The July Patreon playtest packet for the MCDM RPG is out! If you want to see it in its glory, you can join the MCDM Patreon here! In addition, they have given us the game’s name: Draw Steel! I have read the packet and am enjoying what I’m seeing. For this post, I wanted to write about my thoughts after my first readthrough. Now, to be clear, I have not played the game yet. I’m hoping to run some sessions soon, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. If you want to hear how the games go, let me know in the comments!  

Let's start with the basics, then get into character creation!

The Basics of Draw Steel Gameplay

Draw Steel describes itself as a tactical, heroic and cinematic fantasy game, which sounds cool and all—but what do they mean by that? 

Tactical: Positioning and teamwork matter in Draw Steel. I will dig into this more when I describe combat, but for now, it’s important to know that tactics matter. Abilities and triggered actions require players to think tactically. Additionally, initiative order is looser than in some other games to reinforce the tactical nature. Players get to decide who goes when during each round of combat. 

Heroic: This game is about being a hero and doing heroic things. That means you don’t need to track your mundane equipment or worry about surviving in the wilderness; these things just happen. Draw Steel wants you to focus on fighting evil monsters and saving people. 

Cinematic: Playing Draw Steel should allow you to feel like you are in a movie scene. Abilities in Draw Steel have evocative names, and the mechanics support the vision the names create. If you read an ability and you think you can leap into the air with a weapon held high as you come down on the monster’s head, then the mechanics strive to help you do that! MCDM wants the rules and abilities to reflect what you imagine your character doing. 

Fantasy: It's got elves and dragons and all the other stuff you are used to in these types of games—but sometimes with a twist! Gotta keep things fresh!

Characteristics

Heroes in Draw Steel have five characteristics (similar to ability scores/modifiers in D&D): Might, agility, reason, intuition, and presence. Each score can run from -5 to +5, and your class determines your score. Characteristics align with strength, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma from D&D. As you can see, they dropped any sort of analog to constitution or health. Stamina, as it’s called in Draw Steel, is mostly based on your class. I didn’t see disease or poison (poison does damage) resistance in the packet, so there may not have been a use for constitution anyway. I think I like this, as it’s one less attribute/characteristic to spread points around or worry about. 

The Power Roll 

The power roll is THE roll for this game, like the 20-sided die (d20) is for D&D. Almost every roll you make involves the power roll mechanic. There are three types of power rolls:

• Ability rolls are for using abilities given by your class, ancestry, or kit among other things. 
• Resistance rolls are for avoiding harmful effects.
• You make a test roll when using skills (having a skill adds +2 to your roll).

You make a power roll with two 10-sided die (2d10) and add a characteristic. The total determines your outcome tier, of which there are three levels. Tier 1 is 11 or lower, Tier 2 is 12-16, and Tier 3 is 17 or higher. The ability you roll determines the specific outcome. 

For example, the Fury ability Brutal Slam is Power Roll + Might and has the following outcomes.

11 or lower: 3 damage; push 1 (I’ll explain push in the next post, where I’ll talk about combat)

12-16: 8 damage; push 2

17+: 12 damage; push 4

Test tiers depend on the difficulty of the test. You can have an easy, medium, or hard test with different outcomes based on your roll. 

Easy test 

11 or lower: You fail the task.

12-16: You succeed on the task. 

17+: You succeed on the task with a reward.

Medium test 

11 or lower: You fail the task and incur a consequence.

12-16: You succeed on the task and incur a consequence. 

17+: You succeed on the task.

Hard Test

11 or lower: You fail the task and incur a consequence. 

12-16: You fail the task. 

17+: You succeed on the task. 

Rewards and consequences can be narrative or involve hope (which allows you to heal) or villain points (a metacurrency for the Director to use in combat).

Overall, the power roll seems like a solid and flexible roll. It’s simple but allows for near-infinite possibilities. It is also cool to see that using an ability in combat always does something. You make some progress, even on the worst roll, so you’ll never have a turn where nothing happens. You might only accomplish something small, but it still seems like it will be more fun than basically skipping your turn, which can happen in D&D. I also enjoy the power roll for tests. Giving us different difficulty levels offers the director many more levers to pull when trying to help the players tell their story.

Edges and Banes 

Edges and banes function like advantage and disadvantage in D&D. Having an edge gives you +2 and having a bane gives you -2 to a roll. The interesting thing is that you max out at either two edges or two banes. You might have more edges or banes, depending on the circumstances, but they do not affect the outcome of your roll. 

Two edges or two banes are called double edges and double banes. When you have a double edge/bane, you no longer get a numeric modifier to the role. Instead, your outcome moves one tier up (for an edge) or down (for a bane). If you got a total of 13 on your roll (a Tier 2 result) and had a double edge, you would treat it as a Tier 3 result. An edge and a bane cancel each other out, and a double edge cancels out a double bane.

Double edges and banes seem like an elegant way to handle advantage/disadvantage. It allows players to develop tactics without worrying they might be missing a bonus somewhere. 

Character Creation in Draw Steel

Now for the meat of the game, character creation! There are six steps to character creation, as follows:

1. Choose your Ancestry 

In the first step, you choose your ancestry (the equivalent of your race in D&D). Currently, you can choose from 12 ancestries. Most of the ancestry descriptions have interesting lore and short fiction (and they’ll add the ones that don’t in future playtests). The writing helps you imagine what a character with that ancestry might be like and can inspire you to play them. The Draw Steel ancestries include the following: devil, dragon knight, dwarf, hakaan, high elf, human, memonek, orc, polder, revenant, time raider, or wode elf. 

I took a few notes on some of the unusual ancestries. The hakaan are giants who gave up some of their size  to see their future. However, they were tricked and can only see the moment they will die, which gives them doomsight. Size-wise, hakaan are now closer to half-giants in other games. 

Memonek are beings from the plane of law. They are living beings, but instead of being made of flesh and bones like the other ancestries, they are silicone. MCDM shared some early memonek art a while back—some of them look like they are partly or wholly made from fine china. 

The polder are basically halflings that can turn into a shadow when standing still. Pretty cool stuff!

The last ancestry that I want to highlight is not a unique one at all, but I feel what MCDM has done is pretty unique. Humans! In most RPGs, humans are the boring default races. Not so in this game! In Draw Steel, humans can detect the supernatural and resist it as well. They have some damage immunity to magic and psionics (they’re not completely immune, though; think of it as a form of resistance from D&D). Humans also get extra recoveries that they can use to heal up. They’re a pretty powerful race! I definitely need to start thinking about how humans got these powers in Skies. I don't want to use boring humans anymore! 

2. Choose your Culture 

Your culture is where you grew up, and it gives you a language and some skills. The skills you pick vary based on the environment you grew up in and how it was organized. The environment choices are nomadic, rural, secluded, and urban. The organization aspects are anarchic, bureaucratic, and communal. You then get to select an upbringing, or how you were raised. The options for upbringing are academic, creative, illegal, labor, martial, and noble. The upbringing option also allows you to pick from related skills.

Instead of telling you specific skills to grab for these, the character creation process tells you to grab one skill from a group, like the lore or exploration skill groups. Choosing from a set of skills allows you to customize your character further. 

This create-your-own-culture process might not be for everyone, and MCDM plans to create pre-generated cultures that tie directly into the Draw Steel setting. In the final game, players will be able to choose from among the listed cultures if they don't want to create one. I think this will be really cool for people making their own worlds (like me!). Directors can use these culture tools to share information with players about the different cities and groups they should consider during character creation. In my world, the Skies of Mor-ladron, the great city of Empyrean would be an urban bureaucratic culture, whereas Shipspire would be either an urban or secluded anarchic culture. 

3. Choose your Career

What did you do before becoming a hero? That is your career, which gives you skills, languages, a title (titles are similar feats from D&D—at least, those in the playtest packet are), and either renown (how famous your character already is) or project points (which your character can use in crafting and research). The careers in the playtest are artisan, criminal, gladiator, laborer, mage’s apprentice, performer, sage, and soldier. The final game will include even more careers. 

You also choose an inciting incident. The inciting incident caused you to leave your career and become a hero. Each career has a list you can choose from or use as inspiration. Inciting incidents include things like being betrayed or needing to find a cure to save someone you love. Something is also taken from you during this incident—you decide what it is. The inciting incident is more a narrative feature than a mechanical one, but it should give the director plenty to work into the game. 

4. Choose your Class

Classes are the coolest part of any RPG, and Draw Steel does not disappoint. The playtest packet includes five classes, with more to come, and they all ooze with flavor. If I were a player, I have no idea how I would choose which one to try first. I’ve noted a D&D equivalent with each class type. The classes in the packet are: 

1. Conduit (cleric)
2. Elementalist (wizard/sorcerer/druid)
3. Fury (barbarian)
4. Shadow (rogue with shadow magic!) 
5. Tactician (fighter—sort of; it’s more like a commander or warlord. They spend a lot of time helping other people do cool stuff!) 

Classes are made up of a lot of things, but the core of each class is a heroic resource. Each class gains its heroic resource in different ways: automatically during each round, after using specific abilities, or when acting in ways that reflect the class. For example, the shadow gains two of their heroic resource, insight, each round, plus whenever they get a Tier 3 result with an attack. Classes use their heroic resources to power heroic abilities. 

If you don’t have enough of your heroic resource to perform one of these epic movies, you still have powerful signature abilities from your class and kit. All classes are different, too. The fury has heroic abilities to spend their heroic resource, rage on, and also gains passive abilities if they hold onto their rage instead of spending it. The ways heroic resources are gained and used seem to further the fantasy of the classes.

Another reason the classes all sound so fun to play is because everything is named to inspire you, from subclasses like the College of Caustic Alchemy (shadow) or Insurgent (tactician) to the name of abilities like Sacrificial Offer (conduit) or Impaling Strike (fury). The names conjure images of what you think the subclasses and abilities will do, and when you read the mechanics, everything reinforces those images. We will have to see if it works out like that in play, but I’m optimistic!

5. Choose your Kit

Your kit is your loadout; it determines what weapons and armor or magic implements you carry. 

Any class can use any kit, but the playtest packet says some kits work better with certain classes. You will choose from martial or caster kits. Kits give stamina, speed, and stability bonuses, as well as damage bonuses (depending on the weapon type). Each kit also gives you an ability to use in combat. 

A great example is the Shining Armor kit.

Equipment: Heavy armor, a shield, and a medium weapon

Bonuses: Stamina +12, Stability +1, 

Melee Weapon Damage Bonus +2/+2/+2 

Ability: Protective Attack

Power Roll + Might or Agility 

11 or lower: 5 damage; taunted (EoT*)

12–16: 9 damage; taunted (EoT*)

17+: 12 damage; taunted (EoT*)

*EoT = End of Turn—the condition lasts until the target's next turn ends. 

All the kits seem evocative, and I can't wait to try them out! These seem simple to make, and I look forward to adding some firearm kits to the Skies of Mor-ladron. 

6. Choose your Complication

Choosing a complication is optional, but it gives you both a benefit and a drawback. Think of Karlach in Baldur's Gate 3: she had an infernal engine in place of her heart, which gave her great power—but it meant she could not survive outside the Nine Hells for long. Complications like making a deal with a devil or choosing between guilds (so one owes you favors and the other is out to get you) offer exciting gameplay and story ideas! 

What’s Next

Overall, almost everything I’ve seen in the Draw Steel playtest packet inspires me and makes me want to play. The only thing that gave me pause was that some of the ancestries seemed to get more to play with than others. I'm not sure how powerful the abilities are, though, so I'm sure that’s a balance thing, and we’ll see if it ends up being an issue during play. I hope to run one or two groups in the near future, and I’m excited to see what my players think!

In the next post, which will be out later this week, I'll describe how combat and negotiation work in Draw Steel. Then, I will go into more detail on the things I might change or add to fit the Skies of Mor-ladron.