Have you ever built a campaign setting through the Matt Mercer method?
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If you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense why they are using DnD for C4 instead of Daggerheart. Firstly, they actually started developing C4 months ago before they knew how successfull their release would be. Matt has talked about them not wanting to rely on one product (like Daggerheart). On top of that right now there is only the core Daggerheart rules out. I am sure 13 players could develop 13 distinct characters in Daggerheart but it would be harder. On top of that Brennan and the new players probably would have to learn to play Daggerheart. Requiring that in a campaign that already is trying a lot with its structure would not be fair.

THREE SupergeekMike vids in almost one week, Hell Yeah.

It would be super fun to see Chris Perkins run some short Daggerheart games on Critical Role while Brennan is running 5.5e

I can't believe defeating FuturegeekMike cause time ripples so strong that you can see them for almost 8 minutes straight. Maybe it wasn't as simple as Oddwick led us to believe...

As someone who played small press ‘story games’ back in the 2000s and 2010s, I love that Daggerheart’s leading to a renaissance in those ideas.

Daggerheart is so much fun! I am so excited for these Daggerheart videos. My friends and I have been playing DnD5e for years, and we've taken a break with DnD to start playing Daggerheart and have been absolutely loving every second of it.

I feel so much of Daggerheart is just rediscovering the stuff the 2000s indie game designs came up with. In a good way.

That bit about players making dangerous adventure hooks. I did that. I'm currently a player in a Daggerheart campaign where three of the four players chose to play Ribbits. When it came time for me to add a location to the map I plotted a highly insular city who especially was distrustful of Ribbits and tied it into my character's hook of having an item that needed to be delivered to a dangerous location. Last session we finally gained entry into this city that openly does not like us and I've already made plans to covertly deliver diuretics and laxatives to the guards that mocked us at the gates. I only hope that the timing lines up with our exit.

I feel this method would be great for players who are looking to get into DMing soon. It would give them some world-building practice without the pressure of of sorting everything solo.

I really appreciate how much narrating a short-form daggerheart game made me a better D&D DM, great game, buy it and play it!

"Scanlan had a mother who was killed, but I'm not sure if that's important."

I see what you did there.

Really good summary of the building out style of worldbuilding. Already, it makes creating a setting feel less daunting

Excited to hear your takes on Daggerheart, Mike!

Some other interesting things about Percy's backstory: he didn't specify what the smoke entity was, or if it was real. He also didn't give Matt anything about the Briarwoods besides "they're nobles and they slaughtered my whole family". So the demon and vampire elements of that subplot were all Matt and a surprise to Taliesin once he got there. (Though Matt knew Taliesin loved gothic stories so he made sure that whatever he fleshed out was the perfect "gift" to his player, something way easier to do when playing with long-time friends)

Campaign 2 was interesting, because while players didn't DIRECTLY build the world, Matt HEAVILY tailored the parts of the map they come from to their characters backstories and what he felt the players wanted. Laura's character's mom became THE focal point for her port hometown, both in and out of universe. Travis's character's backstory defined nearly everything in the ocean. Marisha's defined the tense tone of the story set in her hometown. And Taliesin's... well, those unspoiled will have to see for themselves. But I'll just say, it's a slow burn.  

14:52 This map's structure reminds me of world maps in older videogame RPGs, like Dragon Quest or Breath of Fire. Looking up some of those could easily inspire maps too. I feel like world maps have become a bit of a "lost art" in modern RPGs, which prefer to flesh out the individual locations (nothing wrong with that) rather than figuring out where they're located in wider continents.

18:30 Meanwhile this map made me think of the following backstory: this world was hit by a cataclysmic meteor storm in the distant past (all those rings of land look like they could be impact craters). The floating castle in the center was one city that used great levitation magic to escape the cataclysm. It could be either still populated, which would likely lead to a vast technological gap between it and the surface and tensions between the two, or abandoned in an Ozymandias (the poem, not the Watchmen character) sense.

In a sense, worldbuilding for a D&D campaign can follow some general writing advice; "what does the reader (or in this case, the players) need to know at any given time?". If you focus on that "need to know" information, you know where to put your effort on the details and what can be left loose and vague until the players actually have the means of getting there. For the opening session, players likely don't need to know what all the political factions are up to or every city on the continent and where their loyalties lie, they just need to know where they are, an idea of what's likely within reasonable travel distance, and what the societal expectations are for wherever they are (so they don't accidentally break any laws or act completely incongruous to what you know of the setting that the players haven't been made aware of but their characters would know). The details of everything can get hashed out on a need to know basis.

I realize you're covering Daggerheart because it's attached to Crit Role... but i would love to see at least a top level video like this on your thoughts about Draw Steel

@4:29 I think it's possible to combine these approaches. You can make a loosely-sketched continent map ahead of time with some rivers and mountain ranges, towns and cities marked. And then when you improvise that an NPC asks the players to clear a cave of monsters, you have an idea of where to put that cave, how far away it is, and what kinds of obstacles they might have to deal with on the way. When they want to go into a big city for supplies, you know where the nearest one is, but you can decide how to characterise it based on what fits the story at the point they go there.

7:55 yeah totally… Scanlan’s mother will never come up as a major issue in campaign 1 at all 😢

So excited for your Daggerheart content! Especially with your knowledge of how Critical Role interacts with mechanics