Tavern Watch Podcast: Draw Steel is a spiritual successor to D&D 4e, and we’re into it

On the latest Tavern Watch Podcast, we’re excited about Draw Steel, a new game from MCDM that strikes us as spiritual successor to D&D 4e. The game features crunchy combat where all of your attacks hit (but may not hit very well) and you’re encouraged to push your luck to rack up more victories before resting — but it also includes rules that encourage roleplay, like detailed downtime activities that could play back into your adventure (rather just saying you spent your downtime making healing potions and leaving it at that). The game has a lot of interesting features for those who enjoy (or at least aren’t opposed to) tactical combat. But at Blizzard Watch, we’re gearing up to play Outgunned Adventure, a pulp action adventure that aims to capture the cinematic feel of movies like The Mummy or Indiana Jones. You’ll be able to catch us playing it next week’s Tavern Watch, but right now we’re still reading up on this variant of Outgunned, a system that homes in on making your tabletop games feel like an action movie.

And Critical Role keeps making news, with new details about the upcoming Campaign 4, which will be GM’d by fan-favorite Brennan Lee Mulligan. He’s taken the reins of the game a couple of times before for short series, but this time he’ll be running the whole show with forever DM Matt Mercer getting the chance to play a long-term campaign. (Fellow DMs know how rare this is.) The new campaign features a supersized cast including all of the original CR crew as well as a bunch of new faces. It will be a West Marches style game, in which three different adventuring parties set out in the new world Aramán with stories that run concurrently and could intertwine. The campaign kicks off on October 2, 2025.

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Music from this episode is “Midnight Tale” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

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