The Darggerheart game is the elephant in the room with 5E players. Few want to criticize it because there are so many fans, yet secretly, many of the 5E stalwarts want to savage it because it threatens the player base.
Daggerheart is the logical evolution of the Critical Role fanbase. They must get their fans on their own game and control their destiny. This is a good thing, in fact.
But what happened to D&D when Critical Role gained popularity is very telling. Notice how the 2024 celebrations of D&D omit or reduce Critical Role and, honestly, most mentions of the game as a spectator activity. This is all about the spectator sport of D&D, and this is the impact of Twitch and YouTube on the game.
Critical Role drove D&D for a few years and steered the entire game into "story gaming" mode like a FATE. I am hesitant to call 5E—as it exists today—a dungeon game. The DMG doesn't help anyone play that way, and every expansion leans hard into that "narrative bucket list" sort of "watch this or that group of YouTubers" play through a "shared experience."
The focus on character and identity in 5E has been so overwhelming that those who love pure dungeon crawls had to go off and make their own game, Shadowdark. The original designers of 5E, who still defend the numerical and mechanical aspects of the system, don't see the metric ton of my character as an ABCD... combo of all these particular terms and choices meaning different things like background, homeland, ancestry, etc. - along with class, multiclass combo, subclass choice, etc.
There are too many choices in 5E.
Every one of those choices is a custom set of rules.
It is killing the game.
And some Open 5E designs make it worse.
In GURPS, the skill system is the same and works the same for everyone. The same goes for powers, advantages, disadvantages, spells, and subsystems. I play Dungeon Fantasy, and does the same advantage work the same for any character type or monster? Does one skill work the same for everyone? Yes, to all of that, it all works the same. All combat options work the same way for everyone, and designers can't write custom combat moves into subclasses.
In 5E, you get a subclass, giving you custom-designed abilities for which other games would have skills. It is frankly a horrible design, inconsistent to hell, forces you to buy new books for new skills, nothing works the same way twice, and overloaded cruft and bloat that game designers solved in the 1980s.
In games that do it right, 'faith healing' is a skill on a skill list. Clerics, druids, paladins, and anyone with that skill can buy it. It works one way for everyone and is written down in one place. In 5E, it can mean a dozen things in a few hundred subclass choices and works differently for all of them.
These combo choices of heritage, ancestry, culture, background, class, and so on are further subdivided into deeper and deeper levels of madness—with unique abilities, powers, and skills written into each one! What's next? We need a choice for education, society, early development, family, and outlook! And every one of these choices needs a spaghetti-coded list of designer-imagines custom powers. If you went to college, please write down your ability to use a 'deduction' power! And reduce study time by 20%! That sounds great! Was your family life 'one of many'? Please write down a 'lost in the crowd' ability that gives you an advantage in not being noticed in crowds! Public school or private? Oh no, you need a new power for those!
And I am writing down huge lists of custom abilities and powers with no end. Everybody wants something for every unique part of their background and life. This is a terrible design trend of snowflake-ism, where we feel obliged to give everyone extraordinary power for every mundane and everyday aspect of their life. Subclasses are the same way. Are you a crusader paladin or champion? Oh no! More powers are needed because you are a particular word!
5E gets sickening after a while with this pandering custom options and power tossed at you like candy you don't want or need. The designers blew it by replacing universal systems with letting designers write custom-written tripe powers and abilities. This killed the game as if a diet high in cholesterol clogs the heart. The core books are fine, but get over three shelves of 5E books, and your game dies.
Will Critical Role force its viewers to sign up for D&D Beyond, potentially exposing them to other streaming shows being pushed via that platform? Or will they release their own rules-light story game with easier character creation so viewers can "play along on their own?"
The answer is easy.
Control your platform.
And rules-light story games come out every day. Good ones are tough to create, harder than a game with defined systems, but they must ultimately serve your market's needs and goals. Daggerheart is a game "that looks and plays like the show."
And that is all it needs to do to be successful.
You can't judge Daggerheart on the merits of 5E, and in doing so, you miss the bigger picture.
5E's mess of designer-driven, custom-hacked works differently every time. Duct-taped-together characters are a game design that locks you into a single platform because character complexity is so high you need a computer to figure it all out. You don't see it in a single character at level one. Give them a few levels, and once you pile on paragraphs of special powers, rules introduced in subclasses, and other custom designer flourishes, you realize every character is a trap.
With a monthly fee.
You are paying Wizards to control the complexity of the game they create. They need an incentive to simplify this design, and even Open 5E falls into this trap. At this point, D&D and 5E are D&D Beyond. Many say they can only figure the game out with it.
That is the plan.
The game was designed that way.
Daggerheart is an off-ramp for Critical Role's casual fans; no matter the quality or design, it is good for them. It will get better with iterations.
All they need to do is keep their audience.
