I recently introduced another D&D 4e veteran to Draw Steel. After playing a couple of battles at level 5, this is what they had to say:

>• Shadow's Player: For me Draw Steel is... fine, so far. It doesn't actually scratch the same itch as 4e to my surprise and while I don't think it's as complex as some other systems I've tried, I find it kinda hard to keep track of what the party as a whole is doing. Especially with all the meta resources

>• Me, the Director: Yes, Draw Steel has much more moving parts than 4e.

>• Shadow's Player: It does and so far I'm not convinced these extra parts really add value proportional to the increased complexity

>Admittedly it may be in part a result of my role since [my shadow]'s largely just the party's turret and thus doesn't have much need to actively engage with anyone else.

>Just soak up the buffs and extra actions, pew-pew-pew

>It's pretty good if you get off on dumping beeeg numbers over and over

>I'm mixed on the class resource system meanwhile. In concept I like the idea of powers being locked by a "super meter" as an alternative to AEDU, but the end result for [my shadow] is "forget everything but Shadowstrike". Despite having a hypothetical variety of main actions, it all comes back to Shadowstrike because why wouldn't it?

>AEDU has its own issues with how it encourages alpha striking and keeping fights short to avoid everyone running out of interesting stuff to do, but it also keeps you rotating through your powers because your "optimal" actions are constantly running out so you're trying to balance using them where best warranted against saving for future encounters. As someone who started with bloody Anima - I like fiddly numbers for cool powers.

>But I do wonder if there's a cozy midpoint somewhere?

>At risk of making the numbers fiddlier - maybe the "cost" of a power incrementally rising with each use in the same encounter? :qiqifallen: