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I played Matt Colville’s RPG

I’m not here to promote the game, but I think Draw Steel will be important to our hobby. Matty C is the most successful RPG youtuber, rising in parallel with the success of D&D 5th Edition, so when the hobby goes through its edition-schism as every publisher and influencer pushes their own potential D&D-killers, I’m putting more weight on MCDM’s efforts. Although Draw Steel doesn’t seem to be a direct reaction to D&D and is built from first principles, the way it’s received by audiences will be a good indicator of how 5th Edition’s design legacy will be remembered. So let’s talk about how Draw Steel plays! And please keep in mind: this is my impression of playtest material, so the final product may differ.

Draw Steel shatters the adventuring day

I saw a great joke where someone had redacted and edited the Player’s Handbook so the section on The mechanical pacing of a D&D adventure sometimes trips me up as a Dungeon Master. How many fights are we expected to get through, and how often should we be resting? Draw Steel answers this by saying, “You are rarely resting, often pushing, and you’ll be rewarded for it.”

A feature which builds this high-momentum feeling is the Victories mechanic. Victories work like this: you win a fight, you get a Victory. You win a negotiation, you got a Victory. You accomplish a story goal, you get a Victory. But if you take a rest, you forfeit your Victories for XP. For my character’s class, the Tactician, the resource powering my abilities was boosted by the number of Victories I had, so as we push further through encounters, I’m more dinged up, but I can deploy more powerful abilities because we haven’t rested. This risk-reward mechanic heightens the session’s momentum makes the question of when to rest a lot more interesting.

Metagaming is encouraged

I played a game called Gloomhaven which explicitly disallowed metagaming; you can’t EVER tell another player what you intend to do on your turn in game terms. Draw Steel feels like the exact opposite of that extreme, because combat rewards collaboration. Combat initiative bounces back and forth between the players and the Director, and the combatants on each side can take their turn in any order they want. As a player, you’ll want to communicate your intentions to your allies because abilities push and pull opponents around the battlefield, and mobility and positional volatility seem high among all classes, so there always feel like an objectively correct order of operations, some genius c-c-c-combo which would absolutely pants the Director’s bag guys.

Structured roleplaying

I’m surprised at this: Draw Steel has mechanics for roleplaying tense negotiations which doesn’t suck. I will make a video about this when I pick up the book, because I think this is something I might adopt wholesale into my D&D games.

Throw out half your dice

As a player, you’re almost exclusively using two D10s, sometimes with a single extra dice type depending on your class. I LOVE THIS! This feels like a brave concession from the game — I think D&D could probably concede the same thing with a D20, but there’s so many granular exceptions of, “Oh, but my dagger throw is a D4, and my Spiritual Weapon is a D8.” Draw Steel generally finds its number variance in bonuses rather than dice value, which I think is a great player-experience decision to declutter the table of rarely-used dice.