Intro
Ben a.k.a. SurfingBird is on Goblin Points. He's a founder of the Draw Steel Brewery Discord server, and recently published the gish class Scion. Ben talks about how he went about designing the class, and how to make sure the class feels like a proper Draw Steel class.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, Ben!
SurfingBird: Hello, Jon. It's lovely to be here.
Jon de Nor: Give us a quick introduction about who you are and also how you ended up in the MCDM/Matt Colville sphere, or community.
SurfingBird: Yeah. Okay, well, I'm Ben. Kind of, I guess, better known as SurfingBird. I really Draw Steel. And I do homebrew for it. Notably, most notably the Scion, which is this mystic anime swordsman...cool guy, I guess. Like...yeah, hopefully it's cool.
Jon de Nor: I think so. (laughter)
SurfingBird: (laughter) Yeah, nice. And the way I got to the MCDM community, I think I've always known Matt on YouTube, and I've seen a bit of videos from time to time. And the way I got to specifically to Draw Steel and joining the server and everything was a buddy of mine — also in the Discord, but not as active as me — called Exocist, who is this really...like the most hardcore tactical TTRPG guy I know. Like, he playtests so many games, and he has eidetic memory, so he remembers everything he reads. And he's this super-mega-optimizer for, like, he knows all the best builds for every game.
And we playtest a bunch of stuff together, and we talked like...well, before I played Draw Steel I was into 5e and then Pathfinder Second Edition, and...I just, I talking builds and optimization and stuff. And he was my buddy, and he introduced me to Draw Steel. And then I just playtested it a bunch. Not even in the actual playtests. I just ran encounters with him for fun. That's how I got into Draw Steel initially, and entered the community.
Jon de Nor: Huh! As you mentioned in your introduction, you've maybe most notably, or recently, released a Scion class. A...is it correct to call it gish?
SurfingBird: Yeah, yeah, that would be...it's definitely like, the first thought I had when...first of all, I love gishes. That's like, whenever I play an RPG, that's the first thing I try to do, a gish.
Jon de Nor: Can I ask you something about gishes? Because it is something that's come up a lot in the community about people wanting a gish in Draw Steel. And I don't know what a gish is. And at this point I'm almost too afraid to ask! (laughter)
SurfingBird: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.
Jon de Nor: Can you kind of summarize what is the fantasy behind a gish? And also, do you have an archetypal example of a gish?
SurfingBird: Yeah. Okay. So I think there are a few ways to think about it. I think the most basic one is I want someone who's like, good at martial arts, but also does magic, and has that flexibility of maybe using some magic and range and to disable his enemies, but also they can like, fight in the front lines, right? I think the second one would be, the archetypal fantasy, for me at least, is modifying my physical arts with magical arts. So enchanting my sword, making it a vessel through which I apply a spell onto someone. Stuff like that, I think is very archetypal.
That is the fantasy, I think. When it comes to mechanics, a gish is...well, it's kind of like, I guess in D&D it would be combining two classes, basically, like a martial class and a caster class. That's like the standard reference for a gish. For me, when I made the Scion, I was trying to kind of tap into all of these things. The primary inspiration from me was the Magus from Pathfinder.
Magus has this cool ability where they can take a spell and then kind of channel it into their weapon, and then when they hit someone, they get the brunt of both the attack, the physical attack, and the spell is applied to them. So you're kind of feeling you're getting away with something, like, "Hey, I'm casting a spell and attacking." And that was the first thing I really had in mind. And that's the basis of the Enweave ability in the Scion.
Jon de Nor: Yes, yes.
SurfingBird: That is the basis of that. So that was the first thing I had in mind when I knew I was going to make a gish class, is...to me, that is the most archetypal thing for a gish. For me. I also knew I was going to have like, you know, abilities that let you kind of cast at range, do stuff at range, not only in melee. But I also knew it's going to be a melee-primary class. It's a melee-only class with some ranged abilities, like the Censor, basically. So yeah, and then it kind of like blossomed from there into all kinds of stuff. But that was the main, the one primary seed, you could say, of the class and the fantasy.
Jon de Nor: I have to admit, as, as someone who hasn't understood what a gish is — I've already mentioned this to you, but I got to play as a 5th-level Blinkblade Scion in a one-shot. And having played, at least, a Scion once, I kind of get why people it, because it is kind of badass. (laughter)
SurfingBird: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the number one thing. Yeah, like, whenever I design, I think the first thing I have in mind is, how do I make this cool? How do I make you feel badass? How? Like, at least in the case of the Scion, I knew it had to be really fucking cool. Like, that was one of the most important things, because it's kind of a class about being cool, in many ways.
The abilities are all supposed to be slick, you know, they evoke the feeling of being this master swordsman, but also mystical and, you know...yeah, just like this total master. You can sense that in the inspirations from Virgil from Devil May Cry, or Demon Slayer, some other inspirations, but that's really the feeling that I want to evoke with every ability, is, it has to be cohesive with the theme and the narrative and the fiction of the class, but it also has to be cool. That's a super top priority.
Jon de Nor: Have you done any design work for other, or have you made homebrew and stuff for other games than Draw Steel? I'm mostly asking because someone was wondering whether you had any points of comparison between homebrewing for Draw Steel versus other games.
SurfingBird: I did some light brewing for 5e. I did some brewing for Pathfinder 2e in terms of, like, just a bunch of house rules that I made, because I'm kind of a balance freak, you would say. I really get into the mechanics of a game, and thinking of like, okay, what's the most, what are the weakest options, the strongest options, and why? When I was...in Pathfinder 2e, when I played, I wrote a bunch of house rules for my table, to smooth out the balance edges. So that was part of it.
But I haven't done much truly creative homebrew. Creative in the sense of creating something new. Draw Steel is pretty much my first experience doing that. And I think a lot of it is to the credit of Draw Steel. I think it's obviously...we're both here, so we both think it's an awesome game. I think it's incredibly designed, and I think the design of it is very inviting for homebrew. And I think you can see that in the massive amount of stuff we have, both in the MCDM server and the server that I'm one of the admins for, the Brewery.
There's so much going on. There are like, I think more than 20, 30 classes in the works. And that's just classes, you know. There's like, you know, monsters, adventures, and house rule discussion, class reworks. I just think Draw Steel is really fun to create for. It gives you...it's kind of structured, in a way. I think when you're making a class for Draw Steel, you kind of know what you need to do, because of just the way classes are built, or the game is built. It all has a kind of clear structure to it.
So yeah, I think that's why I got into Draw Steel. I felt there wasn't a gish, and I really love gishes, and I love this game, and it looks fun to create for, so that's what I did. And I think the...why, maybe, I took to it relatively quickly, is because I've just been obsessed with mechanics for games in the past. Like for 5e and for Pathfinder, I've really been super obsessed with mechanics and balance and builds. So that gave me a reference point for Draw Steel mechanics and balance.
Jon de Nor: You mentioned your friend who does a lot of, plays a lot of tactical RPGs. Has that friend gotten a chance to play the Scion?
SurfingBird: Yes, yes, Exocist. He got a chance. I would love to say that I got a very glowing review, but he's a very chill guy, so...(laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
SurfingBird: ...nothing, really. He doesn't get emotive very easily, you know? He's a great guy, but he's just not that way. But I definitely got some help from him, you know, feedback for the class, like a bunch of it, for sure. And from Tamwin, and from Mattelonian, they were very much there in the first stages of development for the class. Fun fact, before the Brewery — man, that's a hard word. Brewery. Like, it just doesn't work. It's not working. Okay.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
SurfingBird: Anyway, before that server which will not be named, I had, like, a very tiny server in which it was just me, Matt, Exocist, and Tamwin.
SurfingBird: And I just like, I saw that, like, Matt and Tamwin were, like, working on their classes, and I knew I was...I was running just combat encounters with Exocist anyway. So I just invited them onto this really tiny ten-man server. And that's where we, we did some initial Vessel playtesting and some Gunslinger playtesting. So they also took a part in helping me design the Scion from the start. I got a lot of feedback from them as well from the get-go.
Jon de Nor: Was there a part of designing a complete class from scratch that you find the hardest? Like something that really took a long time to kind of lock in?
SurfingBird: Well, there are two parts to this question, I think, because there's...the boring answer is iteration, because you can design something and it doesn't work out, and then you have to try it again, and then it doesn't work out as well, but maybe a little bit better, so you iterate, and...both that and just the process of playtesting is very time-consuming. At this point, like for Scion, I've ran...it's probably been playtested for maybe 200 hours or something like that. Somewhere between 100 and 200, I think, probably closer to the latter. And for a lot of those playtests, I was there. That is arguably more time-consuming than the design, than the time it took me to design a class, to write stuff.
So that part is quite difficult. Grinding, it's a grind. Other part is, I found the first few levels — which make up the most important part of a class, basically, like, you can read the first level of a class and you know what it's about. It contains all the, like, crucial, magic components of like, what is this class about? What is the mechanical core of it? I found the first two, three levels, way easier to design for. Not because the design work is easier. It's quite the opposite. Those are the parts where you iterate the most, and you have to think the hardest about. Because from level three and above, it's mostly, you know, you're filling in the abilities, you're filling in the heroics. You're building on top of what you already built.
So in that sense, those parts are easier. But I actually found them harder because I feel like I had most of my creative juices flowing at the start, you know? So even though it was harder, like, design-wise, it wasn't as taxing to do those first levels. And in fact, the first draft of the first three levels of Scion, I did it in like two weeks, even though it was a lot of work. I did it in two weeks just because I was so into it.
The later parts took me way longer just because I had...I felt I needed more inspiration, you know? I didn't want to like, push it, and force myself to work on something that I didn't feel inspired to do. Yeah, so those levels were harder, actually, for me to do. Because you also, I think you feel at a certain point, you know, at the start, you have all these cool ideas and you make them happen, and, okay, now I need new ideas. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
SurfingBird: I did the things I wanted to do. I have the cool Fate-style ability that you teleport between five people and you slash each of them in a split second. I had that in my mind from a very early, early stage of designing the class before it was even written down. But after I did that, okay, now I need new stuff. I need new concepts. I need something, because the game has so many fucking abilities, it's insane! You need, like, 20-something heroics between like — I'm throwing the number, but it's a lot of abilities to design. You need two for each subclass at levels, I think it's 6 and 8, or 9. And you need a bunch of, like, basic heroics for the class, think of passives...
It's a lot of stuff to get through, and it can feel like a grind, but I guess you just have to get through it. And I found that sometimes, just forcing myself to sit down on it worked. It's not always a matter of waiting for inspiration to hit. Sometimes you just gotta force yourself to sit and work on it and just let it happen. Let the creativity come. It doesn't always strike you, you know?
Jon de Nor: That has actually got me thinking. And let me know if you think there's something to this thought. This is quite freshly brewed. (laughter) I imagine, if you were to design a class for something like D&D 5e or maybe Pathfinder 2, or Pathfinder Second Edition, I should say...I imagine that even if you were doing something like the Scion for one of those games, you could lean on a lot of the existing spells in the spell lists because they are shared. But when you're designing for Draw Steel, you're basically building a complete new spell list for every class.
SurfingBird: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jon de Nor: I wonder if that makes it both...how should I put this? It sounds that would be a huge hurdle to making new classes for Draw Steel, that there's so little you can lean on from the rest of the game. There are skills and perks, they're mostly handled for you by the core rules, unless you want to add some of your own. But everything else you basically have to do from scratch.
SurfingBird: Yeah, pretty much.
Jon de Nor: And you say that there's a lot of classes that people are working on in the Brewery. How do you how do you even square that? Why why are people so eager to make these classes? It sounds like so much work! (laughter)
SurfingBird: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think Draw Steel is awesome and that's part of it. I think people are very creative and they want to give an outlet for their creativity into something they love. So that's probably the best explanation. I will say most of these 20, 30 classes we have, most of them are only designed up to level 1 or 2, because it's a really big hurdle and because you have to do a lot of playtesting on those first few levels, if you want a class to be good, at the very least. So, you know, a lot of people are...even if they wanted to design above level 3, I would say don't bother yet. You don't even have the core of the class down.
So yeah, I think brewing for Draw Steel is both easier and harder. Easier in that you have pretty clear class structure. You know what you need to do. You know you need a Heroic Resource, you know you need signatures, heroics, etc., etc. You know what you need to get done, apart from, you know, the asymmetric elements that every class has, which, you just got to be creative about it and vibe it out, you know? It's not structured. You have to think about what it's like. We can talk more about that later, maybe, about design principles. So there's the structure of it.
But as you say, it's also...it's a grind. You have to write so much. Each class is like 16 pages. It's a lot to write. It's a lot, yeah? It's a lot of work. Yeah, I think, currently we only have...forgive me if I'm missing anyone, but I think we have, the Vampire, the Kiln — that's in the Patreon — we have Scion, Vessel, and Gunslinger...and Magewright. These are the six classes that I know of that are in pretty late stages, that have all ten levels designed and have gone through a lot of playtesting. And other than that, yeah, it's, a lot of it is early stages.
Jon de Nor: How much do you feel you have to design, or how much of a class would you recommend someone design before they kind of commit to making the whole thing? (laughter)
SurfingBird: Yeah. Level 1, level 1. And not even a full level 1. You can, I think Matt said this in one of his streams, you can just design a couple signatures, a couple heroics, a trigger a maneuver, and go from there. And the unspoken part is you also have to have some kind of asymmetric element. So that would be something like the ferocity table for the Fury, or Routines for Troubadour, or Judgment or Mark. You'll notice every class has some way in which it breaks the rules. And it does something different and asymmetric. And that's what makes them interesting, because if they were all just standard, by the book, a budget to each ability, it would have been more boring.
You know, you have you have some, you have a concept that I call power budget. Well, "I call it" — I think it's probably a well-established term by now, but, you know, it's kind of like...this is probably going to be a cringy metaphor for physicists. But I kind of think about it like dark matter, in that we know it's there and we know it's doing something, and it's got to be there, but it doesn't have, like...it's kind of nebulous, I guess you would say.
So power budget isn't a concept that we have numbers for., you know? We have math for things like abilities and kits. There is very specific math that we figured out as a community. It's not official, but we're pretty confident and it's probably 99% correct. Power budget isn't like that. It's vibes, you know? You just got to vibe it out. You just got to like, think, you know, I have a concept of a class I want to make. And ideally, you want the asymmetric element to get a lot of power budget. And for that to be free power, you know?
A theoretical class with no power budget would have no asymmetric elements and all of its signatures and heroics and maneuvers would be totally by the book, by the numbers. But power budget is what lets you cheat and do more than that, you know? So you can look at Censor and Judgment. Like, Judgment is an insanely strong maneuver. It's not standard in any way, right? It's stronger than the Elementalist maneuver, it's stronger than the Shadow subclass maneuvers, it's stronger than most maneuvers in the game. It's definitely stronger than the basic maneuvers, but so are all class maneuvers.
And that's because this dark matter thingy that's a very nebulous and vague thing we call a power budget — a big percentage of it was poured into Judgment. And I think the reason they did that — I can't speak for them, but I can speak for myself — the reason you do that is because you want to emphasize a certain narrative element within a class. So they really wanted Judgment to be like...again, I can't speak for them, but it would seem like they wanted Judgment to be a core aspect that brings to life what the fantasy of the Censor is. And if you want to do that, you gotta juice it up.
So Judgment is juiced up. It has the special sauce we call power budget. And Troubadour, it gets Routines, like, where is that coming from? There's no ability math for Routines. It's just something that the Troubadour does, and it's for free, and it's strong! You just — and it's literally no action economy either. It's just like pure power that it gets every round.
So that concept is something you really, really need to be aware of when you're designing a class. And once you have the fantasy of it down and you know, like, what you want to build, how it's different from what's already existing, how it looks and feels — those are elements you really want to hammer down, I think, before you start designing stuff. And I think I think most people intuit this, but it's good to say it as well. Once you have the narrative and the fantasy and the fiction, whatever, all these fancy words...once you have them down, the power budget is where you want to mess with those concepts and see how you can bring them to life.
So for me, like the Scion, I knew I wanted it to be very much about Enweave, which is — for people who haven't read the Scion, Enweave is a maneuver and it enhances your next melee ability. So the most basic — you have like, I think, 7 or 8 options. So it's a very loaded maneuver. and it's very flexible because it has that special sauce. And it lets you, for instance, do Flame Strike, which just says, on your next melee ability, do extra damage, fire damage, and the type of the damage of your ability is changed to fire. Whatever it was before, it's now fire. And you have Freezing Strike, which applies slowed.
And for context, this maneuver does cost 1 HR, because I'm not super crazy, because it is very strong. It is also that way because I knew that this is the narrative element that I really wanted to hammer down, to hammer home. Or...hit home? English is hard. Anyway, this was the narrative element I really wanted to hone in on, and that's why I got that special sauce.
And I think you have to do that for the class you're designing, you know? You have to realize, okay, what asymmetric elements do I want this class to have? You have to understand there's a cost to them. They they use up this resource that is not numerical, but they're a resource nevertheless. And, you know, you have to decide, like, how do you distribute the power budget of your class? It's very vibes-based and intuition-based. And if you really want to do it well, you have to know the game well. You have to have your reference points.
Because no one is going to...like, you know, if you're designing an ability, again, you can always just refer to our ability math sheets and you'll be probably fine. You know, you can, even for a kit, you can build some OP kits even if they're within bounds. But that's a different tangent. For power budget, you can't...you really have to vibe it, you know, it's an intuition thing.
And if you want to develop that intuition, you have to observe all the existing classes and understand like, okay, where do I think the power budget is here? How much of it is in each element? You know, maybe it's 50% in a maneuver and 50% in the trigger. Or maybe the trigger is also stronger than average. Maybe it's in a different asymmetric element, like a ferocity table or Routines or whatever. And the more you know that in the base classes, the more you understand how much power you have to play with. That develops your intuition.
And I would also say, just generally speaking, if you want to design a class for Draw Steel, you have to know the game. You can't just read a few classes and say, okay, I'm going to build something. No, you have to read all the classes. Probably have to read the entire Heroes book cover-to-cover at least once, hopefully more. You know, I've probably had sections in the book that I've read more than I can count at this point, but not all of them. I didn't read the entire book cover-to-cover, like, you know, twice that way. But I just referred to so many sections again and again.
You really want to build that intuition through both reading the game, the classes. And playing the game, that's also extremely important, because, you know, numbers are one thing, but you also have to understand how they work out in play. So I would also say you gotta play the game, a lot. Hopefully you've had more than ten combat encounters, at least. Ideally more, but that's probably a good starting point to develop your intuition of how combat works in Draw Steel, and how things, you know, shake out.
I think the design in Draw Steel is very reference-based, and I guess you could probably say that for every TTRPG, but you really got to know the base material and how it works. And that makes it easier to design your own things. So, you know, I could probably give you, for almost every ability in the game that I designed for Scion, what was a reference point for me? You know, we talked about before we started recording, we talked about, Blink, you know, the maneuver for Blinkblade, which is just, you teleport. It's pretty boring, you just teleport.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
SurfingBird: But teleportation is cool, so it's fine. And the spend on it is, it costs 5 HR, and it's, you know, it's seemingly very strong. You said, like, oh man, this seems really strong.
Jon de Nor: Yeah.
SurfingBird: Because what it lets you do is, it says, if you use this maneuver and this spend immediately after using any single-target ability, like a strike, I think it says, you can do it again in the spot you teleport to. Which, yeah, is really strong. But also, I had a reference for it. I knew that troubadour has a subclass called Virtuoso, and that class has a triggered, that costs 3 HR and lets you duplicate, like, add a target to stuff. So like, say your buddy uses a signature. You can use 3 HR to add a target to it if it has range or whatever. So I had reference there.
I also knew that my class maneuvers had more power budget to them than normal maneuvers. Because the Scion has literally no passives, it has nothing. It only has active elements — at least, well, you know, at level one. Obviously the subclasses get passives and stuff, but you don't get anything., you don't have a ferocity table, you don't have Routines, you just have very strong maneuvers. So I also knew I could get away with that a bit because I was pouring so much budget into my maneuvers.
Jon de Nor: Ah, yeah.
SurfingBird: And I had basically no budget anywhere else. So that's why the Scion maneuvers are so strong. Like, yeah, they're very strong. They're stronger than most maneuvers. But, you know, that's all you got. You don't have anything else. You don't have this persistent Judgment ability where you fuck with someone for the entire encounter. You don't have free value from Routines, you don't have this, increasingly, you get stronger as you gather HR, you don't have...you know, Shadow has one of the best abilities in the game. Hesitation is Weakness.
Jon de Nor: Yeah.
SurfingBird: That's a super-strong ability. It's way stronger than 1 HR, free triggered, right? Like the effect is extremely strong. Like, the closest comparison would be This Is What We Planned For on the Tactician. That is 5 HR and a maneuver. And it lets you do pretty much double what Hesitation is Weakness lets you do. But Hesitation is Weakness is a free triggered action, so it doesn't even cost any action economy, and it's 1 HR. So how could that be? That's because of power budget. The Shadow has a lot of power budget in that free triggered action. Power budget lets you cheat, basically, and do things, you know, outside the bounds of normal abilities.
Jon de Nor: Looping quickly back to the Enweave maneuver for the Scion. When you explained how a gish is spending, basically, magic to make their weapon attacks stronger, I feel like that whole thesis statement is kind of summarized in the Enweave maneuver, where you get to select, okay, what kind of magic do you want to do with your sword now? And then you imbue an elemental type of damage into the attack, and you add some extra damage from that.
And I also like that, in between the different choices, like for example, the fire damage one, it does...I think it's triple your main stat in fire damage, additionally? But it's not that for every single one. It's not just triple your main stat extra damage. It differs between them, a bit, what kind of effect it has. I felt at least that it kind of reflected the elemental power that you imbued the weapon with.
SurfingBird: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so Freezing Strike, you know, applies slowed. Flame Strike is just pure damage. It only does damage. What else? I think you have Umbral Strike, which is corruption, so it inflicts some damage weakness...crap, I don't remember all the stuff from my own class. Let me just check this out for a minute. You have Gale Strike, which, you know, makes your damage sonic, and it pushes the target, you know, because it's wind and stuff. Yeah. So, I really tried to to hammer that home, and, as you say, Enweave for me was, it's the signature mechanic for the class.
I knew that, you know, for gishes in D&D and Pathfinder, the way they work is, you attack and you also cast a spell, right? And the spell comes from a huge list of spells. And I didn't have the luxury here with Scion. It's just not that kind of game. I don't have a spell list, so I kind of had to build my own, you know, a bespoke kind of effect list to bring through that fantasy of, like, I'm imbuing my weapon with a spell. And I knew I didn't want it to be like, literally combining signatures or something. Because I knew that was probably...it was a dark alley I did not want to enter, because I knew it would be hell to design for.
Jon de Nor: Right, okay, yeah.
SurfingBird: Like combined signatures isn't like...let's not. It's going to be hard, and it's going to be clunky. So yeah, that was the solution I came up with for Enweave, making that bespoke list of options.
Jon de Nor: I also have to say, having — I've only played the one session, the one-shot with the Scion, but the fact that I can tweak my damage to be any type that I want, is so incredibly useful, especially because we fought against trolls which have fire weakness.
SurfingBird: Oh, nice.
Jon de Nor: Which was — I'm, all of a sudden, like, the most, efficient damage dealer because I add so much damage when doing both my regular damage as fire and then the triple stat on top of that. It was — I felt so powerful! (laughter)
SurfingBird: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the funny thing about that is, like, elemental weaknesses aren't actually sort of common in Draw Steel.
Jon de Nor: No, they aren't!
SurfingBird: Which is kind of unfortunate. I think we should have more elemental weaknesses and immunities. But yeah, I think that was definitely...that's a super differentiating factor, right? I think you have something different on Fury. I think level...I think it's either 3 or 6, I can't recall, they get an ability where they can use surges to add, like, elemental damage, of whichever elemental damage they want, basically, from a list. So it's kind of like that. But yeah, I think that was...that, to me, was also a crucial part of the fantasy.
I think that speaks to just how important getting your fantasy down is. Before you even write any mechanics down, I think you really have to understand what the class is about. What does it look like in combat? How does it fight? You know, not just, you know, what abilities it has. Like, what feelings does it evoke? If you were to see this class in combat, what would it feel like? What would it look like? What vibes is giving off, basically? I think you really want to have that down.
I think even the fiction element is not as important. And by that I mean, Scion has this whole fiction part to it, where the idea is, you are the Scion of a Mystic Art. So there's only one Scion of each Art in existence. So the Blinkblade, the Runewright, and Soulforged — and other Arts that are just not, you know, I didn't design, but there are presumably many more. Well, not many more, because, you know, it's kind of stupid to only have one inheritor for each Art. Because if you die and you didn't pass it down to anyone, it's going to die forever. So you definitely had some Arts that just died, in history.
But the idea is, you're an inheritor of this, like, Mystic Art. And you are the only one chosen to carry the torch forward, and that's your subclass. And all that stuff, while I love it, and it's really cool, that isn't really the most important part of the class to me. And actually, that came later, because — fun fact, the class used to be called Magus, based on, you know, the Pathfinder class. That was the initial name for it. And the fiction for it, you know, the flavor text at the beginning? It was pretty generic Magus stuff. You know, you travel around and you collect different, like, martial arts and magical arts and you learn to combine them.
So like, okay, that's cool, but it doesn't really fit Draw Steel. Draw Steel is very, very big on the "no oatmeal" rule, you know. You have to make the class strategy more specific than that. And people in the server rightfully called me out on that. And they said, hey, you know, the class fantasy here is pretty generic. And I was like, "Shit, you're right." And we workshopped together. And to this day, if you go back to the Scion chat in the Brewery — I cannot say that word for the life of me. If you go back — and it's funny because I made the server and I can't even say its name, so that's incredible.
Jon de Nor: You can write the shit word, but you can't say it. (laughter)
SurfingBird: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you go back in the history of the chat, you can even see the actual conversations we had, where we, I had a few people brainstorming, what would be the fantasy, the fictional element of this class. The reason I say this is changing that for the class didn't really change much, because I already had in mind the narrative element. Like, how does it look like? What does it feel like?
So all of those, all of my abilities and my flavor texts didn't need to change, because to me, the core element of the class fantasy is how it feels and looks. And the fictional element, you know, you might be able — if you did a good job with your narrative elements and your thematic elements, you might be able to guess like, what is the flavor text? What's the fictional component of the class, you know?
I think that's that's probably a good barometer for, like, if people can figure out what your class is about from just reading the flavor text and, like, what the abilities do, you're probably done a good job. So, yeah, the point is, you don't even have to have the fiction super down. You have to have the feel of it down, you know?
Jon de Nor: One other thing that I wanted to ask you about, about, specifically, the ability design, which I noticed — and I don't know if this is very unique to the Scion and that you've taken inspiration from some abilities in the core rules, or some monsters — but what I noticed when I was selecting my abilities while building my 5th-level character, was that you use a lot of...how should I put it? Interesting targeting patterns. (laughter)
SurfingBird: Mmm. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: Specifically, I noticed abilities that have a targeting pattern that is a "15 wall within 1", where you put down a wall, and every creature you build on is targeted, and then the wall disappears before anything happens.
SurfingBird: Yeah, it's not an actual wall.
Jon de Nor: No, you just use it for making a pattern for the targets. You end up being able to create these really bizarre lines, basically, around the battlefield to target, like, specific creatures that wouldn't necessarily be...I also noticed one that was, like, "four 5 × 1 lines within 1", which is just, you lash out in, I guess, four different directions, which I also found interesting. Where did those targeting patterns come from? (laughter)
SurfingBird: Yeah, so, actually, where it's coming from is...maybe you know, Tom Bloom. He's the creator of [Kill] Six Billion Demons and Lancer and ICON, which is a work-in-progress project of his. And I was, you know, I told you about my tactical RPG friend Exocist, and we playtested a bunch of ICON together.
Jon de Nor: Ah, yes.
SurfingBird: And it has really cool patterns, you know? It has, like, crosses, like, you know, Xs, and a bunch of stuff, and I figured, why not mess around with that? Like, I don't have to be, I don't have to use cubes and bursts. I use them, but I don't have to. And I feel like, as long as it's not too convoluted and fucked up and hard to use, why not? You know, I mean, I think it conveys something about the narrative element of the ability, you know, the targeting pattern. I think it's cool. I think that's probably the most important part. It's cool.
Jon de Nor: Yeah, it felt really...the whole class made me — and I even expressed some of this on the livestream — the whole class almost kind of unlocked a new level of Draw Steel for me, where there's so much inspired design in here that it kind of expanded what Draw Steel could be, at least to me. (laughter)
SurfingBird: Wow. That's, those are big words.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
SurfingBird: I don't know how to process that. (laughter) Thank you. Yeah, I think the idea is just to make cool stuff, you know, and I think if what you want to make doesn't fall into the bounds of what currently exists, you should still make that, because it's cool, and you want to make the player feel cool. And that is, you know, that is the number one guiding principle, I guess.
Like, you know, there's all the theory and stuff about, you know, abilities and power, and I can ramble about that, but I think, you know, the most important part of why we play is to have fun. And I think a large part of that is, you know, feeling powerful, and feeling cool. And that is something that is definitely a guiding principle. I think, for all of the designs that I did. Yeah.
Jon de Nor: As you've mentioned multiple times throughout the, the interview so far, you're not only the moderator, but you're also the creator of the Brewery server. You apparently started with a small server with just a few of you, and then you launched a new server that's really expanded and become, I think, the main homebrew server outside of the official — or I guess it's the main homebrew server at all, at least that I'm aware of. (laughter)
SurfingBird: Yeah, pretty much. Yeah.
Jon de Nor: How did that come out, come about? Did you just feel the need to invite more people in, and...?
SurfingBird: Mhm. So, yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think one part of it was I wanted a place to playtesting for homebrew. And, you know, you could go to the LFG channel in the MCDM server and try and do that. But, you know, most people probably aren't there to playtest homebrew. So I think that was the, probably the biggest reason. And that was the main function of the small server we had. And I figured, okay, why are we just playtesting this, us? There's four of us, all this stuff, we need more people here.
So that was a big part of it, because playtesting is a huge focus of the Brewery. We have...I think at some point we had a playtest every day of the week. And maybe we still do, by the way, I've lost track, okay? At the beginning — by the way, fun fact, when I first wanted to start the server, and I asked Exocist to join, he said, "I'm not joining until you have at least ten members in the server."
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
SurfingBird: He refused to join until I had, like, I guess, a proof of concept. But at this point I've lost track of how many playtests we have. And I think that's part of why the community is, maybe, attractive, because we have a big focus on that. We don't think it's enough to just design something and release it, as, just like MCDM's done. And I think that approach can be credited to them, because MCDM have gone through so much playtesting, more than any TTRPG that I know, at least, and it shows. So we're kind of trying to, you know, continue that approach.
So that was part of the idea. The other one was just, you know, having a place to discuss and design together. You know, there is the #ds_homebrew channel, and it's great, in the MCDM server. But I guess I wanted something a bit more structured, because we have a channel for every piece of homebrew. Literally every channel gets every piece, like every material gets its own channel, and its creator gets like, you know, permissions to like, manage pins and whatever.
And again, I think the, you know, you have the #ds_creations place in the MCDM server. But, you know, if it weren't — for some reason, it doesn't get as much discussion as we have in our channels, you know, for each — I think maybe things just get lost there, you know, and it's easier when you have a catalog that is organized and you can see the most recent activity, where chatting is going on...you know, I guess, one thing that I just figured out, like, as I'm speaking, you don't really...unless you've commented inside a creation, like, a thread inside the #ds_creations, you wouldn't know that chatting is going on there. But in our server, you can, you know, you see the text of the channel is bold and, you know, people are talking there. So maybe you hop in and see what they're talking about.
Yeah, so I think, for a bunch of reasons, maybe, it invites a lot of discussion. And yeah, I couldn't be really, I couldn't be more proud of it. I think it's turned out so much better than I anticipated. I think we have, like, approaching 500 members at this point.
Jon de Nor: Wow.
SurfingBird: We have tons of awesome homebrew going on. We have very vibrant and active, you know, discussion channels. People are coming in and asking questions and getting them answered, you know. We have a resources channel where you can just, look at all of the collected resources we have for brewing for Draw Steel, and, you know, you'll probably get your answer there, many times. But yeah, we also have very active and experienced homebrewers who can answer every question you have in the channel. And you can ask for feedback, and yeah, I guess most importantly, is you can easily coordinate playtests.
And, you know, the way it works out is, someone is coordinating the playtests and, you know, let's say you want to have a class, you want to playtest. You can just hop in and say, hey, I'm going to bring over my class, I want to playtest it. And you can even say, hey, does anyone want to playtest my class, and I'll playtest theirs? Because that's probably more useful data, to see how someone brand-new is engaging with your stuff. And, yeah, it just really invites a lot of discussion and playtesting and experimentation and iteration and, yeah, I mean, I'm super proud.
Jon de Nor: Just for clarity's sake, the Brewery is open to join for anyone that wants to...?
SurfingBird: Yeah, anyone, for sure. Yeah.
Jon de Nor: Excellent.
SurfingBird: Yeah, I can't legally post the link in the MCDM server because it's against the rules. But you know, sometimes we talk about it and then people ask for a link, so we DM them the link. There's also this Reddit post I made in the Draw Steel subreddit. So you can probably just Googlem "Draw Steel Brewery" and you'll find out on Google. But yeah, open to everyone, for sure.
Jon de Nor: We're coming towards the end of a whole hour already.
SurfingBird: Wow. Time flies.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. And I always ask my guests to bring some kind of recommendation that they want the listeners to check out or be aware of, and it can be anything from a book or a hobby or a movie or a game or whatever it might be. So what have you brought for us this time?
SurfingBird: Yeah. So I talked about this before, but I really like ICON from Tom Bloom. It's even more, I think, targeted at the tactic freaks, I guess you would say, like me. It's even, like, more, very...it's like, you know, it's from the maker of Lancer, so you might expect that. And, you know, it's going through a lot of changes, all the time. But it's really cool and really fun. And I think it has a lot of the notes that people enjoy in Draw Steel, because it's actually, you know...not to bad-mouth other games in the space, but, you know, combat is actually fun in Draw Steel. And it's actually fun in ICON.
Yeah, so either that or if you like, you know, mecha and big robots, you might just check out Lancer, which already exists and isn't a work in progress. Yeah, just, Tom Bloom has some really cool stuff.
Jon de Nor: It has been a...it has been really interesting to have you on, Ben. Your thoughts around and insights into designing a complete class for Draw Steel has...it's kind of unlocked some new perspectives, at least for me, on how the classes kind of balances out, even though, as you say, they're supposed to be asymmetrical, but somehow it all works.
SurfingBird: Yeah, but the asymmetry is symmetrical! You know? (laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter) Yes! (laughter)
SurfingBird: They're all symmetrically asymmetrical. (laughter) That was a bad joke.
Jon de Nor: But it has been — it has really been a, you're a — (laughter) — you're tying up my threads of thought. It has been really been a pleasure to have you on, Ben. And thank you so much for coming on.
SurfingBird: Oh, it's really been a pleasure for me, too. Thank you for having me on.
Outro
Thank you so much for coming on Ben. As I said towards the end of the interview, the scion really expanded my impression of what a Draw Steel class can be. The ways that the scion expands on targeting and the way that it reuses concepts from the core classes, but makes the distinct is fascinating.
I want to thank Robin Baggett, and Antan Karmola for submitting questions for Ben.
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 everything, including this script can be found in the show notes, and on goblinpoints.com.
If you want to support my work, you can become a Patreon member. As a paying member you can submit questions for upcoming guests. You also get access to premium features on Stawl. Stawl is digital tool set for playing and running Draw Steel: digital hero sheets, looking up monsters, or read the core rules. Go to Stawl.app. S-T-A-W-L-dot-app.
Next episode is on the 5th. That's the roundup episode for February, featuring new crowdfunders, vampires and Crows.
See you next time. Snakkes.