There are a lot of really cool ideas in Draw Steel. While there are some elements to the game that I remain a little skeptical about (I need to dig deeper into the kind of out-of-combat stuff you can do) it is, at this point, a game that seems awesome when I imagine running/playing it.
Therein lies the rub, though: there are only so many days in the week. I'm sure that the types of TTRPG tables out there vary greatly, and this may be a common problem or an uncommon one, but here's my issue: My friends have tended to play almost exclusively 5E for the past decade. There's a comfort with that system that is so very familiar after all this time. Furthermore, setting aside any anxieties I have about my own players, I still have so much D&D I want to run. I'd like to run a campaign from the start that uses the 2024 rules (though I'll allow and even recommend using older backgrounds - the only huge issue I have with the 2024 revisions,) as my current one is a bit of a Frankenstein of some players updating and some choosing not to.
Still, Draw Steel is super cool in concept, and I'd love to actually get it on my table (ideally in person, but virtual if needs be) so I can actually see how I like running it (and how my players like playing it).
However: in the meantime, I wanted to take a look at the possibility of stealing ideas from Draw Steel to use in D&D.
And among the coolest things in Draw Steel is how it handles forced movement.
To summarize (I've written about it before, but I'll repeat here): In Draw Steel, there are various abilities that can Push, Pull, or Slide, and each of these can be modified as a Vertical version of it. Each has a number as well, so if you Push 3, you're pushing a creature or object 3 squares away from you (Draw Steel doesn't measure things in feet - squares on a battle map are how any distance or area is measured. You're free to interpret that as 5 feet, of course).
Pushing allows you to move a creature or object away from you. It has to be in a straight line and has to be farther from you each step of that movement. This has to be along the ground (though you could push someone off a cliff, for example.)
Pulling is the same, except that it has to get nearer to you with each step. Again, this only allows horizontal movement.
Slide is the most flexible, and can move in any direction and even change direction mid-movement. Again, horizontal only.
Vertical versions of these can move creatures up and down as well as along the ground. For example, if I vertical push a creature 3, I can send them straight up or at a 45 degree angle from the ground, and if they're up in the air and not, like flying, they'll fall and take fall damage.
Creatures have a statistic called Stability (objects can as well, I think,) which reduces the distance they can be force-moved. A Basalt Stone Giant has an enormous stability of 10, meaning that unless you can move them over 10 squares, they're not budging. But a Radenwight Swiftpaw (a kind of nimble little rat-person) has 0 Stability, and thus will move exactly how far your ability says they will.
Forced movement is great for battlefield control and positioning - shoving a monster away from your ally so they can safely run away from them, or grouping a bunch of monsters up to set them up for a big AoE ability. But forced movement in Draw Steel is also a source of damage itself:
If you slam a creature into another creature (maybe you slide one goblin into another goblin,) both creatures take 1 damage for each square of movement left over. Say I Slide 4 a Goblin Spinecarver into a second one. They started with a single empty square between them, so I slide that goblin 1 square, and then three are left over. The impact does 3 damage.
Now, slamming a creature into a stationary object is even more effective: if I Push 5 a, oh, say a War Dog (a kind of soulless Frankensteined super-soldier) into a wall they were already standing right next to, they take 2 plus the 5 from the squares it couldn't travel.
But wait, there's more:
You can hurl a creature through an object, and there are different amounts of movement that it takes to destroy a square of the object and how much damage it does to the creature. So, this means that you could blast a foe through a plate-glass window, or even a wooden wall, or if you have a huge amount of forced movement, even through a stone or even metal wall.
This is, well, rad as fuck.
Now, Draw Steel is built with this stuff all in mind - tons of characters have lots of forced movement abilities they can use. But D&D also has a fair amount of forced movement as well.
Putting this in 5E:
Typically, by default, hitting a wall or another creature just stops forced movement. There are special call-outs for creatures like the Kraken dealing damage when they fling you, but no grand unified rule for forced movement causing damage.
In my Ravnica game, we have an Artillerist Artificer, and their Force Ballista mode for their eldritch cannons always automatically moves a target back 5 feet (regardless of size). It's not a ton, but it's something. The thing is, very often, creatures are simply already next to another creature or a wall, so the movement winds up being prevented.
If we were to import some of these ideas, that pushback could actually impose some bonus damage.
The question is how we convert the Draw Steel ideas into 5E.
The easiest thing to convert is distance: one square in Draw Steel is 5 feet in D&D. That's essentially just an uncontroversial fact (though I think there are some people who play it as one square is, like, a meter, or maybe two meters? Don't get me wrong, I think the Metric system is way, way better than what we Americans use, but it's an American game).
The bigger and more difficult thing to figure out is how much damage it should do.
The scaling of damage in Draw Steel is something I'm still kind of figuring out: low level monsters have comparable stamina (maybe skewing lower) to low-level monsters' HP in D&D, but I think high-level monsters tend to have more. This is in large part due to how there's nothing like AC to further increase a monster's effective health: heavy armor in Draw Steel is represented simply by having more Stamina.
Now, Draw Steel's damage scaling works in large part simply by making high-cost abilities more accessible as you get to higher levels (and your power rolls on those abilities becoming more likely to earn the highest value). This does mean that I could imagine that damage via forced movement becomes a smaller proportion of your damage output. That being said, I did see a clip of someone fighting Ajax the Invincible (Draw Steel's Tarrasque, except instead of Godzilla, it's brilliant human military dictator who's an unparalleled tactician) and pushing him 27 squares. I think a treasure (read magic item) was involved.
In D&D, I can't think of any knockback effect that can move a creature 135 feet.
But maybe we don't need to worry about these edge cases so early on.
The simplest thing would be to just carry the rule over more or less as-is. Something like: when a creature is force-moved into another creature, they and the other creature take 1 bludgeoning damage for every 5 feet of forced movement that was prevented. So, if my Force Ballista hits you and you're standing in front of a friend, you take the damage of the attack, and then both take 1 damage for the prevented forced movement.
That's... ok, but that's also a pretty tiny bonus (though this also might seem extra tiny because I'm running a game at level 18).
What about a die roll? Perhaps we make it as low as we can get: a d4. That's still 2.5 times the previous value, but what I like about this is how it can deal more damage on a crit. If I hit someone with a warhammer, which has the Push property, it makes sense that my slamming them into a wall with that hammer does more damage.
(There's an alternate approach you could take here, which feels like would be thematically on point: what if a crit with a push weapon pushes them twice as far, but then the damage of forced movement doesn't double again? Or, hell, both? It would certainly make Push weapons more attractive).
Stability, as a system, I think might be harder to implement in 5E. Draw Steel approaches damage resistance and vulnerability closer to how it worked in 3rd Edition, where creatures have a number associated with a damage type for "immunities" and "weaknesses," where they take that much more damage if they take damage of that type. This does make it easier to put weaknesses on monsters without potentially trivializing them, but it also means scratch damage becomes far more potent.
Point is: Stability feels kind of of a piece with this sort of thing. In D&D, you might have disadvantage on grappling a creature larger than you (or they have advantage on the save against it, because grappling now provokes a saving throw).
Stability might be overkill in D&D, because forced movement is rarer and tends not to get into those crazy levels (there a Talent ability that requires you to get to 9th level, which is the penultimate level, that can Push 15, which is like 75 feet).
But maybe we just bypass the official versions of rules where larger creatures can't be so easily moved, and instead give them stability based on their size? Medium and smaller creatures might have 0 unless they're particularly stout, but then maybe Large creatures have 1, Huge have 2, and Gargantuan have 3? And perhaps certain magical things like Force Ballistae or a Warlock's Repelling Blast might ignore stability (as some Draw Steel abilities can).
I'll need to play around with some of the numbers, and I might then try some of these out as experimental rules in my long-running campaign.
I don't know how well these rules can be adapted to another system, but as one of the things that gets my imagination fired up most in Draw Steel's rules, it's something I'd like to see used in the game I already play.
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