Building the Beastheart

Hi! I’m Paul Hughes, the lead writer behind MCDM’s new playtest beastheart class. Besides working on Draw Steel, Flee Mortals, and other projects, I’ve written a couple of bestiaries including EN Publishing’s Monstrous Menagerie and Monstrous Menagerie II, the upcoming Adventure Time RPG monsters, and Roll for Combat’s 5e Battlezoo Bestiaries. Besides my major in monster studies, recently I’ve picked up a minor in monstrous companions; besides working on MCDM’s beastheart, I’m the lead writer on EN Publishing’s upcoming Pets and Sidekicks book. I guess I just have a soft spot for good bois, chill guys, and all creatures 11/10.

The beastheart is a bit different from most Draw Steel classes is that its direct inspiration, MCDM’s 5e beastheart class, is already built somewhat like a Draw Steel class, with a heroic resource (Ferocity) and a Signature Ability-like stable of “primal exploits”: special moves whose names you can imagine shouting in combat (“Aid Us, Friend!” “Bring them down!”). It’s a cool class, and it shines in any 5e game!

Our first question was this: how close were we going to stick to the 5e class? Will a class that shines in a 5e game still shine in Draw Steel, or will it lose some of its luster when compared to the epic heroics of other Draw Steel characters?

There was really no question: we’re building Draw Steel here. We were going to have to up the ante. For testing, we wanted to untether the beastheart from its old design and see how much more “beasthearty” we could make it. Often that would take us to new design space—but we wanted to make sure the core of the class, the central fantasy, remained the same.

Heart of the Beastheart

The central fantasy of the beastheart is NOT that you have a beast pet. You’re not a beastmaster, like the one from the old 80s movie who could command legions of hawks and ferrets and whatnot; you’re not anybody’s master. You have a beast companion. You travel with an untamed wild animal. That comes with risks: sure, your companion may be bound to you by a mystical bond of friendship and loyalty, but in the frenzy and confusion of battle they’re always a moment away from going into a rampage, incapable of distinguishing friend from foe.

Rampage

Your companion is not a domesticated animal. While your companion’s ferocity sharpens its killer instinct, it can also cause your companion to become difficult to control.

After gaining ferocity at the start of your turn, if your companion’s ferocity is equal to at least 7 + your level, your companion runs the risk of entering a rampage. Make an Intuition reactive test, which you can choose to fail. You automatically fail if you’re unable to take actions. You have a bane on this test if your companion’s ferocity is at least 10 + your level. If you succeed on the test, you act normally on your turn. If you fail, your companion enters a rampage.

While in a rampage, on your turn your companion must use their move action to move straight toward the nearest creature apart from you, avoiding damaging terrain, and use your action to make a melee free strike against that creature. Your companion’s melee free strikes deal extra damage equal to your companion’s ferocity plus your level. If your companion is equally distant from multiple creatures, roll a d6. On a result of 1-3 the Director chooses your target (excluding you), and on a result of 4-6 you choose your target. If your companion can’t sense any potential targets, they don’t move or take actions.

While in a rampage, your companion no longer gains ferocity. At the end of your turn, your companion’s rampage ends and your companion loses half of their ferocity.

I think the key, unique attribute of this class is that, when you play a beastheart, you’re playing two characters, not one character with an NPC retainer. (If you want a retainer, MCDM has mechanics for that, and if you want to summon minions, MCDM will soon have a class for that!) The rampage mechanic helps remind us that the companion is an independent character. A person and a wild animal see the world differently. Sometimes the beastheart has some strategic goal in mind, and the companion has a conflicting goal, which is to bite people.

As obvious as this all may seem, I didn’t come to this realization right away. In my first design, I tried making ferocity a heroic resource of the beastheart, not of the companion. When ferocity got too high, instead of the beast rampaging, the beastheart and the companion both rampaged (through the beastheart’s mystical connection with their companion, the beastheart’s mind was swamped by the companion’s wild instincts). This worked pretty well, but it didn’t really draw a strong distinction between the two characters: they were both in pocket, then they both flipped out simultaneously. With the beastheart entering a rampage along with their companion, it felt a bit more like having a fury with a pet than like having an alliance with an untamable beast.

Having tested that, we returned to the original design, which embodies a kind of tension between your characters: the companion earns ferocity (and earning too much can be risky) and the beastheart spends ferocity by using heroic abilities (and you don’t want to overspend if you want to pull off your biggest moves). Mechanically, the characters are pulling in different directions in a way we can play around with.

It Takes Two

With one player playing two characters, we have to decide: exactly how much are they separate characters? While they share their heroic resource, what about their other resources? Do they have their own stamina, recoveries, action economy?

The stamina question is a big one. If the beastheart and the beast have their own stamina, what happens when one’s pool is depleted? When one of the pair is dead, or maybe so low on stamina that they’re hanging back, will you spend long portions of the game playing only one half of the partnership? We want to avoid that. Not only are you not getting the full beastheart experience, it might just not work at all. Playing one side of a beastheart is kind of like driving a car with half its bits missing. If the beast is gone, you lose your motor; if the beastheart is gone, you lose your brakes and steering.

To get around this problem, we considered giving the beastheart and their companion a shared Stamina pool. That avoids the situation where one of them is the last one standing. It has a big drawback though: the same sword swing that fells your beastheart also kills your beast halfway across the battlefield. Fiction-wise that doesn’t feel good.

After a few tests, we ended up at a place I’m pretty happy with: the beast and the beastheart have their own Stamina, but they share their Recoveries (and they get a few more Recoveries than most characters do, since they’re two juicy targets for enemies to whale on). Whenever either the beastheart or the beast would be able to spend a Recovery, their player decides which of them benefits from it. That way, a player can juggle their characters’ Stamina to keep both members of the partnership alive.

That said, adventure is dangerous, and you’re not guaranteed the good ending. When things go south and a beastheart is killed, I kind of like the idea of their companion going out in a rampage-fueled blaze of glory.

So much for the not-enough-characters problem. What about the too-many-characters problem? With two characters, is the beastheart player going to outshine the others? Will they clutter the map? Will they get to do twice as much stuff, and will it take twice as long? A combat turn in Draw Steel usually gives you 1+ power rolls; will the beastheart get 2+?

We decided to share a character’s action economy between the beast and the beastheart. They both act on the same turn. Both get their own moves, but the hero has only one action and one maneuver; if the beastheart takes an action, the beast takes the maneuver, and vice versa. And to double down on the “attacking alongside your companion” fantasy of the class, we’ve added special beastheart maneuvers that let you (or your companion) make attacks, so you and your furry friend can leap forward and tear out throats together in beautiful synchronicity! The key thing is that these new maneuvers are quick to resolve, with no power roll and static damage numbers. Even though the beastheart player has twice as many tactical decisions to make about positioning—and, depending on positioning, twice as many attack vectors—we’re keeping the beastheart’s turn to about the same length as another character’s turn.

That’s the theory anyway, but it remains just a theory until it has survived testing. And testing the beastheart has been a blast. (It’s always fun when your job involves playing Draw Steel with the MCDM crew.) In one game, we stress-tested map clutter by running a beastheart with a size 2 bear, and, in another, we tested game pace by loading up the party with two beasthearts: a defense-focused beastheart with a wolf, and a hit-and-run beastheart with a panther. In a co-op game like Draw Steel, it’s not enough to ensure that the beastheart is fun for its player; you’ve got to make sure that their fun is not subtracting from anyone else’s fun.

Choose Your Companion

At the end of the last section I touched on some of the different companions we’ve been testing (a bear, a wolf, and a panther), so now is a good time to talk about the variety of critters you can team up with while playing a beastheart.

When you’re building a class with a companion beast, whether it be in a pen and paper RPG or a MMO, there are a few tried-and-true approaches:

You have generalized beast statistics, and then you can apply whatever skin you want on top of it. With a few minor changes to movement modes and such, your beast can be a wolf, a unicorn, a flying monkey—whatever you want it to be! The disadvantage: All your possible companions feel tactically similar.

You have a companion template that you can apply to existing monsters from the bestiary. If you could meet a critter in the wild, you could potentially have it as a companion. The disadvantage: Monsters are designed as combatants foremost: some features may work great as part of an enemy’s toolkit for a single battle, but not not work well for an ally over dozens or hundreds of encounters.

You build a small set of maybe 3 to 5 bespoke companions, each with their own specific quirks and abilities: a bear can squeeze you to death or swat you around, while a panther slinks around and pounces on you from hiding. Since you have a limited list of creatures, you can polish each one’s gameplay, with each offering a different tactical experience. Disadvantage: The only real disadvantage of this approach is that you only have a few options to choose from.

As usual, MCDM (company motto: Have Cake And Eat It Too) has chosen Secret Option D. In this case, we took several option Cs and crashed them together. Right now, our approach is to give the beastheart two separate choices to make.

Wild Nature: The beastheart has three or four possible subclasses, called Wild Natures, which express the way that the beastheart and their beast work together. For instance, the Guardian beastheart gains a maneuver and triggered action that helps the beastheart defend their allies, while the Prowler beastheart and their companion have an easier time staying out of sight and striking from ambush. Each wild nature encourages a beastheart to do fundamentally different things on their turn.

Companion: On top of the choice of wild nature, the beastheart has a choice of companion: this is where you choose whether you travel with a wolf, panther, etc. Each companion species starts out with its own maneuvers, triggered actions, or other unique abilities that set them apart from each other, and they can gain more as the beastheart levels up. You can combine that with your wild nature to come up with a unique tactical style. For instance, a panther is naturally sneaky and can synergize well as a companion for a Prowler beastheart, but there are interesting tactical possibilities to be found in running a Guardian beastheart whose panther can go off on their own to leap down on the enemy commander and then tank the consequences.

How many companions we’ll end up with is an open question. We’re still at the beginning of the process of building out the class. For the first test builds, I tried out four companions (the bear, wolf, panther, and hawk); as we get those sorted away, I’m hard at work on other companions. I have no idea exactly how many we’ll end up with, but we’ll see how far we get! Right now we have some more fanciful and less cuddly companions on deck: a basilisk and a gelatinous cube. After that, I’d love to keep going and make a bunch more: you can never have too many friends, even if some of those friends occasionally go on a rampage and try to kill everyone in sight!

This seems like a good time to turn things over to you. What are the must-have beast companions that you think we absolutely need to include?

—Paul