Draw Steel General Thread [+]

[Jahydin]

@Staffan @AdmundfortGeographer
Thanks for the info. I went to get the adventure, but ended up buying everything. The price point of each individual item is pretty steep, but $125 for all physical + PDF is more reasonable (and would recommend for anyone looking to get into this game).

Can't wait to give it a shot later today with my wife.

 

[zakael19]

Improvised an entire metaphysical "Oghma's Test of Mental and Physical Strength" off the cuff tonight, using nested Montages to resolve as a scene-framed dungeon, pulling memories out of character's minds ("Raka, tell us about the last time you felt true mortal fear?") to then play out in a new way based on their Skill Rolls. That was fun as heck and so easy to do with how varied the Skills are and the general framework of Montages. I would've run one of the memories as an encounter (a Netherese combat patrol), but we were low on time so did it as a quick nested montage instead for a success in the overarching one. Worked great.

Edit: a little thing that I really like in DS! is that you’re not guaranteed to Assist. You have to say how you do it and roll a Skill Check, and on a 11-, you make things worse.

Thats great.

 

[CommodoreKong]

It’s 60 pages. Definitely an advanced class, imo.

It’s mostly filled with the blocks for the catalog of summons for each of the four subclasses, demon summoner, elemental summoner, fey summoner, and undead summoner. Plus stats for enemy summoners.

There is a guide for the Director to convert the summons to monster, so effectively this is a notable monster expansion too (most entirely minions)

The only other class they have talked about coming out soon is the next “Master Class”, the Beastheart. Another master class that will include stats for all of the big “pets” that class will go around with. I could see it also being $15 due to the amount of design and playtest work.

I would be surprised if other future classes that are not in the Master Class category would fetch $15 but I’d be shocked if it were much less tbh.

In recent streams Matt has mused about access to their classes. A couple things.

• He talked about Patreon supporters gaining access to their products early without having to purchase published products. I can confirm that I received download codes for both The Summoner and Fall of Blackbottom.
• Matt discussed they were having conversations on when their work would be “opened” with their license. It’s why Forge Steel exists, for instance, because they released Heroes and Monsters both with the open license. There is a strong chance once MCDM has made back what it cost to produce The Summoner (or each future classes) that they would be opened to the community with their license.

Here’s what Matt posted in the MCDM Discord about adding things to the Draw Steel license (specifically the Summoner but it gives an overview on how they’re planning on approaching the license).

“It won't be open for awhile. Many months at least. Allow me to explain.

Opening something makes it, effectively, free. We can't make a product free until it's paid for itself. With something we crowdfund, well the backers pay to make it exist, and then once it's done, we can open it.

All the stuff we develop on our own dime? We need those products to exist in the marketplace and pay for their development before we can open them. Otherwise we go out of business.

Our goal is, at some cadence (Maybe once a year? Once every two years? Twice a year? We don't know yet.) we want to update the core rules with balance patches. That means pushing out a new PDF to everyone.

When we do that, we intend to roll all the classes and ancestries that have paid for themselves into the core rules.

Now, that probably doesn't mean "someday the Summoner will be in the Heroes PDF." For complicated reasons having to do with reprinting the physical books and version control and managing multiuple SKUs of the same product. But it might mean there's a folder and in that folder are the Core Rules PDFs and the new classes and ancestries we're opening.

If this all works (which it might not, all of this is purely hypothetical right now) once you buy the Core Rules you could literally do nothing and, over time, you just GET more classes and ancestries.

Adventures will probably never be open for reasons having to do with the nature of those products and the value of opening rules.”