Daggerheart's Card System: Essential Feature or Elaborate Gimmick?
Why Critical Role's latest RPG might work better without its signature feature
When Critical Role's Daggerheart launched, its colorful array of cards immediately caught the TTRPG community's attention. The core rulebook prominently features these cards as a defining characteristic, creating the impression of a deeply modular system where cards drive meaningful tactical decisions and character customization.
But after digging into the actual mechanics, I discovered that different picture emerges. While visually impressive, the card system may be solving a presentation problem rather than a gameplay one.
The Numbers Game: What You Actually Use
Let's cut through the marketing appeal and examine what these cards actually do during play.
Your Active Arsenal is Surprisingly Small
Despite the abundance of cards in the box, your character uses a surprisingly limited number at any given time:
One ancestry card with two features
One community card with a single feature
Up to three subclass cards (Foundation, Specialization, and Mastery)
Exactly five active domain cards from your "loadout"
That's roughly ten cards affecting your character during any session—not the dozens the visual presentation suggests.
While you'll acquire 11 total domain cards by max level, only five can be active at once. The remaining six sit in your "vault"—inactive until you spend Stress (in most cases) to swap them in during downtime.
This creates a peculiar disconnect: hundreds of cards ship with the core game, but even a max-level character only uses a fraction of their personal collection at any moment.

Where Cards Shine (And Where They Don't)
The card format excels during character creation, especially for newcomers. Physically comparing options side-by-side—weighing the Clank's "Purposeful Design" against the Drakona's "Elemental Breath"—creates an intuitive browsing experience that pure text lists can't match.
For new players building their first character, spreading domain cards across a table and "shopping" for abilities provides a tangible sense of character building that feels more accessible than poring through rulebooks.
Once the game begins, however, the cards introduce several pain points:
The Loadout Shuffle: At each rest, players must decide which five domain cards to keep active, potentially reorganizing their entire setup based on anticipated challenges. This transforms character optimization into a physical sorting task.
Reference Speed: During combat, players flip through individual cards to verify ability details and usage limitations. This card-by-card checking is just slower than scanning a character sheet.
Table Real Estate: Ten active cards per player can dominate table space, competing with maps, dice, Hope tokens, beer and other gaming materials.
The Character Sheet Alternative
Darrington Press provides character sheets that accommodate all this information without cards. Those two ancestry features? They fit in a small text block. Community features require even less space. Domain abilities, despite their apparent complexity, reduce to simple entries: name, recall cost, and effect.
Checkboxes easily track which five domain abilities are currently active, while a complete character overview allows players to scan their entire capability set at once—no shuffling through individual cards.

The Design Philosophy Disconnect
What Cards Actually Achieve: Beyond their utility as learning aids, cards serve important non-mechanical functions. They provide undeniable visual appeal and product differentiation in a crowded TTRPG market, signaling a different kind of gaming experience that distinguishes Daggerheart from traditional book-based RPGs.
What They Don't Achieve: Unlike traditional card games, Daggerheart features no hand management, card draw mechanics, or resource depletion systems. Domain cards function as slowly rotating ability references rather than consumable resources, eliminating the strategic depth cards typically provide in other games. True modularity would create meaningful card interactions, but most Daggerheart domain cards provide independent abilities that don't generate emergent combinations. The few that do interact work through simple numerical bonuses rather than any mechanical synergies.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Daggerheart's underlying game—with its emphasis on collaborative storytelling, flexible rulings, and streamlined core mechanics—aligns perfectly with modern TTRPG design principles. But the cards, while visually appealing and initially helpful, may represent little more than a marketing ploy.
This doesn't invalidate the card system for tables that enjoy it, but it does raise questions about whether Daggerheart's true strengths lie in its collaborative mechanics rather than the cards gimmick.
Perhaps the most successful Daggerheart campaigns will be those where players eventually graduate beyond the cards altogether, embracing the accessible, story-focused experience the game promises by moving past what I consider to be a bit of a shuffalupagus hellscape.
Let me know your experience with the Daggerheart cards and with other RPGs that use cards. Do physical components enhance or complicate your gameplay?
I think this misses the intention of the cards. Since at least the days of D&D4e, power cards have been a popular play aid for RPGs, and the deck in this case serves a similar role.
As pointed out, they are optional to use and a character sheet without them exists. At no point are you required to use them. That said, they are available for players that do want to use them
That brings me to the specific use case that makes them actually useful. Several powers involve gaining a pool of tokens or a die that tracks the condition of a buff or power. The cards provide a simple way of indicating what the tokens or die represents to all players at the table without having to remember "player A's blue die is X power, their tokens are for power Y, they have a second pool of tokens for power Z, etc". They can quickly look at the die, see it's sitting on top of card X, and know that it tracks power X.
Additionally, and this is kind of a minor thing, but the deck and having a limited number of copies of cards in the set encourages players to diversify their chosen powers. A big point is made to try to avoid overlapping choices, and that's easier when there's only one copy of a card during creation. Granted, that's a silly excuse for using a card mechanic, but it *is* a thing
Ultimately, it boils down to them being an accessory and not a necessity for playing the game, just as games with included dice are including an accessory despite you being able to roll dice with a phone app. I don't think that's a bad thing
The challenge - IMO - with the cards is their use is restricted to a very specific way of fantasy gaming. In reality, many GMs (such as myself) will look at the mechanics and say: with this system I can play *this* type of game.
In reality, I look at the mechanics, I love some parts - but the domain rules and abilities plays to a type of gaming that I don't really enjoy: the everyone has magic genre.
If I was looking to modify it to be... grittier or more grounded, it would essentially mean discarding the entire card system. I could re-write domain powers but the cards are locked in.
I *do* like that there is a template to create your own cards.
I come from a Savage Worlds GMing standpoint. The kitbashing we've done with Daggerheart with two different groups has let to very similar conclusions:
1. Hope/Fear mechanic is spot on.
2. The damage & armour system: big hit.
3. The stress system: cool.
4. The experience system: nifty & flexible.
5. The domain powers/card system: Too limited. Too specific. And creates one-trick ponies.
I think the system is definitely 1.0. 2.0 (or 1.5) will sand out some of the challenges and add some flexibility.