by Graham Gentz
Play & Culture Lead
There are a bunch of big new games gunning for the D&D 5e throne.
Games like Shadowdark, Daggerheart, and The Matt Colville Dungeon Master Roleplaying Game: Draw Steel have each gathered followings of their own and are looking to syphon off a little more of that core WOTC audience.
And breaking all previous RPG crowdfunding records, with a total of $15 million, is the Brandon Sanderson-based Cosmere® Roleplaying Game.
Whenever games try to basically do what Dungeons & Dragons does, a particular phrase gets tossed around: "fantasy heartbreaker.” And while some see the term as dismissive or elitist, understanding the “heartbreaker history” explains how we still think about roleplaying mechanics in design spaces.
So to tackle Cosmere®: the Modern Fantasy Heartbreaker, let’s talk about how we talk about games.
The Fantasy of Breaking Hearts
In the ancient days of 1999 to 2012, there was an online forum and design community called “the Forge.”
Founded by Ron Edwards and Clinton R. Nixon, the Forge promoted serious discussions about RPG design, theory, and independent publishing. It popularized GNS theory, i.e., gamist, narrativist, or simulationist play (perhaps a future “How Myth Works” piece of its own). Many influential indie RPGs came directly out of the Forge community, including Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard and Paul Czege’s My Life with Master.
These discussions encouraged designers to clarify the goals of their games rather than defaulting to inherited mechanics. The forum even provided advice on layout, PDF distribution, and print-on-demand publishing and, importantly for our discussion here, served as a hub for indie designers to critique attempts to “improve” D&D.
Edwards coined the term “fantasy heartbreaker” for these new fantasy games trying to be “Dungeons & Dragons but better.” The games were admittedly often earnestly designed and beautifully produced. But they stuck to D&D’s mechanical assumptions while claiming to innovate.
The term has also appeared in discussions within the then new OSR (Old School Revival) movement, where designers sought to revisit older D&D deliberately rather than trying to actively improve it.
So here in 2025, how are these games built? What pieces were selected and where were they placed? Let’s go to the core of what a Cosmere® table experience actively looks like.
A Twenty-Sided Die
The foundation of the Cosmere® Roleplaying Game is the familiar d20. As much a symbol as anything, it certainly makes an easier pitch for disgruntled and/or curious 5e players.
Roll a twenty-sided die, add modifiers from attributes or skills, and compare the total to a target number, whether in combat, exploration, or social encounters. The recognizable grammar of play uses the binary pass/fail outcomes determined by a single die.
Target Numbers predate RPGs entirely, finding, again, mechanical and philosophical roots in 1950s and 60s wargaming. d20 + Modifier ≥ Target was the feature of 1st Edition D&D (though actually 2d6 + Modifier in its very original form in Chainmail). The functionality of this was clarified for the landmark 3rd Edition (and into 3.5 and eventually Paizo’s Pathfinder).
Our modern 5e carries the torch largely symbolically, choosing to drop the high granularity of previous editions while still maintaining its fiddly bits like ability modifiers being mathematical functions of ability scores.
The Plot Die and Narrative Dice Systems
Beyond the d20, certain actions add the Plot Die, a six-sided die rolled when the Game Master “raises the stakes.” The result of this die does not affect whether the action succeeds. Instead, it adds a secondary outcome and splits the binary: an opportunity, a complication, or no additional effect.
This mechanic draws from the partial/mixed success of Powered by the Apocalypse games and Blades in the Dark. The specialty dice system developed by Fantasy Flight Games for their 2012 Star Wars RPG and Genesys, its generic counterpart, also help inform Cosmere® RPG systems. Genesys dice generate results of success, failure, and numerous narrative side effects such as “advantage” or ”threat,” giving the whole process the scapulimantic feel of “reading the bones.”
The end result is the esoteric multi-symbol system into a single six-sided die, creating the three familiar outcomes. The “Opportunity / Complication / No Effect” d6 manages to deconstruct and present another old innovation: the FUDGE dice from 1995 made most visible with 2003’s FATE.
Fast and Slow Turns in Combat
Initiative has often been one of the first mechanics on the chopping block when looking for innovation, particularly as tabletop RPGs continue to take lessons from more narrative-focused philosophies of play. Cosmere® players choose in combat between fast turns acting earlier with limited options and slow turns acting later with expanded actions. Enemies follow the same tempo, creating a two-phase structure for each round.
This is more or less the same streamlining of Shadow of the Demon Lord (2015). Older RPGs have used similar systems, including GURPS (1986) and Shadowrun (1989), which measure action speed with initiative mechanics. Exalted (2001) and Burning Wheel (2002) in turn use abstract and extended action resolutions.
Paths, Talent Trees, and Advancement
Character advancement proceeds through paths and talent trees. Instead of primarily granting numerical bonuses at each level, advancement unlocks abilities chosen from branching structures. This enables a mix-and-match approach, allowing players to combine different powers or specializations.
The system includes structured mechanics for Cosmere®-specific powers, such as Allomancy (Metal Magic), Surgebinding (Force Powers), and Feruchemy (Mind Magic). These powers are integrated into the paths and talent trees to allow characters to develop distinct abilities while maintaining consistency with the core mechanics.
FFG’s Star Wars RPG also utilized branching specialization trees that defined character growth. Additionally, video game tech trees have long used models to provide customizable progression. Cosmere® incorporates both, emphasizing breadth of options rather than linear power scaling.
In horizontal progression, characters gain new abilities and options rather than primarily scaling numbers. This reflects trends in indie narrative RPGs of the 2010s, like Blades in the Dark, which emphasized advancement as a narratively-driven flavor buffet over linear increases in statistical bonuses.
“Who breaks the heartbreakers?”
The great wizard-of-words Terry Pratchett has this quote that I think about a lot:
“J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it’s big and up close. Sometimes it’s a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it’s not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.”
Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t always have to be the Mt. Tolkien Fuji of roleplaying games. Incredible invention and lateral thinking have bloomed over our many blessed decades of design.
It’s harder to get away from, however, for the fantasy heartbreaker. Cosmere® draws from many different sources, much to its benefit. And I think a game succeeds most clearly when it achieves at being what it wants to be.
A much harder question to answer indeed.
