Ring Side Report- RPG review of Daggerheart Playtest

Product– Daggerheart Playtest

System- Daggerheart

Producer– Darrington Press

Price– free here https://app.demiplane.com/nexus/daggerheart/sources/playtest     

TL; DR– RPG fusion! 93% 

Basics– The Critical Roll bunch have an RPG!  Let’s look over this d12 fusion RPG!

Basics- This is a 2d12 rpg.  You roll both, add abilities and statistics, and see if you hit a desired DC.  Pretty simple for the basics.

Hope and fear or 2d12- The basics are not too strange, but when you roll, you roll 2 different colored d12.  One is your hope and one is your fear.  If the hope beats the fear value, then you gain hope.  If the fear beats the hope, then the GM gets to stop the action and jump in or gets to bank a fear for later.

Using hope- Hope is used to either help yourself or an ally when they roll.  You can spend hope to give your friend an additional d12 hope die and choose the better of them.  Also, you have a set of experiences.  These are akin to skills in DnD.  When an experience you have makes sense for a particular action and you want to, you can spend hope to gain the value of an experience as a bonus to the roll.

Combat, turns, and damage- This is a VERY heavy roleplaying game with less focus on crunch.  Combat is not round based.  Players can do any action from using abilities or attacking and place a token on the action tracker.  This continues until a character rolls higher on the fear die.  Then the GM gets to play using each token on the action tracker to do something such as attacking, using abilities, and removing conditions on enemies.  In either case, if an attack is made, the attack goes against an evasion score.  If the attack hits, then the attacker rolls damage.  Damage does not just reduce hit points by an amount, but instead the attack goes against damage thresholds causing between zero and 3 hit points.  If the attack hits but fails to hit the lowest damage threshold, you take stress.  Stress is another stat and represents your body gradually being beaten down, but not enough to hurt you hard.  Stress can also come from the environment or abilities you or enemies have.  In addition, armor allows you to reduce damage, but it also gets beaten down with use.  If you choose, you can reduce damage by your armor value, but you have to check off a use.  No uses left means you can’t use your armor.  No stress left means you can’t use that ability and all rolls against you have advantage.

Using Fear- Fear is the GMs version of hope.  Fear allows enemies to do some actions, for the environment to do some actions, or even for the GM to add additional tokens to the turn tracker.

Alright, thats the basics, let’s dig in.

Mechanics or Crunch– The mechanics here are interesting.  It’s not deep enough to be DnD, but its also not deep enough to be Shadowrun. It’s heavily based on the Cypher system.  That’s not bad, but it’s also really up in the air.  If you want consistency, this won’t be the game for you.  If you can handle the give and take of this game, it’s a solid game.  5/5

Theme or Fluff–  For the story, what’s here is good, but it’s also not done.  It’s got a solid adventure, but you won’t see much world building here, but more is coming as they write more.  I don’t hate anything, but I need more details in the base game, not just the adventure.  4.5/5

Execution– This is an interesting one.  I love online materials, but Nexus does not have an app.  I also don’t like the lack of an index.  If it’s present, I have a hard time finding it, so that’s just as bad.  The basic functions work well, but again there is no app.  So, using a phone for this can be a bit of a pain. The adventure is nice and is fun.  The character PDFs are nice as well and have solid help sections for the players.  4.5/5

Summary– This RPG leaves me optimistic.  The mechanics and theme are interesting.  I want more.  Give me an app and give me some more world building, and I’d be even happier.  That said, if you need hard crunch this won’t be for you.  But it’s free, so check this one out.  At worst, you see the system building before your eyes.  It’s also an interesting mix of several different parts from other RPGs.  You got bits from DnD all the way to the cypher system.  I like those, so I like this as well.  93%