TTRPG - Draw Steel Is Out!
MCDM (Matt Colville's TTRPG resource business) is in the process of releasing their original TTRPG "Draw Steel". The PDFs are now available, and the physical books will apparently be shipping in the next month or two. I'm pretty excited about this for a couple of reasons.
It's not DnD
The main reason is that I've just never really clicked with DnD as a system. It always felt too bitty, too micromanage-y, and all the best examples of "DnD played right" basically involved ignoring the rulebook and making your own fun.
Now as far as I'm concerned "making the game up" is a totally valid way to play any TTRPG, but DnD always felt like this was a compromise formed of its ubiquity rather than an actually intended strategy - I think the folks at WotC writing DnD intend for people to play an intensely spreadsheet-y sort of game, but that doesn't have the mass-appeal befitting the most popular TTRPG on the planet so they just kind of roll with it. Even those "DnD played right" examples (like Critical Role) end up having entire 3-hour shopping sessions.
Ultimately, DnD just isn't a very interesting game because I feel an intense friction between the cavernous character sheets and the way I enjoy playing and running TTRPGs.
FATE fills that niche a lot better but it often feels too far the other way - requiring either an entirely unstructured "we roll dice because it feels good" style, or a huge amount of up-front work by the GM to create systems, structures, and rules to scaffold player decisions. While it is true that "I can do anything" is freeing as a player, it's also really boring if the only action you know you can do is punching things. You can spend a ton of time asking your GM what's possible and if you never hear a "No" then you can really pull the game out of shape.
I don't personally find a complete lack of structure all that fun, so while I love FATE I also find it quite tiring to run.
It's also not FATE
I'm really glad that Draw Steel still holds onto this idea of predefined roles, abilities, and skillsets for its characters, and builds them into the system rather than just handing the GM a set of guidelines and trusting them to design a balanced, fun game.
One of things that DnD excels at is that the rulebooks are basically a shopping catalogue for future fun. Players get to read through dozens of character advancement options, items, spells, etc and the DM has a massive pile of monsters and rewards to sprinkle around. Draw Steel holds onto this.
The two source books are Heroes and Monsters - both hundreds of pages of options for the players and DM respectively, and I love this. This is the part of the experience I think most players would miss if they're migrating away from DnD, and as a DnD hater it's honestly really fun to skim through and get a feel for not just systems but specific threats and obstacles.
It's a Heroic Adventure
The opening paragraph of the Heroes book sets the scene:
"This is a game about fighting monsters. About larger-than-life, extraordinary heroes plunging into battle against terrifying, monstrous enemies."
They reiterate this a bunch, but the idea is clear - the players are heroic, and the Director (the local parlance for GM) is setting the stakes in their cinematic adventure. They also often emphasise tactics, that this is game where tactically saving or spending resource can make the difference, but they don't want to get bogged down with it.
I'm hoping this will help avoid the "table general" appearing and telling everyone what to do, but frankly that's a risk in any game, and for the Director to sort out.
I love the vision this provides, and I think honestly it's the promise that DnD makes as well - my hope is that Draw Steel can do a better job of executing it.
It's Annoying Close to My Own Ideas
A couple of years ago my partner wanted to run a new FATE game, one built around some kind of hex-crawly or base-managementy systems, ultimately revolving around varied player presence and easier scheduling. We spitballed a few ideas for how magic worked (an eternal question in FATE games) and settled on a rough outline where all characters had some kind of 0-20 resource bar they had to manage.
A wizard might have a simple Mana bar because their expertise allowed them the control of the flow of magic, and it kept mostly out of the way while the complexity came from the spells themselves.
Sorcerers on the other hand had to manage Paradox - shamelessly pinched from White Wolf's Mage - an almost malevolent tendency for the universe to snap back at the worst possible time, an increasing ratchet on tension as they push their luck pulling fire from the cosmos.
Barbs could have Rage, Druids Balance, etc. etc. This system was neat, but very complex and involved basically learning a whole new game for each class - some of which the players would never use.
In Draw Steel, every class has their own Resource they manage. They earn them within combat, and after an encounter they go back to 0. They are much simpler than what I came up with, but crucially they're much more scalable and transferable - while an Elementalist's Essence isn't identical to a Talent's Clarity, they are of the same category and so Players and the Director should all be able to follow it by analogy.
There's A Tutorial Adventure
They've also adapted one of Matt's adventures into a proper tutorial, one which could be run sight-unseen by both the Director and the Players.
I think this is a neat idea, and a way to emphasise how they don't want to make playing a TTRPG just one person doing a ton of work for the players' benefit.
I'm planning to run it once I have the physical books to work with, but we may get impatient and give it a go just with the PDFs - it wouldn't be the first time running an in-person game purely from digital files. I've had a skim of it and it looks really nicely structured, bringing mechanics in bit-by-bit so nobody gets overwhelmed.
Extra Thoughts
I haven't run an RPG in a while. I've had ideas, but the work of either building them up from nothing in FATE or fitting within the confines of a more rigid system always tired me out. Seeing a system that actively tries to thread that needle is just inherently exciting.
I know there are hundreds of TTRPG systems out there already of hugely varied complexity, and glomming onto one that happens to be content-creator-adjacent may be a bit basic, but Matt Colville has been improving the RPGs I run and play for near a decade now so he gets a bit of extra trust.
This is the first time I've ever felt like it'd be worth it to get one of those dry-erase battlemats, because the system just seems well-tuned for it. I love FATE's zones system, but I play enough tactical videogames to be comfortable with grids.
Overall I'm just keen to play with it. It's a new box of toys. That's fun!