Draw Steel General Thread [+]

[zakael19]

I think Draw Steel! might be a perfect game to use the 4e Neverwinter Campaign Setting with. Nice an open sandbox, the Theme backgrounds can be overlayed on a DS! character without issue; the Shapeshifter stuff can be a Complication (there's one there already for wolves); etc.

Well I went ahead and turned this into a full campaign frame (yes Daggerheart just has me doing this by default now). None of us are FR lore geeks so we can just vibe it (most of my affection is because BG2 was a formative experience for me, lol), and the weirdness of the 4e / Spellplague timeframe is pretty perfect for adventuring. Plus who doesn't love Netherese flying cities and dramatic undead animating wizards in red robes.

I was able to find 4e FR homes for most of the DS! ancestries, apart from Revenant and Time Raider (which I already don't like anyway). Revenant would be great in an Eberron game though! Somewhat amused at how much DS! stuff aligns with some core concepts from the 4e setups anyway (eg: FR Dragonborn).

Looking through the list of presented enemies and I think there's a decent analogue for most of them already. May re-write some profiles to add the specific flavor the NCS factions want, but that shouldn't be too much.

The special sauce here is of course the backstory + goals of the Themes and the wonderful list of factions and their own goals as laid out.

 

[zakael19]

Session 0 / Start of the NCS game!

• Renegade Red Wizard (Fire Elementalist)
• Neverwinter Noble (Talent)
• Faithful of Oghma (Conduit)
• Scion of Shadow (...Fury?)

Got our characters built, everybody agreed that we should start in a tavern to be Proper D&D, and wanted to go to the Moonstone Mask, so we did some intros and scene setting there, got some initial Goals set and decided on, and kicked off our first Montage to figure out who marked the party as they made their way through the docks to try and ingratiate themselves with the Trade Guild there. That worked really well, I like the structure of it with stakes + Victories on outcomes.

 

[John R Davis]

Played at a con , my first game of DS

PCs are very potent as first level
Very dynamic combat with lots movement
Liked the tag team synergy of everyone's abilities.
May purchase a copy.

 

[wizard71]

Just played Draw Steel on Saturday and the biggest compliment I got was from my player who hates low level D&D and was not thrilled at starting 1rst level in DS. He was playing a revenant shadow that was walking on the bottom of the lake to infiltrate a bandit camp. He got attacked by some aquatic monsters so the rest of the party jumped in to help him. He wasn’t using much of his insight tokens and had 19 saved. The last group of reinforcements had an archer that was fleeing to raise the alarm. He teleported over 15 squares (75 ft) and hit him with his 5 talent backstab that killed the archer instantly. He wasn’t using his tokens previously and was shocked to have this much power at level 1. He became much more invested in the game.

 

[zakael19]

The turn when the guy playing a Conduit in my group realized that their baseline restoration ability was a Maneuver that can, with spending a couple Heroic Resources, drop healing (and/or remove Conditions, and/or pick them up off the ground, and/or give them an additional recovery for burst healing) on the entire party was when he was like "ok this might now be my favorite support I've played."