Draw Steel Class Deep Dive: The Tactician

 The Tactician is, ostensibly, the "basic," "mundane" class in Draw Steel. It is, on its surface, your Fighter, your Warrior, your person who uses weapons and armor without any fancy supernatural stuff aiding them.

In truth, though, Draw Steel's approach to this archetype is actually quite different: Furies call upon the might of the primordial chaos, Censors draw on the divine power of their gods. What do Tacticians fight with? Their allies.

If you want to play a true commander, a genuine leader, this is the class for you. While you can lean into your own martial prowess if you want, the class has many abilities that allow you to enable your allies, setting them up for success. Each class has a big splashy art page with the "iconic" character for each class, and the Tactician's Sir John of Tor is quoted there taunting the enemy commander for their failed strategies as he strides across a battlefield of falling War Dogs. There's very much a "I read your book!" from the movie Patton here.

Notably, every class in Draw Steel gets pretty larger-than-life at high levels. Furies become embodiments of primordial chaos and Shadows become literal shadow-monsters. Tacticians, I believe (and we'll see how this looks when we get to the late-level features) are the sole exception here, remaining just a brilliant mind coordinating and leading the party to victory. Notably, Ajax the Invincible, Draw Steel's toughest monster, is actually just a human tactician who happens to be very, very good at what he does.

Tactician abilities are a mix of classic martial strikes as well as lots of support abilities, including a few that effectively heal your allies by letting them spend recoveries.

Tacticians naturally get maximal Might and Reason characteristics, starting at 2 and getting to 5 at level 10.

Subclasses:

Tacticians, like most classes, get three subclasses.

Insurgents use underhanded tactics to keep allies safe and enemies dead.

Masterminds lean the most heavily into strategic fighting, viewing combat as an elaborate strategy game (which is kind of funny when you consider that that's kind of what Draw Steel is)

Vanguards lead from the front, inspiring allies as you face down threats directly.

Heroic Resource: Focus

Tacticians use Focus to fuel their abilities. As with all classes, when combat begins, you gain Focus equal to your victories, and then you gain 2 more at the start of each of your turns. Tacticians have an important feature called Mark, which we'll get into in a bit. When you or an ally damages a creature you've marked the first time each combat round, you gain 1 focus. Also, the first time in a round that any ally within 10 squares of you uses a heroic ability (meaning an ability they spend their heroic resource on) you gain 1 focus.

Core Features:

At level 1, each subclass gets a non-combat feature from your subclass, and a triggered action also from your sucblass.

Tacticians get a special feature called Field Arsenal, which allows you to equip two kits at once. You basically just take the best bonus in each category from each kit, but they don't stack with one another - if you were to take, say, Cloak and Dagger and Rapid Fire, the +1s to ranged damage from Cloak and Dagger would be overwritten by the +2s to ranged damage from Rapid Fire (not adding together to get +3s), but you'd still get the +1s to melee damage. It's thus advisable to take two very different kits to maximize the bonuses you receive.

Tacticians don't have any unique signature abilities, because you'll get both of your signature abilities from your kits instead.

Mark is a maneuver that is core to the Tactician. As a maneuver, you mark a creature within 10 squares of you until the end of the encounter, or until you're dying or you use the feature again (you can also willingly drop it, no action required). Also, if another Tactician marks your target, your mark ends. If a creature is reduced to 0 stamina, you can use a free triggered action to move the mark to another eligible target. Some other abilities allow you to mark additional targets.

While a creature is marked and within your line of effect, you and your allies get an edge on power rolls made against it, and when you or an ally deal rolled damage to them, you can spend 1 focus to grant one of the following benefits: the creature takes extra damage equal to twice your Reason, the creature dealing the damage can spend a recovery, the creature dealing the damage can shift squares up to your reason score, or if you damage the marked creature with a melee ability, the creature is taunted by you until the end of their next turn. (Only one choice can be used per trigger).

Also at level 1, you get Strike Now, a main action that allows an ally within 10 squares of you to use a signature ability as a free triggered action, and you can spend 5 focus to target two allies instead of one (this is the real "my weapons are my friends" ability).

You also get a 3-Focus and 5-Focus ability.

At level 2, you get a Perk and a feature from your subclass, as well as a 5-focus ability from your subclass.

At level 3, you get Out of Position. At the start of an encounter as a free triggered action, you can use your Mark ability against a creature you have line of effect to even if you're surprised. You can then slide them up to 3 squares, ignoring stability. You can't move them in a way that would deal damage to them or put them in some hazardous location that would leave them dying or suffering a condition.

Also at 3, you get a 7-Focus ability.

At 4, your Might and Reason go up to 3. You also now gain 2 Focus when you or an ally damages a marked target, up from 1.

Improved Field Arsenal gives you an edge when you make a signature ability from one of your equipped kits or make a free strike using a weapon from your kit.

You get another perk, and a skill of your choice.

At level 5 you get two features from your subclass, and also a 9-Focus ability.

At level 6, you get Master of Arms, which lets you negate a bane or reduce a double bane to a regular bane when you use a signature ability from your kits or a free strike using a weapon from one of your kits.

You also get a Perk from the exploration, interpersonal, or intrigue lists, as well as a 9-Focus ability from your subclass.

At 7, your characteristics all go up by 1, giving you 4s in Might and Reason. You also now gain 3 focus at the start of each turn.

Seize the Initiative allows your party to go first in any combat as long as you're not surprised. If the enemy has an ability that allows them to go first, you can roll as normal.

Also at 7 you get a skill of your choice and a subclass feature.

At level 8, you get a perk of your choice, another subclass feature, and an 11-focus ability.

At 9, you get Grandmaster of Arms, which perfects your signature abilities from your kits and free strikes using weapons from those kits: you always get a tier 3 result on their power rolls. You still roll just to see if you score a critical hit.

You also gain an 11-Focus ability from your subclass.

At 10, your Might and Intelligence increase to 5. You also gain a perk from the exploration, interpersonal, or intrigue lists, and a skill of your choice. You also now get 4 focus at the start of each turn, up from 3.

You now have your Epic Resource, called Command. You gain Command equal to your earned XP, and can spend Command as if it were Focus. When an ally uses an ability that deals rolled damage to a marked creature, you can spend 1 Command as a free triggered action to increase the power roll outcome by 1 tier. And if a marked creature makes an ability roll, you can spend 1 command as a free triggered action to reduce the result by one tier.

Warmaster says that whenever you or an ally make an ability roll against a target marked by you, the character making the roll gets to roll three d10s and choose which two to use. Also, when allies use a heroic ability that targets one of your marked targets, the cost of their ability is reduced by 2 (minimum cost of 1).

    So there you have it: nothing crazy and supernatural here, but you become an unparalleled warrior, and have quite a lot of features that will make your friends very happy. You can focus very much on ensuring that your hardest-hitting friends are able to hit even harder and more frequently. While strict hierarchical roles are kind of rare in a TTRPG party, I think that this is the class that lets you at least take on a leadership role when it all goes down.

Building a Tactician in Draw Steel

 In this third post about coming up with a Draw Steel character, we're going to look at the Tactician. This class is probably the closest analogue for the Fighter class in D&D... sort of. In a lot of ways, it takes the flavor of the Battle Master Fighter, particularly things like Commander's Strike, and builds the class around being not just a soldier on the field, but the coordinator for the rest of the party. In an odd sense, there's almost a flavor of being a support class like a Bard, but aesthetically very different.

Conceptually, I like to try to go off the beaten path. In my D&D homebrew setting, one of the most elite miltiary forces is the Miliz - a primarily Halfling force originally founded as a farmer's militia in the gothic moors of Vodaskia, but which was so well-coordinated and battle-hardened that they became a celebrated special forces unit for the Lupinian Empire.

Draw Steel doesn't have Halflings, but its diminutive folk that play a similar role are the Polders, who, like your typical Halflings, tend to live amongst humans and have interconnected cultures and ways of life.

I think our Tactician is not a veteran of any traditional army, but was likely a farmer called up to defend her village from roving bands of goblinoids (maybe just goblins - I don't know if Draw Steel intends to have the same three primary goblinoid types from D&D). Between sowing seeds, feeding chickens, and selling excess wheat at the market, she's had to keep her sword sharp due to the increasingly bold and organized attacks.

And, it turns out that she's developing a knack for battlefield command - when her fellow farmers are terrified at the approaching raiders, she's the one who forms them into lines, warding off charges by goblins on warg-back with a barricade of pitchforks.

    Ancestry

We've decided to go with Polder, so we'll be picking up two ancestry features. The first is Polder Geist - our hero is faster when she's not seen by anyone, getting 3 extra squares of movement if she starts her turn unseen. (We'll have to see if this plays well with any Tactician abilities).

Second, we get Sceanwian (not sure how that's pronounced. I took a semester of Irish language in college, but this could be from Welsh or Scottish and I have no idea). As a maneuver, she can flatten herself into a shadow against a wall or floor she's touching, becoming hidden from anyone she's got cover or concealment from or isn't observing her. Attacks against her and tests made to find her take a bane, but she can't move or take actions or maneuvers except to exit the form. Abilities that target more than 1 square affect her only if it explicitly affects the surface she's flattened against. And she can exit it as a maneuver.

So, both of these features involve hiding, though I notice that you can't really use one with the other, as Sceanwian prevents movement. Naturally, this feature would make a lot of sense for a Shadow, but a bit of sneakiness is probably useful for anyone. We'll see if we can make use of it in combat.

    Culture

Our Environment is pretty obvious: it's Rural. This will give us a Crafting or a Lore skill.

Our Organization is likely Communal (though it could be Anarchic - honestly I think we just need more options here, as there are only 3 at the moment). This will give us either a Crafting or an Interpersonal skill.

Our Upbringing is probably Labor, as our girl is a farmer. This gets her either Blacksmithing, Handle Animals, or one skill form the Exploration group.

    Career

There's a bit of overlap here - we're taking Laborer. This will grant her the Endurance skill, along with two skills from Blacksmithing or the Exploration group (I feel like we've got to take Blacksmithing?)

We'll also get one bonus language (which I'm not covering in these builds) and 50 Project Points, which again, I think is essentially a head start on some crafting project.

Finally, we get a Title: Team Backbone, which allows her to, when making a "Montage Test," both assist another character's test and also make her own.

    Class

Now, onto our class!

The Tactician begins with 21 Stamina and has 15 Recoveries (each healing for 7 at this level).

We start off with a Might and Reason of 2. I think we're going to be somewhat well-rounded, and so we'll take our 1 in Presence (we are a commander, after all) and 0s to Agility and Intuition.

We're going to get the Lead skill, along with any two skills from a big group. So let's pick them now, along with the ones we got from our Culture and Career.

We'll take Nature (from Environment,) Read Person (from Organization - a good commander keeps a finger on the pulse of her troops), and Handle Animals (from Labor). We then get Endurance and Blacksmithing from Laborer.  Finally, we'll get Lead, Alertness, and Monsters from our class.

Next, we need to pick our subclass - our Tactical Doctrine. While my initial concept here was more of a shouting battlefield commander, I think that we might lean into more guerrilla tactics, which the Polders would, I think, be more likely to employ. Thus, we're going to go with the Insurgent (Asymmetric Warfare) subclass.

Our Heroic Resource is Focus. Like all classes, we get an amount of this equal to our Victories at the start of the encounter, but we then get 2 at the start of each turn, and if an ally gets a tier 3 result on a target we have Marked, we also gain 1 focus. (All focus disappears at the end of combat).

Mark is a maneuver we can use at a 10-square range (as this isn't an attack, I don't think there's any downside to using it on a target in melee range). The target is marked by us until the start of our next turn. When we our an ally attack a marked target, they get an edge on the power rolls and also deal extra damage equal to our Reason Score. We can spend 1 focus to mark a second target.

    So, we're probably going to be using the maneuver constantly. We're also probably going to want to take a consistent spot in each round of combat, as we want to maximize the number of allies' turns where they can make use of this.

We also gain Seize the Opening, a ranged Action with a range of 10 in which we target an ally. The target makes a signature attack as a free triggered action (meaning they can still use their triggered action and I believe any other number of free triggered actions) and the target takes extra damage equal to your Reason score. If you spend 5 focus, you can target two allies instead of one, though you won't earn any focus when using this ability in this way.

    And that's pretty interesting - there's a good chance that we're going to be doing more damage by commanding our friends to attack rather than attacking ourselves.

With our Insurgent subclass, we get the Covert Operations feature. Allies that are working according to our plans or in our presence get an edge on tests with any skill in the intrigue group (amazing given that we don't actually have any of those skills!) We can also use the Lead skill to assist on any test made with a skill from the Intrigue group (ah, there we go) and, at Diretor's discretion, we and our allies can use skills from the intrigue skill group to attempt research or reconnaissance during a negotiation outside of that negotiation (a system I'll confess I haven't gotten into yet).

We also get an Insurgent triggered action. This is Flank Them Now! At a range of self or 10, if a non-target ally is about to make an attack, our target can shift up to 2 squares before that attack resolves, and after the attack resolves, both the original attacker and the target can shift up to 2 squares (reminder: "shifting" is movement that doesn't provoke opportunity attacks). If we spend 1 focus, the attack also does an extra d6 of damage.

Next, we get Field Arsenal, which allows us to pick up a second martial kit (we're probably taking a martial kit as our primary choice as well). If two kits have the same benefit, we take the better of the two (but that means we'll probably err on having kits that help different things). And we get both kits' signature actions. So, we'll cover this when we cover kits.

We get both of our Signature attacks from our kits, so we skip ahead to our 3-focus and 5-focus abilities, of which we get 1 each.

For our 3-focus ability, I'm going to go with Inspiring Strike, which allows us to deal some damage (in either melee or a range of 5) and then allow a nearby ally to spend a Recovery (tier 2 adds range to this healing capability and tier 3 also grants an edge to us and the healed ally on their next attack this encounter).

For our 5-focus ability, thematically I'm a bit torn between Now! and This is What We Planned For, both of which seem like a good case of our character springing a trap on the enemy. The former allows all allies within 5 squares of us to make a free strike, while the latter allows every ally within 10 squares to immediately take their turn in any order after ours, and we treat enemies as surprised.

    Technically, the latter doesn't add a ton of damage, but it can create a huge burst that might really change the course of battle. I like it, so let's go with it.

    Kits

So, we get two kits. The Guisarmier feels like the right first choice, as polearms are a classic weapon for farmer militias. We'll then take Sniper as our second one, as your people will be a lot safer if you can take out the biggest threats from far away.

From the Guisarmier, we get a +6 bonus to Stamina (bringing us to 27, and our recoveries are healing for 9 now) and +1 to Stability. Our melee weapon damage (which will be primarily with this thing's signature ability) are +2s across the board. We also get a reach bonus of +1. Our signature ability is Forward Thrust, Backward Smash, which lets us target 2 creatures or objects, dealing modest damage to both.

From Sniper, we get a +1 Speed bonus. We also get a +4 bonus to ranged weapon damage on a tier 3 result. Our ranged weapon distance bonus is 10. And we get Mobility - if an enemy ends their turn adjacent to us, we can shift up to 2 squares as a free triggered action. Our signature ability is Patient Shot, which deals pretty decent damage at a range of 15 (including our bonus) and, if we don't take a move action on the turn we use the attack, we gain an edge on it.

    So, overall, I think we've got a character who will be able to lead from the rear, calling the shots and occasionally shooting their bow as well. Even though we can withstand a fair amount of punishment, we're going to be holding our foes off at range, which should let us move about and command as necessary.