An Objective Draw Steel Vs. Daggerheart Review

     As I write this at the tail of end of August 2025, we're kind of in the last gasps of all those projects that came about when Wizards of the Coast decided to mess with the OGL waaaaaaaay back in January of 2023. Pathfinder has been remastered, the ORC license came out, Kobold Press farted out Tales of the Valiant and everyone forgot it, etc. Most relevantly, MCDM's Draw Steel and Darrington Press' Daggerheart have both been released. The only one left is like...DC20? So, with both in my grubby little hands (thanks to getting a primo copy of Daggerheart at my local Books-a-Million), the only thing left to do is decide which is the objectively better game. Now some might say my decision to run a Daggerheart campaign kind of gives the game away a little bit, to which I say do not worry. I am being fair and impartial. After all, as we all know, art is an entirely objective thing which can be quantified. With that said, let's jump right into it!

Round One: (Second) Most Fuckable Tiefling

Because as we all know, the most fuckable tiefling is Karlach

    One of the inherent truths of modern Dungeons and Dragons is that despite its origin as a wargame made by sweaty Midwestern nerds with weird opinions about women, the hobby as we know it now is dominated largely by what I'll call, for lack of a better term, "Elfkissers." These are people who enjoy play flirting, joke around with NPCs, and have a big case of OC brain. I'm not trying to denigrate these folks, Scarlet Sunrise is full of Elfkissers, and I love them for it. Of late, lots of Elfkissers have gravitated towards tieflings, presumably because they are the ancestry that most resembles a Homestuck troll. While neither game technically has tieflings due to license fuckery, they both have devil-people, and making sure that there's plenty of room for tail stuff is an important part of the modern roleplaying experience.

Me and my boyfriend saw you from across the Infernal Plane, and we really like your vibe.

    Draw Steel is off to a rough start here, as their Devils, while they do have tails for Tail Stuff, and cool weird feet, look a bit too...robotic? They feel more akin to statues, but not in a way where I'd call them statuesque. 

blushes like a slut

    By contrast, this delightful devil (technically Inferni) is...oh my god. The sultry look. The tattoo crawling up the face? The vest and the pants and the open shirt? Is there a Mrs. Purple Devil Person, because if not I am here for it!

Point for Daggerheart

Round Two: The Warlord

    For those of you unfamiliar, the Warlord is the greatest class ever introduced into Dungeons and Dragons. Intended as a martial leader of men type, the Warlord has everything it needs to be a frontliner and a healer, controlling the flow of battle and keeping everyone alive. And then they didn't bring it back for Fifth Edition. It was amazing, I loved it, and now it is gone. Except! Both games have stuff that kinda does it. However, while Daggerheart just has some abilities in the Valor Domain that are about that (Domains being like...generic Sources of Power that certain classes can use), Draw Steel has an entire class, the Tactician. At third level they get the ability to slide an enemy three squares during initiative. Do you know how fucking cool that is? To just be like "No you're closer to the Striker actually." It rocks. And the main villain Ajax the Invincible is also a Tactician! So if you fight him its Warlord Versus Warlord and it would be so cool!

Point for Draw Steel

Round Three: The Setting(s)

    Draw Steel's base setting is the world of Orden and the Timescape. To be blunt, a lot of it is the most generic-ass stuff I have ever seen. This isn't a failure of design-indeed, that seems to be exactly what the fine folks at MCDM are going for-but its a genre that I personally am just so sick of. A lot of the actual writing comes in brief snippets delivered in the kind of casual tone that I really enjoy in MCDM and R. Talsorian products, but it is frustrating that The World gets five pages in the book total, while The Gods get twenty. 

    Daggerheart, on the other hand, doesn't have a setting. Instead it has six. The "Campaign Frames" in the back of the book each cover a different subgenre of high fantasy, from the totally-not-Eberron of Five Banners Burning to the totally-not-Dungeon Meshi of Beast Feast. Each of these settings comes with the same sort of high-level overview that Orden gets, but also offers thematic touchstones, pitches, unique mechanics, and even a sample situation to kick off the campaign. I haven't read most of them, but the ones I have read have been very functional at selling exactly what they're trying to do.

Point for Daggerheart

Round Four: Borrowing from Other Games I Like

    Daggerheart asks the question "What if Dungeons and Dragons was built from the ground up for the theater kids that play it now?" With that goal in mind, it has created something of a slurry of the best the modern RPG scene has to offer; rolls with variable outcomes from the Fantasy Flight games, resource management from Blades in the Dark, the multiple metacurrencies of 2d20 games, Aspects from Fate, and probably a bunch of other stuff I missed. However, to my mind it doesn't fully go far enough. Stapling all that onto what is, at the end of the day, still a Dragon Game means combat is still gonna take a long-ass time relative to doing anything else. I guess what I'm saying is that while its extremely well-designed, I can't help but wish it had gone further in borrowing from its inspirations, especially since the prep-structure is still very much preparing plots.

The touchstones of Daggerheart. Jesus there's a lot of stuff on here.

    

    Draw Steel asks the question "Hey, remember Fourth Edition?" And you know what? I do! I do remember Fourth Edition! Fourth Edition was fucking awesome! In contrast to Daggerheart, Draw Steel knows exactly what its doing and exactly what it wants to be. The way it structures powers means that everything is easy enough to read (though I do wish the actual layout was a lot better). It improves on the 4E chassis by making feats into standalone perks that are awesome instead of +1 to Psoriasis Damage. Everything does what it says it does, and I love it for that. It even to my mind improves on Pathfinder 2E's system of influence by making it so that instead of being necessarily dependent on particular skills, you get access to a better possible set of outcomes if you lean on someone's pressure points. It rocks. Someone please let me play in your Draw Steel game. 

Will this ever be useful in any situation? No idea! I love it anyway. 

Point for Draw Steel

Round Five: The Ancestries

    Here I will not be discussing the number of ancestries or even whether I think they're any good or not, because I'm a weirdo purist who goes "Where is my elf and dwarf! :(" I'm not even gonna talk about mechanics, because I feel like the modularity of a Draw Steel ancestry is suited to its game the way Two Special Abilities is suited to Daggerheart. Instead I wanna talk about how their information is presented. Generally in RPGs the more I know about a specific group of people, the better, so that I can better characterize them. Pathfinder is my gold standard here. 

    Daggerheart doesn't have a setting, so the actual information is split between a paragraph at the beginning and a paragraph in the particular setting, maybe. Sometimes you do sometimes you don't, and if you do it's usually just a couple sentences.

Daggerheart's Elf

    Draw Steel also has a few paragraphs at most describing each ancestry. Fair enough, they're on even terms then, right? Right?

Draw Steel's High Elf

    Except that's not all that's there. Each Ancestry also has a page-long short story that's meant to express the vibes of that ancestry, but really its mostly just teaching us about the main heroic characters of the setting. I feel like in this case its worse than nothing, because if I wanted to read and do analysis I could just go back to grad school! If you enjoyed it, awesome, but to me its a waste of space.

    Also the idea of the Dragon Knights-a species created by virtue of a spell to be perfect soldiers who only failed because they had agency? OOF. I can't tell if the writer even thinks of this whole thing as like...a massive crime against the Dragon Knights? Because it is. Idk. Listen to AMCA.

Point for Daggerheart

Conclusion

    Well there you have it folks. Daggerheart wins 3-2 in the contest of Greatest Game of 2025, which is good because that's the one I'm running and I'd feel like a real idiot if that wasn't the case.

    In all seriousness, I feel both games succeed at what they're broadly trying to do, and I know my group of Elfkissers is gonna love Daggerheart. There's no session today because our fearless captain couldn't make it, but hopefully next week we'll enact our Prison Break!

ooooooough