A Look at Crafting in Draw Steel

While Draw Steel de-emphasizes the accumulation of wealth as a primary gameplay motivator (you're supposed to be heroes, not mercenaries!) it does still have plenty of cool magic items you can get your hands on.

Referred to as "Treasures," these will typically give you a bit of an edge (perhaps sometimes literally) on top of your class abilities.

Because mundane equipment is handled through the use of things like kits or just implied, all Treasures are magical in nature.

Notably, these treasures are put in the Heroes book, rather than the Monsters book, because the players are intended to know about them. And why is that? Because, except for ultra-rare Artifacts, they're all craftable.

Crafting is one of the many things you can do with downtime projects. These projects can reflect making things like magic items, or doing research, gathering intelligence, training, etc.

Here's how it works:

Some projects have an item prerequisite: say you want to craft a Blade of Quintessence, a weapon imbued with great elemental power. You need, for that, a ruby hardened in the City of Brass (this is a piece of Arabic folklore not original to D&D) as well as a sapphire that has been struck by lightning. There's no explicit source for these items, so the Director will either concoct an adventure to acquire them or can make another downtime project to get it.

Projects also have sources - essentially finding instructions or the like that will guide you through completing it. This could be a book or scroll, or even a master of the craft who can instruct you.

Each project requires a certain number of Project Points to complete. Generally, when you take a Respite (Draw Steel's rest mechanic, which requires at least 24 hours of relaxation and recovery in a place of safety - the Hobbits' time in Rivendell in Lord of the Rings is the oft-cited example) you can make working on that project your respite activity. (As a reminder, there's no explicit penalty to taking multiple respites in a row, though narratively, the villains of the story will be on the move.)

Once you have your item prerequisites and source, you can make project rolls. Each project or treasure has associated characteristics: forging a Blade of Quintessence could involve Might, Intuition, or Reason. The project roll is a Test, but rather than three tiers of results, you simply gain Project Points equal to the total roll. Because there are no tiers, a double edge simply translates to a +4 bonus, and a double bane translates to a -4 penalty. Once you reach the total for the project, the project is complete.

Like landing a crit in combat, if you roll a 19 or 20 on the 2d10, you have a breakthrough, allowing you to make another project roll in the same respite.

The easiest projects to complete are things like consumables, like a few Black Ash Darts, which can be thrown as a ranged free strike as a maneuver and then teleport you. This takes 45 Project Points to complete, and nets you 1d3 darts (or 3 if you're a Shadow).

By contrast, building an Airship (a goal that many of my D&D characters have had) takes 3000 Project Points.

So, how long do these take to actually complete?

If you're working entirely on your own, and doing something that uses one of your class' top characteristics, you'll generate an average of 13 project points per respite at level 1, up to an average of 16 at level 10. That means it'll be a while before you complete even the most basic items, and that Airship is looking very far away indeed.

However, there are some ways to mitigate these costs:

First off, multiple characters can contribute to the same project - if you and two fellow players are working on those darts, you might be able to get a set in just a single respite.

Another potential bonus is a Guide - guides might come in the form of some expert who lends their temporary assistance, or perhaps you've salvaged a largely intact part of the thing you're building, or some manual that solves some major logistical issue for you with a clever workaround. These guides are given out at a Director's discretion, but might account for some large portion of the project's total required points.

Finally, this dovetails with another system: Renown. As you adventure, you'll gradually acquire more Renown as your heroic deeds are tallied. At certain levels of renown, you'll attract various followers - NPCs who basically work for you - flavored as you choose. Artisans and Sages are two kinds of followers you can have, and these NPCs can contribute their own Project Rolls once a day to the things you're working on. They won't necessarily have the same bonuses you have - they tend to have 1s and 0s in their characteristics - but a whole other person working on something will get it finished a lot quicker. Also, because they're staying back at your home base, they could potentially keep working on things while you're out on an adventure. You can ultimately get up to 4 followers, and while you might have a Retainer as one of them to fight alongside you in adventures (that's a whole other system) and perhaps have them specialized in different ways, you could also really focus heavily on production. Say you really want to complete that airship, with its whopping 3000 project point goal. Well, on your own, even with a 5 in the relevant characteristic and a relevant skill, you're only getting an average of 18 per day. That's 167 days of downtime. But if you have three followers working on it, each contributing 12 a day, you could cut that down to 56 days. Through in a guide and that could start to look very realistic.