If you were to map each of Draw Steel's current existing 9 classes to a D&D 5E class, you could pretty reasonably do so thusly: Censors are Paladins, Conduits are Clerics, Elementalists are Wizards/Sorcerers (and perhaps a bit of Druid), Furies are Barbarians, Nulls are Monks, Shadows are Rogues, Tacticians are Fighters, Talents are... well, not anything just yet, though the Psion class from a recent UA is a clear analogue, and the Troubadour is the Bard.
And yet...
Classes in most RPGs combine a style of play with a general iconic look - Rogues are most classically depicted in black leather armor and cloaks and hoods, while Paladins are arrayed in bright armor, while Barbarians tend to wear not a whole lot. And these semi-cosmetic descriptions are usually reflected mechanically. My Mage in World of Warcraft can't wear a bunch of plate armor, and my Rogue in D&D isn't going to fight effectively with a Greatsword.
But it turns out that in Draw Steel, these cosmetic choices aren't as intrinsically linked to a class as you might think.
First off, I should note that this really applies more to classes that use Kits, which excludes some of the more pure spellcasting classes like the Conduit, Elementalist, and Talent, as well as the unarmed/unarmored Null.
But the Censor, Fury, Shadow, Tactician, and Troubadour all get to pick a Kit, and that can seriously change the whole vibe of your character, even if your mechanical abilities remain largely the same (apart from what the Kit does for you).
Take a Shadow - classically a Rogue-like class that likes to strike fast and then get the hell away from foes, using either dark magic, alchemical tools, or guile and trickery to aid them, the classic "look" for a Shadow would probably be something like Cloak and Dagger, a kit that gives you light armor and one or two light weapons to wield, which could be daggers or shortswords or what have you.
There are for sure some features here that fit into the Shadow's playbook - you get much better distance on your ranged attacks, higher speed, a bonus to your disengage speed (so you can choose to shift two instead of one square when you do so).
However, there is literally nothing stopping you from going a different direction:
Let's say what you really want to be is some kind of terrifying dark knight. You want to wear blackened plate armor (perhaps bearing the soot stains of your Black Ash magic, if you take that subclass) and appears as a kind of ghostly dreadnought on the battlefield.
Well, the Mountain kit might be good for you. This has you wear heavy armor and a heavy weapon, like a maul or a greataxe. You get significantly more Stamina, as well as higher stability (allowing you to reduce forced movement imposed by foes) and higher damage on tier 3 damage rolls with melee strikes.
Now, is this optimal? Perhaps not, though I haven't had enough experience with the game (none personally) to know whether it could work. The Mountain is built for melee in a way that might strain against some of the Shadow's abilities. But if you focus on getting a lot of melee strikes it could work.
What I think this really gets you to consider is how your class might look and feel different depending on the kit you choose. A Fury could take the Mountain kit to be a raging whirlwind of steel on the battlefield, but they could also take the Pugilist kit to be somewhat like Maxwell Gotch in Dimension 20's Cloudward Ho, a "Gentleman Fister" who is, they say, a bit of a Rowdy (the most recent episode of it as of this writing has Maxwell dispatch a pair of foes in a particularly brutal fashion that gets called out by the DM and other players as being really out-of-tone for a light pulpy steampunk adventure). And if you want the classic Conan look with a loincloth and giant sword, the Panther kit is your Barbarian classic.
But again, you could also be a Troubadour in a loincloth with a giant axe, and it works out.
Draw Steel does have three official campaign settings - two on the world of Orden, with Vasloria as the real standard fantasy world of small towns and feudal lords, as well as the city of Capital, a massive megalopolis filled with court intrigue and such. The Timescape, though, is kind of its science-fantasy/plane-hopping setting (where a few of its playable ancestries come from).
What I'd be really curious to see if to what extent Kits could easily be deployed to expand this game out into other subgenres - while none of the existing kits come with, say, firearms or laser swords, I don't think it would be all that difficult to implement them (indeed, one of the War Dog enemies, basically Frankenstein super soldiers, has what looks like an utterly massive sci-fi sniper rifle in the art). Because the classes focus more on what how the character is doing what they're doing rather than what equipment they're using to do so, a lot of the genre lockdown you can sometimes feel in a system like D&D kind of starts to dissipate.
Readers of this blog will know that I have a particular affection for a kind of New Weird modern blend of sci-fi and fantasy. If you wanted to make a campaign in such a setting, I think you really don't need to do just about anything to the classes themselves - you might limit or expand the Kits available to give some that fit in better with that subgenre, but I think the game mechanics aren't going to fight you that hard.
I'm hoping that the game's a big enough success that they put out some supplements - I know they're already talking about the Summoner and Beast Heart classes - and I think it'd be really cool to expand upon the potential subgenres the game can accomodate through Kits, monsters, and other options.
No comments:
Post a Comment