Daring & Dread Tabletop Roleplaying Game

You've played 5E and you probably even liked it a lot. You've slain goblins, fought dragons, and otherwise did all the hero stuff you want to do. It was great and wonderful, and full of amazing adventure... And truth be told, it all reminded you of a theme park. It had the look of adventure, but the stakes weren't really there and the monsters were just big buckets of hit points that didn't really have teeth. At the end of the day, the victories felt kind of hollow because they all came so easily.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE

Did you know that when they were designing the underlying math for 5E, they started with the assumption that it's better for an attack roll to hit 70% of the time? That's right. Players have more fun when they're winning, so why make it challenging? In fact, some systems that are somewhat derived from 5E but have one or two degrees of separation have done away with the attack roll entirely. Yeah, it's your turn, save time and just roll damage... 

Seriously?

And remember when fantasy included swordplay, monsters that had the potential to tear your character to shreds, and in order to survive, you had to pull out everything from your bag of tricks?

We long for those days too, but we don't believe the answer is to abandon the most recent version of the game and go back thirty years to an earlier system. At its core, 5E is a great system. It has complexity. It has options. You can make exactly the kind of character you want, but it's streamlined enough to expedite play. The problem isn't the mechanics of the game but the mathematical underpinnings on the back end, and mechanics throughout that shift the balance fully in favor of the player characters.

HEROISM ISN'T HEROIC WHEN IT'S EASY.

Would you believe that the game can be made more fun while still making it backwards compatible? You can still run all the adventures and support material you own with little to no conversion work.

Creating a game that harkens back to the golden age of RPGs, is backwards compatible, and yet more dynamic and more challenging has been our design goals. We don't want to create a fundamentally different game. We don't want a game that's impossibly stacked against the players. What we want can be summed up as focused, fantastic, and fun. And to achieve both of these goals, we're making this entire RPG compatible with the existing Daring & Dread Campaign Setting.

What's in this Kickstarter?

This Kickstarter is to create both books: the Player's Guide and the GM's Manual. The Player's Guide contains all the rules to create your character and level them up. It also contains most of the rules to actually play the game. The GM's Manual contains all the tools the Game Master needs to run the game, including magic items and a complete bestiary full of monsters that have received a full overhaul. These two books are the core system, and while we do recommend purchasing them as a set, you do have the option of selecting just one or the other for your backer rewards.

"How are you accomplishing your design goals?"

• We're changing some of the math. We aren't changing it so much that the game is fundamentally different, but we're moving away from the assumption that characters hit 70% of the time. Hits are now less frequent, but the damage is more impactful, making combat feel more heroic. Every single monster is receiving an overhaul.
• Classes are undergoing revisions, although the Ranger class will be rebuilt from the ground up. There will be all new subclasses, which gives you something entirely new to play that's different from what you're used to!
• We're targeting specific systems that don't affect compatability but make play more dynamic and fun. We're talking about things like counterspelling, falling, death and dying, the way certain damage types work, and more!
• We're taking the systems we're focusing on from player feedback rather than assuming our own preferences are right. Sure, not everyone agrees about everything, but at the end of the day, we believe we're redesigning 5E into the game more people would rather play.

STOP PLAYING 5E IN EASY MODE!

Why a Kickstarter?

Darrin Drader Designs (DDD) was founded by industry veteran Darrin Drader, who is known for his work on Dungeons & Dragons, including the Book of Exalted Deeds, Forgotten Realms: Serpent Kingdoms, Forgotten Realms: Mysteries of the Moonsea, D20 Apocalypse, as well as hundreds of other titles he has worked on for most  publishers large and small over his 26-year long career (so far) in the TTRPG industry. As a publisher, we're just getting started, but thus far DDD has successfully run and fulfilled four Kickstarter campaigns, and we've learned the best approaches to put together a product we're proud of and deliver it on schedule. Previous campaigns includes the Daring & Dread Campaign Setting (a fantasy world that harkens back to the golden age of roleplaying), Reign of Discordia (a space opera setting set in the ruins of a galactic empire), Last Fleet to Vega (our homage to some of our favorite scifi from the 1970s), and Apocalyp5e: post apocalyptic roleplaying for 5E and the American Wasteland. All of these titles are built on 5E mechanics. Naturally, this builds on the Daring & Dread Campaign Setting, which is the default world for this set of rules—though it's easilyused with any other 5E setting on the market.

We are not one of those large publishing companies who are using Kickstarter to pad our bottom line. Instead, we are passionate about roleplaying games, and our goal is to establish games and intellectual properties that are accessible and enjoyable. It is our belief that 5E isn't just a system of game rules, but a canvas for artistic expression, and with the right tweaks, it can be adjusted to fit any popular fictional genre. Kickstarter is absolutely essential make this project possible, and it not only allows us to create the games we want to create, but also to provide work for our friends in the industry. We are a small company, but we set a high standard of quality, we believe our work speaks for itself, and we've had the pleasure of working with some absolute legends in the field, such as Ed Greenwood, Creator of the Forgotten Realms, and George "Loki" Williams on previous projects.

Your money goes to provide work to the real heroes of the RPG industry, designers and artists, who have the knowledge and experience to create fantastic roleplaying games. It also allows us to continue forward as a company and bring more products like this to you in the future. If successful, this Kickstarter will make this product possible, which is exactly how Kickstarter is meant to be used.

Our lead designer, Darrin Drader, began his career at Wizards of the Coast, has been a fixture in the roleplaying game industry for more than a quarter century, and has been a gamer for more than 40 years. We know what what makes roleplaying games fun for people, and we also know what kind of recent corporate moves are wildly unpopular. This is why we promise that the Daring & Dread roleplaying game will NOT utilize any of the following:

• Artificial Intelligence
• Subscriptions to access core content
• Microtransactions

STRETCH GOALS

$1000: 10 monsters above and beyond the ones you are already familiar with

$3000: Adventure "Crypt of the Fallen King, a 15 - 20 page adventure free to all backers, for characters level 3 - 5

More to come... ?

We reserve the right to adjust our stretch goals as we go, so we will announce them as we go.