Daggerheart, the original tabletop RPG from Critical Role’s publishing arm Darrington Press, released on May 20, 2025 and immediately sold out worldwide. Business Insider reported the launch sold out in under a week, with the company’s chief operating officer noting that a year’s expected supply lasted just two weeks. More than a year later, the game has settled into a genuine position alongside D&D rather than fading as a passing crossover product, with new expansions confirmed through late 2026.
This review covers what the game actually does, where it succeeds, and who it is genuinely built for.
What it is
Daggerheart is a fantasy tabletop RPG built around what it calls Duality Dice: two twelve-sided dice of different colors, one representing Hope, the other Fear. Rolling both and adding an attribute bonus determines whether an action succeeds or fails, but the wrinkle is what happens alongside that result. If the Hope die comes out higher, the player generates a Hope point they can spend on special abilities or to assist another player. If the Fear die wins, the Game Master gains a Fear point to spend on complications or empowering enemies. Every roll therefore produces both an outcome and a resource, regardless of success or failure.
There is no traditional initiative system. Play moves back and forth between players and GM more like a conversation than a turn order, a structure the designers have openly compared to Forged in the Dark and Powered by the Apocalypse games. Character abilities are distributed across physical cards rather than buried in a character sheet — players hold five active ability cards at a time, swapping them during rests or under stress, which keeps the available options legible without the page-flipping that higher-level D&D characters often require.
Where its influences show
Daggerheart does not hide its lineage. The core rulebook explicitly credits the systems that shaped it — elements pulled from D&D 4th Edition, Fantasy Flight’s Genesys system, Blades in the Dark, and the Cypher System are all acknowledged rather than disguised. For experienced RPG players, this can feel like recognizing pieces from games they already know reassembled into something new. That is not automatically a weakness. Lead designer Spenser Starke has clearly absorbed a wide range of design ideas and recombined them with enough cohesion that the result feels intentional rather than scattershot.
Character creation will feel immediately familiar to D&D 5th Edition players: background, ancestry, class, subclass, and a fifth element called domain combine to build a character, with every choice feeding directly into the card system. The nine character classes and the six renamed core attributes track closely enough to D&D’s structure that the transition for existing players is genuinely smooth.
What works
The card-based ability system solves a real problem. At higher character levels, D&D players often face what some refer to as ability fatigue: so many options accumulate that deciding what to do on a turn becomes slow, and there is a persistent worry about forgetting something useful. Limiting characters to five active cards at a time forces meaningful decisions about which tools to carry into a given session, and swapping cards during rests adds a layer of preparation strategy without overwhelming new players.
The Hope and Fear mechanic earns consistent praise across reviews for making both success and failure interesting. A failed roll with a Fear result is not simply “nothing happens” — it produces a complication that pushes the story forward, often in a direction the table did not expect. One GM’s account of a smuggling-and-bribery scene that turned into the chime of a guard’s hand on a player’s shoulder, generated entirely by the dice rather than scripted, captures what the system is designed to do at its best.
The game also removes the traditional skill list in favor of a small spread of attributes with suggested uses rather than rigid restrictions. The effect, according to reviewers, shifts the player’s mental framing from “do I have that skill” to “what should I try,” which reduces the hesitation some players feel when a desired action does not map cleanly onto a listed skill.
Where it falls short
The most consistent critical note is that Daggerheart tries to do two somewhat opposed things at once: deliver robust, tactical combat tools while also encouraging loose, collaborative storytelling. One reviewer described this tension directly, noting the game is too mechanically dense to fully satisfy narrative-game purists while still offering enough unique structure to avoid feeling like it is simply trying to out-D&D D&D. Whether that balance lands depends heavily on what a given table actually wants from a session.
The resource bookkeeping can also accumulate. Beyond Hope and Fear, several classes track additional meta-currencies, and GMs are simultaneously expected to manage Fear-driven complications, story prompts, and whatever tracking a given mystery or campaign requires. For a system marketed partly on reducing GM burden, the layered resource tracking is a real point of friction for some groups.
Who it is for
Daggerheart is best suited to groups that already have some D&D familiarity and want a system that pushes harder toward collaborative storytelling without abandoning tactical structure entirely. The built-in worldbuilding prompts, which encourage players to help name locations and answer their own questions about the setting from session zero onward, make it particularly strong for groups that enjoy co-creating the world rather than having it handed to them fully formed.
Complete newcomers to tabletop RPGs may find the combination of dice mechanics, card management, and layered resource tracking more to absorb than a stripped-down beginner system would offer. For that audience, a starter set built specifically around onboarding may be a gentler first step before moving to Daggerheart’s full rules.
The verdict
Daggerheart succeeds at what it set out to do: give Critical Role’s audience, and tabletop RPG players more broadly, a genuine alternative to D&D rather than a reskin of it. The card system and Duality Dice mechanic are the clearest design achievements, solving real friction points that longtime D&D players will recognize immediately. The ambition to be both crunchy and narrative-forward does not fully resolve, and which side of that tension a table experiences more strongly will depend on how they choose to run it. For groups already comfortable with D&D’s structure and looking for something that rewards collaborative storytelling more directly, it is a genuinely strong alternative, not a novelty.
Players: 1 GM plus typically 3-5 players
Publisher: Darrington Press
Released: May 20, 2025
Format: Core rulebook plus card decks, with a free System Reference Document available