A Slow Introduction

Are 1st-level heroes too complicated? This is a question I’ve been asking myself since the beginning of Draw Steel. If a hero (or game) is too complicated, it can turn off new players. If a hero doesn’t have enough complexity, they feel too similar to other player characters and don’t excite the player. In many ways, the first twelve to eighteen months of working on Draw Steel was all about finding the right level of complexity for a 1st-level hero. (It’s James. Hey.)

How Much Complexity?

In terms of roleplaying games, complexity—at its most basic level—often means “how many rules does this game have?” We knew we wanted heroes to feel, well, heroic from the start, but a powerful RPG character doesn’t need to be complex. In fact, the most straightforward way to increase a creature’s power is simply by boosting the commonly shared statistics that they use all the time. In the case of Draw Steel, that’s things like Stamina, characteristics, and damage. Increasing those numbers doesn’t make the game anymore complicated at all.

While increasing those numbers does make a player character more heroic, they don’t really give them any more definition and it just makes the game less challenging. Even if this was a game with three character classes—one beefy class with lots of Stamina, one accurate class with a high bonus on ability power rolls, and one asskicker class who deals a lot of damage—we’d still want each to have unique ways to take advantage of those benefits. Beefy would want to have a way to say to enemies “HIT ME (and not my friends)!” Accurate would want their high bonus on power rolls to allow them to achieve cool effects with tier 3 results. Asskicker would want to have ways to get into position to deal a buttload of damage to the target of their choice. These ways we allow the heroes to take advantage of their broader statistics add complexity to the game.

Draw Steel is also a tactical game. Tactics are the creation and an execution of a plan. To deliver on the promise and fun of a tactical game, that means we need to give you choices that you make during character creation and advancement and choices to make in combat encounters, montage tests, and negotiations. Otherwise you’re not really planning. You’re just doing what the game tells you to do. If you only have one option (be it through limitations of what you can do or because there’s one thing that works every single time you use it no matter the situation), then we’ve failed to deliver on that promise.

A Draw Steel player character, in order to fulfill the heroic and tactical fantasies, needs some complexity. That complexity makes the hero more fun … to a point. If the game starts out too complex, most players get overwhelmed by the choices they have and just look for the simplest option and rinse and repeat rather than exploring everything that’s available to them. We do a lot of testing to try and figure out the sweet spot where most of our audience is having fun without feeling overwhelmed by the number of options they have to choose from and the rules they have to keep in mind as they play the game. We’ve gotten there. A 1st-level hero comes with two signature abilities, two heroic abilities, a triggered action, a handful of class features for use in and out of combat, ancestry traits, a perk, skills, and languages. If you’re feeling spicy, you get a complication too! We know from testing that most of you agree with us. (Based on the latest surveys, there’s less than 10% of you who want something more or less complex for a 1st-level hero and we really enjoy playing 1st-level of this game ourselves, so we’re taking it as a win.)

What About Newbies?

However, we also want folks outside of our core audience of playtest coordinators, Patrons, and crowdfunding backers to play this game. We know that most of you have played at least one other RPG, since many of you found us when we were making third-party D&D products. It led to us asking, “What about people who want to play a tactical RPG but want a way to ease themselves into the experience of Draw Steel?” and “What about someone who hasn’t played a tabletop RPG before? They need to just wrap their minds around the concept and then they have a pretty complicated hero to learn on top of that?” We can tell many of you were thinking the same thing based on your very positive response of us saying we might put out an adventure with rules for creating a level 0 hero.

For over a year, the design team has been discussing an alternative method of introducing Draw Steel complexity to new players one encounter at a time. You often see this kind of progression in the tutorial stage of a video game where you learn how to make fast attacks, then strong attacks, then blocking, then counterattacks, and then an ultimate attack.

In our Draw Steel tutorial, you’d start with a very basic version of a hero. This would include all your base statistics (characteristics, Stamina, speed, stability, etc.), your signature abilities without potencies, your heroic resource, a class maneuver if you’re granted one, and a few other flat bonuses you get in combat (like those granted by your kit). You’d play out a very simple encounter against the Director who would use modified monster stat blocks that don’t have triggered options or use potencies or Malice.

After that first battle, you’d then get your triggered action and your 3-cost heroic ability. You’d learn about opportunity attacks as well. This is also where we’d introduce the idea of potencies. The Director now uses full stat blocks and Malice.

After the second battle, you get your 5-cost heroic ability and maybe some of the other conditional combat features you have that make you better at using a specific maneuver or in particular circumstances—the stuff that isn’t “always on.” Now that you have a handle on the rules, those kinds of things are easier to remember.

The process of building your hero encounter by encounter would continue until you have a fully fleshed-out 1st-level hero. The idea is that a new player or a player who wants to be eased into a complex Draw Steel hero can now have a slower, more progressive experience learning the game. This way someone who might enjoy Draw Steel but wants to learn the game by walking before running now has the chance.

We Should Do That

Well, Matt recently reminded me of this and asked me to rework the pregens and part 1 of The Delian Tomb to account for easing new players into Draw Steel. Attached to the bottom of this post are the tutorial versions of the heroes that are in the Delian Tomb playtest. These are for you to check out! (Please do not use these heroes in your playtests if you plan on filling out the survey. Please stick to the pregens in the original post.)

Check them out, and let us know what you think in the comments below!

—James