Some people see Daggerheart and Draw Steel as each being "just another Fantasy TTRPG trying to pick up 5E's scraps" but what I see is the resumption of an evolutionary design philosophy that started in the early 2010's but got unceremoniously trampled by the rise of 5th Edition and Pathfinder.
These were games like Dungeon World, Star Wars: Edge of the Empire, and 13th Age, games that tried to marry the "Fantasy adventure" style that was prevalent at the time with a more narrative bent.
Before that, there was 4th Edition and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edition, both with very strong opinions about what the post-3rd Edition fantasy landscape could look like. 4th Edition saw each character as having a suite of cool abilities that they weren't afraid of using, rather than just swinging a sword or saving their spell slots for the boss. Meanwhile, Warhammer imagined combat as being much more cinematic, with ups and downs that were decided mostly by the dice, rather than by being deliberately planted there by the GM.
4th Edition would get perceptually pushed to the side by Pathfinder, while the "Fail Forward" dice mechanic would evolve into the Powered by the Apocalypse system and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire.
(By the way, I don't know if there is intentionality behind the crossover between WFRP 3 and Apocalypse World's dice mechanics, or if that is just an example of convergent evolution.)
Then 5th Edition would come along and, thanks to the rise of Actual Play and Stranger Things, would become the dominant force that it is now. But those pre-5E games had a point, including 4th Edition. There are a lot of D&D players out there who want something beyond just swinging a sword at a goblin and hoping for a Crit, and rolling Perception checks.
For some people, those games are OSR or indie games on itch.io, and I'm not ruling those out. But those have also been well represented in the wake of 5E, while the more narrative, character-first side of the spectrum has mostly been represented by some combination of 5E and Pathfinder. That, I think, does a disservice to a genre that I've taken to calling "Character Fantasy" that really got going with games like Lancer (on the more combat-heavy side) and Fabula Ultima (on the more narrative side) as well as the upcoming Daggerheart and Draw Steel.
Anyways this is a bit of a rambling post, but I woke up with these thoughts and I knew I'd be thinking about them all day at work if I didn't get them down. The "Character Fantasy Renaissance" is something that I've been thinking about a lot, because I think it exists in the public consciousness but is having trouble being expressed. Mainly because most people think of 5E as being the dominant "Character-first Fantasy" game, which I think is actually a mistake, because it's kind of a bad one.
The games that follow the design patterns of 4E, the Fantasy Flight Narrative Dice games, and Powered by the Apocalypse are the ones that I think much more of as being part of the "Character Fantasy Renaissance" (not sold on the name yet). That's why I'm much more bullish on games like Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and others that are following in the footsteps of those early-2010s games without totally throwing out any semblance of complex conflict resolution mechanics (Read: combat systems, but not necessarily).
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I was asked to draw this character for a client how was playing a call of cthulhu campaign. her name is Everret and she’s a soldier who abandoned her duties after found out some dirty secrets about her old squad.
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