mcdm
patreon
A Slow Introduction
🕑 Added 2025-05-13 16:00:17 +0000 UTCAre 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
Comments
Angela Craig
Several of my favorite campaigns started us at 0 level pesants, it allows you to really understand your character in a way you never will starting at level 1 or higher.I love this idea
Mo Williams
Love to see this! I think it really gives a grounding you don't usually get in crunch games.
Frederica Teather
This would have been perfect for my group, they got very overwhelmed first time
David Marshall
Love this for new players but even more for new Directors.
Dor Edras
From a purely gamist rules perspective I think this works well. I think what I really want out on a level 0 product, however, is something that eases me into both the game rules AND the fiction. Something that combines both rules and narrative - starts me with just an ancestry and a culture and a background and some free strikes without potency, then through a combination of additional layers of rules plus a matching narrative structure, takes me (reasonably quickly!) from newbie to seasoned L1 hero, introducing me to the world, the mechanics, and my character all at once. That would be a good place to expand on some of the initial life path stuff y'all wanted to do but couldn't fit in, too. I guess what I'm saying is: this is a good way to bolt on a tutorial to a story that is not ABOUT becoming an adventurer... but I want that story about becoming an adventurer, too. Thanks for sharing! Cool stuff.
Tom Flynn
I think you're on the right track, but I gotta say: "Level 0" sounds pretty demoralising when you're getting half a level 1 Draw Steel character. It's also not very MCDM to call something special by a boring name. I think selling the sizzle of this is important, and I'd start with calling them an "Origin character" or something. (Origin character is not an original me, it's also fairly standard). I know my players would be like "then what the hell are we doing if we're not even level 1?" and would feel pretty daunted.
Eugene Cheney
My favorite part of this approach to learning Draw Steel is it also weens the director into the game as well! Very cool
Doug Robinson
This is awesome! I just got done running first ever session of DS last night, and even with rpg veterans it was quite a bit to learn at once. We got there, but I couldn't imagine getting someone who's never played an rpg to wrap their head around it all. This seems like a solid option for introducing new players to DS! Love it
Dudimus
I have always been in favor of level 0 rules in Draw Steel for another reason as well. Draw Steel assumes that your character is already a hero. Already has experience and skill. Already has a life lived before the game begins. But that excludes an entire category of stories. What of the farm boy who has never held a sword in his life, but suddenly discovers a mystical heritage and must deal with the consequences? It's classic fantasy stuff. And even at level 1, Draw Steel cannot tell this story (or at least not easily). I don't know how many people will want to play that way, or how often, but shunning it seems like a needless limiting factor. Sometimes I like watching my character start with nothing and work their way up to greatness. Not all the time of course, but having the option available must add value to the game for some people.
Liam Fullerton
This is amazing! Thank you so much I've been wanting some type of instruction like this for my hombrew three-shot I'm planning after the Delian Tomb
Josh
Thank you for looking at this! This was the biggest challenge point I had when first introducing people to this game, the amount of complexity at once just shut off their brains
Michael Hughes
This sounds great! I haven't done any playtests myself, but I've followed the Patreon updates through development, and was worried about throwing too much at once at my TTRPG group, since like half of us have ADHD. This seems like a really good way to easy everyone into things. Hyped for the Delian Tomb, and the pdfs this summer :)
Daniel Quaresma
100 x Yes. So many of my friends are interested in trying RPGs but the level of text on the character sheet shuts their brains down.
