Intro

James Introcaso. Lead designer of Draw Steel. Need I say more. I was really excited to have him on, and it was a delight. James talks about going to GenCon, the value of showing that the core rules aren't sacred, how the victory and respite system is core to the Draw Steel experience, and his adventure design philosophy.

This episode is longer than usual. I keep the interviews to an hour in length. I would apologize for going over. But it's James Introcaso, so I'm not gonna. 'Cause I'm not sorry.

I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.

Interview

Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, James Introcaso!

James Introcaso: Hello. Thank you so much for having me! I'm really excited to be here, Jon.

Jon de Nor: It's fantastic to have you on. Give us a — well, you're pretty well known in the MCDM community, but give us a short direction of who you are and how you ended up here.

James Introcaso: Yeah! So that's a great question. I am James Introcaso, and I am the lead designer of MCDM's roleplaying game, Draw Steel. And I got my start playing roleplaying games, like, very sort of typical story, right? I was, I have an older brother, he and his friends were playing, I watch them, beg them to play...one day, the kid playing the cleric left early. And so they needed somebody to fill in, and I sat there at the table, and they told me which dice to roll, right, and that sort of thing. And I was hooked from then on, right?

And it was one of those things where as a kid, I played a lot of video games, and I always wanted to do things that the video games didn't allow for, right? And when I was growing up, video games were very limited in what you could do. You could run, you could jump. Maybe you could throw fireballs occasionally, right? But you couldn't, you know, hey, there's a tree in the distance. Can I go to that tree? No. Hey, can I climb up? No, this character can't climb, right? This person can't swim, that kind of thing.

And D&D was, you could do anything you could do in real life, plus cast spells, swing swords, all that kind of stuff. That got me into it, and when I was playing that day, they invited a couple of my friends, as well, to come sit at the table and play with us. There were like three of us playing. One of them went home and told his dad what we did, and his dad said, "Oh, I did that in college," and pulled out all of his old roleplaying game books, and we started to play what, at the time, was a game called The Fantasy Trip, which was written by Steve Jackson, who — Steve Jackson Games.

Jon de Nor: Oh!

James Introcaso: And you can actually now — there was a crowdfunder a couple of years ago. You can now go buy a reprint version of that game, The Fantasy Trip. It's like a precursor to GURPS that we played. Really, really fun. Then played D&D and all kinds of stuff through high school and college, and submitted to Dragon magazine a couple of times and got rejected.

And then eventually, I had this sort of inkling that I wanted to podcast about D&D Next, when the D&D Next playtest was going on in like 2012 and 2013, right? Because believe it or not, there were no podcasts, really, about roleplaying games at that time, particularly news-focused.

Jon de Nor: Wow.

James Introcaso: There was one called The Tome Show, and I wrote to that guy for advice, and he said, "Would you like to come do your show here on my feed? Sounds like a cool show." Didn't know me from anyone. His name's Jeff Greiner. The Tome Show still exists, by the way. Still going on, still amazing. He had me on, and when I was on, I was like, "Oh, you know what? I now have this giant audience, thanks to Jeff, that I didn't have before. I should push them to something that I've always wanted to do, which is write and design." And I was like, well, nobody's paying you to do that. Nobody's asking you to do it. So you got to do it on your own.

And so I started a blog, and I started blogging, and eventually that blog got the attention of some publishers, smaller publishers and stuff like that. And the DMs Guild came out, and I started to take some things that I'd made on the blog and put it on the DMs Guild, and all of that snowballed into me getting jobs with some bigger publishers like Wizards of the Coast.

And eventually a guy called Matt Colville put out a job posting for $0.25 a word, which was more money than I had ever seen, and I knew that he had done well on his Kickstarter, and I knew his YouTube videos, but I wasn't like a huge follower at that point. But I said, "$0.25 a word? That sounds great! I've never seen that." So I thought, I'll throw my hat in the ring, and I will start to learn more. And as I did, I was like, "Oh, this is actually really thoughtful and really well-created," and that sort of thing.

And from there I started to freelance with MCDM, and then eventually they wanted to put out a 5e magazine called Arcadia. And when Arcadia came out, I got to go full time with MCDM as the managing editor of that magazine. And I started to take on projects like Kingdoms of Warfare. And then I led the design of Flee, Mortals, which is a 5e monster book, and the Beastheart, and the Talent.

And that whole time, when I got hired full-time, I said to Matt, "Hey, I don't know that I want to take this job because I don't want to make 5e stuff forever. I don't want to make third- party products forever. I want to work on original games." And he said, "Well, so do I."

And I thought, "Oh! Okay, well then, I do want to take this job," right? Because I liked working with Matt and I liked working at the company. And and so we had been talking about Draw Steel for a long time before we actually started to put pen to paper in the development of it. We had some meetings, we would talk about it, we would brainstorm what it was going to be like, and that kind of thing. We came up with the idea for Heroic Resources, you know, back, I want to say, like, three and a half years ago now, right, was when we first had that conversation.

And so that's how I got to be the lead designer of Draw Steel is just through a lifetime of playing these games. And then...you know, I freelanced — before I got my full-time job, I freelanced for, I want to say...well, let's see, if I started freelancing in, like, 2013, and then it wasn't until 2021 that I started with MCDM, so about eight years that it took me, to get a full-time job. And I was very lucky to get it in that time.

Jon de Nor: Wow. It's almost a rags-to-riches, TTRPG edition. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yes, yes. Well, and it's, you know, a lot of it has to do with — I was very fortunate that I worked in an industry that allowed me to freelance. I was a freelance television promo writer and producer, so I could freelance there and freelance here, right? I was able to be flexible. I don't have children, which affords me a large amount of free time, right? And allowed me to kind of fill my schedule that way. So, you know, I am fortunate. I had a lot of fortunate circumstances line up that allowed me to pursue this career.

Jon de Nor: I'm going to start off with some questions that have been submitted by patrons.

James Introcaso: Yes!

Jon de Nor: Because...they are varied, and more numerous than usual. (laughter) I realize now I haven't sorted these. I've just added them to the list as they came in. This is going to be all over the place.

James Introcaso: Excellent. Let's do it.

Jon de Nor: (laughter) What was the most interesting or surprising feedback you got while at GenCon?

James Introcaso: Oh, wow, that's a great question. So I just came back from GenCon while we're recording this. You know, it was really interesting. I was sitting around, talking to people about the game, and people felt very frank, to tell me if they did or did not like the game sometimes. (laughter)

And, you know, for the most — everybody was kind, everybody was polite, right? And many people would say, like, "Oh, I loved it," right? Like that was the overwhelming thing was they loved it. It felt very good. And some people would be like, "You know, I tried it, and I like Daggerheart better." And I was like, "Cool, you didn't need to tell me that, but okay!"

Jon de Nor: (laughter)

James Introcaso: Like, I didn't necessarily ask when they were offering that feedback, right? But I love Daggerheart too. It's a great game. I play it, and it's a lot of fun. So I recommend Daggerheart for folks to try as well.

But some of the most interesting feedback that I got came from a couple of different people who told me that they didn't think they were going to like the negotiation system, but that they really liked it, right? And that when they gave it a shot and when they read the examples and they understood how it was supposed to work, right? It was really, really wonderful to see that, right? Like it made me feel very, very good to see that people — the rules, reading the rules, reading the examples, made people who thought they didn't even like it give it a chance. And then they learned that they did, right?

And so that to me was was very rewarding and interesting, right? Because I thought most people would read it and if they didn't want to try it, they just wouldn't. They'd say, like, not for me. So I think that was a really interesting piece of feedback that we got that also made me very happy.

Jon de Nor: The negotiation system is something that I, I always kind of...I believed in the idea even before, I think, it worked really well. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yes, yes, because it did not always work well. (laughter)

Jon de Nor: No, I remember some of the very early playtest sessions that they were in with SONSON and Argent, I think. And the negotiations were rough, but I remember submitting feedback saying, I really like the idea of this system, I want this to succeed, but it's not there yet. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yes. Yeah. And one of the things that has been really eye-opening for me in general, right, is the idea that...I often thought, because of the way we playtest, right, we playtest sort of with a small, focused group of people, and then we slowly widen that out. I was very nervous the first time we sent something to the patrons because I was like, this is in a state that for other products, our 5e products, we would still be keeping it closed to this smaller group of people. We wouldn't send it to the patrons in the state yet, but we have to, right?

Because we're going to — and honestly, now that we've done it, I wish we had sent it sooner. Because we got so much good feedback, and I underestimated the ability of people to be able to see what the potential was for something, right? So like negotiation, that feedback that you gave is really helpful because it says to us, like, well, we shouldn't can this system, right? We should keep the basic ideas and the basic goals and rework everything else as opposed to saying, like, "Let's just replace negotiation with some more combat options," right? Or "Let's replace negotiation with rules for warfare," right? Or something like that.

And I think — I'm really glad that we didn't give up on that. I'm really glad that the people who were testing also didn't give up on that because they, you know, you can tell when somebody thinks this just isn't going to work, right, and that...you know, there's so much about this game that has changed from the first Patreon test to now. And a lot of that is because people had the ability to see that the game could get better, right? And I knew it would! Right? That's part of just polishing a stone until it turns into a diamond. This is a bad metaphor. You know, that's a big part of it.

Jon de Nor: Moving on to the next question here, what was your favorite Draw Steel feature or content to work on? And why?

James Introcaso: Oh, that is a really good question. So, I think my favorite Draw Steel thing that I worked on was...creating the downtime system was really fun because that was an idea that I had kind of at the beginning, after we had come up with, okay, we knew we wanted a downtime system. This idea of like, what you're going to do is you should just always be making progress, right?

James Introcaso: And it was like, very simple, right? My idea was like, well, you'll roll a die, you'll add modifiers to it, and then you'll just keep track of these rolls that you make until they equal a goal. And then when that goal is accomplished, the thing is done, right? And I was like, that is so simple, I don't think that's going to work, right? Like I don't think it's going to be interesting, but it makes sense, right? Like that's the way it's going to be. In terms of, like, that could be at the heart of it and that could be very basic.

But are people going to say like, this is just way too simple and doesn't make any sense, right? Often you find yourself adding in bits and pieces because people are like, this doesn't feel realistic, it doesn't feel exciting, it doesn't feel fun. Right?

Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

James Introcaso: It really — that is an example of like, collaboration, right? Because I was like, okay, I think this is the baseline. And it's not that very...an original idea, even, right? Roll dice, add them together. Like that's not, I'm not patting myself on the back for that. Where it came from was then sharing the idea with the rest of the design team, right? So the idea of like, hey, you know, you should put some events in here and those will make things more interesting. That came from Matt, right? That idea of like, we should put that in there, we have these events, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, that is really smart. We should absolutely do that. Right?

This idea of like, okay, crafting and research can be more robust, based on the languages you have also came from Matt. He was like, something about, you know, language should be part of it and it should be that, like, you can still have a chance of learning things even if you don't speak the language, but it takes you longer, right? It was like, okay, now this is getting interesting. We're adding some layers here. It's getting more complex and it's interacting with systems we haven't used a lot, like language, right? Like it's giving you more reason, it's giving languages more value. It was cool.

And so we were putting that together. The idea of events really elevated it, right? And then when Willy and Djordi came in, right, Willy was like, you could...this does not have to be limited to crafting and research. This could also be this, this could be that. And said to me, "Just so you know, there is a fishing minigame in here." He didn't tell me anything other than that, and said, "But it's in here, and I am going to work on it," right? And like, in his free time, he came in one weekend and had worked on it over the weekend and said, here's fishing. And I looked at it and I thought, wow, it really, like he...and it worked. And the only reason it worked is because we had already added the event system in there, right?

And that sort of thing — so it's an example of like, somebody building the foundation, somebody adding more layers, and then somebody coming in with those layers and being like, and now we can mix it all up and do all of these really fun, complicated things that really worked out. And so that was just pure fun, to see that very simple idea grow into an entire system, now that when people say, "Is Draw Steel just combat?" Everybody says like, no, no, there's this negotiation system, there's montages, and there's downtime, right? And it's like, oh, it's cool. It's on par now with negotiation and montages, right? That feels great.

Jon de Nor: The downtime project system is...it's kind of becoming my favorite part of Draw Steel...

James Introcaso: That's great.

Jon de Nor: ...because of how, as a Director, it's such a great way to get the players to kind of engage more with the story that they're playing through. So I'm having them basically pick out something they want to create, like look at the downtime projects, find something you want to work on, and then you'll need a project source and you'll probably need some help with the language.

So just that is inspiration for me to kind of say, okay, but then you gotta go over here because there's a rumor that there's a feature over there that will have that thing you need, and then that will act as your required ingredients or whatever. And suddenly they, the players start kind of generating hooks for me to kind of build upon, which also eases my burden. And, yeah, it's...and of course, the fishing game is a huge hit. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yes, yes. But you're absolutely right, right? It becomes this phase where you, your players are telling you what they want, right? What they want out of the game. And it's cool because — I've seen Directors say, like, we spend a whole session doing downtime, because then it helps me plan for what's next, right? I'm able to say like, okay, look at all this stuff you guys want to do, that lets me know that next, I should be working on this, right? And bringing this forward and that sort of thing.

So I'm really glad to hear you say that because I have had a similar experience. In fact, right now — you know, the campaign that I'm playing through with Matt and the rest of the design team and our producer, Gertz, and John Champion — the idea, right, that we are going to have some downtime, and during that downtime, they will also tell me, like, which area of Lord Saxton's forces do they want to sabotage next, right, is going to help me then prepare for the session after that downtime session, right? So I'm glad that people are flocking to that and really enjoying it and taking it and making it, you know, worthwhile. That's awesome.

Jon de Nor: I also very much appreciate that immediately in the, like, core rules, you have this system for doing downtime activities, and then immediately the fishing rules kind of break those rules immediately. You just say, well, in this case, we have these special rules instead, which is very encouraging, I think, for the homebrewers and possibly third parties to kind of build upon what's already there. You've already given permission in the core rules to, "Yeah, you can break the system and do something else based on the same foundations."

James Introcaso: You know, I think one thing that I learned designing a lot for, Fifth Edition is that there are assumptions people have about the way 5e works, and that if they see a third-party designer break that mold, right, in some way...oh, you're, you know, you're making a class that has 2d6 hit dice instead of a d12, right, for instance. The core audience can freak out a little bit, right? They can say like, "Oh, what are you doing?"

We experienced that actually with the Beastheart, because the Beastheart, in 5e, generates resources in a way that a Draw Steel class does, which we didn't know at the time. We didn't 100% know how Draw Steel was going to work, right? But this idea that, like, they build up ferocity during the battle, right? As opposed to starting with a bunch of — and we got feedback from people that were like, "D&D just doesn't work this way." And it was like, but it's balanced, and it seemed to work right, and it didn't have a Victories mechanic, so it wasn't like you were getting stronger every battle, and you still were winnowing down your hit points and your hit dice.

And so, it did work, right, for a majority of people it did work. We wouldn't have released it otherwise. But what was really...what's interesting about that, right, is that, like, if Wizards of the Coast does that and breaks that mold, people become much more comfortable with it. Because they're the creators and the shepherds of Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons, right? We don't want third-party creators to feel like they can't get in there and break the mold. I want people to say, like...to look at our book and say, well, fishing already did this, so I can do whatever I want, right, within these downtime rules, as long as it's well-thought-out and it's thoughtful and that kind of thing.

And so I'm always glad to see that, right? Like the, you know, the Troubadour, works in a different way than all of the other classes do, right? The Talent goes into clarity debt, right, and can become strained. And so we wanted to give you a wide array of things so that — when a third-party creator comes up with a really cool idea for how Heroic Resources or downtime or a treasure or a whole new set of rules, or they take the Draw Steel rules and create their own game using the core, right, whatever it is — that the community doesn't say, "You can't do that," because we want you to do that.

We want third-party creators to do that. I think that is awesome. That was important to us, that we show the different ways it can be used, not just because it's fun for players to get to go fishing. And this is the way fishing has to work, right? But to show third-party creators that like, if you need to change or make exceptions to make something work properly, to make it more fun, then you should absolutely do that. And the audience should be okay with it.

Jon de Nor: You get started breaking your own mold pretty early with the subclasses, because, let's see, the Fury has custom kits that's only for the Fury. And then the Conduit has a special build-your-own-subclass system, and the Tactician gets two kits instead of one. (laughter) So there's exceptions all over the place.

James Introcaso: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's wonderful because it means that very quickly people see, like, okay these can be very different, right? These classes can be very different. I think people...because we, rightfully so, get a lot of comparison to Fourth Edition. One of the big complaints about Fourth Edition was all of the classes felt kind of samey, right? And I think we worked hard to keep things balanced and together and interesting, but then say like, okay, these are going to feel very different.

And like, wait 'til people see the Summoner and the Beastheart, because then...we really broke all of our own established mores and folkways when, like, immediately the first thing people are going to see is the Summoner. And it's like, nothing in the Summoner works the way it does in any other class.

Jon de Nor: Doesn't the Summoner summon some minions at the start of the round? Which is unique to that class, apparently? (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yes! Yes, yeah. Well, you know, it's like, hey, we maybe we need a start of round effect, right? And the idea of that was that, like, you are going to want to have minions out as soon as the battle begins. And because of the way Draw Steel initiative works, right, it was like, well, that means that the Summoner is just always going to ask to go first, and people are going to feel bad if they don't let the Summoner go first.

And in the idea of Draw Steel, right, when something in Draw Steel...we try to do this in our design. When something becomes an inevitability, right, like, this should always happen, you should always go first, you should always use XYZ character option, we then try to make that either built-in or bring up the other options to be comparable, right? And so for the Summoner, it was like, if we just let them summon their minions at the start of the round, then they can — now they fit better into the game we've already created and established, right? And it means that they don't have to go first to get their minions out there on the field, because minions are not just useful on your turn, they're useful to lock people, and they're useful to use triggered actions, and all that, that manner of thing. So that was one reason why we did that.

Jon de Nor: What part of Draw Steel was the most satisfying to crack or solve?

James Introcaso: Oh, very good question. It was definitely when we introduced the idea of Victories, right? So we had gone back and forth on, how were we going to make it so that...we knew how Heroic Resources worked, and those have worked basically the same from the jump, right? We've tweaked the implementation, but the overall idea of like every round you get some of your Heroic Resource, you can build it up and you can spend it all at once to do some big, cool things, or you can spend it a little bit at a time to boost your, sort of, regular stuff, right — like that has always been in the game in one form or another.

And, you know, we were tweaking things and turning knobs to make big things more frequent, or here-and-there powers more frequent, right? And we knew, okay, during the day, it would be cool if during the adventuring day, things also got cooler. But there were a lot of different ways of doing that that we had tried, right? That it was like, well, you know, maybe at the beginning of the day you're tracking your powers on a die, right? And it's like, this die increases, and as it increases, the number of sides increase, you unlock more abilities that you can use, in each battle it starts higher, right? And so, like this idea of Victories existed, in the ether, but we weren't 100% sure how to implement it.

And then it was, we were at a convention, testing Draw Steel at Orccon in Los Angeles. And Matt and I were sitting at a table and we were trying to, we were talking about the problem, and it was like, okay, well, what if, this idea that, like, when you complete a battle, you have this number, and this number goes up, and as as this number goes up, that number increases your power somehow. But how would that work? How would it...? And it was like, maybe it gives you, when you hit a certain threshold, you get something for free, right? You can use one of your abilities for free. Well, what if I don't want to use that ability? What if I want to...?

And it was like, oh, it should just equate to Heroic Resources, right? That's the idea. And when we had that, that was like, oh, that's really something special. And then we came back and we were talking about it, and our general manager said, "I don't want my Victories to go away, then. I would never rest." But what if they converted into experience points? And it was like, yep, okay, there we go, that's what it is. That's the gameplay loop right there, right? And that felt really good.

There have been a couple moments like that. Figuring out that armor was Stamina was like that. Landing on how Malice worked, the Heroic Resource for Directors, was like that too, right? So. And that that was all all of those moments were very satisfying when they when they came together.

Jon de Nor: A lot of the focus around Draw Steel has been like, there's no...you don't miss in combat. That has been like...that's one thing that a lot of people talk about. But one thing that I've seen mentioned multiple places when people talk about — when they've read through the rules and kind of tried to understand them — the one thing that everyone praises, and I feel like everyone talks about this, I'm going to steal this for my game, is the loop of Victories and respites and how it kind of incentivizes the players to push on, but you kind of pull them back with, you don't have any more Recoveries, you need to take a respite. And that whole loop, every time someone mentions it, they're like, "Oh, that's so good, I'm going to steal that from my own game!" (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yeah. And to me, that's the core of Draw Steel, in the sense that like, those are the things that we came up with first, right? Were Heroic Resources and then Victories. Like those are the things in the game that are still existing that we really came up with first, because that, in many ways, that gameplay loop is more important than your core mechanic, right? And our core mechanic, being the power roll, took us a while to land on, but that really informs how the game works, how the stories you tell, the worlds that's going to take place, and what they are like, right, because of that. And so for us, that was big and important. And I'm glad to see people say that.

Because the other thing is like, not missing, right, which is core to Draw Steel definitely, and core to the experience and an important part of the experience, is not unique to Draw Steel, right? There's a lot of games that that work that way. People will bring up Into the Odd, which is a wonderful gameplay system. Everybody should go play Mausritter or Cairn, and, and experience Into the Odd. That's a game where you don't miss, right? And you have HP and it stands for hit protection, because the idea is like, when are you going to run out of, basically, luck, and the ability to dodge things, and then eventually you will get hurt. And, you know, there's plenty of video games that work that way too, where missing rarely happens or never happens.

But for us, I think that that gameplay loop — at least for me, I shouldn't speak for the rest of the design team — that gameplay loop is definitely what I am most proud of. And is actually the most Draw Steel thing that we do.

Jon de Nor: Yeah. I remember seeing someone being almost scandalized that you would change your core die mechanic over a year into development. They were like, "What? What are they doing? They can't do that!" But I always felt like, yeah, it's just like a random number generator. It's not, it's not like core to what the game is about. So it felt less momentous to me than I think it felt to them. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yeah. And it really, like, we spent a lot of time, you know, we changed that core mechanic many, many times. And I wouldn't, I don't regret that. I don't regret that at all. And it worked out great. Like the place where we landed, I'm really proud of. And it's, again, it's a place where like, you know, there's roots of Powered by the Apocalypse games in there, right? And we came by it very honestly. We came by it through this process that we went through to get there, and yeah, to me it was like, well, the important thing here is the gameplay loop. We need to find a core die mechanic that really supported that in the best way, right?

And so, yeah, I have no regrets. And again, I would happily tell people about that. I feel like sometimes when people say like, "Oh, you didn't have your core die mechanic figured out until you're in, that was bad," often those people who are saying that are not game designers. The people who are saying that are have an impression of how they think game design should work, right? But they are not necessarily game designers. And I would probably think the same thing if I was not a game designer. I imagine that I held similar opinions before I was.

Jon de Nor: I often see when people ask, how does Draw Steel work? Or how does Daggerheart work? The thing they open with is, you know, you roll these kinds of dice, and this is how many of them you roll, and this is how you interpret them afterwards. That's like what everyone opens with, and I understand that that's a very simple thing to kind of...it's a very easy answer. Like how do I explain the system? Well, the dice mechanic, that's something easy to explain. But it's very I don't know, it feels very deceptive in...it doesn't really explain anything, other than what dice you need to buy. (laughter)

James Introcaso: (laughter) Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true, right? And often for...it has certainly made me rethink how I describe games because — and when you play a lot of games, I think one of the things that you learn is like, games are tools, right? Game mechanics are tools to help you and your players have fun at the table. And so what kind of fun are you looking for? Are you looking to be scared? Well then there's a lot of games that have mechanics that are geared towards that and work great towards that.

Are you looking to feel, heroic, and have tactical discussions and put yourself in that right position for that perfect shot? Then that's what Draw Steel is for. Draw Steel is about being a big damn hero and tactically taking on monsters, right? And that's how I pitch it to people. And then they generally say, well, how do the rules work? And then it's like, okay, and I will often then start with that gameplay loop, right? And so it takes me a while before I get to the actual dice for the exact reason that you're talking.

Jon de Nor: What was your favorite feature or content in the game that you did not work on and why? And also who did work on it? (laughter)

James Introcaso: (laughter) Well, we've we've talked about Willy, and we've talked about fishing, right? And that to me was one of the most surprising because, Willy had promised it, I wasn't sure how it was going to work, I read it, and I was like, no notes. And basically the system you have is what he wrote when he turned that in, right?

Jon de Nor: Wow.

James Introcaso: It's pretty incredible. I am a big fan of my fellow designers here on the team. And so when I look at the classes in Draw Steel, I did...a lot of the classes, I did from levels 1 to 3, but not all of them. And there's only one class that I wrote from 1 to 10. That was the Conduit, and I gave that to Willy and Djordi, and then they fleshed out the rest of the classes.

But when it comes to the class design, I have to say that the Mull, which is entirely a Djordi baby, I think he did a really, really good job. And that was a class that was the hardest one to pin down, for sure, because we sort of knew what it was, but it didn't really fit a particular fantasy the way all the other classes did. It was sort of a fantasy we were creating mixed in with some fantasies people had. Took a lot of work, a lot of hammering, and a lot of polish, and he really, really did it. And like, whenever I get to play Draw Steel next, I am playing a Null, right? And it's also because I've seen Djordi play a Null to great effect. And now everybody will get to see that on our actual play for The Delian Tomb that we're putting out.

The other one is the Troubadour. I love the Troubadour. And that is Willy. Really got in there, banged that out, and put it together. And again, they had directives, right? Both of these guys had directives that were like, this is what we want these classes to do, this is...but they really took the ball and ran with it and made them incredible. Like one thing we had said about the Null to Djordi was, if anybody is a speedster in Draw Steel, it's the Null, right? And can we make a subclass of this a speedster? Yep, absolutely, right? And that's what the Chronokinetic basically is. It's a speedster class who can also manipulate time.

With the Auteur, Willy really took the ball and ran with the Auteur Troubadour as someone who is basically breaking the fourth wall, and changing the story as it occurs, right? And those things, I just love. It's going to be really hard for me. I wish...for the reason that I would like to play both classes, I wish that we had multiclassing in this game, just so I could play both.

Jon de Nor: I think the Troubadour being so...meta, I guess, is really...I think it kind of once again goes back to the fact that you're willing to break your own mold and kind of stray outside of, I think, even what even TTRPGs usually...the only thing that I can kind of think of that does something similar is like comedy TTRPGs like Toon or Paranoia, maybe, or...where it's kind of explicit that this is bonkers from the outset. But then the Troubadour comes along and starts rewriting the story while we're playing. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yes. Yeah. Which is very interesting and very, very meta. And for a game like Draw Steel, you don't see that in a lot of tactical games where there are these mechanics that that work that way. There's, you know, there's a Powered by the Apocalypse game called Monster of the Week that is very popular. I'm sure a lot of people are familiar with it. And essentially it's a modern-day, monster-hunting thing, inspired by monster-of-the-week shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, Supernatural, right? That kind of show.

There's a, playbook, which is the Powered by the Apocalypse version of classes, a playbook called the Mundane, right? So there's all these playbooks where you are a monster who fights other monsters like Angel or Spike and Buffy, or you're a slayer, or, you know, you're a hardened person out for revenge, right, all these things that we recognize. Well, the Mundane is like the friend, right? Who has all these powerful friends fighting monsters, and they're there too, right? Sort of like, Xander in Buffy, if people are familiar with Buffy. Or Cordelia. There's this person who just kind of gets into trouble but never actually dies.

And one of the things that you are encouraged — you have all of these things on your sheet that encourage you to, like, get into danger, and like, go off alone. And it's like, hey, when you go off alone, mark experience for yourself, right? And hey, the person running the game can't kill you, but they can abduct you, and they can, right, like, all this kind of stuff. And it's one of those things that makes me think of the Troubadour, because the Troubadour has this power to manipulate and change the story, right?

And the Mundane is one of those people who, not so much through breaking the fourth wall, but through the action of doing things that we would consider, like, bad player behavior, often, right, in a game like Draw Steel, means that, like, they are achieving telling a richer story and they are rewarded for it, right? And we wanted to give that with the Troubadour. You are rewarded for changing the story.

Jon de Nor: The next question I have on the roster here is — (laughter) — you're free to skip it.

James Introcaso: Oh no, that's fine.

Jon de Nor: I believe this is given a bit in jest. The question is simply, how did he — and then he's written, James — become so cool.

James Introcaso: That is a good question. I will let you know when it happens, how I become so cool. That is, I assume, a question for Future Me, who is cool. But, yeah, that's, basically what I got. I, you know, in terms of being cool, play lots of games. Play lots of games with lots of people, you'll learn a lot about them, you'll become more comfortable with yourself, and then people will think you're cool when you're not, which is my secret.

Jon de Nor: It isn't the golden bar that you're cool when a teenager says you're cool?

James Introcaso: Nice. Yeah. That's true. Maybe a teen — if a teenager wrote this, then I'm set, I'm cool. But if a teenager didn't write this, then I still got a ways to go.

Jon de Nor: I don't know how old Iron Monocle is, but he's not a teenager, at least.

James Introcaso: Not a teenager. Got it, got it. Get 'em next time. Get 'em next time.

Jon de Nor: But next question. Besides vacation, what are you looking forward to next? Now that the core is out? (laughter)

James Introcaso: Good question. So besides vacation, in terms of work stuff, the thing that I'm looking forward to is, we're working on this Encounters book, and I feel really, really good about what's going to be in there. You know, it's going to be a bunch of three-room dungeons. It's going to be montages and negotiations that you can, all of this stuff, you can drop into your game. And it's going to be an example of every skill, a hard, medium, and easy test that applies to that skill, and advice for running it and that sort of things. Just to give people more ideas of how all the different skills can be used. And again, you can drop these things into your game if you want to use them.

So I'm really looking forward to that, in addition to the classes that are coming out, the adventures, all that kind of stuff. So I feel really, really great right now about everything MCDM is putting together. And I'm also starting up on an as-yet unannounced project. That I am that is the thing I'm most excited about. So I have to come back on and talk about that when I can. So.

Jon de Nor: Ooh, exciting. I'm actually really impressed with the amount of products that you guys have in the pipeline for the next, just the next few months, even. The game is barely out and you are already planning on, okay, the next thing that's supposed to be, that's going to be released. That's really impressive.

James Introcaso: Thanks, thanks, yeah! Well, we started, you know, there's this interesting period of time when you're working on a book, where, everything's kind of in edit, or it's being initially laid out, right, which, it's like...we check in on, but we're not filling our hours full time. So we start to work on other stuff, right? And then what happens is the layout review comes in, and then you stop everything you're doing and you just look at the layout for a while.

And so we're now just starting to pick all of that stuff back up, now that the PDF is out and the books are starting to go to print, right? We're like, okay, well, now it's time to pick everything else back up and, you know, start looking at all of that again and get it ready. So that's what I'm working on right now. Taking a day off tomorrow. But then I will be back at it for a little while, and then, hopefully, a vacation coming up shortly.

Jon de Nor: Well-deserved. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Thank you, thank you.

Jon de Nor: Someone on Bluesky commented on the ancestries in the core book, and were like, "Eh, they're kind of fine, they weren't that interesting." And they mentioned that they were happy that you'd merged the gnomes and the halflings/polders into one ancestry. And they expressed the opinion that you should have just done the same with the dwarves, too. And I responded with, "Gno, gno, gno, the gnomes are coming, and they're actually in this picture over here." And they responded with, "Oh, I'm totally sold, now. Now I want gnomes after all." (laughter)

James Introcaso: Oh, that's wonderful, that's wonderful. (laughter) Yeah, that's great. And that, you know, that piece of art by Gustavo — that has a bunch of upcoming ancestries in it, and things that are hinted at and mentioned — I think is a wonderful piece for people to check out. So I'm glad that that helped convert someone into a lover of Draw Steel ancestries. That's great.

Jon de Nor: I saw also someone mentioning that they were kind of interested in how Draw Steel would be supported now that it's out. The implication was that, well, if there's going to be a drought of content now, then it's just going to kind of die on the vine. I don't necessarily believe that because I seen how I've seen how active the community is, but when they then kind of got told that, well, there's a whole lot of stuff already planned just for this year, and then there are more stuff planned for future years also, it seemed to kind of convert them into thinking that, okay, maybe there's actually something here. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yeah, 100%, right? And that's a big part of this, is, we don't want people to think that this game is not being supported. It is very much being supported, and there's a lot of support coming up. And also it's one reason we have that creator license, right? The creator license is as good for us as it is for creators, right? And that's true of any license you create. The better it is for creators, the better it is going to be for your game. Because it means that, like, people start putting out adventures and content and it helps the life of your game continue on, right?

Because, I remember those early days of Fifth Edition where it was like, you got to wait for the next hardcover to come out, and there was only like two a year, and they didn't have a license yet, right? It was like, oh, man, I've already run through every monster in the Monster Manual. What am I going to do next, right? And so we want to make sure people are getting great content from the get go, not just from us, but from any, any creator out there who wants to make stuff for Draw Steel. I am happy, to have them, you know, make make stuff. It is such an honor whenever I see that someone has done something related to Draw Steel, be it, a great app like Stawl, you know, or be it an adventure, or a piece of content, or that kind of thing. Awesome, amazing.

Jon de Nor: As someone who relies on that license, it's always so fun seeing new people discover it and realize, like, holy crap, it's everything! There are no limitations! What's going on?

James Introcaso: Yeah, it was very encouraging this weekend when, you know, there was chatter about it and chatter about, well, The Delian Tomb costs $10, and it seems like that's a higher-than-normal bar into entry, right? And we could get into why it cost that much and everything, right, it's 145 files, and over 200 pages of content, and so there's a reason why it's worth a lot.

But when people started to realize, "But, oh, the rules are very open, and it will only be a matter of time before they're out there and in the public...actually, this seems pretty cool," was really a really nice reaction for people to have. That was very cool.

Jon de Nor: We're a small group of tool developers that have gotten together to kind of pool our efforts into getting the rules made more available to work on programmatically. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Thank you, thank you. That means a ton. That means a ton!

Jon de Nor: A big shout out to Xentis from the Discord and everything. He's...(exhalation) he's been doing a lot of work and...yeah. (laughter) Hats off.

James Introcaso: Yeah. Thank you. Xentis.

Jon de Nor: I recently did a...kind of a retrospective from the first playtest version that I had of Draw Steel. And also I looked through the crowdfunder campaign and the pitch video from the campaign on a livestream on YouTube. When I read through those old rules, I noticed at some point that you used the term "humaniform", which I commented on in the video, and it was then submitted as a question on Patreon. Why the word "humaniform" instead of, for example, humanoid?

James Introcaso: That's a great question. So that is a Matt Colville word. That's, whenever you see "humaniform", it's probably him who wrote that. So "humaniform" and "humanoid" can kind of mean different things, right? Humanoids are a sapient people who have the shape of...who are humaniform. So humanoids are humaniform. Something that is humaniform is not necessarily humanoid, right, so like a...you know, a big robot, right, like the valok, can be humaniform, but they are not humanoid. "Humanoid" often means that there's this certain level of emotional intelligence, sapience. Implies flesh and blood in some way or another. Like, memonek are not necessarily flesh-and-blood, but their bodies function as if they were.

And then "humaniform" just means a head, two arms, and two legs, right? Like that's sort of...like a doll. A doll is humaniform, but not necessarily a human, right? Maybe a humaniform is like "humanoid shape", right? That would probably be the better way...at least, that's how we use it.

Jon de Nor: Okay, okay. Did "humaniform" survive to the final rules? I can't remember if I've seen them.

James Introcaso: That's a good question, and I...shall tell you. It may be that it made it into...let me open up the old...I should have had these open. I could have predicted that this would happen. I want to say they're in the monster book, because I think we used it in Flee, Moratls when we initially...to describe some of the valok, that we said were...alright, well, I'll tell you what, it's not in the Heroes book. So it didn't survive the Heroes book. And it's not...is it in the monster book? Let's see. Searching...it is still in the valok writeup.

Jon de Nor: Okay. Okay.

James Introcaso: And it is just that one place where we talk about, servok versus multivok, right? Like servok are not humaniform, and multivok are humaniform. And that's Matt's writing, right? Matt did that valok intro. So that's why that's there.

Jon de Nor: But it was really interesting, actually, looking — the whole idea behind the stream was that YouTube, of all things, decided that I probably wanted to watch the pitch video for Draw Steel all of a sudden, like three or four weeks ago, And I started watching it and realized, wow, there are...it's so strange watching Matt talk about this game that you want to build. Even just a few minutes into the video, there's like, oh man, so much has changed since this video went live.

And that made me think, "I think I actually wanna...the thoughts that I'm having, I want to kind of record them for posterity, because I think this is kind of interesting for those of us who've been around for Draw Steel for a really long time at this point." Even in that first video, Matt mentions that he he'd be surprised if the Summoner and the Beastheart won't be in the core rules of the game. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yeah, yeah, right? And at that point, the Beastheart was, right? We were testing the game and the Beastheart existed, right? Was one of the pregens that we were using at that point. And, ultimately, they didn't make it into the game because they're too big, right? They required too many statblocks and other things to function. And we were like, well, we can't do that now. Yeah.

Jon de Nor: I brought up the character sheet for the, the included pregen of the Conduit, which...back then, character creation was, you get to choose your name and your ancestry. And also which equipment...you got to pick equipment, because that when that was back when item qualities was a thing.

James Introcaso: Yes!

Jon de Nor: So I kind of showed off the character sheet, like, okay, down in the right hand corner, there's like, choose your name, choose an ancestry, and your equipment. Here's the list of things you're proficient with. And it was such a strange...because this is before kits had been invented, and kits, when you finally happened upon kits, it felt like such a revolution. (laughter) It felt so wild, yet so elegant, the system...when that finally came around, I just remember being so impressed with how you managed to abstract this very crunchy part of the game into something that's really simple.

And whenever I introduce this to people, they have the initial reaction, "I don't get to choose my weapon?" And I'm like, "Yes, you get to choose your weapon. It's just that you can just choose the weapon you think is cool." And they go, "Ohhh! I don't have to select the longsword or broadsword or whatever to get the right bonus. I can just use the one I think is cool?" Yes!

James Introcaso: Yeah, that was always a big thing is...particularly in a heroic game, one big thing about being a hero, the fantasy of being a hero is like, you get to be good with the thing that you want to be good with, right? So if you want to wield a whip and be good with a whip, our game should allow you to do that. If you want to wield a trident and be good with a trident, we want you to be able to live out that fantasy, right? And so that is a big, big part of it. If you want to, I don't know that, say that your weapon is your shield, and you throw it around like Captain America, right? Those are all different things that I think we want people to be able to do, and to feel like they can really accomplish.

And so the abstracting of equipment through kits really does then allow you to do that. The first thing we tried was like, make every weapon distinct and equally interesting, right? Well, that gets hard when you think about the number of weapon options that, you know, like, I got to make this morningstar and this mace and these daggers and this handaxe and this greataxe and this battleaxe and this longsword and this greatsword and this shortsword...where, like, all of them need to be interesting, and it's like, oh, we're just repeating ourselves, and nothing feels the same. Kits allow you to feel very different, but really customize your equipment, narratively, which was, that really helped.

Jon de Nor: Looking back at the old rules with the item qualities, and especially the weapons list, for me, it made me remember how cool I thought that system was, but it also made me realize why, for example, D&D Fifth Edition doesn't have that many weapons. Because you kind of run out of...you either do what they do, which is a somewhat simple system where you just assign different dice to the different weapons, or you do something where they actually are unique, but then you end up with what you guys tried for a while with the item qualities, and it's so much. (laughter)

James Introcaso: It is. It's a lot, it's a lot. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Jon de Nor: So if nothing else, it made me respect the design choice in D&D more. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Well, good. Good, I'm glad.

Jon de Nor: Turns out it's actually a good thing you brought up the Heroes book, because the next question that I got is the iridescent Rubik's Cube on page 95 of the Heroes. They're wondering, what is it?

James Introcaso: The iridescent Rubik's Cube on page 95...so that's the start of the Conduit chapter. And that is Dazar the dwarf — right, Dazar, who is the iconic Conduit, he's a dwarf Conduit — that is his holy symbol.

Jon de Nor: Oh!

James Introcaso: So that is the holy symbol of his god, right, is this weird-sort-of-looking Rubik's Cube. And our art director came up with that, Jason. And he was very much like, holy symbols don't have to be these flat pendants that hang around your neck. That's like a very sort of Judeo-Christian idea, right, that, like, you know, this is my holy symbol, and I hold it up, and it sheds light, and vampires cower from it. Why can't it be like a cool-looking cube that you carry around with you? So that's what that is. Yeah.

Jon de Nor: Wow. Interesting. Cool. I hadn't made that connection either.

James Introcaso: No, no, right? It's definitely something that is an Easter egg. And it's one of those things where Jason drew it, and then it wasn't in the book for a long time. And then at the very last minute, we were like, we need to fill space. What do we have? And I was like, oh, this is cool. Put that in there. And then we were sort of like, oh, maybe we should have captioned this, or something? But but you know, that's for a reprint, perhaps.

Jon de Nor: Is there anything in the book that didn't get art that you wish had gotten art?

James Introcaso: Ohhh, yes. So...this is a thing people will probably notice, and have noticed. The troll retainer does not have art. And I wish that we, overall, I wish we had more troll art. Because I would love to show the troll retainer as art. But I would also love to show the troll limbjumble, which is one of the minions. We didn't have art for it in Flee, Mortals. We don't have art for it in the monster book. And I think it is such like...it's just a bunch of troll limbs that are of all kind of grown together in a big kind of rat king of legs and arms and, you know, troll parts, that you're like, "Oh, gosh! Kill it with fire!" Right? And I really wish we had art of that, too, because it's, I think, pretty cool and unique. So, yeah, those are...it's all about trolls for me. I wish we had more art for them.

Jon de Nor: Well, trolls are near and dear to my heart as...trolls feature very heavily in Norwegian folklore.

James Introcaso: Ohhh, cool!

Jon de Nor: So trolls have always been, very like, special to me.

James Introcaso: That's great. I didn't — so let me ask you a question. Limbjumbles, those are a thing that are not real. "Real". Of course they're not real, it's trolls. Those are a thing that are not necessarily from real folklore, right? Or at least that you have heard of?

Jon de Nor: Not that I've heard of, no. Most of the trolls in Norwegian folklore feature...they're usually, they're big, often very heavyset, and basically lumbering, I'd say. And they...sometimes they're depicted as having, they're almost rock-like. So they often depicted with either moss or lichen growing on them, or sometimes even, like, they have, maybe small trees growing off of them. And they hide in caves, because according to, well, according to the folklore, if they are out in the sun, they turn into stone. Which is why some of the mountain ranges in Norway kind of look like trolls' faces, because those are trolls that were trapped out in the sun and didn't get back to their caves in time.

James Introcaso: Gotcha, gotcha, wow. (laughter) Oh, my gosh. So that's very of The Hobbit, right? Like, that's the Hobbit lore of trolls is pulled from, Norwegian folklore. Got it. That's cool.

Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how I know trolls. Yeah.

James Introcaso: Very cool, very cool.

Jon de Nor: Were there any unexpected changes that needed to be made, to the rules as a result of designing the layout or something that had to get cut for space?

James Introcaso: Oh, you know, that's...this happens all the time with layout, actually, where, what'll happen is, you'll lay out a page, and everything would fit if you could just cut one word, right, and everything moves up a line. And it's got to be the right word, and it's got to be in the right spot, and everything shifts and moves up a line.

Sometimes, you look at a page and you say, this looks pretty empty. We should add some text here, right? In order to make this work. Now, in the hero book, it's a lot easier to manipulate things because much of what we had was walls of text, right? Just a lot of text coming at you. Abilities, we wanted to keep together, like we had a rule where abilities, we didn't really want to break columns. We never wanted them to break a page, right? And so those were kind of hard to keep together, but they're fairly small chunks of text compared to statblocks.

So the monster book is the big challenge, and the big challenge about the monster book is this: there are certain statblocks that we didn't want to break pages, right? And for most statblocks, that's fine. They're short enough, they're not going to break the page. However, for solos, that is an issue. And sometimes for leaders, right? For leaders, leaders would take up a column of text, and then they would have a full-column piece of art next to them, right? And it was like, ah, this leader spills over into this column, but they can't, because this...and we don't want that to break the page, and we want to keep the art, and we want to...

And so that meant that we were doing a lot of cutting of text, or consolidating of text, in the monster book, very last-minute. And all of that, a lot of that fell to Willy. Willy was the lead designer of the monster book and did an amazing job with that. The flipside of that is that there was stuff, then, in the monster book where, because we were shifting things around, we had a lot of empty space. In some places we added art, right? That we that we could add, right? We did. We did all kinds of stuff.

But a big thing we did was we ended up adding a lot of extra information in certain places. And so that information that we added was like, sidebars about tactics, and encounter groups already pre-made and put together, and that sort of thing. So we ended up adding a lot to the monster book as well.

These were all things because we had just laid out a monster book in our last crowdfunder project with Flee, Mortals, these were all things that we had at our fingertips, right? Flee, Mortals has a lot of tactics, and hey, what magic items are here as part of this creature's treasure hoard, and quotes and things like that, that we added to help fill white space. So that was a big thing we did in the monster book.

Jon de Nor: The fact that you had to design the statblocks as part of basically laying out the monster book, how much extra difficulties did that incur? I assume that when — when you design Flee, Mortals, you kind of know how a 5e statblock look, what it looks like, and you know how to break, when it breaks column, and you know how that would...what that would look like/ How much extra work did it turn out to be that you had to design your own statblocks and figure out how, how do we fit this onto a page?

James Introcaso: Well, so, it's...when you're developing the rules at the same time, it's an ongoing process, right? Because...and Willy did a great job with this, and so did our art team. We very quickly were like, well, how are monsters going to work? What are they going to look like? That kind of thing. So we did all sorts of, different...we made all sorts of different design decisions, and then kept going back and revising them.

And then when we felt like we were pretty set, we said, okay, we need to start really designing what our statblocks are gonna look like. And then we did, right? And so we said, okay, now we can start looking at the book. Where are we going to need art? Where are we going to — right? And we built a, Lars, who works with us, built this whole document that was like, alright, we're going to need art here, here and here. We can fit this many of this — this many minions on a page, this many standard creatures on a page, this many elites, this many solos, this many — right? Like he did all this work to figure that out. And we made all these statblocks, sample statblocks, and we're like, this looks good, right?

And then, when it came time...we laid out the book. We were doing it very quickly because we were, the deadline was upon us. We had a bunch of people working really, really hard on it. We put the book together, we put it in front of everybody, and we all said, "Uh-oh. The text in the statblocks is too small." Right?

Jon de Nor: Oh, no.

James Introcaso: We looked at it and we said, this needs to be bigger. By a pretty big magnitude, we made it bigger. Which meant then that all of the statblocks now took up different spaces on the page. And that's where we were like, okay, now we gotta rework some things and make it work in order to make the book more viable.

So if we had correctly identified how large we wanted the text from the beginning, we probably would have had an easier time laying out the book, right? And we didn't. And so that's how we ended up breaking lots of things and working lots of hours at the last minute because we were like...yeah. We could go this route, right, where everything is small, but we have the pages where we can make them bigger, and we should, because it will make the book more usable. And so that's what we ended up doing.

Jon de Nor: Wow. That is...(laughter)

James Introcaso: Yeah. It was a decision that no one was happy about, but we all knew we had to make it. Because it was just, this is just going to be unacceptable if we don't do it this way. So we have to do it, right? And it really worked out. And the fact that we had the extra pages, right, like when we laid it out, we were like, okay, this is only a 340-page book. We can go way, we have way more pages now, and we kind of have to — there were other things that meant we had to fill those pages because, like, we had a slipcase, right?

Now imagine when you have a slipcase that two books go into, one hero book, one monster book, it has to fit that slipcase perfectly. The slipcases had already been ordered. And we were like, well, the slipcases are for 800 pages of content. So what are we going to do to make sure that these fit in here nicely? And I was like, well, we could, you know, add a bunch of stuff at the back, add maps, add all kinds of, you know, whatever. Or we could make this book more usable and increase the text size.

Jon de Nor: I'm really happy when people open the Monsters book and they realize there's a whole first section of the book that is actually really, really useful as a Director when you're going to run monsters. Everything from...I've seen multiple people comment on the first section where it talks about, when does creatures become monsters, and what the statblocks represent.

And this is a bit of a touchy area, but I really like how you ended up handling the...with the new Monster Manual, Wizards of the Coast tried to kind of unify, how do we defend the idea that orcs are both monsters and player characters? And they ended up removing the orcs from the Monster Manual. So there are no orcs to fight anymore. But I really liked how you handled it instead, where you just say, well, these are creatures in combat, but when they're out of combat, they are people, basically. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah. And that was, again, that was long conversations, but Willy is the person who put that into words, right? And really managed to nail that and get that down. And Matt helped him massage it and get it into a good place. But that was something that we felt pretty strongly about, because the game is about fighting monsters. And so you need a lot of monsters to fight. And the book does a disservice if we give you a bunch of monsters that are not meant for combat, right? In one way or another. Retainers are there to help you. But all other things in that book basically exist to try to harm you.

But we also know that this is a story, right? This game is about creating a narrative with your friends. And so, you know, all of the lore writeups and stuff, we talk about how, like, hey, this is what orcs are like. They're not just monsters, right, they have this culture. They have this...right? That is an important piece of the game. And like, the people you save, right, are who make you a hero. The creatures you fight — the reason you're fighting them isn't to steal their gold, right? It isn't to do anything other than save people who they intend to harm.

And so it's important that you understand that sometimes these creatures, these — anything in this book could become someone that you are maybe going to try to save at some point, too. And I think that's an important thing for us to note, especially when we talk about like, hey, this is what orc and goblin and human and elf culture is like, in these books.

Jon de Nor: Yeah. I also think that having a monster band that's just called "Rivals" kind of underlines that very clearly, that...because, we know what a rival is, that yeah, they are kind of our enemy. But we realize, and especially from a lot of media, that sometimes you can kind of save the rival from themselves and make them an ally instead. And I feel like having rivals as a monster band, basically, underlines that notion that these aren't...they're not always bad.

James Introcaso: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And I think that's, that was important to us too, right? Yeah. You got why we called it "Rivals". Exactly.

Jon de Nor: This is actually the last question. And this was submitted by the Dice Society.

James Introcaso: Love that guy.

Jon de Nor: Ditto. Funnily enough, we are patrons of each other, so...(laughter)

James Introcaso: There you go. I love that, I love that. That's great.

Jon de Nor: He asks, now that the books are done — and we've kind of touched upon a lot of this already, but I'm going to ask it anyway — now that the books are done, is there anything you would have done differently?

James Introcaso: Oh, yes. So I think the big thing that I would have done differently is we would have planned better for the layout process. I'm happy with where the books landed and ended up, right? I'm glad people have them. It was a real grueling process, going through the layout. And I think there are things that everybody on the team would have done differently, in order to prep ourselves for the layout as we have it now.

So I think that's the biggest thing, is that I definitely would have encouraged the team to prepare in a different way for the layout process than...but, you know, hindsight is 20/20, as they say, right? And that's kind of an answer — that may not be the answer the Dice Society is looking for, because the Dice Society is probably looking for an answer about design, right?

I do wish that we had more time because there's other stuff that I would have put in there. I would have loved to have gotten the Summoner in the core rules. I think that would have blown people's minds, to see the Summoner as part of the core rules. I would have loved, loved-loved-loved to get that. I would have loved to have tried to figure out how to make the Cosmic Die work, for sure.

But I have to say, having been able to sit with the game, and getting as many bites at the apple to change and rework things as I have, there's not much that I would have. I think Draw Steel ended up exactly in the place where it needed to be in terms of what's in those books. So, yeah, just more time to polish, more time to work on layout are the biggest things that I wish I had.

Jon de Nor: I remember Matt mentioning once on stream that he wanted this RPG to be...he wanted to publish the second edition as the first edition, and he said that he felt like they, you've kind of succeeded, because you did so much playtesting for such a long time that the first version of the game was left in playtesting, and what you actually ended up publishing now is kind of like the second edition, where you've already revised a lot of the stuff that would have been "wrong", in quotation marks, in the first edition.

James Introcaso: Exactly. Yeah, I do feel that way. I do feel like having rapid-iteration playtesting has really helped us get to the gam, to a level where it's far better than it would have been if we were not doing that, right? And it does feel sort of like it's in its second edition already. Yeah.

Jon de Nor: I have one thing that I've been dying to ask.

James Introcaso: Yeah!

Jon de Nor: Because I've been burnt by adventure design, let's call it before. And I've run some of the dungeons from Where Evil Lives. And I've run The Road to Broadhurst and parts of The Delian Tomb. In all of those adventures and projects, you've kind of...you try to do something a bit different from kind of the standard box text, and especially in The Delian Tomb, the interjections with the rules and everything is such fantastic work, and...

James Introcaso: Thank you.

Jon de Nor: Where does the motivation to kind of...to try to figure out something new come from, when it comes to adventure design, especially, where I feel like there's a very common formula that a lot of games adhere to, and you're trying something really different, I think. Or, not really different, but, at least, something better. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yeah, yeah. You know, I think...again, this comes from the ethos of like, you don't have to do things the way they've always been done just because that's the way they've always been done, right? For me, as a person running a game, I've always hated — I don't hate read-aloud text, right? Like, this is one thing that I want to be clear about. I love when read-aloud text is in a game. I think it really helps Directors and people running games.

What I don't like is having a giant paragraph to read like a speech, right? Because — there's two things that happen immediately. And this is something that Wizards of the Coast actually talked about. Years and years and years ago, they went to GenCon, and they observed that when read-aloud text is more than three sentences, it gets to a point where people stop paying attention. This was before, like, everybody had a phone at the table, right? That they just like, tune out, and then they will immediately ask the person running the game a bunch of questions that was just in the information they heard, because they just glossed over.

Because what happens is, right, we go from having a conversational tone with our friends to, all of a sudden, I'm delivering a lecture, which just makes people's eyes glaze over. It also becomes uncomfortable for a lot of people running games because all of a sudden I go from, "Hey, I'm having a conversation" to, "Uh-oh, I'm giving a lecture!" Which brings a whole different set of nerves, right? Reminds people of reading out loud in class, right, which a lot of us didn't like to do, and that kind of thing. So, you know, you're tripping over your words, it's not as dramatic as if you had just delivered it yourself.

So I was like, okay, what is...and when I talked to people about how I didn't like boxed text, a lot of people said, I don't either. But a lot of adventure designers said, "But I like to write it! That's where I have fun. I like to write." And I was like, well, I don't write the adventure for my fun. I write it for the person running it's fun, right? And I do have fun writing adventures, right? It's not being a banker. It's not, you know, performing plastic surgery or anything like that, right? Like it's like, this is fun!

But so, how do we get short, punchy, evocative text that is also then easier to paraphrase, right? Because it's hard to look at a paragraph and paraphrase it on the fly. Even if you've read it before, you're like, oh, wait, I got to make sure that I mentioned that there's three skeletons over here and two zombies over here, right? Like, I don't want to forget that. So I better just read it.

So if we break it down, like, that's one thing we did that in Where Evil Lives, where I was like, well, what if we break it down? And what if we say, okay, we're going to have like one or two sentences per bullet point? Those bullet points are going to be the important things players need to know, and that's it, about this room. Like, here's what you need to know, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We'll write them short, we'll write them punchy, we'll write them evocative, so you can read them right out loud if you want to, but they'll be broken up.

So they're really easy to paraphrase, if you just want to say, "Hey, you guys walk into this room, there's lava over here, there's three skeletons over here, there's two zombies over here, roll initiative, let's go," right? And so we took that — people really like that from Where Evil Lives. So we brought it over to our adventure design in Draw Steel. That was a simple transference.

In terms of other stuff, it's sort of, what does the adventure require, right? And the rules interjections that are in the beginning of The Delian Tomb were Matt's idea. He was like, we should really write this this way. And he really pushed and encouraged us — me, because I was writing that section — like, hey, write this this way, and let's do that, and I think that was a great decision. It turned out really, really well, yeah.

And so, again, the same way we look at our classes and say, well, no class works the way the Talent does, but that's because that's the way the Talent needs to work. We look at an adventure and say, what does this adventure need to work? We don't have a formula, because having a formula means that you can only make one kind of adventure, right? And we want to make lots of different kinds of adventures. So if this adventure needs to work this way, then it does. If this adventure needs to be told in comic book panels, which I've actually seen done, there's — Oliver Darkshire, I think it's Killer Kobolds from Outer Space, available on the DMs Guild, right? Oliver Darkshire has an adventure that's told through, like, comic book frames.

And so it's like, the sky is the limit. There's no rules. Part of the fun of this game, right, is that like, you can do whatever you want, so you should be able to do whatever you want when you're creating the products. And so that's the ethos we always take when it comes to products, particularly for the person running the game, is like, how can we make this as easy on you as possible? What will make it easier? What will make it better?

And we sit around and a lot of our meetings are talking about like, "You know what I don't like? I don't like when an adventure does this. So how can we make that easier?" And like, I have an adventure design philosophy that is that a good adventure should be able to have...it is not that, "The player characters go here and then they do this, and then they do this, and then they do this." It is, no, here is the situation, right? You are walking into a situation and present that situation to the player characters. And now we probably know what they're going to do, and so we can give advice about like, if they do this, this happens. If they do this, roll this.

For the most part, we shouldn't be presenting adventures as, now the players go here and they do this, right? It's like, no, no, when the players arrive here, if they so choose, this is the situation that they walk into, right? Which is just sort of like a reframing of things that I think helps Directors a lot. You know, one of the biggest things — big takeaway I have in terms of adventure design is, Curse of Strahd is a very popular adventure, right? And there are a lot of reasons why I think people like it, right? People like dark, moody, vampire goth stuff, sure. But the biggest thing about that is that it is...it's the ultimate sandbox, right? The edges are so — like, if you try to leave Barovia before the story is done, you die, right? Or that mist spits you back out into Barovia.

But everything else that is going on in that sandbox is for the players to explore. You want to go right to Strahd's castle and try to fight Strahd? You can. You want to go around and collect a bunch of different weapons and then go there? You can. You want to solve some side quests? You can. And what's great about that is, we, as Directors have this book that tells us, like, okay, when you go here, here's what's happening at the old windmill right now. Here's what's happening in, Castle Ravenloft. Here's what's happening in here. Here are some events you can throw in if you want to. And I think that makes it very easy to run because it is this defined space, right, that people can move around in.

And that's why that's why dungeons are a big part of this game. Because it's like, here are the walls. Here's everything that's happening in here, right? But, other than that, that's what you need to know. You just need to know what's happening in these walls. You just need to know what's happening in Barovia. And so when I think about adventure design, I try to think about it that way. And The Delian Tomb is definitely presented that way. Here's what's happening in Broadhurst and the area around it. Now go, right?

Jon de Nor: Speaking of Delian Tomb and Broadhurst, I remember you mentioning, I think in one of your streams, that you were experimenting with the game world kind of ticking when the heroes take a respite. And I know we're really early in the Delian Tomb life cycle, as it were, but do you have any impression, or early impression, whether or not that has kind of worked the way you wanted?

James Introcaso: So through playtesting, it seemed people really liked that, right? Because it meant that they didn't have to track days. They were tracking respites, which are, as you know, are a big deal. So it's like, hey, even if you didn't start tracking them at the beginning, it's pretty easy to think back and think, okay, how many respites did we have? Well, we probably had like two or three, right, because — and oh, you know what, there's an easy way to figure this out, let me talk to people about what their progress is on downtime projects, and that kind of thing.

And so I tend...the feedback from playtesting was that people really liked it. Will a wider audience like it? I think we still have...we're only a week in. Most people, if they've played any Delian Tomb, have played one session. Most have played none, right? So yeah, I think we will see more once we, once it gets out there. But the playtesting results were promising, and that's why we we kept it in there.

Jon de Nor: When you mentioned it, I immediately liked the idea of...because I feel a day can be very, very short, and having the game world kind of tick every time that it's nighttime feels often like too much work, at least for me as a Director.

James Introcaso: There's something gamist, too, about that, which I like, right? Which is that like, hey, as long as you're trying, right, the clock doesn't really tick. It's when you say, okay, I need to take a break that the clock ticks down, right? And so that encourages you, if you're a player and you understand how it works — which you don't need to, right — but if you're a player and you understand that, you're like, okay, so as long as I push myself, I stop the clock from advancing. And that gives you that heroic feel. And we want people to feel that way.

Jon de Nor: Cameron of Rise Heroes Rise! is running The Delian Tomb for me and a few other people.

James Introcaso: Oh, cool!

Jon de Nor: The fact that we know that the world advances when we take a respite. And it's been very...it has been a tough choice multiple times, whether or not, should we go back? Because we've just solved this part of the tomb, and if we go back now, does that mean that the goblins will make progress in our absence? And do we want that to happen? None of us has read ahead of the adventure, so we don't know. We just know that if we take a respite, other stuff is going to happen. (laughter)

James Introcaso: That's right!

Jon de Nor: So we might have just invented stuff that that's not even in the adventure, for all I know!

James Introcaso: That's great.

Jon de Nor: I really felt like that part of the design worked really well, at least on our group, where it felt very momentous every time we were discussing, should we go back for a respite? Because two of the players were out of Recoveries, I was at full Recoveries so I could still go on, but we didn't want them to take respites on their own, either. And we were discussing that like, okay, we found some health potions, so if you take those, and I'll just kind of go in front, even though I'm an Elementalist and I shouldn't really be there, but I'll protect you from spending your healing potion, and maybe we'll make it work for one more thing...! (laughter)

James Introcaso: That makes me very happy. That makes me very, very happy. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that's, well, then it's working as intended. So, good, good.

Jon de Nor: I've just started running The Delian Tomb for a very irregular group in person. And I've also informed them that, every time we take a respite, yep, you get to do your downtime project. But that also means that the world is moving on to its next phase or whatever. So I'm hoping to have some of the same effect on them. (laughter)

James Introcaso: Yes. Good. I'm glad, I'm glad. I think that's great that sharing that...one thing that, when we first started playtesting, I was like, I don't know if Victories are going to encourage people to press on. And they sure did, right? That sure, sure did encourage people to press on. So that's great. I'm glad. And my hope is that by you sharing that with people, it will continue to impress upon them, like, it's not just losing your Victories now. It's also, you know, the fact that the bad guys advance their plot. That's great. Yeah.

Jon de Nor: I'm out of questions at this point. But as the last thing, I asked you to bring a recommendation of some sort, something you want other people to be aware of. Do you have anything in store for us?

James Introcaso: Yes, absolutely. So in terms of recommendations, I recommend...first, I'm going to give just a general recommendation. Everybody should play lots of games, right? And my one hope for Draw Steel is that we know Draw Steel is going to be many people's second game. And obviously we hope they love Draw Steel and they want to keep playing it. But I also hope it teaches people, "Wow, learning a second roleplaying game is easier than learning a first," right? Learning your first roleplaying game, it's like, what even is this? You have to wrap your head around that, you have to do all this stuff. Second game, you're like, oh, this is even easier. Third game, even easier. It gets easier each time. And so my hope is that it opens people up from becoming not just their second game, but that then they go on to discover a third and a fourth and a fifth and that kind of thing, right?

So with that in mind, I want to recommend games to folks that they should check out. One of my favorite games in terms of design, in terms of the way that you build and customize characters, is a game by a guy named Rob Schwab. Now, Rob Schwab worked on Third, Fourth, and Fifth Edition D&D, is a great game designer. Worked on Shadow of the Demon Lord, which is — if you like, I would say, like, gross horror, but comedy, like, Army of Darkness, or Evil Dead II, that kind of thing. It's a great medieval fantasy horror roleplaying game. If you're not into that, but you want to see how those mechanics work, he just put out Shadow of the Weird Wizard, which is the high fantasy version of that, right? Less poop, and stuff. Both are really good. And I think, people should definitely check them out.

I was just at GenCon and I just played Pirate Borg. I had a blast. Pirate Borg is a Mörk Borg descendant. Uses a lot of the Mörk Borg rules, but encourages you to be pirates in a really fun, great way. I had a blast playing the game. In Pirate Borg, there is a random table — in fact, it is a — you know how there are two d10s you use to make 100? This is a 2d20 table. So you roll a 20 and then you roll another 20. Tons of different combinations to figure out what happens to your character when they experience "ash". Ash is basically like this illegal commodity, which is the ground-up remains of undead that can do all kinds of stuff to you when you inhale it, including having your head fall off and a ghost head appear in its place. Really wonderful, really, really wonderful old-school-style game that I cannot recommend enough for people to check out.

In terms of people checking stuff out that will help them with their game design, play lots of games, check out lots of games. An Architectural Approach to Level Design is a textbook about video games that will help you in your game design. It was recommended to me by a great designer named Sersa Victory, whose work I also cannot recommend enough. People should definitely go check out An Architectural Approach to Level Design. Very good textbook. That will help you out if you want to be a game designer.

Finally, I am big into comedy. And so, if people want to check out — so Matt talks about Taskmaster a lot, right? I love Taskmaster. Great show. People aren't watching that, they should watch the Australia, the New Zealand, there's all kinds...there's a Norwegian version of Taskmaster people can check out. Amazing. That guy from What Does the Fox Say, right? He's a contestant. Watch how long that guy goes without blinking — oh, my God. Incredible. From Ylvis. But there's also a show called Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee.

Jon de Nor: Yes, yes!

James Introcaso: Delightful. Both New Zealand and Australia versions available. It's on YouTube. It is a comedian named Guy Montgomery from New Zealand. Literally, it is...starts as like, sort of a normal spelling bee that he has comedians on and they're spelling stuff, and then it gets, after the first round, gets truly wild and becomes kind of an exercise in absurdity and spelling. And it's just one of the most beautiful things on television right now. And it will inspire you as a game designer based on the games that these people play. So those are my recommendations for folks to check out.

Jon de Nor: Wow. Great recommendations. Really great.

James Introcaso: Thank you. Thank you.

Jon de Nor: James, it has been a pleasure, delight and honor to have you on Goblin Points. This has been really great.

James Introcaso: Thank you. It is my pleasure, delight, and honor to be here. I really appreciate what you're doing. I appreciate you being a great member of this community, Jon. And I also appreciate you putting out the Stawl app, which I will be using in my games. So thank you very much for that.

Jon de Nor: Thank you! (laughter)

Outro

Thank you so much James for coming on. It's an honor to have you on Goblin Points. One thing I've thought about after the interview, is the point about the the rules give explicit permission to break away from the pattern and tweak them for specific scenarios.

We didn't talk about it in the interview, but Project Rolls themselves are also a change from the core mechanics. The rules call them a special kind of test that doesn't use the outcome tiers. A clear indication to creators, I think, that tweaking the core rules to better serve a feature is allowed. Within reason. And after careful consideration.

I want to thank Ananam, Eric Stefen, TDAWS, Seth Lang, Matt Dollar, and The Dice Society for submitting questions for James. Paying patrons can submit question for upcoming guests. Link to join can be found in the episode description.

If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on tips@goblinpoints.com.

Links to the MCDM Discord server, the subreddits for MCDM and Draw Steel, the YouTube channels of Matt and MCDM, the complete link section, and this script is in the show notes. It's also on goblinpoints.com.

Next episode is on the 5th. That'll be the news roundup episode for August. See you next time. Snakkes.

Links

• Shadow of the Demon Lord
• Shadow of the Weird Wizard
• PIRATE BORG
• An Architectural Approach to Level Design
• Taskmaster
• Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee