r/drawsteel

So I've noticed a few posts talking about the design principle of "spread the damage" and how it should be tactically encouraged by the game (otherwise it feels like playing dumb). I'm not sure that I fully agree with the premise of that argument, but when I was reading through the minion rules in Monsters, I noticed two things:

First, minions only add their free strike damage to a signature ability when focus firing one PC and secondly, only a max of 3 minions are even ALLOWED to target one PC.

Doesn't this do quite a lot to nullify the issue of focus firing?

Hey Folks! Most of the groups I run for want to use milestone levelling rather than XP, so I've been mulling over how to still grant them something for losing those victories at respites (other than stamina/recoveries ofc).

My first though was allowing XP to be converted to project points, either at a 1:1 or 2:1 rate.

Has anyone else had any thoughts or ideas on what you could convert victories into for the players?

I'm going to start my first Draw Steel campaign in a few weeks (4 players) and I've been running some level 1 test encounters to get a feel of which class/build I'd like to play.

One of the classes I'm interested in is a Black Ash Shadow with the Arcane Archer or Rapid-Fire kit, so a Ranged Shadow. Its game plan is to annihilate the backline from a distance, move back and use Black Ash Teleport to hide behind cover.

The main difficulty I encountered in playtesting different classes is the ability to target this Shadow with supportive abilities. In some cases its easy for lets say a Conduit to also take a few steps back so they can look around the corner and have line of effect on the Shadow to include them in Faith Is Our Armor. But battles get messy and it easy to envision a Cronopath Talent who wants to use Flashback on the Shadow but doesn't have enough movement to circle back or a Tactician who wants to use Hammer and Anvil and also target the Shadow in the event that they get a T3 outcome, but doesn't have line of effect because they're hidden around a corner.

A solution would be a reverse in action order of the Shadow in which they use Black Ash Teleport first to hide and get the surge and edge from being hidden to finish their turn after they attack, but that takes away from the ranged shadow fantasy and defensive capability.

Am I overthinking this or is it something that sounds familiar to some of you? Or am I missing something which makes it easier to target such a Shadow with supportive abilities?

TLDR: Do you count retainers as heroes for the purposes of malice generation and encounter value?

One of my groups is getting into the higher levels, and a few of them have been getting retainers. Now, they've had one retainer for a long time (adventure reward), and I basically treated it as if he weren't there as far as malice and EV. One of my players has pointed out that if they did count for malice and EV that it would probably be better to just ditch him since his contributions to the hero side wouldn't be worth the extra difficulty on the monster side. Now that my party has three retainers, I'm starting to wonder if I should keep ignoring them.

The rules say they should count for EV, but the retainer rules don't mention malice and the malice rules don't mention retainers. So fellow directors, I'm wondering how you rule this for Retainers, and what do you make of my player's idea that retainers aren't worth the extra combat difficulty?

For those who have been running, do you ever bother with "fog of war" (having unrevealed portions of the map) in combat encounters?

I'm designing my first encounter where this could be an issue, a kobold warren fully of twisty tunnels. In other systems I've run I would probably reveal the map as the characters enter each new section. But that seems sort of wrong for a cinematic set piece combat in Draw Steel.

Thoughts?

I'm currently running the Delian Tomb, and last session saw the group reach the end of level 1 and rescue Violet, and we ended with them taking their first respite and learning about projects/downtime.

I'm curious if those who have run the module did anything to telegraph the negotiation with Illwyth, to give the heroes time to try to figure out her pitfalls and motivations? I'm still trying to decide how much I want to game-ify the negotiation system, but my group is more than willing to play out a conversation in character, so my natural inclination is to treat it like a normal roleplay encounter with the occasional test called for.

Of course, I would let them know the gist of the mechanics beforehand, but if you have advice for negotiations, or for this part of the Delian Tomb, I'd welcome your comments.