Running Draw Steel: The Story So Far
TL;DR: I've been running a custom Draw Steel campaign for about four sessions now, in the same way I've been running D&D for the last five years, and I've been having a ton of fun. Anecdotes, Director decisions, and homebrew materials and resources to be found below.
From basically the moment Draw Steel’s central mechanic of Heroic Resources and Respite was revealed to the world, I had a feeling it was going to be the game that replaced D&D 5e for me as my go-to heroic fantasy roleplaying game. That in-built pacing mechanic alone seemed so much more tailored to the kind of stories I like to tell at the table than D&D’s resource management, attrition-based design.
And, so far, I think I was right.
Now, I’ve been playing D&D for a decade now, and I’ve only been playing Draw Steel for…a couple months? So maybe I’m wrong, the shine will wear off, and I’ll end up another sucked in by Daggerheart or Slugblaster. But for right now, I am running Draw Steel, having a ton of fun doing it, and I figured I would share my experience with all of you.
Going forward, these sorts of posts will probably become something closer to campaign diaries, but since I’m a few sessions into running the game already, I’ve got a pretty big backlog of things to talk about. So, go use the bathroom, get a snack, and strap in, because this is a big one!
How It Started
So, back when Draw Steel was first being announced, I began floating the idea to my table that I was definitely excited about it and wanted to switch over our then current 5E game to it. Long story short, that didn’t work. There were some players whose idea of who their character is was very married to the abilities on their character sheet, and when they couldn’t replicate their old abilities closely enough in Draw Steel, they got frustrated and even a little sad. But I was definitely done running D&D by that point, and everyone was aimiable to the system itself, so we ended up with deciding to just start a new campaign.
Conveniently, Draw Steel released with a starter adventure, The Delian Tomb, which teaches you the game as you play it and provides a very familiar feeling fantasy world and story to ease a new group into the game.
Inconveniently, I didn’t wanna run it. I didn’t want to have my players save the blacksmith’s daughter from a goblin kidnapping, no, I had ideas. I wanted to…actually, I had several ideas of what I wanted to do. So instead, I sent this document to my players, giving short pitches for all the SEVEN different ideas for campaigns I wanted to run, and I let them vote.
My players decided on the campaign where they play as members of a noble house, the House of Hemlock, which in retrospect shouldn’t have surprised me at all, but did at the time. But anyway, once I knew what campaign I was going to be running, it was time to start prepping.
In the past when I’ve run for my friends, I’ve taken a very Critical Role approach to the narrative, trying to work player character stories into the themes and subplots (or main plots) of the adventure. And it’s been fun, but I’ve gotten a little burnt out on that approach for a while for a number of reasons I’ll probably talk about some other time, so this time the narrative was going to be very adventure-first. The adventure would be the adventure, and player backstories weren’t going to be a source of content as much as they were going to be explanations for who these people were.
This immediately made me feel like I could get started and actually do a lot more adventure and story prep without having to know who exactly the characters were going to be, which was great because I was eager to get started and I had a surprising amount to do.
Homebrewing a Setting
In addition to not running the Delian Tomb, I’m also not running in Orden and the timescape, which meant a good portion of my earliest prep for the game was actually converting my own setting, Asher, into Draw Steel. Languages were easy, already had a big list of those we could use basically unchanged. I just have to keep in mind which languages make the most sense for different project sources as I go.
The hard part was ancestries. My world is a very human centric setting, with its own ideas and assumptions of what being human even means, to say nothing about the various idiosyncratic ideas about the various other inhuman ancestries I’ve accumulated over the years. Some of the Draw Steel ancestries were fine to let in with only flavor tweaks. Others got a name change and very minor tweaks. Some needed more work, and a bunch I just had to invent.
If an ancestry wasn’t included in this, I told my players to assume the version in Heroes was fine. Meaning Dragon Knights, Dwarves, Hakaan, Memonek, Orc, Polder, Revenant, and Time Raider all made it in unchanged and unbanned. Devils and Elves got some minor renaming and a couple tweaks. Humans had to get new signature traits to reflect what they mean to my setting vs Orden.
And then I created/converted the Anima (nonspecific beast people), the Startouched (basically my take on the Awoken from Destiny), four flavors of the Enziri (elemental people), the Frostborn (a shameless theft of the Iceborn from Runeterra), Autostructs (robots), and the Sentinels (angels who chose to be reborn as mortals).
The end results of all this can be found here.
Also, because I’m mad and had been foaming at the mouth to run the game since the first backer packet, I also had two homebrew classes in differing stages of completion ready to go.
The Spellforger, which is my setting’s Artificer analogue, based on heroes like Iron Man, Batman, the Ghost from Marvel, presences from Will Wight’s Cradle series, and Phoenix from my own novels. I experimented a lot with giving the class options to create terrain objects to interact with and having lots of abilities that have uses in and out of combat.
And The Champion, which is the first of what I expect to be my many attempts to expand the options for players looking to play “a person with a weapon,” without the additional flavor frills of magic, psionics, or the Primordial Chaos. It’s sort of the selfish opposite of the Tactician. Instead of their greatest weapon being their allies, their greatest weapon is themselves…well, and their weapon. Instead of buffing allies, they buff themselves. It also, coincidentally, ended up becoming a really great fit for a different character in my novels, Brass, who in D&D would have been a fighter but who absolutely would not have been a Tactician in Draw Steel.
Neither of the classes are feature complete to 10th level, but I don’t need them to be to play a campaign that starts at 1st level and probably won’t get past 3rd, and since both classes cleared at least that bar, I put them in front of the players along with the ancestries, and felt like I’d done pretty well for myself creating a lot of content quickly that helped the game feel more like my setting, where we could create the kind of characters my friends were used to making in my games.
…and then one of my players talked about the character they wanted to play, and how, if we were playing D&D, they’d have made him a ranger, but since Draw Steel didn’t really have one, and one of my other players was already playing a Champion, he would try Tactician and see how that felt. But I could tell that prospect disappointed him, so I went and homebrewed the first level of another class, The Hunter, and asked him if that felt better.
He said it did, let me know which of the subclasses he liked (Reaper), and I got to work on the level 2 abilities for that subclass specifically, so I’d have options for him ready when we eventually leveled up. The Hunter is the absolute most unfinished of the classes I’ve started working on, but it’s playable for where we’re at in the campaign. It started out as a second entry in the “person with a weapon” option catalogue, but then I watched Castlevania: Nocturne and a bunch of Richter Belmont snuck into the class’s abilities. Ah well.
COMPARISON POINT! I homebrewed a lot when running D&D. Feats, items, monsters, subclasses, rules, a handful of spells, and ancestries once I had firm ideas about the idiosyncrasies of my setting. But I'd never homebrewed a class before. Frankly, it always seemed like too much work. But not only are Draw Steel classes half as many levels as 5e classes, there's so much more of a formula to follow for when classes get what kinds of cool toys. Making at least the first couple levels of multiple homebrew classes was honestly no big deal.
Preparing the Campaign
Campaign prep is what it always is—who, what, when, where, why. I won’t bore you with all the details, but I will talk about the two big components of prep that were unique to the campaign the party had selected and meant more work unique to the system for me; the roles of the court, and the Baron Hemlock.
Crafting Roles to Play
The roles were a pretty big part of the pitch of the campaign, and I wanted to really help the players feel like their role and feel like they were part of a proper noble house, even if it was a small one. So I gave them all the collective buff of +1 wealth and renown, and then I decided to give them all custom titles based on the roles they picked on top of that. I say this was work unique to Draw Steel, which it technically was—I hadn’t really made custom titles with unique, selectable perks in any other system I’d run and I was inspired to do so by Draw Steel—but also it wasn’t that much work.
I’d had a couple ideas for features I could give some of the titles, but I didn’t bother making them all, and figured I could just focus my design efforts once I knew which roles the players had all picked.
Which incidentally, were:
The High Priest, a Sentinel Conduit.
The Court Mage, a Revenant Summoner
The Steward, a Startouched Talent
SIDENOTE: no Spymaster, which happened purely because the player who claimed that role early ended up backing out of the campaign and by then everyone else was too married to their ideas to switch. Otherwise I think I had two or three players who wanted to be the Spymaster.
Anyway, with five roles selected, I was on the hook for five titles to hand out at the start of the campaign. But a lot of the options I ended up presenting I just lifted straight from DS: Heroes (I got a lot of mileage out of mining “Faction Member” specifically), just rearranged and reflavored. I did throw in a couple ones I fully made up that I thought fit the bill, but only because I had ideas for them.
DS: Heroes also says you can turn any Perk into a quick custom 1st-echelon Title by giving it a prerequisite, which I took to mean a Perk is roughly power equal to a 1st-echelon title, so I threw the option of a bonus perk into all the titles, mostly out of laziness, with the assumption that it couldn’t be that game breaking. We’ll never know if it was though, because not a single player opted in for a bonus Perk as the boon from their title.
Below are the final Titles I presented to each of the players, and I also highlighted the options each of the players actually picked.
While they were talking with each other about what they could get, I heard a lot of them say they were trying to figure out what they’d get the most use out of. That was a probably the biggest thing that drove their decision making, followed by a second priority of picking something cool and flavorful. Fortunately for me, I think most of them DID pick a really cool, flavorful option, that they just happened to believe they’d get a lot of use out of.
Something you may have noticed (which my players certainly did), is that a bunch of the titles reference something called “an intrigue.” You, like my players, are probably asking what the hell that is.
The answer is those options were the ones either stolen from or inspired by the Faction Member title, specifically the benefits that state they cannot be used again “until you complete a task for your faction.” Well, they’re the elite members of a noble house. They are the faction, basically. So instead, I created this term for the tasks that would make up the various smaller adventures of the campaign, and explained all the above to the players, and they seemed to get it. “Oh, okay. Intrigue = a quest. Got it.”
Now, if you’re familiar with Draw Steel, you’re probably thinking, “Hang on, +1 renown, +1 wealth, AND a title on top of that? At first level? At the start of the campaign? Isn’t the at a bit much?”
And the answer is I have no idea! I’ve barely run this game at all!
Building the Baron
The other big point of campaign and Draw Steel specific prep was the Baron Hemlock themselves. A lot of this was system-neutral decision making. I reserved the gender of the baron to be determined by whoever picked the Consort, if anyone did. That’s how we got a boy baron instead of a girl baron. And then what the baron was like, I let be informed by the players and their characters. This NPC is supposed to be the one who sends them on all their quests and who they do all their work in the name of, but I also wanted him to be their Duke Leto, their leader who they all love and who binds them in shared purpose by bringing out the best in them.
Which meant I had to know what the rest of the court was like before I knew what sort of a guy they would like. But also, I wanted to make sure the Baron fulfilled a clear role within the group beyond just being the guy they all like and take orders from. I wanted him to feel like a crucial piece of the puzzle that the house wouldn’t work without. And for that, I looked to the classes in Draw Steel.
Based on the classes and roles everyone picked, it actually wasn’t hard to figure out. The Baron Hemlock was a brilliant military commander. A Tactician, basically. That was what he has that they don’t. That’s his strength that makes him special and worth following. Fitting, honestly. If someone had gone Tactician/the Captain, I’d have had to make him a cunning master of schemes, which…okay, no, that’ve also been fun.
How It’s Going
So that’s everything that went into the setup. How’s it been actually playing the game?
The First Session
First session was about 2/3 just character creation. A lot of answering questions and ctrl+f'ing the pdf. There's a part of me that wishes I'd suggested using Forge Steel, and for next campaign I probably will. But like I mentioned earlier, there were 2 custom classes, a playtest class, and basically full custom ancestries, and while Forge Steel has absolutely fantastic homebrew tools...that's a lot of stuff to manually import into the program after I went and designed all of it. I could. I probably will. But for now, nope. Too much effort, too anxious to play, so we went analogue.
COMPARISON POINT!: I've taken players completely new to D&D through the character creation process a few times, and this was...a rougher experience than that. A recurring complaint among players was "this is so much." And when it's in front of you on the page, Draw Steel feels like a lot. It becomes way more managebale once you've got all the stuff relevant to you on your sheet(s) and can ignore the rest, but the experience is definitely overwhelming without the aid of a tool like Forge Steel. Also, super small thing, my IRL anthropologist player is annoyed the only options for organization in Culture are communal and bureaucratic.
The last third of the session, we just figured out who these people were and how they knew and related to each other, since this would be a party that started out knowing each other. I had some general questions for everyone to answer, but what turned out to be the funnest part of the night came off the back of a suggestion from one of the players and a section of DS: Heroes I overlooked: Step 10 of Making a Hero: Making Connections suggests presenting a few prompts to the characters to help define the relationships between the characters. It provides some, but I ended up making my own and asking each person to answer it in turn:
You worked with someone else in the house to solve a problem. Who was it, and what was the problem?
You owe someone else in the house something. What is it, and why?
You and someone else in the house often share in an activity together. What is it?
The players surprised me by not just answering the questions, but straight up picking a partner for each of their answers and roleplaying a small scene demonstrating the answer. Everyone naturally tried to make sure that no one was being left out, and they even pulled me into a few scenes as their patron, the Baron.
...there's no real advice or material to steal or takeaway from the system for that last bit. I was just really jazzed and felt spoiled by my players and wanted to brag a little.
Also, during character creation, one of my players who picked the Hawk Rider complication (reskinned as a griffon for lore reasons but unchanged stat-wise) wrote up An Unsurprising Treatise on Mounted Combat in Draw Steel, which really deserves its own post but I'm just sticking it here for now to show what kind of fanatics I play with.
The Second Session
After brief round of cinematic intros and some roleplay, I threw the heroes into their first combat vs an ogre and his “hounds of heck” (read: abyssal hyenas). It went pretty good! The fight had a secondary objective of rescuing NPCs trapped by the hounds of heck before they could be eaten. I used the noncombatant statblock from DS: Monsters and beefed up their survivability by placing them all indoors behind walls the hounds had to break through before they could get to them, and it made for real tension in the fight as they rushed around the map to save everyone. Some people got low, the Hunter almost died, everyone popped off with their Heroics, I forgot to use the a bunch of the gnoll/hyena passive abilities, we re-explained potencies about six times.
SYSTEM NOTE! My player who struggled the most with understanding potencies reported that it helped a lot to actually fill in the values for [weak], [average], etc. in their abilities. Before, she was getting very confused and trying to input her characteristics in place of the characteristic calling for a potency check. I.e., she saw M<[weak] and thought "Wait, if my Might is less than [weak]? Wait, what's [weak] again?" And it was a mess. In general, looking at the little statblocks for abilities, they're basically incomprehensible to someone who doesn't know what the symbols and words mean and what values get input where. This is, entirely, a skill issue, and one that's largely evaporated from my group a few sessions in, but maybe take a bit to help new players get their reading comprehension for abilities sorted before really diving in.
Some more roleplay closed out the session. A lot of that session got swallowed by the combat, which was frankly to be expected for how new to it and all the rules everyone was and how many questions everyone had.
By the way, the Draw Steel encounter sheet is a very nice gesture, and I appreciate it on principle. But for my money, nothing beats a lined notebook, some clothespins covered in whiteboard tape, a dowel rod, and a single sheet that looks like this.
The Third Session
More roleplay in which the party is informed of a number of goings on in their territory, and then another fight! This time, I ran an assassination attempt on the players' fearless NPC leader and patron. The secondary goal of the fight was obvious: don't let the Baron go down. I decided to have the assassins be witches who summoned monsters made of blood magic, and the human death cultist was the perfect statblock to use when paired with some goblin minions and mucerons reskinned as blood magic summons.
This session marked the first instance of a player telling me what their ability did (as a rule, I haven't read 90% of what they can do, and even routinely forget what the classes I made can do.) and I as the Director went "Hang on, it can't possibly work like that." Namely, it was the Summoner's Strike For Me ability, which the player though let them essentially use their main action to have a bunch of their summons make a free strike, on top of the strikes all of them got from their own action economy.
Notably, after reading the ability myself, I also still got it wrong, because I missed the part of the trigger that said "outside of your main action." On one hand, oops, and this does explain why the Summoner was somehow the MVP of a fight they arrived an entire round late to. On the other hand, things had gotten pretty dire, and it was a huge hero moment for that player to ride in on a tide of corpses and save the day. So, when I discovered the correct ruling the next week, I just shrugged and said, "Well, it worked that way, for our Summoner, in that moment, but going forward, it works the normal way."
I had a bunch of contingencies for when the enemies would retreat in that fight, and then forgot basically all of them in the chaos of the moment and it became a fight to the death where if one specific character went down, the heroes would lose. Still tense. But coulda been more...versimilitudinous, I guess.
COMPARISON POINT! Very, very early into my D&D career, I stopped using the monster manual. Like, I basically ran Lost Mines of Phandelver by the book, and then that was it, custom monsters galore, only occasionally dipping into the book when I needed a statblock of an iconic monster on the fly or was posessed by laziness.
So far in Draw Steel, I have not even been tempted to make legitmately custom monsters. "Just reflavor an existing statblock" has been advice floating around forever, but I genuinely find it much more rewarding in Draw Steel because I can really easily intuit what the vibe of a monster in Draw Steel is from their stats and abilities, and since I always know the vibe I'm going for, I'm much more down to grab monsters from the book that fit the vibe and go from there. I've never been tempted to do more than change the occasional damage type to match flavor, something the books explicitly mention as a strong option, and often I'm even running creatures straight out of the box. Not to mention, encounter building is a breeze, especially since I discovered this beautiful community built tool. Although, I'm fast approaching not even needing that. Knowing Horde = 1/2 a hero, Platoon = 1 hero, and elite = 2 heroes is HUGE for being able to quickly spitball encounters and land about in the right EV.
The Fourth Session
At the start of this session, I do two things: tell them there's a grand ball they're expected to attend in two weeks, and I give them a bunch of custom downtime activities they can do to prepare for it. By this point, they've also collected a few project sources and prerequisites they could also pursue, and there's also at least three different adventure hooks actively calling for their attention.
I turned them loose to manage their time as they see fit.
COMPARISON POINT! I'm a huge fan of downtime systems in fantasy RPGs, just because I like any incentive I can find to make a bunch of time pass in campaigns where I don't want the entire story to take place in like three days but also don't want it to feel like characters just entered stasis mode and did nothing of importance for X amount of weeks just so I can change the name on the fictional calendar and increment everyone's ages by 1. The systems provided by official D&D materials I've used in the past have been...fine. But I've always felt the need to supplement them, and in D&D in particular it felt like I had to design 11 different minigames to provide a nice slate of options. In Draw Steel, it's all one minigame, the minigame is "get the project points," and creating new options for it felt simple and straight forward.
Explaining downtime was probably the least painful teaching experience of the game so far. They reviewed their options (took them a second to find the Discover Lore project because they were looking alphabetically in the crafting projects and didn't see the separate Research projects section), discussed their priorities, and started rolling away on projects. I ran another combat against some human bandits (brawler, scoundrel, and two trickshots) as a project event for patroling the roads for bandits (seemed obvious), and when renown got tallied up for completing the project, two players had enough for a follower! :D
I told them upfront I wasn't allowing more than one retainer in the party, which turned out to be fine since the two players went for a sage and an artisan anyway.
Our most recent session was the first instance of a negotiation! I've trialed out a version of negotiations in my old 5e games, I was that big a fan and that impatient to have more Draw Steel in my life, and we had one in our Draw Steel trial run of trying to convert our 5e campaign, so my players were at least in concept familiar with them. I have one player in particular who is edging on not being a fan of them, and I can't tell if it's on principle (There's rules for talking to people? Can't we just...talk to them?) or if there's actual game design issues I'll need to rectify with the system or how I run it to make it feel right for the table.
All I know is, when I had the NPC clue in that what the players wanted would require a Negotiation, the Hunter audibly groaned, "Oh, it's one of these." And then further went "Weelp :(" when I explained that only the people who met the renown threshold got the "infamous" buff.
In general, I've been trying to skew my Negotiations harder, since I've felt they're a little easy. What that usually means is less starting patience and interest, only ever having one or two motivations (I know the book says at least two), and trying for at least three or four pitfalls.
And even then, the negotiation ended up being easy, because they came in with a decent offer, were satisfied with a "Yes, but" response that would require them to go fight another troll, and because I wasn't paying enough attention and let them get away with making a roll where they, in hindsight, really should have triggered a pitfall. Eh, it is what it is. I'll just make the troll fight harder to compensate if I really feel bothered by it.
A bigger problem is the early sense that negotiations could be dominated by whichever single character has the best stats (combo of edges, useful skills, and high Presence) for it. I'm considering implementing turns like in Montage tests to mandate greater full party participation, but I'm holding off for now.
In general, if I feel like something's actively not working in a game, I want to give it a bit before I start monkeying with it, especially if I think I could just run it better and maybe solve the problem that way.
If I had one overall complaint so far, it's that at least right now, it feels like we're playing the game more than we're playing our characters, if you know what I mean. We're engaging with all the systems, and those are fun, but there hasn't been as much of the characters shining through. The system isn't invisible outside of combat in the way 5e felt. For now, I'm chalking that up to lack of familiarity on all our parts combined with these first 3.5 session basically being a tutorial jumping around introducing one game system after another. We're officially past what I would consider the tutorial portion of the campaign. We've run multiple combats, downtime, a negotiation, and a montage test. We've pressed all the buttons and know what they do. In theory. We'll probably forget multiple times for years to come, as has been the case for the last ten years of playing together. But such is the stuff tables are made of.
:D
The Prop Department
One of my favorite aspects of running games has always been the tactile physical component. I like pushing lead, rolling dice, I like giving the players hand outs, and I prefer to use my computer as little as possible. That’s meant a lot of physical tools being constructed, the first of which of course had to be a Director’s Screen!
The front image for the screen is this incredible artwork by Igor Artyomenko that I found online, squashed, stretched, and cropped to span across a the width of a three-panel posterboard you’d use for a kid’s science fair project. I printed it off using my local library’s large format printer, which was free with my library card!
SIDENOTE: I love this artwork. The entire idea of my setting is a fantasy world existing in the ruined shadow of a fallen space-fantasy empire, and this image just sells that entire vibe so perfectly I’m frankly flabbergasted I didn’t have to commission it. I’m gobsmacked. If I’m ever in a position to give art direction to people working on Asher stuff, this image will be one of the key references.
Generally, I want to be opening a ruloebook at the table as little as possible, and after reading through Draw Steel Heroes a few times and even playing some test sessions, I thought I had a good idea of the rules I wanted on hand, and this was the result:
I love this Director’s screen. Just seeing it propped in the corner or resting on the table makes me giddy with excitement to play the game. But having used it for a few sessions now, I’ve already got changes I want to make to the interior. Namely, Hide and Sneak, and improvising damage. I’ve seen a few other people’s screens, namely this one, and they’ve definitely given me ideas on how to condense some info to make room for the new stuff. Can’t wait.
A different tool I have that needs no improvements, is perfect, 10/10 no notes, is the initiative tracker that one of my players made.
Look at it! It looks so dope! She gets around to making these for basically every campaign we play, eventually, but I particularly love this design for Draw Steel, because of how the initiative works in the game. When we’re playing, whenever a creature takes a turn, I just pluck them off the dowel rod and onto the Director’s screen. When the rod is empty, the round is over! Easy! Genius!
The last thing I made were these nifty little handout cards.
I made them by taking the ability card section of the official Draw Steel character sheet and editing out everything but the borders, but I also could have just made these by entirely in Canva or Paint if I had enough patience. I give out these cards for things like items, crafting materials, titles, custom downtime projects, and ESPECIALLY for NPCS. By far, the thing my players have received the most of is NPCs.
Some of them are followers and allies, some are just figures they’ve met. I don’t do it for every NPC, just the ones I think will be important. Back when I was running online, I would have all sorts of digital handouts for the players with character art, and importing that practice into in person games has been a ton of fun.
My goal with these is one part scrapbook (“Look at all these people we’ve met!”) to one part toolbelt (“Hey, we’ve got a problem, do we know anyone who can help?")
In my actual game, I use actual character art on the card to help the players apply a face to the name and voice. But I mine all the artwork for them from Pinterest, which means a) I have no idea who made most of it, and would have a hard time finding out to credit them b) a non-zero portion of it is AI, and points a and b mean that c) while I’m fine with using Pinterest art in my home games like I am licensed music, I’m not fine sharing it online on this blog, where I like to at least credit everything I feature.