I was inspired by Matt’s stream on what he learned running lots of Draw Steel sessions and decided to write my own observations up. I’ve run a similar amount of sessions as I’m taking two different groups through the Delian Tomb. We’ve played every two weeks starting around July of last year but with scheduling challenges it might average out to every three weeks. Both groups are around Act 3 and Level 2 though they both seem very interested in clearing out all side quests before heading to the anticipated epic conclusion. :)

I don’t claim any of these insights are correct, they are just my experience. I also don’t claim I am running the game “correctly” if that is even a thing. But I’ve been an MCDM Patreon supporter for a while, engaged with the game prior to release, and have been playing TTRPGs on and off since the 80s.

Lastly, I REALLY like this game a lot so as you read any of the below, know I’ve chosen to spend 100% of my TTRPG time over the past year only playing Draw Steel.

This is a relatively long post: I cover Draw Steel observations in general first, the specifics on Delian Tomb, and a couple paragraphs on VTTs at the end.

General Observations

It takes a while for players to get in the groove, give them time

They’ll have fun right away but it was about three sessions for each group before things started to click.

When both groups started they didn’t “get” Draw Steel in some fundamental sense. Despite everything we talked about they played it like D&D.  So they didn’t quite get the player interactions, the benefits of forced movement, or the ability to strategize around turn order.

But I can remember for both groups there was this moment that they seemed to get it. Suddenly the tactician was getting into letting others shine through their leadership, the conduit always wanted to go last in the turn order whereupon they promptly saved everyone’s bacon (while also attacking as well). The fury started to get the opportunities presented by proper positioning. One group had that “that was just my maneuver!” moment and from then on I realized they were playing Draw Steel.

One group just went through the level up process last night and their new 5-cost heroic skill selections were made together. Watching the Elementalist realize how valuable “Translated Through Flame” would be in moving our Null and Fury to the perfect spot on the battlefield made me feel borderline proud.

If I had it to do over again, I’d probably have run a few sessions each week to get folks familiar with the systems before moving to every other week.

The game moves slower than you expect, that’s okay

Combats especially move more slowly than you might be used to but the players never complained (outside of maybe the first session where no one knew how to play at all (including me)). They didn’t complain because there was a lot of interaction among the players and a fair amount of strategy. Getting through more than two combats in three hours almost never happened.

Encourage the players to establish a default turn order

I had two opposing experiences related to this in my two groups. In one group everyone was overly deferential and no one stepped in wanting to go first in the early sessions. The other group had far too much debate over who had the mathematically “best” turn and thus should go next. The solution for both of these groups was the same: establish a loose default turn order.

This is especially important for new players as they are trying to learn their hero while also learning enough about everyone else’s hero to have a sense of when their hero might want to go. In general, I’ve found the tactician almost always wants to go first and the conduit often benefits from going last (assuming someone isn’t at death’s door). From this default order, the players can then choose to deviate and know why they are doing so. It has been working great for both groups.

Your tactical choices as the Director can really ramp up combat difficulty

In some of my early combats, like my players, I didn’t understand the tools that were provided to me to have the greatest tactical impact. You’ve got more tools than in D&D. The interaction of malice, turn order choices, triggered actions, maneuvers, and in some fights, villain actions can be a lot to deal with. You can run a combat like D&D but expect the heroes to steamroll.

If you need to ramp down a fight, consider less optimal strategy

As director you and your players may be learning the game at different rates. Because I was running Delian twice (concurrently) I was learning twice as fast as the players. I wound up in situations where they were playing suboptimally and I could have easily killed the heroes if I chose to without being particularly mean.

Every director has a different intuition here but my gut is unless the players did something really unskillful, I tried not to have an ordinary encounter turn deadly as everyone learns how to play the game. Given that you never miss as Matt mentioned in his stream, it is harder to keep a hero alive by simply fudging a roll. I found that one of the ways I could tip the scales in favor of the heroes if things started to look bad was simply to play less optimally. Maybe I knew the combo that would be devastating to a given hero but I would choose a different monster to go instead and perhaps have that monster not juice his attack with malice. This requires a bit more advance planning as sometimes things are pretty dire for the heroes and even your weakest attack is bad news.

Like I said above, I can imagine some directors might prefer to kill the hero to encourage the learning but that’s not my style so early in the evolution of this game.

Combat prep matters more than other games

Because of the above, you really need to be familiar with the stat blocks of the creatures you run. I wound up printing out the encounters from the encounter book and then I highlighted things that I wanted to be reminded of—things like triggered actions, specific malice spend that felt extra useful, and powerful attacks that could be boosted by malice or only required a maneuver to execute.

What’s interesting about this is the combat prep is pretty fun. You aren’t reading through long blocks of text trying to figure out how a monster works, you’re trying to discover things like, “Oh, the ghouls should generally attack with their ‘leap’ maneuver before the zombies and the skeletons go because it almost always knocks the hero prone and then allows all manner of nasty things to be done to the hero. And also ‘stand up’ is a maneuver which prevents them from using ‘catch breath’ to heal when they finally get to go.”

Many malice choices aren’t relevant in a given combat

Though malice recommendations are sometimes covered in the “tactics” section of adventures, the malice for a given monster type is sometimes completely irrelevant to the specific combat circumstances in which these monsters appear. Per my prep point earlier, I recommend crossing these out before the combat.  At least for me, between helping the players understand their own abilities and running all the monsters (with malice choices), I often felt a bit overwhelmed. Anything you can do to make your decisions easier when the arrows start flying is a big help.

Don’t forget to role play (if you like that)

Given how much was new for me and for the players and how tactical Draw Steel is, we spent the vast majority of our playtime in combats. This created a dynamic where the inbetween times started to feel a little like a brief break between combats rather than an opportunity to role play and feel more embedded in the world. This was 100% my fault and not the fault of the game, just wanted to point out my own tendency. I simply didn’t have enough capacity to do both. One easy thing that helped was asking players to describe what their signature or heroic abilities looked like. Doing the same with how an extra minion met their demise was fun as well.

The negotiations helped me out a lot as it was a phase of the game where I generally only needed to role play as a single character and the negotiations often took long enough that the players settled into more of the role play groove as well.

No one wants to respite

Almost universally, the players pressed their luck by heading into combat very low on recoveries but high on victories. This is the game working as intended. I generally supported and encouraged this but once in each group they pressed too far. How you handle that as a director is up to you. In one case, the heroes fled a boss fight as a result, in another it was almost a TPK. Hero tokens do work here, as do healing potions to keep everyone alive but there were moments where I took my foot off the gas of encouraging them to proceed and instead hoped they’d get the hint that a respite was wise.

Abilities that seem weak to a player are often poorly understood

Early on, it was fairly common for a player to say something like, “this ability doesn’t do anything for me”. This also happened during the level up process last night as folks were selecting new heroic abilities even after many sessions of play. I’ve learned that this feedback almost always suggests a brief conversation about the ability would be helpful for the player. Common misunderstandings I’ve seen include:

• Not understanding that the ability has a critical keyword like “charge”
• Not noticing an ability is a maneuver rather than a main action
• Not noticing the combo potential of an ability with either another ability or another hero
• Not realizing the ability affects more than one target or that it affects an area but only enemies (generally a notable difference from D&D) making it much more useful in a messy combat

Remind players of hero tokens, surges, and maneuver options

Both groups often forgot that they had hero tokens and how they worked. Additionally, even after many sessions, the value of a surge and when to spend them wasn’t clear to players. Lastly, it is very common in my groups for a player to forget to do something on their maneuver because they felt like they didn’t have anything useful to do. “Knockback” is almost always worth trying and players rarely remembered they could “Aid attack.”

Delian Tomb Observations

Montage tests skew easy

I’m not sure if I’m too much of a pushover or my players are just very creative but the stakes of a montage test in Delian Tomb haver never felt high. I think moving forward I’m simply almost never going to allow a given test to be “easy” and perhaps strive to have some be hard. For example, last night one of my player’s Dragon Knight Elementalist flew over a montage challenge involving navigating difficult terrain. It was hard for me to consider that test anything other than easy.

Negotiations skew difficult

I have yet to have either group hit a home run on a negotiation. I’ve opted over time to giving them the stats more clearly than keeping them below the covers so they know where they are in the negotiation as a result. Even with this, I don’t think I’ve had an Interest 4 outcome yet and definitely no Interest 5 outcomes. If I were running again I might adjust the starting stats of, perhaps, patience to give the heroes more of a sense of a win sometimes.

Since this is a new mechanic to almost everyone, I’d like them to see how fun it can be to get a great outcome. That being said, a bad negotiation almost always gives the combat that sometimes follows extra emotional punch for the players. After all, they did their best to keep things civil.

This is a BIG intro adventure

I was originally thinking Delian Tomb would take us some contained number of sessions to complete like other starter adventures I’ve played. This is a good thing but worth noting. If you are positioning Delian as an adventure to try at your table to see if folks like it, just know it will go a lot longer than you expect. Once folks “get” the game, that might be an appropriate time to ask if they want to continue or maybe shift to Fall of Blackbottom and roll their own characters.

For both of my groups I was anticipating running DT, and then if folks wanted to continue we’d roll new characters and shift to Fall of Blackbottom. Given how long we’ve been in DT though, I think we may need to stick with the characters we have and extend the adventure from here, perhaps by playing Dark Heart of the Wood. Not sure folks will want to go back to lvl 1 after so much playtime.

Bonus: VTT Considerations

I ran in Owlbear Rodeo for both groups until around November of 2025 when we flipped to the Codex. Owlbear is feature limited (but lots of great add ons) but is very predictable and stable in its behavior. It asks a lot of players to track so many new mechanics in this game as is the most like playing at the dinner table. The Codex is super capable but also complex and a bit hard for players to understand. It sometimes seems too close to a videogame to folks and so when things don’t behave like a videogame, they get confused. That said, it tracks things very nicely and helps several of my players understand what is going on with their hero much better. We’re sticking with the Codex and banking that the simplicity and predictability is coming.

For now, I recommend an important rule to help with pace of play in the Codex. Try the “smart” or “automated” thing the Codex can do once (or maybe twice) and if it doesn’t work, just shift to manual rolls and manual stat tracking for that given ability during that combat. You can then research it as the director later to figure out what happened. At our tables, many of us are fairly technical so we often fell into the trap of trying to “figure out” why a thing wasn’t working as expected but that took us out of the flow of the game and slowed combat.

Thanks for reading. Draw Steel is great, I’m so happy to be playing it regularly.