Former D&D leads call Daggerheart a 'fundamental shift' for tabletop RPGs

Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford — two of the lead designers behind D&D 5th edition — joined Critical Role's publishing arm Darrington Press in 2025 to work on Daggerheart, a TTRPG they didn't originally design. In a new video interview with Polygon, both designers open up about what that transition felt like and why they're excited about where Daggerheart is taking the genre.

Perkins says the move wasn't as daunting as it might seem. "Even working on D&D, we were building on the work of previous editions," he says. "It's not like we were creating a game out of nothing." Crawford echoes that, pointing out that Daggerheart draws from a wide pool of TTRPG influences — not just D&D. "So many different RPGs inspired the Daggerheart design team," Crawford says. "They managed to capture the lightning in a bottle of the things that many different design teams and groups have been exploring, and they synthesized it into this game." Some of those influences are visible in specific mechanics — the Syndicate Rogue's Well-Connected feature, for instance, is essentially the "I know a guy" house rule that D&D players have been using organically for years.

The bigger philosophical shift is around collaborative storytelling. D&D supports it, but it's not baked into the rules — it depends on the DM to run the table that way. Daggerheart makes it structural. Campaign frames in the game directly address players and prompt the GM to hand world-building decisions to the table at specific moments. Perkins, who has spent decades writing adventure content for D&D, says that design approach is genuinely new territory for him.

"As we create more adventures for Daggerheart, we're finding ways to bake that into the adventure design, so there are points in every adventure where the players are actually steering the ship," Perkins says. "This is a fun shift for me as someone who has spent a literal lifetime working on adventure content. It's a fundamental shift." With two of D&D's most recognizable designers now championing Daggerheart's approach, the game is shaping up as a serious contender for players ready to try something that rethinks how tabletop adventures are structured from the ground up.