Getting Started with Draw Steel (Backer Preview)

This video was originally published on YouTube. For links and references, please see that platform as this page only contains the transcript.

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to The Dice Society! Today I come to you in video form to give y’all an overview of the brand new Draw Steel playtest packet that went out to the backers last Friday.

Did you just get the packet yourself and don’t know where to start? Do you want a short introduction to share with your players before running for them? Are you just curious to know how Draw Steel works? Well, this video is for all of you! Let’s jump right in…

What is Draw Steel?

So what is Draw Steel? DS is a tabletop RPG in the heroic fantasy genre; it’s in the same ballpark as D&D, so characters all have classes and levels, players roll dice to determine outcomes, you know the drill. But there are a few important differences between DS and D&D.

First: Draw Steel is explicitly heroic, meaning characters already start as competent monster slayers. This isn’t the kind of game where a you’ll be playing a farmer who just picked up their first sword.

Second: it’s a tactical RPG meant to be played on a grid. Every class has a few cool things to do on every turn, even at first level! Positioning matters! Teamwork is vital! No “I swing my sword and pass” turns here.

And third: DS is designed to be cinematic, so every ability is evocative and visual. Additionally, like movie heroes, characters don’t have to track torches, stop to rest all the time, or even worry about rations; this isn’t an OSR game.

To summarize, Draw Steel is a heroic, tactical, cinematic fantasy TTRPG. If this is your cup of tea, let’s talk a little bit about the main mechanic of the game: the Power Roll.

Power Roll

The core resolution mechanic of D&D is the d20; in Draw Steel we have 2d10, dubbed the Power Roll. Much like in every d20 game, you’ll be rolling these dice, adding them up, and then factoring in any extra bonuses like characteristics and skill.

Unlike in D&D, however, you won’t be comparing your result to a numerical difficulty value. In this game there are outcome tiers: an 11 or lower is a Tier 1 result, a 12 through 16 is a Tier 2 result, and a 17 or higher is a Tier 3 result. Natural 19s and 20s are crits, so Tier 3 with a cherry on top.

What each tier means depends on what you’re trying to do. For combat abilities, Tier 1 results do a little damage, but nothing more, while going all the way up to Tier 3 gets you a bunch of damage, plus a powerful effect determined by the ability.

Notice how this means you can’t miss attacks! Characters (and monsters) always do at least some damage on their turn, keeping combat dynamic, interesting, and heroic for everyone. Oh, and in combat rolling a crit awards you a full extra action, so do pray for those!

Now, when we’re talking about resistance rolls, you’re trying to avoid a nasty effect, so the order is reversed: a Tier 3 means you suffer minimal impact, while a Tier 1 means you’re screwed.

Finally, when you’re outside of combat and want to roll a test, a Tier 1 result is always a failure and Tier 3 is always a success. Depending on the difficulty set by the Director, though, a Tier 2 might count as a failure, a success with a cost, or a full success.

And that’s it! It might sound a little finicky, but think of it like D&D with two fixed DCs: 12 and 17. Once you roll a few times, the tiers become second nature and resolving a roll will actually become much faster than in d20 games because you don’t have to ask if your attack hits the target every time.

The only stuff that’s left to talk about are edges and banes. These are like advantage and disadvantage in D&D, but you can have up to two of each. An edge awards you with a +2 to your roll, while a double edge bumps your result up by a whole tier. Banes work in reverse, that is, a -2 for a single, and a tier downgrade for a double.

Now that you know how to Power Roll, let’s talk about the stars of the show: the heroes.

Characters and rules

The meat of a hero in Draw Steel is their ancestry and class. The game is packed full of fantasy ancestries, from the beloved classics, like elves, dwarves, and humans, to the more… Exotic, like revenants, memonek, and hakaan.

As for classes, the packet comes with five of the game’s upcoming nine. The options are Conduit (a cleric), Elementalist (kinda like a wizard), Fury (their barbarian), Shadow (sort of a rogue), and Tactician (a fighter/warlord from 4e).

But don’t let my analogies fool you! These classes work super differently from D&D, with Shadows being able to use Black Ash sorcery to poof away, Furies getting stronger as they accumulate rage, and Tacticians allowing their allies to attack outside of their turns.

The coolest thing about classes, though, are heroic resources. In this game, your most powerful abilities require you to spend some resource that you can only get back through combat.

The Shadow, for example, gets two Insight at the start of their turn and one extra whenever they roll a Tier 3 on an attack. Then, once they have five Insight, they can spend it to use something like Quickness, an ability that let’s them attack twice instead of once on their turn.

Having these resources means that, the longer battles drag on, the more powerful the heroes get. This is a big incentive for heroes to keep fighting instead of going back home! No more 5-minute adventuring days! No more saving up spell slots that go unused!

Besides heroic resources, most aspects of the character sheet will feel familiar to d20 players. Might, Agility, Reason, Intuition, and Presence are the characteristics you’ll be adding to your Power Rolls; stamina is your measure of health; and skills are like proficiencies, adding +2 to your tests.

The new stuff are stability, which reduces how many squares you move when you’re forced pulled or pushed; victories, which counts how many battles you’ve won and become extra heroic resources once combat starts; and recoveries, which allow you to recover some stamina when you’re running low.

The last thing you need to know about characters is kits, which are a more open-ended version of equipment. Like, when choosing a kit, you don’t get a battleaxe or a warhammer, you just get a heavy weapon that you can flavor however you want.

What’s cool about kits is that, besides some bonuses, they all give you a special ability! Raiders get a shield bash, snipers can take a patient shot, and bloodpacts can use drain.

Once you do go into combat and start using these cool abilities, you’ll notice a couple of other Draw Steel innovations. The first is the initiative system itself, where initiative bounces from side to side, but players can freely decide in which order they’ll go.

Another cool piece of tech are maneuvers. While D&D’s bonus actions live in a weird limbo of useful for some and useless for others, all characters in Draw Steel have cool things to do with their maneuvers.

So your turns will have a familiar structure, with an action, a maneuver, and a move (plus an off-turn trigger), but you’ll be using all of them much more often and much more tactically.

Outro

And that’s basically it for the core game, folks! Of course there’s a lot more, like negotiations, titles, and all sorts of cool player options, but I can cover those on future videos.

I hope you liked this video and, if you did, subscribe to the channel and to my mailing list; the link is in the description. See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!