Two questions:1) Any ideas for convincing them not to do that? (We play 5E, Call of Cthulhu and occasionally OSE)2) If I had to pick, which one of the two is the least cancerous?
I heard draw steel got rid of mage user classes so not that one
I heard draw steel got rid of mage user classes so pick that one
I heard draw steel got rid of mage user classes so maybe that one
>>97181378If you’re the GM:“Hey guys, we got a lot on our plate right now, and I’m not really interested in learning to run a new system at the moment. Maybe once we wrap up one of our sessions, we can look into picking up one of those games up, but for now, let’s just stick with what we have.” If they’re really insistent, try a limited one shot of one or the other to see how you like it. I’m sure both have quick starts with pregens and a module.
Hello, anon, let me try to convince you to not play Draw Steel with some pictures.I don't know jackshit about Daggerheart, but it cannot be worse.
I heard mage classes are not in draw steel.
>>97181509I usually try not to be judgmental about these sort of things, but something about hitting the phrase "high fantasy urban intrigue" hit me with a huge dose of "Oh... oh no...."
>>97181564"High Fantasy Urban Intrigue" is the 2025 equivalent of, "grim fantasy" in 2014. It's an oversaturated term that ultimately means nothing. Politics aside, everyone wants to do do a "big city where everything happens" adventure and absolutely nobody learns from history that every "big city where everything happens" in tabletop is *not* where everything happens. Absalom was written as the biggest city in the world in Pathfinder, but it's the podunk towns of Varisia that get the attention.
>>97181545I don’t have an issue with this. I like the idea of their being some weird mysterious force where people just go “Oh yeah that happens” about it sometimes.
>>97181598*thereWhat is wrong with me today. I keep making weird errors like that.
>>97181595I think my main issue with urban fantasy is that there has been no decent examples of it for decades, arguably if not ever, and the people who are using that for a setting are likely drawing from some pretty fetid waters. It's a red flag on the level of a girl having a bookshelf that looks like the Paranormal Romance section at a Barnes&Nobel.
>>97181643Isn't that just the James Bond guy? Is this aislop?
>>97181653Eberron?
>>97181673No huge love or hate for Eberron, but it came out more than two decades ago.
>>97181673>He thinks people actually played Eberron, much less in the giant New York City
>>97181378Both are shit for different reasons, because they are trying to be different games. Here's a 40 minute video on Daggerheart, but the long and short of it is that the game design is nonsensical and despite claims that it is made to be "narrative first" and roleplay heavy, the system is more of a clunky video game than anything else. More "metacurrency-first" than any sort of TTRPG game design that makes sense. The Hope and Fear shit gets old fast and the fact that everything is just vibes based and whenever the GM feels like interrupting, but also whenever the players feel like doing whatever they want as long as they have enough "I can do whatever I want" points... It just doesn't fucking work even half as well as people assume it does from skim reading.https://youtu.be/pXe0QwYs-j8
>>97181697I've played Eberron many times. Sharn is a good city but Stormreach is better
>>97181739How the fuck is it even humanly possible to produce this much dickless writing?
>>97181643>>97181656Alright, this is not the kind of rpg I thought it was
>>97181378Daggerheart is a very, very distantly PbtA-ish, narative-focused RPG. If you are into the PbtA and FitD sphere, then you might like Daggerheart.Draw Steel is a grid-based tactical combat RPG, directly descended from D&D 4e. If you want something like 4e, then you will probably prefer Draw Steel over Daggerheart.That is the long and short of it.I have some experience GMing Daggerheart, and a significant load of experience running and playing Draw Steel.
>>97181399Draw Steel has the conduit (i.e. cleric), the elementalist, the talent (i.e. psion), and the summoner for "mage" classes.>>97181595>>97181653>>97181673>>97181694>>97181697>>97181730I have played and GMed Eberron a lot, almost always with a significant emphasis on Sharn.I have had no issues whatsoever running "high fantasy urban intrigue" in Eberron's Sharn. It has been my mainstay genre when GMing for the past several years. I like big, industrialized cities where lots of international intrigue happens.I am willing to count Planescape's Sigil as close enough, and I have run a bunch of games there, too.
>>97181928>>97181909nononono he's out of containment. go back to your threadposting
>>97181928>conduit (i.e. cleric)Based on the other things I've seen from the game ITT, I'm gonna guess it's gay as fuck.
>>97181378>Any ideas for convincing them not to do that?say you're gonna run a game and don't use either system. pretty simple.
>>97182105It's a weird package....but I believe the "bones" are damn good.The design is a weird selection of dressing up old fantasy classics or putting a personal spin on some but there's still some familiar base elements to make most adaptation pretty easy...but then there's these sudden shifts or additions towards cosmopolitan or multi-dimensional elements that just feel so out of turn.Ya you got your wode elf martial, your still subterranean but different-skinned dwarf cleric-like and what not in a medieval fantasy...BUT THEN THEY GOT THIS MOHAWK GEM-EYED TIMERIDER WHO IS ALSO PART OF THE PARTY WITH HIS INTERDIMENSIONAL LIVING SHIP AND LAZZZERS and its so weird.And you keep finding these sudden shifts across various parts of the game, if it be races, classes, lore, locations, kits. Just a large bunch of "okay but why though?" to allow the game to have a chance to be played into separate genres like urban intrigue or space fantasy. And likely could, but I felt they could have done each as their own full content expansions rather than adding the seeds of them here and expecting everyone to be okay with allowing Memoneks to be present and a typical part of a non-multidimensional setting.They talked a lot about "not wanting to make oatmeal" or other iterations of avoiding "bland/unoriginal/boring" during the development of the game but I feel like in trying not to be oatmeal, they fell into making quinoa....with raisins.To extend the metaphor, I had wished they would have stuck to making a tall and impressive stack of pancakes, so each person can put take some and add the toppings/dressings to their taste and add extra butter if one had felt they didn't add enough...So ya my intent is to redress a large amount of it to be cohesive rather than make players be barred from a notable amount of content that's out place. Which is fine by me, but can really throw people who are expecting a more...focused first product for a game.
>>97181378Daggerheart insist you use its Proprietary Cards and Proprietary DiceDrawsteel can be played off PDFs
>>97182602DS was SOOOOO close to doing proprietart dice too (or at least official version but being able to use like a d6 and knowing which numbers correlated.It DOES call for using a D3 which I have always found fucking weird and was against during its development. Just say use D6 and allowing D3 instead.
>>97182592Yeah, it just tried being way too much shit at once.
>>97181378Daggerheart is all of the theater-kid portions of 5e wrapped into a bow.Drawsteel leans hard into the grid-based combat slog. If you're already playing 5e, just ask yourself which one you think is the less cancerous part.
>>97182105I have a lot of experience playing and GMing for conduits. They are a very serviceable cleric-like class, albeit focused squarely on the "pure caster" style of cleric, with only the tiniest of concessions given to the "warpriest" type. That is more of the censor (i.e. paladin).>>97182592>>97182774I do not think that is quite the full picture.The built-in setting of Draw Steel is divided into three subsettings:• The continent of Vasloria: Generic, pseudo-medieval, Western European fantasy.• The vast and cosmopolitan city of Capital: The kind of high fantasy that takes place in a big and bustling city inspired by real-world London, Paris, Venice, etc. during the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.• The other planets of the timescape, focused chiefly on the upper worlds: Space fantasy with laser swords, laser pistols, and space pirates.If you just want generic """""medieval""""" fantasy, where memonek and time raiders are exceptionally rare curiosities, set your game in Vasloria and restrict memonek and time raider PCs.This is not some homebrew house rule. This is right in the core rulebook, p. 15, at the start of the character creation section:>The Director should tell the players if any options are limited or rare in their campaign. For example, some Directors don’t want psionics to appear in their game worlds, so they might decide that heroes can’t be nulls or talents. Another campaign might be grounded in more typical medieval fantasy and not have any memonek or time raiders, or those ancestries might be exceedingly rare. In the latter case, players should know that their memonek or time raider heroes are likely to get a lot of questions from curious NPCs.Bear in mind that memonek and time raiders are really rather rare in Vasloria to begin with, by default.
>>97181653>no decent examples of it for decades Someone here will hate on all of the following but they're done well for indi rpgs. >Blades in the DarkAbstract city, basically cheated by having it be very handwavey so the abstraction fit just enough to run with. Don't like it myself but its been quite successful and influential.>SpireSome commie trash mixed with drowfagging in ways I didn't think were possible but there it is. All sorts of shitwits like this one. >5e Ravnica Forget when that came out, likely sucks. >Vornhiem Getting older, won some awards, ymmv. >Into the Cess and Citadel Weakest of the Veins of the Earth ripoffs, probably sold well anyway and was lauded as a toolkit by those who wanted to ideologically distance themselves from the edgy part of art osr. >Welcome to Corpathium Series of blog posts, probably the best of the lot. Does a weird dark fantasy city quite well. Have to do some of the work yourself, its a blog.
>>97181653I ran a game in a homebrewed version of Salt in Wound (a city centered around the tarrasque, pinned to the earth by immovable harpoons). I think a cityscape campaign can be loads of fun when you key out important buildings, streets, and districts. And have interesting factions with goals. The players plotting their course through the city or figuring out where they want to buy property are fun examples of what might occur. I would not do it again since eventually it gets a bit samey.
>>97181378... didn't you made this thread on Friday, and before that on Tuesday?
>>97181909It's actually a weird thread because the only thing the two have in common is some people hate both. Daggerheart is closer to being some kind of story game and there's no way anyone should be going for it unless that's exactly what they want. And Draw Steel, likewise, has so much effort put into having good grid based combat that it makes precious little sense for a table not interested in that to try it once.I think the work behind Daggerheart and the way it has been sold is a little more offensive. Daggerheart doesn't really need to exist, and I think eventually it mostly won't. I'm not sure if the market exists for Draw Steel to be popular, but there's a reason it exists, the weirdo influencer who mostly made it actually likes and wants it, and it clearly serves an actual purpose for actual tables. It could flop; it's based on 4e, and anything that isn't 5e basically has no tables. But that is fine, market preference has no intersection with whether a game *should* exist.I just can't imagine anyone asking for help deciding between them. It's like "Instead of this motocycle that gets me places, I've been thinking of a unicycle or a jet ski."
>>97183885Those two are my posts.I've had to step away quite a bit more from following DS back in the beginning of the year, BUT, if I recall correctly from my time following the 2024 releases for playtesting (and I am totally okay being corrected here), Capital is set *in* Vasloria as its greatest city "that ever was and ever will be". So it really feels like Sigil shoved into middle of Middle Earth. Same pattern of cohesion, cohesion, new spin, WACKY addition, no?Doesn't help that they came out of the gate with pointing to Vasloria as one of many worlds of a multiverse from the start, so why would anyone care about the fates of subsistence farmers or the equivalent when the stakes are already set so high to be plane-spanning.And I mean those that take the whole setting sold at face value as one large thing rather than something that is meant to be pick-n-choose.
I'm in a weekly draw steel game. It's mediocre. The system is easy, completely and solely based on running combats with a lot of hand-waving what happens between the combats. It's incredibly gamey and rubbish for telling a story or getting into your character but if you treat it like a board game with character sheets it becomes decent fun.
>>97185385>the only thing the two have in common They were both being promoted as the 5e-killer at around the same time, during the OGL debacle.
>>97185995How are the balance choices? I immediately went to check out their version of dragonborn, the dragon knights. Their breath weapon option costs 2 of their three racial build points and looks like it sucks total ass. I'm not sure I'm reading it correctly but that's a pet peeve of mine, having a breath weapon and it is never smart to use. Is that option trash or ok?And more broadly does the balance seem good between classes? That seems like something they wouldn't get wrong, but you're playing it so how is it at your table?
>>97181378I would honestly and truely pick the most cancerous one first, just so i can try more game systems with my group.After it proved to suck (or not?) we can then switch to your second choice and try that.Trying multiple game systems trumps "picking a system."
Daggerfail is Critical Role garbage, meant for theater kids and their deranged audience.
>>97181697Tons of us were playing it in the 00s when it was the hot new thing, lil zoomie.
>>97186032There's definitely haves and have-nots in the options. Looking at the breath attack specifically it looks decent for a racial. It's less powerful than, say, an elementalist's AoE abilities, but the game likes to throw hordes of weak - and I mean really weak - enemies at you.As far as overall balance it seems okay so far. We have whatever the paladin archetype is called, a rogue, a psion, and my elementalist and we all contribute. I'm running away with the damage but the psion buffs like a motherfucker and the paladin is basically impossible to hurt.
>>97181643>>97181656Main issue is this kinda stuff should have been in a separate supplement. Nothing about any of it is bad outright, but your main product should be closer to traditional fantasy (if you're doing that at all) and then other books focus on spelljamming and outer planes. Why? Those are more niche interests.
>>97181739>>97181866Castrated writing, even. Maybe a few weak-willed people would have such a reaction, these people would be called heretical and likely would convert away from their own beliefs. There should be no room for a truly pious believer to not see their own gods as better and more powerful.
>>97185914Yeah, Vasloria and Capital are on two different continents with a sea between them. This isn't an official map, but it gets the idea across. Capital is somewhere on the coast of Rioja.To your other point about the scope of the setting it always felt pretty standard to me. When you're low level you deal with local stuff and at high level you deal with big plane jumping world ending stuff.
>>97185914This is incorrect.Capital is in the continent of Rioja, which is separated from the continent of Vasloria by an ocean and a supernatural maelstrom. They have trade and contact with one another (there are always people foolhardy enough to brave the maelstrom), but the vortex limits it.Rioja and Vasloria are both continents of the world of Orden, which is one of the lower worlds. While the upper worlds have the metaphysical energies necessary for space opera technology to function, the lower worlds do not, as per the core rulebook, p. 12:>Traveling downward from Quintessence one arrives on Orden, the Plane of Gods and Sorcery, highest of the lower worlds where magic rules. The gods, forbidden from interfering directly in a world with such a low energy state, rely on saints to enact their will. Technology from the upper worlds does not function down here, unless powered by a strong psionic mind or the miracle mineral iridoss, also known as prismacore.The division between the subsettings is fairly coherent. I know that it might superficially look like a wild hodgepodge of a setting where lots of memonek and time raiders are running around """""medieval""""" fantasyland, but it is not.>>97185995There are actual rules for montages (i.e. 4e-style skill challenges) and negotiations. That is more than D&D 5e and Daggerheart can say.
>>97181378If you're not interested in either then why force yourself to run it? If they players are really interested then they can run it with you as a player.I haven't played Daggerheart but I love DS. If you like shit that makes you feel cool and smooth engaging combats I recommend that system heavily. I could talk a lot about the things I like about it.
>>97186032>>97186130PC option balance in Draw Steel is okay enough. There are definitely some outliers and "correct" builds.Forced movement builds completely demolish enemies without high stability, and a hakaan null (metakinetic) is probably the one build with the highest optimization ceiling in the game because of this. Yes, a "monk" shoving people around is as strong as it gets. A good runner-up might be a hakaan fury likewise abusing forced movement, probably with a Hurling weapon for range.I hope you do not mind some Reddit links, because these two threads cover a hakaan null and a hakaan fury:https://www.reddit.com/r/drawsteelbuilds/comments/1mulvvi/what_are_your_thoughts_on_a_hakaan_nulls/https://www.reddit.com/r/drawsteelbuilds/comments/1mwh4p1/the_king_a_reaver_fury_forced_movement_build/Aside from these, I have noted that virtually every high-optimization party wants a tactician (i.e. warlord), because it allows a party to coordinate their tactics and focus their fire far better than, say, a troubadour (i.e. bard). Similarly, the talent (i.e. psion) has some rather nutty hard control, like level 2 Slow and level 3 Fling Through Time, and its level 1(!) Flashback allows the party to spam some of its better synergies.Honorable mention goes to the fury's level 2 You Are Already Dead, which can completely blow through a higher-level elite and trivialize it.None of these stronger options are well and truly game-breaking. They just throw some real wrenches into encounters.Monster balance is jankier. Some monsters punch well above their listed encounter value (EV), such as griffons who can easily cheese Grabbing and dropping, and all of the dragons except for maybe the gloom dragon.I have written a document showcasing just how much the thorn dragon punches well above its EV:https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JyrnHfZ1pUTCW4GJMtB-agThnhNjtaw9Dc39tJAqx5M/editThese are not even high-level enemies. Griffons and thorn dragons are merely level 2.
>>97181378daggerheart is based and i like it
