Acquisitions Incorporated Dumps D&D for Daggerheart, Except Daggerheart Is Run by the Same People Who Broke D&D
The biggest story in tabletop this week has been framed as a triumphant defection. Acquisitions Incorporated, the 17-year-old actual play series that predates Critical Role and built its reputation running official Dungeons & Dragons content at PAX conventions, announced at PAX Unplugged 2025 that it is abandoning D&D entirely. The new campaign runs on Daggerheart, the TTRPG published by Critical Role’s Darrington Press. The TTRPG community celebrated. What most of that coverage missed is who is running Daggerheart.
Jeremy Crawford and Christopher Perkins are the lead designers on Daggerheart at Darrington Press. Both men left Wizards of the Coast in mid-2025. Both were the primary architects of D&D 2024, the edition that drove Crawford to declare the game needed to be less white, removed orcs from the Monster Manual because depicting them as monsters was deemed racist, gender-swapped Dryads and Hags away from their traditional mythological depictions, and added a safe space mechanic to the Dungeon Master’s Guide requiring players to make an X with their arms to halt any game session that made them uncomfortable. That last feature was pulled directly from BDSM community safe word practice and inserted into a tabletop roleplaying game aimed at teenagers.
Fandom Pulse covered Perkins’ and Crawford’s departure from WotC last June. Crawford said at the time, “I’ve always believed that great games invite everyone to the table, and that’s exactly what excites me about joining Darrington Press.” Perkins said joining felt “a bit like coming home.” Neither addressed what they were leaving behind. Both left as the 2024 edition’s failure in the market was becoming impossible to ignore.
The problems they left behind at WotC are documented. Under their stewardship the game lost its core players. White male gamers, historically the plurality of D&D’s fanbase, were told by executive producer Kyle Brink in 2023 that “guys like me can’t leave soon enough for this hobby.” Brink is now gone too. The 2024 edition’s sales did not recover the ground lost from the 2023 OGL betrayal, when WotC attempted to revoke the open license that had made D&D the foundation of the entire TTRPG ecosystem for twenty years.
Now those same designers are building Daggerheart. The system launched in May 2025. It has a growing roster of actual play shows, a PAX presence, and this week the prize of Acquisitions Incorporated using it as its campaign platform. Crawford is GMing the first arc. Perkins takes over after that.
WotC launched its own actual play response the same week. Dungeon Masters, which premiered April 22 on YouTube, features Jasmine Bhullar as the GM. Bhullar’s casting, as Fandom Pulse noted in our April 21 article on the show, tells you everything you need to know about who WotC built this show for. The cast skews toward the same ideological demo that drove the 2024 edition’s design. The prior WotC actual play series, Dice, Camera, Action, collapsed in 2020 after cast controversies. The lesson WotC took from that was apparently to launch another one with a similar casting philosophy.
The real story underneath the Acquisitions Incorporated announcement is not that D&D players are finding a better home. It is that the people who damaged D&D have taken their brand relationships and their design philosophy to a new address and are building the same house again. Crawford and Perkins did not leave WotC because they had a change of heart about what tabletop gaming should be. Perkins said explicitly that Darrington Press felt like “coming home.” Critical Role’s audience is exactly the demographic their D&D 2024 decisions were designed to court. They are not escaping the ideology. They are doubling down on it with a fresh IP and a roster of actual play partners who were already aligned with them.
Daggerheart may well be a better-designed system than D&D 2024. That is a low bar. But players considering whether to follow Acquisitions Incorporated onto the new platform should know who set the table they are sitting down at.
Does the Daggerheart team’s D&D 2024 track record change whether you’d try the game?
Six books. One unforgettable world. The Adventures of Baron Von Monocle is steampunk adventure with the kind of worldbuilding and heart that made you fall in love with fantasy in the first place. Start the series on Amazon.
Nice article. However, I slightly disagree on the premise. You assume that DnD has been killed by these woke activists, in 5e. But a point should be made that, mechanically, since Wizards of the Coast introduced 3rd edition, DnD was not DnD anymore.
Because, mechanically, 3rd edition was not the same game as DnD 2nd edition. There was no backwards compatibility with the older editions anymore, it was a completely different game, and the only thing that was "DnD" was the logo on the cover.
I had the fortune of finding this small channel on YouTube, called "Grumpy Old Grognard". He had a lot of interesting takes, and I credit him formpushing me to shift from "not-DnD" 5e to OSRIC. For this argument specifically, I his video " Dungeons & Dragons was dead long before the OGL 1.1 came along" is the one I am citing, and I agree with him wholeheartedly on the topic.
As another commenter noted, D&D died a while ago. Perkins et al are just scavenging in the remains of what a great man once built.
TSR killed D&D when Gary was pushed out of the company. The 2nd edition was published without him and thus lacked his genius and vision. Everything published afterward is like photocopying a photocopy, again and again and again. No real vision beyond trying to ape the "D&D thing" that the new designers are spiritually incapable of understanding.
Chasing revenue streams killed D&D when the corporate world realized there is no money in this niche hobby. If you publish a game that is "finished", the market will eventually fully saturate and no more books will be purchased by hobbyists. Simply selling "adventure modules" doesn't generate the same scale of revenue as core books, and so a never ending parade of "new editions" and supplements are released.
Consumers killed D&D by buying the garbage WotC shoveled out. I take pity on this group, in particular, since they lack the immune system to effectively overcome the hype and marketing. However, they have and still do contribute to its downfall.
If you like D&D, the first edition still rules. You can play what Gygax the Great wrote. You just have to develop an immunity to hype and marketing, and you will be free.