War!

Hey folks! We had a really cool meeting about our plans for Draw Steel’s Warfare rules and I thought “I should write a post about this!” But then I thought “well, we should bring everyone up to speed on our near-term goals first.” 

This is an exciting new era where the core rules are in editing and layout and we’re (mostly) focused on what comes next. And there’s a lot!

What Comes Next

We’re working on two new classes; The Summoner and the Beastheart. These are both classes we really wanted to include in the core rules (because, unlike the Operator, we think these two classes are broadly useful across a wide array of campaigns) but we couldn’t because they relied on other rules (minions and companions/retainers specifically) that needed to go through all the same testing as the rest of the game. So those classes had to wait until…now! 😀

We’re working on two starter adventures, the Basic Starter: The Delian Tomb which is an upgraded and expanded version of the original adventure that started us off NINE years ago! And the Advanced Starter: The Fall of Blackbottom. I should add here: we do not for certain know exactly what forms the finished products will take. We think the classes will be PDFs like our 5E classes, and the starter sets will be “box sets” but that actually covers a lot so we have more meetings/decisions to determine “exactly what goes in these boxes?”

The Delian Tomb is for people who are just curious about Draw Steel and need to be onboarded. It’s also for folks outside this community who are looking at Draw Steel wondering “yeah cool but if I switch systems can I still run a bog-standard fantasy adventure?” The Delian Tomb says “Yes!”

Whereas The Fall of Blackbottom is for folks who’ve been following development and are like “Yeah yeah I know how to make a character, I know how the power roll works” and want to get dumped right into the DEEP END. They are ready to play, but not dying to invent a whole new adventure from scratch.

Ok cool, those four things are literally in development now. Already gone through a kickoff meeting, an outline was approved, and they are being written. All these products will go through a Patron Testing Phase, and then eventually, whatever form the final products take, you’ll automatically get the finished PDF version.

MEANWHILE we are thinking about future products including potential new adventures. Many of them look like really good candidates for some sort of Stronghold rules and/or Warfare rules!

The Stronghold rules are a great candidate for revisiting because we learned a LOT about what people like/want when it comes to the proverbial “base of operations” after releasing Strongholds & Followers.

S&F was MCDM’s first product! It was ambitious and feature rich and is still one of our bestselling products. But it was based on homebrew rules from the 1980s and it makes some assumptions that, after release, we all discovered do not apply to everyone.

Basically, the Stronghold rules assume YOU build a stronghold. Or rather, your character does. 😀 And it assumes only a few players at any given table will be interested in this. Your stronghold is another expression of your character, like the feats you choose. It’s not your group’s base, it’s your base and it’s where you go when you’re character is “between adventures.”

But while there absolutely are tables where that is the norm, there are at least as many, probably more, where it is not. Those tables want a base for the team and they all want to contribute to it and benefit from it in different ways.

Good to know! So we got together with Sadie Lowry, a designers we’ve worked with MANY TIMES most recently on the legendar, epic, Illrigger Revised. We did a kickoff meeting where we brainstormed a NEW design for strongholds that’s modular. Meaning, you buy rooms and rooms grant benefits.

Rooms have a size, we think, but it’s like…Size 1, Size 2, etc…. You’re not literally buying square feet and doors and stairs. And different sized rooms have different costs allowing us to gate really powerful benefits behind really big rooms. What exactly a “room” can do for you is something we’ll be discovering as we go but as a rule your stronghold shouldn’t steal functionality from other parts of the system. It can grant skills, or skill bonuses, it can be like a magic item (i.e. the Summoning Room where you can recruit a Demon Buddy, or a Teleportation Room?) but it shouldn’t improve your character’s powers, that’s something for Titles we think. It’s a very exciting space for us as designers because it can be really powerful and flexible, but that means we need to make sure we don’t end up turning Draw Steel into the Strongholds Game. We have to ‘color in the lines’ so to speak. But wow we were really excited after that Kickoff Meeting!

Meanwhile I’m talking to various people on the team working out what the next ~3 years worth of Draw Steel products could/should be and which products should go to crowdfunding and which should be developed on our own dime. You all were part of that process! Back when we asked you to vote on which adventures you’d most like to see!

Finally, let’s talk about the real topic of this post; the warfare rules! They’re in basically the same state as the Stronghold rules. We’ve had a Kickoff meeting, we want to take what we learned from Kingdoms & Warfare and figure out how war should work in Draw Steel and, like the Stronghold rules, we don’t know exactly what form factor the finished product will take (book? Box? Something else?) but we know several products we plan to make will use these rules, so might as well get started.

The Old Way

Some of you are familiar with the Warfare rules in Kingdom & Warfare. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Warfare is essentially a self-contained game in which the players control units in an army.

Adventures involve players running around the local area, Gandalf-like, talking to various local factions and solving their problems in order to earn units they can field in battle. All that worked really well as is evidenced by the success of the adventure in K&W, The Regent of Bedegar written by Teos Abadia (outline by moi).

So for example your heroes go to the local elves and ask for help. That’s some diplomacy and negotiation right there. If you’re successful and the elves want to help they say “Well yeah we’d love to help actually but our elite archers, The Thorns, are tied up with this black dragon on our northern border.”

That gameplay loop; “if we take care of the Elves’ problem, we get The Thorns!” is a really powerful and fun process and it seems broadly appealing to a wide array of tables. So we’re keeping that!! 😀

The Warfare Game features units with stats like Morale, Command, there are Cavalry units, Artillery, Infantry, Levies, there is a battlefield with ranks and there’s an array of special commands and orders you issue. It’s pretty tactical but also very light and streamlined compared to a REAL wargame and…it’s pretty fun! Fun enough that we spent some time in 2022 developing it into a stand-alone card game! Although that game made it well into the prototype phase, we suspended development on it to work on Draw Steel.

In preparation for the “how does Warfare in Draw Steel work?” meeting, we busted out the K&W rules and ran a game with MCDM vet Sam Manell, with the intention of giving Sam the responsibility to update the rules for DS. Those of you who remember Arcadia may be familiar with Sam’s rules for aerial combat in 5E; Aces High.

We assumed there would be some way to “punch up” the Warfare rules and make them feel like they belonged in Draw Steel. We played the old rules and…it was pretty rough. 😀

I mean, no more rough than we (or, at least, I) now perceive all of 5E to be. You miss all the time!! Now, you control three units normally, so you get three bites at the apple, but it still felt very…70s. It felt very tactical and gamey, but not very heroic or cinematic or fantastical. 

After playing the old rules with Sam, we had a Kickoff Meeting where the whole design team, and Sam, talked about everything we thought we could do better, what the broad goals of the system was, and what we wanted to preserve.

We (or, at least, I) liked the idea of units with jargony terms in their title like Elite Heavy Orc Cavalry or Veteran Light Elf Archers where each of those keywords means something. That’s a powerful fantasy for me.

Preserving the idea of an Army made of Units you need to raise or recruit, also allows us to keep that critical “run around the local area trying to recruit units from allies, make allies out of neutral organizations from which new units can be recruited, and stop enemies from donating their units to your enemy” gameplay loop we proved out in The Regent of Bedegar.

But does that mean we should bust out an entirely different game? Well, maybe! Maybe we could just abstract it more?

The Middle Way

We didn’t come anywhere near figuring out exactly how a new system might work. We just had a bunch of constraints and ideas. So we asked Sam to write up, not an outline, but more like an approach. Something we could think about, talk about, that might lead to an outline.

Sam had some great ideas about how to abstract out the battlefield into “nodes” representing places on a map–the map of a town, or a forest, anywhere a battle might happen–with each node connected to one or more other nodes that allow players to move their units somewhat abstractly. No grid.

I immediately liked this because it reminded me of a somewhat obscure game I liked a lot but only got to play once called Tannhauser by Fantasy Flight (basically Hellboy with the serial numbers filed off) that used a similar node-based movement system. 

This version would still have you raising/recruiting units that are represented on cards probably, but the units would be moving around an abstract area. This seemed like fertile ground so we asked Sam to work on a really simple prototype we could test.

The New Way?

A few days later I was in my one-on-one with James. This is a meeting we have every week where I ask James “What’s on your mind?” It’s just a weekly check-in to see if there’s anything stressing James out and, if so, if I can help. These are hugely useful diagnostic tools and lots of people at MCDM do them every week. James is my only direct report here, so I only do one of these a week. 

James and I were talking about this new direction and I think I must have had some skepticism because I asked “Well, Red Hand of Doom is all about an army and a siege, how did they do it? They didn’t bust out a whole new game!” I was comparing RHoD to things like Birthright and the Bloodstone Pass trilogy of adventures where they absolutely do expect you to “bust out a whole new game” whenever a battle between armies happens.

So we opened up RHoD and I immediately realized “Ahhh, I think there’s a better way.”

Red Hand of Doom doesn’t have a “warfare system.” There’s a giant enemy army marching toward the big city, and the players just…play D&D normally. It’s a normal D&D adventure with no units to raise or anything like that, but it feels like you’re in war because you’re doing things like…blowing up the bridge the enemy army needs to cross a huge ravine, delaying them for several days.

The heroes fight battles like…the Battle of the East Wall, the Battle at the City Gates. And as usual the heroes are expected to win. There’s an inflection point near the end where the director adds up all the “victory points” the heroes earned by doing things like…destroying all the green dragon eggs in this one encounter, exposing the traitor among the human leaders.

These are all entirely normal things we expect players to do in a D&D game, but it’s very difficult for the heroes to do all of them because of the ticking clock (the advancing horde). The heroes have to make decisions including abandoning certainly subplots because there’s literally no time.

That’s drama! Super good! 

But there’s no experience of Gandalf-ing your ass around making sure all your allies are still ready and willing, no special units to recruit or anything like that. 

Talking to James I felt there was a better way than all these ways. 😀 I think of it as The Star Trek Way.

The Star Trek Way

I worked on two Star Trek RPGs back in the 90s, one I was just an Art Manager, not a designer, but the second one from Decipher I designed the Starship Combat rules which folks seemed to really like!

There was a tendency among Sci-Fi RPGs in the 1900s to switch from playing an RPG to playing a sort of cod Starfleet Battles. RPGs and Wargames were still very closely aligned back then, and a lot of RPG players relished the opportunity to bust out a starfield battlemat and get their little lead spaceship minis out. 

This was problematic for a lot of reasons, mostly the “we’re already playing one game” issue but also, these starship-combat-wargames-in-an-rpg rules usually sucked because they were too short and feature poor to be fun on their own, or capture all the different scenarios you expect a real starship combat game to support.

On the Decipher Trek RPG I said “Hang on, stop. This is not how the show works. If there’s a fight between ships in Star Trek, we don’t switch to a top-down view of the battle and sit there for 10 minutes watching these ships maneuver around and shoot at each other. We stay with the heroes. We follow the bridge crew as they get data from sensors and call out orders, we cut to sickbay where the chief medical officer is treating wounds and trying to keep the crew alive, we cut to engineering where the chief medical officer is trying to keep the ship from falling apart.

So we came up with a new subsystem (not a whole new game) that simulated this will all kinds of events and special actions the characters could take.

The Draw Steel Way

Armed with this insight James and I started talking very fast and getting excited about the possibilities of a new approach to warfare in Draw Steel. We immediately knew we needed to set up a meeting with Willie and Djordi and get the whole design team in on the action.

We already have encounters with different objectives and these really change how combat works because we no longer assume all battles are about killing every last enemy.

So we imagine a new type of encounter. A battle which is a normal Draw Steel encounter, except there’s an objective and a clock. You have to…stop the orc with the bomb from reaching the gates of Helm’s Deep! Classic! 

There are still Special Units like the The Thorns or the Bloodrunners, both enemy special units and hero special units, but their arrival at the battle is an event.

IF you recruit the Thorns…you don’t know exactly when they’ll show up (the adventure tells you, but we could abstract it into a generic rule using a die roll, and then other actions might modify that die roll!). But when they DO show up, they have a MAJOR effect on the battle. Like maybe when the Thorns arrive; all enemies are hit with an attack that does a lot of damage and causes enemies to fall asleep. Elf-shot! That kind of thing. And of course there are special enemy units!

We quickly realized that good objectives are asymmetrical. Sure there can be a tug-of-war scenario where we’re trying to push them back, and they’re trying to push us back, but if you flip sides…it’s the same scenario.

Whereas a King of the Hill scenario is two different battles! Hold this hill while the enemy charges it is ALSO charge this hill and take it FROM the enemy! The orc-with-a-bomb is just Kill The Man With The Ball. Sometimes WE have the ball, sometimes we have to…you get it.

This seemed really promising to us because we want to avoid a scenario where we can make cool adventures with epic battles, but Directors don’t have the tools to create those adventures because we didn’t create an independent system.

Ideally we’d be handing you a system you could easily use to build a fun adventure featuring armies clashing and we think these battle scenarios, where directors have a menu of objectives to choose from, will do the trick. Empower Directors to make their own epic war adventures.

It also seemed useful to us that, unlike normal Draw Steel encounters where we expect you’re probably going to win (though it should be a nail biter) we might want Draw Steel battles to be closer to 50/50. If the system assumes you’re going to win most battles, that means the enemy is losing most battles and if we assume both sides are fighting with units that make up an army that persists through the whole adventure then the heroes’ army is growing in power the entire time and the enemy army is constantly dwindling. Sure we can make that work narratively in ONE adventure…but every time there’s a war??

This might mean we’d benefit from something like a new maneuver; Retreat! Any player can use their character’s maneuver to call the retreat. If a single other allied player seconds the motion, the battle ends. And there’d be some penalty like you lose some recoveries, but critically, you get to keep your special units. They aren’t wasted or destroyed and so, if it looks like you’re going to lose this encounter, you can call the retreat and keep your special units.

Also, retreats are dramatic! If we end up with a Retreat! maneuver, and we craft it well, then retreating can feel dramatic because you’re preserving your troops for the next battle and not feel like you just behaved in a cowardly fashion.

That might not work? It might create weird metagame edge cases where players decide to lose battles on purpose they might otherwise have won handily, just to keep their special units.

We ran all this by Sam and he immediately got it and came up with a bunch of new ideas including new scenarios and options and we feel pretty good about this direction.

How actual armies work in these rules? We have ideas, but it may be players don’t worry about any units other than Special Units. The adventure determines the nature of the armies. 

On the other hand, if we want players to become barons and raise armies just to defend their holdings, then yeah we should worry about how many and what kind of normal units the players control. Maybe that’s what makes Vasloria, Vasloria?

But it certainly not core to Draw Steel. But then, neither is Warfare!

So, as you can see, we have what I consider a really strong direction with a lot of cool mechanics that will unlock new amazing dramatic moments, but we also have a lot of open questions!

I could have waited until we had a tested prototype we’re happy with before writing this post, but then this post would be loooooong. And it’s already long!

At some point in the future we will have a playable prototype our testers have pounded on a little, and then you’ll get to see how everything turned out!

Until then…. be seeing you.