Tag: fantasy

Three six-sided dice stacked on top of each other in a pyramid shape.

Action Points IV: Combat Basics

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Last time, I talked about the action economy for this game, giving an overview of what sort of things you can do during combat. Now, let’s look at combat itself.

Combat Statistics

–or just called Stats. You have four primary stats: Offense, Defense, Control, Resist. Each of these stats has two important rating: Base and Total. The base rating is just the number written in that stat. The total rating is that stat after all modifiers are applied, such as adding Hits from a Power Roll.

  • Offense, which is your base damage of all of your damaging abilities. Abilities with the Offense tag add Hits rolled on their Power Roll to your total Offense.
  • Defense, which is the threshold of damage you can take in a turn before needing to mark Stress. Stress is really bad.
  • Control, which determines the magnitude of effects and conditions, such as the size of an area or the distance of a force move ability. Abilities with the Control tag add Hits rolled on their Power Roll to your total Control.
  • Resist reduces incoming Control effects. Resist is subtracted from the attacker’s total Control value, and if it’s 0 or less, the effect is avoided.

That’s it for stats. I think these terms can be adjusted based on the genre or themes of the game they are used in. A low fantasy game that has little magic and uses mostly weapons could call Offense something like Arsenal, or maybe it’s Firepower in a sci-fi game. Defense could be renamed to Reflex in a fast paced JRPG style game. You get the idea, but for now we stick with this generic terms as they do the trick.

Player characters also have some secondary stats, such as Speed and Stamina Refresh. Currently, I’m thinking that a Stamina cap, or maximum Stamina, isn’t really needed. Yeah, you could store up a ton of Stamina for some reason, that would mean you didn’t do anything or defended yourself.

Abilities

Player characters have several abilities from many different sources. Some are inherent based on choices made, such as picking a class (if this game has classes), or other advancement options. Weapons and other gear are also treated as abilities and are resolved the same way.

All abilities have the same core design:

  • Tags, which categorize the ability and let you add to or modify it based on other perks you might have.
  • Power, which is the Stamina cost and dice pool for the ability–the Power Roll.
  • Base Effect, which is the thing that happens when using the ability regardless of the roll. i.e. Damage.
  • Range, which is the basic range at which the weapon can be used.
  • Crits, which are special effects you can purchase by spending Hits from the Power Roll.

Since weapons are treated as abilities, let’s take a look at how that would work. This is just a mockup, proof of concept sort of thing.

A Sword (Power 6)

Weapon, Melee, Offense
Effect: Deal damage to one target.
Range: Melee (adjacent targets)
Crits: Spend your Hits to buy each of the following effects once per use:

  • Sweep (2). Deal just your base Offense to another adjacent enemy.
    • Deal some damage to an adjacent target that won’t be modified by Hits. This damage is considered your total Offense against that target for the purpose of things that adjust that total value, such as Disadvantage (more on that later).
  • Swordplay (2). Slide the Target (Control). You may enter any space the target has left.
    • Slide lets you move the target in any one direction you like, up to a number of spaces equal to your total Control. Since the weapon does not have the Control tag, your Hits do not increase your total Control for this Crit.
  • Defensive Stance (4). The weapon gains the Block tag this turn.
    • Usually, blocking with a weapon or item that doesn’t have the Block tag would cause you to become Winded.

It costs 6 Stamina to use this weapon based on its Power, and that gives you 6 dice to roll. You can spend more Stamina to charge the use, of course. Any 4+ you roll is a Hit. You can buy more Hits by spending Focus, which you earn by rolling 6s. Hits are added to your total Offense, as the sword has the Offense tag, and you can then also spend Hits to buy Crits. It’s not an either-or–Hits increase your Offense regardless of how many of them you spend on Crits.

Defensive Stance is a great option if you know that the enemy acting on your turn is attacking you. This way you can reduce any damage they might do to you in melee by the Power of your Sword without becoming Winded.

Thunder Roar (Power 6)

Spell, Control
Effect: Push (Control) Target
Range: Close (within 3 spaces)
Crits: Spend your hits to buy each of the following effects once per use:

  • Outburst (3/5). This use gains the Area tag and becomes a Burst 1 instead. +2 Hits to change the area to Control.
    • Burst 1 means it affects all targets adjacent to you, but you can spend more Hits to increase the area to your total Control stat.
  • Force of Nature (4/5/6). For 4 Hits, deal your base Offense as damage to the target. For 5 Hits, add the Lightning tag. For 6 Hits, also gain the Offense tag.
    • This Crit adds damage to this Control ability. Pay an additional Hit to add the Lightning tag, turning the damage into Lightning damage and make the entire ability stronger against enemies that are weak to this element. One more Hit will also allow you to increase your total Offense with your total amount of Hits rolled.

Here is an example of a spell that is nature themed. At its base, it can push a single target away from you up to a distance equal to your total Control–Hits are added to your base Control as it has the Control tag. You can upgrade it with Crits to become an area effect around you, and even add lightning damage to it.

Like I said, these are just a mockup of the kinds of things an ability or weapon would be able to do. It shows off how attacking would look, how Control is used, and how flexible the tag system could be. I envision these abilities to be written on a card-sized paper, which you can lay out in front of you.

The real challenge will be to design Crits that are interesting but not too complex or overwhelming. This mock sword has three options, but to that you would add Crit effects from other perks that are always usable, so that list could get a too big to maintain a good sense what you can do.

Range Bands

The game is played out on a grid. For Project Star Quest, I’m using a hex-grid, cause it’s sci-fi and more played out using ranged combat. Less weirdness with diagonal measurements that way.

That said, I am experimenting with using range bands, something found mostly in more narrative games that have combat, to determining distances for abilities ranges and enemy movement. Currently, that looks like this:

  • Melee: Can only adjacent spaces.
  • Close: Can target up to 3 spaces away.
  • Moderate: Can target up to 6 spaces away.
  • Far: Can target up to 10 spaces away.
  • Extreme: Can target up to 15 spaces away.

All abilities have a set range, and enemy movement is also set to one of these ranges. However, you can target an enemy one range step higher, though the ability now has Disadvantage (see below). Melee actions are an exception as they can’t be used at a range beyond melee.

Why do this?

Well, I find that in most games, the design uses range bands behind the scenes–in 5e, you’ll find that 20 feet, 60 feet, 120 feet, and similar numbers repeat all the time. Draw Steel likes to have distances of 1, 2, 5, 10, 12 a lot. The only difference with my design is that I make this thing part of the interaction. Instead of giving characters plus 1 or minus 2 on a range for whatever reason, I can shift their band up or down with effects, buffs, and so on. I like that.

(There is also a chance that I will remove the grid altogether at some point, at least to try it out.)

Other Factors

Here some other things can affect your abilities.

  • Disadvantage. When an action has Disadvantage, you must cut your total Offense/Control in half after all modifiers have been applied. Having more than one source of Disadvantage means that your total Offense/Control is 0 for that use, which can’t be increased by any means.
  • Dangerous. Some abilities are considered Dangerous, meaning that every 6 you roll is also a Risk you must mark.
  • Impact. Abilities might have an Impact rating. For every point of Impact, you count a Hit twice. For example, if your ability has an Impact of 2 and you roll 4 Hits, you can count the first two Hits twice, for a total of 6 Hits.
  • Cover. When your target has cover, you consider them to be a range step farther than they actually are. For example, if you attack an enemy in cover that is within 5 spaces–Moderate Range, which goes up to 6–you treat them as if they were at Far range (up to 10 spaces). So, if your ability has a base range of Moderate, you would have to attack one step beyond your range band and have disadvantage.

Stress

The last thing I want to touch on for the basics of combat is Stress. This is serious damage you want to avoid at all costs.

Here’s out it works:

You tally up all the damage you take during the course of a single turn. If, at the end of that turn, you took more damage than you the value of your Defense stat, you will take a point of Stress. A player character can only take a small number of Stress points before they are taken out (not outright dead, I prefer more narrative consequences).

Break Gear

Instead of marking Stress to your character, you can decide to instead put that Stress on your worn gear. That breaks them, making them unusable for the rest of the fight. It’s a tough choice to make, but it’s pretty cinematic when you must break your sword as the dark lord winds up to strike you down, just so you can stay in the fight just one more turn.

Healing & Patching

Characters will have a limited resources to heal Stress from themselves or Patch broken gear. Think of it as the Estus Flask in Dark Souls–a limited amount of healing potions everyone has access to and will remove Stress when used as an Engage Action. Patching up gear restores its use but reduces its Power by 1 until they are properly fixed during some form of downtime. And an item with a Power of 0 is destroyed for good.

Monster Stress

Most monsters die if they take a single point of Stress. The idea here is that the players will face a lot of monsters, instead of just a handful. Think of Aragorn facing down an entire horde of orcs. They die easily, but are numerous.

Boss monsters have more Stress they can mark, making them much tougher and dangerous.

When you damage a monster but fail to inflict Stress, they gain a stack of the Stagger condition. Similar to Winded, Stagger makes monsters easier to damage in subsequent turns, and if they gain enough stacks, they break and suffer some terrible effect. I will dig into conditions and monster design soon enough to explain these things in more detail.

That’s enough for combat basics for now. I have a feeling that a lot of these concept might not make a lot of sense outside of the larger context of the complete rules. But it also showcases some of the basic ideas for how I think the players will interact with the game during combat. The two mock abilities–a sword and thunder roar–are great examples for how critical effects would work. The design possibilities here are really exciting to me.

I think Conditions will be next, which includes a deeper look at how Risks work during combat. Stay tuned for that.

Bye.

More Project Star Quest

Design Challenge: Conditions & Risks

Conditions are a staple of any tactical TTRPG. I want to streamline them into something that fits my core dice mechanic by making them part of Risks.

Action Points IV: Combat Basics

Combat is essential for this type of game, so let’s look at some of the basics for my WiP. Mockup ability examples included.

Picture of a bookshelf with books who have each a prompt written on their spine. Daily Prompts 1) Patron 2) Prompt 3) Tavern 4) Message 5) Ancient 6) Motive 7) Journey 8) Explore 9) Inspire 10) Origin 11) Flavour 12) Path 13) Darkness 14) Mystery 15) Deceive 16) Overcome 17) Renew 18) Sign 19) Destiny 20) Enter 21) Unexpected 22) Ally 23) Recent 24) Reveal 25) Challenge 26) Nemesis 27) Tactic 28) Suspense 29) Connect 30) Experience 31) Reward Question Prompts (roll D6) 1) Who 2) What 3) Where 4) When 5) Why 6) How Mood Prompts (roll D10) 1) Envious 2) Nostalgic 3) Proud 4) Enthusiastic 5) Confident 6) Optimistic 7) Lucky 8) Grateful 9) Contemplative 10) Excited Subject Prompts (roll D8) 1) Adventure 2) Character 3) Genre 4) Rule 5) Accessory 6) Art 7) Person 8) Lesson

#RPGaDay2025 Day 10: Origin

Stefan1 Comment

The prompt, Origin, didn’t spark an idea right away, except for maybe talking about Backstories in a TTRPG? So I rolled on the inspirations provided on the bottom. Got why – confident – person.

So, let’s talk about background stories in RPGs. What makes your character a real person that exists in the world of the game? What’s their relations to the themes and motifs; what makes you excited and curious about exploring this character?

Since it’s brand new, and also happens to be my group’s choice of game for the next while, let’s take a look at how you create your backstory for a Draw Steel character.

A Draw Steel character is made up of four key pillars: Ancestry, Culture, Career, Class.

Ancestry is straight forward, of course. Elf, Orc, Human, you name it. They give you some choices to customize ancestral traits, which is nice. Nothing all too new here in terms of what an Ancestry is. Though the options are cool, and Matt Colville has some interesting and unique takes on some of the more common tropes like Elves. While your Ancestry won’t and shouldn’t tell you who your character is, it does give you an initial, general impression of who your character is. Thanks to their fey relationship to the fabled Star Elves, Wode Elves will generally look at the world differently than a Devil, which got stuck in the world after a bad deal went worse. Humans have an interesting relationship to magic, naturally resistant and yet sensitive to it, while Dragon Knights are diminished survivors of an invasion by the big bad evil guy of the setting, Ajax, The Iron Saint.

Class is about as clear-cut as a game of this genre could be. Though, Draw Steel has some more flavorful and unique takes on the tried and true classics. You’re not just a Fighter, you’re a Tactician able to lead your party through danger. You’re not a just a Rogue, you’re a Shadow, using black ash magic and alchemy to outsmart your opponents. You’re not a Paladin, you’re a Censor on a holy crusade to judge the evils of the world. With that comes a lot of identity and flavor, and even the ability names are often evocative and wild.

“Halt, Miscreant!” “My Life For Yours” “Hesitation Is Weakness” “The Flesh, A Crucible”

Finally, your class starts with a lot of cool and interesting things even at level 1. In fact, level 1 has the most amount of choices to make, which takes a bit of time, but gives you a fully capable hero that has already seen a fight or two, saved a person or village before even sessions 1 takes place. Levels beyond 1 usually give a few more minor perks and a choice of an ability. Nothing as complex as level 1.

Culture is your first step into creating a truly realized character. Your background is split into three categories:

  • Environment, such as nomadic, rural, secluded, urbane, wilderness. It’s where you community or communities are generally found, their place in the world.
  • Organization; Bureaucratic, Communal. This describe the functional form of leadership of your culture.
  • Upbringing, which tells you how your character specifically was brought up in that culture. Academic, Creative, Labor, Lawless, Martial, Noble.

All of these options give you insights into where you character came from before becoming a hero out to save the world. They also give you skill choices to round out your character mechanically.

Career describes the things you did before becoming a hero. Your normal life before something forced you to give it all up in pursued of fighting monsters and saving people. Besides more skill options and some other perks, careers make you choose/roll on/invent an inciting incident. The thing that happened to you that changed everything. Something that was taken from you, that set you on a new path. Whether it’s fame and fortune you seek, revenge, or hope, your old life is behind you, and the life of a hero awaits.

All these four parts taken together gives you such a well-rounded character right out of the gate. Yeah, it might take a bit longer, you have to make a fair amount of choices, but it’s worth it. You know who your character is, where the came from, and why they’re here now.

I don’t think it’s needed, or even useful, to write long backstories. No one ever really reads them, and it’s not fair to ask your GM to figure out a way to include all of that information somehow into their game. Unless they asked for this, of course. Draw Steel’s character creation gives you just enough insight into your background to imply a backstory. Not much more is needed, not really. Your culture, with its environment, organization, upbringing, will give the GM enough to build on should the adventure ever take you home. Your career and inciting incident gives you enough inspiration to roleplay your character and explore why they would make the choices they do.

It’s honestly great. Not so much that it becomes overwhelming; just enough to make your character feel real.

The core books for DRAW STEEL are featured side by side. On the left tis the Hero book, showing the villain Ajax flying while fighting a band of heroes. On there right is an eye Monster with floating eye stalks. The text "Draw Steel Core Rules" is written above the two covers.

It’s Time To Draw Steel

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After a very successful Backerkit campaign back in January 2024, today, July 31st 2025, Draw Steel by MCDM released into version 1 as PDF.

In short, Draw Steel is a Heroic Fantasy Roleplaying Game. It sits alongside Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, and many other such games. Characters have levels, classes, ancestries, which all give them statistics and abilities to mostly fight monsters in a fantasy setting using grid-based combat.

However, there a bunch of key differences or fresh takes on these ideas, which make Draw Steel stand out.

Less Attrition, More Momentum

In Draw Steel, heroes become more powerful the longer they go without resting. The same is true for each individual fight they might get into to. Heroes build up their power every round, as well as one challenging situation after another.

Heroic Resource

During a fight, each hero gains points of their specific heroic resource (Insight for Shadow, Ferocity for the Fury, Clarity for Talent). They all get some points at the start of their turn, and each class has some other means to get more points when certain things happen during combat. The Fury gains points when they take damage, the Elementalist when someone takes damage that isn’t untyped (i.e. Fire), or the Troubadour whenever a hero dies.

Once you have enough points, you can spend them on powerful abilities. A level 1 character has a 3-cost and a 5-cost ability to start, and as they reach higher levels, more costly abilities become available. Everyone also gains some minor perks or boosts on which they can spend 1 or more of their resource as the fight goes on. The Tactician, for example, can spend a point of Focus to enhance an ally’s strike a monster they have marked.

Victories

After winning a fight, or when succeeding at other challenges such as puzzles or negotiations, characters gain 1 or more victories. Victories grand the heroes an equal amount of their heroic resource at the start of a new combat encounter. That means that they can unleash their most powerful abilities early in a fight, maybe even in round 1.

Stamina & Recoveries

Heroes have Stamina–the total amount of damage they can take before are defeated. When they fall below half their total stamina, they become winded. Some effects trigger of that status. At 0 stamina, the hero becomes dying. While dying, they can still act, but are also considered bleeding, meaning they take damage whenever they take an action of any kind. If they go below 0 stamina and reach their negative winded value (or half their max stamina), they die.

Heroes also have a limited amount of Recoveries. Most healing in the game is based on recoveries, allowing the hero to regain stamina equal to a third of their maximum stamina (Stamina increases in the game are math’d to be easily divided by 3). When someone or something allows you to heal (such as you taking the Catch Breath maneuver), you spend a recovery and get its value in stamina. There are other ways the game might interact with this. The Censor class, for example, lets the Censor spend one of their recoveries to heal an ally by an amount equal to the Censor’s recovery value. Sometimes a hero might get a free recovery, like when they drink a healing potion. Free recoveries heal them by an amount equal to their recovery value, without using up one of their recoveries.

Recoveries only return when the hero rests.

Respites

Eventually, the heroes must rest as they run out of recoveries. This phase of the adventure is called Respite and takes at least 24 hours in a safe place. Normal sleeping and taking a break don’t qualify as a respite, so the game isn’t really split into “adventuring days.” The time between respites could be a day, but it could also cover a week or a month, depending on the pace of the narrative.

During a respite, characters can take on downtime projects (crafting, socializing, etc), regain all of their recoveries, and convert all of their victories into experience.

Heroic Resource, Victories, and Recoveries create this great dynamic of becoming more powerful as they adventure continues, while also causing the heroes to become more exhausted and battered. Eventually, they might have to make a choice:

  • Do we push on and leverage our momentum in the next fight, potentially ending a fight after just a round or two with our most powerful abilities?
  • Or do we stop and rest, regaining recoveries and converting victories to experience, which could lead to us leveling up?

Engagement

Draw Steel uses 2d10 plus modifiers to resolve actions, instead of just a single die, like, let’s say, a d20. When you roll a single die, you have an equal chance to get any one result–for a d20, the chance is 1 in 20, or 5%, to roll a 20, to roll a 1, or to roll any of the other 18 numbers in between. It’s swingy, which is fine for some type of games.

Rolling two dice gives you this nice and smooth probability curve. The most common result on rolling 2d10 is 11. The least likely results are 2 and 20. So, players (and designers) have some sort of idea of how they will do when they roll and a better sense of how their modifiers might impact the results.

Adding to that is Draw Steels approach to tiered results. Inspired by games like those powered by the Apocalypse, each 2d10 roll in Draw Steel has three potential outcomes:

  • 11 or less: Tier 1
  • 12-16: Tier 2
  • 17+: Tier 3

Out of combat, each tier could mean various outcomes based on the difficult of the test, from Failure with Consequences to Success with Reward.

In combat, however, each result does something. Even a Tier 1 result on an attack does some damage, or has some minor effect. In other words, heroes–and monsters–never miss in Draw Steel. Each turn, something happens that brings the fight closer to an end, one way or another.

On top of that, each hero has at least some ways to act outside of their own turns using triggered actions and free triggered actions.

Knowing that they’ll be able to do something on your turn, instead of wasting it with a bad die roll, and being able to affect the fight outside of their turn, helps in keeping players engaged during combat. Just paying attention to when you would gain extra heroic resources because of what’s happening in a fight could keep you excited, as it might allow you to do even cooler stuff in your next turn.

Fully Realized Heroes

Draw Steel is a game about fighting monsters. To that end, its character creation tools help you create a fully realized monster-fighting hero.

You choose an Ancestry (Game director and lead writer Matt Colville‘s personal take on a lot of the classics, plus some that are more original), and then you create a background. For that, you pick an Environment (where did you come from), an Upbringing (how did you grow up there), and a Career (what did you do before becoming a hero). All of these options offer choices for skills, languages, and the usual fantasy game selections.

The Career also offers a 1d6 random table to create an inciting incident–the thing that made you become a hero, leaving your old life behind. You can roll, you can choose, you can come up with your own, but one way or another, something happened, something was taken from you, and now you’re out there trying to make a difference. Whether your reasons are fame and fortune, vengeance, or guilt, you are a hero now. That is the buy-in for the game. Being a hero is not optional in the core assumptions of the game, adventures, and overall fantasy.

Classes, too, start you off with a lot of choices. When you start a game of Draw Steel with a fresh character, they already are a hero. They already have powerful abilities and probably a few heroic deeds behind them. Gone are the days of a farmer taking up a rusty sword to start their journey as a level 1 Fighter, who can swing their weapon once a turn with a chance to miss and do nothing until it’s their turn again. Level 1 heroes in Draw Steel have many options right from the start, build momentum as they go, and are already good at what they do.

Building characters with strong identities isn’t unique to Draw Steel, of course. But it’s worth mentioning that the systems in place for character creation strongly reinforce the themes and fantasies of what Draw Steel is about. The team worked hard on getting this right, and I feel they succeed.

Not Just Combat

Draw Steel makes no secret about the fact that fighting monsters is its primary focus. And the design does its best to keep fights engaging, tactical, and impressive.

But the game also offers a robust skill system, multiple degrees of success on a roll (instead of just a binary success/failure), and many flavorful abilities and perks to enhance the fantasy of being this ancestry and that class in the world.

Montage Tests

The game also offers rules for Montage Tests, which are, as the name suggests, a collection of scenes and situations for the the players to engage with to reach a certain goal.

Cross a dangerous forest during a rain storm; Escort a merchant caravan safely across a rocky desert; Prepare a town for an incoming invasion of War Dogs.

Players usually two rounds to each create a scenes to deal with a challenge. The Director can lay out a handful of challenges for the players to overcome, but they’re usually free to also create their own scenes and challenges they think might fit the montage. What they do and how they do it is always a conversation between players and Director.

If they succeed a number of times before failing a number of times or the two rounds are up, based on the difficulty of the montage, they succeed. There’s a gradient here, as well: Complete Success, Partial Success, Failure.

It’s a classic skill challenge, and the rules for it are simple and effective.

Negotiations

Draw Steel also comes with a set of systems to handle important negotiations with likewise important NPC.

These NPC have several motivations and pitfalls, as well as interest and patience scores. Motivations and pitfalls are based on 12 basic types (Peace, Greed, Power, etc), but then tailored to fit the personality and goal of the NPC.

The party will try to uncover and appeal to motivations while avoiding pitfalls to increase interests before patience runs out. It gamifies roleplay in an interesting way, and once you get used to it, I believe it adds tension and enhances important negotiations that can change the face of the adventure.

Negotiations are always initiated by the players and, while the NPC still has patience, they decide when they want to end it. If, for example, they reached an interest of 3, the NPC will give them what they want, but will ask something in return. A Yes, But, so to speak. Now the players must decided whether they take it, or if they push their luck and try to make better arguments to increase that interest to 4, gaining a strong Yes without conditions.

It’s up to the Director to tell the party the interest and patience scores. I prefer being transparent about these, letting the players make informed decisions and get a sense of the tensions and stakes rising as they make their arguments. Otherwise, the Director can make strong suggestions to signal the NPC standings, such as warning the heroes to watch their tone when their patience decreases, or giving a nod of approval and a welcoming gesture when the interests goes up.

Motivations and pitfalls are unknown, however, unless they make efforts to uncover them before or during the negotiation (or if it would make sense in the fiction that they would know about some of them).

It’s important to note that negotiations are reserved for important NPC and situations. Convincing a guard to let you into the noble’s estate would not be a negotiation and require, at most, a test to get by them. Talking to the noble, however, trying to get them to do what they heroes need them to do, would be a negotiation.

It’s a cool system and we have used it to great effect already.

But Also A Lot Of Combat

Combat in Draw Steel is always tense, even as enemy forces diminish.

Directors get a resource called Malice to boost their monsters. Better yet, the more victories the heroes have a the start of a fight, the more malice the Director starts with. And with each round, they gain even more malice than the round before.

Malice is spent on activating or enhancing monster abilities as detailed in their statblocks, as well as on generic malice abilities based on monster type, each enemy of that type can use (i.e. Goblin Malice, which every Goblin has access to).

The book is making it clear that combat encounters should serve the narrative. No random encounters or fights just to use up the party’s resources. It also makes a point of clarifying that not all creatures you find are inherently evil. Most goblins just want to live their lives, and it’s just this group at this moment that acts in a manner that causes harm to others for their own selfish interests.

Running monsters in general works well for me. Monsters have the same action economy as heroes (Move Action, Maneuver, Main Action), but their choices are much more limited for each. Monsters always have a signature action, and then maybe a maneuver option, another action, or malice-based actions. Sometimes, they also have triggered actions.

Leader and Solo type monsters are more complex, and they also gain Villain actions which are out-of-turn abilities that are often extremely powerful, but can only be used once each. These actions help Leaders, and especially Solo monsters, to keep the pressure on the heroes. The third and final Villain action is often super powerful and can turn the tides of battle in an instant.

Minions are another great design by MCDM. They can’t do much, but they come in squads of 4-8 and share Stamina between them as one single pool per squad. Even if a hero only attacks a single minions, dealing enough damage might allow them to defeat additional minions, and they get to describe how their attack takes out that other minion regardless of distance of cover or whatever. It’s fast and efficient, let’s the Director clutter the board with lots of bad guys, without becoming overwhelming to run or fight. And taking out multiple minions across the map with a single strike feels epic and cool.

Conclusion

It’s a great game.

There’s much more to discover in the book, like how heroes recruit retainers as they gain renown, or how gear kits are a great innovation to replace tracking equipment, or how crafting your own treasures is part of the core design.

Draw Steel is a heroic fantasy game made from the ground up. It’s not a clone or fork or adaptation of previous games in the genre, but it does have strong influences from many games that came before. The design team tore apart all the things they loved and hated about the games they played for many, many years, worked out how these things tick and why they are even a thing, and put it all back together from first principles to create Draw Steel.

My group and I have been playing it since the latest playtest package, which came out late 2024. It has become our weekly game pretty much from the start. We previously played D&D 5e game, Lancer, and Pathfinder 2e, and Draw Steel stands as great successor to those games for us.

MCDM has their own Patreon, where supporters get exclusive behind the scenes look at how their games are made, access to playtest material, and even access to published content if they’re subscribed long enough to cover the cost.

Both Matt Colville (game director) and James Introcaso (lead designer) regularly go live on Twitch to talk about Draw Steel and other things. Matt likes to just hangout on stream, while James has regular Q&A streams about the game. MCDM also has a Youtube channel which features a lot of the Patreon content in more digestible format, including official Q&As about Draw Steel hosted by Dael Kingsmill.

Title Image for Ironsworn: Starforged showing an Ironsworn with a gun shouldered following their drone across an alien world.

Procedural Storytelling (The Promise of Ironsworn: Starforged)

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To get things started, here is a repost of an overview of Ironsworn: Starforged I posted a while back in my other (inactive) more general blog. Enjoy.

An endless, procedurally generated universe, filled with countless wonders and strange discoveries. No two wanderers will ever experience quiet the same sights, walk the same planets, befriend or fight the same alien creatures. Every planet, every tree or blade of grass or creature, unique–generated just for you in vast, unending universe.

An iron token on which an Ironsworn makes their unshakable oath.

When No Man’s Sky eventually released, after years of hype and excitement, it didn’t live up that promise. Hello Games has since continued to support the game with content updates, graphical improvements, quality of life improvements, and countless interesting implementations such multiplayer, base and freighter construction, farming, crafting, and many many more things-to-do. But one thing the game’s still missing, in my opinion, is the exploration; that original promise of an endless universe for you to explore. After just a short while, even with all the updates the game received, every planet, system, plant, or creature feel the same. You travel around to collect rare ingredients for crafting or making money, not because there are wonders to be found out in the farthest reaches of the galaxy.

This is not to shit on No Man’s Sky, of course. After all, the developers did commit to bringing this game into a great state and they listened to what the majority of the community wanted during that process. But what they all wanted (multiplayer, bases, freighters to own and customize) is not what I wanted. I wanted to be a lone wanderer lost in the endless void of space, finding procedurally generated things no one else in the game has ever seen. Or ever would see.

Then came Ironsworn: Starforged.

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