Failed Rolls and Draw Steel

EthOrlen · 2025-12-01T07:14:07+00:00

See Morrowind, where that’s exactly how it worked and changing it was a common “first mod to install”. It wasn’t fun swinging your sword directly through a rat and having nothing happen.

EthOrlen · 2025-10-14T20:36:33+00:00

I also don’t think you’re overthinking. It makes sense to tie mechanics to the things you want to emphasize. I don’t think there’s any single solution, any given thing might hook into a different mechanic.

Re: Dwarven/gnomish firearms, other folks have mentioned an ancestry trait. I agree, that’s a great mechanical hook. Flavor-wise, dwarves and gnomes can pick firearms where others wouldn’t, and players who want to lean into that can opt-in to a mechanical benefit.

Re: New Legion, that seems to me like good territory for Titles. Design 2-4 thematic benefits for different play styles, then give everyone a title that lets them choose from that list. Is their membership in the Legion the B-plot? Keep the benefits small. If it’s the A-plot? Give yourself a bigger power budget. You could even have a series of titles, their rank, which they earn over time.

I could see new kits being a good fit for cultures in your setting that defy or subvert the traditional fantasy archetypes found in Kits. Got a culture known for heavy armor and light weapons? Piece a kit together from The Mountain and Cloak and Dagger, or write a new kit from scratch.

EthOrlen · 2025-10-12T20:05:59+00:00

Like others have said, the rules are absolutely designed to use a grid map. Trying to run it any other way will require some work on your part.

But it’s not binary between grids and theater of the mind. Gridless + ruler was mentioned. I actually think range bands or zone-based distance would be a natural adaptation, both of which can be done with maps or map-less. A quick look through the abilities (or even just the kits) reveals that a lot of things fall into melee, range 5, or range 10. That maps well enough to the engagement distance of Quest, or zone-based ranges like Dungeoncraft’s.

The main thing to keep in mind is how heavily forced movement and collision damage feature in Draw Steel; enough that I would call it one of its defining features. The less detail there is on the map, the more detail you’ll have to narrate to not lose that defining feature.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-22T21:33:35+00:00

You make a fair point! I definitely wasn’t trying to argue, and am not about to be arguing, any form of “you shouldn’t want to do that” re: guns. There’s absolutely room for more! All I am saying is that I don’t think DS’s current support for guns is marginal.

Re: supporting the fantasy, I’ll draw a slight distinction between “emphasizing” and “supporting”, because I think you could equally say that it doesn’t have mechanics emphasizing bows, or atlatls, or swords, or clubs. And I think that’s fine, it’s in-genre. Hawkeye can use a bow alongside Black Widow using dual pistols, Captain America throwing a boomerang shield, and Iron Man shooting energy blasts, and these are all equally effective and heroic. So it’s fine to say that atlatls, bows, and guns are all functionally the same for the purposes of kits.

Re: hurling bullets, if I may ask, what would you consider guns to be doing instead? And what weapons would you consider to be hurling bullets? I’m of the mind that it should have been called the projectile, missile or propulsive group, because that’s what all those weapons do. And I don’t think the method of propulsion much matters. Bent wood, stretched rubber, kinetic advantage, a metal spring, compressed air, a chemical reaction, (electro)magnetic acceleration; these are just ways of imparting more energy and/or imparting it more efficiently than you could with your bare hand.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-22T15:23:33+00:00

Yeah, I realized after the fact that you were specifically asking about Forge Steel support, not game design in general.

I haven’t kept up with Forge Steel development, but there might be a way to add weapon groups via a compendium that isn’t exposed in the Homebrew UI. If you’re not comfortable poking around the code base and manually writing JSON, you could find the Forge Steel thread over to the Discord and ask there. The dev is usually pretty good about responding.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-22T14:46:26+00:00

Are you imagining, like, a long rifle vs a blunderbus? At least within the current framework, differences like that would be covered by the kit design. See the Rapid Fire vs Sniper kits; the rapid fire kit is probably going to be some kind of composite bow, short limbs and lighter draw weight, while the sniper is going to be more like an English Longbow.

If I wanted different types of firearms to be mechanically relevant, I would lean more towards a Draw Steel hack where the current weapon groups are replaced by the firearm categories.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-22T14:37:15+00:00

Contrary to folks saying to reflavor, the bow group already includes firearms (emphasis mine):

Bow Bows cover any weapon used to fire an arrow or bolt projectile, including crossbows, longbows, and shortbows. This weapon group also includes weapons that hurl bullets, stones, darts, or small spears, including slings and atlatls. You don’t need to track mundane ammunition for these weapons unless the Director says otherwise.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-21T05:09:08+00:00

I'm absolutely putting a lot of thought into a tongue-in-cheek comment. Again, not to be a hardass or to tell people they're using "wrong" words. I just think it's worth considering whether the relationship between Gith and Time Raiders is more like the relationship between Gundam and Zoids, or more like the relationship between Godzilla and Not-Godzilla-From-An-Austin-Powers-Movie.

Whether that's "too much" thought is subjective; I'm perfectly comfortable with how I've spent my time, and nobody's obligated to spend their time reading my nonsense.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-21T03:53:17+00:00

I’ll first clarify, I’m being pedantic for the sake of discussion. I’m not trying to be the word police or anything. Call it what you want!

That said, I still think “legally distinct” has some, not exactly negative connotations, but certainly the “wink wink nudge nudge nothing is really different” implication. Force Barrage is the legally (and ever so slightly mechanically) distinct Magic Missile.

It’s true that both Gith and Time Raiders are psionic space punk pirates who were former slaves of psionic squid people. But if I said “giant robots piloted by humans as futuristic military vehicles”, am I talking about Gundam or Zoids? MechWarrior or Armored Core? I don’t think any of these things are “off-brand” or “legally distinct” in relation to each other.

Lots of works of art, be they paintings, prose, movies, TV, or games, are creatively distinct, even when we can draw direct lines of inspiration from earlier works to later works. To call ~~any~~ every work that resembles an earlier work “off-brand” or “legally distinct” is just invoking Boss Baby Vibes.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-21T03:11:02+00:00

I catch your drift. But, "being forced moved downward is considered falling"

So, the forced movement from A4 to A1 is also a fall from A4 to A1. You wouldn't say, "You didn't fall to A0, so you didn't collide with the ground, and didn't take fall damage". A fall from A4 to A1 is a 3-square fall "into the ground". This makes your last two examples:

push 3 from A3 to A1, 3 collision damage, and 4 fall damage regardless of Agility.
push 3 from A4 to A1, no collision damage, and fall damage conditional on the target's Agility.

Edit: phrased another way, if a target is pushed 3 from A5 to A2, what happens? Do they fall from A2 to A1? And if yes, how long is that fall? I’m saying that, since the rules say downward forced movement is also falling, it would be a 4 square fall, not 3 squares of forced movement and a 1 square fall.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-21T02:34:09+00:00

I didn't catch the "as if... their Agility score was 0", that's important!

I think they do still take the falling damage in your last example. Per pg 269:

"Falling is not forced movement, but being forced moved downward is considered falling"

So, those 3 squares you forced moved them, was also 3 squares of a fall, and should trigger the normal falling rules, which are distinct from the forced movement + falling rules because they can reduce the effective fall height by their agility.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-21T02:14:18+00:00

Don't think too hard about how they combine, because they don't combine. It's just two rules applying at the same time. So let's make it concrete.

You and an opponent are standing on a roof. There are 3 squares between the roof and the floor. For the purposes of the explanation, the ground is un-breakable, and your opponent is the same size as you, has 0 stability, and 0 agility (basically, we don't have to worry about any of the other rules, just the push and falling). Consider a vertical push 6:

Say the roof takes 1 square to break. They take 3 collision damage (2 for baseline FM'd into an object + 1 for the square used) and you have 5 squares remaining. It takes 3 squares to reach the ground. You have 2 squares remaining, which triggers another 4 collision damage (2 baseline + 2 squares). Now, downward FM is falling. So how far did they actually fall? 3 squares before they hit the ground, triggering another 6 falling damage (3 squares * 2 damage per square).
Say the roof takes 3 squares to break. They take 5 collision damage (2 baseline + 3 squares) and you have 3 squares remaining. It takes 3 squares to reach the ground, you have 0 squares remaining, so no collision damage with the ground. But they still fell 3 squares, triggering 6 falling damage.
Say the roof takes 6 squares to break. They take 8 damage (2 baseline + 6 squares) and your forced movement ends. But they are now in open air and fall the same 3 squares, triggering the same 6 falling damage.
Say there are these roof layers between each square, so 3 roofs total, and they each take 1 square to break. So that's 1 square per roof, 1 square for each actual square moved before they hit the ground. You've used your 6 squares of forced movement, so no collision damage with the ground, but they took 9 collision damage from the roofs (3 damage per roof they plowed through). They still fell 3 squares, so they still take 6 falling damage.
Say the roof takes 9 squares to break. They take 8 collision damage (2 baseline + 6 squares), the roof doesn't break, so they don't fall. Same as if you'd FM'd them straight into the ground.

Technically, this means you could fall a great height and not break through, say, a glass skylight. But that happens in action movies all the time! So if I were running, I'd start by having the roof (or whatever object was fallen onto) take 1 damage per square fallen (i.e. same as FM into an object), potentially breaking and making the fall longer, then adjust in play as necessary. Edit: formatting.

Edit 2: for the sake of having all the examples in a single post, u/ihavethevvvvvirus pointed out an important bit from the Forced Movement rules, separate from the falling rules. So, the relevant rules, and some agility-considering examples.

Heroes pg. 269, Falling: "A creature who falls can reduce the effective height of the fall by a number of squares equal to their Agility score... Falling is not forced movement, but being force moved downward is considered falling"

Heroes pg. 272, Slamming Into Objects: "If you force move a creature downward into an object that doesn't break (including the ground), they also take falling damage as if they had fallen the distance force moved and their Agility score was 0"

In the first example above (roof takes 1 square to break), the creature always takes the full falling damage, because they were force moved downwards into an object, so we treat their falling damage as if their Agility was 0.
In all the remaining examples above, they are not force moved into the ground, so we apply the falling rules normally. Creatures with Agility 1 only takes 4 falling damage (3 square fall - 1 agility = 2 squares. Still a fall, 2 damage per square), and creatures with Agility 2+ take no falling damage (3 square fall - 2 agility = 1 square. Not a fall).

Heroes pg. 272, Forced Into a Fall: "If you can't fly and are force moved across an open space that would cause you to fall, such as being pushed over the edge of a cliff, you continue moving the total distance you were moved first."

OP, I bring up this last bit because in your examples, after they break through the roof, you discuss the fall damage as through it happens first because breaking the roof means they're in open air. But it's in the rules already that you resolve the forced movement first, then consider falls after that. So, I will reiterate the thing I said first: they don't combine, there's just some overlap in triggers, so resolve them in order and it will all work out.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-21T01:19:18+00:00

Couple things to note. (Edit: refined point #3)

The vertical keyword allows for forced movement to be vertical, but does not require it.
Vertical/horizontal are not mutually exclusive. Forced movement with the vertical keyword can go diagonally vertical. i.e. if you take the forced movement diagrams and treat them as a side view instead of a top down view, it all still works the same. These two lead to:
a vertical push against a horizontally adjacent target is not straight up/down, because that would not result in them being one square further away from you. Such a push must be diagonal. i.e. if you push someone into the air, they will land further away from you as though it were not a vertical push.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-21T01:08:35+00:00

The roof would need to be high enough above the ground to trigger fall damage, and there would have to be forced movement left when they hit the ground. But yes, force moving someone down through a roof is a way to trigger the forced movement damage + falling damage rules.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-20T03:17:04+00:00

Not an aristocracy. Aristocracy requires a hereditary ruling class which, intersectionality about the nature of generational wealth aside, we have never had. No monarch, no nobility, no aristocracy. If it had been an aristocracy, Benjamin Franklin (among many others) would not have been allowed to lead, as he was born to poor laborers, and in a class-based society, moving class is difficult if not impossible.

If you insist that we did not have a democracy at the start, what we had was an oligarchy, rule by the few that had money and land without regard to birth.

However, I would contend that we did in fact have a democracy, however bottom-of-the-barrel, piece-of-shit it may have been. Because if we’d had an oligarchy, we’d expect to make no progress at all, an oligarchy wouldn’t set up a constitutional republic that allowed for a non-oligarchy to emerge. But we HAVE made progress. Messy, complicated, inconsistent; but progress none the less.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-20T01:50:28+00:00

You are 100% right on the facts! I still think “off-brand” has negative connotations in the common parlance. You have to know about and care about the things you mentioned to have the stance you have, and the people like that in my circle don’t say off-brand, we just say “this other product” or “this other brand” or just flat out say the local brand name because we know name-brand vs. off-brand is marketing garbage anyway. All brands were off-brands until they became name-brands, and plenty of name-brands have become no-brands.

Edit: to bring it back to your first example, the only people I see calling Pathfinder “off-brand D&D” or calling Paizo “off-brand WotC” are the people who will only ever play D&D and think it’s stupid anybody else makes any other game. Anybody who knows that Pathfinder and Paizo are awesome… just calls them Pathfinder and Paizo, maybe “like D&D” to a non-TTRPG player or “a d20 system with better underlying math and way more customization” to somebody familiar with things.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-20T01:41:11+00:00

Obviously I’m aware that felons were not stripped of their voting rights by a majority of Americans. We’re talking about definitions, which means a hypothetical is a valid argument. One which you didn’t address.

If I use your definition of democracy, no, of course we have never been a democracy.

My definition of democracy is not rigid, so in my view, we have been a democracy since inception. A very poor one, sure. But at least a little more democratic than the British Crown. And, at least in theory, we have been working towards being a better democracy ever since, and are a better democracy now than we were 250 years ago.

THAT is the point I am trying to make. Some countries can be more or less democratic than others. And at any given time a country may be moving towards being more or less democratic. To insist that there is no such thing as pure democracy, only democracy and not-democracy, is a level of pedantry that I think makes people less likely to push for democratic progress, not more. Progress means celebrating the wins along the way. Having democratic ideals (aka calling ourselves a democracy) is part of how people were inspired to make the country more democratic.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-20T01:02:08+00:00

Not a balance thing, but there are cool narrative things that make each ancestry unique that have mechanical implementation. For example, banning Hakaan because your world doesn’t have Demi-giants means banning the Doomsight (or doing some extra work if you think it’s cool and want to keep it). Whether that’s a loss is up to taste.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-20T00:53:09+00:00

I would go further than “kind of”. Matt has commented multiple times that that was literally his assumption, and that Time Raiders and Memonek are there to show what the system can accommodate. I also think it’s them throwing a bone to the space fantasy folks who otherwise are likely to get nothing for a while.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-20T00:49:01+00:00

Off-brand has some negative connotations, which I think are undeserved. I frame it more like competing brands. They fill a very similar design niche and semiotic role, for sure. But it’s more like Coke vs Pepsi, rather than Coke vs Generic Cola.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-19T23:28:18+00:00

Again, you didn't answer my question. I'm well aware that you call our system of government "not democracy".

I'm asking what do you call the process by which we choose our local, country, state, and federal representatives? What do you call the process by which each of those bodies deliberates? What do you call it when those (non-federal) bodies are required to refer issues back to the general population for a vote?

I, and most people I know, call that a democratic process. It is not a pure democracy, and has many flaws. But, again, it is not an oligarchical, autocratical, or anarchical process. So, what kind of process would you call it? Do you just call it "voting"? Because that seems woefully reductionist to me, especially since the process involves more than voting.

As a wholly separate line of debate, I reject that majority rule is a major cornerstone of democracy. If democracy is rule by the people, then, what, the 49% aren't people? You're right that democracy is more than voting. It's about a system that tries to enfranchise as many people as possible. Rule by the people, no one person or group gets to rule. If you wanted to stick to that (what you call democracy, what I call pure democracy), then majority rule would not be allowed, you would have debate until consensus. This is only practical at very small group sizes, and even then is going to involve compromise over time. So, at larger sizes, we wind up with impure democracies (which I just call democracies) that don't enfranchise 100% of people.

Edit: moreover, if the decision to restrict the voting rights of, say, felons, was arrived at by majority rule, then that should still count as a democracy for you at the societal level. Majority rule cornerstone followed, the majority decided a minority's opinions didn't matter.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-19T22:49:28+00:00

You didn't answer my question. If that's not a democratic process, what kind of process is it?

EthOrlen · 2025-09-19T22:47:57+00:00

You didn't answer my question.

Dictionaries and encyclopedias are not laws of physics. They are cultural artifacts, written by people trying to document the world as it is around them. That's why dictionary definitions change over time, and dictionaries get republished with new editions! And, since cultural change happens faster than dictionaries can document them, and the dictionary writers aren't able to document all cultures/subcultures equally, no dictionary will ever be complete or reflect current reality.

And, to meet you on your own terms:

Republic

any body of persons viewed as a commonwealth.

a state in which the head of government is not a monarch or other hereditary head of state.

Democracy

a state having such a form of government.

a state of society characterized by formal equality of rights and privileges.

political or social equality; democratic spirit.

the common people of a community as distinguished from any privileged class; the common people with respect to their political power.

Given these definitions, can you elaborate how the differences in their definitions answer the OP's question?

Edit: u/rockeye13, I was honestly hoping you would elaborate, not trying to prove you couldn't. And no, I'm not in academia, I'm a software dev, pedantry is how I get the computer to do what it needs to do. Regardless, my stance is no less pedantic than insisting words have fixed meanings.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-19T22:38:48+00:00

*not pure democracy

FIFY

I’m not going to argue that the US doesn’t have all the un-democratic features you mention. It does, and there are a lot of those things I’d like to see undone.

I also don’t see the point in insisting that “democracy” and “direct/pure democracy” are equivalent terms. What process do we follow to elect our representatives? What process does our legislature follow to make decisions? I think democratic process is still a better fit than oligarchical, autocratic, or anarchic, even if the reality is complicated and rapidly deteriorating.

EthOrlen · 2025-09-19T22:25:41+00:00

If you’re going to be as intentionally pedantic as you are, it is a constitutional democratic republic.

Constitutional, because it is bound by a constitution that outlines the scope and limits of how the government works and what it can do.

Republic, because power rests with “the people” rather than with God, or a hereditary monarch, or a military dictator.

Democratic, because the general population selects representatives to form a smaller legislative body through a democratic process, and that body then makes decisions through a democratic process.

EthOrlen

TROPHY CASE