This isn't going to be a full review but I want to say, Draw Steel is a very fun system that makes combat a dynamic team based experience and when it hits, it HITS. I also don't think it is a system that I personally enjoy, and I may do a more in depth review in the future. Also it is quite possible we did not play it correctly as the GM added/adjusted rules over the course of the year.
Recently a year long campaign ended in a bit of a kerfuffle after a particularly heated session. I wanted to take a few words here to dissect what went wrong with the game and what we are doing going forward. For clarity the group is still playing and the GM is still going to be GM'ing as I think we have a better handle on what our all expectations are.
The campaign premise was that of an artifact hunt. Magical items known as artifacts had begun popping up throughout the world a few years before our game takes place. These artifacts have a tendency to warp reality around them and generally be a menace so our party made our money disposing of them. The campaign operated on a repeating 3 step process: Find artifact, Figure out how to overcome obstacle to get the artifact, Deal with the Artifact. The system we decided to run this in was Draw Steel (which I will touch on later) and we played this via VTT on Roll20 (Which worked great for Draw Steel). Following each session we would also have a recap for the session to talk about how we liked the sessions, what we want to change, and what we are looking forward too. So far so good.
For most of the campaign the sessions were hit or miss, the ones that were combat focused tended towards being better liked, but some of our lowest sessions were also combat encounters. Throughout the campaign there was an ongoing feeling of lack of direction and we had multiple player turnover for a variety of reasons but at least one stated that it was due to that lack of direction combined with a lack of player autonomy (a point on this later).
The players loved the in between moments in this campaign as the characters interacted with each other and we used our abilities out of combat to solve non-combat challenges. The flash point for this campaign was after a series of sessions primarily focused on roleplay we all threw up our hands, the GM exclaiming they wanted us to "actually do something!" and the players exclaiming "We didn't know what to do!". This devolved into a back and forth of everyone being transparent (and at times a bit pointed) about what wasn't working and what was. Eventually we reeled it back and and had a constructive discussion about how to actually fix our problems instead of just bitching.
The primary issue which was underlying all the issues we brought up was one of communication and autonomy. The three step process I highlighted above was suppose to clarify what we were expected to do at any given time but it ended up being more confusing and often removed our autonomy as players. In play what it often ended up being was:
- Phase 1 - Hear random rumors while out adventuring, ask around for more details and get rebuffed, add the rumor the 'Eventually' list and move on.
- Phase 2a - Finally find an artifact location, evaluate obstacle stopping us (e.g. Giant ice wall that hurts us getting near it), leave to get get info about obstacle.
- Phase 2b - Run between multiple contacts, sometimes multiple cities trying to track down info on how to solve to overcome the obstacle. <-- This was a dead-end quite a lot, and we oft abandoned this rumor and chose another.
- Phase 2c - Do multiple side jobs to buy favors from contacts to afford solution to solve obstacle issue.
- Phase 3a - Return to artifact and bypass issue, secure artifact.
- Phase 3b - Figure out who to sell it to or how to dispose of it, this often took months IRL.
This cycle was only really completed twice during our full year of play. A half dozen or so dead-ended and we began pursuing other rumors, or chose to completely derail and go do a hook related to a characters past or some other random NPC hook. The primary stopping force for us was the lack of actionable information we were presented with. The NPC's we talked to would often rebuff us, not know what we were talking about, and we would run out of contacts and random people to talk to. At first this was fine and the group discussed how to get more info from people but regardless of what we tried more info was never forthcoming. We never had the key to slot into the conversations to unlock even part of the solution.
Here is a specific example of this issue: A magical storm is blocking our path, so we go talk to the magical academy. They direct us to talk to a mage who specializes in magical storms, we find them and ask about how to stop or protect ourselves from a storm. "Just destroy the artifact creating it." was the only info we were able to get from them, info we already knew. We had no other contacts related to this issue, and the academy couldn't direct us to anyone else. We abandoned this rumor.
This is an issue of actionability, we found ourselves in a place where there felt to be no actionable choice for us to make. Often we would find ourself sitting with a list of rumors and dead ends and no clue about where to go next. These weren't hurdles our abilities or clever thinking could overcome (they were specifically called out as issues that needed research or outside assistance)and so we would just go down a side-quest and derail the session. This was made even worse by abilities in the vein of "You know a guy" which would normally be able to be called upon in these scenarios being made obsolete, they had no functional effect other than giving us one more person to talk to who never had the info we needed. This just lead to more frustration.
So that's a lot of issues and complaining, but what can we do to circumvent this issue in the future? First we decided to leave Drawl Steel behind and switch to something more focused on a story rather than combat (leading candidate is Legend in the Mist). The second is that players need to make better notes, and the GM needs to be clearer about who and what is relevant. Third is that the phase system needs to be shortened dramatically and have way less running around, so we can feel like we are making progress. Fourth and final is that our abilities matter, we should not be nerfing, removing, or modifying them in a way that nullifies them without full group input.
Hopefully the next campaign we all run together we can find a way to make this all work. Not every campaign is sunshine and rainbows, and to get better at running and playing games you need to practice. It's also key to remember that communication is the most important thing in a game, we failed at it, and then we started fixing it.
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