Astonishing scenes: I took a break in January! Took time off from work, reviewing, writing, everything, and simply "rested" and "had fun". What a concept. If you haven't tried this, I recommend it. But I'm back! This time, I'm reviewing Draw Steel!
Draw Steel, released last year by MCDM Productions (lead designer James Introcaso, but there's really a large team behind it), will tell you exactly what it's about right on the cover: tactical, cinematic, heroic fantasy. Tactical, in the sense that there's crunchy combat where positioning and teamwork and choices matter; cinematic, in the sense that the characters get to be cool, the abilities are full of evocative flavor, and the players get to feel like they're kicking ass instead of doing their taxes; and heroic, in the sense that the game is designed for characters who want to do the right thing for the sake of doing the right thing.
Draw Steel is a 2d10 system, and the core gameplay loop is: get Victories by fighting monsters, negotiating with important NPCs, and doing cinematic montages; get stronger from those Victories; keep fighting monsters etc, now kicking more ass than before; only stop to rest when you literally can't keep going anymore. Once you're in downtime, you can do all kinds of projects: craft treasures, do community service, research, learn a new language or skill, or any number of other things. Then you go right back out to heroic adventuring again.
It brings me no joy at all to say that, unfortunately, Reddit convinced me to play Draw Steel. This is how you know these reviews are honest, I guess. I would never admit such a thing if not for my "integrity".
More precisely, I had heard about Draw Steel by osmosis in the months before its release, but, frankly, I have no feelings about Matt Colville, so his name being attached wasn't enough to interest me. At the time, in the spaces I was in, people mostly discussed Draw Steel (and Daggerheart, released a few months earlier) as a "D&D alternative". With so many things people describe as "D&D alternatives" out there—Pathfinder, Tales of the Valiant, Level Up Advanced 5E, waving my hands vaguely at some OSR—I had no particular reason to be interested in this specific one.
Then, one day, I was minding my own business online and saw a screenshot from the introduction of Draw Steel: Heroes. Specifically, this part, subtitled "What is This Game?":
This is a game about fighting monsters. About larger-than-life, extraordinary heroes plunging into battle against terrifying, monstrous enemies.
That covers a lot! So let's get specific and talk about what this game is, and what it is not.
This game will absolutely feature dungeons. ...But it isn't a dungeon crawler. ...It's not a survival horror game where you must track light and food and the weight of every object you carry. You can fight monsters in a dungeon, but the game is not about dungeons. Lots of games focus on that gameplay and do it really well! Like Shadowdark.
It's not a wilderness exploration game, aka a hex crawl. It's not about surviving in extreme weather, getting lost, or trying to navigate your way back to safety. You can fight monsters in the wilderness, even run a whole campaign in the wilderness, but this game is not about the wilderness. We love games that focus on that fantasy, like Forbidden Lands.
You can run adventures with horror themes, but this is not a horror roleplaying game like Call of Cthulhu. Your sessions can and will feature comedy, but this isn't a comedy RPG like Paranoia.
Draw Steel is definitely a game about creating amazing stories in which the heroes fight monsters and villains using strategy and tactics. ...If you're looking for a game featuring extraordinary heroes overcoming dramatic villains without the focus on tactical combat, maybe check out Daggerheart!
...We genuinely love all those games. But we love them because they focus on specific genres of gameplay and deliver on them really well.
Our game is heroic fantasy. That's its genre. Extraordinary people fighting dragons and necromancers.
But "heroic fantasy" is still a little too broad for our purposes, so we added two other keywords to explain how our game might be different from other games in this genre: tactical and cinematic.
And then the book goes on to explain what, exactly, the MCDM team means by tactical, cinematic, and heroic.
This is really something! I don't think I actually sat bolt upright in bed and started looking for Draw Steel games immediately, but it was pretty damn close. A game with a clear, focused vision, in a genre I love, that knows exactly what it wants to be, and isn't trying to be anything else? Now we're talking! I promptly signed up for StartPlaying's Draw Steel launch event—that's the platform I professionally GM through—picked up my free copies of the books and the starter adventure, signed up for a tutorial one-shot with one of my fellow professionals, and was off to the races.
This will be absolutely no surprise to anyone who's followed me on Bluesky, run into me at an online con, or talked to me about TTRPGs at all in the last six months: I love Draw Steel.
Hang on, what actual mechanics are involved here?
Right, let's do basics first. The core mechanic of Draw Steel is the power roll: 2d10 + your relevant characteristic, maybe a skill, and a very limited number of modifiers. Outcomes are separated into three tiers, à la Apocalypse World. No matter what you roll, something interesting always happens. Out of combat, that's because the result of a roll comes with success/failure and reward/consequence, meaning the most common outcome is a mixed result, and the rules explicitly dictate that even an unmitigated failure should mean an interesting narrative development rather than the end of the action.
In combat, even more exciting: you never miss. If you roll abominably, you still do something cool and make progress toward your goal—though your enemies might be making progress toward their goal faster! None of that "I attack, I miss, okay, that's my whole turn and I did nothing" nonsense you get in other games. This really, really supports the heroic feeling. I've never played a game where I felt so competent all the time.
Speaking of combat! Every class gets a unique heroic resource—like ferocity for the fury, or piety for the conduit—that they use to fuel their cool abilities (though everyone has some they can do for free all the time). And those abilities...they really are cool. Evocative names are all over the place—"Our Hearts Your Strength", which lets you literally buff another hero with the power of friendship, is a personal favorite, but you can open any random page in the Heroes book and you'll find something just as flavorful. I love when a design team designs every last little bit of the game, you know? Draw Steel wants you to feel like an epic hero with a unique identity at the table, and every single thing on the character sheet supports that.
But it never feels absurd, to me. This is the problem I often have with superhero games, which are a different but (IMO) similar genre. I like some superhero games, but in play, they do often feel like cartoon nonsense to me. That's fine and fun, but not always what I'm looking for when I want to have a gaming experience that makes me feel things. Draw Steel genuinely wants you to feel cool, to take your characters and their world seriously, and to experience high stakes, and it manages to do all that while also letting you turn into a capybara or throw somebody literally across a football field. What an accomplishment of design.
Plus, GMs get to have fun too! Where players get heroic resources, the GM gets Malice, which they can spend on their own cool, flavorful monster abilities. For instance, if your heroes are fighting a wode hag, you can spend a bunch of Malice to summon the hag's walking hut, which shows up and starts kicking the heroes. Or, if they're fighting a meteor dragon (real Draw Steel monster), you can spend Malice to summon an actual black hole onto the encounter map. This keeps encounters tense right until the last moment (even one demon can open a portal to the abyss!), and it's incredibly fun. If you, like me, enjoy cackling villainously while inflicting horrors on your player characters, you'll love how Malice feels.
Okay, the next core mechanic: montages. These are sort of like delves in Heart or skill challenges in D&D 4e: the heroes have some goal to accomplish (fortify a town against invaders, infiltrate a palace, perform a complicated ritual, complete a long journey), there are a number of challenges they need to overcome to get there, and they take turns tackling those challenges, alone or together, in a cinematic fashion.
And then there's negotiation—a structured framework for important social encounters in which your heroes need to convince someone to do something high-stakes. The heroes try to discover the NPC's motivations and make arguments they think will be persuasive, the GM tracks the NPC's interest and patience levels, and the negotiation resolves with some offer from the NPC ranging from "I won't help you, and in fact I'm about to stab you" to "I'll help you get into that fortified library, and I believe in your cause so much I'd also like to give you some treasure" based on their final interest level. I'm sure it's no surprise to anyone that I love this high-structure roleplay mechanic; more details later.
Plus, downtime. In Draw Steel, when you're not out adventuring, you're doing projects: making treasures, researching lore, digging a well, going fishing, building an airship, perfecting a new recipe, whatever. This, too, is very structured: each project has requirements (some of which are quest hooks all by themselves!), and you roll every day to see how much progress you make on your project. I think this is fun! It gives player characters new dimensions, plants seeds for more PC-NPC relationships and side quests, and makes the PCs feel more immersed in their communities. Plus, it's nice for players and their characters to have a way to proactively pursue their goals, and takes a lot of the treasure-distribution load off the GM's shoulders.
Speaking of random tables, is this a bunch of random tables?
Draw Steel is the furthest thing imaginable from a bunch of random tables. You will not roll to see if you meet 2d6 wolves or 1d4 ogres on the road. You will not roll to see if you run into a harpy or a set of bagpipes in a dungeon. You will not roll to see if your rival randomly happens to be in town for a duel. Not in Draw Steel!
Part of the "cinematic" aspect of Draw Steel is that every encounter should have narrative weight. No random encounters, and certainly no bag of rats. As the book says: "The rules of the game exist to help you tell a cool heroic fantasy story.... In order to generate Victories and Heroic Resources, you must face and overcome challenges worthy of a hero!" That is: you can spontaneously punch the farmer next to you at the bar, but it's not the GM's problem to prepare that as if it's a heroic combat encounter, and you won't be mechanically rewarded in any way for doing so.
I really, really appreciate this. It feels like the game is designed to support exactly the kind of focused, thoughtful gaming that I enjoy, where the world is coherent, things happen for a reason, and heroes have heroic goals that move the adventure forward without getting bogged down in things that don't matter. And I love not having to prepare a statblock for every random clown the PCs might meet.
Does this have published modules or adventures?
It sure does! There are several modules already out from MCDM: a "conventure" one-shot, a 10-20-session starter adventure that'll help you learn the rules, another higher-octane adventure of similar length, and a short few-shot "quest". And they've got more coming: three more adventures set to release this year and a whole book of encounters.
And the adventures, I'm delighted to say, are good. I've run two now (The Delian Tomb and Dark Heart of the Wood) and had a great time with both, and the playtest versions of the two upcoming adventures look just as fun. I'm a habitual fiddler: I get a new adventure and I immediately need to rip it apart and piece it back together in a shape that's easier and more fun for me to run. But even I can run these adventures almost straight from the book PDF. They're well organized, clearly structured while still allowing for plenty of shenanigans and player choice, and the MCDM team has actually, for real, done the prep necessary for you to have a good time at the table without doing a ton of extra work. You do not have to fill in the details, because they're just already there. I wish all adventures were this supportive of GMs.
If you run out of first-party content, great news! There are already lots of third-party Draw Steel adventures out there. (In fact—to put my writer hat on for a second—I've published one, and I think it's quite good. You can pick it up right now as part of a bundle benefiting the Palestine Children's Relief Fund.)
Some people will you tell you that you can, and those people are lying mistaken. There is a class called the censor, which will feel familiar if you're coming from a game with an inquisitor archetype: powered by holy wrath, smiting evildoers left and right, et cetera. If you want to smite, you can smite. But as I've said many times before, to me, a paladin is not defined by smiting but by their oath: believing in something or someone so passionately that their passion changes the world. And that's just not in Draw Steel.
I do feel the lack of paladins, because I think actually all games should be Pendragon have passion/oath mechanics. (This is a joke, mostly.) But I still have a ton of fun playing Draw Steel, because it's a game for heroes. The baseline assumption is that your character has principles and their adventures are primarily motivated by those principles. I wish there were more mechanics to nail down those principles and bring them directly into play more often, but this is a solid enough foundation for me to have a great time.
Now, I will say: no passions doesn't mean you can't make a complicated, interesting character! There's a lot going on in Draw Steel character creation, but in particular, you get to choose a culture (unrelated to ancestry), career (what you did before you became a hero, complete with a choice of inciting incident), and a complication. Culture and career are great ways to flesh out a character, but the complication is where the really exciting stuff is.
A complication is, well, a way to make your character more complicated: you get both a benefit and a drawback, each of which might be narrative or mechanical, and you get what I can only describe as extra sauce on your character. For example: the Host Body complication means you're a sapient fungus inhabiting a humanoid body, so you can jump into other (dead) bodies but you're flammable and bad at reading humanoid people's feelings. (Who among us.) Or: the Betrothed complication means you ran away from an arranged marriage and stole some of your dowry on your way out (treasure!), but people spread nasty rumors about you and it's hard for you to become famous. Or you can have a contract with a devil, or be cursed to trip over your own feet all the time, or just be a superb chef.
There are one hundred of these complications in the core rulebook, and they're all great. They're just three paragraphs each, but they pack a lot of punch for their size! They add a ton of depth to your character, and some interesting mechanic, and all of them serve as quest hooks, NPC connections, or other weird little seeds for the GM to use to enrich the game if they so desire. But without giving the GM a ton of extra work, since complications are 1) optional, and 2) interesting enough mechanically even if the narrative bits never come into the game.
In my experience, when I make a character for Draw Steel, I come out the other side with a surprisingly full picture of who they are as a person—far more than I do in other tactical games. Which I love! Really sets you up well to have interesting heroic adventures and not just a bunch of fights with unrelated roleplaying tacked on.
Is there crunch and tactical gameplay?
In the most approving tone imaginable: boy, is there ever.
And it's my favorite kind of crunch! Crunch for the things that matter. No crunch for the things that don't matter to the specific experience this game is trying to deliver. You won't find anybody tracking rations or repairing their boots in Draw Steel. There's no money, no encumbrance, and very little in the way of inventory management—you just have the stuff it's reasonable to have and you don't worry about where you're putting it.
Matt Colville and other members of the MCDM team have talked repeatedly about how Draw Steel was designed from the ground up, mechanically speaking, and it really shows. There's nothing in Draw Steel that feels (to me) like it was included out of obligation to emulate other games in the heroic-fantasy genre. Everything, and I do mean everything, feels like it's carefully designed to support a cinematic, heroic experience. I love this on principle—I love any game whose designers are aiming very carefully at a specific vision—and I also love the execution.
Fiddling around with exactly how many looted helmets you can carry to sell to your local smith isn't cinematic or heroic, so it's not in the game...and so heroes in Draw Steel don't go around looting helmets from their dead enemies. You know what is cinematic and heroic, though? Exciting action montages. High-stakes diplomatic negotiations. Kicking villainous ass. So that's where the crunch lives in Draw Steel.
Let's go back to combat for a minute. Combat is the crunchiest of Draw Steel's systems, because it is, after all, a game primarily about fighting monsters. (By the way, the Draw Steel definition of monster: "The defining feature of a monster is that they impose their will on the world at the expense of someone else.") And my word, there's a lot of crunch in combat. Positioning matters. Situational advantages—flanking, having the high ground, specific terrain—matter. The core rule book, which is more than four hundred pages long, includes numerous diagrams to illustrate specific cases of various rules. You should not, under any circumstances, try to run Draw Steel combat with theater of the mind. There's a lot on the character sheet right from level 1—one of my players just realized something about one of her core class features tonight, and we've been playing for four months!
But despite all this crunch, combat in Draw Steel never feels tedious or fiddly. Bonuses and penalties are very limited and easy to remember. Action resolution is quick and easy, since nobody ever misses. Every hero has something cool they can do when it's not their turn, so the whole table stays engaged throughout combat. Combat in Draw Steel isn't actually faster than in other systems, but it absolutely feels that way, because it's just so fun for everyone the whole way through.
What players do spend a lot of time on in combat is tactics, and specifically teamwork. Every character has abilities that can help their allies—some that everyone can do, and some that are specific to that hero's class or subclass—which means there's a lot of space to talk about how the heroes can best combine their turns to achieve their goal. Alternating initiative also helps with this: because heroes can act in any order, and you're not locked into the same order between rounds, the turn order is just another opportunity for the players to strategize together about how to set up the sickest possible combo.
Normally, loosey-goosey initiative systems (or non-systems) stress me out, because it means extra work for me (as the GM) to ensure everyone's getting their fair share of spotlight. But in Draw Steel, it just works. The heroes who act early get to jump headfirst into the action, and the heroes who act later in the round are usually being set up to do the coolest possible thing. Everyone has fun, without a bunch of extra social finagling from the GM.
And! Perhaps the most surprising of all: combat encounters in Draw Steel are easy and fun to prep. The encounter-building math in the book works. It takes me maybe ten minutes to prep a Draw Steel combat from scratch, and even just following the "quick building" rules very reliably gives me an interesting encounter that's fun and appropriately challenging for everyone involved. For such a tactical, crunchy game, that's astonishing. I genuinely did not know preparing combat encounters could feel like this.
Speaking of "I didn't know prep could feel like this", negotiations. Prepping them is, once again, easy and fun: you come up with initial interest and patience levels for your important NPC, establish a few motivations and anti-motivations, determine about five different offers the NPC might make based on their level of interest (with the book providing helpful tips on what the result of each interest level should generally look like), and that's it. You're done! And this gives you a lovely structure for a social encounter that's interesting, engaging, and satisfyingly crunchy.
You all know I love "immersion" and "versimilitude" (whatever those mean), and sometimes social encounter mechanics can...strain whatever verisimilitude you've got going on. Many systems simply don't have robust social encounter mechanics, which often means that a single skill check determines the outcome of a whole high-stakes social situation. To me, this feels unrealistic and underwhelming! But you don't have that problem in Draw Steel, because the structure of a negotiation ensures that your NPCs feel three-dimensional, every hero can contribute meaningfully, and the negotiation feels like a full, fleshed-out encounter on par with a montage or combat.
Plus, in play, the negotiation structure really supports the GM: you're never left wondering "well, was that a good enough argument to get this queen to lend you her magic sword?"; you can just look at the queen's negotiation stats, see which motivations the heroes' argument appeals to, and have them roll accordingly. There's still room for GMs to weight the scales if they like, of course: you're always free to hand out advantages and disadvantages based on circumstances, good (or bad) roleplay, or whatever else. But you always have the structure to fall back on.
Now, I will say: I've heard some GMs have trouble with negotiations. I don't. I think this is because my games are always very roleplay-centric, I play all my NPCs as if they're real complicated people, and my players treat them accordingly. This means that, even in a more structured social encounter like a negotiation, my players are very focused on the fiction, and on forming a genuine connection with the person in front of them; they're not just looking for buttons to press on their character sheets. At my table, a negotiation plays much like any other roleplaying situation, just with higher stakes. I've heard that the negotiation structure feels clunky or interrupts the flow of play for some people, but it never has for me! If anything, the increased structure is diegetic—naturally, in a high stakes situation, the NPC is going to be carefully evaluating the heroes' proposals and what exactly they can afford to offer. The mechanics and the fiction harmonize, for me.
Of course, I famously love to get a lot of crunchy mechanics involved in my social roleplay (see: my passion for Pendragon's feast system), and I acknowledge not everybody feels like that. Your experience of negotiations may vary.
And montages are good too. Quite structured, like everything else in Draw Steel, but they flow very nicely. I've talked before about how I often struggle with montage-like mechanics, mostly because it's often unclear how you're meant to pace these things. In Draw Steel, though—maybe it's the explicit framing as a montage of individual shots with no connective tissue necessary? Maybe it's that the books provide several varied and interesting examples of montages? No matter the reason, montages just work for me. They feel cinematic, they feel exciting, they give a structured way to get from Point A to Point B without worrying about fiddly details, and the turn structure ensures that everybody gets some spotlight. And they're easy and fun to prep! You contemplate what's happening in the fiction, think up 5-7 examples of obstacles between the heroes and their goal, and then hand it over to your players to decide how they want to tackle them. High structure, but again zero fiddliness: at the table, running a montage just means tracking the number of successes and failures your heroes have achieved, and comparing to the success and failure limits determined by the montage's difficulty. Easy breezy.
All this to say: by god, it's crunchy, and by god, the crunch is fun. Not just fun for the players at the table, but fun for everyone, all the time. In fact, that's the most notable thing about Draw Steel for me: it is carefully designed to support the GM's fun in a way that many (most) games are not. A lot of games talk a big talk about "the GM is a player too!", but very rarely do I see so much concrete support for the GM actually having a good time.
Worried I forgot that this blog is called Can I Solo That? Fear not! I have soloed that.
Here's the thing about Draw Steel: it's very much a team game. So much of the game depends on not just the heroes working together in-game, but the players working together in real life. Characters are complicated, especially when it comes to combat: every character has a cool, thematic "reaction" they can take during other people's turns, and specific ways to get more of their heroic resource during other people's turns, and then there's all the teamwork abilities that let you direct a friend to hit someone. It's a lot, and it's a lot happening in parallel, rather than in sequence. Even for me, crunch lover extraordinaire, spreadsheets in the brain, well known for playing at least three characters at once in all my tactical solo games, it is difficult to keep track of all the moving pieces of Draw Steel combat in my head.
But not impossible! I wouldn't recommend solo play as your introduction to Draw Steel, but given time, you will (probably?) develop a level of system knowledge that makes it easier to track all that stuff happening in parallel. It's still much slower than group play, because you are, after all, trying to replace 3-6 brains working together with your one single brain. Tough, no matter how you slice it. Possible nevertheless, if you don't mind a relaxed pace.
There is another way, though! MCDM is developing a VTT called the Codex specifically for Draw Steel. It's in testing right now, accessible to MCDM's Patreon subscribers, and it is quite good. It automates a great deal of those off-turn heroic resource gains and triggered actions. Not at all necessary for group play, but tremendously helpful for solo play, since it lets you focus on just one creature at a time. I solo-Draw-Steel with the Codex fairly regularly these days, though mostly for testing new monsters/encounters rather than purely for fun, and can confirm it's extremely manageable. There's even at least one fan-made Codex module designed to take you through a (short) solo adventure, and the designers are working on automated monster behavior.
All in all, I wouldn't say Draw Steel is my go-to solo game, but it certainly is soloable.
I have exactly one gripe, which is also the one (1) appearance of random tables in Draw Steel: project events, which are random events that might happen during your downtime projects. I will begrudgingly admit that some are good. I like the table for events that might happen during the Build or Repair Road project, for instance—those events are simple and easy to turn into fun gameplay. But some of them are...let's take an example event that might happen during a crafting project: a devil from hell tries to fuck with the project, and if the hero doesn't notice, "the devil is summoned the next time the hero makes a project roll, with goals of the Director’s determination". A game-changing event, surely! But with very little support to turn that freeform improv prompt into something concrete. Common problem for random tables, and I dislike it just as much here as I always do.
Project events are an optional mechanic, so I just haven't been using them. Which is fine, in a practical sense, but frustrating. I want to like and use project events, but the prospect of possibly having a whole new extraplanar entity in my game and having to decide what they want on the fly...feels like a lot of work for me, the GM, in a way that no other part of Draw Steel does. Unfortunate.
And that's it. I am out of gripes. Listen: the game is good. It's really, really good.
Well, all right, there's one thing I found vaguely annoying at first, namely the fact that "line" doesn't mean what you think it does in Draw Steel. But, you know, I can't think of a better term for the thing Draw Steel calls a line, and I'm used to it now. It's fine.
The core rulebook also is more than 400 pages long, which is fine by me. It's a lot of game. This isn't actually a gripe. Certainly there's nothing in there I'd cut. But, you know, 400 pages of book is not always the easiest thing to reference mid-session. If Draw Steel had a more restrictive license, we might all be in trouble—but it doesn't, so there are excellent digital tools like Forge Steel and Stawl, which are tremendously useful both as character builders and as rules references.
My primary wish is honestly for more Draw Steel. I'm really excited about all the adventures and supplements MCDM has planned, and can't wait to play with them. What a nice, peaceful wish to have.
I have some other wishes, though. Namely, I want more concrete guidance on how to create new monsters and new dynamic terrain objects (traps and such). The monsters book has very concrete, very helpful guidance on how to take an existing monster and level it up or down (and I've got a spreadsheet that automates that math for you here), but not so much on how to brew your own. Villain actions (special, powerful boss monster abilities provide a narrative structure for your most important fights) and malice abilities (like the aforementioned wode hag's hut summoning) are particularly difficult to obtain a formula for from the existing monsters, since they're all quite specific to the individual monsters. Which is, you know, great, because the existing monsters are hugely flavorful and interesting, but what's a homebrewer to do?
Unfortunately, the existing monsters were designed based on things like "instinct" and "decades of design experience" and "many hours of playtesting", so...there isn't a published formula for how to make them because there isn't an unpublished formula. Alas! The designers say they're working on more generalizable monster-making guidance, and I do hope that comes out sooner rather than later.
Another wish! The treasures in the core books are okay, but most of them aren't hugely exciting to me. Recently released adventures have had more interesting treasures in them—by which I mean, treasures that give you cool new abilities rather than just some passive bonuses—so I hope that trend continues. More fun treasures!
We're more than five thousand words in and there are still uncountably many other things I love about Draw Steel. Let me try to be so, so brief.
The rules are free. All of them. Both core books. You can go read them right now, because...
The license is very generous. You can use the text in the core books for pretty much whatever, including not just rules but proper names, places, characters, the whole shebang. Hack it, remix it, write adventures or new ancestries or new classes and give them away or sell them for profit...all with very few restrictions. Not like some other gaming companies I'm sure we could all name. Love to see it.
There's a big book of drop-in encounters coming out this year, which MCDM has referred to as the "third core book". They really are thinking about how to make the game easy and fun to run!
Ancestries: customizable! Not all devils (or all humans, or all high elves, etc) have the same ancestral abilities. You get to choose which ones you want. I don't feel constantly haunted by the specter of biological determinism.
I love the conduit's prayer mechanic. An option to gamble every turn by bothering the gods? Sign me right up.
First-level characters are already heroes, and they're surprisingly sturdy. You can't kill them with a stiff breeze, even the squishier ones.
The game isn't trying to trick you. Things generally work how you think they do. (Except the line thing.)
Monsters are fun and inspiring just to read through, and they've all got organizations and roles that determine their function in their group of monsters and their tactical function in combat. Makes it very easy to ensure an interesting mix in each encounter and fine-tune the vibes of your encounters.
Solo monsters are carefully designed to be interesting and challenging encounters. You can actually have an epic boss fight in Draw Steel just by running a solo as written, without the kind of action economy disaster you get in other games.
Things are measured in squares, and there's no Pythagorean theorem. Measuring is easy.
Everyone gets a main action and a maneuver (and a move action) on their turn, and the maneuver options are often so cool and impactful that a common refrain at Draw Steel tables is: "And that was just my maneuver!"
A critical hit gives you a whole extra main action. Let me tell you, when this happens, the whole table starts hooting and hollering, and it feels sick as hell.
Opportunity attacks exist, but aren't a big deal for heroes, meaning everyone can move around the battlefield fairly freely, and combat always feels dynamic.
Healing is good. Everyone can do some on their own, but class-specific healing abilities still feel cool and powerful.
Everyone can always choose to do nonlethal damage. No fucking around with damage types or ranged vs melee attacks or any nonsense. Heroic!
It's impossible to make a character who's bad at their class fantasy.
You can still kick ass in combat even if you're dying. You're in the fight until you're actually, literally dead.
Alarmed by my proximity to six thousand words, I simply must stop there and move on.
Does this game deliver on its premise?
Absolutely it does. It's possible to say you're playing a hero in many games, but in Draw Steel, the game itself makes you feel like a hero. Unlike attrition-based systems, Draw Steel incentivizes you to keep going, to push yourself to the absolute limit in the name of saving the day. That's heroism, baby! Plus it's chock-full of interesting tactics and the kind of cool, flavorful mechanics that naturally produce cinematic moments at the table. Recently, in one of my games, a hero jumped off a sixth-story balcony to swan dive sword-first into a dragon—cinema!!
It's tactical, it's cinematic, it's heroic...the MCDM team had a specific aim and they absolutely nailed it. Top marks for execution.
Did I ever! I sometimes joke that my only complaint about Draw Steel is that it's my sweatiest game: everything is so exciting that I end up literally, physically overheated. Even now, as I've settled into longer-form campaigns, Draw Steel is fun all the time, no matter what side of the screen I'm on.
I would and I am! I've got one active campaign and another launching soon, and you'll find me playtesting and one-shotting across the internet very regularly. I've mentioned before that, having moved away from DnD, I've struggled to find a new go-to heroic fantasy game, and, well, here it is. It's not a replacement for any other system; Draw Steel is its own thing, and, dare I say, better. I anticipate many more hundreds of hours of delightful heroic action to come.
For solo play—I wouldn't not recommend it, but I think you might want to learn the ropes in a group first. For group play, though? Absolutely, unequivocally recommend. You want to be a hero? Go Draw some Steel.
Disclaimers: I got a free copy of Draw Steel: Heroes, Draw Steel: Monsters, and The Delian Tomb from MCDM in my capacity as a professional GM (not as a reviewer). I've playtested a few upcoming Draw Steel products, but only as a volunteer.
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