It's honestly the juice of D&D 4e's design philosophy, coupled with build options that often focus on more options for your game plan instead of optimizing your own gameplay loop. This isn't super unique to Draw Steel (Lancer has this too, as was pointed out) but it definately was a draw of 4e.

I hear this a lot when I join or get involved in a new community. Lots of folks wanting a companion app or something similar to DDB. Overwhelmingly my experience is most games lack these sorta scaffolds. I think it's more productive to not expect them and be suprised if a game does have one.

The main reason why there is a conception that D&D is "simple" is it because it has a LOT of cultural capital and extra-textual supporting resources to onboard new players. Often, if you have a question about the game you can simply look it up online and someone will have an answer.

The one here to reccomend would be ICON, not CAIN.

It has a mix of both. I think the vast VAST majority of it are MCDM takes of "D&D Classics" or conversions of their designs from Flee Mortals. Take that as you will.

its a shibboleth for people to gesture towards "x is good, y is bad". which is...just terrible for all the reasons you would expect. and worst of all, this sorta thing is often spoken by people who don't have much skin in the game, so to speak, when it comes to board games either.

Flavorful and evocative text can be hard. I think ICON accomplishes a lot with comparatively "Iittle" flavor text, so don't get discouraged!

I highly reccomend checking out Kamigakari. It has both renewable per-turn dice pools AND two classes u choose between at character creation!

I have the players agree to a pre-determined order. If there isn't an immediate play when a player turn comes up, we default to that order. So if it's the first player turn and no one has a plan, Player A goes. If Player D, for instance, has a plan though they can go (thus "disrupting" the order).

I think it's an interesting dynamic but personally I find the book doesn't provide enough structure or mechanical examples of how that might play out. Likewise, I also think that just giving out treasures pre-crafted sidesteps a lot of the fun with this, namely engaging with the crafting subsystems.

I think the value of such a thing is very useful if your game cares about the duration of abilities. If something triggers at the start/end of your next turn, or at the end of the round or something like that, then the tactical decision of who goes when can be very powerful.

It's 70 bucks for BOTH pdfs. heroes and monsters. so individually each costs like 35. the creator license means the whole text is free, you can read it for no cost on steel compendium.