#mcdm

As you can tell from the cover art, Draw Steel is a fantasy adventure game, in the vein of D&D. More specifically, it's in the vein of D&D 4e, in that it leans heavily into the tactical wargaming aspect. It bills itself as a heroic, cinematic, tactical fantasy RPG, and a good amount of the intro goes in to describing exactly what they mean by that and, in what I think is a nice touch, suggesting other games if it's not your cup of tea.

So, what makes Draw Steel stand out from the many other fantasy RPGs released in the wake of WotC's OGL fuckup? My three favourite things are the resolution mechanic, the resource system, and the single-roll combat.

The resolution mechanic is the Power Roll: 2d10+attribute. The result is compared to a lookup table: 11 or less is Tier 1, 17+ is Tier 3, and in the middle is Tier 2. A natural 19 or 20 on the dice is a crit, which gives you another action in combat and a success with benefits otherwise.

There are mostly only two things that modify your power rolls: skills, and edges and banes. Skills are simply a +2 to rolls you can convince the game master (Director) they apply to. Edges and banes are the equivalent to D&D's advantage/disadvantage. If you have an edge or bane, you get +2 or -2. If you can two or more, you get +1 or -1 to your tier - so a 13 with a double edge is Tier 3. They cancel each other out one to one, up to two of each - so if you have one edge and three billion banes, that's still just a -2. Crits are still Tier 3 even if you have banes.

In short, there's not a lot of math to do. The dice are big enough that there's some randomness, but having two of them give you a bell curve, which helps keep your generally small bonuses relevant - you're much more likely to roll a 10 or 11 than a 5, so your +2 is pretty likely to kick you up from a Tier 1 to a Tier 2.

If you get into D&D discussions a lot, you've probably heard a lot of grumbling about 'novas', '5 minute workdays', and the unrealistic expectations of the 'adventuring day'. This comes about because resources in D&D almost all count down - you come off a long rest as powerful as you'll ever be, and gradually get weaker as you adventure and use those resources up. Thus, it's always mechanically desirable to take long rests as often as possible.

I mention this to give some context to why I like Draw Steel's resource system, which has tension between different resources. Stamina and Recoveries, your defensive resources, count down, just like in D&D. Your offensive resource, known as your heroic resource, counts up, both in fights and as you adventure.

Each class has it's own heroic resource. You get some at the start of your turn in combat, and some more when specific things happen - for example, the Elementalist gains Essence the first time in a round a creature near them takes elemental damage. The more of your resource you have, the more powerful abilities you can use.

You lose your heroic resource when combat ends, so you're encouraged to use and not hoard it, but you gain a Victory (sometimes two!). Then at the beginning of your next combat, you gain your resource equal to your number of victories. Then, when your Recoveries run low, you go back to town or some other safe place and take a Respite, recovering your Recoveries and Stamina but transforming your Victories to XP. Thus, instead of taking Respites whenever possible, you want to hold off as long as you can so you can start combat with enough of your resource to use your coolest abilities right away, but you also don't want to push your luck too far.

Victories also come from Negotiations and Montages, so it's not purely combat based.

Single-roll combat is just what it sounds like: when you use an ability in combat, you make one roll. No rolling to hit, checking with the GM, then rolling for damage. You make your power roll, check what your ability does at that tier, and tell the Director that. Shrimple. It doesn't sound like much, but I've found that despite unfamiliarity with the system, Draw Steel combat ran as fast or faster than D&D combat, and I think this is a big contributor.

Another cool thing that didn't quite make the top 3 is forced movement. Lots of systems have it, but Draw Steel makes shoving people around the battlefield a big deal. Ever wanted to kick someone through a wall? Draw Steel has very simple rules for how hard to need to hit them and how much it'll hurt. Ever wanted to beat a bad guy with another bad guy? Equally simple, satisfying, and effective.