Poison Damage in One D&D

 There's a whole other post to be written about my hopes for the use of resistance, immunity, and vulnerability moving forward in D&D, but I think there's a special case to be considered: Poison damage.

In the Monster Manual, there are 343 stat blocks that do not have any resistance or immunity to poison. The Monster Manual has a total of 450 stat blocks, giving us 107 that do have these resistances or immunities, or about 24% - nearly a quarter of all monsters in the book.

Among those 107 that have either resistance or immunity to poison, a full 102 of them have full immunity - the handful that do take half-damage include the single "Duergar" stat block, the Assassin (who I guess has worked with poison so much that they've built a tolerance to it?) and the Incubus and Succubus (which are actually the same creature, just with different, gendered names) and the Cambion.

The point here is that of all damage types, poison is the least reliable. If you are facing the vast majority of fiends, the vast majority of undead (oddly, vampires are susceptible,) or the vast majority of constructs (only Modrons are not immune,) your Poison Spray cantrip is going to be utterly worthless.

Now, poison is often coded as a "bad guy" damage type. While Radiant damage is associated mostly with angelic, holy forces, poison is the classic "underhanded" way to harm someone.

But it's also something that player characters can often avoid as well. Dwarves (including Duergar), Green Dragonborn, Autognomes, Stout Halflings, Plasmoids, Reborn, Warforged, and Yuan-Ti are all resistant (the old version of Yuan-Ti Pureblood is fully immune) and Monks all get full immunity to poison damage eventually.

Now, logically, these usually make perfect sense. Fiends are beings of the hellish lower planes, where one imagines poison suffuses everything. Undead are already dead, so the biological mechanisms that a poison would attack or inhibit are already nonfunctional anyway. And Constructs don't have organic tissue that a poison would usually wreck.

But the end result is that this one damage type is singled out for utter uselessness in a ton of scenarios. And I think that leaves some design space on the table.

In World of Warcraft, the Rogue class has as one of its core ideas the use of poison - you apply these to your weapons, and it adds damage and some other effects. Of its three specializations (the WoW equivalent of subclasses,) the Assassination spec is built around abilities that enhance the effectiveness of your poisons.

Now, WoW kind of dispensed with the idea of damage resistance and immunity long ago (the original raid dungeon, Molten Core, was filled with fire elementals, forcing Mages who had chosen the Fire spec to swap over to Frost in order to be effective - today, you can hurt a fire elemental with fireballs even if that doesn't make a ton of sense, for game balance reasons).

But as it stands, unless you can be guaranteed that you won't be fighting a lot of constructs, undead, or fiends in your campaign, you really shouldn't build a character concept around using poison.

As it stands, the DMG has a ton of interesting poisons with different effects that you can employ against your players or NPCs. Many of these are ingested poisons - something you'd sneak into someone's meal rather than coating a weapon with it. But in terms of adventuring gear in the PHB, "basic poison" is the only thing that's really available, and it adds a piddling 1d4 poison damage - meaning that no one in their right mind would bother spending the 100 gold required for it (oh, and the target needs to only make a DC 10 Con save to not take any damage). For 100 gold, you could get two healing potions that each heal at absolute minimum the maximum amount of damage that this could do.

Now, as it stands, I think the only reasonable way for a player character to get poison as a piece of equipment is by using a Poisoner's Kit. The thing is, 5E has been kind of odd about its use of tools in the first place, and surely Alchemist's Supplies should also cover this, right?

One D&D does make the use of tools for ability checks far, far clearer (I've been using the new rules in my campaigns, and it works out great - our Artificer often gets 30s on Intelligence Arcana checks that can use Tinker's Tools, having 22 Intelligence, proficiency in Arcana, and Tool Expertise, which means they get a +16 to their checks and roll them with advantage).

Still, what we don't have are good crafting rules. The amount of downtime required for using the crafting rules found in Xanathar's is basically prohibitive in any campaign where there's any kind of ticking clock (which is most, I think). As it stands, I believe that it would take you two whole weeks to craft a single vial of basic poison - again, not remotely worth it. (Also, it would take 30 weeks - over half a year - to make a set of plate armor).

But we also don't want poison to become this necessity for anyone who fights with a weapon - if it's too good, character concepts that would never use poison will feel obligated to do so.

So, as it currently stands, player characters basically ignore, or should ignore, any spell or item that deals poison damage (there might be edge cases like spells such as Cloudkill when you know you're facing living, non-fiendish monsters). And even opting into it as a character who, logically, it would make sense to be all about that poison (such as an Assassin Rogue - who do automatically gain proficiency in Poisoner's Kits) is a fool's errand given how hard it is to squeeze any significant damage out of it and how costly it will be to get that tiny amount of damage.

So, what do we do?

First, I think, we need to be more liberal with what poison can effect.

Fiends are, I think, the prime candidate to lose this sort of immunity. Yes, the lower planes are filled with noxious fumes and fetid waters, but we could easily create environmental aspects to these places that fiends are simply immune to. Indeed, if we say that Devils are no longer immune to poison, it creates all manner of potential intrigue if rivals for power in the Nine Circles are engaged in a constant war of assassinations, including via poison.

If we don't want to go so far as to remove poison immunity from all fiends, we could limit it, instead, to, for example, demons. Demons, after all, tend to be the gross, unsanitary kind of fiends, and it could create some interesting scenarios in which a party might need to figure out which kind of fiend they're dealing with.

Next, I think we should take a look at undead. I think it's reasonable to say that incorporeal undead like ghosts and specters can have full immunity to poison. But corporeal undead like zombies, ghouls, and the like could either fully take it or perhaps only have resistance to it. I think here we'd also carve out an exception for Skeletons, who don't really have any soft tissue left to be affected.

The point is, if we can bring poison immunity and resistance down to the levels that, say, Fire or Lightning get, or in that ballpark, we could open the door for player characters to start actually wanting to use it.

Now, how should they do that?

Again, I don't think we want to make this so good that everyone who uses weapons will have to stock up on this stuff. So let's place some limitations:

Poison, as an item, should only be able to be applied to certain weapons. It should't be practical to slather one's greatsword or maul with it. But a dagger? A blowdart? An arrow? Sure, these all make sense to me.

Broadly, we could say that it only goes on finesse weapons or ranged weapons. We might limit it further, though: while I think the Pistol and Musket are not so powerful that they need the insanely higher cost they currently have in the playtest, I also think it would be fairly absurd to try to poison a bullet.

Another consideration is that usually, the more beneficial properties a weapons has, the lower its damage die (while detrimental properties, like Heavy, Two-Handed, or Loading, tend to increase them,) and if we are only allowing poison on certain types of weapon, we are effectively giving it a new property, albeit one that requires frequent expense to use.

So let's start very conservatively and say we can only use this with d4 weapons that deal piercing damage. That's just Daggers and Darts. As it stands, the only easily-available poison to player characters is a DC 10 Con save to take none of 1d4 poison damage on a hit. That's a save that will very frequently succeed. So we're adding barely any damage to our weapon.

If we make the save be for half damage, this does turn it into, on average, about 1 damage even on a success. Still doesn't seem worth the 100 gold.

So, I think we could take this one of two directions: one is that we keep poison expensive, but make it worth its cost. For 100 gold, we can get two healing potions, each of which heals for an average of 7 hit points (2d4+2), meaning a total of 14 restored hit points. So, it would seem reasonable that, for an equal investment, we should get at bare minimum a comparable amount of damage.

So, we spend 100 gold on our basic poison, and we should get an average of 14 damage from it. We could either get that from 4d4+4 or 4d6, or even 3d8 (which is 13.5, but pretty close). But what of the Con save?

The thing is, as it currently stands, there are two d20 tests involved in letting a Basic Poison actually do its thing. And that thing it does is a piddling 1d4 damage - not enough unless rolling max damage to kill a Commoner. We're not inflicting the poisoned condition - a much more potentially powerful effect - so here's a question: should there even be a saving throw?

Player character who get advantage on saves against the poisoned condition also tend to have resistance to poison damage, so I think in a lot of ways this is kind of double-dipping. We spent a hundred freaking gold on this! Again, a Commoner will avoid all of this damage 55% of the time, given the low DC for the save.

So I'm tempted to say that the damage should just come with the hit - if you get stabbed with a poisoned dagger, guess what? You're taking that poison damage.

Now, we could also imagine a scenario in which the poison is cheaper and does less damage, but I think then we start to get into "required gear" territory. If it's only 1 gold for poison that does a little bit of damage, you'll swiftly hit a point in which you will want to apply it to your weapons on every fight.

I think keeping it expensive makes it special - we now need to save that poison for the big fight.

Indeed, I think we could even have higher-level poisons show up, but like healing potions, we're not expecting to be able to buy these at just any adventuring supply store. And, like healing potions, I think these are going to be one-and-done when used. If you have it on a melee weapon, you'll have time (say an hour) to make use of it, but once it strikes a target, the poison is no longer on the blade.

Now, this is also where subclasses could come in: I think you could have a Rogue subclass that specializes in poisons. They might be able to more easily produce it - making use of a Poisoner's Kit, for example. The subclass could even derive special toxins that do other types of damage for the (now) rare cases where poison doesn't do anything.

The point is, I think there's some potential left on the table here for interesting and very thematic gameplay.

Candela Obscura, Illuminated Worlds, and Daggerheart

Critical Role has been huge in the D&D world. Though the first campaign began using Pathfinder, when it became a streaming show in 2015, the group formerly known as "The Shits" became a somewhat more public-facing-friendly "Vox Machina," and converted to the then-new 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. While I credit my introduction to D&D to the folks at Penny Arcade with their Acquisitions Incorporated games, there's no doubt that Critical Role has been a big part of how D&D has become more popular than ever before.

Now, credit where credit is due: 5th Edition was also a much more welcoming design than previous editions of the game. Pathfinder was built on the bones of 3rd Edition, and while I haven't played either, my familiarity with Starfinder (itself derived from Pathfinder) suggests that the whole thing is a lot more finicky and granular. While experienced 5E veterans might enjoy the greater degree of challenge and freedom in putting together a character build, 5th Edition does still allow for a lot of customization, but I think the balance it strikes makes it way easier for the majority of players to get into.

Still, Critical Role has been a big part of that D&D brand, but with the launch of their own game publishing subsidiary, Darrington Press, and the debacle of D&D's OGL revisions (a storm that it seems D&D has weathered largely by just doing what the players and community asked them to do - though I'll let those who are more legally versed render the final judgment; I don't blame anyone for being skeptical of the decisions and strategies of giant corporations like Hasbro,) and with folks like Kobold Press and MCDM working on their own RPG systems, it seemed inevitable that CR, through Darrington Press, would do the same.

And, as it turned out, they've got two coming out.

The first of these, Illuminated Worlds, is the basis on which their new ongoing (mini-?) series Candela Obscura is built. Candela Obscura is presented as its own game "using the Illuminated Worlds engine." Candela Obscura is a kind of turn-of-the-century paranormal investigation game, which seems like it would fit well in cosmic horror, a bit of gothic horror, and other supernatural horror subgenres with that cool late-industrial vibe.

I'm given to understand, though, that Illuminated Worlds is intended to be used for all sorts of genres, with the same basic die mechanic.

And that mechanic is actually familiar to me: Having read (some of) the Blades in the Dark core rulebook, the basic gist is the same: Each character has scores in actions, that each find themselves in broader categories. For example, you might have two filled-in dots of "Control," which determines your ability to maintain control of objects, like driving a car, aiming a gun, or just holding your hand steady as you pull off some deft move.

When you perform this action, you roll a number of d6s equal to the number of dots you have, and take the highest result. 6s are full successes, where you basically do what you intended to do. 4-5 means you succeed, but with some complication. And 1-3 are misses. So, if our character has two dots in this action and needs to drive a car to escape some horrible, speedy spirits down a narrow alley, they'll be more than likely to succeed - about a 75% chance - but chances are it's going to have some complication, as there's only a 31% chance to have a full success.

Now, some of the nuances are different from Blades in the Dark, but they do seem to have a lot of similarities. One thing I find interesting is that you don't choose your inventory before you go on a mission - instead, you can pull out useful items at an opportune time, but you only get to do this so many times over the course of a mission.

The system is designed for short, often session-long gameplay loops, and unlike D&D, systems like these don't really see your character getting significantly more powerful over time. Indeed, a character can accrue "scars" that will eventually force them to retire (or die).

Now, all this being said, this is only one of two systems that Darrington Press is working on.

Daggerheart is one we have not really heard much about, but it is this that looks like it will be playing a similar role to D&D, with a character progression system intended for lengthy campaigns. That's basically all we know about it.

However, it would seem very likely that the next campaign of Critical Role, after its current 3rd campaign, will presumably use this system (it would be strange for the company not to use its show to demonstrate and promote its own gameplay system).

I presume that it will fill a similar heroic fantasy vibe to D&D. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if it winds up having very similar bones to 5th Edition D&D, much as Kobold Press' Tales of the Valiant, which explicitly identifies itself as a 5E system.

What I'd be curious to see is if there's any attempt to explore other aspects of the genre. I realize this is kind of my pet thing, but I'd personally love to have a system for, or at least a system that could be used for, some kind of modern New Weird adventures but with the full epic progression system of D&D.

Imagining Playtest Monsters

One of the things we really haven't gotten much of in the One D&D playtest is a sense of what the monsters of the Monster Manual are going to look like.

So, let's consider that.

I suspect we're going to see most of the current entries in the Monster Manual reprinted in some way - I believe they've even said there will be more than there were in the 2014 one, which is already a pretty hefty tome.

Broadly speaking, the only ones I suspect are going to be removed might be stat blocks for playable species - your Orc Eye of Gruumsh or your Drow Priestess of Lolth, given that they're trying to distance these species/lineages/peoples from specific settings and cultures. Even in the Forgotten Realms, Ed Greenwood revised the Drow to not all be Lolth-worshipping bastards, but that that is specifically the culture of Menzoberranzan.

Now, might we have stat blocks instead that are, say, Spider Priests or War Priests? After all, for the most part, the current version of an Orc Eye of Gruumsh is just a stat block with the Orcs' Aggressive feature, the Orc NPC's Gruumsh's Fury feature, and some Cleric spells.

Likely, instead, we're going to get spellcasting stat blocks more in line with the designs from Monsters of the Multiverse - taking out most of the player-facing spells and letting them do damage primarily with bespoke abilities.

But we've written tons about spellcasters. What about other aspects of monster design?

One of the things I'm most curious about is Resistances, Immunities, and Vulnerabilities.

In 5E as it stands, there's this sort of weird thing that happens with weapons. The vast majority of monsters who have any sort of resistance or immunity to the three main damage types associated with weapons - bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing - will only have said resistance or immunity to this damage type if it comes from nonmagical weapons.

So, martial characters (and here I simply mean any character that deals most of their damage through weapons) kind of have to hit this graduation point at a certain level. Usually, by level 5 or 6, you want to have a magical weapon. Once you have a +1 weapon, all your damage is going through in the vast majority of cases. Indeed, some of the very least resisted damage is when it's these three types coming from a magical weapon (I think Force still beats them).

 However, if we are to look at class design as a guide, we see a few notable omissions. Druids do not get any feature that gives their Wild Shape's form's natural weapons the "counts as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance" rider that the 2014 Druid gets at level 6.

So, what does that mean?

Likely, it means that we're going to stop seeing this blanket resistance or immunity for powerful, magical creatures. And I think we can all say good riddance, right?

What was the purpose that such resistance/immunity served? It did mean that some monsters could be absolute terrors, or even basically unvanquishable at low levels, but only for groups that relied on weapon damage. Any spellcasters could basically never worry about this at all, so instead this became a tax purely on the damage output of martial classes.

Ok, so we then sort of have weapon-based characters graduate to being able to do full damage once they have magic weapons. And at that point, we basically just ignore these resistances/immunities.

Like, look, what tier 1 party is going to be expected to fight a Lich and not just automatically die? And what tier 3 party is going to come at a Lich without magical weapons? So why do they have this immunity?

I think, also, there's some potential here to make the more interesting immunities/resistances come to the forefront if we get rid of the idea of separating magical and nonmagical weapon damage.

Lycanthropes and Devils are both resistant or immune to weapon damage unless attacked with a silvered weapon... or a magical weapon. I have to imagine that 99% of the time, the party just has a magic weapon to attack with, and you never worry about getting something made of silver. That's part of what I love about the Loup Garou design. The Loup Garou (which is also much higher CR) can only have its health regeneration stopped if it's hit with a silver weapon (or Chill Touch - I could write a whole post about how I think Chill Touch needs a nerf).

Whereas your standard werewolf will easily go down if they're just hit by spells if your party does't have access to silvered weapons or magic weapons, the Loup Garou can take endless punishment from your Akmon, Hammer of Purphoros, because unless you can get some silver through that hide, that wolf is getting right back up.

Likewise, you could imagine making Adamantine weapons more appealing if they were truly the only way to harm a Golem.

But let's also imagine that we could do more interesting things with these mechanics.

One thing is that vulnerabilities are extremely rare among monsters. That is, of course, sort of necessary for design, because monsters go down pretty quickly as is - giving players an avenue to do so in half the time means you're only going to get a single turn to use the monster in a lot of cases.

But that might also be kind of the backdoor to the real thing here: we need some monsters to live a lot longer.

I think monsters in the tier 1 range are actually pretty balanced in most cases. Player characters are so fragile before level 5 (which is also when Clerics and Druids get their first resurrection magic) that monsters need to be limited in the damage they can do and also go down fairly quickly so they can't unleash too many attacks.

But I'd say that in tier 3 and, I assume, in tier 4 (because I've thrown a bunch of tier 4 monsters at an admittedly large tier 3 group and they've gone down pretty easily) monsters tend to die before they can really threaten the party that much. It does depend a lot, of course, on the group makeup, and given that I've been running a larger group, there are a lot of ways that they can shore up one another's' weaknesses (Flash of Genius is an oft-used feature that basically means it's pretty hard for anyone to fail a saving throw).

But I think a lot of monsters just seem shockingly easy to kill. My prime example is the Lich. The Lich is one of D&D's most iconic monsters, and admittedly, its whole deal is that it's an undead wizard, and thus it makes sense that it's something of a glass cannon. There is a lot of work you'll want to put in to making sure the Lich is ready for the party (spoilers for anyone in my campaign, but I'm currently looking at how to make use of one) but the fact is that if the party finds your Lich and just goes whole-hog on them (as they would be wise to,) its 17 AC and 135 HP mean that thing is going down fast. Yes, resistance to cold, lightning, and necrotic damage. Yes, immunity to poison and nonmagical weapon damage (though the latter here, as we discussed above, is basically irrelevant.)

A tier 3 (say level 13) Warlock with 20 Charisma and Agonizing Blast will be hitting on a roll of 7 or higher (70% of the time) and dealing 1d10+5 (10.5) damage per hit, three times per turn, so even if we ignore crits and any non-cantrip spells the Warlock is casting, that's about 21.35 damage per turn, meaning that a single, very lazy Warlock could take down a Lich in 6.3 turns. If we assume that the rest of a 4-player party is doing comparable damage per round (which, conservatively, is not unreasonable,) that Lich is going to get at most either 1 or 2 turns in combat, depending on how good their initiative is.

Surely, surely they should be able to last a bit longer. There's glass cannons, and then there's cannons made of bubble solution.

Now, granted, I often look at these things from a DM's perspective, and while I always want my party to succeed, I'd prefer if they feel like they really had to be clever and burn a lot of resources in order to achieve victory.

We don't want battles to drag on interminably, but I do think that my general sense is not so much that the monsters aren't doing enough damage or harming the player characters enough, but rather that the monsters go down before they can do most of their cool stuff.

The other thing I'd look into is balancing legendary monsters. A legendary monster, theoretically, should be able to threaten the party on its own. But it's very rare that you can actually just throw an appropriate-CR monster at the party and have the fight challenge them. Interesting encounters basically only work when you have a lot of monsters on the field.

And that can be fun, but on a thematic level, I'd like to be able to throw my party up against a single monster with no minions and let that fight feel like a real challenge.

How do we fix this? Well, we could look into refining the legendary action system. We could also just give the monsters more actions on their turns.

I haven't really played much with the "multiple reactions" alternative to Legendary Actions we've seen on the Eldritch Lich or the Vecna stat block. But I'm curious to see if that works better.

I honestly think, though, that the solution might simply be to bump up HP. If the dragon only gets one chance to breathe on the party, they're not going to be as scary. But they last a bit longer, and a second breath is far harder to recover from than the first.

Imagining a Unique Long-Rest Warlock Spell Progression

 So, in a new Jeremy Crawford/Todd Kenreck interview, Crawford suggested that the current iteration of the One D&D Warlock is just one of many ideas they've had of how to handle Warlock spell slots.

While we didn't get any specifics, one suggestion was that they could have a unique spell level progression that didn't give them the full spellcaster spell slot number as a Wizard or Sorcerer, but still allowed them to, by default, gain spell levels at the full caster rate.

To clarify: currently, Warlocks get access to spells of certain levels at the same rate as any other full spellcaster. They start with 1st level spells, and get a new level of spell at every two character levels.

Now, the recent One D&D Warlock does get to do this... kind of. Starting at level 5, they can take the Mystic Arcanum Eldritch Invocation in order to learn spells of those levels, getting 3rds at level 5, 4ths at level 7, etc., all the way up to 9th level spells at level 17. (One weird oversight here is that they still have to wait for level 5 to get 2nd level spells, meaning that at levels 3 and 4, they're relegated to true half-casters.)

But in terms of actual spell slots they gain, they instead have the same progression as half-casters like Paladins, Rangers, and Artificers.

Now, to be clear, the reason that they don't want to simply give Warlocks the same full caster spell progression is that so much of the class would need to be nerfed in response - Eldritch Blast and its invocations, as well as the Pact Boons, would be too powerful if you also had just as many big spells to cast.

And that's something I can defend. I know some people sort of wish their Warlocks were more or less just another flavor of Wizard, but I highly recommend just playing a Wizard who was taught magic by some otherworldly instructor if you want that.

As I identified in the last post I wrote about Warlocks, there are two things that I think don't feel very good as someone who likes the current Warlock.

The first is that using the new Mystic Arcanum is awkward. Not only does it prevent you from taking other Invocations, but it also requires a Warlock to frequently swap out what their MA spells are once they can cast them naturally - you might pick up Fireball through MA at level 5, but then need to swap it out at level 9, learning it normally and then using the invocation to get a 5th level spell.

I'd rather have a system where the choices you make as you level up can reasonably be left in place.

The other thing is that you lose something I always found neat and cool about the Warlock: that their spell slots scaled up. Unlike a Wizard, who, once they have their Mage Armor up, is probably doing more damage with cantrips than their 1st level spells once they get into the middle tiers, a Warlock's smaller number of spell slots remain fairly impactful.

And, this also encourages them to consider spells that scale well. You could, of course, just get as many 5th level spells as you possibly can, but if you can find spells that genuinely are effective when upcast, like the Tasha's Summon spells, these will really benefit from having all those 5th level spell slots.

So, the simplest solution here would be to basically change Pact Magic - rather than getting a total of 2 spell slots through tiers 1 and 2, 3 in tier 3, and 4 in tier 4, recharging on a short rest, you can instead get more spell slots that still scale up, at least to 5th level (by level 9).

How many should there be?

Well, if we are trying to basically give you what you would have had if you had a short rest or two during the day, that means that by level 9, you should have either 4 or 6 5th level spell slots (and no other spell slots).

Now, maybe we just clap our hands together and say we're done. 4 is probably going to leave you with the same problem - these are precious resources that the Warlock will be hesitant to spend. 6 might be too many - you can cast Synaptic Static six times in a row in a single fight?

Well... maybe that's not so bad. I mean, the limitation there is more about action economy. How many fights go six rounds?

Let's entertain a different possibility: can we give Warlocks higher-level spell slots at the same rate as full casters, but without giving them as many spell slots?

Let's figure out the math here:

In terms of total number of spell slots for the class, a half-caster gets this progression (the format here is level:total spell slot number)

1:2

2:2

3:3

4:3

5:6

6:6

7:7

8:7

9:9

10:9

11:10

12:10

13:11

14:11

15:12

16:12

17:14

18:14

19:15

20:15

A half-caster gets a new level of spell about every 4 levels - at 1st, 5th, 9th, 13th, and 17th. About every two levels, they usually get a third spell slot of their highest level.

Let's imagine, though, that we never get more than 2 slots of any given level. So, something like this:

1: 2 1st level

2: 2 1st level

3: 2 1st level, 1 2nd level

4: 2 1st level, 1 2nd level

5: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 1 3rd level

6: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 1 3rd level

7: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 1 4th level

8: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 1 4th level

9: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 1 5th level

10: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 1 5th level

(Here, we need to make a decision - do we stick to the idea that Warlocks only have up to 5th level spell slots, and that higher-level spells are only found via Mystic Arcanum? We could go in two directions with this, but I'm going to go with my preference - that Warlocks actually get those higher-level spell slots, so that they can upcast things).

11: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 1 5th level, 1 6th level

12: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 1 5th level, 1 6th level

13: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 1 5th level, 1 6th level, 1 7th level

14: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 1 5th level, 1 6th level, 1 7th level

15: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 1 5th level, 1 6th level, 1 7th level, 1 8th level

16: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 1 5th level, 1 6th level, 1 7th level, 1 8th level

17: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 2 5th level, 1 6th level, 1 7th level, 1 8th level, 1 9th level

18: 2 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 2 5th level, 1 6th level, 1 7th level, 1 8th level, 1 9th level

19: 3 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 2 5th level, 1 6th level, 1 7th level, 1 8th level, 1 9th level

20: 3 1st level, 2 2nd level, 2 3rd level, 2 4th level, 2 5th level, 1 6th level, 1 7th level, 1 8th level, 1 9th level

    So, here we've got a system in which you don't have any more spell slots at any level than a half-caster, but the levels of your spell slots are going up at a full caster rate. But you also, at no point, have more slots of a given level than anyone else.

You'll still need to rely on your cantrips and such compared with a Wizard, but you won't run out instantly. Basically, as you get to higher levels, you won't have as many low level "throw away" spell slots, but that's where your various Warlock powers come in.

Some of this could be shuffled around - potentially, you might only ever get a single 4th or 5th level spell slot in exchange for more 1st and 2nds, though I think this would run counter to their current design goals. Basically, the reason I think this system could work is that you're still incentivized to be a bit more conservative than your fellow full-casters, but you don't feel relegated to some lower power level despite the deal you've made.

Now, this version would also make Mystic Arcanum no longer necessary. As such, we'd also have to reexamine how many Eldritch Invocations you get. The 9th you gain in the recent playtest is currently seriously counterbalanced by the fact that you need to spend so many to get Mystic Arcanum. If that as a feature just disappears in a puff of irrelevance, would we need to reduce the number of invocations you get? Perhaps - while I think that the current playtest version has, if anything, too few invocations given the need to spend them on MA, I also see how the rolling of so many feats into the Pact Boons also means that we perhaps don't need as many as we currently do - a Bladelock no longer needs Thirsting Blade, for example.

Still, I think that a spell progression like this would likely satisfy my issues with the current playtest while still holding the Warlock back in the ways it needs to be.

Cynicism, Nihilism, and Hope in Deathloop

 I beat Deathloop (actually, I did a couple days ago). The game is one of brutal violence and utter cruelty, so the fact that it ends on a... well, vaguely hopeful note (I supposed depending on the ending you choose) is kind of surprising.

That might be enough of a spoiler already, but let's get into the cut for full spoiler territory.

SPOILER ALERT.

Aberrus, and Neltharion's Twisted Legacy

 What does it take to fall to darkness?

World of Warcraft's greatest villains tend to be corrupted heroes. Arthas, Sargeras, and Neltharion/Deathwing are some of the game's most iconic big bads. The current patch, 10.1, which opens up the first true underground zone - something that had evidently been planned for Azjol-Nerub in Wrath of the Lich King, but wasn't even implemented - also gives us a new raid: Aberrus.

Aberrus is the ancient laboratory where the Black Dragon aspect experimented, seeking to discovery new powers that could serve to safeguard Azeroth, but his experiments also led him to corruption.

When, precisely, did Neltharion fall? We know that in the War of the Ancients, he revealed himself as Deathwing and slaughtered most of the Blue Dragonflight, and dragged his entire dragonflight along with him into murderous rampage. It would be ten thousand years before Deathwing was finally put down.

But because the Dragon Isles were locked away similar to Pandaria for those ten thousand years, Aberrus is a bit of a time capsule.

As we see in the first wing of the raid's LFR version, the Sundered Flame has been enticed into pillaging the laboratory for magic that will give them the power they feel they need to be free. But we're greeted by a projected echo of Neltharion - ostensibly before his fall to corruption - to guide Wrathion, Sabellian, Emberthal, and Ebyssian through the raid along with us.

And you know what? He's kind of a dick.

How did the Old Gods manage to worm their way into his mind? Well, sure, he's the aspect of the deep places, so he was positioned to be nearer their whispers. But we also see a callous and ruthless pursuit of power here. Was this adopted only after the whispers began? Or was it this single-minded quest for power, regardless of the lives he both created and destroyed in the process, that made him susceptible in the first place?

The truth about Arthas' story is that he turned to evil before he ever became a Death Knight. And I think that, despite the stories we've heard about Neltharion being a noble champion prior to his corruption, we might now be seeing that he always had it in him.

To borrow D&D terms, one could almost imagine that he was already leaning Lawful Evil - maybe more lawful than evil, but still leaning down that way. The Old Gods merely tipped him instead onto the Chaotic side of things, and any restraint of his evil impulses he had was broken.

Anyway, the first LFR wing is fun and not too difficult - I've run it on a ton of characters.

Deathloop and the Nature of Video Games

 The first time I ever played Super Mario World, I was at an old defunct Girl Scouts' camp in Maine that my dad's colleague owned as a vacation spot. His son had a Super Nintendo, and my sister and I had really not played any video game consoles before.

Super Mario World is, to me, the quintessential, platonic idea of what a "video game" even means to me.

But my sister and I were both unused to the challenge and difficulties of video games, so rather than trying to progress through the game, we just ran the level Yoshi's Island 2 over and over and over again. We learned its patterns and were able to often get to the end, earning a bunch of lives and letting the older kids play the later levels.

The thing is, this kind of repetition and learning in games is a big part of how video games are structured. Speedrunners know every little corner and beat of each level in games like Super Mario World, but this kind of learning through repetition is also how, for example, a World of Warcraft raid works. You stumble through the fights the first time through, and while the gear you get lets you have an easier time through it, a big part is just learning the patterns and strategies of the fight.

Deathloop, interestingly, makes this idea canonical. Every time you re-play a level, it's not just a video game conceit, but is instead what is actually happening. The fact that NPCs have the same conversations and movement patterns each time you could back to, say, Updaam at Noon, is justified by the game's time loop premise, even thought it's exactly how every video game works.

In fact, I think this is almost an evolution of the concept in FromSoft's Souls games, which has an in-universe justification for why you come back when you die - rather than just having you sort of pretend like any time you fail in a level or area is not canonical, these games embrace it.

But Deathloop even covers the reason why NPCs act the same way each time.

Anyway, I'm nearing the end of the game. I've managed to take down each of the Visionaries at least once, and I've completed enough of their "leads" to set up the final break-the-loop mission.

I still think there are a lot of things I could figure out to make things a bit smoother. This is a game that has tons of optional secrets and methods to unlock.

Another Look at the One D&D Warlock

 Treantmonk's Temple is a YouTube channel that goes into the math to evaluate the power levels of things in D&D. Now, I'll confess that I have mixed feelings about optimizing and min-maxing in D&D. I don't think you should play a Paladin with 8 Charisma just because you want to play one that's kind of a mess (I convinced a friend to reconsider this by pointing out he was doing the opposite extreme of min-maxing) but at the same time, I think I have the most fun if you don't search out bizarre and out-of-character exploits to get super-powered characters who can never be challenged.

I've played Adventurer's League, and I know that some players enjoy the challenge of breaking the game that way, but the way I see it, especially in TTRPGs, the build should support the character and fantasy you're trying to portray.

Fantasy can include being a powerful adventurer, to be clear. But if your choices don't really serve the fantasy and are instead just about numbers going up, I think you and I play this game for very different reasons.

Indeed, sometimes if those choices arise naturally from the story, they can be great - Fjord in Critical Role's second campaign made total sense multiclassing into Paladin from Warlock (though I might argue that Ukotoa would have made more sense as a Great Old One patron. The Fathomless patron option didn't exist yet when that campaign started, which would otherwise be the obvious best pick).

Anyway, lest I get ahead of myself: Treantmonk's Temple did a video defending the One D&D version of the Warlock, and I thought I'd chip in my own impressions of what he argues.

As the video points out, the Warlock can still access spells at certain levels at the same rate of one every two that full spellcasters do - with the exception of having to wait until level 5 for both 2nd and 3rd level spells. You'll still be able to cast a 9th level spell at level 17, just as you can now. And by expanding the Warlock's spell choices to the entire Arcane spell list, they now have access to a ton of far, far better spells than they had before.

But let's talk about the issues that I have with the way this works (and fair warning, if you've read my earlier posts about Warlocks, some of these will be familiar).

The first, and simpler, of the issues I have is that this creates a bizarre shuffling required by the Warlock as they level up. If I want access to a 3rd level spell at 5th level, I'll pick up the Mystic Arcanum invocation. Cool, I have Fireball now. But when I hit level 7, and I want a 4th level spell, I'll need to spend another invocation to get, say, Polymorph. Now, when I hit 9th level and I want to get, say, Danse Macabre, I'd need another invocation... or, I could swap Fireball out from the first Mystic Arcanum and change it to Danse Macabre, and then take Fireball as a learned spell.

This is all doable, but it's a real fucking hassle. As an experienced player who understands the ins and outs of the game, I can manage this, but as a DM with players who might not have the comfort I do, I feel like this will be a tangled mess of trying to help someone fix their character sheet.

The second issue is one that is actually shared with the current version of Mystic Arcanum. Warlocks are weird in that, for low-to-low-mid-level spells, they love a spell that scales really well when upcast. In D&D, most spells fall short when you upcast them - you'd much rather cast Meteor Swarm than a 9th level Fireball, for example. But there are a handful of spells that are specifically intended for Warlocks that get much better when upcast. Armor of Agathys is my go-to example. At 1st level, it's unlikely this will protect against more than a single hit, and will do a grand total of 5 damage to the attacker. But at 5th level, the 25 temporary hit points could, depending on the foes you're facing, last two or three attacks, or even more, giving the spell a huge damage potential - if a creature hits you three times and their average damage is 8 or less, that's 75 cold damage you've put on them.

Likewise, the Tasha's 'Summon' spells like Summon Undead, Summon Shadowfiend, or Summon Aberration scale quite well with upcasting. Ironically, though, Warlocks will now find that Summon Aberration is a far better choice than the 3rd level spells of this list because it is natively 4th level. At level 7, I could use Mystic Arcanum to get Summon Aberration, and have a Beholderkin shooting mind beams out twice a round. If I wanted to do the same with my Skeletal Undead Spirit's Grave Bolts, I'd have to wait until level 13 because even if I can get Summon Undead at level 5, I won't have the spell slots to upcast it at 4th level until 8 levels later, and Mystic Arcanum does not allow upcasting. Indeed, I can grab Summon Fiend at level 11 to get three attacks per round from that minion before I can even give my skeleton a second attack.

Warlocks have never been able to do great high-level spell scaling, but they're built around automatic low-level spell scaling. This is a pretty profound change.

Now, maybe this isn't bad so much as it is different. In terms of power, you might be better off just taking higher-level spells via Mystic Arcanum instead. (Loathe as I am to admit it, the Summoned minions, cool as they are, have to hit a ton of times to equal a single Fireball that hits three or more targets).

One point I fully agree with Treantmonk on is that invocations are unbalanced. I adore Eyes of the Runekeeper from a flavor and vibe perspective, but in terms of player power, it falls so very far behind other options. Indeed, I think making Mystic Arcanum an Invocation feels very much like you're forced to choose between whether you want to be able to use that high level magic and whether you want the other customization options invocations give you. This was not a choice you had to make in the current version, so my initial reaction is to not like it.

But what's the counterbalance? I think that the Pact Boon redesign has made them all far more impactful. Pact of the Blade just does what it's advertised to do, and I think will encourage far, far more players to pick up the Blade without feeling they then have to go Hexblade. Pact of the Tome is actually very flexible now because you can cast it any time you have an hour to spare, swapping out the cantrips and ritual spells within. (Also interesting that the Tome pact lets you skip Agonizing Blast, or at least replace it at level 5).

Where I agree with Treantmonk profusely is that Hex feels like it should be better. The upgrade to increase its damage done is a bit of a wash (though it falls off in tier 4) but there are just far better spells to concentrate on.

I think I'd like to see either class features or the spell itself significantly redesigned. If we want Warlocks Hexing their foes, I think it's got to do more. The damage is not enough to justify itself when you could have, for instance, Summon Fiend up (at base level, the number of d6s a summoned Devil deals per round, without even accounting for bonuses, is twice that of a 5th level hex and available six levels earlier). A Hex should be debilitating in some way. Ability checks do happen sometimes in combat, but they're not as common as attack rolls and saving throws. One way this could make a huge impact is if, when cast at higher levels, the chosen ability score is further debilitated - maybe you start with ability checks, add saving throws when cast at 3rd level, and then add attack rolls made with that ability at 5th level. It's not game-breaking, but with no save, it can be a big deal.

And then maybe the damage doesn't go up to balance that. I don't know.

I'm sure, given the general sense from the community, that we'll see some big revisions to the Warlock in the playtest process, but what I'd hope for is to allow Warlocks to more smoothly access high-level magic, without a lot of swapping out in the leveling process.

Monks: Predicting Innovations Beyond Weapon Mastery

 As it turns out, the simple addition of Weapon Mastery to Fighters and Barbarians will be enough to give them a significant damage boost, or a great deal of battlefield utility, with effects like Push, Topple, Slow, and Sap.

In the 2024PHB, Monks will be classified as Warriors, gaining access to these weapon masteries along with, presumably, the Fighting Style feats. Truthfully, though, it appears that Rangers and Paladins are likely to also get the benefits of these Warrior traits (no word on Rogues, but as the last obligate weapon-based class, it would seem unfair to deny them weapon mastery).

Now, two things strike me about Weapon Mastery when it comes to the Monk. The first thing is that Monks are famous for their unarmed strikes. While any Monk with a magical weapon (and, before tier 3 or so, any quarterstaff or spear) is going to be using that weapon for their primary attacks, Monks are built around the utility of their unarmed strikes.

Now, you could argue that the bonus hit (or hits with Flurry of Blows) are icing on the cake, and don't deserve to get the weapon mastery bonuses. I'm not really here to offer solutions in this post, but only to suggest that there might be a reason to let Monks do something special with those masteries.

Indeed, one could imagine that when you choose a mastery at the start of your day, your unarmed strikes benefit from the same one - you might get Vex, or Slow, for instance. On the other hand, some, such as Flex or Nick, don't really make sense for unarmed strikes.

As an alternative, there might be a selection of specific "unarmed strike mastery options," and perhaps a Monk could get access here to things they normally wouldn't get on their weapons, such as Graze, Push, or Topple.

The Monk is far more fragile than most classes that are built to be in melee all the time - they have only a d8 hit die, but unlike Rogues (who are often at range anyway), they do not have anything like Uncanny Dodge. In order to gain a defensive benefit, they need to sacrifice both damage and a resource for something like Patient Defense.

I've always suspected that the reason for this is that the Monk's Stunning Strike is such a powerful effect when it goes off. You can more or less take a foe out for a full round, during which your party is set up to much more easily kill them. But Stunning Strike is not reliable - it requires a Constitution save (something almost every monster has at least some bonus to) against a DC set by a stat you might have as your secondary or tertiary priority. I think it's fine that this doesn't go off reliably, but because it's so powerful when it works.

However, we've got a new condition that's still powerful, but not so profoundly powerful that we would need to nerf Monks' defensive abilities in response. And that is Dazed. The Dazed condition limits the creature to either moving or using an action, preventing bonus actions and reactions.

This will not fully prevent a foe from making any attacks, but it will, for instance, allow the Monk to strike them and then run away safely, and keep the foe either locked down or unable to attack, severely lessening it as a threat, but not allowing the party to pile on with a bunch of attacks at advantage.

Dazing Strike could thus free up a lot of design space to make the Monk a tougher class to kill, and bring them in line with the other melee classes.

So, now that we're committing to that, where do we look to improve a Monk's survivability?

Let's compare a Standard Array Monk with a Standard Array Fighter. We'll assume each has a +3 to their main stat (Dexterity for the Monk, Strength for the Fighter) and +2 to two secondary stats (say Wisdom and Constitution for the Monk, and Intelligence and Constitution for the Fighter).

The Fighter at level 1 can get Chain Mail for an AC of 16, and has 12 HP. The Monk, using Unarmored Defense, gets an AC of 15, and has 10 HP.

Now, the Fighter can also pick up a shield, but let's assume that they're both more focused on damage-dealing (actually, the Monk isn't really choosing one or the other).

The balance of damage to survival is not precisely the same (and remember, we want the game to have these weird trade-offs where neither option feels strictly better than the other while still feeling distinct) but right now the Monk is taking more damage due to the lower AC and also has only 5/6 of the Fighter's HP.

Now, contrasted with the Barbarian, the Barbarian does tend to have lower AC than the Fighter (outside of magic armor, a Barbarian can technically reach higher AC, but it's unlikely) but they also have Rage and higher HP to compensate for these things. The Monk, usually at lower AC (with those starting stats, they're not going to hit the Fighter's nonmagical maximum until level 12 at the earliest) does not have any ongoing damage reduction.

And, if we're encouraging players to take feats rather than the standard ASI, they'll increase their ACs at a slower rate, and likely not getting to 18 AC until level 20.

So, how might we fix this?

The first is simple: we give the Monk a d10 hit die. Now, the Monk is keeping pace with Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers (who honestly would probably be fine with a d8) in terms of HP. Given their reliance on both Dexterity and Wisdom, it might be difficult for them to boost Constitution over time, though, so even here, they're likely going to lag a little behind on HP. That's not so terrible, though, if we expect them to be a little better at damage-dealing.

But if the AC and the HP are both lower, do we need something else?

I suggested in earlier posts that the Monk could have some subtractive damage reduction. A Barbarian halves the damage they take from most standard weapons, which makes them much better at tanking the massive hits of a giant monster, but a subtractive system would, by contrast, be more effective against lots of small attacks.

The Heavy Armor Master feat, in One D&D, reduces incoming "BPS" damage by an amount equal to your proficiency bonus. We could explore this as a model.

A Zombie hits for an average of 4.5 damage (1d6+1,) so if we gave Monks the same style of damage reduction, they will only take any damage in tier 1 if they the Zombie rolls a 2 or higher. I believe that the average here is 2.5, but just to check: we've got 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 damage, averaging to, yeah 2.5.

A Barbarian, on the other hand, using Rage, will simply take half the average, for 2.75.

Now, if we go to higher-level foes, a Marilith makes six Longsword attacks for an average of 13 damage each, and a single tail attack for an average of 15.

Our tier 3 Monk we'll say is knocking 5 off of each of these, taking a total of 48 from all the longsword attacks (if they all hit) and then 10 from the tail, for a total of 58.

The Barbarian it simply taking the full 78 from the swords and 15 from the tail, but halving both to 38+7, or 45.

By contrast, an Iron Golem (same CR as the Marilith) is dealing 23 damage with each of its two sword attacks, for a total of 46.

The Monk in this case is reducing the swords to 18, for a total of 36 damage, while the Barbarian is just halving both attacks to 11, taking only 22.

Now, in fact, both of these scenarios favor the Barbarian, but we could imagine that if it's not one big scary monster but just a ton of smaller ones, the Monk might come out ahead. Still, we create two classes that are better in different scenarios.

We could adjust the damage reduction to fine-tune it, perhaps decoupling it from PB.

I honestly don't think the Monks have too much trouble in terms of damage output, and as we looked at earlier, the new version of dual-wielding, now tied to the Nick weapon mastery, can give them a crazy number of attacks per round, and their access to two weapon fighting as a Fighting Style on top of that gives them a very solid damage output.

I don't know how long it will be before we get the One D&D version of the Monk, but I could imagine some big upgrades.

One thing I do wonder about is Ki Points - which are evidently being renamed "Spirit Points" in an effort to avoid drawing as strong a connection between the class an East Asian culture (the logic here is a little convoluted, but the idea is, I think, to make it less "the Asian class" and thus make the other classes equally work for Asian-inspired settings and characters... I'll let people connected to those cultures make the judgment call of whether this is a good move or not).

Currently, Ki Points (while they're called that) recharge on a short rest, and you get a number equal to your Monk level starting at level 2 (making them similar to Sorcery Points, except that those recharge on a long rest). Now, while it looks like they're migrating a lot of "short rest recharge" mechanics toward long rests - such as Second Wind and Warlock spell slots - they aren't entirely getting rid of them either - a Fighter's Action Surge is still recharging on a short rest, for example.

Monks do get a fair number of cool things outside of resource-consuming abilities, such as their super-fast movement speed, their Martial Arts bonus attack, and stuff like slow fall, deflect missiles, and eventual immunity to all poison damage and the poisoned condition. But I do think that it's easy enough to run out of Ki Points pretty quickly, and so if this does become a long rest recharge, I think we'll want to give Monks a higher total amount - perhaps doubling them.

I'd bet that there are going to be some radical changes to the Monk, given their exclusion from the PHB 5 packet. But if they are going with radical changes, it makes a lot of my speculation less likely to turn out true. So, we'll see.

The Deathloop Starts to Click Into Place

 So, I'm starting to get Deathloop.

The objective of the game is to kill eight different "Visionaries" whose lives are keeping the endless loop of the same day going. To break the loop, you need to kill all eight within a single day, and that's pretty damn tough, because everyone on the island is trying to kill you.

However, with the exception of Juliana, who periodically hunts you down like a Dark Souls invader, no one but you and she have any memory of previous cycles. This means that the enemies have the same behavior on each loop, and things like access codes (with one exception I know of) remain the same each day.

One of the Visionaries is a musician/DJ named Frank, and when you first go after him, you have to take him out in his recording studio. However, within there, you find an audio diary in which he confesses to being reckless with fireworks - and he's set to launch the fireworks display at the end of the "first night of the loop" celebration (which happens every night because everyone thinks it's still the first day.) You can then find out that there is an access code to the fireworks controller you can find in a workshop in the residential area (one of four "levels") called Updaam. The problem, though, is that at noon (one of the four times of day in each cycle) the place explodes before you can get to the code.

So, you need to go there in the morning and deactivate an over-worked generator that causes the explosion, and then come back at noon to get the code.

But once that code is acquired, you automatically remember it, and can auto-fill it at the fireworks depot in another part of town any time in the future.

So, you can go there in the morning (it's near another Visionary whom I think you can only get to in the morning) and sabotage the fireworks controller so that it will cause an explosion that will catch Frank in the evening - the last of the four time periods.

And that means that you don't have to go back and attack him at his studio.

What's nice is that the game kind of tracks all of these things so that you don't have to remember every sequence of events you need to go through.

But it also plays with the bizarre ethical and chronomechanical implications of the time loop. I don't think you can figure out that you need those access codes until you've killed Frank the first time, but once you have, you'll do it a different way.

The tone of this game is fairly cynical - these are generally kind of awful people who have chosen a bizarrely awful way to spend their immortality. The player character wants to break the loop in part just to escape, but you could actually argue that by doing so, he's saving all the people on the island from an endless purgatory of violence and meaninglessness.

Thus, the rather brutal ways you kill the unnamed "Eternalists" who serve as the main obstacles of the game and the way you set up elaborate death traps for each of the Visionaries is, in a strange way, an act of mercy.

I don't know precisely how the end of the game will play out - whether the broken loop resets one more time or if the people killed in that final iteration remain dead. But it's kind of a fascinating premise (which admittedly has been played with in Majora's Mask 21 years earlier).

Deathloop is a spiritual successor of (and evidently set in a future version of the setting of) Dishonored, but I think I'm finding myself more in tune with this game - the repetitive nature of the missions and levels makes stealthy traversal something you can feel yourself getting better at - ah yes, I remember that there's a turret I can hack here, or I remember that there's this window I can open here, etc. There's also, as far as I can tell, no penalty for using violence, whereas if I recall correctly, Dishonored had the environment grow darker and more hazardous if you killed more minions on your way to your targets.

The game is not forgiving - and it can be very frustrating when you get taken out during a multi-stage leg of some quest (such as the first time I tried to get to that workshop for the code and was taken out by an invading Juliana before I could reach it) but I'm finding that the elaborate complexity of figuring out all of these paths to taking out the Visionaries get broken down into suitably bite-sized chunks to keep it from being too overwhelming.

The New Standard: You're Not Getting Rid of Farewell That Easily

 Kamigawa Neon Dynasty was a fantastic card set. A return to a plane that didn't really work when it had the whole 2004-2005 release year and three different sets (blown away by the perhaps overpowered Mirrodin block and the absolutely beloved introduction of Ravnica in the subsequent year,) KND was exciting and fun, and it also bent Magic: the Gathering's genre more than it had ever before - for the first time, we saw futuristic technology that wasn't some vaguely-defined magitek, and showed the the fantasy genre can easily blend with other genres, such as Cyberpunk.

But, as a popular set, it also brought some popular cards that are... well, perhaps a little overpowered.

Maybe the biggest offender, as in, it's the card you basically are going to put in every single deck you have that uses red mana, is Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, one of the call-back Sagas that refer to a legendary creature from the original Kamigawa run.

The thing is, I don't actually mind this so much. It can become very powerful if left to its own devices, eventually copying creatures with powerful ETB effects or death effects. But it takes four turns to actually hit that point (or three if you have a way to get its flip side haste) and there are ample opportunities to deal with it.

No, the card from KND I can't stand is Farewell.

Farewell wipes the board. It wipes the graveyard. Selectively, it has the potential to wipe out everything the opponent has built up to this point in the game other than planeswalkers.

Basically, you build around using this, and on turn six, your opponent is set back almost to turn 1.

Board wipes are a healthy part of the game, mind you - they're a useful tool for control decks to get some good asymmetrical card advantage and stall things out to let them build to their finishers. But this one, which does not destroy but exiles, and wipes the graveyard, and artifacts, and enchantments, on top of creatures...

If this existed before Lorwyn block it would let you clear every single thing out of the game other than lands and cards in hand, and libraries.

So, I was, with some bittersweet joy (I love, for example, the Innistrad dual lands) looking forward to its rotating out with the Wilds of Eldraine.

But it seems we will not so easily be rid of Farewell.

That's because Standard, which has for as long as I can remember (and I think I was first aware of formats when I was playing MTGO back in 2005-2007) been composed of sets from the past two years, rotating out the older "block" (even if we don't use blocks anymore) in September, is now going to have three years' worth of card sets.

In other words, for this year only, there will be no set rotation. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, Innistrad: Crimson Vow, Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, and Streets of New Capenna will all remain in Standard until fall of 2024.

When they rotate out with the as-yet unannounced (I think) set that comes then, we'll still have another full year of the Phyrexia Arc sets, meaning Dominaria United, The Brother's War, Phyrexia All Will Be One, March of the Machine, and March of the Machine: The Aftermath.

So, the good news is that if you're still playing that werewolf deck you made in the fall of 2021, you're going to be able to keep playing it for a good long while in Standard. But if you are sick and tired of losing attacking creatures to a flashed-out Wandering Emperor any time your white-deck opponent has four mana open, well... you're going to have to deal with that for a bit longer.

Thoughts on Each Weapon Mastery

 While the five previewed classes are nothing to sneeze at (and the changes to the Warlock cannot be understated - though I imagine I'm not alone in my hopes that they seriously revisit the change to their spellcasting system, which I think turns the Warlock into a different class and not one I'm as excited to play) I think the real exciting highlight of One D&D's 5th playtest packet is the introduction of Weapon Masteries.

I talked about these when the packet first came out, but I wanted to focus purely on the mastery effects themselves and talk about what I think about them.

Cleave:

This is one of the strongest of the masteries, and has a lot of great flavor to it. I'm not sure if this is the case, but I think the use of 'Cleave' to describe attacking two foes with a single swing might have originated in World of Warcraft (the game that inspired the creation of this blog,) but that's a storied and established-enough game at this point (when the new core rulebooks come out, it will be 20 years old, and I'll have played it for eighteen of those) that I think it's fitting enough to let it contribute this to the RPG lexicon.

Anyway, Cleave is strong, doing a lot of damage, but only in the right circumstances. I think it's an attractive mastery. My only issue with it is that it sits in some redundant territory in terms of flavor.

Great Weapon Master has changed in One D&D, but it still retains its bonus action attack when you score a critical hit or reduce a foe to 0 hit points. In both cases, I've always interpreted this as the weapon hitting with so much momentum (either from a particularly strong swing or because the foe it hit has been cut in half and no longer resists it) that you can strike another nearby enemy. But this is also, I think, very similar to the flavor of the Cleave mastery.

Now, mechanically, this plays well with Great Weapon Master, as the bonus attack from Cleave does not require a bonus action, so it remains very strong. Cleave will be fantastic when facing tightly-packed foes, though it's a bit all-or-nothing, and so players might wish to hold onto another weapon if possible when facing a single enemy, or spread-out foes.

Flex:

Ok, we go from one of the strongest masteries to what has got to be the weakest of the bunch. Versatile as a feature on weapons is good only because there is no downside to it. But Flex's downside is that you aren't getting one of the many other good masteries.

Upgrading from a d6 to a d8 or a d8 to a d10 only gives you a single extra point of average damage. In the grand scheme of things, this is going to be kind of negligible.

Now, there are Fighting Styles that don't really give you much either - I remember being kind of surprised to realize that Great Weapon Fighting only gives you 1.33 extra damage on a Greatsword or Maul, which makes it worse than Dueling or Two-Weapon Fighting. But at least this has a certain "feels better" effect, as you're less likely to be distraught when you roll double ones on your damage dice.

But as it currently stands, I'll almost always want a Battleaxe over a Longsword or a Trident over a Warhammer (at least if I'm not on a Fighter, who will be able to swap Flex out for something better).

Graze:

In terms of direct damage-increasing masteries, I think I might like this the best, even if I don't know that it's the most powerful. One of the most frustrating things a martial player can feel is when they miss on all their attacks, and feel like the entire turn is wasted because of some unlucky rolls. Giving you a bare minimum of damage to deal gives you a way to feel like you're at least helping a little bit.

Indeed, I'd almost be tempted to say that this is too powerful, but if an Evoker can roll half damage even on cantrips, perhaps it's ok that you can get that minimum damage on misses.

That said, a tier 4 fire bolt is doing 4d10+5 damage on an Evoker, or about 27 on average, halved to 13 (or a minimum of 4). A level 18 Fighter with a Greatsword who misses every one of their attacks is going to still be doing 20 damage.

So, this comes online immediately (the Greatsword is an option for starting equipment for Fighters) and might be a little powerful for those early levels. But still, I like this one.

Nick:

Ok, so Nick is great. The problem is that I think we all preferred when the functionality of Nick was baked into the Light weapon property, as it was in previous playtest packets.

I think basically every single person who read about this change to the light weapon property prior to packet 5 loved it, as it made dual-wielding work the way it always seemed it should.

Now, to be fair, Nick is only required for the off-hand weapon, so you can take other properties (likely Vex) on your main hand and get the full benefit of both. But we don't yet know to what extent Paladins, Rangers, and especially Rogues (who are often left out of the 'universal martial features' club) will be able to make use of this. Rogues in particular would benefit from having this, given both their love of dual-wielding and their frequent use of bonus actions.

If weapon mastery is given out freely to basically every class that fights with weapons, this might not be a problem. But I think it would be more elegant if this were baked into the Light property as it was before. Perhaps Nick, then, could instead be something else. Just based on the name, it sounds almost like it could be a less powerful version of Graze, but I'm going to keep a lid on the speculation here.

Push:

Finally, we get to a mastery that doesn't directly affect damage you deal. And as someone who loves Repelling Blast on a Warlock, I think Push is a fantastic thing for martials to get their hands on - reliable battlefield manipulation.

The only thing here is that this would seem to make shoving pointless in most situations. If you can push a target twice as far as you could shove them, especially based as an attack roll (which I think tend to hit more frequently than a successful contested athletics check) you're going to have a lot of fun with this one.

The real limitation here is simply with your own movement speed. The more attacks you get, the more you'll have to run to catch up with your foe to push them again. That makes this arguably more powerful on a ranged weapon, and only one ranged weapon has this naturally.

But I think this is great.

Sap:

So, this one I think is interesting. It's good, but weirdly gets better when you can spread your attacks around - which I usually tend to avoid as it's generally better to down one enemy before attacking another.

The other thing that's interesting about this one is that it only comes on a small number of weapons that are then severely limited as to which masteries can be swapped onto them, and because the limit is that the weapon cannot have any other properties, no weapon that doesn't already have Sap on it can gain it via a Fighter's ability to swap weapon masteries.

This requires a strong commitment to playing defense, so while I'm sure there are some character concepts that will like it, I'm not particularly drawn to it.

Slow:

Slow is not as cool as Push. I think that's really the main drawback to it. In a vacuum, it's simple but useful. This is, honestly, probably the most uncontroversially "balanced" mastery, feeling like it has a noticeable and useful effect while not really breaking things due to being overpowered.

The only thing I'd worry about with this is that it will often not really affect the battle in any significant way. If you slow an enemy who's already in melee, wailing on you, they're not going to worry much about their reduced movement speed.

Thus, this becomes a bit more helpful on a ranged weapon - and it does find itself on a lot of ranged weapons. And there, I think it's fine, basically working like Ray of Frost.

Topple:

Now we're freaking talking. Topple has some oddities to it - I think it's strange that the target makes a Con save instead of a Dex or Strength one - but even if those saves often succeed, the fact that it's less reliable actually makes it more dynamic, and makes its powerful effect less overpowered.

A few issues, though:

First off, this can technically go on a couple of ranged weapons, but unless you just want to set up your melee allies, you don't want to use this (it doesn't come naturally on any, so this isn't that much of an issue).

Second: is this not just better than Slow? I guess it doesn't automatically succeed, but unless the target's speed is less than 20 feet, knocking it prone will do more to slow it down than the Slow effect will.

The biggest problem, though, as pointed out by D&D Youtube Channel Treantmonk's Temple, is that this will force way more saving throws to be rolled in the middle of combat, potentially bogging down the flow of play.

I might be willing to pay that price, but it is something to consider.

Vex:

Ok, now this might be the most powerful mastery. Getting rolling Advantage on attacks is pretty great. Actually, the Armorer Artificer can get something like this effect with their Lightning Launcher at high levels. And boy howdy will Rogues absolutely love this if they can get their hands on it - genuinely, I think it would make a feat investment in Weapon Master well worth it (assuming they don't automatically get some form of Weapon Mastery in the Expert Class revisions).

The only reason not to like it is if it's too powerful.

But it has a few things going for it: it's attractive (the power helps,) and it's pretty simple and straightforward. Not much else to say.

    So there you have it. I'm kind of amazed that the Trident has gone from one of the least exciting weapon options to now one of the best you can get as a sword-and-board build, and as I've said before, I cannot wait to jump back into my Fighter at some point and start blasting foes around the battlefield with my battleaxe (putting Push on it until I can have both Push and Topple at the same time).

Getting Caught in the Deathloop

 A game that grabbed me with its 60s-style mod style and intriguing time-bending premise, Deathloop came out a good while ago and I didn't try it out until now (it helped that it was for sale on the PS Store for 20 bucks).

The premise, if you're not familiar, is that you are stuck in an endless loop on an island out in the "Polar Sea." After the game starts with your agonizing, brutal death, you wake up on a beach with no memories except for the odd floating text that shows up throughout the game, with a mission: break the loop.

Gameplay-wise, there's a bit of a Majora's Mask idea here - the island resets back to the same day each time, and you have to find a way to break the loop during that day, presumably so that time can move forward and people aren't trapped in this endless limbo - or at least, so that you aren't.

Essentially, the form this takes is that there are four broad maps, and each of them can be visited at four times a day - morning, noon, afternoon, and evening. Each is filled with people who have been encouraged to kill the player character and prevent him from breaking the loop. Why would they want this?

Well, the idea behind the loop apparently was to create a kind of utopian paradise where no one would ever die or even age. One could indulge in all manner of debauchery, violence, and hedonism with no fear of lasting repercussions. The hitch in that plan, though, it seems, is that the vast majority of people on the island don't actually retain their memories when the loop resets. To them, it's the first day of this grand utopian future - and it will always be that first day.

The exceptions are Colt, the player character, and Juliana, who now spends her time hunting him down and killing him - all in an effort to preserve this strange immortality they've achieved. In terms of gameplay, there's a Dark Souls-like Invasion system in which players can play as Juliana to show up in someone else's game and attack them (you can opt out of this is you aren't into PvP).

The game also uses a kind of loot system, and in the early missions, you find a way to hold onto individual items that you might like, with a resource called Residuum (also like Dark Souls, if you drop this when you die, you'll need to retrieve it before you die again, though enemies don't respawn as much).

It's funny, because I just watched a video essay about Glass Onion, the Rian Johnson film, which is also about a bunch of rich assholes who go to an island to escape some problem we mere mortals have to deal with (though this isn't just Covid, but time itself).

Deathloop is made by the same studio that did Dishonored, and while it's swapped out the 19th-century steampunk vibes for mid-century modern mod chic, I've actually heard it's set in the same world, perhaps just a century later (I'm 100% here for full on secondary-world fiction with a modern or semi-modern aesthetic).

Aside from Residuum, the other resource you have is Colt's memory - things like security codes can be auto-filled once you learn them, which makes traversal more efficient.

Currently, I'm stuck on a major foe who sits at the top of what would in a world without infinite respawns probably be a paintball or laser tag arena, though here they use live ammo. I've noticed a window high up on the building that is sometimes obscured by a cut-out of a planet (the arena is space-adventure themed) that I imagine is the quickest and most efficient way to take the guy out, but I don't know that I have the tools required to use that method yet.

Actually, infuriatingly, I actually took the guy down and nearly made it to the exit of the level, where I could use Residuum to infuse the "slab" he carried and thus be able to keep the teleportation ability of his for future missions and future loops (this might actually be how you can take him down quicker the next time) but died before I could get to the exit.

Like Dishonored, this is a game that favors a stealthy, strategic approach, though sometimes things devolve into a full firefight. Enemies hit hard, but sneaking up on them with your machete will let you take them out with relative ease (the violence is graphic, though not quite "Fallout 3 exploding skulls" graphic).

Ultimately, the game is setting things up for an eventual grand day in which you need to take out each of the eight major bosses in a single loop, but so far at least the game holds your hand enough to keep such a massive checklist of tasks manageable. I imagine there will be quick ways to take them out that you learn (like with that window) but only after you've amassed a great deal of knowledge and Residuum-infused gear.

Here, actually, the fact that there are only four levels (admittedly at four times of day each) makes the game's exploration an act of teaching you the maps, teaching you where the enemies are, and knowing where the paths of least resistance can be found.

I was kind of nervous going into it, but I'm starting to feel a bit more comfortable - though I'm devastated at that last death. We'll see how tricky it is to actually get through the end of the game.