Daggerheart Selling Out?

It is nice to hear that Daggerheart is selling out in some stores. D&D 2024 landed with a wet thud, YouTube went to war with D&D content creators, and the hobby needs a hit. The last excitement we had was Shadowdark, and that game is still doing well. But we need a new game that sells out and creates a buzz outside the hobby, and I hope Daggerheart is it.

This is no longer about D&D; it's about the larger hobby.

The Critical Role (CR) audience needs this, and keeping D&D as the flagship of the streaming show has a limited life. This was inevitable, and I am happy to see the game selling out and people outside the hobby, or those in the CR sphere, taking notice, and the game becoming a hot commodity.

I would love to see Daggerheart on the shelves of Target and Walmart, and selling there as well. We need a massive hit that they cannot keep in stock.

Daggerheart innovates and plays to the strengths of the streaming show model. It simplifies the boring and bookkeeping parts of the game and creates narrative pool systems that drive tension. People understand "hope and fear points," and those can be clearly displayed on a streaming show's screen.

Spell slots? Dozens of hit points? Tracking individual reuses of powers equal to an ability score bonus? Lists of abilities on a character sheet six pages long?

Those suck, take up the streaming show's time again and again, and the average "viewer at home" does not grasp those concepts as easily unless they understand the game.

D&D 2024 was designed to please a subset of existing D&D players. It made no efforts to streamline or simplify, and in many cases, it went into far too much depth that was ever needed or asked for (weapon masteries).

Daggerheart was designed to expand the audience to people who may watch the show but find the games too challenging to grasp and master.

Is it for everyone? Not really. My other "blue game" is Tales of the Valiant, a game I never apologize for, and one that does generic 5E fantasy far better than D&D 2024, which is tied to decades of settings and nostalgia that it has the same problems as any IP tied to that much canon and legacy content. I don't want the D&D planes, villains, product identity, worlds, or other cruft that gets in the way of imagining my own worlds and settings.

Daggerheart goes a step beyond this, and forces you to define a world every time you create a campaign, which is another smart move - putting your players' imaginations first, and your "legacy nostalgia IP" second. But as my "fall back" version of 5E, which I will now know as it is and as I like it, ToV will exist past D&D 2024's expiration date and far past the next incompatible version of D&D.

The new "blue games" of 2025 are taking over my shelves, and there is always a place for Shadowdark.

Daggerheart is a brilliant game that aligns with their brand, strengths, and message.