Draw Steel Class Deep Dive: The Talent

 We might be getting through our "spellcasters" (though these guys don't strictly cast spells) quickly given that we're following up the Elementalist. But I do think this is a notable class to look at because it's the only one that (at least until they publish the Psion, which appeared in playtesting a few months ago) doesn't really have a strict D&D analogue, at least in WotC-published content (MCDM actually published their own 5E Talent, so that's your clear analogue).

The Talent is Draw Steel's full psionic class. While the Null uses a lot of psionic abilities, arguably actually using psionics just as much as Talents, the Talent is the more traditional "I fight with mental powers" class, and is another flavor of primarily ranged "caster" to go along with the Elementalist (the Conduit being the other, which is your divine spellcsater).

I realize one thing I've neglected to point out in my deep-dives is things like your max Stamina and number of recoveries you get from your class. Talents are among the "squishier" classes, with lower max Stamina and fewer recoveries. Ideally you'll be fighting from afar to avoid your foes' assaults.

Talents' primary characteristics are Reason and Presence, which both automatically scale up as you go to new echelons of play.

Like Elementalists, there are a lot of psionic traditions that could theoretically form the basis for a subclass in future releases, but there are only three presented in the core rules (unlike Elementalists, though, we get a number of abilities that belong to the traditions that don't get subclasses here).

Heroic Resource: Clarity (and Strain)

Talents have a unique relationship with their heroic resource in the form of Strain, which we'll get to in a moment. Like everyone, when combat begins, you gain an amount of Clarity equal to your Victories. At the start of each of your turns, you gain 1d3 Clarity (which subtly places this on the "chaos" side of the classes - interesting given that the other psionic class, the Null, is an Order class).

The first time in each combat round that a creature is force-moved, you'll gain one additional Clarity.

The big thing, though, is that you can spend Clarity you don't yet have. You can essentially go into Clarity debt equal to 1+ your Reason score (so -3 at level 1 and eventually -6). While you're in debt this way, at the end of each of your turns, you take 1 damage for each negative point of clarity, being your psychic nosebleed from pushing yourself beyond your limits. This can allow you to, right at the start of a fight, use an ability that would usually take you a turn or two to build up to, but with the following consequence:

While below 0 Clarity, you are strained, which will alter some of your abilities - often these create negative side effects, but on some abilities, Strain can actually enhance them as well. Both Clarity and Strain reset to 0 outside of combat.

Subclasses:

While there are eight psionic traditions, only three are presented as subclasses in the core rules. These are:

Chronopathy: giving you the ability to see across and manipulate time.

Telekinesis: giving you the power to physically manipulate objects and creatures.

Telepathy: giving you the power to read, communicate with, and manipulate the minds of others.

Core Features:

Mind Spike is a special ranged free strike (not unlike the Elementalist's Hurl Element) that does psychic damage and uses your Reason rather than Might or Agility. It does extra damage when you're strained, but you also take that extra damage.

Psionic Augmentation, similar to the one the Null gets, gives you one of several bonuses that can be swapped as a respite activity. Battle Augmentation increases your Stamina, increases your damage with weapon abilities, and lets you wear light armor and wield light weapons, as long as you don't already have a kit. Density Augmentation increases your stamina and grants some stability. Distance augmentation increases the range on your ranged psionic abilities. Force augmentation increases rolled damage from your damage-dealing psionic abilities, and Speed Augmentation increases your speed and the distance you can shift when disengaging.

Talent Wards are protective bonuses you can choose from, and can swap as a respite activity.

Entropy Ward reduces the speed of creatures that attack you and prevents them from taking triggered actions. Repulsive Ward lets you use a free triggered action when an adjacent creature damages you to push them. Steel Ward gives you some damage immunity after you take damage until the end of your next turn. And Vanishing Ward lets you become invisible after you take damage until the end of your next turn.

Talents also get Telepathic Speech, giving the the Mindspeech language and also lets you communicate (two-way) with creatures in your Mind Spike range if you share a language.

At level 3, all Talents get Scan. Once on each of your turns, you can search for hidden creatures as a free maneuver, and also, once you establish line of effect to a creature within distance of your Mind Spike, you always have line of effect to them (meaning that they could duck behind cover and you'd still be able to target them).

At level 4, you get Mind Projection, which lets you project your mind outside your body as a maneuver. Your mind is treated as a separate entity that can move through solid objects and automatically has concealment. Your psionic abilities originate from your mind, and both body and mind can take damage, which is deducted from your stamina. If you take damage, your mind returns to your body and this effect ends, or you can end it as a free maneuver.

Also at 4, Mind Recovery lets you spend a recovery while strained to regain 3 Clarity instead of restoring stamina, and also increases the clarity you get from creatures being force-moved.

Additionally at 4, you get Suspensor Field, which allows you to fly. While flying, your stability is reduced to 0 (and can't be increased). If you could already fly, you get a +2 bonus to fly speed instead. And if you are flying while strained, if you are force-moved, the effect is increased by 2 squares.

At level 6, you get Psi Boost, allowing you to spend varying amounts of Clarity to enhance any ability with the psionic keyword. You can apply as many of these boosts to a single ability as you want, but never the same boost multiple time on the same use of an ability. These can do things like increase the forced movement of an ability, expand the area of area-effect abilities, grant extended range, increase rolled damage, increase potencies, hit additional targets, or give you an edge on the power roll.

At level 7, you get Ancestral Memory, which allow you to replace some of your skills at the end of a respite with different ones from the interpersonal and lore skill groups until the next respite.

Also at 7, you get Cascading Strain, which lets you cause an enemy to take the damage you get from being strained as well.

And you also gain more Clarity at the start of your turns.

At level 9, you get Fortress of Perfect Thought, which gives you several benefits: You can breathe even when there is no breathable air. You get psychic immunity 10. Creatures can't read your thoughts unless you allow them to. You get to treat your Reason and Intuition as 2 higher for the purpose of resisting potencies, and you can't be taunted or frightened.

Finally, at level 10, you get a few features to cap things off:

Omnisensory increases the distance of your ranged abilities by 10 (doubling most of them). You also don't need line of effect to a creature capable of thought that you had previously had line of effect to.

Psion increases the Clarity you gain at the start of each turn again, and you can also simply choose not to take damage from being Strained, and you can also choose to use the Strained effect on your abilities even if you're not strained.

Vision is your epic resource. You gain an equal amount of Vision whenever you gain XP, and you can spend it as if it were Clarity. You can also spend Vision to use an additional psionic ability per turn (I assume this means you can effectively get another main action, maneuver, etc.) as long as you pay its entire cost in Vision. Abilities that don't cost any Clarity require 1 Vision to use this way. Like other epic resources, you only lose Vision when you spend it.

Building a Talent in Draw Steel

 Back during one of the game's playtests, I did character builds for what were then the available classes, the Conduit, Elementalist, Fury, Shadow, and Tactician. Now that the game's official core rulebooks are out, we've got a few additional classes to play with.

Having seen MCDM's own actual-play of the Delian Tomb (the game's starter adventure,) I'm struck by how powerful forced movement can be in this game, and so I thought it would be fun to build a character that really focuses on shoving monsters around (into walls, into other monsters, etc.) While we could play something like a Fury, who is physically tossing monsters around the battlefield, I figured we'd go a little more Stephen King here and have the game's psionic class, the Talent. Because I love the trope, as seen in King works like Firestarter, or in King-inspired ones like Stranger Things, we're going to play someone who was experimented upon by some shady government program (perhaps the laboratories of Ajax the Invincible, Draw Steel's evil human conqueror, who is the most powerful monster in the Monsters book) only to break free and use their powers to help others escape such a cruel fate.

Let's go over some basics before we begin:

Most abilities use a Power Roll, which has you roll 2d10 and then add a relevant Characteristic. As a Talent, our abilities tend to use Reason or Presence, which is fine because these automatically go up as we level up, and will always be among our best stats, starting off at 2, and capping out at 5 when we hit level 10.

Each Power Roll has three tiers of result, 11 and lower is a tier 1, 12-16 is tier 2, and 17+ is tier 3. The higher the tier, the better result for us.

Another important thing for what this character will be built to do is how forced movement works:

Various abilities will Push, Pull, Vertical Push, Vertical Pull, or Slide.

If an ability does, say, Push 3, we get to move that creature away from us 3 squares. The movement has to be in a straight line, but we can sort of angle it. For example, if we've got a monster adjacent to the left of us and we push them 3, we can either push them 3 spaces to the left of where they currently are, or we can push them diagonally up and to the left of where they are (even if the line from us isn't perfectly straight, as long as the monster is going away from us for this full move, it's kosher).

Pull, of course, is similar, but forces a monster closer to us.

Vertical Pull and Vertical Push allow you to move a creature off the ground with the ability. For example, if we have Vertical Push 3, we might send them diagonally (or directly) up away from us, which means they'd also take some damage from falling, unless they land on some higher surface.

Slide is the most versatile forced movement - you can move them in any direction, and even change direction mid-forced-movement.

Now: let's talk about the benefits of forced movement:

Not only is this useful for tactical positioning - such as setting up an ally with a Burst ability or an AoE attack - but you can also damage creatures by tossing them into things. If you force move a creature into an object, the creature takes one point of damage for every square left of movement that it couldn't move because it was stopped. Say I Push 3 a Skeleton into a heavy closed sarcophagus that is two squares behind them. One square of that forced movement is used up by pushing it into the empty square behind them, but then because the Skeleton can't move into the space of the object, the remaining two squares of forced movement are dealt to the Skeleton as damage. That extra 2 is on top of whatever damage my ability that moved them in the first place might have done.

Creatures getting force-moved into one another will each take the damage. (Also, at Director's discretion, certain objects made of certain materials might have a set amount of stamina per square of size, so you can potentially, say, shove a monster through a glass or wooden - or even stone or metal - structure to destroy it.)

With all that preamble out of the way, let's get started:

For our Ancestry, we're going to go Hakaan, the half-giants. We're pretty big (1L, or one size larger than most ancestries, but we still just occupy one square on the board). We then have three ancestry points to spend on traits.

First, we'll take Forceful, which increases all our Forced Movement by 1 (naturally important for this build).

While Doomsight would be kind of cool and flavorful, we're not going to build this one with a future death in mind, so instead, we'll take Stand Tough, which lets us treat our Might as one higher to resist potencies, and also gives us an edge of Might tests to resist environmental effects and creature traits and abilities. Finally, with our last point, we can take (and in fact can only take) All is a Feather, which gives us an edge of tests to lift and haul heavy objects (which I think in theory should work with telekinetic abilities).

For our Background, this is mainly flavor, but I think a Secluded environment, with Bureaucratic organization, and maybe an Academic culture. Our career was probably closest to a Mage's Apprentice, which gives us a Supernatural Perk. Now, given that we'll be getting Minor Telekinesis, we might not have as much of a use for Invisible Force, which is kind of an extra-minor Telekinesis that isn't used for damaging things. Depending on the interpretation of our subclass ability, and whether it's too forceful to be used to delicately manipulate objects, we might take this anyway.

Invisible Force is a maneuver that lets us move a 1T object (which is something around the size of a rabbit or a coffee mug) a number of squares equal to our relevant mental characteristic (both or Reason and Presence are 2 to start off, so 2 squares). I actually don't know if this can be considered forced movement to damage things, but it's a good bit of out-of-combat utility.

Finally, let's get into our class features:

As a Talent, we have 2s in Reason and Presence. We have a few options for how we want the other three characteristics to look. Given the strange manner in which our Talent was brought up, I'm going to say that they're rather poorly attuned to others' normal behavior and just being aware of an environment that isn't the strange laboratory in which they were experimented upon, and thus, their Intuition will take a -1 hit. That leaves Might and Agility - we can take either a 2 in one and a -1 in the other or we can take a 1 in each. I'm going to say that there probably was some physical conditioning that we were put through, so we'll be decent at both: thus we have M1, A1, R2, I-1, and P2.

We start off with 18 Stamina (meaning our Recoveries are for 6) and our Potencies are currently Weak:0, Normal:1, and Strong:2 (which I suspect is true for just about everyone at level 1).

We have the Psionics and Read Person skills, and we can pick two skills from Interpersonal or Lore skills. If we were being conditioned to be some kind of super soldier, perhaps we have knowledge of Strategy and then Interrogate.

Now, the meaty stuff:

As a Talent, we get a few things for free:

First, our heroic resource is Clarity. We get the typical 1d3 at the start of our turns, and an amount equal to our victories at the start of the combat. We then get an extra one each round each time a creature is force-moved the first time that round. Given that we're going to be doing a lot of force-moving, we can probably expect to get that every round (this also works when our friends knock creatures around. Indeed, with a Might of 1, we're actually going to be able to use the Knockback maneuver nearly as reliably as a Fury, so we could even do that on our turn to give us the extra Clarity for a Heroic ability).

Talents have a special rule which allows them to spend Clarity they don't have - you can go to negative Clarity, with a negative value equal to 1 + our Reason score, so we can actually go to -3. At the start of each of our turns, we take 1 damage for each negative point of Clairty, but this can potentially be a way to start off the fight with a powerful ability that might actually wind up saving us from greater damage that a monster might have dealt to us. While we're in Clarity debt, though, we're Strained, which affects a lot of our abilities in interesting ways.

Mind Spike is essentially a specialized Ranged Free Strike that does psychic damage at a range of 10. It normally does 2, 4, or 6 psychic damage plus our Reason (so 4, 6, or 8) and does an additional 2 if we're strained, but also does that 2 to us as well.

We're also going to pick a Psionic Augmentation, which is something we can swap on a Respite. None of these really play into our primary "move thing with our mind" theme, so I'd be tempted to take either Density Augmentation (which just raises our Stamina by 6, and does so again at 4th, 7th, and 10th levels) and increases our Stability by 1 (which reduces the amount by which others can move us) or we might take Distance Augmentation to extend the range of our ranged psionic abilities by 2. The latter seems quite useful if we do wind up with a lot of ranged abilities.

Next, we have our Talent Ward. Here, the obvious one is Repulsive Ward - when a creature adjacent to use deals damage to us, we can use a free triggered action to push them a number of squares equal to our Reason. This is both on-theme and also very cool.

Finally, another free thing we get is Telepathic Speech, where we can communicate with any creature that shares a language within the range of our Mind Spike (which we may have extended with our Augmentation). We also get the Mindspeech language.

Finally, we start to look at some Talent Tradition features - we're obviously going with Telekinesis as our tradition (aka our subclass,) and so we get two: Minor Telekinesis, and Repel.

Minor Telekinesis is a maneuver with a range of 10 and can target ourselves or a single size 1 creature or object. We can slide the target a number of squares equal to our Reason score. We can also spend 2+ Clairty to slide creatures or objects of larger sizes, increasing the size by 1 for each 2 Clarity spent. Finally, if we spend 3 Clarity, we can vertically slide them as well (hey, you want to deal with that flying monster by throwing another monster into it? Or drag it down to the ground? Or throw that enemy up in the air so they take fall damage?)

Repel is a Triggered action (notably, because our Repulsive Ward is a free triggered action, we can use both on the same round) we can use on ourselves or an ally within 10 squares. If the target takes damage or is force-moved, we can either cause the creature to take half damage (if it's damaged) or reduce the forced movement by a number of squares equal to our Reason score. If they're both damaged and force-moved, we choose one or the other. If we reduce forced movement to 0, the target can then push the source of the forced movement a number of squares equal to our Reason score.

    Naturally, the ideal scenario would be an enemy tries to shove our ally off a narrow bridge, and we stop them from doing so and then send that force right back at them.

Now, on to our Signature Abilities, of which we can pick two:

First, let's take the obvious one: Kinetic Grip.

Kinetic Grip slides a creature or object within a range of 10 a number of squares equal to 2, 4, or 6 plus our Reason score. If we get the tier 3 result, they're also knocked prone. If strained, we can only vertically push them instead of sliding them, but hey - we can do some fall damage with that. Notably, this doesn't do any damage on its own, but if we slide a monster that's next to an ally already, we could potentially do 8 damage to both of them by knocking their heads together.

Next, we're going to go a little outside our standard wheelhouse. While we could take Kinetic Pulse, which has the potential to push enemies back in a burst, I think we could use some ranged damage options.

Incinerate (naturally a pyrokinesis ability) lets us deal fire damage in 3 cube area within 10 squares (3 cube being a 3x3 square on the map, and only one of the constituent squares need be within our range,) doing 2, 4, or 6 fire damage to enemies (note that this avoids friendly fire, which is a thing in Draw Steel most of the time). Furthermore, the area of fire remains until the start of our next turn, dealing 2 damage to any creature that enters it the first time on a round or starts their turn there. Thus, this actually pairs well with Minor Telekinesis, as we could try to catch as many monsters as we can within it and then use our maneuver to slide another nearby creature into the flames. If we're Strained, the cube is 2 sizes bigger (a 5 cube) but only lasts until the end of our turn (still, we can do that Minor Telekinesis trick).

Now, we pick our Heroic Abilities. We get one 3-Clarity ability and one 5-Clarity ability at level 1.

For the first, we'll pick Choke:

This lets us, within a range of 10, deal 3, 5, or 8 damage in addition to our Reason (so 2 right now) to the target, and uses a Potency - depending our our tier result, it's a Might of less than 0, 1, or 2. On tier 1 and 2 results, they'e slowed (their speed reduced to 2) until they save out of it on the end of their turn (essentially a coin flip). If it's a tier 3, they're instead restrained (save ends,) (this reduces their movement to 0 and a few other things). It also, regardless of outcome, lets us vertical pull the target up to 2 squares, and if we restrain them, this ignores stability - which is great because Stability is our bane (though of course it'll only work on a tier 3 against a creature without a lot of might).

Four our 5-Clarity ability, while Inertia Soak is very on-brand, I'm really tempted to be a bit more of a team-player and take Flashback.

Flashback is a maneuver that we can use on ourselves or an ally within 10 squares. The target can use an ability with a base Heroic Resource cost of 7 or lower that they've previously used this round without spending any resources (though if the ability can be augmented by spending more, they can do so, paying as usual). If we're strained, we take 1d6 damage and are slowed (save ends).

    Naturally, we could use this on ourselves, though I don't think it's likely to be worth it to spend 5 Clarity to do another Choke. Where this will be far more impactful is when one of our fellow players does some huge, nasty ability and we get them to do it again (and once we get 7-cost abilities, we'll be able to do this at a discount). Thanks to the fact that we can choose the order in which we go, we might thus wait to let other players go before us in order to use this.

And that's it for level 1. It's a lot of things to figure out, though what I find fascinating about this game is that, as complex as building your character can be, ultimately in combat we've only got something like five or six options to choose from. The ability to go Strained as a talent does let us light things up much faster in the first combat. Thanks to our Hakaan Forceful feature, all our our many forced-movement abilities are going to be that much more potent, both for positioning and damaging with that movement.

Admittedly, at higher levels, it remains to be seen how powerful those single-digit points of damage from forced movement are going to be, but I also think that the scaling up of damage and stamina is not as pronounced in this as it is in a game like D&D. We're, of course, going to be getting more powerful abilities as well, but at least in those early levels, Horde-style enemies (the kind that tend to show up two to a party member in an encounter) have around 10-20 Stamina (also depending on what kind of monster they are).