TDS 015: Draw Steel's New Classes

TDS 015: Draw Steel's New Classes

· Caio · #podcast  #mcdm  #ttrpg  #draw-steel 

This episode was originally published on YouTube and Spotify. This page only contains the transcript.

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the fifteenth episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about MCDM’s Draw Steel TTRPG, where I talk about its development, my playing experience, and first- and third-party content being made for the game.

Today we’ll start the show with the headliners: I’ll tell you everything there is to know about the Beastheart and the Summoner, MCDM’s brand new classes for Draw Steel. Then, we’ll talk about the latest changes coming to the rules in the news segment of the podcast. And last, but not least, I’ll go over the creations from the community, highlighting a new adventure currently in crowdfunding!

Cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

New classes

Draw Steel will ship with nine core classes. If you haven’t heard the list before, they are: the Censor (a religious knight), the Conduit (a devoted priest), the Elementalist (a scholar of the elements), the Fury (a raging warrior), the Null (an unarmed psion), the Shadow (an expert assassin), the Tactician (a weapon master), the Talent (a psionic caster), and the Troubadour (a swashbuckling storyteller).

Instead of resting on their laurels, though, the dev team at MCDM is already making the next classes that will be added to the game. Since Draw Steel doesn’t have multiclassing, this means that they can create niche, flavorful classes without worrying that they will break the game’s balance when combined with one of the core classes.

The first one they are working on is the Beastheart; this is MCDM’s warrior from the wilds, an adventurer that fights alongside a powerful pet companion. Be it a wyrmling, an earth elemental, or a freaking owlbear, the Beastheart has a mystic connection with their bonded creature, which allows them to combo off of each other during combat. But beware! A Beastheart’s companion might enter a rampage if their ferocity is not kept in check.

Dope, right? If you’ve been following Matt Colville and MCDM for a while, you probably know that this class is already out for D&D 5th Edition! What they’re doing now is porting the class over to Draw Steel, transforming it into what the team has dubbed the ‘Beastheart UNCHAINED’; a version of the class that is not kept back by 5e’s rules.

According to James, the Beastheart UNCHAINED is already being tested, and they are exploring different ways of making the class as cool as possible. However, they haven’t shown it off to the public yet; once they have a public prototype, I’ll make sure to talk about it in the podcast.

Now let’s talk about the second class MCDM has been working on: it is the Summoner! This is a brand new class, one that the devs have wanted to implement for a while, actually. The fact that the monsters rules were still in the works is what delayed their plans, but now that they are free to summon the Summoner, it is getting made. Unlike the Beastheart, this class is already in prototype phase, so we have a lot more information about it.

So, what is the core fantasy of the Summoner? According to Willy, the designer in charge of implementing it, their main inspirations are Diablo’s necromancer, Yu-Gi-Oh!’s upcycling mechanics, and Pikmin. The goal here is to have the player control a squishy caster whose main feature is commanding a small army of minions.

Flavor-wise, the Summoners are defined by the kind of creature they are able to summon. There are currently four planned subclasses: undead (which are tanky, but slow moving), elementals (which can control the terrain), demons (which are fast harriers), and pixies (which are good at buffing and debuffing).

Ok, so you are playing a necromancer, or a pixiemancer, or whatever, but what is the actual gameplay loop of the Summoner? Well, I’m glad you asked! It all hinges on the minion lifecycle; at the start of the round, you get four of your signature minions, which are your smallest possible summons. Then, on your turn, you can either command those minions to attack, use a maneuver, you know the basics, or sacrifice your minions to gain Essence, your heroic resource. Then, you can use that Essence to cast some spells or summon bigger, stronger minions.

Hearing this, you might be wondering just how long a Summoner’s turn is. Unsurprisingly, the devs have already thought about that. The first limiter to the complexity of this class is its minion ceiling; right now, they can’t ever have more than 12 minions on the field. The next limiter is the fact that minions do static damage, so the Summoner is still only making at most one or two Power Rolls on their turn. Finally, their actions and spells mostly work on their minions; their free strike, for example, simply commands their minions to attack again.

If you want to see a necromancer Summoner at work, make sure to check out Matt’s stream from January 31st. There you’ll be able to see Bjorn, Again at work! My favorite moment from that stream is definitely when Matt gets to use his Minion Bridge ability to be crowd surfed by his skeletons up a cliff… You just can’t make that shit up.

Fine, now you’re excited. When can we get our hands on the Beastheart and the Summoner? Bad news: no one knows. According to the devs, they still haven’t decided on which product these classes will be coming out, so we’ll have to wait a little longer until we know just how long exactly we’re gonna have to wait. I know, it’s sad, but what are you gonna do?

And that’s all we know about the new classes. Again, once we have more information about them, I’ll share everything on the podcast. But before you leave, let me know which one you’re most excited for. I personally really wanna summon some demons, I don’t know why. But I think I should talk to my therapist about that…

Now let’s get into the rest of the news: everything that is changing in the core rules of the game!

Intermission

Hey, quick break before we move on! I just wanna remind you to subscribe to The Dice Society’s mailing list if you don’t want to depend on an algorithm to receive updates from me. Also, don’t forget to rate this episode in your platform of choice, ‘cause it really helps me reach more people.

That’s it! Back to the show…

News

Most of the news for today is about the little changes the devs are implementing while Draw Steel is in editing and layout. As I’ve said in the previous episode, the game is content complete, meaning there will be no new features added, but this does not mean that the game is done.

According to James, lead designer at MCDM, their plan is to release the full PDF before sending the files to the printer, allowing them to make any last-minute changes before the text is set in stone… Or paper, I guess. Anyway, this helps avoid things like day-one errata. So we can expect minor tweaks to the rules up until the physical books are finalized.

But, come on, let’s get on with it and talk about those changes that have already been implemented!

A bunch of stuff was renamed. The Troubadour Skald is now the Auteur, the Fury’s Rage is now Ferocity, monster bands are now hordes, and monster troops are now elites. The devs are also working on better wording to explain some rules, and Djordi is making a few diagrams to help us visual learners.

On the balancing department, minions should now be coming in packs of four instead of eight, solos should now have to buy their second action with Malice, and some ancestries got more or less trait points depending on the power level of their signature traits. The devs have also clarified that two Victories (not three) will equate to an extra hero in the party for the purposes of encounter building.

To finish off the changelog, there are some news about the Draw Steel VTT, aka the Codex. Development is now full steam ahead, and the devs have been adding some pretty nice features over the past few weeks! I don’t have a list of everything that has changed, but make sure to check out the links in the description for demos of their new smart targeting system and forced movement automation.

As for new stuff coming to Draw Steel, Matt has briefly mentioned the Radenwight and the Gol ancestries, which might be coming in the Vasloria line of products. There are also some new classes, of course, but I’ll talk about those in a second…

To wrap up the news, we have a glimpse of the business side of things. Apparently, month-over-month preorders of Draw Steel are going up, even if you account for the spikes caused by the release of new videos and that kind of stuff. Things are looking good for Draw Steel!

And using that as a nice segue, let’s switch gears and talk about the community members making the most out of this rising interest in the game.

Community

Even two months after the release of the latest playtest packet, people are still making a lot of content for Draw Steel. Since I don’t wanna be here for the next couple of days, I’ll only talk about the community creations that caught my attention, so make sure to sign up for MCDM’s Discord if you want to see everything that people have been making for the game.

Let’s start with a bang… The very first third-party Draw Steel crowdfunder has launched: it’s called The Great Thaw of Gryzmithrak Spire! According to Andie Margolskee and Shae Dunser, the creators of the campaign, it is going to be a “level 1 adventure compatible with MCDM’s Draw Steel […] in which the heroes confront an ancient evil to stop an impending climate disaster.”

I won’t spoil the whole pitch—for that you’ll have to check out the crowdfundr—but it features kobolds, war machines, an ancient artifact, and a red dragon! The adventure is “packed with simple, high stakes intrigue and a growing crisis that only the heroes can stop.”

The creators were asking for 250 dollars to fund the PDF, but they have already soared past the 500 dollar mark with more than two weeks still left in the campaign. For four dollars, you can get yourself a PDF copy of the Great Thaw, for 25 bucks you get to play with the creators, and for 30 you get to participate in a 1-hour call with Shae to help develop an NPC or encounter for the adventure.

As I record this, they’re sitting at around 650 dollars. If they reach 750, they will be commissioning two custom pieces of art, so go back this campaign right now!

Before we move on to more creations from the community, let me just relay to you something Andie and I talked about over on Bluesky. I asked them what was the inspiration behind the adventure, take a listen:

“The inspiration came partly from my background as a climate scientist and partly from a ski trip I was on, where I found myself thinking about climate change, loss of snow cover, and what that does to local communities that rely on tourist activity. Until about a month ago I was a postdoctoral research associate working in a modeling group studying the Southern Ocean, and I really like thinking about how rapid shifts in local conditions create compelling stories as people react to changing conditions. I also have a soft spot for kobolds, so I couldn’t resist the pull of Draw Steel’s new angle on them as legions.”

I don’t know if the final product will be any good, but from the effort the creators have put into the campaign and the deep scientific background that inspired it, I think it’s worth your four bucks. The link to the crowdfundr page will be in this episode’s description.

Ok, so, with that out of the way, let’s talk about a couple of livestreams. The first one is an actual play of the Bay of Blackbottom; Leon Barillaro, the adventure’s author, ran it as a one-shot on TTRPGifs’ Twitch channel in order to raise funds for the SoCal fire relief. People could even donate money to make dope stuff happen during the game! Do check it out, it was super fun.

The second stream is the third part of Matt’s adventure brainstorming series. This is his unedited process of creating the outline for a Draw Steel adventure he wants to run for his friends; at some point, we might even get a recording of him running said adventure. The final videos are a bit on the longer side, but I really think they’re worth the watch if you care about adventure design.

Now, leaving the world of live video, let’s talk about a couple of… Dead videos? Pre-recorded videos, yes. Starting with a Danger Room in The Draw Steel Codex, by Rise Heroes Rise!; This is an actual play that shows off the Codex, so it’s the perfect watch if you want to see the VTT doing its thing. The Rise Heroes Rise! YouTube channel also has some fun shorts of their other actual plays if you want to check those out too.

The other video I want to mention is The Ten Thousand Year Cataclysm, a level 10 actual play by d20play; Tom has been covering Draw Steel for some time already, but this one-shot was a truly epic adventure. Also take a look at the rest of his YouTube channel for more videos about Draw Steel and even some interviews with James Introcaso.

Moving on from actual plays to actual interviews, I just gotta highlight the chat Jon de Nor and I had over at Goblin Points. Jon is such a cool guy, a great interviewer, and he had some really deep and interesting questions for me during the episode. We talked about moderation, advertising, YouTube, the whole deal; I highly recommend you listen and subscribe to Goblin Points, his awesome Draw Steel podcast.

The second interview I want to talk about is Aestus’ conversation with Dale Kingsmill; if you don’t know her, she’s a D&D YouTuber and podcaster who also does most of MCDM’s developer Q&As. During the interview, they talked about mythology, growing up in Australia, fantasy literature, and a whole lot more. Aestus has also done other interviews about Draw Steel with James and Djordi, which you can check out on his YouTube channel.

Off of social media we also had plenty of creations from the community. The first two are character sheets: a custom PDF sheet by Plusmouse and a digital sheet by Jon de Nor. The former is now the default output of my favorite character builder, Forge Steel, while the latter is integrated into the Stawl Draw Steel toolset. Make sure to check both out before playing your next hero!

And, to close off this section, let’s just do a quick lightning round of some miscellaneous stuff that caught my eye:

That’s a wrap! Let’s hope the community segment of the podcast is always this full of awesome stuff to highlight.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and a full transcript of this episode. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!