Has it really been three years since the Hasbro/WotC/D&D OGL crisis? Yes.
Are things better for it? Yes.
And in this new modern age of role playing games, Draw Steel and Daggerheart captured my attention as two unique takes on “killing things and taking their stuff”.
This post is based on running the Daggerheart quick-start over two sessions and running the first two sessions of Draw Steels starter adventure, The Delian Tomb.
Daggerheart
I took a look at the Daggerheart quick-start adventure and it looked so easy to run, that I felt I had to try it. The quick-start is a true “print and play” type of experience. It does not assume you have ever read the rule book, or even played (or run) an RPG before. This lowered barrier to run the quick start took a lot of load off me as game master to prepare and run this for my players. This made learning the game fun and fast. In the two nights of play, we finished the quick start. On the first night, we flew through three “encounters”, one of which was a combat session. And the second night was focused on the final combat encounter. We used the pre-generated characters and they felt unique and interesting.
One of my favorite features of this system is how similar the mechanics for non-combat and combat are. The absence of initiative order for combat helps make flowing in and out of combat smoother as well. Overall running Daggerheart felt like it had a great “flow” and my players also appreciated the speed of the game.
Now, Daggerheart has a narrative heart, and that means there are a couple of concerns I see using Daggerheart for future games. I feel that the campaign frames in the rule book are designed to lay out sandboxes that let you explore a setting cooperatively. But, I would really love to see some traditional style adventures for Daggerheart that follow the quick-start template. This narrative approach can also get a bit difficult when it comes to interpreting rolls. Success with a complication? Failure with a complication? Got to think up complications on the fly. That’s some game master overhead. The book does try to help get into that mindset and give good ideas, but keeping this fresh is always a challenge for me.
Draw Steel
I relate to Matt Colville’s approach to RPGs. And I also really started running D&D regularly when the fourth edition came out. So Draw Steel was on my radar when it was announced. I backed the kickstarter, even. And it’s not a stripped down system, which seems counter to the current trends.
There are a lot of things to track, a lot of rules to learn, and new terminology to grok. But after having gone through the learning curve of the second edition of Pathfinder, Draw Steel felt less painful and more polished. And unlock Pathfinder 2e, the payoff in Draw Steel is that all that crunch comes out as crazy super-heroic cool things that players (and sometimes enemies) can do. Unlike Daggerheart, my two sessions were two entire combat encounters. Once encounter each night. At level one. Wow. I remember D&D 4e getting slow around level six, so here is hoping Draw Steel only gets faster as time goes on.
I especially enjoyed Draw Steel’s take on conditions, like “Bleeding”. It doesn’t stack, you either are or aren’t, and it doesn’t just do damage. In this case, it puts the players into a position where they can take damage to use their full turn, but they can also opt to do less and avoid the damage. That’s a good way to force players to make hard choices.
The Delian Tomb is the Draw Steel version of a quick-start, but it’s not really a one-shot. It’s well written and well designed. It gets right to the heart of learning the game. If you use the pre-made characters, the system is designed to slowly introduce you to new mechanics over time. The second encounter in The Delian Tomb requires using twenty two goblin minis. Oof. My mini game needs some work because I could barely field that many minis and actually keep track of which one was Goblin Warrior 4.
Summary
Even though they are very different feeling systems, they do a lot of similar things that I do like.
- Both systems implement a more free flowing initiative systems to give more control to the players.
- Both systems provide a sense of being a heroic character in different ways. Daggerheart does it by really letting the players steer more, and Draw Steel does it by giving players ridiculously cool powers.
- Both systems ditch player rolled D20s in favor of a more bell curve experience of 2d10.
- Both have a great introductory adventure that really shows off their systems and is probably as easy as it gets for the game master.
I look forward to running more games of both.