Draw Steel (Part 2)

First draw some circles, then the rest of the fucking game

You can find part 1 here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

The reason why these kinds of games are so often (usually in bad faith and/or dismissive insult) compared with wargames, boardgames or video games is that they lack solid roleplaying engines that reproduce the game. You run encounter after encounter and keep getting into encounter after encounter because you want to get into another encounter. No matter the narrative dressing, the essential buy-in is that you want — any non-combat options is to reframe externality to the fight; encounters will happen, just different and with different setup and stakes. You’re nudging the game in a certain narrative direction, not avoiding playing it.

There are really no engines in Draw Steel recognizable as a cooperative collaborative storytelling game engine — as there is not one in the pop games this descends from. That is not to say these games lack engines. They do tend to have very refined engines, just not one that you may not recognize as a roleplaying ones. They are primarily concerned about scarcity, resource-conservation.

This tends to be the case because, well, it is a perfect fit for a focus in “tactics”. Getting fun and feeling successful in a tactical sense come from efficiently pursuing the goals set by strategy. If your game is focused on tactics and maneuvering around scarcity is not your engine, you’re creative indeed.

Draw Steel is conservative on this. HP, HP Recovery, Recovery Recovery. You want to get as much done for least HP, least HP Recovery and taking the least Recovery Recovery. Then, each class has its own Resource, which adds nuance with their own mini-game. This engine hooks nicely with the play-by-play of encounters, which is throwing powers against each other, and those powers are set up and the outcome of Class Resource use.

Renown, Wealth, and other drivers for adventuring are quite secondary and shallow, given only a brief acknowledgment but not integrated on the engine.

You go to the next encounter because you want to play through the next encounter. Anything else is a distraction.

I wrote a whole article on this, but this is truly a game you play for the sheer joy of the danger of combat, you have the ultimate incentive: having a good time. That is your engine forward, the gas in it, and brother, if you like tactical games, you are going to have it.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Listen.

You will not get this huge thing ready for the table in one hour. However, the good thing about Draw Steel is that its lead designer made a career telling people how to prepare games. So the best thing you can do is get Youtube fired up.

If you have time before, I suggest making pre-made characters for the table, preparing 3-4 encounters and fire the grid up.

On precise rules. Focus on the powers and list them to players, and understanding how powers work. Treat everything like a power if you remember nothing else: there are 3 (4) outcomes. Less than 11, progress at a minimum but progress, nonetheless. 12-16 . 17+ is maximum success. 20 is for there as legacy support for meme outcomes. When in doubt, fall back to that.

Also learn how Malice works for Monsters. Come on, the best part of this game is encounter design and playing from the Game Master size, so don’t deny yourself that.

My friend, this is a big,meaty game. Build your first dungeon ahead of time and remember this is a game where movement is a big thing, both yours and the enemies. When you are building dungeons and other encounters, you need to think about it like a boomer-shooter and focus on strong kinetic possibilities.

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Before I go deep into the many stress points of this game, I have to commend it on its sturdiness. Draw Steel knows people will play the game wrong no matter what and has made sure that no matter what, they still get a satisfying tactical and cinematic experience. That by itself makes it excel at this parameter of critique.

That said, while you would struggle to really derail this game, you cannot spend any amount of time with this game without stepping on its exposed nails.

The game has many issues, and almost all of them stem from one or two points:

• Despite being aware that they cannot “fix” Dungeons and Dragons and so they must build a game from scratch, they keep swerving into fixing Dungeons and Dragons, integrating sacred cows and its legacy elements.

• The naked focus on marketing previously discussed on part 1, screaming about Market Optimization, Focus Testing; as such, every single tendency of designfluencers and “design it for the post” trend manages to crawl in any moment Draw Steel falters in what it is about.

Every single one of the things I will discuss as stress points can be traced to one of those, if not both. I say it now so I don’t have to repeat myself every step of the way.

The one that keeps reappearing over and over is when Draw Steel falters in what it is about. I often harp on an on about what failure and success means, and how most game do not think about their desired gamescapes and how every mechanic should produce outcomes that are their game desired gamescapes — and thus, abandoning “success” and “failure” altogether as design concerns. Draw Steel understands that, everything you do advances the game and produces the desired gamestate; where Draw Steel is Draw Steel, where it excels, it sticks to this principle and the game is satisfying. You do something, there are three outcomes (plus one), all of them produce Draw Steel as intended. When it loses sight of itself, it wanders off and uses some generic inputs that produce generic noise. The biggest case of this has to be Skills. So how come when it comes to fights and powers, there are three possible outcomes and all produce the desired gamestate, why do skills have 12 possible outcomes and almost half of them get in the way of Draw Steel doing what the rest of Draw Steel is doing/wants to do? Why can you keep failing and twiddling your thumbs with none of the Tactics, Cinematics or Heroics of the game? This contrast really comes out as unnatural with Maneuvers, aka: using Skills in Combat. They have to be massaged into powers (because everything you do in this game when you are actually playing Draw Steel is mechanized as a power), but somehow they still have to be Skills, so… half of the time they are powers that do nothing. Making pretty apparently that if one was to think about all those non-power Skill mechanics as powers, they would be bad powers. Which then we see on the entire mechanics for Negotiations: where half the outcome of Negotiations does not advance them, and thus making Negotiations — which otherwise would have the potential to be as tactically, heroic, or cinematic as encounters — feel as deeply satisfying as any other pop fantasy game non-combat sequence. “Oh shit, if I try to take part in this Negotiation scene I will make things worse half the time? Oh, I will help the people good at this then. Wait, for some reason helping in a Skill is very likely to make the outcome worse?” These are the kinds of things that players that stumble into playing this different game coming from Draw Steel realize and verbalize with disappointment.

This mess of Skills/Maneuvers/Negotiations aligns with a common issue across the rules: the game is not as elegant in its mechanics as it could be. And most of the time, when I mention that in my critique, it is because of some limitation or constraint that is obvious to anyone delving into the process of design. You can see where the engine struggles, where things don’t connect so well, how design processes went and solutions were integrated; how many small fixes accumulated but the final step of redesigning/rewriting never happened — imagine breaking it after all that trouble just to make it more elegant. The most common example is when a designer singles a part of the engine as a “resolution mechanic”, and as a game grows in complexity, more parts of the game have to hook up to the inputs of a “resolution mechanic”; as a result, soon a “resolution mechanic” has more and more intermediate/pre-processing steps. Now, where this grows into a lack of design elegance is when the complexity of inputs does not match the resolution of outputs; so you keep doing more and more steps, which have less impact on the outcomes, making each step (and every part of the engine hooking to that step) less important. This is a problem that it would be inevitable for Draw Steel and failing to do so would, again, be the expected way for the game to become less elegant — after all, everything feeds into a power and a power only has 3(4) possible outputs and they all drive the same direction. Except it is not: Draw Steel knows this is something that needs to be made a feature and not a problem, so it attenuates how many inputs can actually interact with the micro-engines of Draw Steel.

So the inelegance is not coming from inside the organic game design process? Where it is coming from. I will now list many stress points that would be elegant if Draw Steel stuck to its ongoing design rather than optimal marketing/how pop fantasy games are supposed to be:

• Due to one of those attenuations, the modifiers to a use of a power can never, after math, go more than -4/+4 mallus or bonus. With attributes, this means after even more math, the range will be -9 to +9. This is part of careful design, however, it is a very interesting range, because it means it: a) very similar to rolling 3d10s rather than 2d10s b) it is just enough to drop a tier 3 outcome to tier 1 and raise a tier 1 to tier 3. It is a good fix to the problem of game math, however these numbers highlight how foreign the problem is to Draw Steel — it is an excellent solution and gating function to a problem they introduce for no benefit for the game in terms of power mechanics or somewhere else¹. The perfect solution shows design chops and awareness, which then, when you are slowing down playing your game doing pointless math, you start to wonder why. Why am I even doing this math? And even more, why am I even rolling dice in this situation. Since every outcome is tier 1-3, if one is building on Draw Steel’s game design, the solution internally would not be to add and subtracting numbers: it would be, for extreme situations, to bypass rolling altogether — you are trying to do something you are not good at in awful circumstances this can only be tier 1 or everything is in your favor and you excel at this so it is automatic tier 3. Any more common in between could be solved with a third dice, which the edges and banes nudging how the results are read. The pointless math steps are coming from outside the house.

• You would not think so based on my harsh words in part 1, but Draw Steel has the best implementation of ancestry in any Dungeons and Dragons heartbreaker. The problem with that praise is that rather than being the awesome ancestry rules of Draw Steel, they are the best implementation of a pop game heartbreak. All the pieces are there: a point-buy system to fully customize the embodied ancestry of your character, the culture, and career choices to complement those, unique abilities that change interaction with the world and game. But because it has to be bundled in a certain way, things have to be divided into packages that are “elf”, “orc” or “dwarf”. All those good ingredients come up as traditional adventuconquistador Hitler particles sludge. All you needed to was open the point build creation options for every character, have the unique ability be tied to a macro-region/culture, and then have example builds of the majority population of people in a given location, it would be much more in tune with the rest of Draw Steel.

• Part of why this was not done was because the setting of Draw Steel is intentionally designed to be as generic, bland, and Mass Market Appeal as possible. It refuses to commit to anything or be about anything, because doing so would close the door to potential clients. It is clearly a successful product, but suffers as a game and cultural production because of that.

• And of course, discussing marketing, we should round up to the point I mentioned about the borderline false-advertisement of playing with expectations in part 1. You have a game named Draw Steel; you keep dropping words in all copy like medieval, high fantasy, heroic, tactical, cinematic, etc. And weapons and armors and their interplay really don’t matter compared with the rest of the game. Because of all these entanglements and expectations, the opportunity was missed to redesign the role of equipment in heroic tactical fantasy. For example, attributes exist because attributes have to exist in these games, I guess, and so there has to be pointless math. And affect powers since they exist. But if they are here, why not move those to weapons? Especially when weapons as they are already doing that? Why are the attributes not in their weapons? Why does each class not have their main attributes in a primary weapon and their array of choice in a secondary weapon? Why not make signature weapons a thing in this game, expanding the rather pointless role of Kits?

If the previous stress points are of a category of “why you have everything going so well you have to add these things”, there are a few minor ones that are more of missed opportunities.

The Project rules are fantastic, with all the pieces there for great gameplay. I love when downtime mechanics are well integrated, and it is nice to see how well they attune with the 24h rest of the Draw Steel gameplay loop. Still, they are kinda lumped together with Treasure but not really well formalized and integrated. Furthermore, the systems to make weapons and armor more iconic are already there. All the parts are there, so this could just be presented as having collective party projects (creating a party identity) and individual projects (where you improve your weapons, armor, or character).

Renown and Wealth are given a token page in the rules, but it is so underwhelming it makes one wonder why even is presented in this way. Almost as lackluster are Perks.

The thing with Renown and Wealth comes with an issue with Draw Steel: it is a game about heroes playing coy not to alienate any market share. So heroes and heroism are not about anything. So they don’t end up feeling like much of characters. Sure, this is my time raider agent urban conduit with a swashbuckling kit and a dragon knight name. But that is what it is. It is not a person. And it is a hero in much the same way a Marvel superhero is: because Disney brands them so.

A minor but still remarkable omission is a lever about the “opportunity cost” of resting. When the engine of a tactical game is resource scarcity, it would be fitting to have some kind of “looming threat” to make clear what is at stake and the urgency. We don’t do a Recovery Recovery after every fight because X. Since this is a feature of the engine, and Monsters are such looming figures, it is quite an omission that the advancement of villainous plots is not formalized as correlating with how much time Heroes take in stopping them. You could even use the same Project system for villains to advance their own projects.

In addition to all the above, I am going to call out such a bizarre miss. You should absolutely wrongly steal and use the 4th edition skill challenges for this game, they would have been a natural fit and it feels weird not to have them.

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Okay so, what lessons can we take from here?

There is, of course, the old lesson about confidence of design. If you are not confident in a design choice, don’t include in; commit to it and stick to design principles you establish for yourself and your design work. Draw Steel is an excellent game when it knows what it is about, sticks to its guns and commits to certain design choices. Sure, you may not like the focus on powers for combat, but the game is better when it does it.

Another lesson is that trying to appeal to everyone is a quick way to appeal to nobody. Draw Steel does not gain any fans to it with its generic non-comital fantasy slurry — you coming into it for other reasons. Chasing after Product Optimization, Focus Testing and Market Penetration takes a cost. You can look at what Draw Steel got for paying that price and think, well, that’s a price I will gladly pay. However, James Introcaso and Matt Colville are marketing adepts and the biggest designfluencers not working in the space of traditional pop games — and only now migrated from Hasbro’s tit. You’re not Colville or Introcaso. The cost will be the same for your game and will get you not as much. You will need to embrace the freak, the niche, and go deeper. Find your people.

This is also good instruction in how “fluff”, setting and other “soft” elements are actually part of a system, mechanics and should be taken as serious as any other design.

As a final note, I must mention Draw Steel’s licensing. Most of those efforts are just to make new enclosures rather than Hasbro’s, but this one seems determined in one thing and one thing only: to protect MCDM interests. It seems to grant nothing to creators while imposing all sorts of limitations. It is not clear to me what environment for third-parties it creates. As such, I cannot end up with a recommendation for designers, podcasters, life players, streamers to produce art related to Draw Steel — despite how much potential the game has for that.

We live in a post-OGL world. That seems like such an unusual thing to say, it seemed that the OGL would always exist and loom large in this hobby, but truthfully, you can see its bloody end all over this world. Draw Steel is the first of the next generation of true Fantasy Heartbreakers, inheritor to a legacy of jeweled thrones to tread and earths to wander.

But what for you to steal? Enough of talk of passion, of familiarity, fools have plenty of each. I have a simple question? Why reinvent the wheel? We live in an art form that hasn’t even seen what the top speed of the wheel is yet, and you have people afraid to use it. Draw Steel saw a wheel and tried to improve it, maybe you could do the same?

1. No, not quite. Doing this to power modifiers also makes the current implementation of skills work, so it is both a good solution for a problem they introduced (in Powers mechanics) to allow a bad solution to a poor implementation of Skills and Tests that they did that way because that’s what skills are in pop fantasy games.