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. Ancient underground complexes filled with ravenous undead or creeping oozes. But it isn't a dungeon crawler. It's not about "clearing rooms." 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. Draw Steel has a lot of other tools! But fighting monsters is sort of non-negotiable. If you're looking for a game featuring extraordinary heroes overcoming dramatic villains without the focus on tactical combat, maybe check out Daggerheart! Just right next door alphabet-wise!

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.

These terms are just guidelines. A vibe. But we find them useful when trying to choose between different features. "Both of these ideas are cool, but which is the most cinematic? The most heroic?"

So let's talk about what we mean when we use these terms.

Tactical

Strategy is: "What are we trying to do?" Break a siege, free a prisoner, rescue a captive, steal a tome of ancient lore. Strategy is about long-term goals.

Tactics is about: "How are we going to do that?" We're going to... surround them! Sneak around them! Pick them off one by one! Kill their leader first. Kill their priest first! "No resurrections!"

In a tactical game, positioning matters. So our game is played on a grid. Effects and distances are measured in squares. This means all players are focused on the same problem, and there is no ambiguity regarding where the heroes and villains are in relation to each other. The hobgoblin troopers are setting themselves up in a line to stop our tactician and fury from getting into melee with the hobgoblin war mage. We're all aware of what's happening, and we can talk about what we're going to do to stop it.

That means teamwork matters. That's why the order of combat works the way it does—to encourage the players to plan! "Okay, you use Concussive Slam on that trooper, it'll push him back, and on my turn, I can use Squad! Forward! to get us all into melee with the death captain." We think focusing on teamwork also makes the game more heroic!

In a tactical game, you have many choices each combat round. You are never reduced to just swinging your sword. You have options. If we do a good job, you don't feel as if you outlasted your opponents because you wore their Stamina down before they could reduce yours to 0-you feel like you beat those hobgoblins! Through stealth and sorcery, coordination and ferocity!

As you play with the same group of characters, you learn what they can all do. You discover synergies, "combos." Some of them intended by the designers, some not! You start to learn these unique characters, and to rely on them to do their cool things. It's a great feeling when another player comes up with a cool plan that relies on your unique abilities.

You learn which characters are the "squishies" who need to be protected or healed. You learn which characters can push themselves right to the edge and keep fighting. "Don't worry about healing Barlaca. She's our fury. She's happier with 3 Stamina." Our game is not about tactics. It's not a wargame. But it is tactical.

Heroic

Our game is definitely about heroism! For us, this means a couple of things. It means we don't assume your character is primarily motivated by greed. They might be! But we don't assume that. Instead we assume you're going to do the right thing. It might take some convincing, and there might be some reluctant heroes in your party, but that's part of the fun!

You should absolutely be able to run a Chain of Acheron-style campaign where the heroes are hard-bitten mercenaries in a morally ambiguous world. But that's not the baseline assumption. The fiction and adventures that inspire us feature epic villains trying to remake the world in their image, and the dashing, unyielding heroes who strive against them even in the face of impossible odds.

So that's one component of the heroic keyword. But another component, equally important, is what kinds of things happen "onscreen," so to speak. This is closely related to the cinematic keyword.

For instance, you never see Indiana Jones having to find a local sporting goods store because he needs to stock up on ammo. You never see Katniss Everdeen have to stop and take a shower because she stinks.

These things do happen. No one watching Raiders of the Lost Ark thinks that Indy's gun is magic and doesn't need bullets—but we simply don't need to see Indy doing that stuff. We don't need to waste time on it.

Likewise in our game, we don't worry about stuff that heroes in fiction tend not to worry about. We don't worry how much everything you're carrying weighs. If you try to lift a bear, you might have trouble, sure. But nowhere on your character sheet are you tracking the weight of every item.

You don't track food such as rations, and you don't worry about how many torches you have. Light might factor into a specific environment, because that can be a fun tactical challenge, but the game doesn't expect that everyone is always worried about running out of light.

Basically, we worry only about those things you'd see your characters doing in a movie, or a comic, or a novel about their adventures. Assume all the tedious stuff happens off-screen. Speaking of things happening on-screen...

Cinematic

Closely tied to the heroic keyword, the cinematic keyword is about how we like abilities and features to be strongly evocative. You can imagine your character doing or saying these things. "In All This Confusion" is a good name for the shadow's ability to slip out of melee and retreat to safety. The text of the ability says how it works, but the name creates an awareness that explains how it's working.

When Sir Vanazor the dragon knight fury leaps onto a goblin war spider, cleaving through the goblins riding the creature in a single turn, you experience that action in your mind. It feels like a movie. It doesn't feel simply as if you rolled well, but like an epic scene, complete with slow motion and a Carpenter Brut soundtrack.

You should imagine your tactician character leading the battle, granting your allies free strikes, extra maneuvers. Coordinating the battle. That's what the name implies. And if we've done a good job, when you read through your character's abilities, you think, "Yes! This is what I was imagining! I can't wait to do this!"

Fantasy

Just... you know... it's got dragons and stuff.

It's worth mentioning—while everyone basically already knows what fantasy means in this context, we do imagine it a little more broadly than your average classical medieval fantasy. We like that stuff! Vasloria is our medieval European fantasy analog with knights on horseback and wizards in towers. But we also like high fantasy urban intrigue, and so we're developing Capital, the City of the Great Game, the Greatest City in This or Any Age. Vasloria is mostly humans and elves and orcs and dwarves, but Capital has dozens, hundreds of different ancestries in it.

Looking back at movies like Star Wars and the work of artists like Chris Foss, that '70s stuff now seems explicitly fantastical. There's nothing scientific or even plausible about a lightsaber or a John Berkey spaceship. But damn, they look cool!

So our setting includes the timescape—our multiverse, of which the world of Orden containing Capital and Vasloria is only one part. The timescape is more explicitly "space fantasy."

These core rules mostly cover the classic fantasy stuff. But we think Capital and the timescape will help us deliver a game where more people can see their fantasy in our worlds.

For us, fantasy includes magic, like wizards casting spells, and psionics, the natural and focused ability some creatures have to manipulate and warp reality with their minds. You know, telekinesis and telepathy! Jean Grey style!

If You're Coming From D20 Fantasy

We know that many folks are coming to this game having only experienced d20 fantasy RPGs. This section details a few key distinctions between this game and typical d20 fantasy that you'll notice right away. These aren't the only distinctions, but they're the most obvious.

Character options are different. We strongly recommend you start exploring Draw Steel by looking through the character creation section before you decide what you want to play. You can't just assume the conduit is "basically a cleric." In some ways, it is! But in other ways, it's quite different. You might have some cool character archetype you love to play in d20 fantasy, and you're dying to see how that might work in Draw Steel. But you'll have a lot more fun if you start by browsing the Ancestries and Classes sections and getting inspired. Once you know a bit more about how the game works, you'll have a better handle on how to build your favorite character the Draw Steel way.
Smaller bonuses and penalties. Draw Steel is built around the roll of two ten-sided dice to produce three possible outcomes—tier 1, tier 2, or tier 3. On the surface, this might not seem that different from rolling a twenty-sided die and having two outcomes—success or failure. But we've run the math. A lot. A bonus of +1 or penalty of −2 is significant in Draw Steel, much more so than in a typical d20 fantasy game. That means you should feel pretty good attempting most power rolls—the rolls you make to determine success both in and out of combat—if you have a decent characteristic bonus to add to those rolls. And if you have a specific skill that applies to a power roll made as a test outside of combat, you'll do even better.
Abilities automatically deal damage. When you use an ability—one of the unique combat features that defines your character—you can still have a bad turn! A tier 1 outcome with minimal damage and effects is the worst outcome you can obtain with an ability. It's not awesome. But you're still always making progress. The question is: Who's making progress faster? You or the monsters? Since there's no, "I miss, who's next?" in this game, fights typically last 3 or fewer rounds. A fight that lasts 5 rounds is a long fight. Because everyone's always doing damage!
You don't need to rest all the time. Most d20 fantasy games are games of attrition. Your spell slots and other features dwindle as the adventuring day goes on. In Draw Steel, you need to rest to regain your Stamina and Recoveries—the stats that determine how robust you are in combat. But all characters earn the capability to use their magic and other awesome abilities as they adventure, encouraging you to press on heroically.
Our game has a lot of skills. Your character can make use of a long list of skills, but we don't expect you to memorize that list. We get into why the Tests chapter features so many skills, but the short version is that we think having a lot of skills allows you to create more distinct and specialized heroes, which supports the sort of gameplay we want to see in Draw Steel. And skills in the game aren't tied to characteristics. If you're trying to lose someone in a crowd, you can use Presence—the characteristic that represents your character's force of personality—to try to hide! Why not?
We won't be able to point out every difference. Beyond what's noted here, don't assume that these rules work like any d20 fantasy game you've played. We don't have the space to point out every exception. So if you're in doubt about how something works, put d20 fantasy out of your mind and read our rules without those assumptions, and you'll find that things make better sense. If you're still confused, stop by the MCDM Discord and ask. We've got tons of awesome community members ready to help!
We don't expect you to do everything to the letter. This is actually one thing Draw Steel does have in common with d20 fantasy. This is a big book of rules! Don't stress if you need to look something up or make a ruling about an edge case on the fly. If everyone's having fun, you're doing it right.