Cardboard Coercion

Episode 16 of the Rascal Radio Hour tackles two extremely busy weeks in the realm of tabletop games. We've got union contracts, hirings and firings, DriveThruRPG's censorship of an antifascist game, charity bundles aiming to repair Ukrainian hospitals, and Caelyn's predicament between a rock and a hard plastic place.

Elsewhere, the crew take a moment to discuss the last month of running the site. Rowan stepped away for a health sabbatical, and Rascal took the opportunity to experiment with differnet internal processes. If you're interested in hearing how the journalistic sausage is made, we talk about all of that up top. And then, as always, we delve into the Question Dungeon to address wargaming as a solo player who is still interested in stories!

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Here's an excerpt:

Thomas: I think MCDM has this very enviable position where Matt Colville has been making videos for a decade now, he has this YouTube audience and generally is very well liked and well respected. So, their crowdfunding campaign makes a lot of money. They have this ability, this rare ability, to have full-time designers in a room to start working on a game from scratch, from first principles. They have this ability to playtest using contracted, paid playtesters and volunteer playtesters. They have this ability to send surveys to their backers to ask for quantitative feedback on various iterations.

It is a really interesting design process that I kind of wanted to document. The game, as of today, is out to patrons on Patreon. Some people have got their hands on the final version. And another fun aspect of that story is that it's an example of this whole like "indie problem" of like, when did this game come out? Because people have been playing it for seven months, you know?

Chase: I'm very fascinated with the legs on Draw Steel. I had this thought whenever Kobold Press' Tales of the Valiant came out, but that one has like, just sort of quietly found its niche. Draw Steel and Daggerheart are in a bit of a different class. I think all three of those do come out of the OGL fiasco back in 2023 and people going, well, I'm going to make my own game. Over those years, Draw Steel has taken on its own identity thanks to Matt Coville's direction as a designer and Introcaso's help in a lot of the internal playtesting and with the community.

I'm really fascinated about what niche its going to carve out for itself and what these first six to eight months of post release looks like for the game because we very rarely get a wholly new RPG coming out that has the potential to make waves in a commercial and creative sense.

Thomas: Yeah, yeah, and it is creatively an interesting project, right? It is a tactical game. I know the nerds will be happy to know that it uses 2D10 to do a Powered by the Apocalypse-style band of results. There's some interesting stuff there. It's more push your luck than attrition.

Caelyn: I have to say, after reading the article, I was definitely like, yeah, this is interesting. I want to check this out. Because I'd not really been following any of these like big, OGL fiasco spawned fantasy games, but it definitely caught my eye after reading.

Chase: I wonder if there's anything to both Daggerheart and Draw Steel using 2D10s as a core part of their system.

Thomas: I think Daggerheart uses 2D12.

Chase: Okay, well, you know, I'm glad that both of them are stepping away from the d20 because I will go on the record saying the d20 sucks.

Caelyn: It's too swingy!

Chase: The one game that the d20 is good for is Frostgrave and Stargrave because they are built around swingy rolls. It wants to have an element of randomnicity and chaos because you're wizards throwing spells at each other. But when you're in a storytelling game where you have intent and then the dice have to follow that intent, a d20 fucking sucks. I think it just keeps too many feel bad moments into a game where you're trying to tell a story.

So anyway, if I don't like anything else about Daggerheart or Draw Steel, I like the fact that you gave up the D20. Smart move.