Draw Steel News

[Retreater]

But we can all see that Draw Steel isn't ready for sale at GenCon. The deadline for reserving an expensive single booth was so long ago, that it's possible MCDM didn't know if they'd even have finalized PDFs (which just dropped in the past week.)
If Matt Colville had been there, I guess he could've sold pre-orders? He's not going to have enough time at a booth to explain the system to 80,000 attendees.
If Draw Steel falls on its face, it won't be because of GenCon.

 

[SteveC]

I’ll just say that if Matt doesn’t want to go to Gen Con I can understand that. I went since the Parkside days and had to stop when my daughter was born. I think it would be too big to have much fun at now.

But I’ll invite him to Gamehole Con. He’d have a blast.

Edited to add: I was watching his livestream and he suggested it as a possibility. I 100% do not know Matt, but I do know he would be very welcome there.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I've commented here. I've pointed out the VTT to others. I've spent two days looking at the PDFs. It's like going to a sports site and disagreeing with what your team did, and being told you're not a real fan ..

Which sadly does happen all the time.

On the other hand the fans saying that then immediately get screamed at by other fans saying it is THEY who are "not real fans" because they're unwilling to say when the team is rubbish, and so on and back and forth and life continues (my old mum basically lives on an unofficial but very popular/busy Arsenal fan forum lol, I'm a chip off the block in that sense, albeit she started using forums after me).

If Draw Steel falls on its face, it won't be because of GenCon.

For sure. It's probably been decades since GenCon decided the life or death of a product.

My reading on the situation was that they know Daggerheart is in the wind right now. They know they cannot really compete for media attention in that environement, and that they are hence waiting for the physical release for their PR-push.

I could see that, and that might well be part of the reason they seem to be soft-pedalling it right now (as might the lack of physical books, which like, I think is a bad idea but nonetheless may make sense to them). It doesn't really explain earlier missteps, nor Colville's general apparent lack of enthusiasm, but it if James Introcaso etc. are more in charge now maybe they're playing it smart?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I've tried to read the PDFs several times. I just can't do it. I need a Knights of Last Call video series or something.

Yeah it's weirdly difficult to parse for me too. I didn't know if it was just me.

Like, it's kind of a funny situation because just looking at it, it seems like it'd be easier for me to read though it than Daggerheart, which I really did not like the concept of the way it was arranged, but Daggerheart's arrangement just pulled me through the PDF no problems, whereas I'm still dithering with Draw Steel!

 

[Retreater]

Yeah it's weirdly difficult to parse for me too. I didn't know if it was just me.

Like, it's kind of a funny situation because just looking at it, it seems like it'd be easier for me to read though it than Daggerheart, which I really did not like the concept of the way it was arranged, but Daggerheart's arrangement just pulled me through the PDF no problems, whereas I'm still dithering with Draw Steel!

Just my opinion, not as a professional layout artist, but as a general reader of RPG books.

• The text is black on a white background. The very stark brightness of the background leads to eye strain (for me).
• It looks like the text was laid out using Microsoft Word. There are few vision cues besides line breaks and font size. (It doesn't use color at all.)
• Walls of text in what appears to be 12-point font, all in left-justified columns, that really doesn't distinguish what is the start of a section, what should be a bullet-point, etc.
• Few sidebars or charts to draw our attention to important stuff.

 

[Vael]

Yeah it's weirdly difficult to parse for me too. I didn't know if it was just me.

Like, it's kind of a funny situation because just looking at it, it seems like it'd be easier for me to read though it than Daggerheart, which I really did not like the concept of the way it was arranged, but Daggerheart's arrangement just pulled me through the PDF no problems, whereas I'm still dithering with Draw Steel!

I think the sci-fi-isms are causing me issues. Daggerheart used a lot of DnD terminology to quickly on board me. Sure, there's occasional bumps and twists, like, oh, Daggerheart Wizards can heal? Sorcerers share domains with Druids and Rogues?, but in general, I know what a Wizard is and a Druid and so on.

Whereas, a Censor or a Null give me nothing, except a desire to joke about not wanting to play a Fox News anchor or a bad spreadsheet result.

Anyway, it just seems that I'm finding a lack of resonance with Draw Steel, which is a shame.

 

[Enrahim]

Just my opinion, not as a professional layout artist, but as a general reader of RPG books.

• The text is black on a white background. The very stark brightness of the background leads to eye strain (for me).
• It looks like the text was laid out using Microsoft Word. There are few vision cues besides line breaks and font size. (It doesn't use color at all.)
• Walls of text in what appears to be 12-point font, all in left-justified columns, that really doesn't distinguish what is the start of a section, what should be a bullet-point, etc.
• Few sidebars or charts to draw our attention to important stuff.

What is hard for me is to recognise what is encyclopedia, and what is rules worthwhile reading. For instance you might think you could skip class entries completely - but some golden nuggets about how the game works are burried deep in it, like the green elementalst's shape shifting. The key mechanics of heroic resources are first explained in each class entry.

 

[Zaukrie]

One thing I noticed, every class has a resource, but they are all named a different thing. I get why! It's very flavorful. But, man, it's just one more thing to remember when reading (likely not an issue while playing, for sure).

I'm also finding it hard to read online....and might need to go to a store and see if they have a physical copy that is easier for me to digest.

My thoughts are the same as they were when first getting the PDFs, it's intimidating to read. And I've been reading different game books for longer than most of you have been alive. I'm not yet sure why! It just is for some reason. I THINK it's because I've been looking at what @mearls is doing to simplify things, and Nimble, and I'm getting used to seeing simpler things? Not sure, really.

I'm 100% into the ideas behind this game.......I might just need to find someone else that is playing to try it.

 

[Enrahim]

They really haven't, yeah, they don't even seem particularly interested in telling us what's good or special about it, and worse, I don't think the game itself does that, like, internally, with some totally unnecessarily boring or confusing terminology, like "Power rolls" which can achieve Tier I, Tier II, or Tier III results being the main mechanic of the game. What joyless Order-bound automaton came up with that lol?

Digging trough the book slowly, now on page 250 I got to the more common word descriptions. Short story: there is a minor simple matrix between tier and difficulty that produces the more common terms. As such a bit hard to imagine them finding anything flavorful when even tier 1 is sort of a success with both abilities and easy tests, while at the same time being potentially really bad failure on a hard test.

 

[Aldarc]

I think the sci-fi-isms are causing me issues. Daggerheart used a lot of DnD terminology to quickly on board me. Sure, there's occasional bumps and twists, like, oh, Daggerheart Wizards can heal? Sorcerers share domains with Druids and Rogues?, but in general, I know what a Wizard is and a Druid and so on.

Whereas, a Censor or a Null give me nothing, except a desire to joke about not wanting to play a Fox News anchor or a bad spreadsheet result.

Anyway, it just seems that I'm finding a lack of resonance with Draw Steel, which is a shame.

I know what an Elementalist is. Knowing what a Wizard is beyond being a "mage" relies on presuming D&Disms, which I personally dislike as an approach.