There are plenty of things about Draw Steel that are worth talking about. I considered the classes, zipper initiative, the multitude of counters or how it handles spellcasting, but after a few days of deliberation, what really takes the cake is the health/damage system.
How it works
This will be a rather dry and objective description of how Draw Steel handles health and damage. It may feel distressing in parts, but hang on we’ll get there.
Health
A character in Draw Steel has stamina and recoveries. Stamina can be thought of as traditional hit points and recoveries can be used to re-gain a third of your stamina. The kit (common abstraction for weapons and armor) your character has can increase your stamina. A character’s stamina is always divisible by three. At level one, the sturdier pregens hovers around 30 stamina while a squishier one may only have 18. Most characters start with 8-10 recoveries.
There is an important maneuver (bonus action, minor action, non-main action) called “catch breath”, which allows using one of your recoveries to restore a third of your stamina. There is also a main action called “heal”, which allows doing this for someone else, use one of their recoveries to heal them.
If you fall below half of your stamina, you are winded. It has no inherent meaning, but some things key off of it. Your stamina can go into the negatives, which is a state called “dying” that comes with a few key things. First of all, most things you do will deal you 1d6 of unavoidable damage. Second of all, you are unable to use “catch breath”. Third of all, if it goes past your winded value to the negatives, you die.
Damage
To attack, the attacker rolls 2d10, adds their bonuses and checks which bucket the result falls into. 11 or lower, 12-16, 17 or higher. Every attack will always hit, but the amount of damage varies greatly between the buckets. Your basic free strike without modifiers deals 2/5/7 base damage + might or agility (usually +2 at level 1 for strikey characters).
Why it works
Gushing about the flow
With the explanation out of the way, I can geek out. The way damage is dealt is genuinely one of the best design decisions to come out of the game. It fixes so many problems and speeds up the game tremendously. I would not be surprised if this was the core around which the rest of the system was built.
Instead of:
- Player: I would like to hit the monster
- DM: Aight, roll to hit
- Player: 18 to hit
- DM: 18 hits, roll damage
- Player rolls like three dice and takes 10s to do math
- Player: 15 points of thronging damage
You get:
- Player rolls 2d10, adds one number, quickly picks the bucket based on result
- Player: I hit the monster for 15 thronging damage
Being fair, you can optimize the first one kind of by rolling damage while rolling to hit and communicating both numbers at the same time but you still get the math break and more communication overhead.
This makes it so much faster. Draw Steel is incredibly snappy compared to traditional d20 fantasy games, where the only quick turns tend to be the turns where you do nothing. Like seriously, this is a valid turn that probably takes less than 20 seconds:
I move there, attack the monster (interaction from above) and then use a maneuver to kick sand in its eyes to help my team
Reducing the amount of die rolls and back and forth speeds up everything. An argument could be made that combat in traditional d20 fantasy is slow on purpose to pity the DM, as combat is one of the most prep time efficient activities.
Damn the simulations, Kirk the Maru
The clever clocks among you may have noticed that 8-10 recoveries, with each healing a third of your health means you can take quite a beating before running out of steam. To my eternal shame, I must admit there is a part of me that goes “hold up, that’s not how health works”. Just like there has to be rules for underwater combat or fall damage, simulating the world is the implicit purpose for many rules.
But why?
Not only why we simulate, but why does Draw Steel get this reaction out of me, while other d20 systems don’t? Health points are a simplified abstraction, but I guess those get a pass somehow?
What MCDM has clearly done with Draw Steel is go for an aesthetic. A vibe as the kids would say (That’s me, I’m kids). It’s not trying to simulate John Knight battling a theoretical dragon and estimating how much damage would a flame breath attack deal to John depending on his gear, the angle of impact, heat of the flame, the volume of fire and the velocity of it. The mission statement was clearly to create a playable action movie. It’s romp, it’s pulpy, it’s fast and frenetic.
Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, or John McClane would never go through the play patterns that naturally happen in traditional d20 games. There is no way any of them would go “Sorry guys I kinda used my spell slots on the first fight and gotta take the rest of the day off now”. None of them would say “Hey I almost got stabbed, could we maybe like setup a campfire in the middle of the enemy territory for an hour so I can bandage my wounds”. Some systems bring that down to a blazingly fast 10 minutes, but that’s still an oddly long break to have in an action movie. An action movie star will grit their teeth, have a deep breath, and move on.
Rules are meant to be broken
I proclaim the following:
Every ttrpg system should have a core fantasy it is aiming for, and the system should build and evaluate every rule against that fantasy and discard rules that don’t glaringly obviously support it.
There are so many rules that are just cognitive filler and exist to pad out books or to gain some sense of “realistic simulation”. Fall damage, underwater combat, crafting and downtime rules in most systems, survival in nature, random encounters, rations, heat and cold, weather and climate, the list goes on. I would divide these into two camps, background mechanics and subsystems.
Subsystems are rules meant to handle specific cases, like fall damage and underwater combat from the list above. Subsystems are explicitly called upon when a player attempts to do a thing. Whenever someone falls down a cliff, it’s pretty obvious they should take some damage, the exact formula is just one rules lookup away.
Background mechanics are things you can forget. I loathe these, as most of the time they come up in hindsight and there is no neat way to retroactively introduce them. On more than one occasion, I’ve asked “How’s everyone’s rations stash doing” and gotten back panicked looks and mumbling about forgetting to track rations. Then follows a short attempt to “fix” the ration situation. This includes a recap of how many days ago they were in town exactly and did they have rations back then and well actually they didn’t have any money then so they couldn’t have bought rations. After this we usually agree to no longer track rations.
Subsystems are somewhat necessary, but can be greatly lightened by consistency. If every subsystem works in roughly the same way, it’s much easier to remember how a specific one works. If we have a game where consequences have degrees, each degree on a similar subsystem should have about as big a reward or punishment on success and failure respectively.
You can also rely on a more general system for some cases. There is no need for a specific lockpicking system, when you have a skill system or a tools system. This is what Draw Steel does with attacking. The numbers and additional benefits change, but the core activity relies on a uniform structure.
Most background mechanics are useless filler and should be heavily assessed against the fantasy before inclusion.
In conclusion
Draw Steel is great for what it does, but it does a specific thing.
Removing dice rolls speeds up stuff. Do that.
Don’t add rules for the sake of simulating the world. Only add rules that support the core fantasy of your game.