I haven't posted about Draw Steel in a while, because, well, I have still not had a chance to play it. I need to be the one pushing my friends to try it out, and between the D&D game I play in and the one I run (and hoping we can one day return to the Sunday game I play in that hasn't played in like 7 months) and everyone having packed adult schedules, I've been struggling to find the oomph to actually set a date and get it running.
Still, while my admiration for the game is still theoretical at this point, I wanted to point out one other thing that I really appreciate about the game:
Naturally, this is going to be in comparison to D&D - the 800-pound Gorilla of the TTRPG space, to which Draw Steel was designed largely in response to.
If you are playing a Bard in D&D, you will most likely have Charisma as your top stat, potentially even if you're going for a melee build like Dance or Valor. While I think they only get simple weapons now, back in 2014, they got proficiency in Longswords as one of the specific martial options they were granted. A Longsword is not a finesse weapon, so barring something like True Strike or Pact of the Blade, you'll need to attack using Strength with it.
Now, I like the idea of a strong Bard. But because Bards are limited to Light Armor, if you don't invest pretty heavily in Dexterity (or somehow upgrade your armor type through multiclassing or a feat) you'll have a pitiful AC, which is a real liability (though I do think monster attack bonuses outpace AC growth unless you get lots of magic armor).
We do, in theory, have a lot of options for how we want to express our characters with different stats, but it's quite difficult to make it impactful without hindering our characters. Basically every character wants at least a decent Constitution score, and to have decent armor, you need at least a 14 in Dex unless you can wear heavy armor, in which case you will want at least a 15 in Strength. (Armor Artificers are a rare exception, who truly don't need a good stat for AC, but given that the armor you wear still contributes to the weight you're carrying, if your table uses any kind of encumbrance rules, you might still consider investing a bit in Strength).
Different classes have different degrees of flexibility here - a Rogue really only needs high Dexterity and probably decent Constitution, though certain subclasses will then want to invest in Intelligence as well, and possibly Wisdom to aid in important perception checks and the like. A Paladin, though, who really wants to maximize their Strength, Charisma, and ideally Con as well, has very little flexibility on getting decent Dex, Int, or Wis - in fact, the "optimal" build using Point Buy is to take 15s in Str, Cha, and Con and 8s in the rest.
There are two ways in which Draw Steel, to me, really fixes the friction here:
First, there's the way that Stamina (the equivalent of HP) is calculated - there's no Constitution stat, and so your Stamina is determined by your class, level, and potentially your Kit, all of which are basically divorced from your stats. There is also no concept of an Armor Class - all attacks will do something, it's just a question of how much of an impact they have (think of it as damage rolls without attack rolls). Again, there is no stat minimum for your Shining Armor or Cloak and Dagger kits.
The second element is that your class guarantees that the most important stats for you go up, hitting the maximum for any stat you could have at each level it could reach that (basically each echelon of play - their version of tiers of play).
The Censor, which is the rough equivalent of the Paladin, for example, always has Might and Presence both at the highest amount you could get at any level (the equivalents of Strength and Charisma).
Now, for the other stats, the player has a choice - they can either have a relatively flat spread between the other three stats (Agility, Reason, and Intuition - the equivalents of Dexterity, Intelligence, and Wisdom) or they can actually take a low score in at least one of them to keep another at or near the level of their primary stats.
I realized this when I was building a Talent - the psionic class that doesn't really have a 5E equivalent until they come out with the Psion, presumably in some upcoming Dark Sun book. Talents earn more of their heroic resource when a creature is force-moved near them, and while that would most classically take the form of some kind of telekinetic movement, it actually works just fine if you shove someone.
A Talent is among the "squishiest" classes (meaning purely that it has lower Stamina) and so you wouldn't think it would be a class that lends itself to having a high Might. But there's actually nothing really stopping you from doing that. Thus, I built a Hakaan (think sort of Goliaths but made of stone and literally one size category larger than most characters, though they still fit on one grid square) Talent whose Might was just one point lower than his Reason and Presence (the core stats for Talents). Because you can shove creatures as a maneuver (think bonus action) I figured he could start off a turn if someone was up in his face by shoving them away, thus immediately gaining some extra Clarity, and then drop some nasty psionics on them.
By contrast, it's very unlikely that a Sorcerer in D&D would be able to afford having a high Strength when they need to have a high Charisma, decent Con and decent Dexterity.
It does honestly make me wonder if D&D would be better off if armor was less stat-dependent, and if we could make room for weirder stat arrays.
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