TDS 017: Draw Steel Strongholds & Warfare

TDS 017: Draw Steel Strongholds & Warfare

· 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 seventeenth 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’re talking strongholds and warfare! Over the past few weeks, we got some sneak peeks into the politics rules that might be coming later this year to Draw Steel.

Before we get to that, though, I’ll be covering the creations from the community that caught my eye and some miscellaneous news, including Willy’s new April’s Fools ancestry.

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

Community

We open today’s community corner with adventures! First is The Great Rebirth, an introductory adventure by Shaeomar (the same one from The Great Thaw crowdfunder, by the way). This 14-page PDF is already available on DriveThruRPG for $4 and promises to be “ideal […] for those wanting to run Draw Steel for the first time or looking to onboard newer players.”

And if you thought I was going to take this opportunity to talk about my own introductory adventure… How dare you? I’m much worse!

‘Cause turns out I recently launched a Patreon, which lets you join my Discord server, gain early access to videos and podcasts, get a digital copy of every Draw Steel product I make, and some other perks.

Last week’s post for members of the Initiate tier and above was the draft of the reworked version of You Meet in an Ambush, the introductory adventure I made way back in backer packet number 1. If you join the Patreon, you can download the PDF of the adventure, and every map and token you need to run it right now! So, head over there and check it out to make this disgusting self-promotion worth it.

By the way, the announcement post of the Patreon is open to everyone. In it, I talk about the history of The Dice Society, and what my goals are for the channel and the podcast, so it’s worth a look even if you don’t end up joining.

Ok, with this shameless plug out of the way, let’s talk about some ancestries. Eli.keytickler made a pack with six cool new ancestries, including Gnolls, Hobgoblins, and Kobolds. Then, Moffles, inspired by a post on the MCDM Patreon, made a Plasmoid ancestry.

From character options to character builders, the Character Sheet Toolkit, by MrMattDollar, now has a couple of automation features. In this updated version, you can simply check some boxes to have their contents added to your character. A great addition for those of us who like Matt’s toolkit.

Next, Stawl, by friend of the show Jon de Nor, also got some new goodies. With this update, you can now create homebrew monsters directly from within the app. Jon continues his great work of making Stawl a flexible, yet capable, all-in-one platform for Draw Steel players and directors.

Moving on to other online tools, Cal made an awesome website called Heroic Resources. Besides a great name, the web page has a collection of tools and resources for your Draw Steel game! Do check it out, it’s definitely worth a look.

Then, we’ve got Condition Labels, an Owlbear Rodeo extension by Seamus. As the name suggests, it provides directors with a quick way to add conditions to tokens in OBR without having to type them manually. I’ve already given this a try, and, oh my god, it is very good!

Leaving the world of online tools behind, we have a new crowdfunder on the horizon! The BackerKit campaign for Weapons of Legend was just announced by Jeff Stevens Games. This seems to be a Draw Steel version of their 5e electrum bestseller product of the same name.

However, we’re still more than 80 days away from the campaign actually going live, so expect me to talk more about it in the upcoming episodes of the podcast.

Ok, now to close off the community corner, let’s take a quick look into a few miscellaneous creations:

As always, you will find links to every single community creation mentioned here in this episode’s description.

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

We started the community segment talking about adventures, so let’s do the same for news segment!

In a recent Twitch stream, James told us that he’s finishing the draft of the Delian Tomb adventure, their introduction for people completely new to the game. According to him, it’s clocking in at 50 thousand words and players should take around 20 to 24 hours of play to get through it. MCDM patrons should be getting a playtest packet with the adventure sometime in May.

James also told us that their plans for after the core rules are solidifying around three distinct books. Matt elaborated on what these could be: first, an epic adventure called Crack the Sun; second, a setting book for Omundsland; and third, a book of encounters, containing challenges, montages, negotiations, and delves, which are self-contained short adventures that you can drop into your ongoing campaign.

In addition to these big books, Matt mentioned that there could be a second track of products that isn’t going to crowdfunding. Stuff like adventures and player options could be released as PDFs without the need of a whole BackerKit campaign.

This is all very early days, of course, but we did get the news that Willy has already drafted Radenwight and Goblin ancestries. Apparently, it’s an option for goblin players to run a tribe of three goblins instead of a single individual; if this does get through testing, my girlfriend is already in line to play three chaotic goblins in a trench coat.

Speaking of Willy, we got two posts of his on the Patreon: one with an ooze monster group, and one with… Clounns (spelled C-L-O-U-N-N). This last one was actually an April Fool’s joke that contained the titular Clounn ancestry, a Political Statement kit, and the Fool, a new Troubadour class act. Willy continues being, as always, a national treasure.

Before we head into the main segment of the show, let me quickly talk about Matt’s list of character names by ancestry. He shared it on Patreon and it’s already one of my favorite things about Draw Steel! When you read someone’s name, you can tell which ancestry they are from, it’s not just a random string of vaguely fantasy-sounding letters.

If you’ve ever read an MCDM dragon name, you know Dannorax is a Dragon Knight name. If I tell you someone is called Every Flake Of Snow A Memory, you instantly know that’s a High Elf. Anyway, I’m in love with these names and it seems like they’re already coming to the Codex. These folks can’t stop shipping!

Ok, that’s it for the news segment. Not a lot of stuff, I know, but that’s because the core books are in editing and layout. I expect to have more stuff to talk about once the plans for next year are more concrete.

Strongholds & Warfare

Remember Crack the Sun and the Omundsland setting I mentioned a minute ago? Well, an important piece of these two books seems to be politics. And by politics, I mean war!

Matt wrote a huge post on Patreon detailing their plans for a translation of the strongholds and warfare rules from 5th Edition into Draw Steel. As much as these rulesets were super cool to use in D&D, they can’t just be converted one-to-one for a game where heroes cannot miss.

So, everything I’m going to talk about right now is highly speculative, but I’m a big fan of Strongholds & Followers & Kingdoms & Warfare, and have deployed them to great success in my 5e campaigns! Therefore, I’m super excited to share what the devs are cooking up for us in that regard.

Starting with the least developed of the two: strongholds. Their main premise here is that the stronghold rules should allow parties to create a base for the whole team. You could still make an individual base for each hero like in 5e, of course, but there should be a way for the characters to contribute to a single stronghold that is shared among all of them.

This is a big win in my book, as my players have always wanted to share their bases. In my campaigns, the stronghold is an amalgamation of the party, with stuff like a big garden in the center for the druid, next to a creepy altar for the warlock’s patron. It’s a physical manifestation of their combined personalities.

And how would that work, you ask? With modular strongholds. Let me read straight from the post just to give you an idea of what that could look like:

“Rooms have a size, we think, but it’s like… Size 1, Size 2, etc…. You’re not literally buying square feet and doors and stairs. And different sized rooms have different costs allowing us to gate really powerful benefits behind really big rooms. What exactly a ‘room’ can do for you is something we’ll be discovering as we go but as a rule your stronghold shouldn’t steal functionality from other parts of the system. It can grant skills, or skill bonuses, it can be like a magic item […] but it shouldn’t improve your character’s powers, that’s something for Titles we think.”

If you’re keeping up with D&D 2024, these sound a lot like the bastion rules from the latest Dungeon Master’s Guide. I personally liked their implementation, but the sentiment online towards them seemed to be quite negative; I’ve even seen some people mention Strongholds & Followers as a better implementation of bastions, so I’m eager to see how Draw Steel players will react to this design if it gets past playtesting.

But that’s all we know about strongholds right now: modular buildings where bigger rooms grant better benefits.

That leaves us with warfare. This is my favorite MCDM system, and I’ve used it in the finale of my first big D&D campaign; we were cutting back and forth between the heroes fighting the big bad, and their army battling the big bad’s army. Each unit in the battle was headed by one of the parties’ retainers, so each defeat felt personal and meaningful. One of my favorite RPG experiences ever, for real.

The design, however, felt very… ’70s’, as Matt puts it. First of all, you had to break out a whole other game to run the battle! New rules, new mechanics, new powers… It was a little too much to learn for what, in my case, amounted to a single session of play. And on top of that you still had to deal with misses, which, as anyone who’s played some Draw Steel can tell you, kinda sucks.

So the devs want to keep the 5e gameplay loop where you have to recruit units through politics and adventuring, but avoid having a separate game that everybody has to learn before beginning a battle.

Their current idea for how to implement this is a new type of encounter, one where there’s an objective and a clock; the example of the post is stopping the orc with the bomb before they reach the gates of Helm’s Deep.

In this new warfare system, the heroes are fighting a regular combat set in the middle of the battle, and the arrival of your special units becomes an event! Let me read Matt’s explanation:

“IF you recruit the Thorns… you don’t know exactly when they’ll show up […]. But when they DO show up, they have a MAJOR effect on the battle. Like maybe when the Thorns arrive; all enemies are hit with an attack that does a lot of damage and causes enemies to fall asleep. Elf-shot! That kind of thing. And of course there are special enemy units!”

Matt goes on to talk about army persistence, a possible new maneuver, but I think this is the main point about their current thinking for warfare in Draw Steel: it will be played as a combat, but with events and objectives related to the greater battle that’s happening around the heroes. This is for sure way more cinematic than the 5e rules.

I’ve got to admit I liked the previous system, but I completely understand if they actually pivot away from it. The thing is you gotta support the core principles of the game, so it doesn’t really matter if you develop a cool warfare system if it doesn’t jive well with Draw Steel’s heroic and cinematic components.

I’m sure a few people are gonna complain about someone moving their cheese if these rules do get through playtesting, but I for one am excited to see what the team comes up with.

But that’s all I had to say about what we know of the upcoming strongholds and warfare rules for Draw Steel. Let me know in the comments what you think about them; I’m really curious to see how the community responds to these news.

Outro

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

A special thanks to my current Initiate-level patrons: grif and IronMonocle! You guys rock <3

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!