Daggerheart vs Into the Odd Remastered
Compare Daggerheart and Into the Odd Remastered side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.
| Daggerheart | Into the Odd Remastered | |
|---|---|---|
| Genre | Fantasy | Fantasy |
| Play Style | Narrative, Collaborative, Heroic, Roleplay-Heavy, Fiction-First, Theater of the Mind, Character Building, Drama, Beginner-Friendly, Character-Driven | Rules-Light, Dungeon Crawl, Weird, Low-Prep, Attacks Always Hit, Open Source |
| Core Mechanic | Roll 2d12 Duality Dice (Hope + Fear) and add modifiers vs. difficulty. Which die rolls higher determines whether the moment swings toward the players (Hope) or the GM gains Fear tokens to spend on complications. In combat, adversary attacks roll d20 + modifier against target's Evasion. | Three ability scores (STR, DEX, WIL) rolled on 3d6. No to-hit rolls: attacks always deal damage directly. Saves are d20 roll-under the relevant ability. Damage reduces HP first, then STR; at 0 STR you die. Arcana are unique magical objects that grant strange powers. |
| Dice | 2d12 | d20, d4–d12 |
| Complexity | Medium | Very Low |
| Accessibility | Very High | Medium |
| Runnability | Very High | Medium |
| License | Darrington Press Community Gaming License (DPCGL) | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Cost | $$$ | $ |
| Publisher | Darrington Press | Bastionland Press / Free League Workshop |
| Year | 2025 | 2022 |
| Best For | Groups who want heroic fantasy with emotionally driven storytelling, where every roll shifts momentum between hope and fear. Great for Critical Role fans and narrative-focused tables. | Groups who want an ultra-streamlined OSR game where character creation takes minutes, combat is fast and deadly, and strange Arcana replace traditional spell lists. |
| Highlights | Every action roll uses 2d12 Duality Dice, and whether Hope or Fear lands higher hands momentum to the player or the GM. Combat runs fiction-first with no fixed initiative, so the spotlight passes by the action rather than a turn order. Characters equip abilities as domain cards drawn from two domains, building a loadout the player can swap between. | Character creation in under five minutes, no wasted turns thanks to auto-hit combat, Arcana system offers wide creative options, fits in about 50 pages, spawned an entire design movement (Cairn, Liminal Horror, etc.) |
| Considerations | The domain-card system runs best with printed cards, though it can be played from the character sheet alone. Players and the GM use asymmetric rules, so each side has its own procedures to learn. Mechanics are tied to the game's own setting and ancestries, which takes work to reskin for another world. | Very swingy random ability scores at creation, tightly coupled to its Bastion/Underground setting, no structured advancement beyond finding Arcana, auto-hit combat removes tactical decisions around accuracy |