Draw Steel News

[Zaukrie]

I feel you. I really wish I hadn’t backed Draw Steel but rather put that money into Daggerheart instead.

I'm going to look at their free rules and see.....but that's certainly possible.

The monsters just look so complex to run.......I love cool things! I have lost a lot of interest in complexity.

 

[Zetesofos]

I'm going to look at their free rules and see.....but that's certainly possible.

The monsters just look so complex to run.......I love cool things! I have lost a lot of interest in complexity.

The great thing about the monsters is you don't need to 'learn' the monsters like you do in D&D. You can trust the difficulty calculator for encounters, and you can build encounters by picking roles (artillery vs brute). You start the fight and each stat block is laid out to give you a signature ability, and if you just do what's on the monster block, it Works. You can put extra effort in if you like, but you don't NEED to.

Importantly, building encounters as a Director is FUN. Its some of the best fun I've had planning encounters and adventures - it doesn't feel like work, it feels like another FUN thing I get to do.

 

[Zaukrie]

The great thing about the monsters is you don't need to 'learn' the monsters like you do in D&D. You can trust the difficulty calculator for encounters, and you can build encounters by picking roles (artillery vs brute). You start the fight and each stat block is laid out to give you a signature ability, and if you just do what's on the monster block, it Works. You can put extra effort in if you like, but you don't NEED to.

Importantly, building encounters as a Director is FUN. Its some of the best fun I've had planning encounters and adventures - it doesn't feel like work, it feels like another FUN thing I get to do.

I'm not worried about encounter building....but those blocks have a lot going on. Not to mention that every monsters has malice abilities that aren't in the block, I have to look at another page entirely. But, I've not run anything yet, so maybe it isn't as hard as it looks. But I can tell you with certainty, those blocks look intimidating, and are going to turn off a lot of people because of it.

 

[Zetesofos]

I'm not worried about encounter building....but those blocks have a lot going on. Not to mention that every monsters has malice abilities that aren't in the block, I have to look at another page entirely. But, I've not run anything yet, so maybe it isn't as hard as it looks. But I can tell you with certainty, those blocks look intimidating, and are going to turn off a lot of people because of it.

Well, Matt's on record saying that Draw Steel is not 'oatmeal'. It has clear positions and intentions on their design, and they are not trying to please everyone. Certainly, for people who want a more laid back and casual experience, its a hard sell.

But, if people have wanted a very exciting and engaging game-loop combined with system that reinforce heroic fantasy, the game delivers on that.

 

[gnarlygninja]

Once you start running them, the monsters aren't really as complicated as they appear. They're just...differently complicated from dnd. For the most part it all clicked in game since everything works how it says it does.

 

[Zaukrie]

Once you start running them, the monsters aren't really as complicated as they appear. They're just...differently complicated from dnd. For the most part it all clicked in game since everything works how it says it does.

good to know. Like I said, it looks difficult, but I've not run it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This campaign has not convinced me that Backerkit is particularly well-designed.

But yes, Backerkit is a trashfire when it comes to getting rewards, I have literally no idea why people use it. I've got a bunch of KS and Backerkit projects which used it, like 15+ and it's been annoying to try and get in to backerkit and get your rewards with every single one, because Backerkit loves to somehow log you in to some other version of Backerkit or just a lot of clicks and careful looking at the screen away from your downloads.

It may have been a problem on MCDM's part, but... I feel like backerkit shouldn't make such a thing easy to screw up.

Nah, I had other stuff on Backerkit at the same time and it had the same exact hard-to-describe problem.

To be fair in literally the last 2 months Backerkit seem to have made it less painful but it's still unnecessarily painful.

Plus they've not been very good at hyping it lately.

They really haven't, yeah, they don't even seem particularly interested in telling us what's good or special about it, and worse, I don't think the game itself does that, like, internally, with some totally unnecessarily boring or confusing terminology, like "Power rolls" which can achieve Tier I, Tier II, or Tier III results being the main mechanic of the game. What joyless Order-bound automaton came up with that lol?

 

[DevL]

A lot of stuff has been going on in the 1½ years since they ran the crowdfunder, both in gaming and in the rest of the world. Plus they've not been very good at hyping it lately.

What really annoyed me was that backers were pretty much kept in the dark with an occasional drop of some beta stuff while MCDM detailed the ongoing design work on Patreon. Had they wanted to keep even their backers engaged over the many months to reach this point, perhaps they should’ve taken a different strategy.

 

[Zetesofos]

View attachment 413017
But yes, Backerkit is a trashfire when it comes to getting rewards, I have literally no idea why people use it. I've got a bunch of KS and Backerkit projects which used it, like 15+ and it's been annoying to try and get in to backerkit and get your rewards with every single one, because Backerkit loves to somehow log you in to some other version of Backerkit or just a lot of clicks and careful looking at the screen away from your downloads.


Nah, I had other stuff on Backerkit at the same time and it had the same exact hard-to-describe problem.

To be fair in literally the last 2 months Backerkit seem to have made it less painful but it's still unnecessarily painful.


They really haven't, yeah, they don't even seem particularly interested in telling us what's good or special about it, and worse, I don't think the game itself does that, like, internally, with some totally unnecessarily boring or confusing terminology, like "Power rolls" which can achieve Tier I, Tier II, or Tier III results being the main mechanic of the game. What joyless Order-bound automaton came up with that lol?

I find critiques of nomenclature used in rulebooks to be very strange. With all respect, if you haven't played it - how would you know whether or not the terminology is useful for the system?

 

[Bacon Bits]

But yes, Backerkit is a trashfire when it comes to getting rewards, I have literally no idea why people use it. I've got a bunch of KS and Backerkit projects which used it, like 15+ and it's been annoying to try and get in to backerkit and get your rewards with every single one, because Backerkit loves to somehow log you in to some other version of Backerkit or just a lot of clicks and careful looking at the screen away from your downloads.

Yeah, that's exactly the situation.

They're apparently really good at the physical fulfillment part, which Kickstarter has historically been a trashfire about. So I guess you get to choose between good UI programming and terrible fulfillment, or good fulfillment and terrible UI programming.

Well, and Kickstarter permits AI art and was interested in blockchain investments. Ethically they've been a trashfire.

To be fair in literally the last 2 months Backerkit seem to have made it less painful but it's still unnecessarily painful.

Yeah, today was definitely the fastest I've navigated the site, but it still felt awful and backwards getting to it.

They really haven't, yeah, they don't even seem particularly interested in telling us what's good or special about it, and worse, I don't think the game itself does that, like, internally, with some totally unnecessarily boring or confusing terminology, like "Power rolls" which can achieve Tier I, Tier II, or Tier III being the main mechanic of the game. What joyless Order-bound automaton came up with that lol?

I guess I don't really agree that they haven't been hyping it, but I've been following it. I've been a patron since Arcadia days, and active enough in the Discord. Mostly they've been communicating about what they've been working on, but they've been communicating to backers and patrons. Which seems fair before release.

Like, Daggerheart feels like it's just now getting some real momentum, and it's over two months old. Hell D&D 2024 has been out six months, and there's very little hype. The doomsayers on YouTube keep claiming it's a total failure... but we haven't even seen the first adventure released for 2024!

And Draw Steel is still on day 1 of release. I think it's a bit early.

I feel like people somehow expect TTRPGs to have releases like video games where day 1 is about the multiplayer servers crashing under load, and that's not how it works. It takes a long time for TTRPGs to ramp up because almost nobody switches immediately.

As far as the power rolls and outcome tiers... I mean the power roll design is similar to PbtA with 2d10 instead of 2d6. What does PbtA call theirs? Oh, yeah. It's called a "roll," and the outcomes are called... Failure, 7-9 and 10+. They tend not to use a more specific name for it because depending on the move it might be "partial success" and "success," or sometimes "success" and "success plus". Pathfinder 2e does it too. They call their core resolution mechanic a "check," and the outcome tiers are "degrees of success" and the tiers are... Critical Failure, Failure, Success, and... Critical Success.

So... I guess I'm not seeing a whole lot of creativity from anybody else here? Like this complaint doesn't feel like it has teeth. Like it needs a name, and they use "tier" for how double edge and double bane interact.