Book Details
| Title: | Draw Steel: Heroes | |
| Author: | Various | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 12.16.25 |
Other Books Read By This Author (6)
- Call of Cthulhu: Keeper Rulebook
- Dungeons & Dragons: Dungeon Master's Guide
- Dungeons & Dragons: Player's Handbook
- Flee, Mortals!
- The Smashing Book
- Xanathar's Guide to Everything
| Date Read | Note |
| 12.16.25 | This is another odd entry as this is a tabletop role playing game rulebook but I did read it all and I did similar entries for when I read the 5E D&D books and I'm making up the rules so who cares. This was a lot. The book's laid out clearly and labelled well and it didn't read like an antiquated tome or unnecessarily complicated, but it was 400 full double-column pages with not a ton of art. There is art but it's fitted into the column format such that it's either a quarter, half, or full page and that's it. So I don't know the word count but it feels high. It took me a long time to read (I also took a break halfway to read that latest Michael Connelly). I don't regret reading it or anything, it's just a lot of rules to ingest and retain. I am excited about the game itself though. I've been lucky to have a D&D game still going with friends that started in the pandemic and it's scratching the itch for playing RPGs as well as a good hang . I don't think there's much interest from the players to have to learn a new game or change anything up but I've been feeling like D&D, especially the combat, is getting a tad bit old. I've found that if I don't throw a shit ton of thought and planning into the encounter that it's just not fun (for me at least). It follows a very predictable pattern where I have one maybe two rounds to throw a challenge at my players before things become a slog where people don't move they just stand there rolling dice at each other. The cool special abilities that enemies might have to differentiate themselves are still prone to not hitting so they sound cooler on the page than in practice, and similarly I think my players feel stuck into one primary move during combat. This might be a product of a lot of different factors, but the net result is I wish combat was more dynamic. Enter Draw Steel, which seems to take some stuff from 4E (which I never played) and give the players explicit abilities with cool names that they can select more like a video or board game. So they still have a basic attack but they are accumulating resources which they can spend on cooler attacks and whatnot. Similarly, I also accumulate resources which gives the enemies cooler attacks. So instead of the first round being the most interesting, fights get more interesting the longer they go. There's a bunch of other rules in this game I'm also keen on trying but a huge aspect that most interests me is that they're making a dedicated virtual tabletop app that actively supports the game's rules and mechanics. So while I'm concerned that my players won't want to learn a bunch of new rules, I'm hopeful that the VTT will incorporate many of them and ease that learning curve. I still need to know all the rules to explain it to them in the first place (hence me reading this book cover to cover), but I'm hopeful it will change things up in a good way. Hopefully we try it out in 2026. There's a companion book to this with all the monsters and about 30 more pages of combat-oriented rules. I'm not sure if I'm going to read that one cover-to-cover or not, and there are published adventures which are in various digital formats that I don't think I'll make entries on here for so this might stand as the sole Draw Steel entry on the journal, but just know I'm reading more game content. Um, so yeah I liked it? Feels weird putting down my feelings as if it was a work of fiction or something. There are passages of fiction explaining the various ancestries in the book which were good, and surprisingly enough the chapter on gods and religion (typically the toughest for me to get through) was also very entertaining. They list out various saints of gods which are basically summarized stories of how they became saints which were all cool and interesting. But there were also passages of reading lists of examples or lists of magic items. That's where I'd prefer each item to have associated art so you can see what's there. This book represents some/half the items but you have to read the entries to understand what they all do (duh). I will say there were no chapters as sloggy to read through as the D&D spell list. I know the book's probably not designed to read through like that but how else are you going to learn what all the spells do? and I still remember how brutal that was. So nothing like that here. I will say that nearly every page had meaningful content right up to the end. The final chaptuer with advice for "directors" (this game's term for dungeon master or game master) was packed. There's also a cyclical nature to some of the rules where when you read it from cover to cover, early stuff references later stuff and later stuff references early stuff so you're always waiting for some things to get explained more or forget earlier details when that thing finally is explained. The book has a ton of links and references connecting everything together but I took it as just another sign that I needed to read the whole book to holistically understand everything. There are many youtube videos from people also explaining things but the book is the source. So I guess as far as reading rulebooks go, this was long but good? |
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