with the assumption that your imagination is all that is needed to play a role-playing game. The dice, they are just here to occasionally spice things up, to give you something to play off.

For me, that’s a huge part of why this game clicks. It supports the way I love to play RPGs, the question is, will it do the same for other fans of fantasy games like D&D in the modern era of gaming culture?

The answer, I think, is complicated.

The Challenge

The challenge, as I see it, is that many tables may stumble over what Daggerheart doesn’t offer, namely, the mechanical structure that modern players have come to expect. Things like mode switches from “story time” to “combat time” are deeply ingrained in the DNA of today’s most popular systems. It’s not hard to see why so many games, from Tales of Valor to DC20 to Draw Steel, all echo D&D’s approach: it provides a clear, familiar rhythm. Narrative leads to mechanics, which leads to story outcomes, in clean, modular segments. Daggerheart simply doesn’t work that way. It’s a game where narrative leads to more narrative and the mechanics are a sort of backdrop that occasionally says ,”Well hello there!”, just to spice things up

And that’s not just a missing feature, it’s a statement of intent.

Take something as basic as turn order. In D&D, initiative answers the question: “What happens next?” It’s mechanical, structured, and impartial. In Daggerheart, that question is handed right back to the table. “What should happen next?” What makes sense for the scene, the moment, the emotion of the story you’re building together? There are no infiltrating mechanics that you will trip over that say, “No, you can’t do that, it’s not your turn. That’s just one of many examples of how Daggerheart, as a system, gets out of your way.

For players accustomed to clear procedures and predictable outcomes, that I would imagine is going to be quite disorienting. Daggerheart doesn’t just present a different set of tools, it presents a different point of view about what playing an RPG means. This is a game where the story isn’t something that emerges from the gameplay; it is the gameplay. That’s not just a shift in tone or presentation. It’s a fundamental paradigm shift in what the game asks of its players and how it wants to be played. And frankly, that’s going to be a tough adjustment for some tables.

I don’t think Daggerheart is going to suddenly cause people to abandon the staple playstyle of modern Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, I’m not even sure the two games compete with each other, unless you consider that Critical Role might just use Daggerheart instead of D&D 5e to run its next campaign.

I do think how well Daggerheart will be received and whether or not it will be embraced by the D&D community at large is going to be a lot more artificial than just playstyle preferences and rules system.

People play 5e today in large part because of influences like Critical Role, and it may be that seeing this playstyle in action, as is the case with Critical Role’s current Age of Umbra campaign, might be the thing that enacts change in RPG culture.

Only time will tell how Daggerheart will fare but I do believe it has presented itself as a direct challenge to the ideas that modern RPG culture has about what it means to play an RPG.

We hear all the time from modern role-players that story and narrative are the most important components of playing an RPG, but is that really true? Is that an honest answer about what it’s like to play D&D today for example?

Would it not be more accurate to say it’s a game about fighting monsters? After all, everything about D&D is designed to explain what happens in combat in the most intricate and detailed way; there is an entire book dedicated to the presentation of monsters, and almost every single ability of a class in D&D is exclusively for combat purposes. If you read the book, there is not much in there to suggest that this is a narrative-first game other than the book’s claim that it is. A sort of nod to the base belief modern gamers have created, but not a practical design that says “yeah, this is the game, it’s about story”.

It’s a bit like claiming guns are for protection, which I’m sure is sometimes true, but claiming a 75 MM Howitzer is just another gun is stretching that definition a bit far. That’s kind of how I see D&D, it’s a role-playing game, but it’s stretching that “we are narrative first” claim.

So what happens when the same people who for the last several years have told you that D&D is a game about story, and you should play it, suddenly introduce Daggerheart, a game that is nothing like D&D and is actually exclusively story and not much else.

A game that is designed, from the ground up, as a narrative first RPG and delivers that playstyle unapologetically with no real alternatives built into it. Does the D&D community that has always claimed to be narrative-first adopt it, or has Critical Role called their bluff?

I suspect, the makers of Daggerheart are about to find out just how full of shit the modern D&D community is. I believe the culture and tradition to claim that D&D is about the story is just that, a tradition. They are going to fold as soon as they are handed a game that says, “here is exactly what you said you liked”.

I don’t see the modern D&D community embracing Daggerheart. There is not enough tactical combat, it’s missing a need for miniatures, there is no Monster Manual, and there are insufficient mechanical levers to entertain a community of gamers that is ashamed to admit that they play a game about killing monsters and finding treasure. As an old school gamer who loves that sort of stuff, I don’t fully understand why modern gamers are embarrassed about that, but they are and it’s weird, but the result is the same.

Daggerheart is not for modern D&D players; it’s for people who cherish the narrative, live for the story, and can embrace the ideals of theatre at the table. It’s what modern D&D players think they are, it’s what they insist they are, but the reality is that the overwhelming majority simply are not.

What does this mean for Daggerheart?

Sadly, it means Daggerheart will be much like Candela Obscura, some initial excitement with a fringe community that actually appreciates this playstyle, but it’s not going to shift the mass market away from slaughtering Orcs and taking their stuff.

And that’s ok, Daggerheart in my eyes is not a massive leap forward in modern game design, quite to the contrary, it’s a system that rides on the coattails of many already amazing designers that have forged the way ahead of them. Games like Blades in the Dark, Genesys and the Cypher System, all games acknowledged in the Daggerheart core rulebook as inspirations. These games were all ahead of their time, so much so that even today, most people have no idea they exist and fewer still have actually sat down to play them. But they are games that have forged a way forward for games like Daggerheart to come into being, and for that, I can only be thankful. Making this kind of game more mainstream is good for the hobby.

I have personally been on a quest to find that perfect fantasy RPG for many years, many disappointing years, going so far as to try my hand at game design out of sheer frustration. Daggerheart, in more ways than I can count, is the system I was amateurishly trying to conceive but simply lacked the talent to do so. It brings to the forefront everything I love about the tabletop experience. It has that same ineffable quality of 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, but brings it to the table in an articulated and streamlined fashion, the exact “thing” I was trying to achieve in my own designs.

Suffice it to say, Matt Mercer, this generation’s Gary Gygax, has done the work for us and for me personally, Daggerheart is THE definitive tool I have been thirsty for, for as long as I can remember participating in this wonderful hobby.

In a word, Daggerheart is extraordinary in every measurable way. A premature assessment, of that I’m certain, but one that I’m unlikely to regret.