Draw Steel After 6 Months

Draw Steel sits in an interesting position as almost the Pathfinder of 4E however coming way later than Pathfinder in relation to 3.5. Understanding a bit of the history around 4E and the 2022 OGL licensing debacle is important when looking at Draw Steel. 4E was the last major catalyst for games to break off of Dungeons and Dragons. At the time it was seen by many, myself included, as more of an MMO forced into the shape of a TTRPG than the flexible but math heavy game that was 3.5. This criticism is only partly unfounded because Wizards did intend to make 4E into more of a video game by building a VTT for itThe comments on this video do an incredible job preserving the arguments people made about 4E. "If I wanted a crude looking video game I'd play Nethack, thanks" is a good summary. They were a bit ahead of the time, and 4E hit so poorly, the Pathfinder ecosystem exists because of this backlash, that the plans for a VTT were scrapped and only 5 years after 4E was released 5E came out to much fanfair.

That does not mean that 4E wasn't popular and looking back is was actually pretty goodThis article goes way more into the history and is worth a read if you're curious. One of its major tenetes was that the rules were mostly intended to provide for interesting combat and the roleplaying aspects could be managed by those playing the game. This meant that it was stripped down when talking about things like Skills. Skill points were replaced with just a trained bonus plus a static bonus based on your level and attributes. The number of skills was also significantly reduced from 3.5's 38, if you don't count every different subversion of some of the skills, to 17 skills. This lack of ability to specify to a deeper level what your character was capable of was a key part of why people didn't like the system.

For those who've only played 5E this might sound a bit surprising as 5E only has 18 skills and there's no skill points. In reality the skill system in 5E is largely unchanged, aside from balancing, from 4E. But aside from some early complaints the skill system of 5E is generally considered as providing a pretty good balance between a crunchier system like 3.5 and a skill-less system.

Looking back at 4E I think it's likely that a lot of the backlash was related more to the presentation of the rules, and the large divergence from 3.5 than from 4E actually being weaker than other DnD additions. This leads us to the OGL backlash of winter 2022. In the lead up to 5.5(5E 2024) Wizards announced that they'd be changing the OGL to be less open. This sparked a backlash even larger than the 4E backlash and resulted in many of the 5E creators, seeing their livelihoods threatened, started to work on their own systems. Daggerheart, Draw Steel, Tales of the Valiant, and more come out of this spark.

With the history out of the way we have some more context within which to think about Draw Steel. I tend to think of Draw Steel as the Pathfinder of this backlash. Instead of being the system that retains the rules before they changed, look to Tales of the Valiant for that if you want it, Draw Steel aims to reinvent the prior system, 4E. This means it's strategic and combat heavy. It cares about movement and plays best with minis. Building a character involves picking from a few different abilities per level which empower your character inside and outside of combat.

I think this is the good part of Draw Steel. They had a lot of fun with creating these abilities and many of them have names which work well when shouted. It does feel a bit missmatched in flavor as some of the system is a bit silly, Your Entrails are your Extrails! has a very different vibe from Thunder Roar, and at times it does break the immersion. However flavor aside the abilities work pretty well. Combat is dynamic and you find interesting combos between the different player characters.

However this does come up against some of the downsides of a more strategic combat system. The demand on the GM is significantly higher than a system like 5E. 5E fights in a square room with no terrain suck of course, but in Draw Steel they are worse. They go from boring to boring and lacking the core competency of the system. A strong mastery over your VTT or minis is needed for a satisfying play of Draw Steel.

As with any game if it's key selling point, in this case strategic ability based combat, sounds fun to you you'll likely enjoy it. This can be a bit devsive of course as 4E was but it's a flavor of game and I think Draw Steel does it well.

The history lesson I think it key to why I see Draw Steel's fatal flaw in their roleplaying rules. When looking back at 4E many see the reason it failed is because it lacked roleplay rules. But looking at 5E it's clear to me that that's not the case. Skill points still don't exist, there's no subskills, there's no real roleplaying rules beyond the few interpersonal skills that exist. To me that says the correct decision for Draw Steel would have been to just build on 4E's roleplaying rules in the same way it built on the combat and abilities.

Draw Steel however chose to agree strongly with the backlash to 4E and didn't learn the lesson from 5E that framing is what matters. Instead Draw Steel worked to build complex roleplaying rules.

In 5E there's a common trope of a persuasion check being mind control. Regularly a successful check is considered the same as totally convincing someone. The solution to this is to, as the GM, treat success as moving towards a successful negotiation. Draw Steel puts strong rails around this whole process. It provides multiple stats, Interest and Paitence, as well as multiple roleplay descriptions of the enemy, Motivations and Pitfalls. These rails feel nice at first and like a good way to avoid the issues of persuasion as mind control. In practice however they function to totally break any immersion of the roleplay. When your GM says "The mercenary seems to be motivated by the promise of gold" that's not a suggestion that you offer them money, instead it is a specific hint that the next Argument you make, if it mentions money, you get a bonus on.

The reason this all feels a bit clunky is because they are trying to put rails around what a good GM should be doing. These rails are simply too strong. You need to track two different stats which move opposite of each other. I can see a worksheet where you fill out Motivations and Pitfalls along side a tracker for Interest and Paitence as being useful for managing this. This would also be useful for almost any system. The structure can help at times but it being a core part of the system, the rules get their own chapter, just feels off.

While I think negotiations are roughly ok even if a bit overspecified, Draw Steel's skill system is unacceptably bad. There are 58 skills. As a reminder 3.5, the reason everyone hated that 4E only had 17 skills, has 38. Pathfinder 2 has 17, Pathfinder 1 has 35, 10 of them knowledge skills. 58 is simply absurd. That's not really the reason I don't like the Draw Skill system though.

Skill systems largely lay along a spectrum of 3 different types: skill-less, you get bonuses when you do anything that it makes sense for your character to be good at, skill-lite, you pick from a small set of skills which you are trained in and get a set bonus when using, skill-points, you gain points which you can spread across a typically large number of skills to gain bonuses. Shadow of the Weird Wizard is skill-less. You pick a profession, let's say woodcutter, and when you are in a situation where your profession is relevant you get a bonus. 5E is skill-lite. You pick a set of trained skills which you're much better at than others. Pathfinder uses skill points. You get a set of points to spread across skills to represent your character's differing level of ability.

Draw Steel is none of those. You gain skills in a similar way to 5E and, when using them get a bonus. So it might seem skill-lite. But there's more. When your GM declares there's a challenge you need to overcome they tell the party which attribute is relevant. Need to climb a hill? Use Might. Which skill should you use? That's up to the player to suggest. Suddenly Draw Steel is a skill-less system where it's up to the player to explain why their character is good at something. But only within a set of, very broad, options.

This to me is simply too much. If you want a skill-less system where players have more agency about how to solve tasks use one. If you want a system with a few skills that help guide play use one. It's why I think the backlash to 4E is so relevant. This skill system feels to me like one designed by people who were there at the time and thought the reason 4E didn't take off was because the skill system wasn't evolved enough. But looking at that time from where today I think it's clear that's not the case. Even the 3.5 splinter, Pathfinder, now has less skills than 5E! They gave in to the backlash without learning from it.

No matter how negative this review might see I don't really think Draw Steel is actually bad. It's a system that if you're playing it for strategic combat plays very well. I'm honestly pretty optimistic for a v2 where they push harder into that, go skill-lite, and maybe even cut out negotiations. As they build out more content I expect the game to get tighter.

There's also the option of just playing 4E. There's only 5 years worth of content but there's way more than there is for most other small games. It turns out the game is actually a lot like 5E except with a bit more of an ability combat focus. I recently ran a few sessions of it and it was enjoyable. The player response was "this is too much like 5E" which in retrospect is quite funny.

I do wish I'd written a Draw Steel at 1 month review. I suspect it would have been entirely positive. I didn't even realize how many skills there were at that point and my first negotiation felt like a novel way of doing roleplaying.