Daggerheart Review

Written By Felix Twingrin
“Truly great game for roleplay nuts, and homebrew heroes with just enough tactical crunch to keep the game spicy. Badger is a fan! ”

Daggerheart core book and card box

Welcome all to the first of our Badger Tales TTRPG reviews. A full video review will be coming soon, which will be posted here when it’s done, so keep your eyes peeled for that. In the meantime, we thought we would share some of our thoughts and feelings about Darrington Press’ new TTRPG, Daggerheart!

Kicking off the bat, let’s make the claims and aims of this review very clear. We are not going to do a full rundown of the rules and how to play this game. We will be posting videos on how to run it in the following weeks, though. No, the aim of this review is to highlight the core things we liked and disliked and come to a conclusion on who we think this game most suits. That way, you can draw your own assertions on if this system suits you.

There is also soooo much more we want to talk about here, but we simply don’t have the space, so you’ll have to check out everything we have to say when our video review comes out soon.

We also want to note that we only write reviews for games we have run campaigns for. In the run-up to this review, Badger Tales has run three different campaigns:

The game held up with each of these settings we ran and flowed well with adjustments and small elements of homebrewing.

Also, the elephant in the room: this review contains a lot of references to D&D 5e and the 2024 edition. This is kind of inescapable, as the audience for this game often finds it filling the spot of an alternative to D&D simply because it sits in the most popular market of generic fantasy TTRPGs. We adore D&D and have no goals on bringing it down but we do want to highlight what this game does better, and worse.

What is Daggerheart

Designed by the folks at Darrington Press, headed up by the master of masters Matt Mercer and Spenser Starke (who you may know from the interesting TTRPG texting experience Alice is Missing), Daggerheart is best described as a rules-medium, roleplay-heavy fantasy TTRPG with a d12 system and the use of spendable resources known as Hope (for the players) and Fear (for the Storyteller).

The game is designed at its heart to be built around collaborative storytelling, giving more narrative power to the players and having a high level of accessibility. To undertake any action in Daggerheart, you generally roll 2d12—one marked as your Hope die, the other as your Fear die. Depending on which rolls higher, you can elicit different results. This means you can pass a check with Fear, succeeding in your action but also giving some ground and allowing the Storyteller to not only gain a Fear token but steal the spotlight and highlight some threat.

Cutting things to the clear, we’ll start things off by saying this… we really, really like this game. Not only that, but the team has pretty much universally agreed that it is an improvement for new players entering the TTRPG space when compared to D&D and Pathfinder. From setup to playtime, it takes significantly less time and flows a lot easier.

Home for the Homebrewers

This game has homebrewing in its blood and is determined to bring you out of your creative shell—something we absolutely LOVE at Badger Tales. Everything from the weapons to the abilities is described with minimalism and vagueness in order to provide as much room as possible for creative interpretation and adaptation.

For example the various ancestries (Daggerheart’s species) are all listed with a variety of options on how to depict them in your game, preventing you from feeling hamstrung or controlled. Do you want your Katari to be more feline or anthropomorphic? Well, the book comes with detailed drawings showing the various different ways you can have them, so your setting might have more animalistic or humanoid ones depending on your preference. What’s more, the ancestry abilities fully outline what I mean when I refer to adaptable vagueness.

When you pick Katari, you get the following abilities:

Feline Agility: When you make an Agility roll, you can spend 2 Hope to reroll your Hope die.
Retracting Claws: Make an Agility roll to scratch a target within melee range. On a success, they become temporarily vulnerable.

Daggerheart Ancestries, simple and adaptable.

And that’s it. All the heavy lifting of your ancestry is done by those two sentences. Not only does this create ease in character creation, giving you less to remember but it also gives you room to adapt and add to for homebrewing. These sentences could easily be reasigned to a wolflike race or a race with spectral spirit claws, its very much in your hands. This design philosphy perminates the game bringing everything to the roots, so you can fill in the blanks yourself.

The counter to this is that it takes away some of the min-max depth that people are used to when picking a species, ability or other. There are no Strength benefits to being an orc, for example. We, however, really like this, as it puts the power in the hands of the player to define their character’s originality. Between this and your community choice (Daggerheart’s replacement for background), you don’t have to be bound by the typical orc stereotypes but can make your character what you want. Through applying this to all aspects of the game you end up giving much more control into the hands of the players to make something that really feels like their own.

Substance and Style?

One of the more bizarre complaints I have seen online about Daggerheart is a dislike of the game’s setting and tone, often calling it too cutesy or not gritty enough—which is such a strange criticism considering the game has multiple settings within it (or Frames, as they are referred to in the book), including three that are very gritty, with one even being heavily inspired by the Dark Souls and Elden Ring games. What’s more, each aspect of the game can be adapted to your likes and dislikes very easily. I mean, just look at the adversary pack and the Demon of Avarice—you can’t tell me that isn’t verging on eldritch horror.

Demon of Avarice

I believe these people complaining about this are simply looking at the book’s artwork and formulating this opinion from that, which I do get—the outward appearance of the game is on the higher-fantasy scale, more akin to The Legend of Vox Machina than D&D’s more general Lord of the Rings aesthetic (unsurprising considering the Critical Role roots of Daggerheart). I would say that there is still plenty of gritty, dark, and beautiful artwork in this book, so if you’ve got this idea in your head, I encourage you to give the game another shot.

Shut Up and Fight

Combat is a delight in Daggerheart! It is smooth as butter and truly flowing in a way that I haven’t experienced in a game for a while. It takes the flow of games like City of Mist and injects just enough crunch to keep the game grinding along in spectacular fashion. There is no turn order in the system, with the game flowing back and forth between the Storyteller and players through spotlighting. Players lose the spotlight when they fail a roll, roll with Fear, or the GM spends a Fear. This means encounters are always moving and players stay on their toes.

The cards and abilities being so simple lend to the dynamic, roleplay-heavy nature of the combat, relying on Storyteller and player interpretation of events rather than hyper-specific rules you have to search a book for. In fact, Daggerheart has almost no conditions, with the core three being ‘hidden’, ‘restrained’, and ‘vulnerable’. All conditions are cleared by a roll (decided in agreement between Storyteller and player) and a description of the manner of escape. This provides much more room for creative approaches to issues, allowing players to apply their strengths with their imagination. Wanna get out of the monster’s grapple? You can wiggle free with Agility, force out with Strength, or Presence your way out with a charming word.

The downside to this is that many abilities can feel samey—if many things all cause ‘vulnerable,’ what makes any of them special? The game answers this by juggling its various resources of stress, armour, hit points, Hope, and Fear, with abilities causing stress damage to enemies (preventing them from using their abilities) or bumping up your allies with more Hope to do their cool stuff.

Daggerheart tops this off with a delicious set of systems such as its terrific death mechanic, giving players control of their characters’ final moments and allowing them to make a heroic last stand should they feel the moment upon them, or to safely slip into unconsciousness but forfeit their role in the fight.

Now, fights aren’t perfect. Though movement around the field is better, it sometimes ends up with the typical D&D lockdown, with players stuck in one position with an enemy wailing on each other till the hit points reach zero—but that is rarer. We would like to see more abilities that bump up the dynamic flow of combat in the future.

What’s more, Daggerheart has deftly broken its adversaries (enemy NPCs) into categories such as Skulk, Leader, and Minion, giving them abilities that synergise and enable them to feel like dynamic foes. When paired with the ‘environment’ stat block, this means you can have epic-feeling encounters with plenty of room for Storyteller input.

There is a small issue here, though. As Daggerheart is built on a threshold system for its damage, you can only ever do 1–3 hit points of damage no matter your attack unless you use the ‘Brutal Critical’ rule, which allows you to deal 4. Even then, most standard adversaries have hit points of 4–5, meaning there is almost no way to wipe them out with a single hit. The game makes up for this with ‘minions,’ which multiple can be killed with one roll, but it still feels strange that a level 10 character can never immediately slay a tier one ‘Jagged Knife Bandit.’ And yes, with the nature of Daggerheart, those two should never end up fighting, but it does take away some of the joy of the massive damage levels you can dish out in other games.

Overall, we feel that Daggerheart’s combat is just crunchy enough to be engaging but well-covered in narrative sauce to keep it exciting and immersive.

Too Many Pieces!

My god, this game has a lot of stuff. By the time you are ready to play, you will have your character sheet, your character cards, and your Hope tokens. Now, that may not sound like a lot, but it quickly becomes a bigger deal when you take in the connotations.

Ability cards, dice, hope tokens, fear tokens…. oh my…

Remember those ancestries and communities I mentioned before? Well, they are on cards too, which is great for quick checking but adds to your growing deck. Now add your abilities, your subclass, then take out the abilities that have their own tokens and put tokens on them… you get the picture. If you are playing Daggerheart, you’d better have a large table and not spill anything.

Added to this is the issue of setup and takedown. Usually, only one person has bought the pretty book with all its lovely cards, and they don’t exactly want people walking home with those expensive cards. So the first section of every session tends to involve 15–20 minutes of finding everyone’s cards, remembering what they picked, and re-handing them out again. This gets doubly frustrating when cards have specific token usage on them and players forget what Hope level they were on. Now imagine that but running for three different groups a week… yikes.

There are benefits to the bittyness of this all. Everything feels tactile and solid in your hands. It feels great to put down your spell card when you cast, like you’re in a game of Magic: The Gathering. It also feels awesome to pay and receive Hope. In our games, we used little coin tokens that were a delight to spend and amass.

There is also a lot of content that really didn’t need to be separate. As much as I adore the tactile nature of the cards and the Hope tokens, they both could be tracked on a sheet. Hope is on the sheet already, but there’s no space to add your chosen cards, meaning the system seems to be asking you to spend money on more cards. You can, of course, print out the cards for free online, but they never feel the same and quickly become damaged.

This all leaves a slightly sour taste in the mouth as you consider the monetisation elements of this game coming together. They have already started selling class card packs and no doubt will also soon release official Hope tokens and Fear counters. Will the void content eventually be removed and added to the next book with a big price tag? And will each player end up having to buy all this fiddly stuff to feel a part of the game properly?… Well, maybe—and we have to be honest, that is a worry.

Well That’s a Bit Rogue

Some of the classes in the game and some of the general ideas are… well, odd. The worst offender of this is probably the game’s rogue class. Daggerheart’s class system is built on overlapping domains that combine to make a class. For example, a warrior is made up of the domains of Blade and Bone, and the guardian right next to it is made of Blade and Valor, and so on and so on till the circle completes with Sage and Bone to make a ranger. This is a very cool idea, and pretty to look at when you see the domain circle, but it means you end up with some classes that come together with abilities that don’t really fit what their normal utility is.

Daggerheart Domain Circle

The rogue gets meshed between Grace and Shadow, with Shadow being less a domain of stealth but more a subsection of casting with skulduggery implications. This hamstrings you into having to have a rogue that has half its abilities based on elegance and attracting attention to itself and the other being quite spell-based. You essentially end up with a charming caster.

Now, don’t get us wrong, that concept is awesome—but it’s absolutely not a typical rogue and definitely forces players to move down a route that doesn’t suit their character concept. You want to play an Ezio Auditore-inspired assassin? Well, you might be out of luck, or even better off making them a warrior. I am aware they have implemented the assassin class over on the void to attempt to fix this, but we are focusing this review on the book you have paid for, not the extended content.

Other classes also have issues, with fan favourites like the warlock not even making the cut. The seraph, for instance, is caught between a subclass that gives you wings or one that gives you a returning weapon. So all you clerics looking to play something a little more grounded and low-magic are going to have a tough time.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we adore this game. It most definitely has its faults—from the number of its pieces to some strange design choices—but it pulls through with a delightful focus on roleplay and creativity, giving Storytellers the room to make their own settings and players the room to make characters they really want to play.

If you are eager to try Daggerheart for yourself or want to jump into one of our outstandingly immersive settings, you can book now through our online enquiry form here:
https://www.badgertales.co.uk/services

Felix Twingrin
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The Harper and The Sea