Buffs, Debuffs, and the Return of the SURGE!

Hey folks! Matt Colville here with an update on recent changes to the game. It’s been a while since I posted about real game design nonsense! I’m excited! 😀

We had our quarterly In-person Week last month and in between all the meetings we managed to play Draw Steel a few times. I got to play AND run the game! We already play the game a couple of times a week via Owlbear Rodeo, and (fingers crossed) soon via the CODEX! But the in-person experience is still super valuable to us.

In multiple sessions, as both player and director, I had the same experience: it was very easy for players to hand out buffs and debuffs. One character grants everyone an edge, another character weakens all enemies within an area. It seemed like a common experience.

So we sat down and talked about this, as a problem, and we talked about solutions. Spoilers; we came up with some solutions we really liked, got excited about, and have since implemented and tested in several sessions and they seem to be working! Knock on wood. So let’s talk about exactly what the problem was, and what our solutions are.

Everyone So Buff

First, buffs. Now, for context, this is a tactical game, teamwork is a big focus. So, lots of characters can hand out buffs. We like that! You feel like you’re helping your friends and that’s good. This the Tragedy of the Commons basically. An individual player likes buffing their friends, players like getting buffs from their teammates. But when one player can give everyone an edge, and then another player gives you “a bonus to their next attack equal to twice your Reason score” or whatever, pretty quickly it’s way too much.

So that was one constraint. We don’t want to cut way back on the buffs, they represent the team working together, and we like that! But these buffs come in so many different flavors it gets very hard to track all of them. This character grants me an edge, this character grants me a bonus based on their Might which is +2. Another character grants me a bonus equal to DOUBLE their Reason which is +4 and it’s just…damn that’s a lot to remember.

At the same time, edges were flying around like crazy to the point where it felt like everyone always had an edge. That should not be. No bonus should be so common you can basically count on it, and then feel bad (or worse, stupid) if you don’t manage to get an edge like everyone else.

Buff Buff Debuff

ALSO at the same time there was another, related issue. Sort of the reverse (obverse?) of the Buffs issue and that was the Debuff issue! 😀Many characters on both sides, could point to an area of the map and say “All my opponents in this area are weakened.” Which just grants a bane on their next roll. We like that banes and edges cancel each other out, but when everyone’s getting both all the time it becomes annoying to do the Plus/Minus thing in your head every time you act.

These sort of seem like the same problem? But they are subtly different. We want players to hand buffs around, it’s fun, but it’s a pain in the ass to remember them and add them all up. We want each side to be able to debuff the other. But we don’t it to be automatic. “Everyone” in this area all get a debuff? Really? Everyone? No chance for any of us (or any of them!) to avoid it?

The Return of the Surge!

So, two solutions.

First, fixing the buff problem. The issues were A: the ubiquity of edges and B: all the different flavors of mathematical bonuses. “+1 from the Tactician’s reason, +4 from twice the Troubadour’s presence.” 

The suggestion was pitched as “the universal damage buff.” Instead of Dael giving you +2 from her reason and John giving you +4 from twice his intuition, and some buffs are to your Power Roll and some are to your damage, instead you have a Damage Buff Track on your sheet. It’s probably the same track for every character? But it’s early days in the design, I’m sure if this idea works we’ll end up doing other cool stuff with it. Like right now the Tactician has an extra Shield level of -8. 

Each bonus, no matter who it comes from, moves you up one on your damage buff track. We started calling them Damage Surges, and that stuck. So here’s what the track actually looks like.

⚡ +2 damage

⚡⚡ +4 damage

⚡⚡⚡ +6 damage

🛡️   -2 damage

🛡️🛡️   -4 damage

🛡️🛡️🛡️ -6 damage

Someone gives you a Damage Surge, you just remember. “I got one surge.” I mean, maybe you write it down, or use a token? But so far across two sessions I personally have had no problem remembering how many surges I have. But they all do the same thing! Just bonus damage. No need to scour your sheet for “things to spend my surges on” like the original iteration of the game back in 2022. Each surge is just another +2 damage.

It’s +2 in this example because the actual value of a surge or a shield is based on “your best stat” which at first level is +2. So, as you level up, the value of these slowly goes up!

The reason this works, if it works, is that while the buff comes from your allies, the value of the buff, what it actually does, is on your sheet. And it’s always the same. Just +X where X is your best stat which changes pretty slowly. 

So! No more “grant an ally a bonus to their next roll equal to your Might,” or “Double your Reason score” or any of that. No more remembering “it was +1 from you, +2 from you, +4 from you….” It’s all just Damage Surges now. Still lots of buffs flying around! But they are much easier to hold in your head. Much easier cognitive load.

You see there are also shields on here, which are just the defensive version of Surges. A Shield is just a one-time damage reduction bonus. Both surges and shields are buffs you grant your allies. So far, in my limited experience, surges are a lot more common? But the idea is still very new. 

Since so many buffs are now just a Damage Surge, that means we can be a lot more picky about handing out edges! The rule should be: Edges are bonuses to your power roll as a result of using superior tactics. Flanking, getting the high ground, attacking while hidden, etc…. 

That’s the rule. Edges are more about positioning and teamwork, damage surges can come from all kinds of abilities. Surges are common, Edges more rare. I think the right ratio is 75/25 surges/edges but that’s going to depend a lot on your team comp.

This also means we no longer need to remember which bonuses were to our Power Roll and which to the actual damage! Thank Glob! Surges are damage buffs, edges are Power Roll buffs. Simple.

We tested this in our last two playtests and it seems to be working really well! It remains to be seen what our Contract testers make of it, but whatever bugs they find, I think it’s likely we’ll be able to patch without throwing the idea out entirely.

These surges don’t have anything to do with the surges you used to get when we had Funky Dice, but it was fun seeing the name, at least, make a return.

Meanwhile, debuffs.

Condition Gates

The other side of this problem is the “everyone within 5 of me is weakened” issue. That being: it was too easy for one character to debuff a LOT of characters to the point that, by the end of the first round of combat, every monster was always weakened or bleeding or both! How to fix?

Well this is something we’ve been going back and forth over since we very first started working on this game. We have competing goals that have been, thusfar, hard to reconcile but through much iteration and the benefit of having more eyes on the problem now, I think we have a good solution.

The problems that seemed irreconcilable were: we do not want players or directors to do a lot of rolling when its not their turn. It majorly slows down play and disrupts flow. This is important to all of us as designers. I mean, and players!

However we also want your stats, or SOME attribute, to determine whether you’re affected by any given debuff. If a dragon breathes on all of us, surely SOME of us were able to get out of the way? Or otherwise minimize the effect?

Well the obvious answer there is something like a saving throw. Or a Resistance Roll. This satisfies our second goal. Some characters have good agility, some average, some poor. So an ability that Agility can save you from? Some heroes avoid it, some don’t, because not everyone has great Agility.

But this violates our first goal which is “no rolling when its not your turn.” Or rather, very rarely do you roll when it’s not your turn.

In the past we thought; apply all debuffs equally to everyone. They last for at least for one turn, then the target can make a roll to try and get rid of it. That roll is where you stat factors in. But this was causing the “everyone is debuffed all the time” problem.

The proposed solution is internally referred to as Condition Gates. “Gate” meaning a simple pass/fail, it either works or it doesn’t; check your stat against a target number and if it’s lower than the number, you are effected.. 

Abilities that debuff enemies target a stat, and since all our stats start with different letters we just use the first letter to indicate which stat is relevant like M for Might. You then get a number which is “Unless your stat is this high or higher, you are affected by the debuff.”

So “M2 Bleeding” means “Unless your might is 2 or greater, you are bleeding.” Simple, straightforward, we’ve tested it internally and it seems to work. Now when the Chimera roars, only characters with Intuition less than 2 are effected (and stats generally go from -1 to 2 at first level).

Yes, it’s true that ALL characters with Intuition less than 2 are effected. There is no roll to resist this. But these debuffs usually come from power rolls and the number you need to resist depends on how well they roll. So just because the Chimera frightened you this turn, doesn’t mean you’ll always be frightened whenever a Chimera roars.

But your stat still matters! And, as a result, not everyone is automatically frightened when the Chimera roars. Not everyone is automatically On Fire when the dragon breathes. 

Sure, you might think it would be more fun to get a resistance roll (a “save”) when the Chimera roars, absolutely. And that’s how it works in a lot of games! But this way A: only some characters are affected by any given AoE, and B: we don’t all have to roll and then submit our result to the Director who now has to deal with each player saying “I got a 12, what happens to me?!” 

That’s what this solution does. Your stat matters! But we do not interrupt flow to get there.

Finally, once you’ve suffered a debuff? Because your Might or Presence wasn’t high enough? You get to make a resistance roll at the end of your turn and it’s just: roll a d10 and you clear the debuff if you get a 6 or better. 50% chance. 

Putting It Together…

Put it all together and you get: Big area debuffs no longer automatically affect everyone, your stats matter when it comes to avoiding debuffs, the enemy still rolls to set the target number to avoid, so you’re not DOOMED to always suffer the same result every time they attack you, and it’s very easy to remember how you clear a debuff. 50% chance, at the end of your turn. Not affected by anything else, same for all characters. 

This does…everything we want! And so far…it seems to be working? 😀 Again, like everything else, we’ll see what the contract testers have to say but at this stage we feel like, as with the Damage Surge idea, whatever problem they find we’ll try to iterate on a solution using these rules, rather than throw it out and try something else.

I think this also makes it easy for the director to improvise a difficulty on the fly when they need to since, at every level, the director basically always knows what counts as a “really good” stat, a good stat, an average stat, and a poor stat. At first level, for instance, it’s 2, 1, 0, and -1 respectively.

We may still use the classic resistance roll where you are target of an enemy’s ability and instead of them rolling, YOU roll, and a good roll means nothing, or very little, happens to you. The reverse of the power roll. But if so we would probably save that for 1:1 effects that are more about your unique ability to resist an effect that targets you alone.

That’s it folks! Just trying to streamline the game further, keep all the stuff we like, but polish it all to smooth out the stuff that annoys us. We’ll send this design to the contract testers soon, like maybe this week, and see what they think! I think it will just get more polished as we go.

That’s sort of why we focused on this, now. The rest of the game has settled down to the point where we notice stuff like this AND have the bandwidth to address it, since all the other important stuff is Basically Working.

If everything goes well, you’ll see this design in the next Patreon packet which we think will go out this month! Fingers crossed! 😀

I feel weird with a giant text post and no art, so here’s Grace’s art of the Iconic Null, a Hakaan! Using their ability to punch someone into another dimension for a round!

Folks in the patreon channel of the discord have already seen this, so make sure you connect your Patreon and Discord accounts to see cool fun stuff like this. The Draw Steel Patrons channel is a major part of what your $8 gets you!