Daggerheart review – The narrative tabletop RPG of my dreams

Realistically, I can only squeeze one or two TTRPGs into my weekly schedule. I occasionally cram a curiosity one-shot into my calendar that lets me test a new system, but there’s a ceiling on how many long-term games I can carry without collapsing. It’s a common problem that drives players to crown a ‘hero’ game, their go-to rule set for campaigns that stretch over months or years.

Perhaps it’s survivorship bias, but the tabletop RPGs with decades of branding under their belts seem to fare best as ‘forever games’. My original go-to was Call of Cthulhu. Then, it was Dungeons and Dragons. There are many lesser-known systems that have captured my heart over the years, but none have risen to ‘comfy slippers’ status, where I’ll return to them on a weekly basis for three years straight.

Daggerheart might be my new forever game.

What is Daggerheart?

Daggerheart is a mid-weight heroic fantasy RPG with a serious emphasis on storytelling. It bridges the gap between combat-focused systems like Pathfinder or D&D and more narrative-focused games like Powered By The Apocalypse or Forged In the Dark.

None of Daggerheart’s mechanics are revolutionary, but it blends existing design ideas together seamlessly. Its dice system is asymmetric, with GMs rolling the dramatic yet unreliable D20, while players opt for the still-heroic but more predictable 2D12. We’ve seen both in many systems, from classic D&D to Warhammer’s Wrath and Glory.

The D12s are divided into Hope and Fear die. When the former rolls higher than the latter, a player gains a Hope to spend on additional abilities. In the other scenario, the GM gains a Fear that they can spend on their own plans. They also usually get to interrupt the players’ narrative by taking a turn, introducing monsters and consequences to the current scene.

Daggerheart’s other signature feature is its dedicated deck of cards (something likely inspired by co-designer Spenser Starke’s days working on Alice Is Missing). Each character class consists of two Domain decks, and these are the primary pieces of your character build. As you level, you’ll gradually pick up more cards from either domain (or another if you choose to multiclass), creating a vault of spells and abilities to choose from day-to-day.

Beyond this, things feel familiar yet distinct. Encounters are resolved with skill checks or attacks, depending on how much violence the situation calls for. The former situation more closely resembles a narrative game, where rolls are used sparingly and player creativity drives the scene. The latter has echoes of a Pathfinder or D&D, but it’s far less concerned with the mathematics of moving from one side of the room to the other.

Who is Daggerheart for?

Daggerheart is for the storytellers. By that, I mean people who are attracted to tabletop RPGs as a vehicle for narrative. They are more concerned with creating meaning than optimized characters that squeeze the most value out of each roll.

That being said, Daggerheart caters to players who aren’t ready to give up their dungeon crawls entirely. It’s by no means a wargame, but its classes offer enough decision points to keep more strategic gamers enthused. Satisfying combos are possible, both on your character sheet and in combat.

I’m a long-time Dungeons and Dragons player who loves the process of building a character, but I’m not interested in optimization. I also chafe when it comes to checking nitty-gritty rules during play, and I’d prefer to hand-wave these details away to focus on the flow of the story. Essentially, I’m the perfect candidate for a Daggerheart campaign.

Speaking of campaigns, Daggerheart’s storytelling favors long-term tales over one-shots. There’s nothing to stop you running single games, but much of the book’s advice and structure is geared toward longform collaborations between the GM and their players. Daggerheart gives you the tools to build entire worlds from the ground up, and that’s something that’s tough to explore in three to six hours of play.

What’s good about Daggerheart?

Daggerheart is a game that genuinely delights me. That’s the only word I can use to summarize its core rulebook. I’m talking about delight of the Fey kind, the sort you get when turning up to a Wonderland feast with all your favorite foods on the menu.

It’s a product that packs plenty of whimsy in. From gorgeous art of frog and mushroom creatures to a Delicious In Dungeon style adventure setting, Daggerheart puts glee front-and-center in its games. The inclusion of character cards, tokens, and map-designing mechanics make games feel wonderfully tactile, from session zero up to level 10. Daggerheart puts the play back in roleplaying, encouraging you to approach your hobby with childlike wonder and restriction-free creativity.

That’s not to say Daggerheart is all rambunctious romps and silly scamps. Matt Mercer’s Age of Umbra setting proves that Daggerheart is well-equipped to tell more serious stories. The core rules also feature several in-depth essays on modern-day roleplay that are both insightful and genuinely useful for upping your roleplay game.

The most tantalizing meal at Daggerheart’s table is player choice. This is a game that encourages players to contribute to worldbuilding at every turn. The system doesn’t use many concrete mechanics to achieve this, but it structures every aspect of play around this philosophy.

I could technically ask my players to decide what a monster looks like in any RPG session – but actually doing so feels uniquely Daggerheart. It also feels immensely joyful, and it was by far my test group’s favorite aspect of the game.

Daggerheart creates space for this open-ended creativity in two key ways. The first is by giving immense support to GMs. Beyond reminding you to ask for player input, Daggerheart isn’t afraid to lift the curtain and show DMs how its design choices create a balanced, fun encounter. Its examples and advice encourage experimentation, and even the least confident GMs could be shepherded into creating their own monsters and adventures – all with support from their players.

The second method is through the rules themselves. Some people may critique Daggerheart for not including any innovative new mechanics, but I think this was by design. From the moment you begin reading the rules, Daggerheart feels familiar to someone who has played at least one RPG before. If that RPG is D&D, you’re already off to a running start. That familiarity makes it easy to sit down and start playing.

In play, Daggerheart is simple enough that it leaves room for the GM to daydream. When you’re not worrying about nitty-gritty rules that may affect the unfolding scene, you have more headspace to listen to player suggestions, jot down details, and throw in creative ideas that your players can build upon.

Speaking of nitty-gritty, there are many minor details in Daggerheart that sparked serious joy. Many of them actively solve problems that I’ve had in other tabletop RPGs.

From personalized death mechanics to GM PC rules, everything is designed to reduce GM workload and increase player autonomy. Daggerheart’s damage system eliminates swing-y dice rolls that can turn an epic boss fight into an underwhelming one-shot. The countdown systems are an easy way to structure encounters, both in and out of combat, and environments having their own stat blocks gives you new ways to spice up a scene. Countless small moments of joy add up to a system that sparks joy.

What’s not good about Daggerheart?

Despite this, Daggerheart still has its limitations. The first of these is that Daggerheart suffers from a serious lack of content. Where D&D splits its GM advice, monster stats, and character options across three books, Daggerheart squeezes the same into one. Players will get a decent amount of mileage from the different class and ancestry options, but GMs will quickly run out of pre-generated stat blocks when creating custom adventures.

This is easily solved with more Daggerheart books, and Darrington Press has made it clear that it’s planning plenty of supporting supplements. New classes are already in playtesting, and early designer interviews promise even more character options and dedicated setting books.

Daggerheart’s other problems are slightly less simple fixes. Many of them stem from the system’s dual identity. Daggerheart attempts to be both a rules-light narrative game and a combat-focused heroic fantasy. Occasionally, when these two concepts meet, there is tension.

For example, the cards that fuel each character’s domains are tactile, flavorful, and easy to read. However, their limited size restricts the rules explanations they can provide. That can lead to confusion and a lack of clarity when trying to establish how an ability resolves in play.

Similarly, where the rulebook focuses more on stories than strategic builds, character creation is quite unintuitive. Daggerheart doesn’t stop to explain which stats are most important for a class, and it’s tough to understand what cards, gear, and classes pair well together without arduously flipping back-and-forth between chapters. There is one complete example of a character build in the book, and it doesn’t explain the logic behind many of its choices.

These crunchy bits would be considered essential in D&D character creation, but Daggerheart overlooks them. Its sort-of-similarity to Dungeons and Dragons causes further issues in play. Part of these problems comes from player expectations, but the system itself is also partly to blame.

D&D is so pervasive in the world of TTRPGs that players often make assumptions about competing systems. They might be surprised when that game isn’t structured like Dungeons and Dragons. Daggerheart, with its classes, ancestries, and seconds-long combat turns, closely resembles the all-consuming D&D monolith. Even when it does away with five-foot squares and initiative counts, it still can’t entirely shed the expectations of a D&D-like game.

This actually disappointed some players at my testing table. They found it tricky to provide meaningful narration when every turn was still broken down into seconds-long segments (something Daggerheart never explicitly says is the case but certainly implies when listing what can be achieved on a turn).

After gleefully setting up an epic Tag Team roll, my players were disappointed to learn that they couldn’t deal any spectacular damage thanks to the damage threshold system. The rules that prevent unsatisfying, swing-y turns also took away some of the ‘heroic’ feeling of a heroic fantasy game.

It might be wrong to criticize Daggerheart for not being the system that players initially expect it to be. However, I believe it’s worth flagging, given how much the rules rely on the social contract of gaming. Daggerheart is a strong system that’s seriously in danger of falling apart if the people playing it misunderstand its vision.

The game openly encourages collaboration, but it has few safeguards against anyone who still believes that RPGs are power struggles between GMs and players. Players who lack confidence or fail to throw themselves into the spotlight regularly will suffer in a game without traditional turns and initiative, but Daggerheart’s only solution to the situation is to rewrite aspects of its own rules. Either the GM must introduce a more structured turn system, or they must dedicate far more of their resources to micromanaging the table.

Daggerheart’s conflicting genres often chafe when they come into contact. But, however occasionally inelegant its design may be, the system is still so much fun. The delight it can deliver only increases as players have their expectations smashed. Daggerheart asks to be broken down and reformed, moulded to become your perfect hero game. Beyond its hype-fuelled launch, I can see the system having a lot of longevity.

Want to share your own thoughts on Daggerheart? I’d love to hear them over in the Wargamer Discord. Or, for more on RPGs, here’s all you need to know about DnD classes and DnD races.