Critical Role’s DAGGERHEART Explained | 2d12 Roll, Cards, DEATH & More!

everything we knew about dagger heart until last week the game is called daggerhart it's fun and fresh update to the fantasy genre of RPGs and it's been designed for long-term campaign play and character progression we've been working on it for a while and we're super excited for you to check it out hey I'm Bob this is where we learn how to have more fun playing RPGs together and critical roles new RPG dagger heart is a 2d12 system can you believe it you know they never said it was going to be a D20 system roll that clip if I had to guess this is a DND clone and why wouldn't it be I mean why wouldn't they if they swap over to dagger heart on their show they will pull that Titanic audience with them so we don't even know for sure that it's a D20 system but as someone said online critical role's logo is a D20 so this is a pleasant surprise of course you're still going to be rolling dice to beat a DC Target number you still have a character with a class and hit points and renamed versions of race subclass and the six core stats but daggerhart also has Unique Mechanics for dealing and reducing damage boosting your allies roles relying on cards rather than flipping through a rulebook players adding to the narrative and even permanent stat loss and player character death in a blaze of glory that's right no death saves High fantasy detailed character creation without making characters Invincible superheroes as Matt Mercer said dagger heart is truly going to be a fresh take on fantasy RPGs and thanks to comicbook.com we got a whole article breaking down everything about dagger heart that was revealed last week at Gen Con I'm going to share my perspective on it here but the original article is linked in the description where you'll also find a link to this video's sponsor Gilman's guide to speed by only crits yes the same folks who made the Bob World Builder metal dice set and many many more awesome dice are launching their first big 5e Source book of high-speed Arcane Punk gameplay new races new classes and subclasses new Feats and backgrounds spells monsters magic items puzzles riddles and rules for building and racing your own Vehicles turbocharged by Magic the book includes over 30 pre-made Vehicles you can get cards for the Monsters and magic items a GM screen and of course your choice of awesome dice or go all digital with a vtt package but be sure to pack Gilman's guide to speed on Kickstarter in the first 48 hours to get a free set of dice in an exclusive dice bag just remember to use the link below so they know who sent you now I'm going to be making parallels between dagger heart and DND because comparing and contrasting to something we already understand is the easiest way to learn something new but dagger heart really is doing something new here where D D is a 1d20 roll High system with strength dexterity Constitution intelligence wisdom and Charisma dagger heart is a 2d12 roll High system with strength agility Precision presence intuition and knowledge so we can immediately see some obvious connections or overlaps between those stats but what's really exciting even though it's such a simple Improvement is that daggerhart has dropped ability scores leaving only the modifiers so to speak rather than having a stat score of 16 and then Translating that to a plus three you just have three for example dagger heart is by no means the first game to do this but the reason that's so important is that it signals to us as players and game Masters critical roles Darrington press is not afraid to shed the vestigial elements of DnD that make it a little more complicated than it needs to be the dagger heart designers are ready to streamline and innovate another notable change they said goodbye to the D20 this was kind of shocking because while the initial announcement never said it would use a D20 someone pointed out to me at the time well the critical role logo is a D20 so I don't think anyone expected 2d12 but what this means is we're now operating on a bell curve from 2 to 24 not nearly as tight as the curve of 2d6 powered by the apocalypse systems but not nearly as swingy as a 1d20 system on each roll you're still trying to beat a DC determined by the game master but you're rolling with 1d12 representing hope and 1d12 representing fear and adding them together as noted in the article getting a 9 on the hope Dice and a 7 on the fear dice is a 16 with hope while a 7 on the Hope Dice and a 9 on the fear dice is a 16 with fear success with hope gets you some kind of benefit while Success With Fear means there's still some kind of cost to your success and failure is failure back to the article doubles on the d12s results in a critical success which is a success with no negative consequences and usually a narrative bonus on the result so we don't know exactly how this works yet I dare you to count how many times I say that in this video but if we take that literally doubles on the d12s means getting two twelves two eights or even two ones is a crit and please check my math but I think that means that you have a 1 in 12 chance of critting every time you roll which would mean significantly more critical successes than we're used to in d d back to Hope and fear the article says that rolling with hope during combat means the players retain initiative and a player character gets to go next a role with fear hands initiative back to the enemy characters and often comes with some sort of narrative consequence that the game master warns players about in advance for instance still quoting here my rogue character made an agility check to run past one enemy to attack a more vulnerable foe the roll was made with fear so the enemy I ran by was able to attack me as I sprinted this fluid form of initiative could be fun or it could be confusing if there's only one enemy in five PCS but the PCS keep rolling with fear does the one enemy get to keep attacking over and over I'm sure there's a great answer to that because action economy is such a foundational element to these kinds of games and just like d d there's probably certain classes or features that may allow your character to manipulate their initiative order we just don't know yet we do know that success leading with hope also builds up hope points that can be spent to boost roles according to a video I found from someone else who got to play test dagger heart at Gen Con linked below you can spend two points to boost your own role or one point to boost an allies role therefore it is optimal to help your allies instead of yourself personally I think building that sort of cooperation into the rules is awesome if you agree give this video a thumbs up and how do you boost those roles with hope points you ask by granting Advantage dagger heart advantage means you add 1d6 to your role and of course disadvantage means you subtract 1d6 very simple but with an average roll of 3.5 dagger Hearts version is a little less impactful than how the same mechanic Works in 5e however we do not yet know if those extra d6s can stack up my guess is that they can't by default but some character features mail out we'll have to wait and see so for a quick recap dagger heart is 2d12 roll high with strength agility Precision presence intuition and knowledge you roll against a DC set by the DM and if your hope D12 is higher than your fear D12 you rolled with hope or vice versa rolling with beer comes at a cost and rolling with comes with a benefit like earning a hope point you can spend two hope points on yourself or one point on another player to Grant advantage on a roll in the form of plus one D6 let me know down in the comments how that sounds to you while we shift gears from core mechanics into character creation then we'll touch on a couple rules we learned about combat damage like we mentioned earlier for the main stats your character just has a few small numbers instead of big numbers that need to be translated into small numbers the article States players have four points to spend across six different stats however this photo of the journalist character sheet makes it look like they added two points to agility and precision but also got to take a negative one in knowledge and move that point to presence maybe so we don't know exactly how that works yet but Darrington press is clearly going for a more balanced approach than rolling stats randomly and this point by style all also allows you to choose the stats you want in order to build your character's strengths and weaknesses the way you want that kind of control and depth in character customization seems to be a big feature of the game as we should expect from a group whose success largely comes from creating deeply fascinating characters oh yeah oh all right time to find my friends and save the world then where D D characters are built around race or species background class subclass and Feats dagger heart characters are built around ancestry Community class subclass and domains taking those from the top ancestry is race just like it is in Pathfinder and Shadow dark and so far we know the ancestry options include katari straight from the character sheet those of katari ancestry resemble a cat in humanoid form typically recognized by their soft fur large ears and tail with a feature called feline instincts on any agility roll you may Mark a stress to re-roll your hoped eye if you do take the new role instead and that's the only ancestry shown in that article but in that video I watched they said there were also dwarves stone giants ganasi Damon as a tiefling equivalent and turtle folk now I'm guessing dagger heart has its own names for a stone giants ganasi Turtle folk and this is almost certainly an an incomplete list because that creator also said there were no elves or humans available in their play test in a fantasy game without elves humans or any kind of little folk besides dwarves would be pretty inconceivable what you may have also noticed is that the ancestry part of the character sheet is actually a card sitting on top of the sheet this is fascinating to me zooming out we can see this sheet is actually designed for a rogue and then they have cards for their subclass Rogue nightwalker their ancestry katari and their community darkborn and the author points out that this means that there's zero flipping through rule books because everything you need to know about your ancestry or subclass or whatever is right on the card do these cards also mean dagger heart is going to be sold more like a boxed board game than an RPG rulebook does this mean in the future they will release expansion packs of cards with new ancestries and subclasses rather than needing to print entirely new books I don't know but I'm excited to find out as for this specific character's dark born Community the picture doesn't have enough pixels to for me to decipher what its features are and the other video didn't expand on community as far as I can tell so we just don't know much about this yet but it definitely seems like an analog for character background occupation profession Etc by granting one or two cool features for your character we also don't know about the other options for classes besides two named in the article the guardian and the serif like a paladin I'm guessing but I can tell you that the Rogue has two starting moves called cloak and sneak attack cloak says when you move into a location where no enemies can see you you can cloak enemies can't Target or see you even if they move into line of sight while you are cloaked you are no longer cloaked after you move or attack when you leave cloaked to make an attack the role has advantage and sneak attack if you have advantage on an attack roll or an ally is in melee with your target always add a d8 I think to your damage roll when you use a sneak attack you may also spend any number of Hope before the attack roll and if it is successful also add a number of d8 I think equal to the Hope spent so these Rogue features are very similar to what we see in DND or even Dungeon Crawl Classics but they're solid the cloak feature is very straightforward you hide until you move or attack with advantage and the sneak attack is cool because you can add even more dice if you have hope to spend meaning your allies might be able to boost your damage on a sneak attack honestly I don't know for sure if that's how it worked and I wonder if anyone's actually keeping track of how many times I say that but that's probably how I would run it more importantly it doesn't say there's any limit on how often you can try to cloak or use sneak attack or abuse any of these features as you'll see in a minute to me that means you can either use these things whenever you want which would be pretty awesome or you can use them once or a number of times equal to your level or equal to some other prominent number on your sheet before needing to recharge with rest or spending points to regain them so please lend me your speculation on how these class features might work down in the comments while we move into subclass features that somehow seem both more and less well defined the subclass card indicates that their spell casting stat is agility interesting and it also comes with two features Dark Cloud make a spellcast testing roll 12. on a success create a temporary Dark Cloud that covers any area within close distance of you anyone In This Cloud can't see out of it and anyone outside of it can't see in you are considered cloaked from any enemy it blocks line of sight from and slippery you may spend hope to immediately slip out of anything that is physically keeping you from moving that second one is super simple and I love that for Rogues the first one is slightly crunchy but it looks like you roll against a static DC to cast then being in the cloud automatically cloaks you for cohesion with your other Rogue abilities what's interesting to me is that dark cloud uses terms like temporary and close distance instead of defining specific spell durations ranges and areas of effect while also bringing up line of sight again so it seems like we're using general ranges instead of five foot squares which I like but still using line of sight for some tactical positioning and we can only guess that temporary and close and dispels general area of effect are all defined Elsewhere for the GM to Reference last part of character customization we have a domains which seem to work a lot like Feats but also spells we know from the article that the characters choose two domain abilities at the start and can gain more when they level up with up to five domains active at one time and if you cut it that statement confirms dagger heart uses character levels but there's no mention yet of XP so I'm guessing it's Milestone or story based because that would make the most sense for critical role but on that note they did not comment to the journalist about whether or not dagger heart would ever replace d d as their main show we will see anyway this character has the domain spell reign of blades which spends hope to conjure throwing knives and the rest is cut off in the photo and the domain ability Deft deceiver which allows you to spend stress to get advantage on a role to deceive someone so what is stress well I know from the article that you sometimes Mark stress instead of taking damage and I'll explain when that happens in a second but as far as I could tell I couldn't find anything explaining what happens when you build up so many points of stress so that's another thing we'll have to figure out later damage and hit points on the other hand were pretty well explained and are very interesting let's check out that sheet again this character's daggers do two D12 damage sounds a little overpowered right wrong you roll that damage against your targets minor damage threshold for example this character's minor damage threshold is nine so the damage roll were under nine they would Mark stress instead of losing HP if it's over nine but doesn't exceed their major threshold they mark one HP if it's over their major threshold but doesn't exceed their severe threshold they take 2 Hp and if it's severe they take 3 HP saying that out loud sounds kinda complicated but for me just looking at the sheet with the three thresholds laid out makes it very easy to understand but tell me what you think about this little HP subsystem in the comments and if you're caught up on just how little those HP numbers seem only one two and three hit points these characters only had six total HP but obviously those six hit points could account for several attacks using this system where dagger heart gets even more interesting and tactical is how armor works now I'm not certain about this but it seems like dagger heart has no armor class I assume you have to roll against something to hit because we already know that rolling with hope in combat affects initiative and such but we do know that armor was described in the article as a damage reduction mechanic as you can see on this sheet light armor has a score of three meaning this character can reduce incoming damage by three points when they're attacked and hopefully that reduction could lower the damage from severe to major or major to minor or minor to only marking stress instead of any hit points apparently you can do that armor damage reduction up to three times and repair your armor during a short rest admittedly this approach to attacks and damage does read as being more complex than just rolling to hit rolling damage and subtracting that damage from your hit points however it seems like this approach will allow for more hits on your turn and more damaged ice rolls and we all know that more hits than misses and more dice than fewer dice means more fun and unlike DND character death is actually a thing that can happen from the article finally we should mention the death mechanic of dagger heart which is a lot more meaningful than what we've seen in games like Dungeons and Dragons when a player runs out of hit points they have three options they can choose to die in a blaze of glory with an automatic critical success on their final action they can choose to become scarred and permanently remove one of their hope slots to recover or they can risk it all by rolling their hope and fear Dice and letting the dice determine their fate if the Hope dice is higher their character recovers but if the fear dice is higher they die the lead designer mentioned that there's only one Resurrection spell in dagger heart and that it's a one-off ability so it seems like death will have a higher impact and Stakes than in other fantasy ttrpgs honestly I love those options Auto crit on one action as you die sounds like something I went to Homebrew into my games immediately and rolling with a 50 50 shot of life or death is basically something I was already considering doing but specifically I was thinking about the 50 50 shot that's another way to use the cool coins that I've home brewed into my game one other detail from the article describes how the game master of this play test who was the lead designer of the game by the way ask the players to fill in descriptions about the town they explored the monsters they fought and how daggerhart truly made quote the GM and players equal Partners in the storytelling but that's also something that could have just been the GM's personal style I've run several sessions of DnD where I asked players to make decisions about their Locale their enemies Etc and it's always a ton of fun so it'll be interesting to see if this more equal and more genuine form of collaborative storytelling is really built into dagger heart any more than it's already an option in DND my hopes are that when the dagger heart rulebook comes out they don't make it super redundant and contain all the same information that's already on the cards that way we might actually get a digest size rule book or at least one that's under 200 Pages for once I also hope the cards come with the rulebook and do not have to be sold separately and whether sold separately or not I hope they make a dice box that contains like five or six pairs of Hope and fear dice because that would be way more convenient than having to pull out d12s from a bunch of different die sets and my overall impression is that dagger heart could easily go to toe-to-toe with Pathfinder and even d d in terms of what the game offers a high fantasy role-playing game experience with powerful customizable characters and dice mechanics it'll never beat d d and name recognition but it already feels like something I want to play because it sounds like a slightly more rules light version of DnD 5e with easier character creation based on Switching out a few cards and more firmly built in collaboration with how easy it is to gain and share advantage on dice rolls but I beg of you tell me in the comments what do you think of dagger heart based on everything we know so far the core mechanic the stats Advantage classes ancestries damage hit points there's already so much to talk about and I will do my best to reply to any questions then if you're interested in the idea of players controlling more of the story you should absolutely check out this video on how the players are the ones who balance combat encounters all the time don't forget to like this video share it with your game group subscribe for more and consider joining patreon to directly support what I do but in any form thank you for your support and keep building and I hope everyone liked my slideshow

Channel: Bob World Builder

Views: 174,849

Keywords: dagger heart, candela obscura, darrington press, d&d, d&d 5e, how to play d&d, d&d player guide, dungeons and dragons, bob world builder, dungeon master guide, dnd 5e, critical role rpg, matthew mercer, matt mercer

Id: U0MZojA7PuY

Length: 23min 6sec (1386 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 16 2023