I have Strixhaven thoughts because of the Omens of Chaos book, and a persistent one is that despite its relevant sourcebook the axioms of D&D make it a vastly suboptimal pick to pull that off.
Hey, I did make a magical school game, stuck in layout as may be. I've some cognition of the matter.
It's a common criticism of the D&D Strixhaven book, from what I've heard. Not that book is bad in any measure (although the lack of playable dryads for Dina makes me sad, as it's something I feel is always missing. No wonder I've designed Witchford Academy to do that.)
Rather, it struggles. How?
In short, it struggles because the gameplay loop endorsed by all the D&D framework doesn't match well with Strixhaven.
It pushes people to leave the school, not interact with classes, and go on more classic "D&D adventures"
The book does a lot to patch that down, but there's an ongoing tension.
And that's even before getting into the fact Strixhaven is a magical college and only half of the D&D subclasses make sense as students, "magical subclasses" notwithstanding.
Sure, if the DM says "we're playing Strixhaven" it's part of the deal to go magical, but - again - tension.
So because of design brain, I'm thinking. "Were I to run a Strixhaven game, because ideas are free and I don't need permission to do it nor to ask WotC, what would I pick?"
My own game (well, it's not mine, I developed it as freelancer, but it's my baby, so shaddap) goes for other, more stylized vibes. It could work, and I'd love to try, but something insists in telling me it wouldn't be a good fit.
It's fun - perhaps even more fun - but in a different way.
At the moment, I'm thinking Daggerheart would work great.
Someone from a RPG YouTube channel I often stumble upon made that suggestion, and I gotta say the reasoning behind that made plenty of sense.
It's a different framework with different priorities that I believe would work well.
We'll see. Perhaps once Hope & Fear with its classes arrives here I'll give it a shot.
Hell, by that time I hope my game will be out as well, but that's another story
Anyways, yes. Daggerheart enables the kind of gameplay, rewards, and character options that would do Strixhaven justice, I believe.
As beloved as the Magic the Gathering settings are conceptually, this is exactly why generally the response to their books is generally mid. The freedom provided by the soft magic MtG uses makes up a lot of the ludonarrative elements people love about the game.
D&D is great, but its magic system is granular, it's just specific enough that reflavoring feels like a cop out instead of freedom of creativity and the mechanical prerequisites for casting spells feel forced for a Strixhaven game.
Daggerheart is built in a way that BEGS you to twist it into whatever fantasy you like. Not just in terms of flavor, but like, mechanically. The design of most player features is so modular it literally has to fit on a card.
This opens the door for a lot of great homebrew options like giving out magical homebrew abilities as a reward for the classes they take, especially since the book as published by WotC doesn't have much in terms of magic items to make the characters feel like they're scaling up in abilities (another weak point of D&D). Even if you break the balance of combat, you can still unbreak it 9 times out of 10 by swinging a bit harder in combat via spending more fear in my experience.
So yeah, highly recommend, been running Daggerheart for a while now and it delivers. My opinion for a while now has been that if you want a game that creates stories that feel like the actual plays you love, play D&D. If you want a game that creates stories that feel like the books, movies or TV shows you love, play Daggerheart.
Also, MtG has cards, Daggerheart has cards, dopamine goblin go brrrrr
