Draw Steel News

[Elvish Lore]

I feel like Draw Steel is a game you almost need to play in a VTT to speed things up and help keep track of all the little rules like Pathfinder 2e.

I agree. And I’m fine with that and I look forward to the VTT that MCDM is coming out with.

I’ve been playing P2e for years on Foundry and it’s a really good experience, so much better than face-to-face (which is a mode of play that I prefer overall).

 

[zakael19]

I agree. And I’m fine with that and I look forward to the VTT that MCDM is coming out with.

I’ve been playing P2e for years on Foundry and it’s a really good experience, so much better than face-to-face (which is a mode of play that I prefer overall).

I guess the sort of “VTT in center of fancy gaming table” hybrid approach would work well?

 

[Staffan]

By contrast Draw Steel to pick a weapon you need a kit. Which has a stamina bonus, a stability bonus, a speed bonus, three damage bonuses, a distance bonus, a disengage bonus, and a signature ability locked to two or three stats with multiple tiers, and a rider.

I'm not critiquing Draw Steel here; this is one of the parts I like. But the idea that Draw Steel's weapon mechanics are simpler than Daggerheart is one I find confusing.

I don't have Daggerheart so I can't compare the two, but in Draw Steel your kit is your whole combat equipment loadout. So you decide on the Mountain kit, for example, which includes heavy armor and a heavy (two-handed non-reach) weapon. Is that weapon a greatsword, a greataxe, a huge hammer, or something else? Are you wearing plate or heavy chain or something similar? That's cosmetic. Or if you prioritize protection, you'd get the Shining Armor kit and trade out the heavy weapon for a medium weapon and a shield. Is it a pick? A broadsword? A battleax? A mace? Doesn't matter.

In my D&D experience, people usually choose one of two methods for gearing up: either the fast one of taking the best available armor, a longsword or a greatsword depending on if you want a shield or not, and go; or meticulously scanning the weapon lists to find the weapon with the right combination of stats to fit what you personally want to do. Draw Steel works much more with the former, except you need to select tradeoffs with mobility and such as well.

 

[Bacon Bits]

In my D&D experience, people usually choose one of two methods for gearing up: either the fast one of taking the best available armor, a longsword or a greatsword depending on if you want a shield or not, and go; or meticulously scanning the weapon lists to find the weapon with the right combination of stats to fit what you personally want to do. Draw Steel works much more with the former, except you need to select tradeoffs with mobility and such as well.

This matches my experience as well, with the exception that after a fairly small amount of consideration you end up with about 5 weapons that people will just always select. The weapon list is really much smaller than it looks. Weapon Mastery helps theoretically, but I think as people gain experience Weapon Mastery will just narrow the list even further. People will just always select Short Sword or always select Scimitar when Vex or Nick proves to be better, etc.

It's kind of like point buy in 5e D&D. Theoretically, you have dozens of potential arrays. In practice, there's like 3 that are most common, and 2 more that are rarely useful, and the rest are redundant. They really could replace the whole point buy system with "pick one of these 5 arrays" and it would cover the whole game with no illusionary complexity.

I genuinely think the kit system is just a better design overall. I don't care what you want to say your heavy armor is or looks like. I don't care if you're using a longbow or a crossbow. I don't want to futz around with whatever simulation details there are, especially when the simulation includes anachronisms and hallucinations like studded leather armor or ring mail.

 

[Enrahim]

Meanwhile the damage rolls are familiar to anyone has played D&D and the weapons just have a stat, a number of hands, a damage expression, and a trait.

By contrast Draw Steel to pick a weapon you need a kit. Which has a stamina bonus, a stability bonus, a speed bonus, three damage bonuses, a distance bonus, a disengage bonus, and a signature ability locked to two or three stats with multiple tiers, and a rider.

I'm not critiquing Draw Steel here; this is one of the parts I like. But the idea that Draw Steel's weapon mechanics are simpler than Daggerheart is one I find confusing.

Remember that kit is weapons and armor.

In draw steel the melee weapon part is just melee damage, melee range, and feature. The ranged part is for any ranged weapons in the kit (damage, range, feature). You have both types of weapon in Daggerheart, and they also have damage (3 numbers - die count, die type and bonus) and range - but you have burden and trait on top of that (+ damage type if you include implements).

And in daggerheart the shield get a full secondary weapon treatment, while in Draw Steel it is simply a stamina bonus (+ feature)

Any added complexity in Kit from Draw steel seem to rather be accounting for the armor part. I think speed, disengage, stamina and stability can be related to this. On first impression Daggerheart is a bit simpler as it only has moderate and severe treshold, and base score. However looking at the features, it also even in tbe base tier 1 setup also affect evasion and agility. And even worse it has the dynamic number of armor slots associated with it that needs to be keep track of (vs the purely static numbers of draw steel).

So even if you split out weapons and armor as seperate entities in Draw Steel it seem to me like you get something simpler than in Daggerheart. But the real big simplification in my eyes that prompted my comment was indeed this merging of all three concepts into kits at the base level. Draw Steel give us out of the box 21 highly distinct and flavorful loadouts.

Daggerheart give us 12 base melee main weapons, 3 ranged weapons, 7 secondary weapons and 4 armors. That is 26 things to consider. The exact number og viable kits is a bit hard to calculate, as having nothing counts as a posibility, and secondary weapons are less relevant with a two handed weapon. But as just multiplying these numbers togetter give us just over 1000 I think we can quite safely say we have at least an order of magnitude more possible base loadouts than draw steel. Choosing between these certanly seem more "crunchy"...

I guess you missed the environments and social monsters - and the suggested moves.

I put that in the "content" bucket. I didn't see much rules regarding it? That is where is the crunch?

Edit: Ok, some of the features in environements do feature some crunch - and I do agree there are no corresponding elements in Draw Steel. Some of it is covered by environemental hassards, but not all. Some of it also seem to have similarities with montages. Not sure how heavily this will affect actual play though?

 

[Enrahim]

I feel like Draw Steel is a game you almost need to play in a VTT to speed things up and help keep track of all the little rules like Pathfinder 2e.

I do not think a VTT is neccessary, but game aids beyond sheets of paper likely is.

Condition markers are mentioned in the rulebook, and I think these are going to be critical. Alternatively a dry erase solution could work.

Tokens or dry erase battlemat for player made terrain/walls/effects are also probably needed (i think all such changes are permanent, though I have not scanned all abilities). This could actually be more tricky with some of the vtts.

The card format for powers are sub-optimal for getting a quick overview of your options - a list format is more effective for that purpose. Similar for the rules reference - 4 pages are hardly usable at the table - simple lists with page reference would likely be much more useful.

Physical tokens for heroic resource and malice I think has to be a must.This would also be nice with for recoveries, but here a box row should work fine as well (but not eraser + number!). For hp a seperate piece of paper tracking current numbers is much more efficient than eraser or tokens for the frequency of updates and counts we are looking at here. (Also just noting damage values without summing on the fly could be a trick to speed things up for some GM). Players could also consider having a dedicated calculator.

When it comes to rules load beyond the above I cannot see why that would be particularly harder yhan any other rpg in this family. In particular the absence of timers massively simplifies certain kinds of book keeping.

Hp tracking is common to D&D family RPGs, and the rest of the techniques are common techniques employed in board games. I think with these, the game should flow at least as well as D&D 5ed - maybe even better due to no abilities that last a number of rounds.

 

[zakael19]

Daggerheart give us 12 base melee main weapons, 3 ranged weapons, 7 secondary weapons and 4 armors. That is 26 things to consider. The exact number og viable kits is a bit hard to calculate, as having nothing counts as a posibility, and secondary weapons are less relevant with a two handed weapon. But as just multiplying these numbers togetter give us just over 1000 I think we can quite safely say we have at least an order of magnitude more possible base loadouts than draw steel. Choosing between these certanly seem more "crunchy"...

Not to turn this into an argument between games, but in DH each class/subclass is going to have a primary stat/Trait (either via their Spellcast trait or what the player decides to focus on for a couple) and there’s only a handful of weapons aligned with said primary. So it’s really “pick a 1h or 2h option for your main trait, and if you want to be dual wielding.”

So your decision tree mostly goes: What stat is my focus? Ok, if melee do I want 1h or 2h? Ok, what secondary (tied to traits again) compliments my primary choice?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Daggerheart give us 12 base melee main weapons, 3 ranged weapons, 7 secondary weapons and 4 armors. That is 26 things to consider. The exact number og viable kits is a bit hard to calculate, as having nothing counts as a posibility, and secondary weapons are less relevant with a two handed weapon. But as just multiplying these numbers togetter give us just over 1000 I think we can quite safely say we have at least an order of magnitude more possible base loadouts than draw steel. Choosing between these certanly seem more "crunchy"...

That's not how it works in practice, though.

As @zakael19 says, you're very likely to use one of the few weapons who align with your primary stat, and certainly when I ran it, every single PC ended up looking at the weapon/armour chart then picking the default suggested ones for their class. The Rogue player was actually congratulating the game on making Dagger/Dagger the default for Rogues!

I think what Draw Steel! offers is significantly different and it's more of a real/serious choice-point, because a lot of the kits are viable for a lot of the classes and offer potentially significant theme differences, and potentially huge differences to STA, movement, range (including melee range!), entire extra abilities, and so on. I'd personally say there are maybe too many of them (and some ridiculously narrow/niche, like Retiarius) myself but I haven't run it yet so...

 

[mamba]

For all those wondering why Matt is staying silent, he posted a new video, haven’t watched it yet…

 

[Elvish Lore]

Glad to see this is out. I think MCDM heard all the fan clamor about 'why aren't you pushing the game?' and MCDM answered.

I'm not too worried about it but I'll say that releasing this while Gen Con was happening without any kind of Gen Con push was bizarre, and borderline a total wasted opportunity.