news: 2025-09-29

The Dice of Daggerheart: Using Mechanics to Reinforce Theme

Last month, as I was going through the Daggerheart Collectors’ Edition unboxing, I mentioned wanting to dig more deeply into the mechanics of Daggerheart. Specifically, I want to talk about how the game designers at Darrington Press have built a motif around their core dice mechanic, and how that motif helps shape the narratives that occur at the table.

Let me start by saying that the game very clearly wears its evolutionary history on its sleeve. It’s neither a blessing nor a curse to say that Daggerheart bears a lot of resemblance to Dungeons&Dragons. They both use a set of six basic character attributes, though D&D puts their statistics through a translation layer first. They both use character classes to divide up abilities, rather than, say, using a points-based system to make every character custom like GURPS or Champions. They both use the full suite of “D&D polyhedra;” which is to say the d100, the d20, the d12, the d10, the d8, the d6, and the d4 all make some appearance in some roll somewhere; instead of opting for a single die like Shadowrun of World of Darkness; or for some other mechanic like Saga Machine’s playing cards or Noumenon’s dominoes. And they both use a level system to improve characters in broad chunks as opposed to improving individual skills or powers at their own pace. Taking a massive step backwards and surveying the full field of game systems, Daggerheart’s origins become very evident.

Again, this is not a negative. This is to situate the game and its creators within the wider design space. Matt Mercer and the team that have put on Critical Role have been playing Dungeons&Dragons for a living for ten years; it’s very understandable that when they felt the time had come to perhaps take control of their own content engine, they would stick to familiar design principles. An entirely new system would require a longer learning curve for not only core crew but guests wanting to join them as well. It’s not an insurmountable issue, to be sure; they launched Candela Obscura to great effect, but they’re also not trying to run a CO campaign as a primary entertainment offering on their premier webservice.

As it is, I’ve heard a few disappointed grumblings around the community about the choice to use D&D2024 instead of Daggerheart for Critical Role Campaign 4. All I’ll say about this is, I have to believe everyone working there must be hugely disappointed to make the choice to launch Campaign 4 on a competitor’s platform when their own is right there, waiting. I cannot believe this decision was made lightly or in haste, especially given how much steam they’ve been trying to put into Daggerheart as a system! Yes, I agree this is deeply unfortunate; and also reading Polygon’s take on it, I have to agree. Given how many other things are changing at once – new setting, new primary taleweaver, larger cast, new format – asking everyone to also adopt a new system feels like one leap too many.

During Age of Umbra, the existing cast of Critical Role have to repeatedly look up basic rules; Daggerheart is based on D&D, but it isn’t D&D, and it doesn’t play like D&D. This is, I think, a good thing overall! It’s also enough of a change that if I were banking my signature series of my streaming service for the next two years on it, I would want my core players to have had more time to get familiar with the rules. I have no doubt that they will move to Daggerheart, when enough of their cast and peripheral crew have had time to learn how to play that using it won’t feel clunky on the main stage.

So, with all that said, let’s start digging into those mechanics. The primary way that a player changes the state of the world is through an Action roll. That is, a player names an action that they would like their character to take, the taleweaver determines the character trait against which the player is rolling – which determines the base modifer to the roll – as well as difficulty of that action, typically ranging from a 5 being a trivial task to a 30 being a legendary feat. The player then adds any relevant Experiences or other modifiers – e.g. advantage or Rally dice – and rolls the Duality dice, summing everything together for a final result.

This result is compared to the difficulty, and if the result is higher the roll is a Success, otherwise it’s a Failure. In addition, the higher of the two Duality dice is named as the roll being with that die, so a roll with a larger Hope die would be with Hope; the player gains a point of Hope if they have room to do so. A roll with a higher Fear die is with Fear, and the taleweaver gains a Fear token if there are any available from the stack. If the two dice are the same, the roll is a critical success, which counts as a roll with Hope and also clears a Stress point from the character.

A Reaction roll is a roll that’s triggered in response to a taleweaver’s move, and also uses the Duality dice, but is neither with Hope nor with Fear, as Reaction rolls specifically do not generate Hope and Fear. This is the first important piece of game design that I want to identify; only player Actions drive the economy. A taleweaver can’t spend a Fear to trigger a nasty move, demand a bunch of Reaction rolls from the players, and then reap the bounty of unfortunate rolls that result. Only when the players choose to change the state of the world do the stakes change. This puts a lot of visible weight on player choices in ways that D&D doesn’t.

Further, there are no neutral outcomes; every roll is either positive – giving the player Hope with which to power abilities, execute joint maneuvers, or give advantage to other players – or negative – giving the taleweaver Fear with which to make extra moves, and use and enhance special abilities of enemies and the environment. Moreover, when the taleweaver takes any action adjudicated by a roll, they use 1d20, not 2d12. Again, only player actions can generate Hope and Fear, and every player decision changes the stakes of play.

Now, to be sure, this isn’t the only way Hope and Fear accumulate; if the party chooses downtime, a character can choose to Prepare, which regains them 1 Hope. However, the taleweaver regains 1d4 Fear after a short rest even if nobody chooses to Prepare, and after a long rest that goes up by the number of players at the table; this mechanic is clearly weighted in favor of the taleweaver, to discourage players from relying on it as a method of getting their Hope back! Available in times of need, absolutely, but not to be taken lightly or without consideration. Daggerheart wants you to make choices you might regret, because the alternative is waiting for the end.

So, how do these mechanics play into their motifs, and how do they help shape the story? Well, let’s start by looking at the basic fact that the players and the taleweaver are not operating on the same curve:

This shows the the odds a taleweaver will succeed on a roll of a given difficulty, assuming no modifiers; versus the odds a PC will succeed on a roll of the same difficulty, again with no modifiers. On unmodified rolls, the average character roll will be three points higher than the average taleweaver roll. Looking at difficulty 10, we see the taleweaver die will roll it fifty-five percent of the time, while a PC will pull it off seventy-five percent. At difficulty 15, those percentages shift to thirty and thirty-eight. And at difficulty 20, they’re five and ten. Plus, notice that the PC scale goes all the way out to 24, which the taleweaver scale stops at 20. These might not look like much, but before I unpack this any further, I want to offer a quick lesson in how to read percentages; it’s the key to understanding why these small changes in small number make such a big difference.

I find that the easiest way to think about these things is to shift from thinking about “odds of success per attempt” to “number of successes out of a 100 attempts.” An action that succeeds fifteen percent of the time will succeed that fifteen times out of every hundred attempts. So out of every one-hundred attempted DC 10 rolls, the PCs will have an extra twenty successes on which to count. Out of the DC 15s, they can count on making eight more successes than the taleweaver does. Even at DC 20, they can still count on twice the successes over the long term. Even knowing the odds are against them at that level, the players can rest easy knowing the odds are against the taleweaver even more!

This becomes even more pronounced at higher difficulties; a level-one PC with a +2 in a trait, a relevant Experience, and advantage from an ally has one chance in twenty-five of hitting a bullseye on the moon:

Lastly, I’d like to look into the critical rate, since they’re a net driver of excitement at most tables:

The taleweaver, as in D&D, gets a critical hit on a natural 20; a player, however, rolls a critical success when Hope and Fear tie. This mean, on average, that five percent of all taleweaver rolls will be critical successes, compared to eight percent of player rolls. This translates to sixty percent more player criticals than taleweaver criticals over the course of a campaign, which is not an insignificant weighting of the dice in favor of the players! And this is is just how the dice are in Daggerheart; none of this is homebrew. These advantages are baked into the rules of the game!

So how does this play into the motifs of Hope and Fear?

First, by “putting a thumb on the scale” for the players like this, I think the game system can encourage what feels like encounters that ought to be above the PCs’ weight-class. With dice weighted to the players’ advantage like this, a player coming to Daggerheart from D&D will almost certainly feel a bit like a powerhouse, what with the baked in advantages in rolls. It certainly won’t feel like it on the first three with Fear, but over time the numbers can’t help but be what they’ll be. This game is, I think, more generous with its successes to players on the same scale as D&D overall, and that will make it feel more high-powered.

Of course, there is no such thing as “overpowered” within the confines of the system. Eventually there will be a player base that grows up with this arrangement of the dice as natural, and I suspect that to them, D&D will likely feel risky and heavy, with the even odds between player and taleweaver coming across as a distinct disadvantage compared to Daggerheart. I look forward to the discussions between native Daggerheart players and their D&D-playing compatriots in in future years.

Second, by making player rolls the primary driver of Hope and Fear management, Daggerheart in some sense demands both player engagement, and a consideration of consequence, in ways D&D doesn’t. D&D by default assigns no stakes to a failed roll other than the character not getting what they want. A failed lock-picking attempt results in the lock remaining locked; a failed turning of the undead just means the zombies are still trying to eat your brain. In Daggerheart, statistically, a little under half of all rolls will empower the taleweaver and up the stakes, make the situation worse, or further imperil the characters; that failed roll could mean a broken pick and a jammed lock, or maybe more zombies just crawled out of the ground. Of course, in D&D a taleweaver can still impose those negative outcomes, but doing so would be homebrew, not rules-as-written. In Daggerheart, these are part of the basic mechanics of the game.

And at the same time, not engaging in Daggerheart means not recovering the Hope needed to sense the deadly poison trap or to banish not just the zombies but the vampire controlling them. I think there’s very much an attempt to encourage a sense of no guts, no glory to Daggerheart that, comparatively, D&D’s more cautious approach to resource management with its six-to-eight encounters per long rest lacks. PCs can hold at most six Hope; the Taleweaver can carry at most twelve Fear. At that point, spending them is essential; they’re meant to be used.

This is, I think, what Darrington Press means when they describe Daggerheart as a system where “[taleweavers] and players share in narrative worldbuilding.” Every other action roll, on average, will generate a Hope. Roughly every twelfth action roll will both generate a Hope and clear a Stress. Every opposed roll subtly favors the player by a small but noticeable amount. The risk of generating Fear for the taleweaver on any given roll is almost always outweighed by the guarantee of giving them Fear during the next downtime, which encourages players to push forward the narrative until their characters are spent. Every advantage is given to the player who embraces action over passivity and agency over observation.

This is, I think, also reinforced by the explicit options of both the Blaze of Glory and Risking It All, should a character ever drop to zero hit points. While there do exist TTRPGs that simply do away with death as a mechanic – Lancer being the first that comes to mind but there are others – Daggerheart replaces D&D’s extended agony of death saving throws with a fast-and-quick choice: pass out and leave the fight until you’re healed, take one guaranteed critical success and then die forever, or risk coming back at full or dying on the spot depending on the outcome of the Duality Dice.

Multiple times during Age of Umbra, the cast tested their luck. The dice were harsh but fair.

Returning to our question, how do the mechanics influence the stories that get told at the table? I think that the Daggerheart rules will drive two distinct flavors of stories:

• Taleweavers that enjoy hoarding their Fear can use its presence at the table as a looming threat. This can be accompanied by increasingly dark tonal shifts in the narrative as the palpable aura of imminent danger mounts. There will come a point at which all of this accumulated Fear must come crashing down. For now, each poor roll, each needed break, just keeps adding to the doom pile. This can be good for building complex lair encounters, hordes wanting lots of spotlights, and big boss fights with powerful attacks.
• Taleweavers that enjoy spending their Fear can take advantage of a few poor rolls to start throwing curveballs at the players, prompting hasty reactions that can in turn call for more rolls! Rather than letting fear linger around, this manifests in the form of a constantly mounting pressure campaign as one thing after another starts to go wrong in the wake of a few unlucky turns. This looks to lend itself to diamond heists, races against time, setting or beating records, and other encounters that need to constantly feel the heat.

Of course, there is no One True Way for a taleweaver to run a campaign. Different taleweavers will lean on different mechanics to accomplish the similar stories, as well as using the same tools for vastly different tales.

Lastly, I want to talk just about the act of rolling two dice instead of rolling one. I am not part of the Critical Role team, and I cannot imagine how the conversations went, but I’ve played enough D&D myself to know the excitement of getting to roll with advantage, which in that system means rolling with 2d20 and taking the higher result. Rolling the Duality Dice in many ways feels a lot like “rolling with advantage” in that you’re not just looking as you are comparing; there’s a more complex emotional arc as you see the result of the first die, and then look at the second. I think it’s a small thing, hardly noticeable on its own, but I think it does factor into the emotional impact of a roll; it makes it feel every choice feel just a bit more impactful.

Speaking of advantage, that’s one of the few places where I think Daggerheart’s new mechanics fall down just a little bit. I think I understand why they chose to make it a flat 1d6 added or subtracted to the final roll – it lets the player spending the Hope participate in the roll, which spreads the emotional excitement, it’s simpler math than pretty much anything else they could’ve chosen, and it pairs neatly with disadvantage being a 1d6 subtracted from the final roll. That said, as I noted above it puts the spread of potential skill rolls available to a player early on extremely high; while I won’t say there’s to build to, there’s something about unlocking levels of ability that weren’t possible before, and as we say earlier the cap to a Daggerheart character starts fairly high already!

That said, given everything else that’s true about Daggerheart, I’m not sure there’s an easy fix, or even if it’s worth “fixing.” I’m not even entirely sure it’s broken. Daggerheart bills itself on big stories and bold narratives; if low-level players can achieve impossible feats in their worlds given the right setup, that doesn’t seem unreasonable for the kinds of stories the designers of Daggerheart seem likely to play, or to want to encourage. This is a game that tells you one of your options at death is one guaranteed success followed by permanent oblivion and the chance to roll up a new character. The team at Critical Role has a ten-year history of telling epic adventures, and that shows in how they designed their game.

Ultimately, Daggerheart is here to get the players off the sidelines and into the mix. Characters cannot help but have an impact on the world, meaning players are thrust into a level of agency with which some players may be unfamiliar; but not in a way that feels unfriendly or unfair. Instead, the rules invite players to take risks by giving them better odds of success than the world around them, balancing the chance of triumph against the risk of strengthening their foes. This push and pull of character empowerment and threat escalation, combined with the cap on resources and the steady availability of chances for more, creates a drive to spend liberally, knowing the best chance of recouping your losses is to make a choice, and change the world.