Daggerheart is considering the removal one of one of its combat mechanics – the Action Tracker subsystem. ComicBook had the opportunity to play through a session of Daggerheart hosted by Darrington Press, Critical Role’s game publishing arm. The session, run by lead designer Spenser Starke, featured both character creation and a brief combat session with a notable exclusion – there was no Action Tracker. During the session, Starke explained that he and co-designer Rowan Hall were trying out combat sessions without the Action Tracker system, thus removing a subsystem from play. In versions of Daggerheart made available to players, players placed tokens into the Action Tracker, and the GM used those tokens to activate various enemies on their turn.
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While activations continue to bounce back and forth between the players and the GM with no set turn order (players go until a player rolls “with Fear”, which triggers the GM’s turn), Starke tested out using the Fear resource to activate multiple adversaries on a turn. Each adversary beyond the first one cost one Fear to activate, so a GM could decide whether to spend Fear to activate more adversaries, or keep their Fear reserve for other actions later in the combat. To help balance out the Fear economy, Starke mentioned that there would be ways for the GM to potentially restock their supply during short or long rests, but that they were still testing whether to still move forward with this shift. Please note that this was a playtest session and there’s no guarantee that the Action tracker subsystem will be removed from the final version of Daggerheart.
Daggerheart closed its open beta playtest last month, but it’s clear that the developers are hard at work at tinkering some of the game’s subsystems to make it as refined as possible. The tabletop roleplaying game is a mix of narrative-focused gameplay with a bit of mechanical crunch and synergies, although the rule system is lighter than Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. While the game system supports standard high fantasy play, the most recent playtest uses Campaign Frames to support more specific types of stories. Each campaign frame provides setting details about a specific world and goals the party might have, along with specific subsystems and new mechanics that can be utilized to support play within that world.
Daggerheart will be released in 2025.
