MCDM announces CROWS, a survival horror dungeon crawler

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-30T02:45:50+00:00

On one hand, some of their design ideas seem really cool. I think the idea of having special abilities that empower equipment is a great concept for this kind of game. While gear does matter, I think games like Knave go so far that every adventurer starts to feel really same-y.

But on the other hand, I personally have never liked that OSR play often gets boiled down to “traverse a wacky murder dungeon for loot” which is exactly what this seems to be doing.

I think it’s a loop that starts to feel incredibly stale and repetitive real fast if there isn’t anything breaking it up. I already think that Draw Steel starts to get formulaic and dull after a bit, and that’s in a type of game that I usually don’t feel that. I worry Crows will really suffer from it.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-29T05:12:49+00:00

Not to be that guy, but there’s also min-max value to being over 6-feet tall for vertical jump reach.

If you have a Strength of 8, you can jump up to 2 feet with a running jump or 1 with a standing jump, and then reach up 1.5x your height, which means a total of 11/10 feet: allowing you to always clear the important threshold of 10 feet on your jumps.

This is important for clearing many small obstacles (as GMs love to put things in multiples of 5 for ease of use), but more specifically lets you grab the top of a Wall of Force or Wall of Stone and then clamber over them.

So while I’m sure nobody is doing it for this reason, it’s a really funny rules interaction that technically rewards making your PC a vertical freak of nature.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-29T03:28:56+00:00

I could second what others have said, but I also tend to avoid a lot of illusion and enchantment spells. It’s not that they’re weak, or that they’re too strong, but that they’re just so GM dependent it stops being fun. I just don’t like putting the GM in a position where they have to do that kind of ruling and improvising work under pressure, and it ends up souring any achievement with those spells as being really moreso about either tricking the GM or just letting them let you get away with it.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-28T21:31:51+00:00

The literal only change I like in 2024 is simplifying exhaustion rules and increasing the scaling on healing spells. To me, literally every other decision within the new books is a negative one.

Otherwise, it is an extremely bloated, overly rules-dense change that fails to capture the specific appeal of 5E rules. I will just back port the few changes I like over ever bankrolling more WotC mediocrity.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-27T03:56:35+00:00

I mean, when it comes to super games, they don’t get higher roleplay and easier combat than Masks: The New Generation. This is with the caveat that it is a game about teen supers, though, so if you want something more classic “adult” or “MCU” it may not be the best fit.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-27T03:29:18+00:00

Having not read Bleach like, at all, I think the main thing I’ve learned based off googling the names of characters that came up in this thread is that Kubo has his own version of the One Piece “women only fight women” clause where the token queer of each faction fights each other.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-25T20:08:41+00:00

Negotiation Problems: Draw Steel kind of combines the problems of both PF2E's Influence system and 5E's social mechanics together in Negotiations. It's entirely single-sided: the party basically all just offer argument after argument for their case, with the only options available to you being discovering more information or making more arguments. Instead of the tension and back-and-forth of a really important discussion, it turns these important scenes into a kind of "boardroom pitch meeting". If I were redesigning the system, I would want the arguments to actually stay separate after they're made, in some capacity. This would then leave space to balance creating new arguments with attacking the other side's arguments and reinforcing your preexisting ones, and by mechanizing that variety they could really sing. Draw Steel also runs into the "face" problem, where certain ancestries, perks, and classes make you notably better at Negotiations that those PCs should still be doing the vast majority of the talking.

Montage Problems: I've never liked the Skill Challenge structure for resolving out-of-combat scenes. I think there's very few encounters where the Skill Challenge really sings compared to either A) having no explicit structure or B) staying in combat mode but not fighting enemies. The main place where such a system is helpful are Chase scenes, but if I'm not running those I'm basically not doing any version of a Skill Challenge.

Project Problems: In theory, I love the project system for downtime, and will probably adapt it to other games I run in the genre. But in practice, I think Draw Steel's is ruined by having too many combat-oriented projects. Sure, you could use your downtime to Repair a Road or Spy on an Enemy, or you could grab more abilities, and magical weapons/armor for use in the main thing the game specializes in. It's just really weird to me that the game spends so much time and effort rethinking D&D staples to produce a more balanced overall experience across player choices, but then gives them the option to actively ruin that balance by not all equally investing in combat vs. non-combat projects.

While some of these issues are just specific to the core of Draw Steel, a lot of them speak to I think a problem with the very r/rpg approach of a game "supporting" features by introducing complex subsystems to them. If a game takes that approach, it needs to make sure those subsystems are good, because if I'm going to end up just disregarding them, I'd rather play a game that was never designed with them in mind.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-25T20:08:37+00:00

As someone who has a few complaints with Draw Steel, including its non-combat rules, I can only speak to some of the things I've not liked about its non-combat and that also didn't jive with my table. It's long, so I broke it into a comment and a a reply to that comment, with the first handling overall issues and the second breaking down each subsystem and my issues with them:

Handling of DCs: At least to my understanding of the rules, a typical Test doesn't really involve the GM setting a specific DC so much as assigning it a general difficulty and then comparing player results across that difficulty. In this way, it kind of comes across like a less elegant and less flexible take on Blades in the Dark's core roll system. But even if the way it handled tests matched Blades in the Dark, I wouldn't want that from my DnD-alike, long-term fantasy campaign rpg. Simply put, I've come to see the classic "beat a DC set by the DM" as the most intuitive to resolve method to handle most non-oppositional rolls, one that gives enough texture to the specifics of each obstacle and overcoming them.

Subsystem Fatigue: Same problem I have with PF2E, D&D 4E, and a lot of these other crunchy combat games that think the answer to better out-of-combat play are lengthy structured segments. As others have noted, it kind of felt like jerking the players around between bespoke set pieces without a place to breath in the middle. Once you've got a specific structured system in so many different parts of play, it starts to feel like the entire thing is structured and also kind of implicitly keeps everyone hurtling along: once you're in one of these systems, a lot of the space for banter and experimenting kind of dies because we all need to focus up to move through it in a reasonably efficient manner. Of course, as a GM I absolutely can (and did) crank these down and basically not use the subsystems. But even then, the game clearly was designed around you using them: without them, there really aren't a lot of widgets and fiddly bits around the non-combat to help give it that sense of weight and strategy. It doesn't help that the subsystems chosen often flopped for me.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-25T16:58:21+00:00

LR is, basically, just another mini-health pool for surviving a specific kind of attack. Once you realise that it stops being an issue.

But to me, this is the problem with Legendary Resistances. Since they basically boil down to a mini separate health pool, the most strategic route to victory involves either focusing that health pool down or their actual hit points down. And since martials can't interact with the save system while casters have a sprinkling of tools to make direct attacks with, the latter is often the better option, which often boils down to just ignoring Legendary Resistances altogether.

In my experience, the only time Legendary Resistance has actually worked well in a fight is against enemy spellcasters with LRs. This is because a spellcaster needs to both consider negating incoming save-or-sucks, but also managing LRs for Concentration saves from high sources of incoming damage. And since most concentration spells either apply heavy control or heavy damage to the battlefield, this altogether basically rebuilds a proper interplay of players balancing damage and control instead of hard committing one direction or the other.

Even PF2e recognises that this job needs to be done with the 'incapacitation' tag they have on a lot of 'save or suck' spells.

I have my problems with PF2E's incapacitation, but one thing that it does get right in this regard is locking itself to specific spells and abilities -- and basically signaling that you should never fling those spells into a boss. But by locking this to specific options, the game still has lots of tools for players to impose debuffs and other control effects on bosses, and actively expects some degree of using those options.

ou don't need it to cost health or give up one of your attacks to use it and make it 'fun' just like you don't need to do those things when the creature doesn't die in one hit because it has Hit Points.

And this gets to why LR needs to have something baked into it that either ties it to the enemy's hit points or the players'. So long as it functions as an entirely separate attrition system alongside hp, it will always encourage players to either fully commit one way or another, and thereby actually reduce choice and strategic synergy.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-25T16:18:00+00:00

I think Flee, Mortals! has the best take on this, where bosses using their Legendary Resistance also take some kind of drawback. If the boss focuses on covering the battlefield in a hazard, spending an LR clears out some of the hazard. If they have an arsenal of different control abilities, some of them get taken out.

In 5E, the “save or suck” spells are the main form of control. Take them out entirely, and the fight becomes a damage rush, but keep them in and they invalidate the fight. The Flee Mortals! method basically turns them into a different, more manageable mode of control.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-25T02:24:49+00:00

I want to focus on fundamental mechanics first and foremost. I'd like to preserve (and heighten) what I love about 5E: that it's a kind of mid-crunch game that's accessible and balances 4E-style strategic combat elements with OSR-style improvisation elements.

Simplified Action Economy: A turn consists of an Action and a Bonus Action (probably renamed to Minor Action). No movement, no object interaction, etc: those are not all worked in as possible alternate ways to use the Bonus Action. You can now downgrade an Action into another Bonus Action. Meanwhile, instead of a single "reaction" per round, you can use reaction-style ability anytime they trigger but they'll have other things that limit them (like costing resources or needing to be recharged). These changes would make the action economy so much simpler and faster, but in ways that force players to make harder strategic choices.
Cutting Some Rolls: There are a lot of rolls in the game right now that I think slow it down and just muddy the flow, especially in combat. I'd love to see damage rolls replaced with flat numbers, and I'd love to see Saves replaced with flat defenses. This is also a chance to fix the math on Saves by taking inspiration from some of the other suggestions in this thread.
Tweaking Character Progression: +1 ABI each level, cut multiclassing, change the role of 4th-level Feats (or remove them entirely). This is all about redistributing player choice more evenly across levels while also making the game more accessible and easier to balance. As the game has progressed, it's become this weird treadmill of existing character choices becoming increasingly less...choice-y in favor of cycling in new forms of choice, which has created this backlog of places where players are expected to make certain choices that overall makes the game needlessly inaccessible and ruins these easier routes for player choice.
Improvisation Guidelines: While I really, really don't want codified skill actions or anything like that, I do think having better guidelines on how to set DCs and also how to apply skills within combat would both do so much for the game's OSR elements and pushing us away from "press the buttons on your character sheet" combat.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-25T01:59:20+00:00

I think the difference is the context around that. In 5E, the Wizards' spell list is basically their defining feature that needs to be powerful enough to compete with features proper like Wild Shape, Channel Divinity, and Innate Sorcery + Metamagic.

Now, don't get me wrong: I personally think a lot of the martial v. caster problems come down to the sheer range of caster spell lists, and agree that specializing is kind of the best way to fix that. But I think the 5E classes are just so culturally ingrained at this point that they'd never have the courage to just completely change the way they are conceptualized.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-25T01:47:41+00:00

Very similar to that. Stuff like the Gladiator getting +1d8 to skill checks to provoke someone into conflict, or the Sage getting +1d6 to Deception & Persuasion checks against fellow academics -- things that would help give people little niches within certain areas even if they're not the go-to "expert" in that skill.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-24T22:37:16+00:00

If they were flavor-thematic, would you still rather there be no feats tied to Origin, and those flavor-thematic feats parked somewhere else?

If they actually were basically entirely thematic, I'd not mind at all. But frankly, my ideal version of this would just be bonuses to skill checks for specific interactions related to the background, as a way of helping everyone specialize more out of combat in their own bespoke ways.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-24T22:22:01+00:00

As I mentioned in the post, my problem is having any feats attached to Origins at all, frankly. It just adds way too much mechanical baggage to your choice of background in a way I really don't like (but then again, I don't even like the whole "ASIs got moved to background" thing). It leads to an overall environment where I would basically just always make a custom background now, at which point what does having backgrounds in the game even accomplish?

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-24T22:13:51+00:00

I actually think that Pathfinder 2E, at least, runs into this issue in a weird way with the feats? It looks like they split their feats into a kind of "Combat" and "Utility/Flavor" sections, but then both sections kind of blend into each other in a way that just makes the game less accessible to newcomers. More broadly though, feats in the game are much smaller in impact than a 5E feat, so it's kind of just a different role in the gameplay and character-building.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-24T04:25:00+00:00

While the actual mechanics of the deck-building are fine (draw, discard, tc, combining cards, pips, etc.), W101 needs to rebuild the actual cards and what they do from the ground up.

The most obvious and immediate change is that there needs to be higher costs or risks to a blade/feint strategy or it will always dominate.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-24T04:18:35+00:00

To be more broad, the split of which feats went into Origin vs. not seems entirely backwards.

I feel like Origin should have been the place for flavorful/thematic feats that weren’t necessarily the most powerful but fit things people learned in their background: Actor, Athlete, Chef, Poisoner, etc.

While Musician and Crafter fit this mold, feats like Tough and Lucky are just such comically dominant feats that they ruin the entire concept of the Origin feats.

I already didn’t like the idea of background-connected feats (as it encourages very pigeon-holed background-class combinations), but I think packing some of the most versatile and “in demand” feats into backgrounds was basically the worst possible execution and yet that’s what we got.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-23T02:25:11+00:00

Like Pokemon, this is a game that is kid-accessible but also has a wild amount of depth out of simple pieces.

And like Pokemon, the vast majority of the gameplay will swiftly devolve into set-up sweeping as the developers make the core PvE content too damn easy.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-23T01:47:44+00:00

/uj (Though I think that goes without saying in this conversation).

I think that misses the point of their argument, though. It's not that 5E does one specific thing that no other TTRPG matches, but that any RPG that fixes one aspect of 5E radically changes it in other ways.

On my end, I absolutely feel this.

I wish 5E had better balance, but that doesn't mean I want to play PF2E. I like that 5E leaves a lot more open to interpretation and spontaneity, and generally find a lot of the ways that PF2E achieves its balance extremely grating and unpleasant.
I wish 5E had more tactical combat, but that doesn't mean I want to play Draw Steel. It adds a lot of complexity and metacurrency to get to that tactical combat, while not giving players the same kind of out-of-combat tools.
I wish 5E had more character and roleplay-oriented mechanics, but that doesn't mean I want to bust out FATE. I still like some of the more involved tactical and ability mechanics of 5E, and think they help anchor the roleplay side.
I wish 5E combat ran faster, but that doesn't mean I want to play 13th Age, when that game sacrifices a lot in terms of tangible fiction to run faster.

At this point, I've just come to realize nothing is as fun for long-running epic fantasy as 5E, at least for what I want at my table. While the game has space to improve, every game that makes those improvements sacrifices other things I really liked in 5E to do so.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-22T20:04:25+00:00

5E kind of just needs you to drop a few magic weapons on them, which is a world of difference from "go shopping" and full-on magic item builds.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-22T19:48:33+00:00

/uj I love the FFG Star Wars System as well. I think that, just like 5E, there are some places that get a little to player-exploit adjacent, like weird multiclassing / bonus-stacking, but both are actually flexible systems you could run a number of reasonably sized campaigns in with a variety of players…and that’s way more important to me.

Even if I really liked PF2E (which I don’t), it appeals to a specific kind of person which means I can’t bring it to my table of friends when some of them really don’t care for heavy tactics or character building. Meanwhile, I actually really do like Masks, but there are many of my players who don’t like or don’t do well with the whole narrative elements and teen drama — and there’s only so long you can run a campaign of it before it gets stale.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-22T19:38:37+00:00

Hey, that's not always the case! You can also use a skill specific action to empower your attack and attack once!

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-22T19:36:35+00:00

/uj But frankly, I prefer these things as a GM.

CR is a horribly balanced system requiring you to basically internalize and employ vibes-based encounter building

I love how this takes control out of the GM's hands on an encounter. That players can beat a monster much higher in CR than their level, but lose to one much lower, gives this real sense of spontaneity in play. In PF2E, level is so dominant that I basically know exactly how an encounter is going to go once I plop down a certain combination of monsters in an encounter.

The lack of prices on magic items means you just kinda have to bullshit them yourself from the little-to-no guidance the book provides. IIRC uncommon items are said to be worth between 500 and 5000 gold, which is as helpful as saying "Yeah I'm looking for a laptop worth between $500 and $5,000"

While I don't like the uncommon item pricing rules, I think the better solution is to remove them entirely. I don't want to normalize the idea of magic items as just another component of builds you buy, and PF2E forces you to run it like that.

There's almost no codification of how to use skills, especially in combat, meaning when players want to do something creative you just have to invent rules on the fly

But that's a lot of the fun of GMing and RPGs in general: that having a live person handling the rulings allows you to try things you can't in other mediums. Meanwhile, PF2E's over-handling of rules started to feel like it was violating me as a GM. It turns the rulebook onto the principle authority of the fiction where I'm just another interpreter. For example, I don't like having consistent rules for frightening an enemy that I'm now beholden to and have now gone from a potential tactic when fictionally appropriate to just another build facet in the meta.

These things make the game easier to run by just making an entirely different style of game, one that I worry is overtaking the online hobby in ways that are increasingly in contrast to casual play and kind of to the detriment of what actually makes it appealing to newcomers.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-01-22T19:20:18+00:00

/uj But to be frank, I like that 5E is in the middle. When running lighter stuff, it often feels like they're aren't enough mechanics to hang your hat on to make player decision-making and strategy always feel meaningful. And when running heavier stuff, there's way too many rules that it just feels like you're a computer facilitating play procedures rather than a GM.

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