Transformations

Before Daggerheart: Hope & Fear, before helping shape the system's newest Classes and its savvy Transformation system, Rob Hebert spent years moving between worlds: law school and screenwriting, production meetings and convention halls, podcast studios and late-night homebrew sessions. Like many designers of his generation, he built a career sideways, assembling it from freelance gigs, creative risks, and a few lucky rolls of the die.

That winding road turns out to be well-suited to Daggerheart, a game obsessed with drama, emotional momentum, and transformation in all its forms. In this conversation, Hebert talks about how years spent balancing legal contracts, screenwriting, and art prepared him for the writers room inside Critical Role’s publishing arm. 

Along the way, he discusses rebuilding the game's Assassin class from scratch, why Transformations had to become its own system, and shares an exclusive glimpse from the upcoming Daggerheart: Hope & Fear release.

We reached Hebert at his home in Los Angeles. This interview has been lightly edited for length.  

Aside from asking where to find the bathrooms and how many snacks you can take from the kitchen—what was the first thing you asked when you joined the team?

To see everything from the Core Rulebook's development that ended up on the cutting room floor. I think you can learn a lot about a game or its designers' sensibilities by figuring out what didn't work (or just doesn't fit) and why. We actually reassessed some of that stuff and rebuilt it for Hope & Fear.

What were some of the things you learned?

I think the most important thing I learned was that the design always needs to come back to the player experience. There were some very elegant and interesting mechanics, from very early in Core's development, that just didn't lead to the kinds of choices and experiences Daggerheart thrives on, so they had to go. 

Anything come to mind?

On Hope & Fear, when I first started working on the Assassin class, I had some big ideas (and preconceived notions) about how we could give a player the feeling of being Ezio Auditore or Corvo Attano—and while these were mechanically balanced and used some interesting tech, they weren't delivering emotionally or experientially. As a result, we completely rebuilt the Assassin from scratch, and it became my favorite of the new classes.

I want to talk more about Daggerheart, but let’s back up. I’m fascinated by your background: writer and designer, but also a head of production and financial analyst. Tell me a bit about your journey. Were you making games back in high school? Learning Excel? What's young Rob’s origin story?

I was really into card and board games from a very early age. I vividly remember getting the Uncanny X-Men Alert board game for Christmas when I was 8 years old. It came with 18 figurines, and I would design my own (terrible) skirmish games using different dice and cards. When I was a little older, I randomly found a copy of the West End Games DC Universe Roleplaying Game at Books-a-Million, and the idea of being able to procedurally generate actual stories about superheroes using math and dice set something off in my brain. I made my first decent homebrew TTRPG (which was embarrassingly enough based on Gundam Wing) shortly after that and ran it for some internet friends for about a year—but I never really understood that "tabletop designer" was an actual full-time job, so game design remained a hobby for me throughout college and law school.

When I moved to Los Angeles for a job as a screen writer, the RPG community was a good way to make friends. I started going to local cons, and that's where I plugged into the local designer community. My first paid gig in the RPG industry was actually as an illustrator. I was playing in a game with designer Christopher Grey (Highcaster, Temples & Tombs, Great American Novel), and he saw me drawing all the PCs at the table. He offered me the artist gig on Happiest Apocalypse on Earth, and that made me realize I could make my own stuff and just... put it out there for people to play. 

Law school…screenwriter. Did you exit uni disenchanted with law? Was it the safe foundation to allow for a bet on the arts?

Yeah, I definitely went to law school with the goal of having “safe” job prospects—and if you squint, you can see why contracts, regulations, and policy papers would appeal to a game designer. But then I graduated into a really poor labor market for law grads, and it didn't feel especially safe anymore. 

I had continued to write all throughout law school, and I sold a script through a screenwriting contest soon after graduating. It wasn't a lot of money, but it gave me a lot more confidence in myself as a creative. So I decided that, if I passed the California bar, I would move out here, get an entry level legal position, and keep creating stuff in my off hours. I did that for a few years: sold some scripts that never went anywhere, did some paid rewrites, all the standard "baby writer" stuff.