Dumping on Daggerheart

Hey, everybody else is doing it! (Or praising it. Mostly praising it, actually.)

I know, Mom, “everybody else is doing it” isn't a good excuse. And Daggerheart obviously isn't and wasn't meant for me. It's not fair for me to critique something that I wouldn't otherwise look at just because everybody else is talking about it, and be like, “I don't like this.”

It's kind of an interesting exercise, though. I collect a lot of TTRPGs, but my collection is very heavy on apples that haven't fallen far from the B/X tree and loosey-goosey narrative stuff. Other than my old D&D 3.5E books, the crunchiest thing I own is probably…Numenera? Star Trek Adventures? (Maybe Stillfleet, but I haven't really dug into that one enough yet to know.)

Anyway, it's interesting to look at a game that's very much not My Kind of Thing. I can poke around for bits and pieces that I do like, and I can also interrogate what it is about This Kind of Thing that just doesn't do it for me.

On that note, why not just dive into the two biggest things that turn me off about Daggerheart? (They're closely related to one another, hence both at once.)

* * *

First thing: It's very clearly aimed at 5E players. Second thing: It's very clearly meant to support a 5E-like ecosystem of player-oriented supplements.

I'm looking at the SRD, but I've watched people flip through the book, and it's laid out similarly. It's an all-in-one document; they're not doing the PHB/DMG/MM thing, thank goodness. The layout is player-oriented and the mechanics are character-forward. Right from the jump, page 4, immediately following the obligatory explanation of what an RPG is and what kind of RPG Daggerheart is: STEP 1. Choose a Class and Subclass.

There are nine classes. They're based on “domains” that form a tidy little wheel. They're largely familiar D&D classes, similar to what's in the 3E or 5E PHB, except that instead of Paladin and Fighter we have Guardian and Warrior, and instead of Cleric, we have Seraph. There's no Barbarian, Monk, or Warlock.

It seems like it must have been intended to make converting a long-running 5E campaign to Daggerheart feasible, but despite copying a bunch of latter-day D&D's peculiarities, it changes enough, both in terms of the class list itself and the mechanics, that that process wouldn't be smooth or easy. (Kind of a bait-and-switch for 5E diehards.)

They've copied about 80% of D&D's character-creation homework. Bards buff their allies via magic songs (or poetry). Druids are shapeshifters. Rangers have animal companions (via a subclass). Rogues can sneak attack for massive damage. Sorcerers are innately magical, whereas wizards are bookish nerds. This stuff might all be second nature to us now, but if you can step away from your knowledge of D&D, it's not self-supporting. None of this makes a lot of sense, and some of it makes none at all, except that, well, that's how D&D is.

The treatment of druids is particularly annoying to me. How did this extremely culturally specific priesthood get turned into a generic fantasy character archetype? And why do they all have the ability to shapeshift into animal forms? Yeah, it's pretty ubiquitous now (thanks, World of Warcraft), but it's a whole-cloth invention of D&D. Why reproduce it here?

And then, on the other side of the coin, why replace the nice, generic Cleric with the culturally specific (i.e., hyper-Christian) Seraph? Where did this come from? Why, in a meta-setting with no other cultural specificity, have we baked into the core rules of the game the notion that all gods, everywhere, are Judeo-Christian? I hate it!

Somewhat relatedly, and perhaps uncharitably, I hate absolutely everything about the domains. A nonagonal version of the MTG color pie underpins all the supernatural powers in the universe? I dislike neat and tidy mathematical magic systems and cosmologies in the first place, but I also hate (returning at last to my second gripe) how nakedly commercial this is.

The nine adjacencies in the color pie create the nine base classes, but there are 27 more pairings just waiting to be named and marketed, and that's just up until they let you double down on domains, or have tri-domain classes, or add new domains or God knows what else. And there are subclasses, too! There's a bottomless well to go back to for character options to sell to players (a market that's what, three or four times larger than the market of GMs?).

The nice way to look at this is that it supports a rich community and secondary market for fanmade content and homebrew, but four decades of living under capitalism have ground my rose-colored glasses to dust and instead I just see a bunch of sockets for FUTURE PRODUCT. Yes, they're a nice indie press, they're not Hasbro, it's a by-gamers, for-gamers kind of enterprise, and yet it still feels like it was built as an armature to plug PRODUCT into first, a game-mechanical structure second, an appealing meta-setting not at all.

And hey, as long as I'm being petty and negative, please forgive an old English major some snooty contempt for bad writing: The names of the domains are a crime against language. This is the foundation of the whole character system and basically the whole game universe (or metaverse), and it's just a bunch of random words! They are all nouns, but that's literally the only thing they have in common. Some are concrete objects that people might wield (blade, codex); others are, or could be, concrete, but aren't implements (bone). Some are abstract personal qualities (grace, valor); others are abstract concepts that people do not personally possess (arcana, splendor). Sage doesn't make any sense at all; they don't mean the plant (although I guess somebody could wield that), and everything else here is a noun, so they probably don't mean “wise,” which leaves us with sage as in “wise person.” How the hell is that a domain? Why not “sagacity”? There's also “midnight.” What was wrong with “night”?

I can't overstate how much this turns me off. True, most people don't care about words, but the kinds of dorks who buy TTRPG books aren't most people. Some of us care about words a lot, and the lazy artlessness of the domain names makes me feel like none of this was meant for me (which, again, in fairness, it wasn't). There's no poetry here, no mystery, no sense that anybody thought long or carefully about how any of the game's systems and structures would interact with its settings and lore.

I'll jump ahead here—we'll never get through character creation at this rate—to note that the game's central resolution mechanic suffers from the same writerly carelessness. The whole “roll 2d12, matching dice crit, add or subtract d6 for advantage/disadvantage, player or GM gains metacurrency depending on the result” thing is solid. But “duality dice”? “Hope and fear”? Why? What do these terms have to do with anything?

I'd love it if there were some kind of cosmologically relevant yin and yang thing going on here, if balance were important and maybe hoarding too much of one metacurrency was a bad or risky thing (good way to get characters to spend the stuff). I'd like it if these things connected to the domains in any way. I'd like it if they seemed to have anything to do with…anything.

Nope. It's just (approximately) 50/50 that something good happens or something bad happens. Of course our elfgames are all about random generation that could be boiled down to flipping coins at the end of the day, but the feeling of, “Ah, I rolled badly but because this is something I'm good at, I get a partial success instead of an out-and-out failure” is strong and reinforces a sense of connection to the character. Having this mechanic just randomly, metronomically award the PCs the good metacurrency or the GM the bad one seems like a missed opportunity to me.

* * *

But surely I like some of it, right? Definitely! This post is long enough already, so just some quick hits:

• The system integrating hitpoints, incoming damage, armor, defense, etc. is great. Sounds like it went through a lot of iteration during the beta, and it came out all the better for it. Shares some relationships with Panic Engine systems (Mothership, Cloud Empress)—light damage that's easy to shrug off eventually adds up to serious injuries, and armor is extremely important. The way armor works here adds some active player decision-making, which is always a big plus.
• I don't love the thematically weak metacurrencies, but I do like the way the GM gains a bit of the “bad” one whenever the party rests. It's a simple, elegant way to put pressure on the party to push their luck and keep moving, especially if you have players who find resource tracking a chore.
• Folding CON into STR and dividing DEX is good. We've all read 30 different blog posts proposing it; it's nice to see games actually doing it (but renaming almost all of the core stats, in a game that in most other ways refuses to leave D&D's stylistic shadow, is annoying).
• The section about playing a wheelchair user is great. It's thorough and explained well, it offers a nice template for homebrew content giving characters integral equipment or unusual movement abilities, and it's undoubtedly infuriating to the worst people on the internet.
• The frog man is EXTREMELY cute. There are some things about the heritage system I don't like (too many of the ancestries are, again, just carbon copies of familiar stuff from D&D, like tieflings and dragonborn, and the community side of things is undercooked), but I will forgive you a lot for the sake of an adorable little frog man. This is practically the one thing I've seen of Daggerheart's meta-setting that actually makes me want to play the game.

I've watched people page through the ancestry section, which is chock-full of wonderful, diverse sketches. Credit where it's due: In contrast to the FUTURE PRODUCT GOES HERE feeling of the domains, classes, and subclasses, the ancestries are very generous. Because I am an inveterate hater, of course, I still have two gripes: The “generic modern fantasy grab bag” nature of the ancestries and the sketchy, underdeveloped quality of the communities contribute to my feeling that the game has no character and no strong identity. And the lead concept artist apparently wanted flipping through the ancestry sketches to feel like “messing around in a character creator,” which…ugh. God save us from the videogamification of TTRPGs (and everything else).

* * *

So Daggerheart isn't for me. No big surprise there; it wasn't aimed at me. I'd happily play it, though, and I found plenty to like about it mechanically, things to borrow or iterate on. I also think I learned a little about what makes a game appeal to me and what doesn't. You can sell me on a game that isn't my usual jam by presenting it in a compelling way. And an uninspiring presentation is going to put me off a game even if it's full of mechanics I find intriguing.

I can't untangle what I don't like about Daggerheart from the fact that it's so squarely aimed at 5E players and videogamers. The strong effort to make it appealing to a couple related products' large audiences is totally reasonable, and I'm sure that the folks who made it this way did so because they themselves are huge fans of 5E and BG3. But I can't see that affection. Maybe it's my own cynicism, but this looks like a commercial product to me, not a labor of love.

Even if it is, is that so wrong? Of course not. It's good that people can make an honest living designing (and illustrating, editing, publishing) games. But one of the things I love about indie games, as I wrote in that diatribe linked above, is the sense of contact with somebody else's personality, with originality, with creativity, with the odds warts and bumps of a singular human mind. I want auteurism. I see some of that in the rules of Daggerheart, but I see scarcely any traces of it in the presentation.