TDS 008: MCDM RPG Is Now Draw Steel

2024-08-01 · Caio Lente · #podcast #mcdm #ttrpg #draw-steel

This episode was originally published on YouTube and Spotify. For links and references, please see those platforms as this page only contains the transcript.

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the eighth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming MCDM RPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

In today’s episode, we’ll talk about Draw Steel! Yup, the official title of the MCDM RPG has finally been announced alongside a new playtest packet for Patreon supporters. I’ll go over the announcement and loads more in the News segment of the podcast.

And speaking of the new playtest packet, today’s main topics are all about that. First I’ll walk you through the contents and structure of the packet, and then I’ll talk about how it felt to run the first act of the included adventure.

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here. Cool? Cool. Let’s draw steel and get started.

News

First things first: the game has a name! After over a year and a half in the works, the team has finally announced that the MCDM RPG is officially called Draw Steel. Short and punchy, evocative as hell, and very cinematic; it says this is a game about fighting monsters like nothing else. Of course some people didn’t like it, but it was never gonna please everyone and, honestly, that’s fine.

Did I suspect this was gonna be the title? Well, I have no way of proving this, but yes. Matt had said multiple times that the name wasn’t a secret, it just hadn’t been announced yet. To me this meant that the name was already public, they just hadn’t told us it was the actual title of the game.

Draw Steel was my best guess because that’s the way they call for initiative when running combats; that’s why I say it on every intro before getting into the News section and now it has a whole new meaning! The BackerKit campaign even had a Prepare to Draw Steel! banner at the top of the page since it launched… It was there all along. By the way, now it says Prepare for Draw Steel!

With the title out of the way, let’s get to the rest of the updates. Since the team was very busy getting the playtest packet ready and gearing up for Gen Con, there’s not a lot of news to talk about. Let’s go over them one by one:

The dev team is now playing a campaign. Since they believe the game is already feature-complete enough, the devs started playing a full campaign to see how the game plays over a longer stretch of time. This is meant to test character progression, Victories, Experience, that sort of stuff.
Ancestry write ups are done. One of Matt’s main tasks as of late was writing an entry for each ancestry that explained a little bit about it through fiction; this could be a scene, some in-world text, anything that wasn’t bland and boring like an encyclopedia entry. Well, it seems like he’s mostly done with those and many were already included in the latest playtest packet.
Three Class sneak peeks. The first was the Troubadour, a sort of Bard analog, who is getting three subclasses: the Skald, a storyteller that can “rewrite” events, the Virtuoso, an inspiring musician, and the Duelist, a flourishing swordsperson. The second was the Censor, our Paladin-y class, who also gets three subclasses: the Paragon, a classic knight in shining armor, the Exorcist, a monster hunter, witcher-like character, and the Oracle, more focused on healing and buffing. The last one was the Null, the Monk for this game, who’s probably getting their subclasses from the Talent’s disciplines, but we don’t have any more information than this.
Dragon Knight sneak peek. This is MCDM’s dragonborn, but with a twist: in Orden, dragon people were created by sorcerers. Even the term Dragon Knight aludes to the fact that most were created to be part of King Omund’s Dragon Phalanx. Mechanically, Dragon Knights have protective scales and an extra feature that the player chooses; this can be either flight speed, or wings that absorb damage, or a frightening roar.
Caster Kits have changed a little bit. Last time we talked about this, caster Kits gave your Hero a Signature Ability and a Maneuver, but now they give them a Signature Ability and a protective Ward. This Ward might hinder enemies, damage attackers, grant immunities, that sort of stuff.
A video for backers. According to Matt, they plan on releasing a video for BackerKit backers alongside their playtest packet explaining what is still likely to change and what they think is close to final. This is meant to set expectations for the finished version of the game and get everyone up to speed with their development process. Unfortunately, we still have no information as to when this packet might be coming out.

And that’s it for our news. Now let’s talk about the playtest packet the patrons recently got, see ya there!

2nd Patreon packet

On July 26th, MCDM’s Patreon supporters got the notification they were waiting for: the second playtest packet of the MCDM RPG was out. After weeks of chewing on drywall in anticipation for this very moment, it was as if the Discord breathed a sigh of relief. And as an added bonus, it came with the official title of the game!

So what’s in the packet? Obviously there are the rules, which look similar to the ones I playtested a few weeks ago and talked about on episode 7 of the podcast. This version, however, is significantly slimmer, missing any rules for Research, Crafting, and Treasures. We also only got the first level of each Class, with levels two and three currently absent. Matt said that they want to iterate faster on the Patreon packets now that the game is closer to feature-complete, so we might not have to wait long before we get these missing rules.

The biggest change I noticed was with Inciting Incidents, which have been almost completely redesigned. According to James, the team came to the conclusion that Incidents had conflicting purposes; now they’re simply a list of narrative reasons for why you left your Career to become a hero. The benefits and drawbacks these used to give you are now Class-agnostic and have moved to the brand new Complications section of character creation.

Besides the rules, we also got a bestiary with a preview of the encounter-building guidelines and almost 70 statblocks. There are demons, goblins, humans, radenwights (which are rat people), time raiders, and war dogs (which, despite the name, are Ajax’s humanoid patchwork soldiers).

The statblocks are very compact, spanning about 20 pages with plenty of whitespace around them. The longest creature takes up half a page, while the shorter ones probably take up an eighth. Most creatures have a Signature Ability, and either a Maneuver or a special passive ability. Beefier non-minion enemies might get a second option for their Actions, an Ability that consumes Villain Power, or a Triggered Action. Bosses are the most complex of all, with an additional three Villain Actions each, à la Flee, Mortals!.

Speaking of villains, we finally got to learn how Villain Power works. The Director generates VP at the top of each round equal to twice the number of Heroes in the party. Each monster faction also awards the Director some VP when they do something that synergizes with their tactics; goblins, for instance, give you one VP when they attack a flanked enemy without a Bane.

This VP can then be spent on monster Abilities like the Ruinant’s Salt Wounds, which deals some ranged damage to Winded Heroes. Each faction also gets a few generic VP Abilities, which can be activated at the start of any creature from that faction’s turn. Any human, for example, can spend two VP to use Staying Power, which allows them to recover a third of their max Stamina.

All of this contributes to the overall tactical nature of the game. Despite not being that complicated on their own, monsters have loads of tactical options and interesting effects to keep the Heroes on their toes.

Now back to the packet! Alongside the rules and the bestiary, we got a nice 15-page adventure. Again, no spoilers of the plot because it is probably going to be featured in the Gen Con demo in some way or another. What I can say is that it is composed of three acts, contains a total of 11 encounters (but some are optional), and by my estimates should take about 10 hours to complete.

In order to help you run this adventure, the packet also comes with high-definition maps, tokens for every creature, a cheat sheet for players and Directors, form fillable character sheets, and five pregen Heroes in case your group doesn’t want to go through character creation.

And that’s basically it for the contents of the packet. There’s not art, no layout, and it hasn’t gone through a thorough editing pass either… So if you’re not the kind of nerd who enjoys reading raw, unformatted text, I don’t suggest you subscribe to their Patreon just to get access to these documents. You only get one first impression, and seeing the rules in this state might make you think less of the product.

But if you are a patron, you should be getting a survey about this playtest packet after Gen Con. Make sure to actually test the game though, ‘cause you simply cannot tell how the game plays just by reading the rules. Which is a nice segue into the next section of the podcast, where I’m gonna talk about my impressions of actually running this version of the game. See ya!

My impressions

Before I get into my impressions of the playtest, let me just go off on a tangent for a second. Last episode I talked about the “mouthfeel” of the game and more than a few people seemed to… Well, dislike my word choice. Some thought it didn’t fit right, some thought there were better options, some just thought it was funny.

So let me try and explain what I meant when I used the term mouthfeel. For example, just because some food is made with ingredients you like on their own, doesn’t mean the final product is gonna be good. I like peanut butter and cotton candy, but mixing the two is probably going to result in a goopy, sugary mess.

Coming back to RPGs, I like tactical games, but just because Draw Steel is tactical, doesn’t mean I was going to like the end result. For instance, the rules could feel clunky or the mechanics could feel dissociated from the fiction. If you sell me on a powerful spellcaster that can bend reality with their mind and give me a first-level Wizard that has to worry about spell slots… Well, that has bad mouthfeel.

Matt said it best on the Discord, which is where the term started being used in the first place: “did the experience of play in combat match the fantasy?” It did! And that’s why I thought the game had a good mouthfeel and used the term in the title of the episode.

Just so we can go back to the main subject, I stand by my decision to use that word, but I think it caused more friction than I expected. From now on I’ll just say that something feels right or matches the fantasy. We good? Ok, then let’s get to my impressions of the packet.

My story actually starts a few hours before it was released. I had some friends coming over from overseas, so I started prepping a 5e adventure for us to play. It was 11 PM my time and I was one page away from finishing my prep when the Draw Steel packet came out… So, like any sane person would do, I started prepping the Draw Steel adventure.

I already knew most of the rules because of my previous playtest, but I had to read the adventure, get the maps ready for printing, and learn the rules for running monsters. In the end, I went to bed at around 2 AM and had to wake up quite early to get the house ready for them. So I wasn’t in top directing shape, let’s say.

When they got here, we went through the basics of the game using the cheat sheet and I let each one of them choose a pregen from the packet. Then, I read each player’s character sheet with them so they understood everything that their Hero was able to do. It’s not a simple game by any stretch of the imagination, but my friends are well acquainted with TTRPGs, so the whole process must have taken us around 45 minutes from start to finish. Oh, and we only had three players, so one hour would be more realistic if we had a full party of five.

In the end, the party was made up of a Wode Elf Shadow, a Dwarf Conduit, and an Orc Fury. Minis were chosen, the music started playing, and I began to set the scene with the flavor text provided by the adventure. Once the intro was over, it was time to draw steel!

In no time, the Shadow was teleporting all over the map, the Fury was splitting demons in half, and the Conduit was rolling like shit. Like my own Elementalist in the last episode though, that didn’t mean the Conduit was missing, nuh-uh. They were still racking up Piety and casting some nasty area of effects that got rid of plenty of my minions.

Over the next two or three hours, they cheered when the Fury got a crit, they laughed when I rolled low and took as much damage from the Conduit’s Spirit Ward as the Conduit took from my attack, and rooted for the Shadow when they eradicated a whole squad of minions with their Blade Dance ability.

Once we were done with the first act of the adventure, we stopped, and started talking about how the game felt. And unless my friends were lying to me, it seemed like they enjoyed it! All of them played the previous playtest packet with me last December and a couple of them mentioned how much they felt like the game had improved. They all found the initiative system more intuitive the second time around, and the Shadow player said that remembering to gain Insight at the start of their turn was much easier than they had anticipated.

There was also some negative feedback, of course. They thought the Heroes were a bit too complicated for first-level characters, but one of them mentioned that this might’ve been because they didn’t build their characters from scratch, so this feeling could come from the fact that they simply weren’t well acquainted with their Heroes’ Abilities. The character sheet also got a bit of heat, but presentation is not something that they’re really testing right now.

So what about me, the Director? In the last episode, I mentioned that it looked like the system was asking a lot of the person running the game. And I’m happy to say that it wasn’t as bad as I thought! Since statblocks are compact, I was able to fit every monster I needed into a single page for each encounter.

I’m not even used to running RPGs in person, and it was surprisingly easy to keep track of my creatures! I always remembered to gain Villain Power at the start of each round, I was mostly able to use my monsters’ passive abilities, and squads of minions commanded by a regular creature worked quite well.

But I did forget to track some stuff, I’m not gonna lie. Faction Traits, for example, are things that every non-minion of that faction has, but I always went straight to attacks when it was my turn; I couldn’t remember to check traits for the life of me. Faction VP Abilities were easier to remember because they were a great way to spend a lot of VP, but demons had so many that I had to print them on a separate sheet of paper, and ended up forgetting about it for half the battle.

None of this detracted from the experience, mind you! My friends had no idea I was forgetting these Traits and Abilities, so no one minded. Overall, I do think there’s a lot of stuff for the Director to remember during combat, but I bet time and a dedicated VTT will do wonders to help with this. And, as always, the game isn’t done yet! It might all change tomorrow, VP might get scrapped, monsters might get more complicated, we just don’t know!

So these are my impressions of running the game. It’s great, if feels right, my players seemed to like it, and I’ll probably keep playing it after it comes out. There are rough edges and some stuff might not be for everyone, but we’ll have to wait and see before we pass any judgement on that.

And what about you, dear listener? What else do you want to know about the playtest and directing it? Please let me know in the comments on YouTube or Spotify, because I read them all and love learning what y’all thought.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

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