Behaviour’s first community-created chapter, The Grimoire, hands core Killer and Survivor design choices to players. Here’s how the voting works, what fans are already shaping, and why this experiment could redefine Dead by Daylight’s live-service future.
Behaviour Interactive has turned its asymmetrical horror giant into a live experiment. With The Grimoire, Dead by Daylight is getting its first community-created chapter, and this time the studio is not just crowdsourcing charm-tier cosmetics. Players are voting on the fundamental identity of a new Killer and Survivor in a way that could ripple through matchmaking, meta trends, and even the game’s monetization.
What The Grimoire Actually Is
The Grimoire is a recurring, time-limited survey system that Behvaiour is presenting in-game as an eerie interactive book. Every two weeks or so, it opens for a new “Verse” of questions that push the design of an upcoming original chapter forward.
Earlier, foundational votes locked in the narrative and archetypes. The community chose a divine, otherworldly entity as the Killer, described as an exalted being of truth that inflicts direct torment. On the other side, players backed a spiritual scientist Survivor hailing from a world devastated by that same divinity, someone actively researching ways to resist instead of just enduring the Entity’s trials.
Those concepts are not just flavor. They set rails for art direction, perk fantasy, and even map possibilities. By nailing these down publicly, Behaviour has essentially opened its early concept phase to millions of players instead of a closed design team.
Voting On The Shape Of Evil
With production underway, The Grimoire has shifted into visual and gameplay-adjacent decisions that will actually impact how matches feel.
The current wave of voting focuses on the Killer’s silhouette. Rather than finished splash art, Behaviour is giving players stark, high-contrast outlines. One option reads like a classic angelic figure, tall and almost statuesque. Another leans into the internet’s fascination with “biblically accurate” angels, all jagged shapes and unnatural appendages. A third choice is more monstrous, a beast-like head perched on a cluster of grasping limbs.
These aren’t just aesthetic preferences. Silhouette defines readability in a PvP game. A towering, symmetrical Killer might broadcast its presence from across a tile, while a mass of limbs could blur into cover or feel more oppressive in tight loops. Community voting here is, indirectly, a vote on how this Killer will pressure survivors on the macro level.
Picking The Face Of Resistance
In parallel, players are voting on the face of the spiritual scientist Survivor. Behaviour has offered multiple head concepts, from softer, more grounded designs to sharper, scarred looks. One option that has quickly become a talking point across forums and social channels is a silver-haired woman with a pronounced scar and a discolored pupil.
Survivor silhouettes are less critical to moment-to-moment balance than Killer shapes, but they do feed the fantasy that perks and cosmetics are built around. A battle-worn researcher might naturally lean into resilience, aura-reading or anti-curse mechanics. A more serene mystic could end up tied to totems, boons or stealth. The community is not writing perk text, but it is choosing a baseline vibe that Behaviour will almost certainly support with mechanical hooks.
A Live-Service Collaboration, Not Just A Poll
The Grimoire is structured as a multi-verse “choose your own chapter” flow rather than a single marketing vote. Earlier questions established the broad fiction and role of each character. Present rounds drill into silhouettes and faces. Behaviour has already said future verses will branch into mood boards, material choices and later, more gameplay-relevant framing for powers and perks.
That matters because it changes the usual live-service contract. Traditionally, a game like Dead by Daylight reveals a chapter, then asks players to spend on it. Feedback comes after the sale, usually through nerf and buff cycles. In this case, players are being invited upstream into pre-production and early production decisions.
For Behaviour, that is a way to de-risk an original chapter in a game that has become heavily associated with licensed horror icons. Giving the community something it literally voted into existence is a powerful antidote to “why isn’t this the next big crossover” fatigue.
How Fans Are Already Shaping The Meta
Even at this early stage, The Grimoire has prompted meta-focused speculation that goes far beyond “which design looks coolest.”
On Reddit and the official forums, you can already see players mapping their favorite Killer silhouette options to archetypes. The more angelic form is often associated with a tall, possibly slower, terror-radius heavy Killer built around zone control and line-of-sight pressure. The bizarre, many-eyed divine concept is popularly imagined as an information-driven Killer, with community wishlists full of aura disruption, illusionary clones or vision denial.
The monstrous, limbed option tends to inspire talk of mobility and traversal: extra limbs that dig into surfaces, clamber across vertical spaces or manipulate multiple objects at once. That, in turn, feeds survivor worries about yet another high-mobility chaser warping the map meta toward safe pallets and away from mindgame-heavy tiles.
On the Survivor side, the spiritual scientist has become a vehicle for long-running debates about gen speeds and slowdown. Some players want this character to embody counter-play to oppressive Killers, perhaps by interacting more efficiently with cursed objects or weakening area denial. Others argue that leaning into utility and information, rather than raw generator throughput, would be healthier and less likely to trigger another balance whiplash patch.
Behaviour has not shared perk drafts, but the studio has been explicit that the community’s thematic choices are informing their internal design work. That means the winning concepts from The Grimoire are extremely likely to steer their thinking on what these characters should be able to do in a trial.
Monetization Through Ownership
There is also a clear business logic behind this experiment. By letting players shape the chapter from the ground up, Behaviour is essentially pre-selling emotional investment in a future DLC.
If you have spent months returning to The Grimoire site, casting your vote every two weeks and debating options on Discord, you are far more likely to buy the chapter or at least its cosmetics once it hits the store. The Killer you run or the Survivor you main is no longer just a design you like; it is a design you helped win.
This has interesting implications for how Dead by Daylight might package and sell related items. Behaviour can build cosmetics that directly mirror losing concepts. The Killer silhouette that almost won could reappear as a premium outfit, letting fans of that design still get something close to their original pick. Survivor faces that didn’t make the cut might inform future characters or be repurposed into legendary skins.
We have already seen live-service games turn survey data into monetization plans, but The Grimoire makes that loop explicit. The same votes that guide development will also provide a clear heat map of what the community is willing to pay for when the chapter arrives.
The Community Mood Around The Grimoire
Reaction so far has been a mix of excitement, theorycrafting and cautious skepticism.
On one side, you have players thrilled that Behaviour is finally letting them in before anything is “final.” Many view The Grimoire as a chance to pull the game away from overly safe archetypes. The divine, otherworldly Killer in particular has sparked calls for more reality-warping mechanics and less conventional chase tools.
On the other side, some long-time fans warn that community taste does not always align with competitive health. Forum posts are already begging voters not to chase only the flashiest, most overloaded designs, arguing that a broken Killer or overly niche Survivor would hurt the game far more than another grounded, balanced addition.
There is also a healthy suspicion that no matter which concepts win, perks will ultimately follow Dead by Daylight’s familiar pattern. Critics expect the Killer to launch too strong, with perk combinations that accelerate kill rates, and the Survivor to arrive with at least one meta-adjacent tool that quietly reshapes optimization around generators or information.
That tension is part of the experiment. Behaviour is effectively betting that making the process visible will blunt some of the frustration that usually follows balance missteps. If the new Killer ends up oppressive, it will, to some degree, be the Killer players chose.
What Comes Next For The Grimoire
The Grimoire’s current phase centers on visual identity, but the cadence suggests Behaviour will keep the book open right up to the chapter’s release window. Each new Verse is an opportunity to refine the chapter’s tone, lore and mechanical focus without spoiling everything outright.
Expect upcoming rounds to explore weapon silhouettes, power motifs and perhaps even rough perk fantasies, framed as narrative choices rather than raw stat sliders. The more of those beats the community writes, the easier it will be for Behaviour to frame The Grimoire chapter as something collectively authored instead of simply consumed.
If it works, Dead by Daylight may have carved out a new template for live-service collaboration: not just reacting to the meta in patches, but proactively inviting players into the earliest stages of content creation. That approach could pay off in a healthier, more invested player base and a chapter that feels uniquely “owned” by its community.
In a game where every new Killer and Survivor subtly rewires the tension of a trial, The Grimoire is more than a fun poll. It is the community’s chance to write the next balance patch before a single perk ever hits the PTB.