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Former D&D creative lead Chris Perkins says too many rulebooks hurt tabletop RPGs. so he's changing that with Daggerheart

The secret to getting people to play D&D adventures is to make them buy fewer books, Daggerheart's Chris Perkins explains

Features by Trent Cannon, Senior Contributing writer

Published on Tue Jun 02 2026

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The thing about tabletop gaming is that it can be a very expensive hobby to get into. With D&D, past editions relied on players and DMs buying not just the core rulebook but DM Guides and Monster Manuals and expanded rules that introduced new, more powerful classes. Much of this has been part of a corporate strategy to increase sales, but Chris Perkins tells us that it has actually hurt sales in many cases.

We spoke to Chris Perkins, who was Story Lead and Creative Director for Dungeons & Dragons before he retired and then joined Critical Role’s Darrington Press in 2025 to work on their Daggerheart system, at PAX East 2026. He explained that he wants to make sure that Daggerheart adventures don’t require the player or the GM to own anything but the core rulebook to run. “We want our adventures to basically be runnable just with the Core Rulebook, so that means making sure that anything we introduce that is new is playing nicely with the core rules. We don’t want GMs to feel like they have to own six different products to run an adventure.”

It is a lesson that comes from years of working on D&D. “That’s a hard lesson Jeremy [Crawford] and I learned on D&D, particularly 5th Edition, is that adventures will get played more and used more if they require fewer things to run. And so that’s going to be true of Daggerheart adventures going forward.”

That is probably reassuring for Daggerheart players and GMs, but also for the publisher since fans are more likely to buy and run an adventure if they don’t have to purchase a library worth of books to use it.

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