Critical Role's homebrew TTRPG Daggerheart is now in open beta, and the good news is it's nothing like D&D

When I heard Critical Role was making a fantasy TTRPG, I was a touch sceptical—Darrington Press' other project, Candela Obscura, branched out from sword and sorcery, adamant in doing its own thing. 

But when a group of dice celebrities known for playing D&D announce they're making something D&D-adjacent, you wonder why they're even bothering—beyond the looming danger of a second OGL catastrophe putting your suddenly-major company at risk. Fortunately, that's not at all what Matthew Mercer and co have done, here.

Daggerheart, which is available for playtesting right now, at first glance looks like it's trying to don its best robe and wizard hat. Its classes are basically your standard gamut—even 'Guardian' and 'Seraph' are just secret code for Barbarian and Cleric-flavoured adventurers. But the more you look at it, the more you realise: that's not a wizard, that's a bunch of narrative systems in a trenchcoat.

The core thrust of Daggerheart is its 2d12 (two 12-sided die) rolling system—which saws D&D's vaunted d20 in half. You still add both of your results together, but one of them's a «hope» die and the other's a «fear» die. 

If your hope die is higher than your fear die, you get a point of 'hope'—a resource you can spend on stuff like aiding a teammate, much like Masks: A New Generation's «team» mechanic (a system the book mentions as an inspiration). 

On the other hand, if your fear die is higher than your hope die, you get a mixed success. Or—if you flubbed the roll overall—something extra bad happens, and the GM gets a fear point to stab you with later.

I thought 'okay, so far, so good. This is like D&D with some extra zest, that's fine.' Then I looked at hit points, and realised I didn't know what the hell I was looking at.

Players compare incoming damage to their three damage thresholds. In the example above, a character taking 14 damage marks three pips of hit points, but only two pips if they took 9-13 damage. Where this gets interesting is in how