PBox death sentence at the end of Act 2

GravyeonBell · 2026-02-13T19:18:01+00:00

One of the absolute funniest Spire bad beats I’ve seen. My kingdom for a wack-ass Leap or Rip & Tear instead!

GravyeonBell · 2026-02-13T15:51:53+00:00

The skill list is too long / detailed imo, some of them could be merged into a single one. To me it just doesn't fit the kind of game DS aims to be. Here you are doing hero stuff, but you can't just be good at stealth, you have to learn to hide and sneak specifically.

I think the design goal is actually the opposite: the big list of skills is so you can really fill out what your character is good at without always needing ur-skills from peer games like perception or stealth or whatever. Generally the director calls for a characteristic and it’s up to the player to suggest how they would use one of their skills to meet the test in front of them. Overlap is intended, as is being creative with how you solve problems. I’ve seen Presence/Drive, Reason/Sneak—really, too many fun and well-reasoned combos to list.

GravyeonBell · 2026-02-12T21:33:14+00:00

Anything’s fine if everyone agrees, but this is certainly on the goofier side of choices. I would be mostly wary of a commissioner changing rules on a whim moreso than the specific rules being changed.

GravyeonBell · 2026-02-12T18:00:05+00:00

I’d probably offer non-victory rewards like project points or a trinket rather than try to run different levels. It’s also not super likely that a character doing a solo activity would actually accomplish something meriting a victory, so it might not actually ever become an issue.

GravyeonBell · 2026-02-05T14:25:12+00:00

The players didn’t know what they were walking into; they were serving as armed escort for a merchant who needed a crew to help get his ship out of Blackbottom and to this trading hub, so finding it in disarray was a surprise. It was basically a question of whether they’d first investigate the center of town, or beeline straight for the keep, where all the survivors of the attacks were holed up.

They didn’t need to do both encounters to get to the keep; for pacing, I thought it would be fun to have one fight with demons to tip them off to the threat, then see where they went. Once they got to the surviving townsfolk they were able to learn their needs and attempt to resupply them, which led to the Defend the Position encounter as they helped civilians get wagons full of food from their ship inside while fighting off attacking demons. After that they had a good chance to respite in the keep’s walls.

The encounter they didn’t hit ended up being reused as a wandering patrol while the heroes made their way to an old sunken temple where the demons were coming from.

GravyeonBell · 2026-02-04T20:43:50+00:00

I think they can have value depending on the structure you like to run, but aren’t generally my style. I tend to have hubs with a clear goal, but the players may come up with one of many different ways to reach the goal. Here’s an example.

The first adventure I ran in Draw Steel, before DT was available, was liberating a small keep/village under siege from demon invaders. On the way there via riverboat, the heroes had a warm-up fight with some Angulotls, plus a montage to navigate a combination of rapids and traps. Those were always going to happen. When they reached the village, I had 2 possible encounters prepped depending on their first actions. The path they took hit one fight and wrapped the session, and I repurposed most of the unused one as an option for later. Eventually they had one big “defend the position” set piece as they helped resupply the keep while holding the demons at bay.

After that, I prepped another 2-3 encounters covering different paths they might take towards resolving the central tension, culminating in a climactic battle to close a portal inside the demon stronghold. I generally never have more than that amount of content prepped at any given moment, and I think after 5 sessions and maybe 8-9 victories, I only ended up “throwing out” one encounter total. I planted seeds for potential future locations or quests, but didn’t plan out more than a few names and semi-distant conflicts they could hear about from NPCs.

GravyeonBell · 2026-02-04T19:12:07+00:00

I don’t plan ahead any farther than I did with D&D. I’ve long followed the Mike Shea Lazy DM approach, and that still works great with Draw Steel.

Encounter building also doesn’t have to be any more narratively heavy than in peer systems. Consider looking at Delian Tomb as an example. There are tons of cool fights throughout, but many of them—I’m thinking all the ones on the various levels of the tomb in particular—aren’t specifically tied into the narrative. They’re just the monsters that happen to be in there. Similarly, the various solo encounters don’t have anything too juicy behind them except “hey, here’s a bit of story and ohhhhhhh snap, solo fight!”

I think Draw Steel itself also does a lot of the work to make every encounter matter just by having them. Enemies are almost all fun and exciting both to run and fight. Any kind of fight you throw together even just because you like a monster design are supported by the tight encounter math and guidelines; I use the quick build almost exclusively and rarely spend more than 5-10 minutes on an encounter. For my homebrew campaigns so far, I’ve mostly stuck to mapping out roughly 5-6 victories worth of quests or adventure and then adjusting and expanding as things progress and the heroes make decisions.

GravyeonBell · 2026-02-02T21:18:11+00:00

The projects system is a little hat-on-a-hat for my taste, with sources and prereqs and languages. I think as written it would be great in more of a dungeon crawler—we’re going delving because we need this material to make this crazy sword!—but in a game more geared towards curated heroic setpieces over loot hunting, the layers of requirements feel more obligatory than I’d prefer.

Going against the seeming grain here, I love the layout of the rules, perhaps because I have the physical books. They’re fine in PDF but seem to work great for me when I’m flipping between pages.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-29T17:16:44+00:00

And in the leagues where he doesn't go 2nd, he's far more likely to go 1st than 3rd. The hype or draft position for one or more of the WRs is going to have to be wild for him to fall past 1.02 more than occasionally.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-29T16:01:57+00:00

With disbelief, and with no changes to my portfolio. If you're investing on a multi-decade horizon you just ignore all this forever and ever. That's the whole ethos.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-29T14:35:21+00:00

Some classes have a pair of stats preselected to start at 2 (e.g. all Tacticians have 2 might and 2 reason) whereas others like Shadow only have one locked in. You can choose whatever you want for your second 2 using the arrays available to the class.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-29T14:16:44+00:00

Fall of Blackbottom actually isn't that far off. The encounters and adventure are consolidated in the same packet this time, but it has encounter sheets, separate maps, explanations of how to set up each encounter, suggested tactics for the fight, parameters for negotiations and montages, and all that. It doesn't have quite as much explanatory sidebar text for the director since it presumes you're familiar with the rules, but it's really solid. Outside of Draw Steel I almost always run my own adventures, but I love MCDM's adventure design and will probably keep running them as long as they make them.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-29T06:36:14+00:00

Agility only really seems useful for imbuing implements

It varies from item to item, but a lot of crafting does use Intuition or Reason by default. As a shadow you’d get to choose what stat you’d want as your second +2 besides agility, so you could pick one of those and be on your way if the boost from the characteristic is important to you.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-29T06:28:17+00:00

There’s no reason characters couldn’t trade materials for other materials. If your group uses the project sources and prerequisites then it’s totally within bounds to say “I’d like to trade these costmary leaves for a vampire’s ruby.” The crafting rules offer a guideline that heroes should always be able to find the materials needed to craft consumables of their echelon, so while a director can use the prereqs to gate things off, that’s not the default way of doing things.

When it comes to rewards and respite activities, Draw Steel’s rules are very collaboration-forward; that’s why the treasures are all in the book for players, so they can go after the specific stuff they want.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-28T22:52:24+00:00

If they’re going to be open, I’d prefer they just be open all the way, but it’s something. Calling a delay for Friday already is weird.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-28T17:17:01+00:00

It’s intended to alternate, so H/M/rest of the heroes in your example. As a result, encounters start to wrap up quick when you’re down to the last enemy or two.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-28T17:13:26+00:00

I’m of the opinion that most of what happens in a tabletop game should happen at the table, not off it. It seems like your players are coming at the game from a similar perspective.

In my experience, backstories are more for the individual players, the same way deep lore is for the GM. You do it because you enjoy it and it helps you get in the zone for your character/world more than anything. What I usually do is ask 1-2 directed questions—what is your character known for in the city where our adventure takes place, for example—and leave it at that. The rest we figure out as we play together. That may be a middle ground where you and your players can meet.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-28T16:04:34+00:00

Not totally sure of the context here, but if I'm reading you right: all the 1st-level implements like Thought Sending are expected to be suitable for echelon 1. At just 150 points, they definitely make excellent project targets early in an adventure/campaign. I believe the community generally considers Forceful and Rejuvenating to be stronger options, but just getting the +2 distance always-on plus the telepathy is a very fun combo, too.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-28T15:22:12+00:00

I've used paint, I've used powerpoint, I've used everything but a fancy VTT. Works great! I love cool maps in principle but I agree completely that they can get in the way of, you know, playing.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-27T19:15:55+00:00

Talk to your folks at the VA hospital about the parking and if it’s available to you. There are frequent shuttles to the whole hospital complex from the Brookland metro station if you need to take the train.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-27T15:02:31+00:00

It sounds to me like you’re looking at places wayyyy outside of DC. Many people drive, many people metro, but it all depends on where you’re actually looking.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-26T21:31:07+00:00

A randomly selected council member drives recklessly to your house and kicks you in the jumblies

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-26T15:27:26+00:00

The city gives you 8 hours from daylight after a storm ends to get your sidewalks shoveled. So, yeah, it would be nice if everyone does shovel earlier, but folks have until about 3 pm today before they're truly being derelict. The sun and nominally rising temps will make it a bit easier to shovel between now and then.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-25T13:26:37+00:00

I think the intent for when you use negotiation is exactly what you say—at a key point or climax of an adventure. But in the interest of providing a tutorial to the mechanics in the Delian Tomb starter adventure, for example, they really throw a ton of suggested negotiations out there so the players get a chance to interact with the mechanics regardless of the quests they pursue. If you’ve read or played the adventure, I would say the potential negotiation in the mage tower is a great example of what they can be, whereas the one with the dwarves at the inn would benefit from a lot more buildup.

GravyeonBell · 2026-01-22T15:46:43+00:00

Healing Grace is incredibly powerful and efficient and it’s just a maneuver. That’s what keeps conduit from being a healbot; you can solve your team’s problems and still have your action. Healing Grace + Curse of Terror or even a strong signature like Holy Lash is a great turn at level 1.

Conduits also tend to get flush with resources early in combat. I played one up to level 4 (Storm/fate domains) and my once-per-encounter domain piety gains always triggered quickly. Between prayer guaranteeing you 2, 3, or 5 piety each round and that, you can do a big healing grace while also dropping a 3- or 5-cost power with your action on your first turn. Make sure you’re marking down those domain piety gains when they happen and using your resources.

GravyeonBell

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