What We Learned at Gen Con

Inquire with the engineer about the possibility of going to 105% on the reactor.

Hey everyone! It’s Djordi again, emerging from my post Gen Con and post COVID recovery to communicate with you fine human beings now that I feel like a human being again.

I wanted to share with y’all a bit about our experience at Gen Con, some of the learnings we took away from Gen Con, and how those learnings will affect the development of Draw Steel.

Beyond some Djordice™ adventures and taking in the whole Gen Con experience, we had one primary goal for MCDM at Gen Con. Running Draw Steel in person for players!

Which went GREAT! We had a mix of ticketed events where players knew they were going to play Draw Steel as well as some First Exposure Hall events where players didn’t know what they were getting into.

And we had MANY LEARNINGS and are in the process of applying those learnings to update Draw Steel to be a better game.

We have always known that Draw Steel was going to be it’s OWN GAME rather than a “patch” to existing d20 heritage games out there. Our core pillars are TACTICAL, HEROIC, CINEMATIC, FANTASY. It’s intentional that TACTICAL is the first pillar in the list. We think the grid is important and essential and are leveraging lessons from a broad pool of tactically oriented games. And that means that Draw Steel is going to take a bit of effort to learn, just like any whole new game.

But in testing the game and running the game for a large swath of players at Gen Con, we noticed some things that are going to guide our next iterations, even acknowledging that there is effort to learn a new game. Without a digital tool, there are aspects of the game that were harder to remember or that were glossed over in actual play. We think that The Codex will be a fantastic tool to make the game easier to prepare and play, but the game needs to work even without The Codex being available.

TL;DR - the players had a great time playing and the Directors had a great time running, but the process of running the game was more taxing than ideal.

So we need to analyze what worked well and what could work better to see where we can make the best tweaks to make Draw Steel the best possible experience. Or rather the best possible experience without reinventing the wheel. The bones of the game are good and it would be easy to overreact to some of these playtest experiences.

A useful methodology I’ve used in the past and that applies here is viewing the experiences through the lens of survivorship bias.

The classic example of this is data from where allied bombers during WW2 were hit. The diagram above shows bullet holes and damage in red. Initial instinctive reaction to this data was to reinforce the areas that were damaged to help the plane survive, but thinking through the problem it’s actually the areas with no red marks that are the vulnerable areas. Because no planes ever returned with damage to those areas. The areas in red are the areas where a bomber could be struck and return to base.

Similarly, with RPGs that are well designed the Director and players can get a “good enough” play experience if the core mechanics are solid and intuitive. We believe that Draw Steel has that with our core power roll and test systems. Even if some rules are forgotten, the game will still work if the core resolution mechanics are there as a fallback.

So, running with the metaphor, what we want to do as we iterate on the game is to get more of the game to be the durable “red marked” sections that can deal with less than perfect real world situations and then focus on refining the rules for the special case scenarios that are the equivalent of the bomber not returning home. The guiding principle we use is the previous work MCDM did with Flee Mortals which was refined to really make it easier for DMs to feel like they were tactical geniuses without actually having to be tactical geniuses.

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face” - Mike Tyson

Actually running the game without the benefit of digital tools, and in an environment with a bit of chaos like Gen Con, exposed some of the elements that are likely to be forgotten or misused. I designed the pool of demons we used and even I forgot to best use their abilities in every encounter! And there were definitely some turns that took longer because I had many options on the battlefield that were incrementally different than the other. Effects that lasted on the battlefield were more difficult to track than we anticipated, even with a nice laminated map with some wet erase markers.

Back in olden-times, when I was working on video games, specifically working on video games in the 20th Century, I walked in on the Lead Designer of our game testing the latest build. He was playing through the campaign mode of the game while he was reading a magazine and using his non primary hand to play the entire game with the mouse and not using keyboard shortcuts. He explained that, as the most experienced person with the game, he had to intentionally handicap himself to try and capture the state of a brand new player to the game. And an element like the core campaign needed to be easy to understand and play.

So, we took those lessons from our experiences playing and James has proposed some tweaks based on our experiences, including:

• Streamlining the captain vs squad benefits and mechanics so they don’t slow down the game

• Reducing Villain Point choices to the big ticket items to reduce choice paralysis when the Director takes their turn

• Re-evaluate conditions for best use and making them easier to remember

This is all part of understanding that the Director is playing a marathon and not a sprint and has to be able to run the game and stay interested in running the game for a long period of time. You don’t want to be running the reactor at 105% for extended periods of time.

If you haven’t looked over the latest playtest packet, you have until August 27th at noon Pacific US time to get us feedback on the survey.