Draw Steel Class Deep Dive: The Conduit

 So, I'm hitting this class now and I'll let you know: this is probably the class I've looked the least into. I've never really been all that compelled by "priest" classes, especially when there's an opportunity to have a more knightly divine warrior like a Paladin or Draw Steel's Censor. That means that I'll be probably learning a lot more about this class in the reading and summarizing here than normal.

Conduits are called that because they act as conduits for the divine forces the work through them. They might be adherents of a Saint or a god, and work that being's will upon the world through divine magic. One of the core rules' three pure spellcasters (though Troubadours are on the cusp of counting as a fourth,) Conduits bring that holy (or unholy - though the game assumes that your character is a hero) power.

Conduits' main characteristic is Intuition, which will start at 2 and go up by 1 with each echelon of play.

One of the most interesting elements of the class is that subclasses work very differently. Divine beings each have a number of domains, such as Sun, Death, Love, Creation, etc. Both Censors and Conduits interact with these domains to get certain features (though Censors, which we'll cover in a later post, also have traditional subclasses). Conduits choose two of the domains their divine patron represents, taking features from those two choices as they level up.

It's essentially a "build your own subclass" toolbox.

The divine domains are:

Creation, Death, Fate, Knowledge, Life, Love, Nature, Protection, Storm, Sun, Trickery, and War.

Heroic Resource: Piety

Like with all other classes, when combat begins, you gain Piety equal to your victories, and you gain 1d3 Piety at the start of each of your turns (interestingly, this puts you on the more "chaotic" side of the classes, though I've also noticed that if you think of Nulls and Talents being the two psionic classes and Elementalists and Furies as the more elemental magic classes, each of which have one chaotic and one orderly resource generation, this likely balances the two divine magic classes, as Censors get the flat 2).

Conduits can choose before they roll for their Piety each turn to pray to the gods for more. Now, if you roll a 1 on the d3, you gain 1 additional Piety but take psychic damage equal to 1d6 plus your level (damage that cannot be reduced). If you roll a 2, you just gain the additional piety with no ill effects. If you roll a 3, you gain 2 additional piety and can activate a special prayer effect from one of your two domains.

Each domain has a passive piety generation effect, like most classes have. For example, if you have the Creation domain, you'll get 2 piety the first time in an encounter that a creature within 10 squares of you uses an area ability.

In addition to their special piety-generating features and prayer effects, you also get a feature from one of your chosen domains, as well as a skill from the group associated with that domain.

Healing Grace is a maneuver that all Conduits get at level 1, which can target yourself or an ally, with a range of 10. The target can spend a recovery, and you can spend piety to add benefits, spending one piety for each effect: You can target a second ally within distance, you can end one effect on the target that is ended by a saving throw or ends at the end of their turn, a prone target can stand up, or the target can spend an additional recovery.

Ray of Wrath is your magical ranged free strike, which allows you to deal your choice of untyped or holy damage to a creature or object.

You'll also choose a Triggered action at level 1, one of which grants allies edges to ability rolls for damage-dealing abilities, with the option to spend 1 piety to make it a double edge, or another that gives a bane to abilities that target an ally with a power roll, with the option to spend piety to give it a double bane.

You'll pick a Prayer (not to be confused with praying for piety) that grant things like greater range with ranged abilities, a bonus to rolled damage with magic abilities, higher speed, higher stamina and stability, or the option to wear armor and wield a weapon. You can swap your prayer as a respite activity.

Also, Conduits can choose a Ward, each of which give you various defensive bonuses, also swappable as a respite activity.

You'll pick two signature abilities and a 3-Piety and 5-Piety heroic ability.

At level 2, you get The Lists of Heaven, which allows you to spend a Recovery when you allow another creature to spend a recovery.

You also get a crafting, lore, or supernatural perk.

Also at 2, you get a 5-piety heroic ability from one of your two domains.

At level 3, you get Minor Miracle, which allows you to bring a creature who died in the last 24 hours (from an effect not related to age) back to life as a respite activity. The creature's soul must be willing (you'll understand immediately if they aren't, and can do a different respite activity if that's the case). The revived creature returns to life at the end of the respite with full stamina, but only half their recoveries, and you regain only half your recoveries at the end of this respite.

Also at 3, you pick a 7-Piety heroic ability.

At level 4, you get Blessed Domain, increasing the piety gained by your domain features by 1.

Also, your Intuition goes up to 3, and you can increase another characteristic by 1 (to a maximum of 3).

You also get a perk and a skill of your choice.

Also at level 4, you gain one feature from one of your domains.

At level 5, you get to pick the domain feature you could have gotten at level 4 from your other domain. You also get your choice of 9-piety heroic ability.

At level 6, you get Burgeoning Saint. This comes with several benefits as you are infused with divine power. You get an edge on presence tests to interact with other creatures, you can spend a recovery whenever you deal damage to an enemy, you have your choice of corruption or holy immunity 10, and your clothing and equipment change in a way that reflects your deity's chosen champion.

You also get a crafting, lore, or supernatural perk of your choice.

You also get a 9-piety heroic ability from one of your two domains.

At level 7, all of your characteristics go up by 1, maximum of 4. You also now gain 1d3+1 piety at the start of each of your turns. You also get a skill of your choice.

Finally, at 7, you gain another feature from one of your two domains.

At level 8, you get a perk of your choice, and you get the level 7 feature from your other domain. You also choose an 11-piety heroic ability.

At level 9, you get Faith's Sword. When you finish a respite, you can choose a willing hero (player) ally who finished that respite with you. They get the benefits of your Burgeoning Saint feature until you finish another respite. Also, you can spend piety as a free maneuver to give that hero 1 of their heroic resource for every 2 you spend.

You also get Ordained, allowing you to treat your characteristics as 1 higher for the purpose of resisting potencies. When you have 5 or more Victories, you get a double-edge on presence tests to influence other creatures.

Also at 9, you get one 11-piety heroic ability from one of your domains.

Finally, at level 10, you get Avatar. You can now be affected by three different Prayers at once (and can swap all of them as a respite activity). You can also use a maneuver to activate a domain effect without needing to pray. Additionally, when you take a respite, you can open a portal to rest in the presence of your deity and bring any allies. When you do so, you can ask the deity three questions, which the Director will answer honestly if the deity knows the answer. When you finish the respite, you and your allies can appear anywhere in the Timescape where someone worships your deity.

Also, your Intuition goes up to 5 and another characteristic increases by 1 (maximum of 5).

Your epic resource is Divine Power - you gain one for each XP you earn at the end of a respite. This can be spent as if it were Piety. You can spend this even to use as Piety for conduit abilities you don't have (if the ability doesn't cost any piety, you'll need to spend 1 divine power if you don't already have it).

Most Pious gives you 1 additional piety when you roll for it at the start of your turn (so 1d3+2, or more if you're praying for more).

And you get a skill and a crafting/lore/supernatural perk of your choice.

    It's interesting: especially when you get to level 10, you'll really need to have a good sense of all the options that this class has available to it. Conduits have, I think, unparalleled support abilities, and while "healers" in Draw Steel are a little unconventional, this class certainly excels at that.

Building a Conduit in Draw Steel

 The Conduit is Draw Steel's divine spellcaster class, pretty analogous to the Cleric. The name, of course, presents the class as a means by which divine magic is wrought upon the world.

I'll confess that while I often like playing Paladins (the yet-to-be-released Censor being Draw Steel's equivalent. How is it that I only now realized this game has my initials? Though having a Hungarian name I typically write my initials as DSz, because that's the convention there when you have a compound consonant) I'm generally not really into playing priest-like classes. I've never been drawn much to playing a healer, but let's see how the Conduit feels.

As usual, I try to find outside-the-box backstories. We've already done a kind of Shamanistic wise man with our Elementalist. I think we're going to lean into the idea that this character was decidedly not raised to be a priest or cleric of some sort. I really like the idea of divine spellcasters being a sort of prophet of their gods, and that role is not really chosen by the individual.

I like my divinity mysterious. And I also think that one of the world-design cliches that a lot of fantasy creators fall into is letting antipathy toward organized religion bleed over into antipathy toward the gods themselves. For certain it's a valid path, but in my mind, it seems more likely that if a god of good virtues has an oppressive church dedicated to them, an interesting story would be to see the god send a prophet to disrupt that, overthrow that church, and either establish a reconstructed one or perhaps alter fundamentally the nature of worship in that world.

Thus, it might actually be because our hero was not a member of the church/temple/religious organization for that deity that they were chosen to channel the power.

    Ancestry

One of the original ancestries to Draw Steel is the Memonek, a people made of what we, on our plane, would consider inorganic materials. Memoneks are from Axiom, the plane of utmost law. In our case, we're probably sent to reform a church that has taken its mission of law and order to the point where they've actually become repressive - righteousness so zealous that it metes out disproportionate, retributive punishment and fears impurities to the point that innocents are killed on the mere suspicion of evil. Our Conduit was chosen because their cerebral nature prevents zeal from clouding their judgment.

Our Ancestry features are the following:

Lightweight gives us a weight of 3 and a speed of 7 (one lower speed than humans, but two extra squares of movement). Our stability decreases by 2, which means it might be negative and thus we get pushed even farther when we're force-moved. (We'll be the pinball Conduit!)

We also get Keeper of Order - when a creature adjacent to us makes a Power Roll, we can remove an edge or a bane from the roll as a free triggered action once per round.

    Culture

Now, conceptually, where is our Conduit from? I imagine they maybe aren't personally from Axiom - they've been in the mortal world for a few generations. But I suspect that they're from a very orderly, buttoned-down, and probably dull but safe background. I think maybe they were some kind of accountant or scribe. Maybe they weren't even aware of the abuses being committed by the church, and it was only through some rude interruption of their daily routine that they were first awakened to this truth. Maybe they were doing accounts as some kind of contractor for an Inquisition-like atrocity, only slowly recognizing their own complicity. Upon realizing the evil being committed, they had a divine revelation (or perhaps struck out against one of the oppressors with unexpected divine magic).

With a decidedly white-collar role, we're going to choose the Urban environment, which gives us one skill from either Interpersonal or Intrigue groups.

Our Organization is most certainly Bureaucratic. This gives us either an Intrigue or Lore skill.

Finally, our Upbringing was probably Academic, giving us one Lore skill.

    Career

Now, weirdly enough, this heroic fantasy game doesn't have an obvious career for "desk jockey," so our best option is probably Sage - which I realize we used with our Elementalist, but I think this is really our best option.

We get two Lore skills (which we'll have plenty of).

We get another language, and then 100 Project points.

Finally, we get Expert Sage, which allows us to roll twice if we make a test as part of a research or crafting project that uses one of our Lore skills.

    Class

Obviously, we're going with Conduit.

As a Conduit, we get 2s in both Intuition and Presence. Being fairly lore-heavy, we might want to take a 1 in Reason and then we'll dump Might and Agility to 0. In fact, if we wanted to really play up their nebbishness, we could even take -1s to both of those and thus get a 2 in Reason. But I'm sort of allergic to having multiple negative characteristics, so we'll stick with the original plan.

We have 18 Stamina, and 8 recoveries (each healing for 6). We'll check this again when we pick a Kit.

We also get two skills from the Lore or Interpersonal groups. So, now we should choose our skills.

We'll pick up Religion and Culture from the Sage career. We'll grab Conceal Object from Urban. We'll then grab Eavesdrop from Bureaucratic (they've gotten good at keeping an ear out for rumors at the office) and History from Academic. Finally, we pick up Lead and Empathize as a direct result of the influence of our god, who wants us to be able to speak to the people and show them a new way.

Now, here's the really weird thing for Conduits: we actually kind of pick two subclasses, creating a kind of menu from which to draw features. While there are canonical deities to Draw Steel's primary setting, we'll be using one of the deities I created for my D&D setting, Doros - a god of light, the sun, and just leadership (often more narrowly interpreted as a god of kings, but actually more likely to bless a robust and free liberal democracy). Doros would probably have the Sun, Life, Protection, and Love domains in this system. Our Conduit picks two of these domains to focus on - we'll say that, given the nature is to reform a corrupt church, we'll have them take Protection and Life.

Our Heroic Resource is Piety. Like all such resources, we gain Piety equal to our Victories at the start of combat. Each round, we gain 2 Piety. We also have the Prayer ability, a maneuver, to potentially get more. (Notably, we don't seem to lose any Piety between fights - we'll see how possible it is to stockpile insane amounts of this).

Prayer is a maneuver we get. We make an Intuition Power roll. On a tier 1 result, we just get 1d6 damage and the bleeding condition until the end of turn. On tier 2, we get 1 Piety. On tier 3, we get 2 piety and also get to choose a Domain effect (which we'll get into.

Notably, the first time during an encounter we use Prayer, we have a double-edge on it (so no chance to take damage - I don't think Draw Steel has critical failures). The second time, we just have an edge. The third time, we take a bane, and the fourth and subsequent times we use it, we get a double bane (though here I think a crit overcomes that).

Now, let's look at our Domain effects. With Protection and Life, the possible effects are thus:

Life: We, or an ally within 10 squares, can spend 2 recoveries and end any effects on them that have a duration of EoT or are ended by a resistance roll. Alternatively, we or an ally within 10 squares gains 20 temporary Stamina (I'm not totally clear on whether they get the healing from these spent recoveries or if it just ends the effects - hopefully the former).

Protection: An ally of our choice within 10 squares gains damage immunity equal to our Intuition score (currently 2) plus our level (currently 1) until the end of our next turn. Depending on how much they're getting hit, this could potentially prevent a ton of damage (and definitely scales up pretty nicely).

Next, we pick a 1st level Domain Feature. Let's pick up Alertness Ward, the Protection benefit. This gives us an each ally within 2 squares of us an edge of tests that use the Alertness feature. We also gain an Exploration skill, which we'll say is Drive, just for fun.

We then get Healing Grace. This is a maneuver with a range of 5 (has the Magic and Ranged tags, so we'll see if our kit affects it) and can target ourselves or an ally. At base, this allows the target to spend a recovery. We can also spend any amount of Piety, and for each spent, we can add one of the following enhancements:

We can target an additional ally within range, we can end one effect on the target with a duration of EoT or that is ended with a resistance roll, a prone target can stand up, or the target can spend an additional recovery.

As a note, one thing I find interesting here is that the healing is still limited by recoveries - outside of combat, there's no reason for you to use these given that a character can just take their Catch Breath action. We're essentially just speeding up the process so that people can do other things.

We also get Pious Force. This is a ranged magic attack action, targeting one creature or object, with a range of 5, and deals 2, 6, or 9 damage.

We next pick out a Triggered Action. We're really focused on defending the innocent, so we'll grab Divine Disruption, the more defensive option. This magic, ranged triggered action (range of 5) targets an enemy when they make an attack (we can use this after we see their result). We put a bane on the attack, and on top of that, we reduce the damage by an amount equal to our Intuition. If we spend 1 Piety, the attack gets a double bane, and the damage to one creature is reduced by twice our Intuition. (A Remasch Demon's Abyssal Strike does 4 damage on a tier 1 attack, so there's a good chance we're fully negating the damage with this).

Next, we pick our Signature Ability.

I've got to say I think I love the flavor of Lightfall, which deals a little damage to all enemies within a 3-cube, but also lets us teleport each ally in the area and ourselves (if we're in the area) to another unoccupied space within the area. It's a somewhat tight space, but it lets you really rearrange things as a signature ability. We're not here for damage - we're here to help set up our allies.

Next, we get our 3-Piety ability.

Well, let's bring the punishment - Punishing Smite has a range of 5 and hits a creature or object for 6, 8, or 13 holy damage. On tier 2, it knocks the target prone, and on tier 3, they can't stand up until EoT. Hey, we've got to punish the hypocrites!

Then, we'll grab our 5-Piety ability.

Well, we've got our wrath. Now let's bring the protection. We'll grab Armor of the Faithful, which can hit 3 allies within 5 squares and give them 10, 15, or 20 temporary stamina (which does, sadly, fade at the end of the encounter). Note that we can't target ourselves with this, but we can put a big absorb shield on potentially the rest of the party.

    Kit

Well, we're going with a Caster Kit, obviously, because everything else we do is magic. I think the only one that really fits our flavor is the Ward Weaver.

This gives us a Stamina bonus of 6, raising our Stamina to 24 (and thus our recoveries heal for 8). We also get a Stability bonus of 1... which, hilariously, brings our Stability up to... a -1. Oh well!

We gain a signature ability called Energy Siphon, which has a range of 8 (better than most of what we can do) and hits a single creature for 2, 6, or 9 psychic damage, but also gives us damage immunity 1, 3, or 5 until the end of our next turn.

Our Kit Ward is Repulsive Ward. When we or an ally within 2 squares of us takes damage from another creature's melee ability, we can push that creature a number of squares equal to our highest characteristic (so 2 for now).

    So, there we have it. Primarily we're going to be preventing damage by giving temp Stamina or reducing damage with Divine Disruption, and we can do a bit of battlefield management with Lightfall.

So, that just leaves the Fury to build. I have to say, doing this has really helped me get a sense of what this game is going to look like. I've still got to figure out exactly how monsters look (especially Minions and Captains) but I really hope to run a playtest at some point.