Well, I became a Patreon Patron to MCDM in order to get my hands on the latest playtest for MCDM's new RPG, Draw Steel. (Having already backed them on Backerkit, I am weighing instantly cancelling my patronage, only paying the 8 bucks to get a glimpse of this - not out of any disappointment, but only to avoid double-dipping too much.)
There has obviously been a lot of iteration on the game, but here are the basics as things stand:
At the core of the game is the Power Roll. Rather than rolling a d20, you roll 2d10, adding an appropriate attribute (Might, Dexterity, Reason, Intuition, or Presence, for which you'll generally start with scores ranging from 2 to -1) and then determining which of the three tiers of results it lands in. 11 and lower is a tier 1, 12-16 is tier 2, and 17+ is tier 3. Essentially, I think players will gradually just start to internalize 12 and 17 as the thresholds.
The ranges of the power roll results are interesting - 11 is the average roll for 2d10, meaning that unless you have a positive score in the attribute you're rolling, you're more likely to get the lowest tier result. Having just a bonus of 1 will push you over the edge, statistically, so you'll be more likely than not to succeed at least a little with the things that your character is good at.
The Power Roll is part of both Tests (like "can I climb up that wall?" or "can I convince this palace guard that I am, in fact, Prince Jacques de Vontare?") and attacks ("I'm going to stab this guy.")
In combat, your attacks will deal damage based on the power roll - notably, there is no missing in this game; you'll always hit your target, but the power of your attack and potentially other effects that might be added to the damage are determined by the tier of your power roll result.
Rolling a natural 20 - in other words, getting a 10 on both dice (which is only a 1% chance) - will cause the roll to automatically get a tier 3 result and also, in combat, gives you an additional action on your turn.
Now, there are also situational bonuses and penalties called Edges and Banes. If you're attacking a creature who is prone, for example, you'll gain an Edge to your Power Roll, which adds 2 to it. If you're trying to climb a wall that is slick with rain, you'll get a Bane, subtracting 2 from your roll.
If you get two or more Edges, you get a Double Edge, which simply guarantees that you can treat your Power Roll as having gotten one tier higher. Double Banes work similarly, and reduce your result to one tier lower. The +2 or -2 bonus goes away, but that's fine because this will either have the same or a better effect every time.
Notably, this means that if you really put in the effort to set yourself up for success, you won't still wind up getting the worst result.
Character creation involves picking an Ancestry, a Culture, a Career, a Class, and a Kit.
Ancestry is your classic fantasy race/species, such as Dwarves, High Elves, Orcs, or unique Draw Steel options like the Memonek or the Hakaan (also, Devils are apparently just people in this game, and are an option). Ancestries give you a small number of abilities and adjustments.
Culture has you piecing together the elements of the society that you were brought up in, picking the environment, the organization of that culture, and your upbringing within it, along with languages you speak. Each of these choices then provides skill categories from which to choose your particular skillset.
Career is basically what you were doing before becoming an adventuring hero, giving you some skills, a "Title" (which is like a bonus feature that you normally earn in-game) and some other benefits like Renown or Project Points (the exact details of which I haven't gotten to yet).
Your Class, of course, is the biggest choice, and determines what kind of things you can do in your adventuring, from the battlefield commander Tactician to the magic-slinging Elementalist.
Finally, your Kit is kind of a generalized representation of your equipment and the style in which you fight and adventure. Kits will tell you the kind of armor and weapons you're carrying, and will affect your attacks and your spells, and give you a few other features. For example, a Shadow (the sneaky thief/assassin class) might pick the Cloak and Dagger kit if they want to mix it up and confound enemies while tossing knives at them, or they might go with the Sniper kit if they want to be far away from the action and taking out enemies from long range with a bow.
Each class gets a fair number of things at level 1, but it appears it's mostly about choices: you'll be able to choose a Signature Ability - which is something you can do free - and various Heroic abilities, which you'll need to spend a certain amount of your Heroic Resources to use.
It appears that a 1st level character will only have their Signature ability and then a single 3-resource cost ability and a single 5-resource cost ability, but as you gain levels, you'll be able to choose more abilities from these lists, and get some higher-cost abilities as well (though we only really have the details to build 1st level characters).
In other words, I think that every character will require some big choices when you level up, but once those choices are made, you'll actually have a pretty small, curated list of abilities to use. Ideally, this means that combat will go quickly because you only have so many things you can do, but players will feel a sense of control and agency over their characters because they get to make all these choices.
What I'm curious to see if how the classes evolve with each level. There is, frankly, a lot of front-loaded choice to make upon character creation, which I think could overwhelm a new player (and we're all new players given the game isn't even out yet). I also wonder if, as character level up, if they'll largely just be making choices from the same pool of options or if they'll get new and exciting options as well (the existence of 7-cost abilities is encouraging).
Heroic Resources vary from class to class. Some classes will carry over their resources from battle to battle, and might sometimes use them outside of combat, while some really only have these resources in combat.
The design here is to ensure that the game is not attrition-based - heroes will generally have more resources to work with at the later stages of an adventure than they have in the beginning. Each time the party overcomes a combat encounter or has some other significant triumph (maybe they solved a complex puzzle or successfully got what they wanted when negotiating with an important NPC) they earn a Victory. When combat starts (Draw Steel!) characters gain an amount of their Heroic Resource equal to their Victories, so you'll be better prepared to face down the final boss after you've fought all of their minions.
I'm still figuring out the exact flow of combat - this packet goes heavily into character creation before laying out the exact rhythms of it. But as I understand it, characters get an Action and a Maneuver on their turn, the former being pretty straightforward and the latter either being your movement or some other feature you can use in place of movement.
Overall, I think that the game could be very fun - I'm definitely used to D&D's style, which tends to be more limited in the features it gives to players (except spellcasters, which admittedly are the majority) and I think it will take some familiarity with the game before it becomes easy to really know what options to choose.
I actually really like how vague the Kits are - it gives players a ton of license to really reskin their characters to make them feel the way they want them to. I could even see genre-bending in this way - if your Tactician uses the Rapid Fire kit, who's to say that you aren't using a six-gun and have a total wild west vibe? Likewise, the fact that your classes are pretty agnostic about what kind of gear you're carrying opens this up.
I haven't quite figured out whether there are limitations on which classes can pick which kits beyond a simple Martial/Magic divide - can a Shadow pick the Shining Armor kit? On one hand, that would be a really weird choice, but on the other, it might allow for some really original character concepts (imagine an order of benevolent Shadow Knights who strike from the darkness to safeguard the innocent.)
Anyway, I'm just over halfway through the packet. I don't want to give away all the specifics, but I think I've been speaking generally enough not to run afoul of MCDM's effort to incentivize people to pay them for their work.
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