MCDM's New Tactical TTRPG Hits $1M Crowdfunding On First Day!

Matt Colville's MCDM is no stranger to crowdfunding, with three million dollar Kickstarters already under its belt. With the launch of The MCDM RPG, that makes four!

This new game is not a D&D variant or a supplement for D&D, which is what MCDM has focussed on so far. This is an all-new game which concentrates on tactical play, with a fulfilment goal of July 2025. It comes in two books--a 400-page 'Heroes' book and a 'Monsters' book which is an adaption of the existing Flee, Mortals!

The MCDM RPG

Whether you’re a group of local heroes sent to investigate mysterious goings-on in the nearby haunted wood, or famous mercenaries plotting and scheming in the big city, the MCDM RPG makes building adventures and fighting monsters fun.

www.backerkit.com

The game takes aim at traditional d20 fantasy gaming, referring to the burden of 'sacred cows from the 1970s', but point out that it's not a dungeon crawling or exploration game--its core activity is fighting monsters. The system is geared towards tactical combat--you roll 2d6, add an attribute, and do that damage; there's no separate attack roll.

At $40 for the base Heroes PDF and $70 for the hardcover (though there are discounts for both books if you buy them together), it's not a cheap buy-in, but with over 4,000 backers already that's not deterring anybody!

Even more ambitiously, one of the stretch goals is a Virtual Tabletop (VTT). There's already a working prototype of it.

 

[Parmandur]

That's not the issue - they're just not at the point where a quick start would make sense. They're earlier in the design process - this more like D&D Next was when it was in internal playtesting, before the first open playtest.

That's very good of you, I don't think it's much of a derail given we're waiting for more info at the moment! Re: "risk of failure", well, the final system remains to be seen, but my expectation is you can still have attacks totally fail to work, but it'll be because the enemy used some kind of spell/ability, or you roll so low they soaked the damage or the like. This is what I mean by shifting things around - instead total failure being RNG based on a high-variability.

I think D&D's gambling angle would work a lot better if it also a cooked system, as it were - if you missed like, default 15% of the time, in D&D (which is what Pillars 1 went for), rather than, like, default 30-45% of the time (I forget exactly what the intended default is for 5E, but I think it's between those), I think you could retain the rush you describe but lose a lot of the swing-y-ness which can turn some combats into tedium or totally undermine good play (or buoy up really bad play lol!).

But that would require moving away from a single d20 roll as hit, which complicates matters - I don't think anyone wants to be, for example, rolling 2d20 and averaging them lol! So there are other considerations at the tabletop.

Yeah,about 2/3 success rate for most things: Mearls dropped during a stream in the way back when he was stilla round and oversharing that their internal data showed that 2/3 is the sweet spot for giving people a dopamine rush from risk while still cooking the books for the party succeeding over the course of a full combat or series of combats.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

stilla round and oversharing

<3 I just want to say this genuinely made me chuckle out loud.

their internal data showed that 2/3 is the sweet spot for giving people a dopamine rush from risk while still cooking the books for the party succeeding over the course of a full combat or series of combats

Interesting! I wonder what variables they tried.

 

[Parmandur]

<3 I just want to say this genuinely made me chuckle out loud.


Interesting! I wonder what variables they tried.

Yeah, he didn't overshare quite that much, lol, but the ratio definitely is the result of their more rigorous internal playtesting data collection.

 

[SteveC]

I think the "no miss" part of MCDM is one of the more interesting parts. If you think in terms of other games that have issues with hitting/missing, I think there's no better example of the ... intense ... feelings this can come out of this than in the X-Com games. You can see a ton of videos on RNG issues with that game, and it is a big deal if you play the game (which I recommend, it's a game that I finished the original campaign of, something that doesn't happen that often).

I think the big design issue that Matt is working on is that most combats are about reducing one side's resources to a fail state. Each round if you take an action and "miss" you aren't doing anything to advance the progress of the combat. Since your opponents are likely reducing your own values, you are getting closer to a "lose" state. That's not a particularly dramatic, narrative, or "sexy" way of looking at it, but that's what's going on under the hood.

With what Matt (and other game systems too, this isn't unique) is doing, you are going to always be moving forward to the "win" condition. Now an interesting thing that comes up with this is when you take an action that doesn't cause damage. Now you have a tradeoff where you doing some other action instead. That can be interesting in terms of designing a battle where characters need to do something like that, or terrain or other environment requires it.

I think this is going to be interesting to think about, especially when you look at what happens after a battle: do resources reset? Is there a daily amount of resources (ahem, healing surges) that gradually get depleted?

I am excited to see where things go. I'm most interested in how an encounter works in conjunction with the adventuring day.

 

[Retreater]

Strike!, Lancer & Icon (same creator), Gubat Banwa (Philippine fantasy), Fabula Ultima (JRPG TTRPG), Beacon, and Emberwind come to mind. Stonetop, which uses a modified version of Dungeon World, also came out of a 4e D&D campaign.

All of these games have cited 4e D&D as inspiration. They uncoincidentally also take open inspiration from JRPGs as well. Likewise, Matt Colville even said recently in one of his streams how a number of detractors who used World of Warcraft to detract from 4e D&D ignored the similarity 4e had with D&D inspired JRPGs.

I guess "technically" we can say that 5e is "inspired" by 4e. It still doesn't resemble 4e from a gameplay perspective, even if it takes the concept of spending Hit Dice as an extremely loose approximation of the Healing Surge mechanics. (I think that's about all it can claim, with the possible exception of the disadvantage/advantage mechanic kinda coming from the Avenger class design.)
From what I know about watching Fabula Ultima through online discussions and livestreams, it doesn't resemble 4e at all. Maybe the design team played 4e at some point?
In any case, 4e is the least supported edition of D&D. The GSL assured that there can't be an actual retroclone - regardless of what ORCUS would have you believe (like we've seen with OSE or other old school products).
As far as mainstream games that you could theoretically purchase at a FLGS or find at a convention, I think 13th Age is as close as it gets. AFAIK, the 2nd edition of 13th Age has been substantially delayed as well, so I don't even know how accessible 13th Age is right now.
I'll look into the titles you've mentioned, but it's a pretty dark time for tactical RPGs in general. Outside of the heavyweight PF2, the TTRPG industry is predominantly narrative "fluff" - heavily leaning on DM/GM/Keeper fiat and storytelling mechanics.

 

[Parmandur]

I'll look into the titles you've mentioned, but it's a pretty dark time for tactical RPGs in general. Outside of the heavyweight PF2, the TTRPG industry is predominantly narrative "fluff" - heavily leaning on DM/GM/Keeper fiat and storytelling mechanics.

Well, that's the nature of the market: the latter lean into what makes a tabletop game shine as tabletop, the former has to compete with Fire Emblem, Triangle Strategy and Banner Saga in the video game sphere.

 

[Aldarc]

Not every game inspired by 4e D&D is going to be a one-for-one retroclone or a close rendition. Fabula Ultima moves the tactical combat game to a Ryuutama-resolution system that is TotM. Lancer/Icon uses hex grid-based combat and zones. MCDM uses 2d6 and is throwing out a lot of D&D sacred cows. Nevertheless, these are games that cite 4e D&D as a major influence. Due to 4e D&D being something of a black sheep, I tend to trust creators when they dare publicly say that 4e D&D inlfuenced their game. That's enough for me.

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:
Folks,

Please remember that this thread should not become about 4e. Keep on topic, please.

 

[Nightfly]

The digression into 4e reminded me of something else Matt said on the stream.

He wants this new game to be homebrewable. He called out 4e as being very difficult to homebrew, because classes were so complex and there were 30 levels of each one. Coming up with your own class was a huge effort and very difficult to balance. He does not want this game to be like that. He wants third-party crunch to be published and people to cook up their own stuff in their own games.

He also said that the game would primarily use 6-sided dice, but with the occasional d4 and d8. A viewer asked, "Will my d12s still be useless?" and Matt had to break the news that indeed they would.

 

[darjr]

The character sheets so far are one page. I wouldn’t say they are simple but they are not full of a lot of moving parts.