How MCDM designed Draw Steel alongside their fans

When MCDM launched the crowdfunding campaign for their new fantasy RPG in December 2023, they were striking while the post-OGL iron was hot. With the power of founder Matt Colville’s YouTube audience, the company raised more than $4 million. And the game didn’t even have a name yet — it was simply called the MCDM RPG. Now, after a relatively quiet development period, it has a tentative release date of July 2025. It’s also got a name: Draw Steel. 

But that’s not the only thing the game has picked up on its journey. It has somehow accumulated a third-party adventure, homebrew classes, a digital character builder, multiple podcasts, and actual play videos — all before release date. How does that happen? Is it just because MCDM released a creator license alongside their playtest rules? Maybe, but that just raises the question of why they prioritized it so early.

The answer, as it turns out, is all about the game's origins and how it's been developed over the past two years. It is technically already live. “[People] are already playing it”, said James Introcaso, Lead Game Designer at MCDM. “They've been playing it, in many cases, since… December was our final public packet that we've put out. And so I think for many people, they're like, I know this game. I've been playing it for months now.”

In true indie fashion, Draw Steel is a game that has already lived many lives and cycled through many incarnations even before it comes out. Its release will only be one more stop on a long journey. 

The crowdfunding campaign only showed backers the barest bones of Draw Steel’s system. There was a version in playtest — MCDM used both volunteer and paid playtesters all through the development — but it was “volatile”, in Introcaso’s words. “Everything was on the table to change at that point. And we let people know.” And most everything did change over the course of future iterations. The main thing that really remained the same was the identity of the game, which was encapsulated in four words: tactical, heroic, cinematic, and fantasy.

These four words were the pig iron that Colville, Introcaso, and the rest of the team hammered into their vision for the game. They also had to decide once and for all whether they were going to be a D20 game or not. As a company whose third-party 5E products allowed them to support a staff of 11 people, it wasn’t an easy decision. “Are we shooting ourselves in the foot?” said Introcaso. “Ultimately we thought, no, we should start from first principles and examine this stuff. And the more we did that, the more faith we had in ourselves and in the project. Because as soon as we decided to leave the D20 behind, it was kind of like, well, now it's already different.”

This process of working from first principles led to the current core loop of the game. In modern D&D, you start with access to all your resources (spell slots, ki points, etc.) and then spend them over the adventuring day until you’re completely out, reduced to swinging your axe like some kind of filthy peasant. In Draw Steel, you build up what you can do through ‘victories’. As you successfully navigate combat, negotiations (which are mechanized), and montage tests (skill challenges), you accumulate victories. Eventually, “like a limit break bar in a Street Fighter game”, you unlock stronger abilities. As Introcaso put it, “Instead of you saying, okay, I'm gonna stop and take a rest right now because I lost my sixth level spell slot; let's hole up in Strahd's parlor before we go fight Strahd, this actually encourages you to push on because when you rest, you lose your victories. They convert into experience points, which is great for the long-term, but for the short-term, you want those victories for that battle... And that feels more heroic, right?” Instead of slowly diminishing, you’re instead pushing your luck, gambling that being a little beaten up is fine as long as you can really lay the smack down when it matters.

The game’s core identity didn’t change over the course of 2024, but many other aspects did. Even the central mechanic evolved, albeit modestly — going from 2d6 to 2d10 to allow for a wider spread of tactical bonuses. It also allowed the studio to make D20s that had two sets of numbers going from one to ten for those that just enjoy the feel of the icosahedron. 

As they released game versions to their Patreon and campaign backers, they also ran surveys which influenced the direction of the game’s development. The survey included both qualitative answers as well as straightforward approval ratings (think of those surveys where you’re asked to rate something across five options from strongly disagree to strongly agree). The first survey attracted close to 3,000 responses, but this number quickly dropped off and more recent ones received closer to 800. This remains an impressive tally but it still represents less than 10% of their backers and Patreon subscribers.

Introcaso used these surveys to diagnose problems and identify areas for development, including how character creation should work. “We have a devil ancestry where you could build traits by purchasing them, kind of like you do in the AGE system with Fantasy AGE... Then we were like, hey, when we look at satisfaction, the devil is this high; everybody else is low. What's up with that? We dug into it, and people are actually saying everything should be like the devil.” So now, everything is — all ancestries are customizable in the same way.  

When the game ships next month, it’ll have the core rules, an adventure, and a monster book. Then, it becomes a product line in the fullest sense: there’s a starter set called The Delian Tomb, named after Colville’s video about beginner dungeons. After that, they will release an “advanced starter set” called The Fall of Blackbottom, which will be based around an iconic moment from their actual play series, The Chain of Acheron. An advanced starter set is a bit of a contradiction in terms — it’s best to think of it as a capsule adventure with pregens, maps, and so on, for those who have played the game before and want to be thrown into the deep end.

After this, according to Introcaso, all the company’s immediate plans are around actively supporting Draw Steel with supplements — though they hope to diversify in a few years. While it’s not been officially announced, their next crowdfunding project will probably be an adventure book based on another streamed campaign called Dusk as well as a dedicated setting book called Omund’s Land (good news for the fans who maintain the wiki and post fan theories based on Colville’s videos.) Introcaso is happy to share these plans because the company actively forgoes non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that would police what can be said and what can’t. “No one who works with us full-time or a contractor or volunteer signs an NDA,” he said. “Nobody signs a non-compete. So that means you can go on and say what you want about working with us. ”

This goes hand-in-hand with generous rates: writers on Draw Steel have earned roughly 35 cents per word, probably the highest rate among companies of similar scale. Introcaso added, “We pay people for rewrites and revisions because that takes time too, right? We pay people for meetings. If you're in a meeting with us, we're gonna pay you for your time.”

For Introcaso, this all comes directly out of the fact that the company is independently-owned. “Nobody is saying, you gotta do this, right? There's nothing like, hey, you've gotta use AI, because investors love when they hear about AI, right? None of that is happening. And that is one of the things that makes working here really great.”

As a game design studio, MCDM is often brought up alongside Darrington Press because of the two companies' similarities. Both owe their start to success on video platforms. Both companies began in the orbit of Wizards of the Coast but are breaking away by releasing original fantasy games on the back of the disastrous OGL fallout. Both of their games will have ended up releasing along very similar timelines — Daggerheart reaching tables only a few months before Draw Steel is scheduled to. And both games might have the privilege of being the ‘second game’ to a lot of people, especially those who started recently.

The effects of these companies jumping the 5E ship has yet to be seen. Will they make a splash? Will they bring a rising tide? It’s hard to tell. But Draw Steel at least seems to be helmed by steady hands.