Encounter Design Lessons from The Delian Tomb

The Delian Tomb is the adventure module designed to bring players and GMs from zero knowledge of Draw Steel to the point where they can play without someone having to sit through the whole rulebook first. In addition to teaching the rules, The Tomb sets expectations for what a Draw Steel battle map should look like.

Spoilers for the first part of The Delian Tomb.

One of the most important, and easiest, part of battle map design for Draw Steel is ensuring there are objects to throw people into or off of.

Being able to move enemies is so central to combat that there’s a maneuver specifically for doing so. I don’t have a perfect tool for assessing the amount of terrain a battle map needs, but having no more than five squares between most objects is probably a good guideline. Interior maps can have things like walls, pillars, or pits. Exterior maps can have things like wells, trees, or cliffs.

In general, maps need to be larger because moving and being moved are so important.

Draw Steel isn’t a game about skulking down narrow hallways with a ten-foot pole and sneaking past powerful guards; it’s about heroes confronting challenges in exciting ways. If you want a dungeon that consists of a bunch of cramped sewer tunnels, you’re going to have to find a creative way to do it. Five foot wide corridors and fifteen by fifteen rooms are going to preclude a lot of the positional mechanics that make Draw Steel fun and turn combat into a slog.

The guidelines for encounter design also encourage a larger map. Having a fight with 35 participants is not out of the question. That’s a seven by five battle map just so everyone can have their own spot to stand.

Battle maps should be designed with an explicit purpose.

Simply drawing a rectangular grid is insufficient. Even the Goblin Guards battle map has deliberate design elements that support its goal of introducing everyone to combat. The heroes and monsters are on opposite sides of big rectangle, but the distance between them is about a move and a charge for the goblins. It’s close enough that neither group can charge the other if they go first, reducing the chances that something catastrophic will happen to either side on turn one. There’s also no terrain, which limits the information load that players have to deal with in their first Draw Steel combat ever.

D1 and D3 are compact with a centrally placed feature whose rules they want the player to learn. D1 introduces and encourages players to slam enemies into things. D3 teaches players that they can interact parts of the environment that they can’t slam bad guys into.

Battle maps with interesting features should funnel heroes towards those features.

D1 and D3 are cramped, but their design encourages players to interact with the set pieces. In D1, between the walls, pillars, and brazier, no one is more than a square or two from taking collision damage. And the centrally located brazier does even more damage than a regular collision.

D3 presents the heroes with a giant skull on the floor. For whatever reason, as soon as I saw that, I desperately wanted it to have something to do with the undead pincer attacking us. Then, it turned out it did! We didn’t use it to defeat the encounter though. The first time we hit the thing, it damaged us and there was no discernable impact on the monsters, so we thought it was just some sort of trap. If you’re going to add a feature that has a mixed impact on the heroes, the positive result should be just as visible as the negative one. I also wonder they arrive at 60 stamina for the skull.

Battle maps should signal information to the player.

In D2, there is a corpse on the floor. I remember seeing that and immediately thinking that there was a trap. Most people don’t like unavoidable traps and everyone likes to feel clever for deciphering clues.

One thing I go back and forth on though, should the pillars and brazier, for example, have some sort of outline or other visual indication that you can throw people into them? It’s not so much an issue in D1, but in the Goblin Guard encounter, there are trees on the map with no indication as to whether they are decorative or interactive. Given that it’s intended to be someone’s first ever Draw Steel encounter, I suspect they are decorative, but some clarity would be nice.

The Delian Tomb has exceeded my expectations so far for an introductory adventure. The cost to value is astounding and it feels like they really put their heart into designing it. I’m really looking forward to getting through the rest of the material and starting on my own dungeons.