Intro
You've seen the wildly successful crowdfunder. I'm joined by the lead brain behind the game Night Shift: Devil Division from Slightly Reckless Games. Why did they use Draw Steel as a base, and what did they change from the base game? And what are ascended techniques?
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, Sacha!
Sacha: Thank you for having me.
Jon de Nor: Give us an introduction of who you are, and also how you ended up in the Draw Steel...well, Draw Steel community, and how you heard about Draw Steel, I guess.
Sacha: Yeah. So I'm Sacha, I'm the director at Slightly Reckless Games. It's always difficult to kind of put a moniker on my position because I wear a lot of different hats for the company, but, generally, lead game designer. And then I handle a lot of the business side of stuff as well. The Draw Steel community...kind of by accident, as you know, a lot of things happen in life.
We were...we'd finished up on our last project, which was the expansion for our first game called Ronin, which is a samurai, dark fantasy hack of MÖRK BORG. And I was in Japan, having some meetings with anime IP holders and that kind of things about developing TTRPGs for anime. So it was in this kind of head space of developing mechanics and, kind of, ideas for roleplaying games that were, you know, very anime-coded. Got back, like anyone who's worked in Japan will know Japanese business moves slow. So those kind of things are still ongoing.
But we decided that, you know, we're going to have to do our own project. And I got ideas for days written down in notebooks and stuff. But the one that was kind of the most prevalent in my brain at the time was the world and the setting for Night Shift: Devil Division. And then our home game, we'd finished up...I think — I can't remember the last game we played. It might have been Mutant Year Zero or something. I think it was something Free League, anyway.
And we needed a new system and game to try out, and I was like, oh, I've had a lot about Draw Steel at the moment, so you guys want to try that? So we tried it and then, literally, I think we were two sessions in once everybody had kind of got the basis of the rules down, and we were running some combat. And I think Dom, our designer, was playing a Null, and he, like, uppercuted a goblin into the ceiling. And then I think someone copied the ability and it happened again. And because of the minion rules, he ended up wiping off like eight goblins in one turn, and it felt very anime and anime-coded.
And I think I was sat there, DMing, and there and then I was like, this is the system we need to use for this setting and world. And then it kind of snowballed from there, and I started looking at the homebrew Discord, and kind of getting involved on MCDM's Discord, and went and bought all the, you know, the supplements, and bought a bunch of homebrew stuff and kind of started doing research and then, you know, one thing led to another and we did the Night Shift campaign, and it did really well.
Jon de Nor: Doing really well is an understatement, I'd say. (laughter)
Sacha: (laughter) Yeah, a little bit, yeah.
Jon de Nor: You were aiming for 30,000 pounds, right, in the crowdfunder. And, I'm looking at it now. And you ended up at almost 270. (laughter)
Sacha: Yeah. A very nice 269,000. Yeah. So I spoke about this in the update that I posted yesterday, after the campaign finished, and like...the people and the funds that we raised is great. Like it obviously, it allows us to do so much, and get a lot of great art, like the artists we work with are brilliant. But for me, the best thing is like, seeing our Discord community grow the way it has. It used to be that I could kind of pop in the Discord in between, like doing emails or whatever, and just kind of see what was what was going on in the Discord. But now, like, I can't keep up with everything that's happening.
People are having conversations and there's like hundreds of messages that I missed and I like, I can't go back and read everything. So I've just got to kind of trust that everyone's, you know, being okay and chatting nicely with each other. But yeah, I'm like seeing people come in and be so excited for the game and make original content like art, and people are making terrain and stuff like that. It's been fucking mindblowing. Our first two games were obviously...we did well, and they were popular, but compared to those, like, the way that community's reacted and come in and been so excited about it has been the best thing for me.
Jon de Nor: From all the people that I've spoken to about the game, people are really excited from it. Everything from the fantastic art that you've got, the...just the vibe of it, the monsters that you've shown off. I think people really like everything, it seems.
Sacha: Yeah. And it was important for me — not that we played it safe with our previous games, but they're very kind of recognizable in terms of, you know, one's samurai stuff and the other's Viking stuff. But, you know, we still have the philosophy that the art should be distinctive and original and cool, and the game mechanics and stuff should be doing stuff that's like a little bit different than that. But it's quite easy for someone to look at those projects or those pages and go, okay, yeah, I get it. It's Vikings on samurais or whatever.
So I knew with our next project that I wanted it to be a little bit crazier, a little bit kind of more out there in terms of like...you know, I think one of the first hybrid artworks we showed off was a guy with a hypodermic needle for a head? And that's the kind of thing where people go, you know, "What is that? What's, what do you even, what's going on there?" And that's the kind of reaction I was trying to get. I wanted people to kind of go, oh, I don't know, necessarily — like, I can see the inspirations and I can recognize that it's, you know, anime and 90s and that kind of stuff. But I also wanted to kind of, what even is that? Why has that shark got legs or whatever?
Jon de Nor: In the crowdfunder, you had multiple pledge levels, with a lot of different materials in each of them. But at the core, kind of, there's two books, the Division and the Devils books. Is there a reason you went with the same — how should I put it? — format as Draw Steel? It's not unique to Draw Steel, but with two core books?
Sacha: Yeah, obviously with the game being based on Draw Steel, it made sense to kind of match the offerings that Draw Steel had. Not just in terms of like audience recognizability; I think our audience is probably split 50/50 between people who have played and know what Draw Steel is, and people who have never played Draw Steel. But I also understand why they made two books, because there's a lot of content.
And, after, we got to sit down with some of the MCDM team, and we were speaking to Geoff, and he was telling us about how like, because of the way the abilities are written and with the power rolls and stuff, and you've got three things, it was like, it's just...like, I think they originally wanted to do one book, and they were like this. They must be like 600, 700 pages. So it makes more sense to split it across two books.
And it just means we can do a little bit more, especially in terms of like, layout and design philosophy and stuff, when you've got the segmentation between...this is what, kind of, the combat and the PCs and stuff, and then you can flavor the stuff around the devils and the Vault and that kind of thing a little bit differently. And it also kind of leaves it open for making more books to, you know, I think...similar to MCDM, they've got, you know, an Encounters book coming out, and, it means you can always keep adding on to it book-wise without doing a revised edition or whatever that might be.
Jon de Nor: You mentioned the devils and the Vault. Can you a primer to the setting or story of Night Shift?
Sacha: Yeah. This might be where I go on a little bit of a tangent, to be fair. So the history of the in-game world is, there is a thing called Kegare, which is like a spiritual residue that kind of collects in places where people are sad or there's like grief or negative emotions and feelings and that kind of stuff. Back in the Meiji era, there were kind of two different opposing ideologies about how Kegare could be used for combat and seals and rituals and that kind of thing.
One was the Exokinetics, and one was the Endogenics, which is what the Division calls them. But in the Meiji era, it was kind of...one had a philosophy about kind of training the inner, like, physical use and breathing techniques and that kind of thing. And then the other school was more about kind of outwardly projecting Kegare into using like, hand gestures and sorcery-esque things. And they were always in conflict around these ideologies.
And one night in the Meiji era, they both decided to kind of attack the other school. One of them put up a big barrier, and the other one tried to kind of wipe out the other school completely, and they created this event that created what is known as Under-Tokyo and the UT-Zone. The UT-Zone, in modern — or, I'll say, in 90s Japan, when the game's set, is kind of this world where...it's like a mirror of the Tokyo above. So it's kind of like a bit Stranger Things-esque in terms of, like, the layout is similar, but it's like a dead creepy place and it's full of the devils and stuff like that.
After the event, which is called the Sundering, back in the Meiji era, they came together, the two schools, and wrote the thing that was called the Accord, where they were like, "Okay, we've fucked up. We've made a mess here. We should probably kind of work together in order to kind of maintain and contain this problem that we both created." There was people, kind of, factions within those schools that didn't agree with the Accord and, you know, teaming up with these people that they hated on an ideological level. So they kind of separated and ended up making their own kind of separate factions.
But the ones who signed the Accord ended up creating what would be the basis of the future Devil Division in the kind of modern setting of 90s Japan, as publicly facing, kind of public safety, you know, dealing with gas leaks and kind of, government...I don't want to say, like, endorsed, but government-accepted kind of bureaucratic cooperation. Outward-facing, that's what they do. But inward-facing, they deal with devils and these things that may come through from the UT-Zone, or just kind of arrive or be manifested in places where there's a lot of Kegare.
90s Japan was chosen because it was post-bubble, when there was a lot of, you know, after the economic crash, there's a lot of sadness and grief and stuff like that. And Tokyo's in a place where everything's kind of, like, stacked on top of each other. So it made sense in for terms like, where would these devils show up? And it was it's been a cool kind of design space to work in, because when I was — I was born in the early 90s and I grew up in the 90s, and I loved Japan in the 90s, you know. Anyone who played video games, who was into like, Pokémon and that kind of stuff, probably had some sort of infatuation with Japan.
So yeah. Unlike, I think...there's a lot of you know, Delta Green and Triangle Agency. There's a lot of that kind of Remedy-esque stuff out there. And I didn't want to go too far into that kind of corporation-y, bureaucratic-y stuff. I wanted that to be kind of like the background to this cinematic, anime-coded combat. But there is a little bit of that kind of stuff in there. And, you know, in Japan, salaryman culture is, you know, I'd probably say like 70% of the people in Tokyo are salarymen or work salaryman jobs. So it made sense that, you know, it kind of fits that bureaucratic corporation stuff.
Jon de Nor: The reasoning for setting it in the 90s was more detailed than I realized. (laughter)
Sacha: I mean, don't get me wrong, the nostalgia aspect is big. I think...is it in The Matrix where, I think, Morpheus says to Neo, like, the machines made the Matrix based on 1999 because that was the peak of human civilization at the time. That was kind of like...you know, that's quite funny. But now when I look back on it. I'm like, well, no, maybe those machines were right. Maybe 1999 was the peak of human civilization. But yeah, the post-bubble thing was a big part of it. And, you know, Shintoism and that kind of stuff is the personification of like, bad emotions and spirits and stuff was a big part of it as well.
Jon de Nor: I noticed in the...almost in the introduction of the starter rules, you mentioned that, in contrast from Draw Steel, Night Shift has three pillars that you've designed the game on: tactical, cinematic, and anime. Are tactical and cinematic the same pillars as they are in Draw Steel? And how is the anime pillar different from the heroic fantasy pillars that was in Draw Steel?
Sacha: So I'll start with the anime thing. Obviously the game is very inspired by anime,and its...the artwork and the game design and stuff is based on the anime thing. I think one of the things when I was playing Draw Steel was I felt like I had to — and this might be different for, you know, different player groups, but I felt like, now and then, I had to remind the players that, like, you are heroic, you have to do heroic things.
The games that I run and play, I like a lot of moral ambiguity. I like a lot of difficult decisions. I like players who are not necessarily — like, they work together as a team, but there can be conflict amongst those. And I'm not saying that you can't do that in Draw Steel, but the Draw Steel book does a kind of...it tries to remind you, you know, these are heroes you're doing heroic things, you're expected to save the town and save the princess. And you're not expected to kind of do something that might be antithetical to that.
So I knew going into Night Shift: Devil Division that I wanted to kind of push a little bit more the other way in terms of...the Division itself is, you know, they're not a good company, and they're probably most seen as quite a bad company. Even though they're doing things that save lives and save people, they do need to justify their existence. And they do have a thing called managed leakage where they let things happen, bad things happen, in order to justify their existence. And, you know, they want you to...they don't want you to eradicate these devils. They want you to capture them and bring them back so they can experiment and do deals with them and stuff like that.
The anime thing, when compared to the heroic thing, is, there's a lot of anime tropes that I think are already built into Draw Steel. The main one being the fact that the more you kind of fight without resting, the better you get. And I really wanted to lean into that philosophy of...that was one of my favorite things about Draw Steel, when I had the idea for our game, was, it wasn't a case of like, you have to manage your resources in a way that's like, you know, we've got to save our spell slots or whatever that resource might be, because, you know, there might be a miniboss or a hard fight coming up.
It was, you can use your resources, and you know that the more Triumphs — in Devil Division, or, you know, Victories in Draw Steel — that you get, the more stronger you will get. But obviously you'll use more Recoveries. So I liked the balancing act of it becoming, how far can we push before we've kind of stepped too far and we're in a bit of trouble? That felt very anime to me.
And there's a lot of tropes, kind of like, as I spoke about before, I like the villain-to-hero trope. You know, Vegeta has probably the best character arc in Dragon Ball Z because he goes through the most character development. And it's not just, you know, in &Dragon Ball Z&, it happens across loads of anime, where these kind of antagonists become protagonists, and the people that the main characters see as villains become heroes down the line.
One thing that anime does well is it reinforces the teamwork aspect. And that was another thing from Draw Steel that I wanted to really focus on with the class designs and stuff. There's a lot of room for comboing abilities and using each other's strengths to your advantage.
Jon de Nor: You kept the tactical and cinematic pillars. Are they the same as they are in Draw Steel, or do you redefine them in some way?
Sacha: Yeah, we do redefine them a little bit. The cinematic one is — and I've seen a lot of discourse online about like, can, you know, can crunchy combat that takes, you know, a reasonable amount of time be cinematic. And I definitely think it can. I think there's different ways of looking at — like, say a combat takes two hours to run. There are scenarios and games where that two hours feels like a slog.
But then there are games like Draw Steel, where the combat might take two hours, but it's only lasted three rounds or four rounds max, because of all the tactical decision-making and the conversation that happens, and the things that are happening between rounds and actions and stuff. You know, as long as the players are interested and engaged, I think that's where the cinematic feel comes from, if the things that are happening are interesting and you can picture it in your mind and it feels cinematic. Then even if the combat takes two hours, as long as everyone's interested and engaged, I wouldn't consider that a long combat, just based on, like, you know, it took two hours.
You know, there are games where that might be 14 or 10 rounds of combat, where one player just isn't rolling very well, and they feel like I'm not really getting much out of that. And I like that in Draw Steel, you're always doing something that progresses, you know, with the power rolls and stuff. But moreso, the generation of the Heroic Resource means you kind of have to be engaged and seeing what's happening. You can't kind of sit back on your phone and wait for your turn. You've got to know, I've just gained a resource, or someone has just done something that's, I've got a triggered action, now.
So the cinematic thing, we tried to just kind of build on that a little bit. So we've got the banter between rounds. I like the idea that it also felt very anime that, you know, at the end of a combat round, you can have a little side conversation with whoever your fighting with, or it might even just be with your allies, kind of explaining the situation. And then the tactical pillar is, you know, the game itself is built on that pillar. So that one's probably the one that's the most unchanged. But the tweaks we made were in service of kind of our vision.
A lot of people have said, in our Discord and stuff, when they got the starter rules, it was like, "The stuff that you have changed is kind of more a stripping back rather than like additive." We have added new things to the kind of game design and stuff, but the reason I picked Draw Steel was because of the forced movement and tactical combat. And I didn't want to mess too much with the kind of fundamentals of the game. And anything that was additive was in service of the other two pillars. And then the things that I wanted to change with the fundamental kind of tactical side of stuff was more a case of like simplifying, you know, metacurrencies, or how certain things are handled, without changing so much that it becomes unrecognizable or a new system altogether.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. Let's dive a bit into those changes that you've made and let's start with the meta currencies. Those are some of the first things that come up in the starter rules. Specifically Adrenaline, which is, Night Shift version of the hero token. But you both grant more of them, but you've also made damage boosts and what you call thresholds, which Draw Steel calls potencies, you've made those cheaper.
Sacha: So the reason I chuckled a little bit then was because, our Discord community has been very vocal about the fact that Adrenaline and Momentum should be swapped, naming-wise, because, oh, adrenaline is more of like an individual thing that's personal to you, and momentum can be attributed to a group, kind of...
Jon de Nor: Oh, okay. Yeah, I see. (laughter)
Sacha: It just makes more sense from a naming convention. And I think, like, I've spoke about this before as well, I think I'd originally started with the names flipped, and then I flipped them, and then I flipped them again, and now the community is making me swap them again. So it might be that Adrenaline, probably Adrenaline will be the Heroic Resource.
The reason for unifying that — obviously, in Draw Steel, functionally, they all work the same, even though it's personal to you. I can see why they named them individual to classes, because it feels more kind of...like when you're generating drama or something like that, it feels personal to your class. But for the things that I wanted to do with Devil Division, it made more sense to have it as...the Heroic Resource to have one name.
And then that just means that, when we use the Vault, for players being able to get these abilities from devils, I don't have to write, you know, "Heroic Resource". I can just write, you know, you use this, and it ports over very easily and stuff like that. And if there's anything else that grants abilities that use the Adrenaline, then it's just kind of an easier 1-to-1.
That being said, like, much like Draw Steel, each different class and subclass generates their Adrenaline in a different way that feels unique to them, and the way they use it will feel unique based on the class abilities. It was just a case of making it kind of simpler. And then the merging of hero tokens and surges, it just — when we were playing Draw Steel, it just felt like too many metacurrencies to manage. Obviously, the DM's got Malice, or we call it Dread in our game. You've got your own heroic resource to keep track of that you generate and then stuff.
And then, when we were playing, it felt like either surges or hero tokens would be forgot about a little bit, or kind of remembered in a situation where it was like, "Oh shit, I need to heal. Oh yeah, we've got hero tokens." So I was like, there was kind of like an exchange rate in Draw Steel that I could kind of see in terms of surges and hero tokens. I can't remember it off the top of my head, but you know, you can spend two to buy one or something like that. And I was like, if there's crossover in the base game between those two things — and I know the representative of different kind of, not philosophical, but like different game stuff — I was like, if they can serve a similar function, then we should try merging them for our game and let players have a little bit more freedom with how they spend and how many they can spend.
Hopefully, like from a tactile point of view, that having just kind of...and I'm talking like, in reference to our starter set and stuff, we'll have ways of tracking these resources on the table. It just felt nicer to have a pile of stuff, be it Momentum now, that everyone can see and have access to and spend freely on a bunch of different stuff depending on the situation, rather than having, you know, two separate things and then your own personal thing and then they've got their own personal thing. So it was just a case of looking at it in a way, and how can we make it more table-friendly and not kind of something that gets put to the wayside and then remembered just when it's kind of necessary.
Jon de Nor: Moving on to something else that's also...very much feels like the same thing, but it's also different, and I think you're trying to capture something, a different...call it vibe, theme, maybe, which is the characteristics, which you called metrics in Night Shift. And you've changed — or, I say change, but you've named them Body, Reflex, Analysis, Instinct, and Nerve, which I think very cleverly spells out BRAIN, which I love. (laughter)
Sacha: You know what, I've been trying to do that in a game for ages, where...there's another game I've been working on in the background for a few years now, and I tried to make the title of the game, the characteristics, and it always felt a bit clunky. And then when I was coming up with it, I was like, what do we name our version of characteristics? And it was another kind of sticking point with Draw Steel where, to me, the, Intuition and...and I'm caught on using our ones now because I've been working on Devil Division, I couldn't tell you the Draw Steel ones off the top of my head, now.
But players at the table were always asking, like, is that this one? Is it Reason or is it Intuition? I wanted it to be a little bit more clear in the naming convention that this is for this, and it was actually by accident that ended up...I think it like nearly spelled "brain", and I had something different for the last one. And I was like, I need to come up with a name that begins with N so I can make it say "Use your BRAIN", and, you know, Body, Reflex...so yeah, it was, it was kind of like half accident for something I've wanted to do in the past then. So when I got to do it, I was like, I was happy.
Jon de Nor: Would you say that the five metrics represent the same ideas as the characteristics does in Draw Steel, or is it more than just the names that are different about them?
Sacha: At the core they are similar in what they're trying to represent, but obviously due to the setting and the style of game, they'll probably be used in a lot of different ways. Obviously, a a big part of it is, and I know we're in 90s Japan, but there's not much, like, obviously there's not much in the way of technology and stuff like that in Draw Steel. So that's a big part of it in terms of kind of electronics, and there's kind of a lot of space for interacting with modern equipment and weapons and stuff like that. So I think that will come up a lot more.
But then, you know, there's probably stuff in Draw Steel that comes up a lot, the way that those characteristics are used that probably wouldn't be applicable to Devil Division. The way that that has kind of developed is more in the sense of like, obviously, you have the core characteristics and metrics in our game that are similar, but then when it gets to the use of skills and the skills that are available, they're more obviously custom and kind of more pointed at the things that are used within Devil Division.
So, in my experience, obviously, you're adding the metrics when you're doing power rolls and combat and stuff, which makes sense for whatever you're doing. But the thing that I found that characteristics and metrics ended up being where the confusion came from, and where generally that comes up the most, is when you are using a skill in combination with the tests and stuff. So the outside of combat thing is where, you know, when you're using skills and stuff, that's where it should be, the changes will be most apparent.
Jon de Nor: And speaking of tests, you've also elected to only have one set of test outcomes instead of the three that Draw Steel percents with easy, medium and hard tests. You've just a single power roll table for tests.
Sacha: Our kind of philosophy at the company is we don't like to mess with roleplay too much. The combat stuff is where you can kind of get granular and crunchy, and that's where you'll be doing like the cool techniques and stuff. But the outside of combat stuff, like, when I'm running a game, I like it to flow quite naturally and gracefully, and I don't like to kind of shoehorn too much, either rule-checking or, you know, I don't want to have to be flicking through, a rulebook during roleplay if I can help it. Obviously, there's always things where you might need to check, you know, how something works or not.
But for me, when I was running Draw Steel, it became a case of like, first of all, I had to kind of either suggest a characteristic to be used, and then there's a back and forth about how many skill, like what skill do I use? And then as a GM, I have to decide whether it's easy or hard or medium. And I was kind of...I feel like, with any TTRPG where that kind of difference and kind of difficulty of test is used, obviously you'll default to the middle one a lot of the time.
So I was like, why don't we just kind of have the middle one as the default? And we can change the difficulty using edges and banes and stuff like that, which, you know, having a double edge or double bane will change the tier of the outcome anyway, which is kind of...it's kind of like reverse-engineering the difficulty system, but just trying to do it in a way that feels more intuitive and quicker.
And like I say, I mentioned to you before, that after making that system, obviously we're still playing Draw Steel for research purposes and for our home game. I've completely switched to that system now, and it's been easier for us at the table to kind of run those non-combat scenarios and stuff like that, where it's just a case of like, I want to do this. Okay, yeah, maybe like, I'll suggest a characteristic. They'll go, "Can I use this skill?" They roll and everyone at the table instantly knows, oh, that's a pass, that's a fail, or, you know, we're going to get a reward.
And I think it's important to mention that, like...I'm sure Draw Steel players might be aware of the test table and stuff, but I like it when everyone at the table knows what the result kind of relates to. So if it's a fail, the whole table can kind of go "Oooh..." rather than having a result and then it being like, oh, you know, maybe I told you it was a hard test, maybe I just kind of asked for the test, and now I have to look at the result and narrate the result. I like when it's a group experience where we're all in the same boat and we can all go, oh, you fucked up, and something bad is going to happen now.
Jon de Nor: And speaking of out of combat, or as you call it, engagement in the rules, I think. You have something you call cinematic mode.
Sacha: So yeah, it's kind of our version of the montage test system from, Draw Steel handled in a similar way, but I just kind of wanted to remove some of the restrictions and kind of streamline it. Again, with this philosophy of like, I don't want to be checking too much stuff and the isn't kind of like, you need X amount of successes to achieve, you know, these different outcomes, or there's...you know, you don't need a sheet of paper with all the different stuff on to run it. You can use the test system that we've got to go, "This is the thing that is propelling the cinematic mode." It links with that binary test game design philosophy of, we can stay immersed in the roleplay aspect. We can have these quick vignettes where people are in different places or, you know, we don't have to kind of focus on traveling around Tokyo unless it's needed.
It's about having these kind of quick vignettes that can spiral one way or another and like, things can go successfully. You might be in a situation where a devil has been confirmed in a location, and there's a public safety aspect where one player might need to kind of get the public out and tell them a lie. And someone might have to like, say, find out where, what floor the devil is on, and someone might have to kind of deal with security aspects of making sure that it can't escape once the engagement happens. And it becomes this kind of like very cinematic, fast paced thing of like, oh shit, you failed, but they kind of covered you by doing this. And it kind of like flows really nicely into, once we get to the engagement, it feels like the engagement was earned in a way that felt natural outside of the engagement itself.
Jon de Nor: I feel we at least have to touch a bit on combat, because of the kind of game this is. And you've made some interesting changes. We've already mentioned but Adrenaline and Momentum, and there's also some smaller changes that I noticed by looking through the starter rules that I found interesting. To start with something simple, you've changed crits to also grant a, should I say reward, when you crit on something else than the main action?
Sacha: That, for me, was one of the things I noticed when we were playing Draw Steel. I'm very much of the mindset that if you get a crit, it should be a celebratory thing. And what I found happened in Draw Steel was someone will get a crit and celebrate and then be like, oh, no, it's a triggered action, or it's a maneuver, or something that wasn't a main action. It kind of had this feelsbad kind of vibe about it of like, "Hey, a crit!" Everyone's like "A crit!" And then it's like, oh, we don't really get...there's no benefit to that, because it wasn't the main action.
So I was like, there should be some kind of benefit outside of a main action. So we decided that it would generate Momentum, or what maybe will be Adrenaline, like one of the two, depending on the naming conventions that we end up landing on. But yeah, that was the kind of decision-making behind that.
Jon de Nor: I...*(laughter) Something that I saw mentioned in the Draw Steel Brewery server was renaming the free strikes to basic strikes, which has been a much-debated topic in the Draw Steel community in general. What were your thoughts about naming them basic strikes instead?
Sacha: The free strike thing, it's just...there's a lot of things in the Draw Steel kind of naming conventions to me that felt either like, like it could have been better. And sometimes it led to like confusing situations. And obviously once you've played the game a bit, it doesn't becomes less of an issue, right? But like, I don't want to make the barrier to entry any more difficult than it than it could be. So calling something a free strike and then having a confusion about if it costs, like if it's free in terms of an action or whatever, it's just kind of like a little stumbling block that could happen at a table that might not be familiar with Draw Steel, or might not be familiar with roleplaying games, you know, at all.
So a lot of the decision making behind — and people have talked about it in the Discord of like, how you've just kind of renamed some Draw Steel stuff, and it's like, yeah, there is a bit of that. But it wasn't just done because like, oh, it's a different game, so we need to rename it. The decision-making, is how do we make it either clearer or more kind of easier to understand in terms of naming conventions for both new players and experienced players or people who might be experienced with Draw Steel?
And generally the feedback has been good from the community. People are going, oh, we're glad you've changed it to this name, or, yeah, this is way better, it's way easier for me to understand that the basic strike is something that you don't really want to be doing, but it's a good kind of thing to have in your back pocket when you might not be able to do anything else, but there's no kind of confusion around it being free in terms of action economy or what have you.
Jon de Nor: Back in the days when Draw Steel was under development, it was named basic strikes at some point.
Sacha: Oh, really?
Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they changed it to free strike in the final version, mostly based on tester feedback, because the main issue that they had was, when they called it basic strikes, new players tended to think that these are the default attacks you should do, and that signatures and heroics are for...are basically like your powerful spells, basically. And these are like, "I run over and hit them with my sword" abilities.
Sacha: Ah, I see. That's interesting, yeah. I can see both points of view, right? I can see the one side, and I can see the other. And maybe like after playtesting we'll end up in a similar situation where we go, "Oh, right. We can't call it basic strike for that reason." But I don't think I would — I wouldn't go back to free strike, either, I would try...and in development, it was one of the things where I looked at so many synonyms, and, like, it needs to communicate this, but there's no perfect word that says this is what it is without being a little bit confusing. So maybe I end up changing that down the line. But "basic strike" feels right for now, and we'll see how playtesting goes, yeah.
Jon de Nor: I prefer basic strike over free strike, too. (laughter)
Sacha: I would rather people view it as the thing that isn't powerful because it isn't, at least that's a correct kind of interpretation, than the interpretation that it is free or something that might cause confusion. At least if people are treating it as the basic thing, then the interpretation is correct, even if the usage isn't right. Because, you know, the way we explain signature techniques in the book is this is the thing that you should be doing the most, rather than...yeah.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. In the triggered action section, you mentioned that you have two specific kinds of triggered action. What's the intention of kind of categorizing them into specific categories, which is instant and...oh, no...
Sacha: Interruption and reaction, yeah.
Jon de Nor: Exactly. Yes.
Sacha: So I play a lot of Magic: The Gathering. I've played Magic: The Gathering for years now. It's where basically all my money goes. Coming from a game like that, where, you know, it can get really confusing...I always like things to be intuitive, and trigger actions in Draw Steel kind of...we had scenarios and situations that happened at the table where it wasn't always clear when the kind of when the action happened. Obviously the trigger is clear, because the trigger is outlined in whatever triggers the action. But I just wanted to be a little bit more, okay, this happens before the trigger, so you can interrupt it. And this happens after the trigger as a reaction.
We haven't fully like playtested the triggered action stuff yet. It's kind of something that we're looking to focus on, but it just felt more natural...I think maybe 4e uses a similar thing, I think? And it just becomes a clearer...there's no confusion at the table. It's clear within the trigger action, whether it happens before the thing or after the thing, and it creates scenarios, obviously, where, if you do an interrupt that does damage, you could actually cancel the thing that triggered it outright.
But yeah, it was just a case of...and, you know, as I spoke before, a lot of the decision-making is, how do we make something clear and intuitive that, at the table, doesn't become a point of conversation or slows things down.
Jon de Nor: And speaking of that, I also looked at the conditions, which are mostly the same. A couple of them have been renamed, but as far as I could see, you've opted to drop the dazed condition. And you've also added contaminated and infected. What's the difference, and why drop dazed? (laughter)
Sacha: The conditions and damage types and weaknesses are probably the things that will change the most, and I think I changed some of the conditions that we did bring over as well to fit our game better. The reason for dropping dazed is, I felt like dazed was antithetical to the design goals of the game. Like that the Draw Steel kind of...it seemed to me like Draw Steel wanted you to always be doing something and progressing. And, you know, even when you roll less, you know, 11 or less and you get a tier 1, at least you're still doing some kind of damage or you're doing something. But then dazed seemed antithetical to that, of like, you can only pick one of these things to do.
And I get it like, and I know why it's in a lot of games, but there's nothing I hate more than either a character being stunlocked and dazed. And I know that's on the GM, they don't have to play it in a way. But there's scenarios I've played in a lot of games where that condition exists, where one player ends up dazed for fucking ages and they feel like shit. They feel like, "Well, why am I even playing?" You know what I mean?
And also, it's happened the other way where I've played games, where I've been a player and we've stunlocked an enemy, and it's supposed to be this big, you know, grand...it might be the fight at the end of an arc or something like that. And it always kind of just feels deflated or something like that. And I know that, like, on the GM side, you can have like the end condition thing where you just take a bit of damage and you can end the condition.
But for me, I was like, I was having conversations with the team and I was I was just saying like, do we need it? Is it additive in a way that won't become a problem at a table? And you can probably have that conversation about a lot of the conditions. But for me, dazed was the one where, like, I don't want people to end up stunlocked or an enemy be stunlocked. Like, the benefit of keeping it wasn't worth the potential downside. So that's why that was cut.
And then the additions were...and I've spoken — again, I'll probably say this a lot — I spoke a lot about it in our Discord of, it felt to me like Draw Steel had this kind of...with the conditions and the weaknesses and stuff, if you look across like the monsters included in the Monsters book, the weaknesses to certain damage types and that weren't really, like, implemented or used as much as I thought. Because I thought it was like a really interesting thing to have damage type weaknesses and stuff, but it just didn't seem to be used as much as I thought it was going to be used when I was running monsters at the table.
So that was one thing I wanted to make sure, was like, spread across both player classes and enemies, and also having enemy weaknesses that...I think it's in Delian Tomb, where the arixx has kind of like a weak underbelly. Having stuff like that, where players can kind of figure out weaknesses that aren't necessarily mechanical, but then provide a mechanical benefit, that was something that I was like, we need to...I want to implement a lot of that in our enemy design.
Jon de Nor: You've opted for clocks when you're working on projects instead of the project roll and project goal that Draw Steel uses. So you got the clocks, and you also keep the power roll table, and just advance the clocks by 1, 2 or 3 segments.
Sacha: The initial thing — I think the biggest change was the fact that like, the On Leave aspect of the game is probably the most anime outside of the combat. Anyone who's watched anime has seen like, you know, the beach episodes, or where Piccolo and Goku are taken driving lessons and stuff like...they're basically the filler episodes that people either love or hate. I really like that kind of stuff, because you get to see characters in situations that are kind of different, and they feel like you're getting to know the character a little bit more outside of this combat role, if it's a shonen anime.
That felt to me very akin to roleplaying games, where...you know, my favorite part about playing a roleplaying game generally isn't like the combat. It's the stuff that happens outside of the combat. It's playing a character and seeing how that character develops over time, and how their relationships with other player characters and NPCs kind of grow and change. So I was like, On Leave's a great place to kind of explore that. So most of the On Leave activities are geared towards building up RP and relationship moments with, you know, potential mechanical benefits and stuff built into those On Leave activities.
But as you said, some of them will be kind of more long-term projects, or training arcs, or that kind of thing. The reason for switching to clocks was just, it's...you know, it provides us an easier kind of visual representation of, you know, an amount or a target that we've got to reach, but it just keeps it easier to track in terms of, you know, rather than I've...and I'll go back to Delian Tomb, when a lot of the kind of difficult projects are all 450 points anyway. So it's just a kind of simplification of that system.
And I knew when we created On Leave and that kind of stuff, that the goal wasn't to be these like long-term projects. It was more a chance for exploration of character and RP moments. That's why it's only some of the On Leave activities that are, you know, optional in terms of like, if you want to do these long-term projects. But a lot of them, you know, the large majority of them are more kind of social activities, like going to izakayas and doing karaoke and going to the beach in Okinawa and stuff like that.
Places where you can take a little bit of a break, you can explore your characters' relationships with each other, and you get to do a roll where you can get like a mechanical benefit that might help in the next operation, or develop a relationship with an NPC, or kind of progress the story in a way that's, a little bit more...not tangible, but like, roleplay, story-esque rather than just, I've, you know, found a cure for this, or I've built this weapon or machine or whatever. Which is, you know, options you can do. But won't be the option you take most of the time, I don't think. The game doesn't kind of promote that.
Jon de Nor: And the last thing I want to ask you about is something you've named Ascended Techniques, which you mentioned...
Sacha: I wondered when you were gonna ask about this, yeah.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) You mentioned them as something that's unlocked when the characters level up and certain conditions are met.
Sacha: It's the one that I've spent a lot of time on that, and originally it was kind of like...I think it was like an echelon-specific, or it might have been every level, or...it was happening too much, so I kind of changed it. So maybe I would say across...let's say you play a five-level or ten-level campaign, it will only happen maybe like maximum three, four times across ten levels. So maybe twice over five levels.
Your class will have Ascendant Techniques at certain points in your class's journey. And these are supposed to be like, you know, your high-cost, you know, they'll be the high-cost abilities that are probably the most powerful. You know, abilities that you would gain probably, anyway, in the class journey. But I liked the idea that, you know, in anime, there's always this thing where, like, in the middle of a fight, someone will unlock a new ability or a new technique, or they'll remember something that kind of makes them go further and be more powerful. And I was like, how can we communicate that kind of thing in combat?
So I decided to have this idea where, it could be the certain kind of requirements that need to be met. So when you level up, you'll have it kind of there, but you won't be able to use it. And then it might be a case of, when an ally goes down in combat, that is the requirement. That means you can use that technique. So you can use that technique, the Ascendant Technique in the combat.
You get this little moment to kind of narrate — if you like. It's not — it's optional. I would encourage players to do it because you get to kind of take the spotlight a little bit and show us kind of more about your character and how they unlocked this technique. You could do it with a flashback. You could say it's because you're so close to this ally that's gone downm that's kind of triggered this thing in you. And then you get to use the big flashy ability, and then after that, it's unlocked as a normal ability that you can use in combat whenever you want.
The most difficult thing at the moment is finding requirements or these triggers that will happen often enough that you're not gonna...I don't want to end up — and I've spoke about this in the Discord as well — I don't want to end up in a situation where people are like trying to engineer these triggers. So they're like, you know, and the example I come back to that is like, when an ally goes down, they're like, you know, not going as far to like hit the ally, but not helping them or, you know, kind of waiting for them to go down and die, because it's like, "Well, I'm going to get my bonus if you go down, so you're on your own, pal."
It will be explained — I need the requirements not to force people into doing things that where it becomes like metagaming, where it's like, "Oh, you know, I need this to happen, so I'm going to kind of nudge the scenario or story to, you know, push someone off of the roof or whatever, just to, like, unlock the technique." It's built around the philosophy of, like, it's your personal journey and it's your chance to kind of become more powerful during a combat, right?
And it's an idea I've had for a while, where...originally, it was going to be like you leveled up in combat, but I didn't want to stop everyone mid-combat to level up and then go back to the combat. So I just wanted a way of doing it quickly.
Jon de Nor: We are sadly running out of time. (laughter) I always ask my guests to bring some kind of recommendation. So I am interested to hear what you've brought.
Sacha: It's tough when...when Tom, our support manager kind of messaged me, it was like, "Oh, you need to bring a recommendation." I was like, it's quite a tough thing, because it's like, I don't want to come on here and you know, recommend The Godfather. Something that's like, so...but I don't want to go like to obscur, either. But my recommendations that I thought about were Vagabond, which is a manga written by Takehiko Inoue about a guy called Miyamoto Musashi, who is like a real samurai, dead famous, probably the most famous samurai of all time. He was, like, undefeated. 63 duels, I think he won in his lifetime. And he wrote a book called The Book of Five Rings, which I also recommend. But that's not part of the recommendation section.
But Vagabond is based on a novel, and it kind of goes through his life. And the artwork's amazing. I will preface it by saying that it's been on hiatus for the last ten years, and it's not finished, but it's still worth reading up to where it's at. And then, you know, praying that he'll finish it one day, whenever he decides he wants to get back to it.
The album I want to recommend is there was an anime that came out last year called Lazarus by Shinichirō Watanabe, who made Cowboy Bebop, and Samurai Champloo, and Space Dandy, and that kind of thing. The anime itself isn't that good. (laughter) It's not...nothing to write home about, but the soundtrack is absolutely amazing. It's three people, it's Bonobo, Floating Points, and Kamasi Washington, for anyone who likes jazz music. So there's a good mix of electronic and jazz music, but it's...I listened to it nonstop last year. So I highly recommend that.
And then the last thing is a TV show, which I'm recommending, but nobody should watch. It is called — maybe you've — it's called Copenhagen Cowboy. It's a Danish TV show by Nicolas Winding Refn. And it was on Netflix. Nobody I have ever met has watched it. Nobody should watch it because it's terrible. But for some reason, I'm recommending it, because there's something about it where I watched it and I think about it a lot. And I think, like, art doesn't always have to be entertaining or enjoyable. It just has to kind of leave an effect on you, and it did leave an effect on me, for better or worse. It's a lot of long shots of people's faces lit by neon, and it's...the story's bad, and the acting's a bit shit, but maybe watch the first episode and see how you feel. They're my recommendations.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) That is the most bizarre recommendation I've gotten so far.
Sacha: If even one person goes out and watches the whole thing, then please DM me on Discord because I need someone to talk about it. Because it's so modern, and so rubbish, but like make me feel weird, and like, visually it's cool. Yeah. Somebody come and be my friend. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter) All right, time is up. But thank you so very much, Sacha, for coming on. It's really interesting to hear about the game.
Sacha: Thank you for having me. Yeah, I've enjoyed talking about it.
Outro
It's not a wild departure from Draw Steel, but I think the changes they're making to downtime, surges, hero tokens and heroic resources is going to change how sessions and longtime play feels. And the vibe and the setting is going to further make it feel like it's own thing.
I want to thank FoxTrick for submitting questions for Sacha.
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.
You can support my work by becoming a Patreon member. Paying members get to submit questions to my upcoming guests here on Goblin Points. You also get access to premium features on Stawl. Stawl is a digital toolset for playing and running Draw Steel: digital hero sheets, encounter builder, monster look up, the complete rules text, and more. Such as the Stawl Supplement Index, a comprehensive list of supplements being published for Draw Steel, in one convenient place! Visit Stawl.app. S-T-A-W-L-dot-app.
Next episode is on the 25th. I'm joined by speep, the designer behnd the twofold class, where two players play individual characters, but they have a close bond that make them stronger together.
See you next time. Snakkes.