The Draw Steel RPG and its power roll
What the Draw Steel RPG is, how its 2d10 power roll and three tiers work, and the Victories, Stamina and hero tokens around them.
Draw Steel is a tactical fantasy RPG published by MCDM Productions, built around one resolution mechanic called the power roll. Most abilities and all tests ask you to roll 2d10, add a characteristic, and read the total against three bands: a tier 1 result is 11 or lower, tier 2 is 12 to 16, and tier 3 is 17 or higher. Those three tiers are set out in the free Draw Steel Rules Reference, and they are the thing to understand first, because almost everything else in the system is a way of nudging a roll from one band into the next.
Two dice instead of one is a design decision with consequences. A d20 spreads results flat across its whole range, so a character with a good bonus and a character with a poor one are both mostly at the mercy of the die. Two ten-sided dice pile results in the middle, which makes a modifier worth more and makes a tier 2 outcome the ordinary case.
Reading the three tiers
Every power roll lands in one of the three bands, and the ability being used says what each band produces. Tier 1 is the weak result, tier 2 the expected one, tier 3 the strong one. The tier is read straight off the total, so the roll that decides whether something happens is the same roll that decides how well.
A natural 19 or 20, rolled with no modifier applied, is a critical hit. It counts as a tier 3 result whatever the modifiers say, and on a strike or an ability that uses an action it lets the hero immediately take another action. That is a sharper reward than most systems attach to a high roll, and it means the table's loudest moment tends to arrive mid-turn rather than at the end of one.
Edges and banes
Situational advantage in Draw Steel is an edge, worth +2 on a power roll. Two or more edges make a double edge, which does something different: instead of adding more, it moves the result one tier higher. A bane runs the same way in the other direction, and having one of each cancels out. A relevant skill adds +2 to a test.
The distinction between a numeric bonus and a tier shift is worth sitting with, because it is where the maths of the system lives. Stacking small bonuses moves you along a curve. Shifting a tier jumps the outcome outright. A Director deciding whether a clever plan is worth an edge or a double edge is setting how much the plan is allowed to accomplish.
Stamina, Recoveries and dying
Damage reduces Stamina, which is the hit point track under another name and with different behaviour at the bottom. A hero at 0 Stamina is dying and cannot take the Catch Breath maneuver in combat. Death arrives when Stamina reaches negative the hero's winded value, so the dying range is a real span of numbers rather than a single point.
Recoveries are the self-healing budget. Spending one restores Stamina equal to the hero's recovery value, and only heroes have them, which is the clearest statement in the rules that heroes and monsters are built to different specifications.
Victories and the Respite
Heroes earn Victories by successfully overcoming challenges such as combat. Those Victories sit on the sheet until a Respite: an uninterrupted rest of 24 hours in a safe place, at the end of which the hero regains all Recoveries and Stamina and converts their Victories into XP.
Advancement is therefore tied to stopping, and the game knows it. A party that pushes on with Victories banked is carrying an unpaid reward and a thinning Stamina pool at the same time. That pressure is the pacing mechanism, and it does more work at the table than any encounter budget.
Hero tokens and the Director's pool
The game master is called the Director, and at the start of each session the Director sets out hero tokens in a shared pool the whole table draws from. A hero can spend 1 token to gain 2 surges, 1 token to succeed on a saving throw they have just failed, or 1 token to reroll a test and keep the new result.
A shared pool changes the social dynamic of a resource. A per-player pot invites everyone to hoard their own; a common pot means spending one is a decision made in front of the group, and players talk about who needs it more. That conversation is part of what the mechanic is for.
Encounters, negotiations and montages
MCDM publishes free Director sheets for the three kinds of scene the system structures: encounters, negotiations and montages. The set includes an encounter sheet, a negotiation sheet, a montage sheet, large encounter essentials, NPC cards and hero cards, all as form-fillable PDFs.
That sheet list tells you what the game treats as a scene worth its own rules. Combat is one of three, and talking your way through a problem gets the same kind of structural support as fighting through it. A group used to systems where social scenes are handled with a single roll will find the negotiation rules ask for considerably more from both sides of the screen.
The books and the pregenerated heroes
The line runs on two core books, Heroes and Monsters, both currently at Version 1.0, according to the errata document MCDM last updated on 14 November 2025. The Rules Reference covers the shared glossary and the combat terms, and it is free, which makes it the sensible first read before buying anything.
The nine pregenerated heroes on the resources page are the fastest way to see what character options look like in practice: a Dwarf Fury, a High Elf Tactician, a Human Censor, a Human Null, a Human Talent, an Orc Conduit, a Polder Elementalist, a Polder Shadow and a Wode Elf Troubadour. Read across those and you can see the shape of the ancestry and class split: ancestry supplies the body and its traits, class supplies the abilities.
Start by rolling a few power rolls against a printed hero sheet before you read anything else. Ten minutes of that teaches the tier system faster than the glossary does.