Intro
It's the man with the plan, for Draw Steel. Paul Hughes is on Goblin Points talking about Draw Steel, what the future will bring, how it's going with Crack the Sun, and what the signs of a healthy Draw Steel game and community is.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, Paul Hughes!
Paul Hughes: Hey, how are you doing?
Jon de Nor: So for those who — I don't know, I feel like everyone should know who you are. But for those who might not know who you are, tell us a bit about yourself, and I'm also interested in knowing how you became aware of either Matt Colville and MCDM general.
Paul Hughes: Okay, so I am...and I'm going to try to think of what my title is. I think it might be Line Editor, or Line Lead, for Draw Steel. That's basically the person who spends half their time developing Draw Steel and half their time looking at spreadsheets, versus the other Draw Steel developers who just get to develop all day. And I came up through the ranks of freelancers at MCDM, working on the core books, working on Flee, Mortals, et cetera. And before that, I've been doing lots of freelance RPG writing for a bunch of years, and I find myself very lucky to have, like, the best job in the industry. So here we are!
I've always been really interested in monster design. And so it was sort of impossible to not be aware of, Matt Colville's take on monster design for 5e. And it, you know, sort of was...it's a great take, and was sort of in alignment with the way I treated...solo monsters, I've always been really interested in narratively, and sometimes you just want to fight one bad guy and you want them to be super cool. And how can we build out the technology to do that? Because at the time, when Matt Colville was primarily doing his advice for 5e, and when I was primarily writing for 5e, the technology wasn't fully baked out to make legendary creatures as cool as they could be. So I think we both spent a lot of time on, how can we publish a monster that as cool as the ones that we run in our home game?
Jon de Nor: Ah, okay, yeah.
Paul Hughes: So, yeah, you know, I was sort of a watcher and an enjoyer of Matt Colville's stuff, and followed the Kickstarters, and was always happy to see big numbers on Kickstarters because it's such a sign of the health of the industry. Which I was really invested in both because — primarily because, it's awesome that people are playing this game, and secondarily because I was like, you know, I really would like to work in this field. And so I want there to be some money floating around so that that can make it happen.
Jon de Nor: Yeah, speaking of monsters...because I almost know you as the monster guy. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Right? Yeah, I've done a lot of stuff with 5e. I've done a lot of, sort of, "What if I put all the monster stats into spreadsheets and figure out averages and stuff?" It's one of the one of the ways in which my desire to save myself work always buys myself a lot of work, because I'm always like...I want to run monsters on the fly. I don't want to just be stuck with what another designer did. So in order to do that, I think I should reverse-engineer how monsters work and do all these calculations so that I can, you know, I can spend...I can spend 100 hours so that I can save 5 hours of game prep.
Which is, I don't know why I ever thought it was a good idea, but it ended up with me putting a lot of stuff on my blog about how I thought 5e monsters were designed. And before that, I'd also done 4e monsters back in the, you know, the 4e days, and taking that here. And I've also...sort of like, another 5e guy who also does this is Sly Flourish, Mike Shea, we've sort of independently worked on reverse-engineering monster design and have come to a lot of the same conclusions, which makes me very excited. And we've sort of collaborated on stuff like that.
And this, I believe, was sort of influential, in some ways, on Draw Steel as it was being developed. And Draw Steel takes a kind of a similar, very mathy approach to building monsters. Which I appreciate, because I think you have to do the math, because you're going to be throwing a dart and it's going to be hitting somewhere on the target. And if you do the math, you know where that is and can control it.
Jon de Nor: There have been teasers that at some point, MCDM might publish the monster math, the math behind the monsters, in more detail than it is already in the Monsters book. And I've had patrons ask about this, because the homebrew community is very...they have reverse-engineered a lot of the math, but they — what they actually want is like the —
Paul Hughes: Like, "Is there a spreadsheet we could have?"
Jon de Nor: Yeah, basically. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Yeah, totally. I would love to share it. And I think it's very likely that we'll be able to. Whenever I ask — and, you know, I've worked here for a very short time — whenever I'm like, "Am I allowed to say this?" The answer's always like, "Yeah." Matt in particular is very, has a philosophy which is very much into transparency. There's no idea that we should have, sort of like, trade secrets, or anything like that. So I think we want to do it.
I think we want to look at it and clean it up and make sure it's in the most usable form, because sometimes, when you're messing around with something, you've got a lot of assumptions and you sort of have to train people and be like, "Well, you know, this number here, we ignore. And this is number is wrong, so we don't really use that." So, we would just want to clean it up. But I think we can make that available.
Jon de Nor: Yeah, I know there are a lot of people that would really appreciate seeing — I think both for use, but also for, I think, fixing what they imagine being wrong with the monster design.
Paul Hughes: Right, yeah. Well, I mean, there's so many open questions, like, do minions have the right amount of Stamina? Do they do the right amount of damage? You know, how about solos? How can they be cooler? You know, how many, so many experiments you can do. And it's so much work, as I know from my own history, to reverse-engineer something when it would be a lot easier to be like, "Hey, could you like, can you just, like, put me in the little — can you hit the share tab and just sort of, you know, put me in there so I can just poke around in your Google Docs or your Google Sheets and so on?" So I'd love to share that. As a part of a general, sort of, let's open up and share the rules a little bit more.
And also, as a project that would be great to get started is let's do some errata, let's fix some rules, let's take a look at the most-often reported pain points. And, you know, start making fixes, because the game is recent and because it's had such a large volume of products that have come out since it came out, we haven't had the time that we would like to do that, but it's always number one in the list. Until some emergency comes up and bumps it down.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Paul Hughes: But I really want emergencies to stop coming up so it can actually get to about the top of the list, and I can publish my 75% done, you know, errata list, that just needs a little more work with some of the amazing community members who I'm sort of collaborating with on that.
Jon de Nor: So you're actually asking for feedback from specific community members that might have some input on...at least what they've seen?
Paul Hughes: Yeah, that's right. So, in the Discord, there's a couple of really great, you know, like rules questions channels, and stuff like that. With some, you know, absolutely fantastic people in there who answer a lot of questions. And I've reached out to some of them, as a kind of a brain trust for..."You guys know the ins and outs of these rules better than I do. And I don't want to say something that's dumb. So can you sort of check me here?" And I'd sort of like to expand that relationship more, so that the game ownership can expand out to the community a little more.
Jon de Nor: My biggest moment was, when looking at the rules, was realizing that the example in the hiding rules where you hide from a dragon, according to the rules as written, you can't actually hide that way. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: The hiding rules is rough. And this is like, part of a long tradition of RPGs. It's like, the storied history of games where the hiding rules are rough is, it's a noble ancestry. The different confusions and pain points that come around hiding, sneaking, invisibility, darkness...the way these things are handled requires so much careful, word-by-word reading of the rules and trying to interpret, "What was the intent here?" That is one of the things that we really would like to clean up. I need to consult those every time and look at them.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. It's so strange though, because it feels like, especially like hiding, it seems so intuitive in real life, like, you know, when you're hiding. But making that work in the rules, and especially a game like Draw Steel where it actually kind of matters when you're actually hiding...(laughter)
Paul Hughes: Right?
Jon de Nor: Makes it really...yeah. It's such a weird dichotomy that something that seems so simple is so difficult to express in a good way when it comes to writing.
Paul Hughes: Yeah. I mean, so that narratively, like, "I hide from the bad guy, and I sneak up, and then I stab 'em" is so narratively simple. But once you get onto a map, there are so many questions that come up. And Draw Steel, I think has some great sort of pieces, in terms of, you don't have to be hiding when you stab the guy. You have to have been hiding recently in order to stab the guy and do extra damage. And all those things are great pieces, and I think we're a couple of errata away from it being pretty solid. We just got to A) write the errata, and B) an underrated part of errata is playtesting it, because it's very easy to, as with software, put out a patch for a problem, and now you have two problems.
Jon de Nor: The errata, how invasive are they?
Paul Hughes: Yeah, that's a good question.
Jon de Nor: Like because, in theory, you could just do like — the first errata was basically just like, oh, there are some typos and there are some ambiguous meanings that if we just add like a comma here and a couple of words here, it kind of straightens out and it reads a lot better. But from what I've been hearing, Matt mentioned on stream, he's been mentioning more like balancing patches, basically. Is that going to be part of the errata that you're working on now, or is that something you want to save for something I don't know, bigger, like Draw Steel Revised" something.
Paul Hughes: Right. I mean, there's a huge continuum between editorial stuff versus, like, a revised version of Draw Steel. Right now, I am more interested in things that don't work, things that are unclear or things that are not the intent of the authors, fixing them. I think that would be the first sort of errata pass. And you know how errata is. It's not like there's a new errata every, you know, twice a week. It always takes a while to get out. So the first pass or two is going to take a while.
Eventually we're going to have more data, too, which says these things are overpowered, these things are underpowered. But there are some things that sort of put the brakes on a kind of like, MMO-style balancing. That would be fun in a lot of ways, but A) you don't want to be making too many changes too rapidly to something which is, essentially at its heart, a paper product, because you're leaving a lot of people behind. Even if you get to the point where a third to a half of people are playing online, and even if it was 75% of the people playing online, you don't want to have an underclass of people who have to be scribbling in their books every couple of weeks.
Secondly, I much prefer "Let's boost underpowered things" than "Let's nerf overpowered things" because one is a feels-good and one is a feels-bad. Yeah. So it's like it's not that fun when you find out like, "Oh, my Censor thing is now much weaker." Like, oh, well, that's too bad. Like, I'm level 8 and I'm having a lot of fun. Versus, "Hey, we boosted this one ability," and now, instead of it never crossing my mind that I would want to use this — "Hey, I want to try that out!"
So that would be sort of the first pass of balancing that I would want to do. But for me, that's not really on the horizon of stuff I want to get out immediately. I just want the game to work, and be clear, and get the read-as-written and the read-as-intended to align. And balancing and updating is next, after that.
Jon de Nor: That, I think, makes a lot of sense.
Paul Hughes: Yeah. Also, the game's so new, you know? And you don't want to...you want to wait for consensus to kind of settle because it can be really easy in the first six months or so for people to be like, you know, this is really underpowered. And then the meta changes for no apparent reason, when someone sort of figures out, wait, actually this is, this is overpowered. So you don't want to overcorrect too much, too fast, I think.
And also, one more thing — because it's not a competitive game where you need to have ultra balance because people are fighting each other, but a cooperative game, there...you're not really robbing people of fun if one of their abilities is 96% as effective as someone else. Whereas if this were a PvP game, it would be a different story.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. Speaking of balancing, almost, you worked on the Beastheart class. And — "worked on". You made the Beastheart class. (laughter) I think that's a more fair description. Then you worked on the core rules, too, I believe?
Paul Hughes: I did, I worked on a lot of pieces of the core rules. I think that I sort of...I'm not necessarily a very good writer, but I'm a fast writer. So when deadlines came up, I was often, "Hey, Paul, could you write something for us in, like, 36 hours?" Like, yeah, sure, I could do that. So I ended up working on a lot of pieces. But sort of the older, like, the most-cooked stuff, like the core classes, I wasn't super involved with.
Jon de Nor: I ask because I was wondering, is there any, anything you feel is important to know if you want to design something for Draw Steel? And I think this comes with, partly from like a third-party perspective. Like, how do you make something work well with Draw Steel? And what makes it feel like it's part of Draw Steel?
Paul Hughes: It's a great question, and I'm sort of learning as I go. The Summoner and the Beastheart classes are interesting because they're sort of labeled, as, you know, expert classes. And there's an expectation that we hope they don't slow things down too much, but these are things that you should do after you've sort of mastered the rules. I actually think it is easier to write classes and features like that than it is to write simple classes and features.
So I would say as a third-party designer, A) follow your ideas. Often, your first draft is going to be very complicated. But the most important part of creating is iterating. And as you iterate, often what happens is things become simpler and simpler. And I think writing first drafts is more fun, and iterating and testing is often less fun. But stick to those pieces. As a third-party designer, one of the big luxuries you have, and advantages you have, is you have time to iterate. So make the most of that time. You don't need to be worrying about a product schedule. You are making the coolest thing you can.
So test in your group, play a game, try it in your weekly game. And this is also something that we're trying to do internally. One of the things that I would really like to do is, we have a lot of testing in the process. What if we had more testing? You know, it's like, what if we had more time set aside in our developers' time for weekly games? What if we encouraged and paid freelancers more for testing on their own? And what if we put more time into the schedule for various pieces of, you know, sort of getting feedback and testing?
I would love it if we put out 80% as much stuff, and it was 20% better. You know, in general. As a rule, let's do that every year. And I think that's where the team's head's at is, let's...we've got the basics out. Now, let's iterate.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. I have to say, the first year of Draw Steel, and especially this, like latter half of the first year, has been really busy with releases from MCDM for the game. I mean, compared to, Daggerheart, which just released like the first proper supplement for the game over a year after it released. It's a very strange contrast between the two strategies where, I don't know, it feels like Draw Steel came out, and then it was like, we need to get more stuff out immediately. And then it starts with the Summoner. And then we get like two adventures, three adventures, and another class. It's an interesting contrast between the two games, which came out very close to each other.
Paul Hughes: Yeah. I think, a lot of it comes down to, what do you consider the core of the game to be? And I think for Draw Steel, there's an idea that the core of the game should include adventures, because it's not just, "Here's a book, go and do what you want with it." It's, "Let's make a bunch of stuff for you to play with and get that out to you." And it's not necessarily a promise, "Hey, we're going to, every year, we're going to do a crowdfunder where we have eight new products."
I don't think that anybody needs eight new products every year from one company, but let's get at least one of everything out as soon as possible. You know, let's get, you know, we've got a couple of different adventure sizes. So, you know, we have the idea of, we have a delve, which is a couple of, you know, a little short couple of combats, versus an adventure or a campaign. Let's get an example of one of all these out. Let's get an example of what, you know, what you used to call a splatbook, like, a thing with a bunch of new ancestries, one of those out. Let's get out all the stuff that we wish we could have fit in the core book about how to use tests as soon as we can, so that all of the tools are out and public. And then once that's the case, we can slow down, versus, all the tools are in the core book.
And neither is right or wrong, but I think that's kind of the internal thinking, is, we want to...we have all these good ideas. We really want to share them as quickly as we can. And that'll, you know, every company is guided by, like, the presiding genius of the company. And for us, you know, Matt Colville is such a generous person in terms of ideas, as you can tell from the amount that he streams, the amount that he interacts, the amount that he shares his ideas. He is just a guy who wants to share all the cool stuff he can as quickly as he can. And so we follow his lead.
Jon de Nor: Speaking of the crowdfunders, they've been going very well so far. (laughter) And they have for years for MCDM's part. But what do you think is like a good indication, or like, what's the barometer for a healthy Draw Steel, and a healthy community around Draw Steel?
Paul Hughes: I would say part of it is having third-party crowdfunders that are in, like, at least six figures would be great. You know, having like a good supply of them. And we have quite a few that are very successful. Because I think the idea of having a really solid community is that it's not just one person coming in saying, here's, you know, "We're going to spoon-feed you stuff." It's having a lot of people who are able to share their ideas, because that's how we all think of roleplaying games. Because we're we're all from the background of, we like to play games, and now we like to...we can't stop ourselves from designing for those games. And if somebody pays us to do it, great. But, like, honestly, we would do it for free.
And, you know, so we just sort of, think that's what a healthy community looks like is where everybody has the ability to do that. Internally, obviously, it would be great if MCDM's crowdfunders kept on doing multi-million dollars so that we can keep the lights on. But the game's success, I think, the barometer is how many crowdfunders, and other ways of selling products besides crowdfunders, are there? How cool are the ideas? And are people doing well enough that they want to keep going with them?
Jon de Nor: As...this might be — I'm going to ask it just in case you have an answer, because of course people are curious about, Crack the Sun. And I've had a question submitted, by someone wondering if there is like a revised timeline, because the last timeline we got was back in February, I think. That was one of your...no, was it your post?
Paul Hughes: I think it might have been, yeah.
Jon de Nor: Yeah.
Paul Hughes: That might have been sort of like one of my first posts, when we got together for one of the in-person meetings, and I was sort of keeping notes on that. We are trying like heck to hit those timelines.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) Okay.
Paul Hughes: And so...I don't guarantee that it's not going to be changed in the future.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) That's fair.
Paul Hughes: But right now, we are just on pace, but not ahead of schedule, for hitting those timelines. And it does mean, you know, everybody is sort of pitching in and working on this. It's a massive project doing, you know, sort of five books at once. A very different scale than anything I've ever worked on. I generally work on one book at once, or two books at once. Not only is it a firehose in terms of just the amount of words, but the testing schedule to get all the pieces to a point where people are happy with them, and everything is working, means that it is bigger than anything I've worked on in these, in both of these dimensions, number of words and amount of testing. Because I've never worked in an environment that took testing as seriously as this one.
But, you know, you're squaring the amount of work, you're not doubling the amount of work, when you do that. So it is monumental. So we've got Teos, we've got me, we've got Willy and Djordi, and we're pulling in..."Hey, James, I know you have this Crows game that you're working on, but can we just pick your brain a little bit here?" You know, I'm jumping on a call with Matt, like, multiple times a week, wasting his time when he should be working on other stuff. So it is something where I would never want to say, "I promise we're not going to...the schedule is not going to slip." But I'm proud to say the schedule has not yet slipped.
Jon de Nor: Wow. That is impressive considering the amount of work that has to go into all of this.
Paul Hughes: Yeah. Yeah, there are so many things where it's like, oh, you know, I love to make this change in Act 1. It does mean that there are cascading changes through Acts 2 through 5.
Jon de Nor: Right, yeah.
Paul Hughes: And, oh, that does mean we have to retest everything.
Jon de Nor: Just so I remember correctly, because the schedule is for the PDF releases, because the physical release is for like, when everything's done, isn't it?
Paul Hughes: Yes, that's right. The PDF releases are I think, I believe, going to be one by one. And I don't remember the dates offhand. I don't have the spreadsheets open, but...now I could just immediately get off the call and look and be like, "Whoops! We bumped everything by a month, I forgot!" And if so, well, I'll be like, I guess we could put that in the comments down below.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. (laughter) That's part of the...that's just how it is.
Paul Hughes: Yeah.
Jon de Nor: The MCDM patron account asked, what's the coolest moment in Crack the Sun that no one knows about yet?
Paul Hughes: (laughter)
Jon de Nor: I feel like this is your — you're now allowed to spoil something from Crack the Sun. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Well, it depends on — I mean, somebody knows about everything. I know about a lot of stuff. Now, when you talk about the patrons, the patrons have seen Act 1, Act 2, and they haven't seen Act 3 yet, I believe. But I could be wrong, because there's also the...there's a pretty big pool of playtesters who have seen Act 3. So not counting Act 1 and Act 2, I'm going to try to channel Matt and spoil something. Act...can I go all the way to Act 4?
Willy has been doing developmental editing on Act 4, and in it, you visit a shadow elf city that is cool as hell.
Jon de Nor: Oh, okay.
Paul Hughes: So let's see if I get in trouble for that announcement.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Paul Hughes: The design ideas for this city — the art is going to be really cool. And I think it's going to be pretty different from...you know, it's not meant Menzoberranzan or however that's pronounced. It's its own thing, and I think it's going to be cool.
Jon de Nor: Wow. Oh no, I shouldn't have asked. Now — (laughter)
Paul Hughes: (laughter) But you'll have to wait a long time for...you know.
Jon de Nor: Yeah...(sigh of elven yearning).
Paul Hughes: Act 4, unfortunately, is not the first one that's going to come out.
Jon de Nor: Who would have thought? (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Time is linear, and that is one of the big problems with time.
Jon de Nor: With Crack the Sun, Teos has been, kind of, hired to work as a...I don't know what his title is. Coordinator? Or, like, Lead Developer?
Paul Hughes: Yeah, manager, coordinator, I'm not really...I also don't, I'm so bad with titles. I'm like, what is my title?
Jon de Nor: (laughter) But that kind of means — and each, if I remember correctly, from what I've heard, each part of Crack the Sun had, like, a main author.
Paul Hughes: Yes. That's right.
Jon de Nor: How do you make sure...or what information and what kind of main points you give to, like, contractors to make them submit work that is Draw Steel-like?
Paul Hughes: I mean, one of the hard things is, there's five different authors, and this is a single story. So how do you make those snap together? Well, it's easy, as long as you don't change your outline at any point. (laughter) I just made you do a spit take
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Of course, we did make a lot of changes. Unfortunately, we keep on having ideas where we're like, "Ah...unfortunately, this is cooler." Or, this is actually the...you know, sometimes you just have an idea, you're like, "Oh, it turns out this is correct." And so that does mean we do make cascading changes across the adventure. And so that means a lot of work for Teos, for me. And it's going to mean a lot of work for the editors as we get into editing to make sure everything fits together.
And it's hard for the authors, because you're getting a snapshot in time of where the adventure is and working off that. So, you know, the difference between what you have in an outline for something that's in Act 1 and then the way it ends up in Act 5 are going to mean that, at some point, when we get it back from the authors, we do a dev pass, where we make a bunch of changes. Not because anything is wrong with the author's version, you know, which are great. But because we end up knowing stuff about the other four chapters that they didn't know and often didn't exist at the time when we had the initial meetings with them. And that's the chaos of doing a big project.
Jon de Nor: How is it working...I feel like most contractors in the TTRPG business have probably worked on some kind of 5e supplement at some point. How much does other games designs' affect what people, or like contractors, submit? And how much — I don't know what to call it, like, coaching? — do you have to do to make it more Draw Steel?
Paul Hughes: How 5e is is stuff by authors who haven't written for Draw Steel for very long, which is everybody? Yeah. And it's very much so. And it's a back-and forth-conversation, because no one's written for Draw Steel for more than a year or two. And a lot of people, myself and a lot of people on the team, and a lot of contractors have worked on D&D for a long time in some form, often longer even than 5e.
The games are very different in the — especially when it gets to combat encounters — in the requirements. So there is a, usually, when you're working with sort of a new author who comes from 5e, a period of, let's work together and figure out exactly what a Draw Steel encounter looks like. And I think the easiest way to do that is to play games with the others.
And that's something that I'd like to do more. I believe that so much of development of a game is playing the game. So...and when I was working on the Beastheart and when I was working on Condemned, one of the important things for me was, let me get on Zoom or something with the devs and let's do some testing, and let's play. And I want to keep that rolling as we make new products and as we work on Crack the Sun. Let's make sure we've played through all this stuff and been...because the stuff that you get from your testers is stuff they learn from playing, and incredibly useful, but it's secondhand.
So you're like, "Well, do I believe it though? I really believe in my beautiful pet idea that I came up with, even though people said it's not working." And the cure for that is playing it yourself. And then you're like, "Yep, they were right. This doesn't work." So I think we need to have more of that before, after, and during other forms of testing. Everything that we send out, it would be great if we all had the experience of, "Yeah, we played this and it was awesome." And it doesn't leave until we feel that way.
Jon de Nor: Speaking of pets...
Paul Hughes: Yes!
Jon de Nor: As the designer of the Beastheart.
Paul Hughes: Oh, this is a this is a beautiful segue.
Jon de Nor: (laughter) What's your favorite companion?
Paul Hughes: (sigh of deep contemplation) You know, I think in the introduction I was like, I really like the condor best, but...you know, I've played a couple now, and I think I'm a very basic person, and I think I really like the wolf.
Jon de Nor: Oh!
Paul Hughes: And it's not even like a mechanical...oh, you know what though? I really like the panther, too. These are both extremely basic. A panther is maybe the most basic answer you can have for a ranger-type class. Especially if you're coming from 5e and you've read, the works of one R.A. Salvatore. But the fun thing about the panther is jumping around, you know? And kind of surprising the Director when you're like, "Okay, yeah, I jump up onto that 4-square thing, and then I'm going to jump down on the other side of the wall, and I'm gonna bite your guy who's hiding behind the wall here."
It's really fun when a game...when you write rules by ignoring existing rules, rather than by building new ones. It's like, "Your petty rules of how high, where I have to look up how high I can jump based on, you know, how good my roll was, that doesn't apply to me. I just jump straight up."
Jon de Nor: That's an interesting design space.
Paul Hughes: Yeah, the space of removing rules, what can I ignore? I think that's an especially useful lens for, when you're looking at, what can my character do when they level up? What no longer applies to me? You know, at some point, death starts to apply to me less, you know? And at some point, any kind of logistics applies to me less. Not that Draw Steel really has as much logistics as other games like D&D do, but, you know, just, what systems can I ignore? They're not for me anymore, as I become more like a demigod.
Jon de Nor: I see some of the designs coming out of the, Brewery, especially when it comes to classes. And some of it is really impressive, and especially like the new stuff that they bring into the game. And I'm very much of the opinion that Draw Steel is both a game that kind of encourages to have like a very strong flavor, where, don't be afraid to kind of make your thing...don't make it bland. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Right. Be specific.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. Be specific.
Paul Hughes: Don't be like, I'm going to write this, it's a generalist, and it can be used to express 20 different ideas. Let's see what one idea looks like if you push it a little further.
Jon de Nor: Yeah, yeah. I just spoke with the designer of the Twofold class, which is a class designed for two players to play together.
Paul Hughes: Yeah, cool as heck.
Jon de Nor: And that's such a cool concept, but — and he was very honest, about, both in the text of the class itself, but also during the interview, that this class is not for everyone. If you don't like having to coordinate constantly with someone else, don't play this class. (laughter) And I feel the core rules of Draw Steel kind of encourage that kind of design, to push this specific thing to as far as you can go, And I like third-party classes, kind of pushing those limits, like the Gunslinger bringing basically gunpowder into Draw Steel. Does it belong in the core rules? I don't think so, but it very much belongs with the Gunslinger, which I would happily have in a game.
Paul Hughes: I mean, I think everyone loves that class. You know, it's such a great class. And I think that there's a ton of room for things that are not for everybody. Draw Steel is in the enviable position of not having to be for everybody, which means it can have a strong point of view on a lot of things. And I think that this is a golden age of roleplaying that we're in right now, because we now have room for a lot of games that aren't for everybody, because there are other games out there.
And in the third-party space, that's even more true, because the scale is such that you don't need to design for the entire audience. You have to find your audience, who likes your stuff. So we're the...I think MCDM is in that position, and as a third-party person, you should embrace that position. It's such a great place to be.
Jon de Nor: But I also like that the core rules are also not afraid to break the pattern for some things as simple as, for the Talent, they can be strained. So all the heroic resources work the same except for the Talent's one, which can go into the negative. And I just like that the core rules says, yeah, that's fine, you could do that.
And then you see, like, the Huntsman class that uses the epic resource you're supposed to get at level 10, you get that a 1st level instead, because they use it as a parallel thing instead. And it's like, immediately, you say that's okay. And that's both like a green flag for the designers, but also for, especially, Directors, looking at, "Wait, they're doing strange things with heroic resources in this class! But, well, actually, it's kind of like the Talent anyways, so it's not that different." (laughter) So I feel like that's breaking Directors out of the mold.
Paul Hughes: Right? It's really easy to try to develop stuff by filling in boxes in a grid, and it's great when the design breaks out of that. Like the Huntsman, where you're like, this is...there's nothing else that does this. Or, like, you know, currently there's no other class that does this. Or the Talent. And that's one of the great places for third-party stuff where, you can have a person who's dedicated job it is to make sure this class works, because they're the author of the class. And that means that you can go really high in how polished that gets. And you don't need to have a huge budget to do it. You do need to have time, and that's like, honestly, that is a budget. You know, that's a limited budget for everybody.
Jon de Nor: I especially think the Beastheart...those are two creatures sharing some of the resources. And while it's not part of core, it is an MCDM class. And it's also become, I think, a very beloved class. I see people always speak highly of it, like, it's fun to play, and Directors think it's cool to have a Beasthaert in the party, which I think is...that means that must be good design, if both players and Directors like it. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: That's great.
Jon de Nor: TBut it also brings stuff like the Twofold, which takes that even further, where they can have basically a shared Stamina pool between them, which I think is a bit too crazy for maybe like a core or like an MCDM class. But I love that third-parties are willing to even try that.
Paul Hughes: Right. And I did test that, also. (laughter) I was like, "Can I just do one Stamina pool? Would that be cool?" I ended up not doing it. But it's good to try. At some point I was like, you know, it's really tough, like you get hit with an axe, and then your wolf is 20 feet away and your wolf drops dead. Just narratively, I couldn't get there. But let's do the experiment.
Jon de Nor: The way the Twofold does it is, I think it's the 2nd-level feature, where, at the beginning of combat, you can redistribute Stamina between the two, as a pre-combat thing. So it's only then, but it allows you to be out of Recoveries and still make sure that you don't die at the first hit. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Right. Yeah, what's worse than being out of recoveries and.
Jon de Nor: In Draw Steel, not much. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Yeah, not much. It's a tough one.
Jon de Nor: There is something so intense, and I always find this interesting when people that don't play Draw Steel...when they see, "Oh, you always do damage? How is that any fun?" And that's until you're out of Recoveries and you're basically at zero Stamina, I'm like, "Hngh, okay, I can't actually be hit. And they always hit, so I need to do something!" (laughter)
Paul Hughes: Right. Well, the other thing about like, "You always do damage, how can that be fun?" Like, Final Fantasy's done okay.
Jon de Nor: There is something so intense, and I always find this interesting when people that don't play Draw Steel...when they see, "Oh, you always do damage? How is that any fun?" And that's until you're out of Recoveries and you're basically at zero Stamina, I'm like, "Hngh, okay, I can't actually be hit. And they always hit, so I need to do something!" (laughter)
Paul Hughes: You know? It's pretty fun to do damage. So that is one, you know, sort of like...it's not super common in RPGs, but there is a lot of room at looking at other media and seeing what's cool there, too. And, you know, you don't want to be, accused of being too video gamey, which is something that's been leveled against other systems, and no doubt against Draw Steel. And, you know, RPGs are better than video games, in my opinion.
But I think it just makes sense to have a broad look at what you can draw from video games and books and, you know, different media. And sometimes you can see something works, and so let's give it a try. And I say that with having...again, not being here when they were designing the core pieces of the game. And so I don't have an insight on what they were thinking.
Jon de Nor: Before we started recording, we talked a bit about monster design, and I mentioned the very minimal monsters in Nimble. And at some point, they did toy with very minimal monsters in Draw Steel, for like a month or something during development. And I've always felt a loss that that didn't come to pass, because that's...I really like the idea of having an easy way to kind of put a lot of monsters onto the field without too much like bookkeeping on my end, as a Director.
Paul Hughes: Yeah. I love that because I love doing a lot of stuff on the fly and, being very reactive to what the players want to do. If they do something crazy and stir up trouble in the city and they get a faction mad at them, it's great to be able to just throw a bunch of bad guys down that you did not plan on putting down without preparing beforehand. So anything that makes it easier to do that makes it easier to invent an encounter during a game instead of before a game, I'm all for, and I'd like to see us make more tools that make that possible.
Jon de Nor: That would be very cool.
Paul Hughes: Yeah. I mean, that's my dream, is to have the beautifully tuned...and you know, it could be more tuned, but I think Draw Steel is beautifully tuned in a lot of ways. Having that combined with the kind of, we can go anywhere, we could do anything, you know, sort of open world feeling, I think would just be fantastic. And I think we can get there.
Jon de Nor: The last question I want to ask you, and we've kind of touched upon this a few times, but if you had like...what's one thing you would like to do for Draw Steel? It could be like, a new thing, something you designed, or maybe a change, I don't know, but what would be one thing you wanted to do for Draw Steel, if you had unlimited, like, time, budget, and no constraints?
Paul Hughes: Besides the things that I've mentioned, these are the things that I want to have as a Director myself. Toolkits that empower me to react to what the players do and allow players to really go off the rails and do something completely unexpected is just a blast for me. It's a kind of Director that I am, and I want to have tools that make it less intimidating for that to happen. And that's something that comes with maturity with the game. It's usually not available in sort of like, you know, the first round. And I'd like that to be something that we build out in future products. Because part of me, part of the joy is like, "Oh, this was a big surprise. I did not expect the players to do this."
Jon de Nor: Do you think the upcoming Encounters book is, like, a first step on that kind of journey?
Paul Hughes: Yes! It has a lot of the tools that allow that. So one of the big challenges besides combat is, what exactly is the difficulty in attempting this when I'm trying to do something crazy? If I'm trying, "Oh, there's a, you know what, there's a ship over there. Can we steal it?" Like, what does that look like? So having systems of, "Here's a new montage test that we could use." Or just, what exactly can we do with Sneak versus Hide? You know, "What would a really hard test look like for trying to convince people that I'm the new first mate of the ship, and I should be allowed to, you know, set sail?"
So just those tools, I think, allow things to go in crazy directions. And then you've also got...it made sense to the players to go off-course; I need a little bit of, I need to throw them a new adventure, and I don't have anything prepared. So can I throw in one of these delves? Having a bunch of things like that are super useful.
And then the other thing is, who is the bad guy here? You know, if I'm coming up with a new sort of metaplot on the fly that I didn't expect to be coming out, coming out with what can I show the players that they've never seen before? And a lot of that is going to be like, here's a new personality. Here's a guy who has new combat moves that they've never seen. They're fighting goblins...what does a badass goblin look like? And you can do that with dastards.
So I think these are a lot of the building blocks of, "I want to put together something pretty quickly, a new adventure..." are good for me because I really don't like...as I've said before, I will put in a lot of work to avoid doing the work of prepping for a campaign.
Jon de Nor: If you just make enough...
Paul Hughes: Exactly. I will write 400 words, you know, so that I can have a book I can flip through so I don't need to spend 10 minutes, you know, prepping. Which is a pretty backwards way to prepare, but unfortunately, it's how my brain works.
Jon de Nor: We're closing in on the end of the interview, and I always ask my guests to bring some kind of recommendation or recommendations. So what have you brought for our listeners?
Paul Hughes: I think I asked before if anybody had recommended this. There's a book, a novel, Gideon the Ninth, which is one of my favorite...I don't know if it's sci-fi or fantasy novels.
Jon de Nor: Good question. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: And my usual pitch for this book is "lesbian necromancers in space." And it's, you know, it's got sort of like a magic system, a crazy world, mystery, a lot of dueling and stuff like that. All the ingredients that should be in every book, and are the reason I never got through a bunch of Charles Dickens books, because there was just not nearly enough skeletons in them.
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Paul Hughes: But my pitch as a game designer for this book is, if you think of a generic fantasy novel, you think of something where you've got basically classes. You've got like, this guy is like a fighty type, this guy's a wizard type, this guy's a thief type. And then you can get more specific like that. Like you could have a book where everybody is a different kind of wizard. And now it's like, "Alright, now you have my attention. That's cool. How are we going to differentiate all these different wizards and make them cool?"
Gideon the Ninth is a book where you said, "Okay, what if we have a whole bunch of characters and they're all necromancer wizards?" So we're just taking one specific subset of wizards and like, can we come up with eight different kinds of them? And I'm like, this seems like this is going to be a really interesting design project. And amazingly, sticks the landing. And at the end of the book, you're like, "Wow, I totally get it. I totally remember all eight different types of necromancers. This one does the skeleton stuff. This one does the talking-to-the-dead stuff. This one does the resurrection stuff."
So I think it's a worldbuilding master class. And also, in a way, it's a character-class-building master class in a book, in a novel. So give it a try. It's not for everyone. But as we said before, not everything has to be for everyone. And that's one of the great things about coming up with something with a unique point of view. So that's something I love to see.
Jon de Nor: I've read the first three books, I think.
Paul Hughes: And then the problem is, with this series, we're starting to get into George R.R. Martin land, because it's supposed to be a four-book series. Three of them come out, and it's been a while. And there's a lot of great fantasy series which is one book short of the whole thing. And you hope it doesn't end up that way. It's, you know, the Locke Lamora books, and...
Jon de Nor: Yes, I read those too. *(laughter)
Paul Hughes: Yep, and you're like, "Oh, man, when's the last one coming out? That's going to be cool, I bet." The Patrick Rothfusses of the world and...you know. If one had a magic power, and it was, "make authors excited to do the last book of their series," that wouldn't be so bad. That would be a pretty good magic power. But I also...you give them a break, you know, you work on your fantasy series for ten years or so and you're like, I want to do something different. That's their right, too.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. Paul, it has been...it's been fantastic to have you on. It's so interesting and so illuminating in so many ways. (laughter)
Paul Hughes: (laughter) We'll find out if I illuminated too much about Act 4 of Crack the Sun. But it's been a pleasure. I would love to be on again. This has been really fun talking to you.
Jon de Nor: Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much.
Paul Hughes: Yeah. Any time.
Outro
Thank you so much for coming on Paul. And thank for that little scoop into the fourth act of Crack the Sun. The feeling I was left with after talking to Paul was that Draw Steel is in good hands. It sounds like Paul has thought about how to make sure Draw Steel can be improved in smaller and larger ways, without alienating the community or confusing players.
I want to thank FoxTrick, Shane Richardson, someone at MCDM, and tootallferne for submitting questions for Paul.
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. That's going to be the interview with Finn Brodie, the person behind Mythical Press, the monthly Draw Steel zine featuring monsters and more.
See you next time. Snakkes.