Draw Steel General Thread [+]
- Thread starter overgeeked
- Start date
AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
I’m the current dm for our group and we had started a new campaign using 2024 5E, and just completed getting an adventure and got to level 3. About to start the next adventure and The Delian Tomb had been in my downloads for a couple weeks. I heard a ton of word of mouth that it can be basically run with no prep so I asked the group if they’d be up for a pivot and trying it out, especially since our play style is very combat tactical.
I was surprised they said yes, honestly!
Two nights ago I sent them the pretend characters and the reference sheets. And doubting that it needed no prep, I started reading it finally.
It is practically true you don’t need prep to start running it. I play at the table, not virtually, so I needed to print the color maps, and get some tokens to represent the “hero tokens” … (which no one actually used).
But part 1 of The Delian Tomb is like a videogame tutorial walk through that has the Director narrate how the game is played, introducing the game elements and describe how they will be used. The player’s pregen character sheets are laid out in a way that “unlocks” the 1st-level class features encounter by encounter. It literally is teaching the game to both the director and the players.
We had very rare reasons to dig out the included 70+ page starter rules to adjudicate anything (opportunity attacks from prone were a thing we checked and turned out you cannot), though we did our veteran player brains kick in and just want to see the math for how the pregens were built, look under the hood so to speak and this doesn’t give that sort of insight.
We played it last night and it went very smooth. The group from random draws were the elementalist, tactician, talent, and fury. We only got through encounter 3 of part 1 and everyone was excited to continue.
I went in nervous it would be received well but universally everyone said they had a great time. There were reasons everyone had to pay attention when it was not their character’s turn because likely they might get to do fun stuff. One said the combats were so much more entertaining than 5E combat that going back will be hard, the other players agreed.
My prep tip for the Delian Tomb up to at least Part 1 would be:
I was surprised they said yes, honestly!
Two nights ago I sent them the pretend characters and the reference sheets. And doubting that it needed no prep, I started reading it finally.
It is practically true you don’t need prep to start running it. I play at the table, not virtually, so I needed to print the color maps, and get some tokens to represent the “hero tokens” … (which no one actually used).
But part 1 of The Delian Tomb is like a videogame tutorial walk through that has the Director narrate how the game is played, introducing the game elements and describe how they will be used. The player’s pregen character sheets are laid out in a way that “unlocks” the 1st-level class features encounter by encounter. It literally is teaching the game to both the director and the players.
We had very rare reasons to dig out the included 70+ page starter rules to adjudicate anything (opportunity attacks from prone were a thing we checked and turned out you cannot), though we did our veteran player brains kick in and just want to see the math for how the pregens were built, look under the hood so to speak and this doesn’t give that sort of insight.
We played it last night and it went very smooth. The group from random draws were the elementalist, tactician, talent, and fury. We only got through encounter 3 of part 1 and everyone was excited to continue.
I went in nervous it would be received well but universally everyone said they had a great time. There were reasons everyone had to pay attention when it was not their character’s turn because likely they might get to do fun stuff. One said the combats were so much more entertaining than 5E combat that going back will be hard, the other players agreed.
My prep tip for the Delian Tomb up to at least Part 1 would be:
- Print the included maps out at scale if you play at the table. It saved me having to draw out the maps with all the interact-able objects.
- Have the Adventure .pdf on a tablet or computer
- Print out the encounters from the Encounters .pdf, but have the .pdf on the computer or tablet so you can zoom in on the encounter map and see the colors of the enemy groupings as those grouping colors are a mush when printed that my eyes cannot discern. Having the adventure on my device, and the encounter sheet on paper made it easy to swap back and forth.
- have printed Reference sheets for everyone at the table, director included.
Reynard
aka Ian Eller
Thank you for the detailed reply.
The Delian Tomb can be played without any intro.
Read up on hide and catch your breath ( I think it's called that). I'd trade the minion rules a few times. Make sure when you play you know which goblins are which, by the group.
It's complicated, but not difficult.
Yes 200% decided while the playtest packets months ago. As to why I can summarize that by retelling something another player said to me while we were both players in a 5.25 game watching a third player engage in 3.5 spiked chain style shenanigans. The gm (not me) may or may not been running strict RAW (don't know don't care) and we both blew our actions with a quick spell before every other player at the table engaged in I do this this change weapons for this effect change weapons for that effect etc and all of the associated checks/dice rolls. Ten minutes after our turns there was still another player expected to engage in the same shenanigans plus at least one or two monsters iirc, the other caster turned to me and said "I'm bored to tears" then the monk who killed the last monster said "LetsTakeAShortRest" immediately after the last monster fell without even bothering to check for treasure or anything.
Draw Steel combat is so much smoother & faster both in combat and social and has so much structural mass in its ruleset to make combat quick and awesome on top of ensuring the R O L E PLAY side of roleplay vrs rollplay matters in ways that feels awesome to players and gm rather than wasted nonsense to brush aside in favor of push button solutions and daring the gm to stake the campaign on a "no".
I'm tired of being bored as a player and sick of being setup as the one responsible for both making sure players aren't bored by the Rules as Written along with being the fallguy that negatively impacted players should direct hate and frustration at as the one responsible party for any changes made to keep tearful boredom at bay for the other players.
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Reynard
aka Ian Eller
Thank you.
I used different maps that I already own. Was pretty easy to do the outside, but the inside took more work.
My players got bottlenecked at the entry. I'm not sure how to avoid that. We didn't get to the hallway..... Yet. They do want to achieve the goal....
That's awesome! The first game I saw do anything like this was Fabula Ultima, who leans into the JRPG styling in their Press Start intro and "unlocks" the character sheet in a similar way - fusing learning a portion of the mechanic with an immediate introduction of use in the module. May have to pick up the Delian Tomb starter to see now!
Edit: ok, I'm reading through it and it's not as well set up as Fabula Ultima is from a "walk through the entire sheet with numerical areas" but it's pretty darn good as a deliberate tutorial. I like how they've split the pregen character sheets up by giving you more options each encounter so you don't have absolutely analysis paralysis or get overwhelmed.
The graphic design/layout work is really not that excellent though is it. Colors in the callout boxes and some use of bolding/italics/etc would really help.
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gnarlygninja
Adventurer
I ran it in Owlbear Rodeo with very little work setting it up. I think I had to install two extensions.
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