Episode 2024.18 Published on 5 December 2024

The Illrigger is on D&D Beyond, and shields are out of Draw Steel | November Roundup

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Intro

Feature changes in Draw Steel is slowing down, it's mostly tweaking and balancing from here. Codex is getting some exciting features related to elevation on battle maps. The Illrigger has arrived on D&D Beyond. Trenchworx is making more MCDM minis. And we talk about Derelict.

I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.

Draw Steel

Let's start off with some news on Draw Steel.

Shields

Shields are out. Let's just get that out there. They were mostly an afterthought anyway. When the team came up with surges, someone mentioned that there could be an opposite that decreased damage, instead of increasing it. Turns out that really ruins the fun when they're applied all over the place.

In a play test the team did with tenth level heroes, the shields made it really hard for the director to do any damage to them. In addition, shields have also been criticized in test feedback for being too powerful already at fifth level and making attacks feel like null results.

Now they're just straight up gone.

Surges

Surges are still in, but they're receiving a revision. The current implementation of surges equates them to damage, which means you could do "two surges" of damage. That's no longer the case. Surges now only modify damage.

They're also a poolable resource now, instead of something akin to a condition. In the current packet, surges are applied much like a condition granting a creature extra damage on their attacks, or granting extra damage when attacking specific creatures.

Surges have been changed to be a small bonus that's granted as a buff, and added to a pool on the players character sheet. The player can choose when to spend their pooled surges, but are limited to a maximum of three per attack. The pool of surges have no limit, but the surges disappear when the encounter is over.

One of my hangups with surges were the many ways they were applied, sometimes as a permanent buff on yourself, sometimes temporary, sometimes as a permanent buff when attacking a specific enemy, sometimes temporary, and sometimes you just did damage equal to two surges. All that's fixed by basically making them a resource that the player can spend when they see fit.

The instances where heroes grant extra damage or do a static amount of damage, have now been reverted back to being a multiple of your highest characteristic score. E.g. "damage equal to twice your intuition score."

Potencies

Potencies are staying in, but they're getting tweaked. The spread of values is getting bigger, and the notation is being changed. The new notation is characteristic less than number. For example M less than 1. If the target has a characteristic score less than one, they're affected. The intention is to make it easier to parse for players.

James did a highly informal poll among the patrons on Discord, about which resistance system they preferred: the first play test packet system with active resistance rolls, the second play test packet system with no resistance, or the third play test packet system with potencies. Potencies was by far the preferred system.

Vasloria Box Set

There's been a bit of talk about the Vasloria box set this month. As we're getting closer to pencils down for Draw Steel, the team needs new things to work on.

The Vasloria box set will contain a lot more setting information; all Vasloria focused. It will also allow to expand the types of games that can be played in Draw Steel. It seems the team is pretty keen on the idea of it being a hexcrawl lite experience, where the heroes make their way through Vasloria, clearing up troubles in every hex they arrive in. The players then build strongholds or fortify the local settlement to "project" order and prevent the wilderness from seeping back in.

The problems that the heroes encounter, needs to be "solved" in some way. It might be something as straight forward as clearing out a goblin lair; stopping a chimera from attacking, but it turns out the chimera has a thorn in it's paw which makes it aggressive; to something more complex like brokering a peace between two neighboring regions.

The team is toying with the idea that maybe half of the hexes on the map are not filled with anything, but are left up to the director to fill. The box set will include rules and guides on how to fill those hexes, to aid directors in making it their own.

Pencils Down

And speaking of pencils down. The team aims to have the game mechanics finished by the end of the year. That means there won't be any new mechanics that go into the game. What's left then is polish, tweaking and balancing.

The team believes the difference between a good game and a great game is the amount of polish it has received. Next year, until release, is all about polish.

Creator License

The release of the third patron play test packet didn't contain an updated creator license for the game. This didn't really surprise me as the patrons are intended as an extended tester pool.

The general manager of MCDM did confirm however that there will be an updated license for the next backer packet. That packet is scheduled to be released before the end of the year, but time will show whether that'll be the case.

Mot's Miscellaneous

And now, a few quick news pieces in Mot's Miscellaneous. [Mot sounds].

Conditions now all end at end of turn, either instantly or by save ends. (Except for logical exceptions like prone and grabbed).

They're trying out echelon as the name for a tier of play. The design team is trying to avoid using the same word for multiple concepts in the rules.

Matt mentioned that they're doing more tests without conduits and censors to make sure the game works well without a dedicated healer, or a strong healer.

James mentioned that retainers may be included in the next packet drop.

Matt's mentioned that there's a possibility there'll be a Dusk Book 2 in the future, with him running it in Draw Steel. It won't be live streamed, but recorded, edited and then published.

James suggested that there might be a limit to how many titles a hero can have. In that case, there'd also be guidance about lifting that limitation.

Codex

They're making fast progress on Codex, and the developers showed off some of the elevation features they're currently working on. These features allow you to select parts of the map to be elevated, even at different levels. This works even on two-dimensional maps, where Codex does a bit of simple manipulation of the original image to make it appear as if parts of the map are higher up than the rest.

This also goes for making holes in the map. The developers showed making a hole in the ground, under some creatures, which made them fall in and take fall damage.

DMHub, and by extension Codex, supports exporting maps as what they call bundles. These bundles can contain maps with their elevation data baked in. They also hope to partner with map creators in the future, where the map creators create versions of their maps explicitly for Codex and/or DMHub.

Derelict

With pencils down on Draw Steel closing in, the team is actively looking at their next project, and it's not just new stuff for Draw Steel.

Matt and Jason have long been discussing a dungeon crawler board game they want to make. I've heard tidbits about it multiple times before, but they've started talking about it more openly now.

The game is not under any significant amount of development, so nothing I'm about to talk about here is guaranteed to be in the final game, if it even releases. But here are some of the ideas that have been aired about it.

Derelict is a sci-fi board game dungeon crawler set on derelict space ships. The player characters are salvagers, and go to the ships looking for valuable parts, cargo or other items or information of interest.

The abandoned ships are different for every time you play, both in terms of layout, but also the reason why the ship became derelict, and the reason the characters are on the ship. Matt said the game is reminiscent of games like Descent or Gloomhaven.

Between missions to derelict ships you'll be able to upgrade you character. You might find alien weaponry, or civilization changing technology on the ships. That can be sold for a neat price, and the credits spent on upgrading your own gear.

They're currently thinking that you don't create a character from scratch, but select one from a list. Each character belongs to department, like the science department, which determines a lot of the characters traits. A bit like a class. The players then choose which section of that the department they belong to, as a specialization within that department.

They imagine they can make the game work for 4 to 5 players, but would love to be able to support up to 6 players. There isn't a director or game master. Instead the monsters play themselves, following simple instructions: If the monster is far away from a character, move closer, if they are close, attack, etc. It's all PvE, the characters against the monsters, no combat between the players.

Matt has a sweet spot for a "real" action point system, and wants to see if he can make that happen in Derelict. He did toy with the idea of implementing that in Draw Steel early in development, but quickly realized it didn't fit there.

With this system you get maybe twelve points on a turn. You can move one square for a point, shoot a heavy weapon, like a sniper rifle for a lot of action points, and use small and/or fast weapons for a few points. The thinking is that quick actions can be done a lot of times on a single turn.

Again. I want to emphasize that this is very early stages. Remember when Draw Steel had funky dice, with custom symbols on them? Well, this is earlier than that.

Trenchworx Minis

Trenchworx, the official minis partner for MCDM, has run another successful campaign for a bunch of minis. They'd set a goal of $37,500, and ended up at a little over $103,000.

The campaign included minis of goblins, kobolds and hobgoblins. You could get them both as regular minis, or STL files for 3D printing.

Pre-orders are open, and it looks like all the options are available as pre-orders too.

Link is in the link section.

The Illrigger on D&D Beyond

As maybe the biggest surprise of November, the Illrigger class launched on D&D Beyond. This is the second non-Wizards of the Coast class on D&D Beyond, after the Bloodhunter made by Matt Mercer.

The Illrigger version is the revised Illrigger released last year. Sadie Lowry was lead on the project to redesign it. She's also done an interview with D&D Beyond about the Illrigger where she explains the class in general and the subclasses specifically.

The release includes the class with five subsclasses, two magic items, and 5 spells.

Links to the interview and the Illrigger on the D&D Beyond shop in the links section.

Mini Monday

Mini mondays continues, and this month we even got an extra treat. Mini Monday 003 contained the goblin war spider Marrowgnaw, but as an extra treat for the occation of Trenchworx' crowdfunding campaign, Mini Moday 003 also included Toblobb the goblin sneak.

Mini Monday 004 contained Tristan Vaslor, The King Below, originally seen in Kingdoms & Warfare.

From the Community

Let's highlight a few things from the MCDM community.

Draw Steel Homebrew

Tara_Reid has created a complete monster section with bugs and insects for Draw Steel. They say it's inspired by the Zerg, Tyranids, Formics, Glyphids and other creepy crawly hivemindy mutatey nasty buggers.

Picklei has created a negotiation cheat sheet for running negotiations.

Draw Steel Media

Aeastus_RPG has done three(!) interviews with people from MCDM this past month. He's done two interviews with James, and one with Djordi. Links to all of them in the links section.

And speaking of... Aestus_RPG, Tamwin (whom I interviewed back in August), and myself got to play in a one-shot run by The Dice Society. We had a ton of fun fighting undead and some of Ajax' forces below a church in Blackbottom. Links to the recording of that session, along with The Dice Society podcast's newest episode is in the links section.

Matt's been busy this month and release three videos! Must be years since the last time that was the case. The main feature is of course his video on how The Elusive Shift shows that the TTRPG hobby doesn't remember where it started, and how the early days of the hobby is misremembered and misrepresented. You'll find the link to that and the two other videos in the link section.

Average Roll, Don't Shout Mimic, Rise Heroes Rise!, and Robin Baggett have all published videos about Draw Steel. I've linked to their playlists of videos.

From Around the Web

There have been some coverage of Draw Steel outside of our community, but most of the focus this month is of course on the Illrigger. I've included multiple videos and articles talking about the release, and people's impressions of the class.

Outro

All right. That was everything for November.

If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on [email protected].

Links to the MCDM Discord server, the subreddits for MCDM and Draw Steel, the YouTube channels of Matt and MCDM, the complete link section, and this script is in the show notes. It's also on goblinpoints.com.

Next episode is on the 20th. This time I'll be speaking with Dojikaan, whose fantastic time raider art you might've seen on Discord. See you next time. Snakkes.

Links

Draw Steel

Derelict

Trenchworx Minis

The Illrigger on D&D Beyond

Mini Monday

From MCDM

From the Community

Draw Steel Homebrew

Draw Steel Media

5e Homebrew

From Around the Web

Draw Steel

The Illrigger