Draw Steel the MCDM RPG!

[Helena Real]

I think Skills in this case don't work as discreet things you can ask rolls about as a GM ("Roll to Hide"). Instead, the GM asks for a Characteristic test ("Might" or "Agility") and then the player can offer one or more skills that could benefit them in this situation. If the GM agrees to one, then you get a +2 to the roll; that's it. And as a PC gets only a few, it's going to be pretty easy to know which ones you have available

Also: these skills are so specific that they feel more like specializations than general, broad categories of expertise, so it's great to have a broad selection.

Finally, as a Call of Cthulhu/Stormbringer GM for years, I can tell you that 50+ skills are totally OK and they work in play just fine

 

[Helena Real]

Interesting - which are these? Like what sort of archetypes/concepts do they have?

Off the top of my head we have the Mnemonek (an organic construct), the Hakaan (the COOLEST half-giants ever), the Revenant, and the Time Raiders (my favoritest nomads of the Astral Plane)... Plus all the classic ancestries revisited.

 

[The Soloist]

Fantasy AGE 2e skill list. Not exhaustive. You can add any new skill you want. They are not all listed on the character sheet. You only list those you have a Focus on (+2). Not a problem.

 

[Staffan]

Yeah exactly. 60 sounds clinically insane in a way that it seems like Matt Colville... just isn't. I'm really hoping that a typo or misstatement or something.

Even 30 is wild, and you've started getting down to pretty fine distinctions between skills. 60 is more than Call of Cthulhu! CoC is like 50-something and has ultra-nuanced and ultra-precise skills which frequently get in the way of gameplay in my experience. And that's where all the combat stuff is also skills, which I presume is not the case in Draw Steel!

EDIT - Particularly bizarre given early packets had like 12 skills total, if I understand correctly.

I think it depends on how skills are positioned in the system. In Call of Cthulhu, most skills have a pretty low default (in the 0-20% range), little to no impact from stats, and most tasks in the system are skill checks. So if you don't have a particular skill, you're kind of effed when you need to roll it. In Fantasy AGE, on the other hand, the basic assumption is that you're rolling for an ability score, with a skill (or "focus" as they call it) giving a bonus. In other words, does a skill represent a basic (or higher) degree of competence in that area, or are characters assumed to be broadly competent and skills represent things they are particularly good at? I'm much more OK with a broad range of skills in the later type of game than in the former.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Yeah exactly. 60 sounds clinically insane in a way that it seems like Matt Colville... just isn't. I'm really hoping that a typo or misstatement or something.

Even 30 is wild, and you've started getting down to pretty fine distinctions between skills. 60 is more than Call of Cthulhu! CoC is like 50-something and has ultra-nuanced and ultra-precise skills which frequently get in the way of gameplay in my experience. And that's where all the combat stuff is also skills, which I presume is not the case in Draw Steel!

EDIT - Particularly bizarre given early packets had like 12 skills total, if I understand correctly.

Have you ever read or played Burning Wheel?

 

[tetrasodium]

Interesting - which are these? Like what sort of archetypes/concepts do they have?

I think that it goes deeper than just the ancestry. The idea is that the PCs are already heroes based on some past deeds (IMO hero could be saved a kid from a startled horse & carriage up to much more dramatic past campaign type stuff), but there are a few steps in actually building the PC & those steps range from species to what you were doing maybe as recent as last week.
Chargen has ten steps . Without getting too deep & writing a novel or rewriting the pdf those steps are:

• Think: There are seven example questions to help get a feel for the character you plan to make & more than one is somewhat relevant to later steps
• Ancestry: Most of them grant one or more interesting abilities & sometimes a choice of them, your ancestry will make a big impact on how the PC plays. I'm not going to beat around the bust & just going to say that this is what would have been called your PC's race in the past.
• Culture: You get one or two skills from 1-2 of the specific skill groups Also you get some language stuff but that's actually interesting & useful
• Career: All of them have some questions to think on & answer about them Things are all over the place a bit & it feels logical but not easily summarized into you get 2 of x & one of Y because sometimes it's different. Most of them give a skill or two from specific skill groups. Some also add a language and/or renown along with a "title" that grants some ability or rules exception. Going to list the mechanical bits of two :
  • Laborer: grants three skills (one predefined & the other two from two specific skill groups). After that it grants one language 50 project points (I think these are crafting related) & the title of "team backbone which allows you to both make a test & assist another player's test on your first turn of a montage test
  • Mage apprentice: Grants 3 skills (one specific & two chosen from a specific skill group), a language, 1 renown, & the title hedge mage... hedge mage grants the "arcane trick" ability & it's kinda long but a slightly more & less functional analog of bits from cantrips like prestidigitation/minor illusion/druidcraft/etc plus a few other things that seem useful.
• Career (Continued): All of them have a few examples of an "inciting incident" that is thematically relevant to the career. Pretty much it explains why you quit doing that thing & went off to go be a hero. They have a few an example keyword & a couple sentences for each keyword. Laborer & mage apprentice have disaster/embarrassment/live the dream & oops/ultimate power/missing mage. Elsewhere it literally says "
• (Playtest note: There are currently three inciting incidents for each career. More are coming.) " but they all feel pretty flexible & it doesn't seem to be much of an issue to say "hey gm can my iciting incident be something like xxx instead?"
• Class: I haven't had the time to go through these but if you played or read over the previous packet's pregen PCs each of them still has a unique power source with it's own way of gaining & spending those points. The included classes are conduit (, elementalist, fury, shadow, & tactician
• Kit: Here is where things get interesting in ways you don't normally see. In a nutshell decide if your PC is a martial type or a spellcaster. There are a few flavors & the type of weapon/armor you choose is a somewhat secondary choice. The kit gives some mechanical stuff plus some ability related to movement combat positioning etc
• Add free strikes:. These kinda hook into your class & kit I'll just quote the summary & skip the mechanics
  • Every creature can make a free strike as an action on their turn, though doing so typically isn’t the most effective choice. Most of the time, you’ll use "most effective choice. Most of the time, you’ll use free strikes
    when the rules call for it. Specific rules let you use free strikes as part of an action that allows you to also do
    something else impactful, such as how the Charge action lets you move and use a melee free strike in one action (see Charge above). "
• Complication: These grant a benefit & a drawback but are optional & require gm approval. Notably though they all link your PC deeper to the world. A couple examples are devil deal, punishment curse, shipwrecked, & war of the guilds... they do not seem like a player could do the often seen flaw abuse of "I'm going to take this penalty to heavy weapons & get a bonus to my spellcasting stat on my mage" type stuff.
• Determine details: backstory appearance personality etc type stuff
• Make Connections: I'm just going to quote the start of this "Ask the Director if all the heroes start the campaign knowing each other. If they do, talk to the other players and build some connections between your heroes. If you like, you can use the following prompts to make those connections, or to come up with prompts of your own: "

Please to hear it's not just a dungeon crawler, because initially it seemed like that was what Matt was going for - a game very much primarily focused on dungeons and tactical combat (which would have been fine, but it's nice to hear it's more), but 60 skills? Really? 60? What is this, Call of Cthulhu? When you have that many discrete skills, you cannot have heroic gameplay, in my experience. I've never seen an RPG successfully combine "gigantic number of skills" with any kind of real heroism (and yeah I'm looking at you, Exalted).

The chargen summary above should make it clear that it's not just a dungeon crawler but I did see a blurb about torch mechanics somewhere think this little blurb expresses a lot "The Dead Languages table shows some of the dead languages of Orden, and the modern languages related to those ancient languages."

It feels like 30 skills would be pushing it hard, let alone 60. How on earth do you have 12 interpersonal skills without stepping on your own toes constantly for example? Especially as Intrigue is a whole other category! Did you mean like, a half-dozen-ish?

This got covered nicely in 41. I'd call the section on skills various forms of tests crunch that elegantly supports cool stuff at the table rather than just crunch for the sake of crunch.

The only way I can see that working is if not every character has the same set of skills available and it’s on the player to say what skill they want to use instead of the GM calling for a skill to be used.

This is part of why I dipped into the chargen above. There is literally a sidebar in the upbringing bit of culture titled "but I really want alertness" that talks about working with the GM & making a case for why your culture should be modified to get your pet skill of choice from it complete with an example.

 

[Zaukrie]

Still looking forward to seeing this before I die....

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think that it goes deeper than just the ancestry. The idea is that the PCs are already heroes based on some past deeds (IMO hero could be saved a kid from a startled horse & carriage up to much more dramatic past campaign type stuff), but there are a few steps in actually building the PC & those steps range from species to what you were doing maybe as recent as last week.
Chargen has ten steps . Without getting too deep & writing a novel or rewriting the pdf those steps are:

• Think: There are seven example questions to help get a feel for the character you plan to make & more than one is somewhat relevant to later steps
• Ancestry: Most of them grant one or more interesting abilities & sometimes a choice of them, your ancestry will make a big impact on how the PC plays. I'm not going to beat around the bust & just going to say that this is what would have been called your PC's race in the past.
• Culture: You get one or two skills from 1-2 of the specific skill groups Also you get some language stuff but that's actually interesting & useful
• Career: All of them have some questions to think on & answer about them Things are all over the place a bit & it feels logical but not easily summarized into you get 2 of x & one of Y because sometimes it's different. Most of them give a skill or two from specific skill groups. Some also add a language and/or renown along with a "title" that grants some ability or rules exception. Going to list the mechanical bits of two :
  • Laborer: grants three skills (one predefined & the other two from two specific skill groups). After that it grants one language 50 project points (I think these are crafting related) & the title of "team backbone which allows you to both make a test & assist another player's test on your first turn of a montage test
  • Mage apprentice: Grants 3 skills (one specific & two chosen from a specific skill group), a language, 1 renown, & the title hedge mage... hedge mage grants the "arcane trick" ability & it's kinda long but a slightly more & less functional analog of bits from cantrips like prestidigitation/minor illusion/druidcraft/etc plus a few other things that seem useful.
• Career (Continued): All of them have a few examples of an "inciting incident" that is thematically relevant to the career. Pretty much it explains why you quit doing that thing & went off to go be a hero. They have a few an example keyword & a couple sentences for each keyword. Laborer & mage apprentice have disaster/embarrassment/live the dream & oops/ultimate power/missing mage. Elsewhere it literally says "
• (Playtest note: There are currently three inciting incidents for each career. More are coming.) " but they all feel pretty flexible & it doesn't seem to be much of an issue to say "hey gm can my iciting incident be something like xxx instead?"
• Class: I haven't had the time to go through these but if you played or read over the previous packet's pregen PCs each of them still has a unique power source with it's own way of gaining & spending those points. The included classes are conduit (, elementalist, fury, shadow, & tactician
• Kit: Here is where things get interesting in ways you don't normally see. In a nutshell decide if your PC is a martial type or a spellcaster. There are a few flavors & the type of weapon/armor you choose is a somewhat secondary choice. The kit gives some mechanical stuff plus some ability related to movement combat positioning etc
• Add free strikes:. These kinda hook into your class & kit I'll just quote the summary & skip the mechanics
  • Every creature can make a free strike as an action on their turn, though doing so typically isn’t the most effective choice. Most of the time, you’ll use "most effective choice. Most of the time, you’ll use free strikes
    when the rules call for it. Specific rules let you use free strikes as part of an action that allows you to also do
    something else impactful, such as how the Charge action lets you move and use a melee free strike in one action (see Charge above). "
• Complication: These grant a benefit & a drawback but are optional & require gm approval. Notably though they all link your PC deeper to the world. A couple examples are devil deal, punishment curse, shipwrecked, & war of the guilds... they do not seem like a player could do the often seen flaw abuse of "I'm going to take this penalty to heavy weapons & get a bonus to my spellcasting stat on my mage" type stuff.
• Determine details: backstory appearance personality etc type stuff
• Make Connections: I'm just going to quote the start of this "Ask the Director if all the heroes start the campaign knowing each other. If they do, talk to the other players and build some connections between your heroes. If you like, you can use the following prompts to make those connections, or to come up with prompts of your own: "

The chargen summary above should make it clear that it's not just a dungeon crawler but I did see a blurb about torch mechanics somewhere think this little blurb expresses a lot "The Dead Languages table shows some of the dead languages of Orden, and the modern languages related to those ancient languages."

This got covered nicely in 41. I'd call the section on skills various forms of tests crunch that elegantly supports cool stuff at the table rather than just crunch for the sake of crunch.

This is part of why I dipped into the chargen above. There is literally a sidebar in the upbringing bit of culture titled "but I really want alertness" that talks about working with the GM & making a case for why your culture should be modified to get your pet skill of choice from it complete with an example.

I have to say that chargen sounds somewhat towards the "Uh oh" end of complicated chargen, like, bad old days WoD stuff but I guess if the game is rewarding enough it could make sense. Especially if things aren't interdependent - all the worst chargen I worked with is stuff where you have to go back and forth rather than being able to go through in a line. This sounds like it might work in a line at least.

Re: Skills yeah I see they're what in other systems we'd call specializations, that's fine.

 

[tetrasodium]

I have to say that chargen sounds somewhat towards the "Uh oh" end of complicated chargen, like, bad old days WoD stuff but I guess if the game is rewarding enough it could make sense. Especially if things aren't interdependent - all the worst chargen I worked with is stuff where you have to go back and forth rather than being able to go through in a line. This sounds like it might work in a line at least.

Re: Skills yeah I see they're what in other systems we'd call specializations, that's fine.

It's fairly simple to run through the chargen. What did you think sounded "complicated"?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It's fairly simple to run through the chargen. What did you think sounded "complicated"?

Career sounds like an entire extra step from most chargen and you have to answer yet more questions after already coming up with a concept and so on. You also describe it as "a bit of all over the place" (very bad in a chargen system). Then your example careers seem pretty fiddly and like they'd require a player to pre-emptively know what certain systems and rules actually meant (including one you apparently don't even know what it means lol!), at a time when they definitely will not. You also have to pick an inciting incident which is related to career not class.

Then you have to bizarrely independently choose class and kit even though class would surely inform and delimit kit pretty severely. Does class involve any L1 choices? A lot of the kit from what we saw previously looks likely to induce at least minor analysis paralysis.

Free strikes - do these involve choices is or is this just an admin step you wrote down?

Complications - Optional but yet another layer a lot of RPGs skip (including 5E, and I was rather expecting this to be on-par with 5E crunch-wise, but it seems like it's going north of that by some margin). Further analysis too as players will try to determine whether they actually want them.

Determine details - yet more detail, which is fine, but it feels like adding this on top at this point in chargen is absolutely well into the upper realms of complex chargen.

Make connections - Another whole step, and one I like, but it's another whole step.

I'm also not convinced the order of operations here is as rational as a lot of other decisions being made about this game. I don't think this general approach to chargen is a bad thing, but I do think creating a character in this system will be considerably heavier than 5E or a lot of modern systems.