Draw Steel vs Wicked Ones

Compare Draw Steel and Wicked Ones side by side. See differences in complexity, dice, genre, cost, and more.

	Draw Steel	Wicked Ones
Genre	Fantasy	Fantasy
Play Style	Tactical, Heroic, Cinematic, Character Building, High-Fantasy, Attacks Always Hit, Lore-Heavy	Base-Building, Domain Management, Faction Play, Sandbox, Playbook-Driven, Fiction-First, Open Source
Core Mechanic	Power Roll: roll 2d10 + characteristic and check which tier the result falls into: Tier 1 (11 or less), Tier 2 (12–16), or Tier 3 (17+). Every ability describes three outcomes by tier, so rolls always produce an effect, with no whiffed turns. Edges and banes (+2/−2, or tier shift at double) modify rolls situationally. Each class builds a unique heroic resource during combat, unlocking increasingly powerful abilities as momentum builds. Victories earned from combat and noncombat challenges accumulate across encounters and convert to XP during respites.	Build a pool of d6s equal to your action rating and keep the single highest die: a 6 succeeds, a 4 or 5 succeeds with a consequence, and a 1 to 3 fails. Before the roll the GM sets position and effect, which fix how bad the consequence can be and how much the action accomplishes. Stress can be spent to push a roll or resist a consequence.
Dice	2d10	d6 dice pool
Complexity	High	High
Accessibility	High	Very Low
Runnability	High	Very High
License	Draw Steel Creator License	CC0 1.0
Cost	$$$	Free
Publisher	MCDM Productions	Bandit Camp
Year	2025	2020
Best For	Groups who want deeply tactical, cinematic combat where every ability matters and no turn is wasted. Ideal for players who love build variety and dramatic, heroic battles.	Groups who like the fiction-first Forged in the Dark engine and want to flip the dungeon crawl: instead of raiding a dungeon they build, grow, and defend one as its monstrous residents across a long campaign. It rewards tables that enjoy a strategic hoard-and-tier economy layered on villain-POV roleplay, and that are willing to set tone and safety expectations up front given the evil-protagonist premise.
Highlights	Power Rolls resolve to one of three tiers, so every roll produces an effect and a turn is never wasted. Each of the nine classes builds a unique heroic resource during a fight, unlocking stronger abilities as momentum grows. A negotiation subsystem tracks an NPC's interest and patience, giving social scenes a structured back-and-forth like combat.	Players design their own dungeon during downtime and later roll its traps and defenses against invaders, which turns base-building into the game's central strategic layer. Giving in to a monster's Dark Impulse earns a Dark Heart to spend for a bonus die, so playing to your character's worst instincts is rewarded rather than left as flavor. The four-phase cycle feeds each raid's fallout back as calamity and blowback that summon heroes to your door, so the campaign escalates its own stakes without the GM inventing threats by hand.
Considerations	Heroes start with many abilities and options even at level 1, creating a steeper initial learning curve. Each combat turn juggles heroic resources, conditions, and edges and banes at once, so play carries real tracking overhead. The system targets heroic tactical fantasy specifically, so it provides no rules for dungeon crawling, hexcrawl exploration, or survival play.	The three magic disciplines have no fixed spell lists, so a spell's power is decided by the GM in the moment. During a dungeon invasion the player characters cannot leave the sanctum, so most of the defense is run through minions and traps until the heroes reach the final room. There is no published setting, so each group must build its own region and factions before raiding can begin.