#MCDM rpg

[xochilexart]

Settled on a look for this wode elf elementalist

[probablygoodrpgideas]

Draw Steel (also known as the mcdm rpg) sent out playtesting stuff for backers and so far I really like that you can customize your devil PCs, you get 3 Fiend Points and can spend them on stuff like a prehensile tail, glowing eyes, or wings

[vixensdungeon]

I saw someone complaining that MCDM RPG’s fighter type class has a taunt mechanic, which is bad because it takes away the GM’s agency and fun.

As a gamesmistress, deciding who Goblin #6 is going to attack each round is one of my least favorite things so this actually sounds like it would increase my fun. And I don’t think I’d miss that tiny bit of agency next to the godlike agency I have as a GM in these types of games.

Oh, it’s also bad because it’s like in a MMORPG, which as an argument is very 2000 and late.

[jettermelon]

I'm reading the new playtest material for Draw Steel (The MCDM RPG), and I think I'm going to become insufferable. I don't have many articulate thoughts yet, but I just need to forewarn y'all. I'm not going to shut the fuck up about this game for a while, I fear.

[rpgsandbox]

MCDM’s first original game, a new Heroic Fantasy RPG from the folks who brought you;

Strongholds & Followers

Kingdoms & Warfare

The Illrigger

The Beastheart

The Talent

Flee, Mortals!

Where Evil Lives

Comes a brand new game, built from the ground up to give you a better system for running a better game.

Xorannox, The Tyract Lord Syuul

A Fantasy RPG where your character starts, at level 1, already a hero. Maybe even locally famous! You might meet in a tavern, or start in the middle of the action! 

Whether you’re a group of local heroes sent to investigate mysterious goings-on in the nearby haunted wood, or famous mercenaries plotting and scheming in the big city, the MCDM RPG makes building adventures and fighting monsters fun.

Basically, any adventure or story you’re running in your current Fantasy RPG, you can do that in this game. Just, in a more straightforward and fun way, unburdened by sacred cows from the 1970s.

You can absolutely run epic games with heroes exploring dungeons, but this game is not about dungeoncrawling. You don’t track torches or rations or worry about running out of light.

You can plunge, heedless of danger, into a dark and haunted forest, but this game is not about exploration. No hexes to explore.

By focusing on the core fantasy of epic heroes fighting monsters and tyranny, we think we can deliver a better experience for your friends and your table.

Fighting monsters in this game is a dynamic, action-oriented blast. Heroes and monsters often have abilities that knock their opponents into walls, through doors, into each other. 

Every hero has a small array of cool, thematic abilities they can use every round. You gain resources in this game as you play, so battles get more epic as they go. No slog.

The game uses 2d6, plus a handful of d4s and d8s. When you attack, you roll 2d6, add one of your attributes, and that is how much damage you do. Your attack roll IS your damage roll. 

You cannot miss. No more wasted turns, no more burning resources on spells only for your target to “save.”

Lady Morgant Lord Saxton

We love fighting monsters! But there’s more to the game than that!

Certain NPCs can be negotiated with to get them to change their allegiance or reconsider their actions. (Technically, ANY npc can be negotiated with but there’s usually only one per adventure) These NPCs have stats like Patience and Interest. 

We also plan on rules for Research & Crafting to let players unlock ancient secrets and build wonderous marvels. 

We have ideas for how to make language fluency relevant, better rules for wealth, renown. But it’s unknown how much of that we can fit in a 400 page rulebook.

full resolution - What is this game?

full resolution - Building A Heroic Narrative

full resolution - Tactician

full resolution - Dwarves

full resolution - Revenants

full resolution - Forced Movement

full resolution - Kits

full resolution - Necromancer

We are funding two books!

Heroes Basically, The Rulebook. Approximately 400 pages of rules for making characters, character customization, advancement. There’ll be ancestries (classic and new!), classes, skills, rules for combat, negotiation, research & crafting, and more!

We really like customizing characters and giving players lots of options. Even two heroes of the same class and ancestry can be very different in this game.

Monsters A monster book! Basically, Flee, Mortals! without the Villain Parties or Environments. MOST of the monsters in our 5E monster book, plus all the stuff we had to cut, and a bunch of new stuff!

You’ll also get rules for building balanced (or deliberately unbalanced depending on how much trouble your players have gotten into) encounters.

We’ve been testing and developing this game internally for almost a year now, but that was just the folks at the office and our friends. The first packet went to our Contract Testers back in August and have been pounding on it ever since.

The game is already working and it’s already fun! For the next 18 months we’ll be adding more classes, ancestries, progression, customization, and rewards.

We take testing very seriously. We want to make books that are fun to read, full of great ideas for your world and your game, and fun to play and that takes time. Polish, iteration, and lots of testing.

You do not need to take our work for it, come to the Discord and talk to them directly, or join a future playtest.

We think we can get these two PDFs finished by June of 2025, but we don’t think you’ll have to wait that long to play it.

If things go well, we intend to get you, our backers, a playtest packet sometime next year, hopefully by Q2 2024. 

We intend to publish this game under an open license, probably something like the Shadowdark license, because we want you, and anyone who wants to, to make, share, publish their own work using these rules and set in this world.

We hope, by the time the PDF exists, folks will not only have been playing this game for months, they’ll be making, sharing, selling their own original works using this material.

Lord Kenway Pinna

Backerkit campaign ends: Jan 5, 2024 at 8:01am GMT

Website: [MCDM Productions] [facebook] [twitter] [instagram] [youtube] [discord]

[grimseverity]

Judge, Tiefling Illrigger from the Chain of Acheron MCDM 5e Actual Play :) art by me

[sunbeargames]

Got to run the playtest of Draw Steel for my players. It's the new "tactical cinematic heroic fantasy" TTRPG from MCDM.

As a combat engine, it's a huge improvement from 5e. Better resource economy and better class design.

Everyone has a "heroic resource" to manage that goes up during each fight and can be spent on cool abilities. Rather than spamming Fireball at the start of each encounter, your cool moves are what you use to actually turn the tide of the fight or finish off the enemies.

Your turn is never wasted on missing. The Power Roll has a 3-tier result system, and on most abilities even getting a tier 1 result still does something good. You are always making progress, and so you never have the issue of waiting for your turn and then accomplishing nothing because you rolled a 1.

Initiative works by swapping back and forth between the heroes and the Director. The players pick one person to go, then I have a monster (or small group of monsters) act, then another player goes. The players decide the order they act in, which promotes a lot of teamwork.

The Director has a resource called Villain Points they can gain and spend like the Heroic Resources, so I can pull out cooler abilities as the fight goes on.

All that stuff is really flashy and cool, and was surprisingly easy to run. It was a little rocky like learning a new system always is, but we got the hang of things pretty fast.

I think ultimately Draw Steel still has to prove it can support the person running the game better than 5e did (a low bar, admittedly).

Currently, I'm waiting to see how it handles fail states other than dying. The heroes are hard to kill, which I like, but that means there needs to be ways for them to lose without the adventure ending, otherwise the stakes kind of just disappear because I'd have an incentive to pull my punches and not have things end in an anticlimactic fashion.

Rules for things like retreating, chase scenes, heroes being captured, and generally making it easy to help the party fail forward are going to be really important.

[thingsareswinging]

So I got the play test packet for The MCDM RPG the other day and decided to run it with my players, most of whom (myself included) had only ever seriously played D&D5e. This proved to be a mixed blessing, because it turned out that everyone instantly latched onto The MCDM RPG quicker than they ever clicked with 5e combat, and they had a grand time to the point where they would like our current campaign to be converted over to this new system.

Which is a problem because The MCDM RPG has not actually been written yet. It currently exists only in the form of five pregenerated characters and a clock tower full of kobolds. The kobolds do have jet packs, but it’s still not enough to actually make a campaign around.

[level2janitor]

so i played a oneshot of MCDM game

my thoughts:

autohit is wonderful and i'll forever be baffled by people saying they like missed attacks

every character gets multiple at-wills, which are largely "make an attack + do small cool thing" or "do big cool thing". every at-will (at least for the class i picked) gives you a bit of the class resource you use to do your strongest attacks. this is overall good and meant there were basically no boring turns for me. not only no missed attacks, but no turns where i just attacked. 2 at-wills come from your class and 1 comes from your kit, so there's a lot of mix-n-matching you can do there which is very cool

each turn you get 1 action & 1 maneuver (aka movement). no bonus action. but i never missed having a bonus action, because A) your attacks all have rider effects so you're doing a lot besides attacking even without it, and B) there are a lot of maneuvers besides moving. so on turns when you don't move, you get to grapple someone or give an ally advantage or give an enemy disadvantage or whatever

the fact that you can swap out your movement for something else actually made me not hate opportunity attacks, which i didn't think any game was going to do. nice job MCDM

there's mechanics for in-depth negotiation you pull out when you need to convince an NPC of something that'll change the course of the adventure (not used for less-important social situations). they're fine. i like them better than charisma checks, i don't think i like them better than just talking things out with no roll like i do when i run my OSR games.

this game basically solves the adventuring day problem bc you get various bonuses that scale with number of battles/conflicts won since your last rest. you can even run a low-combat game perfectly well if the occasional combats you do have are very tough & you hand out lots of victories for non-combat challenges

the layout of the playtest rules is not good. it's very wordy with little to no use of bold text or bullet points to make the most important bits jump out and easier to parse when looking up rules during play. reminded me unpleasantly of 5e. god i hope they don't ship without addressing this

[xochilexart]

Finally finished this piece of Gwinnora, a wode elf NPC in the Draw Steel game I'm running!

[the-d12rose]

The death of Blood Drinker Vrin from the absolutely stellar DUSK, MCDM's 4e liveplay. You can watch/listen to the whole thing on YouTube, and I highly recommend it. My favorite actual play!

[wretchedelights]

My coworker is going to be running the MCDM RPG playtest later this week for a bunch of us, and I'm super hyped to try it out. So meet Gheldyr, the wode elf shadow I'll be playing as.

There isn't a tonne of info about the setting floating around yet, but I found a bit of art of the wode elves and they just look so damn cool that I had to draw mine.

[pocgamer]

Bailing on the OGL: 3 Companies, 3 Directions

When Wizards pulled their OGL nonsense back in January and February, several major companies made announcements about their plans to forge ahead on their own. Now it’s nearly a year later, and we’re seeing the results. Three companies, three directions, let’s dive in. Continue reading Untitled

[thelibraryofthacey]

Review: Draw Steel Backer Packet 1

I recently ran a playtest game of Draw Steel, a TTRPG being developed by MCDM. I’ve been a diehard Matt Colville fan since before he started MCDM, so suffice to say I’ve been very eager to get my hands on Draw Steel. Now that I have, I feel obligated to write out my thoughts on the game that I ran.

A few disclaimers before I get into it, though. First, the game I ran was accurately billed as a first draft. It was essentially the bare minimum needed to run a game - half the classes, only level one, a few cohorts of low-level monsters, bare-bones character sheets, etc. What I saw was not necessarily representative of the final product.

Second, the adventure I ran was also one provided in the packet and written by MCDM. That module colored my experience of the game at least as much as the rules themselves, but I’ll get into that later. 

Third, as mentioned, longtime diehard Colville fan. I am biased.

Let’s also clear up which version of the game I’m talking about. The game I ran was from the first “backer packet,” sent out to folks who had backed the game at the end of August. The game has certainly undergone revisions and expansions since then, but I don’t have access to those since I’m not on MCDM’s Patreon.

Alright, let’s dive in!

Presentation

Given that this was, as advertised, the bare minimum needed to play a game, the rules suffered from an almost total lack of formatting. It was a tiny step above raw text, just a pdf with chapters and headings. The pdf did have bookmarks, but the toolbar is fully exploded when you open it. Given the sheer number of headings, this made it no more useful for navigation than scrolling the pages themselves. Finding the rule we needed in a given moment was difficult.

The ordering of the document was good for character creation, but bad for rules referencing. You have the absolute core mechanics, then step-by-step character creation, then detailed rules. Having the rules split by all the character options was less than ideal. If I needed to hunt for a rule, I didn’t know whether that rule was going to be towards the front of the document or towards the back, and guessing wrong meant a lot more scrolling.

I wasn’t playing a character, as I was the GM, but several of my players complained about the character sheets being messy, making it hard to find their own abilities and get a sense of what their options were. On my end, I thought the monster statblocks were very well done, with everything I needed to know presented in a nice, compact entry.

On the one hand, I was forewarned of the lack of formatting, and the backers were told that we may prefer to wait for a better formatted document, so there is a bit of caveat emptor here. Still, I don’t think you should ever let a customer’s first impression of your product be that much of a mess, even if they opt into it. It’s only going to do you a disservice, potentially killing their hype with frustration. If I absolutely had to see every rule and revision as early as possible, I’d be on the Patreon.

One part about the formatting I did like, though, was the conversational writing style and the use of prose to sell the game’s fiction. For example, each of the playable ancestries is preceded by a short scene that shows their place in the game’s pre-packaged setting. I found it very effective, though not all my players would agree with me. One said that the Devil ancestry’s entry made them seem very silly, and described the writing style as “too quippy for [their] taste.” That is to say, your mileage may vary.

Mechanics

I’m going to assess the game mechanics in terms of Draw Steel’s tagline: Tactical Cinematic Heroic Fantasy. After discussing the core dice mechanic, that is

The core mechanic is a bit unusual for a game of this type in that you roll against static targets that are not affected by the enemy and/or difficulty of the task at hand. In fact, they don’t ever change, it’s always 12-16 for a moderate result and 17+ for a good result. I don’t hate it, but I’m not sure how that’s going to play out as you level up. It sounds like your bonuses will increase, but not the targets?

In theory, a low roll still does something small, but that didn’t exactly pan out in practice. Humans in Draw Steel are magic resistant, expressed as a small subtraction from magic damage taken. This is nevertheless enough to blank some weaker magic attacks. Also, skill checks still just fail on a bad roll. 

Tactical

I’d say the game’s pretty tactical. Positioning is very important, not so much for flanking bonuses and such but because forced movement is very common. It’s also got popcorn initiative, which forces the players to coordinate their tactics so they can decide who goes next. It does make the GM create maps with interesting terrain on them. More work, but worthwhile.

Cinematic

When I first heard the tagline, I was very curious to find out how game mechanics could be “cinematic,” and after playing the game, I still am! In my assessment, “cinematic” is more a question of presentation, narration, and adventure design than mechanics. I have serious doubts that game mechanics can be cinematic. I think the closest I’ve seen is… maybe Feng Shui? No, not even then, it’s really just the mechanics referencing action movie tropes. Presentation. 

Heroic

I’m… not sold on the mechanics being “heroic,” and the main reason is how the game handles failure. As @sunbeargames noted, there isn’t really a failure state for combat other than “everyone dies.” Combined with a low time to kill, this makes the game a lot more lethal than I was expecting, which isn’t particularly heroic if you ask me.

Skill checks being able to just fail also contributes to a lack of heroic flavor. My players rolled very badly on a skill cha - sorry, Montage Test, and they got slapped with some pretty gnarly consequences without actually making any decisions that led to them. That felt very arbitrary and disempowering.

On the plus side, the process of character creation necessarily introduces narrative elements into your character - you have to choose an inciting incident from your background, for example, and you get benefits based on the one you choose. It makes it easy to make a fleshed-out heroic character, rather than a guy with a penchant for violence.

Fantasy

There’s elves and wizards and demons and stuff. Check. The setting is pretty rad, honestly, which makes sense given that Colville has been developing it for decades.

The Module

I don’t have a lot to say in favor of the module. It is a very cool scenario and a great inciting incident - the city the heroes are in is suddenly attacked by a demonic army, and they must escape while saving as many civilians as they can - but it does not fit the game. It’s not heroic fantasy action - it’s dark and violent. The heroes didn’t feel like saviors, it felt like they were just surviving themselves, and only just. This would have been a great scenario for a gritty, dark fantasy kind of system, but that’s not what Draw Steel is supposed to be.

There were some odd plot holes as well. For example, the final battle involves securing a ship to sail the civilians out of the city. But the narration before that battle includes a giant sea monster out in the bay, which the module does not have the heroes deal with. Also, for some reason it assumes that the heroes do not themselves get on the ship and have to find some other means of escape for themselves.

Finally, there is a lot going on in all of these fights. There’s secondary objectives, there’s changing terrain, there’s encounter-specific mechanics… and that’s cool and all, but I feel the need to point out that this is most likely a player’s first encounter with the system. They’ve got enough to worry about just learning the game! Draw Steel is not a lightweight system!

Conclusions

Overall, Draw Steel is a mechanically interesting game, but I don’t think they quite hit their target this go around. That can be fixed in later revisions, of course, but I think MCDM needs to assess whether their design is serving their goals. My enthusiasm for the game is not totally dispelled, but it is certainly diminished.

[corful]

Valtari, my Fury Devil im playing in the current packet & The Fall of Blackbottom! She got infused with the Primordial Chaos and raised from the beginning as a guard for the elite of a crime organisation, her "family". After a long time of service, she was forced to take the heat for a mistake of the organisation. While in jail and up for execution, a lucky break allowed her to escape. Disillusioned and nowhere to go, she joined the Chain of Acheron and was stationed in Blackbottom. Im having a lot of fun with Draw Steel, very excited for whats to come!!