Our ongoing Daggerheart campaign led us further away from the DnD comfort zone towards a charming high-fantasy TTRPG bursting with anime goodness.
In addition to being one of the best TTRPGs in its own right, Daggerheart has given GMs of all kinds an excuse to look beyond their role-playing comfort zones and to try new things. Having had their eyes opened to new possibilities by Daggerheart’s narrative-first storytelling mechanics, my players have begun to clamour for new, exciting experiences. This led us to ‘BREAK!!’, an award-winning fantasy TTRPG that takes the traditional d20 system, pioneered by Dungeons and Dragons, strips out the faff, and adds a healthy heaping of anime-inspired whimsy.
A cursory glance at BREAK!!’s Kickstarter page reveals that the title raised a whopping $667,519 (£492,452). Having gotten my hands on a copy, it’s easy to see why. For starters, character creation can take as little as 15 minutes, offering a beginner-friendly experience that won’t bog your players down in unnecessary detail.
Once you’re in the action, BREAK!!’s elegant, central mechanic does a great deal of heavy lifting. Outside of combat, to achieve something, simply roll a d20. If you score under or equal to your relevant stat, you succeed. In combat, you’ll need to add a single modifier to your roll and roll equal to or above an enemy’s defence. These modifiers are a direct result of your class (known as Callings in BREAK!!), so they don’t require any tedious calculation on the part of players or DMs.
In addition to these simple, streamlined and beginner-friendly core mechanics, BREAK!! expertly evokes a sense of adventure and wonder in line with the video games and anime which inspired it. Contrary to Daggerheart, which, as written, is setting agnostic, BREAK!! offers a distinctive, post-apocalyptic world for its players to explore, where even the sun itself was shattered by conflicts of the past.
In our small, local TTRPG ecosystem, Daggerheart has created room for new systems to bloom across players’ collective consciousnesses. If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to try out a new system for yourself, there has never been a better time.
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