TDS 009: Draw Steel Treasures & Negotiation

2024-08-21 · 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 ninth 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 Draw Steel TTRPG, 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 the feedback the devs got from Gen Con, the next revision of the game, how the Talent might work, and loads more in the News segment of the podcast.

As for our main topics, I’ll tell you everything the designers shared with the patrons about treasures, and my experience running a negotiation from the latest playtest packet. We’re getting closer and closer to getting a complete game, folks! Hang tight!

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. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

News

Our first segment is, as always, the news. Let’s go through them one by one:

Feedback from Gen Con. According to James, the feedback they got from the games they ran at Gen Con was really positive! Apparently, most of the negative feedback came from the Director side, as some people thought there was a bit too much stuff to keep track of. Which leads us straight into…
The next revision of the game will be a bit simpler. Working off of the feedback they got, the devs are trying to simplify Villain Power options in such a way that they’re not overwhelming Directors. The goal is to have fewer, but more meaningful options for spending VP.
The Talent is going forward. In episode 7, I said that the Talent might get replaced by the Summoner in the core rules, but the team has decided that this will not be the case. This mostly came down to the fact that implementing the Summoner would involve rushing monster design, so the devs decided to go with the class that had less dependencies. And speaking of classes…
More class sneak peeks. In Matt’s recent “Let’s Make a Hero” stream, he showed off the Null’s three subclasses: Chronokinetic, Cryokinetic, and Metakinetic. Since they’re both psionic classes, these are related to the Talent’s subclasses: Chronopath, Telepath, and Telekinetic. We also got a little bit of information about the Talent’s resource, called Clarity. This is a resource that works like any other, but you can go into Clarity debt in order to push yourself like the 5th Edition’s Talent; in this situation, you’re considered Strained and you character is hindered in some (yet unspecified) way.
More Patreon packets! In the latest Q&A, James mentioned that their plan is to send packets to Patreon backers more frequently from now on. As for the first BackerKit packet, it will probably come with the license for the game and a homebrewing Discord channel so that people can start sharing their creations with the community.
Ancestry art. In that same “Let’s Make a Hero” stream, Matt showed off the art for most of the ancestries in the book and, in this host’s humble opinion, they’re looking great. The dev team is also getting the old ancestries in line with the most recent design standards, so brace for some new awesome ancestry mechanics in the coming weeks or months.
Lightning round. The devs are currently working on making levels four through ten for the existing classes; the team is talking about possible level zero rules, but this might not fit into the core books; more caster kits are coming; and the crit ranges of abilities and tests are getting unified.

And that’s it for our news. Now let’s move on to our first main topic of the day: treasures. See you on the other side!

Treasures

Treasures are Draw Steel’s magic and psionic items. James Introcaso recently wrote a whole Patreon post about them and I though it was just too cool to not talk about it. so let’s dig in and get to know a little more about this aspect of the game.

First and foremost, there are four types of treasure: consumables, trinkets, leveled treasures, and artifacts. Consumables and trinkets are both minor items which are balanced for a specific tier of play, while leveled items, as their name suggests, keep up with the heroes in such a way that they are always relevant and level-appropriate. Artifacts, though, are basically broken and are meant to be given out if you want to see your players engage in some OP hijinx.

An example of a consumable is the Mirror Token, an item that can be used once as a triggered action to reflect an attack back at someone, having them take half the damage and all of the effects of the triggering attack. Super simple and straightforward, not much to see here.

Trinkets are a little more interesting because these can be used as many times as you want. A trinket example are the Gecko Gloves, an item that makes it impossible for you to be disarmed or to fall while climbing, plus it makes it harder for other creatures to escape your grapple. Again, a minor item that helps the character a little.

Things start to get more impressive with leveled items, which are so powerful that you can only benefit from three at a time. If you try to use more than three, you run the risk of being possessed by one of them during the night and discarding all other leveled items somewhere you can’t remember. This is so much cooler than attunement, I can’t even begin to describe it…

Anyway, an example of a leveled treasure they give us is Revenger’s Wrap. At level one, this cloak marks for revenge the last creature who attacked you, granting you an edge on attacks against them and, if you do attack them, making them suffer bleeding until the end of their next turn. Then, at level five, more than one creature can be marked for revenge at the same time and the bleeding they suffer lasts until the end of the encounter. Finally, at level nine, if you have more than two creatures marked for revenge, single-target attacks against any one of them also targets all of the others regardless of distance and such.

Now is a good moment to talk a little bit about crafting; consumables, trinkets, and leveled items can all be crafted by heroes and each comes with information on how to do that in the form of item prerequisites, research materials, a project roll, and a project goal.

The item prerequisites are the resources you need to craft the item, which you will need to procure before starting to work on it; for example, in order to create Gecko Gloves, you’d need 10 gecko tails. The research materials are like the recipe you’d need to bake a cake and most of the time these are texts written in some particular language; in order to craft, say, a Mirror Token, you’d need texts in Variac, the language of gnomes.

Once you have the item prerequisites and research materials, you can start making project rolls in order to reach a project goal. The Patreon post doesn’t have much detail about this process, but the project roll seems to always be a power roll and the goal seems to always be a number which you must reach by making a bunch of project rolls. The Revenger’s Wrap project, for example, is 2d10 + Might, Reason, or Intuition, with a project goal of 450.

What sets artifacts apart from the other item types is that they seemingly cannot be crafted by the heroes. While every consumable, trinket, and leveled item have crafting instructions, artifacts are simply too powerful to be craftable.

The only example of artifact they gave us is The Encepter, a scepter that awaits its champion “high in the sky, resting within an endlessly raging cyclone”. First of all, it makes any Presence power roll you make get an automatic tier three result, which equates to always getting the best result possible in every test and combat ability that uses Presence.

As if that wasn’t enough already, you can also trace a line of light with your movement and, if you cross this line again, everyone unlucky enough to be encircled by The Encepter’s light becomes lassoed by it. Creatures lassoed in this way can’t move or teleport away, and you can use your action to deal a truckload of damage to these poor creatures.

Oh, and by the way, don’t use The Encepter if you don’t need it. Its rules specify that if it was taken without the purpose of vanquishing a “terrible threat”, then one of those is definitely happening within three days. I’m sure no one would do that, right? Right?

Anyway, that’s it for treasures. For now, let’s move on to our next topic of today: the negotiation system.

Intermission

Hey there! Before we move on to the next segment of the podcast, let me just quickly plug The Dice Society’s brand new mailing list.

We all know how messed up social media algorithms are and how they have a weird tendency of now showing your stuff to your followers. If you want to avoid the algorithms altogether, how about subscribing to my mailing list?

I won’t flood your inbox, I swear! I just wanna send you a ping once a new piece of content is out, that’s all. You can subscribe at the link in this episode’s description and you can always unsubscribe if you feel like it’s not worth the space in your inbox.

Thanks for your time! Now back to the show…

Negotiation

I’ve talked about Draw Steel’s negotiation system in the past, but today I want to take some time to really explain how it currently works so you know what to expect once you get your hands on the core rules. This is a major feature of the game that is mostly absent from d20 RPGs, so some people might have negative, knee-jerk reactions simply because they have never seen anything like this before.

So, when does a negotiation start? Well, that’s up to the Director, but it isn’t the same thing as a simple Persuasion check in D&D. If you want to, say, get a discount when buying a Healing Potion, you can just make a Persuade test like in any other RPG. If the seller is not listening, then an Intimidate test might be in order; on the other hand, if the seller seems a little too interested in listening, then a Flirt test might be more appropriate.

In any case, basic tests are still broadly useful when trying to resolve quick interactions between heroes and NPCs. Negotiation comes into play, according to the latest Patreon packet, with “named NPCs who can provide information, items, or services that dramatically change the course of an adventure”. If you and your allies are trying to convince a king to lend you aid during a war, then that’s when a negotiation starts.

During a negotiation, NPCs have four stats: interest, patience, motivations, and pitfalls. In adventure modules these might come prespecified, but the Director can always quickly improvise some stats on the spot like they might do with the DC for a Persuasion check in D&D, for example.

Interest is a number that goes from zero to five and represents how… Well, interested the NPC is in the heroes’ talking points. This stat can go up and down depending on how well the heroes negotiate and, once negotiation is over, it is also what determines how good the NPC’s final offer is. Likewise, patience is also a number ranging from zero to five, but it basically represents how many arguments the heroes get to make before the NPC makes a final offer.

Motivations and pitfalls, on the other hand, are the kinds of arguments that particularly resonate or irritate the NPC. A revolutionary leader, for example, might have freedom as a motivation and higher authority as a pitfall; when negotiating with them, arguments that appeal to the revolutionary’s sense of freedom will require an easier test than those that don’t, while arguments that mention higher authorities will not work and can reduce the NPC’s patience.

There are currently twelve types of argument in the list of motivations and pitfalls. These are: benevolence, discovery, freedom, greed, higher authority, justice, legacy, peace, power, protection, revelry, and vengeance.

Once the Director decides the negotiation stats of the NPC, the heroes can start talking. One of the heroes should begin by making an argument or offering something in exchange for the NPC’s favor, making an easy test if they appeal to a motivation or a medium test if they don’t. Each type of test has a different outcome for each tier, but, most of the time, the NPC’s patience will decrease by one and their interest will go up, down, or stay the same depending on how well the hero rolls. Mentioning a pitfall, though, is an automatic fail, and the NPC’s interest and patience both decrease by one.

Now it’s time for the NPC to make an offer. If their current interest is five, they accept the heroes’ deal and go out of their way to do something extra for them; if their interest is four, they accept the deal, that’s it; if their interest is three, they accept the deal, but ask for something more in return. Now stuff starts to get ugly if their interest is lower than three… At two, they reject the deal, but are willing to do something to help the heroes out; at interest one, they flat out refuse the heroes’ deal; finally, if their interest is zero, they reject the deal, stop listening, and try to make the heroes’ lives more difficult.

If after this first argument the NPC still has some patience left, the heroes can either accept the offer or make another argument to try and sweeten the deal. Then, rinse and repeat until the NPC either runs out of patience, or their interest reaches zero or five.

There are still more elements to this system, like consequences for lying, ways to uncover motivations and pitfalls, how sharing languages with the NPC affects their patience, the impact renown has on tests, etc. But I think this was a good enough summary.

Now, before I start talking about my impressions of this system, I have a question for you, dear listener: what do you think of these rules? Do they fit your idea of how negotiations should be done in RPGs? Do you think they’re even necessary? Please, let me know in the comments, ‘cause I’m very interested in what the community has to say about negotiations in Draw Steel.

With that out of the way, onto my take. Last week I played the second act of Draw Steel’s latest Patreon packet, which features a couple of optional negotiations. My players talked to some hawklords, mounted warriors that have been pressed into the service of Ajax the Invincible. Overall, my players weren’t fans of the negotiation system.

Part of this may be due to my lack of experience; I didn’t know the possible outcomes of each test by heart, so I had to keep referring back to the rules instead of engaging with my players. Another possible factor may be the adventure itself; my players knew nothing about the hawklords and they show up in the middle of a fast-paced scene where a negotiation doesn’t even look like a possible course of action, so I kinda had to shove this possibility in their faces, which made it feel super forced.

As for me, I’m still not sure what I think, sorry. Having a list of motivations and pitfalls for each important NPC would be, no joke, one of my favorite features of adventures made for Draw Steel. And I do love having some structure in the social pillar of a game, but keeping track of patience and interest like some social hit points felt like a step too far.

However, I’m pretty decent at improvising NPC interactions and I do an ok job tracking what NPCs think of the heroes, so a fully fledged negotiation system felt like bit of a burden. What I’m guessing, though, is that rules like these could really help people who aren’t that good with improvisation or modeling the internal state of a made-up person.

So currently I’m cautiously optimistic that this system won’t get in my way once I get better acquainted with it and that it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for Directors who need a little help with the social pillar. And, in any case, you could simply ignore the negotiation rules if don’t like them, it’s not the same as not liking the combat rules in a game about fighting monsters; this isn’t a game about asking kings for help, it’s just one of the things you do.

Outro

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

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

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