Planning a Campaign That, By Design, We'll Rarely Play

 For the past three years or so, I've been playing in a D&D campaign set in Wildemount, the continent from Critical Role's second (and, in my opinion, best) campaign on the world of Exandria (the shared setting for all three campaigns). We try to play every week, but between illness (Covid and other joys) and various scheduling conflicts (most of my friends are actors, and when you get a gig, you have to skip D&D) and other factors at play, we do sometimes miss the game.

Now, I'm a bum, and so I have basically tons of free time to both run D&D and also plan for it. So, I volunteered to start a "off-weeks" game for when our DM had to cancel for one reason or another (the DM is my best friend).

The intent, here, of course, is never to usurp the Wildemount campaign. After all, this is the game in which I am the most invested in my own player character, and very much want to see him grow and follow his adventurous path (not to mention get all those sweet high-level Wizard spells! I've got the first notions of what his Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion will look like - as a Triton, it's going to have a significant underwater section).

But even while I'm pretty busy running my weekly Ravnica game (which does have a path to its conclusion, but still many chapters remaining before we hit that point) I've had the itch to A: run something in my own homebrew world and B: play with the 2024 rules.

The C:, though, here, is that I also wanted to change the way I go about structuring a campaign. Brennan Lee Mulligan, the maestro of Dimension 20, had a very good point about how he approaches structuring a campaign: the player characters are the main characters of your story. And so, the plot should involve them.

Now, to be fair, there are for sure stories about people getting swept up in a plot that goes beyond them - Frodo, after all, has little more connection to Sauron than anyone else, except that his uncle happened to steal the Dark Lord's long-lost ring. His heroism, and that of all the hobbits, is all the more heroic because they're just the innocent, little folk who have never before had all that much of an impact on history (again, barring uncle Bilbo).

Still, even within that story, you have the most archetypically heroic character of all, Aragorn, turn out to be the heir to the throne of Gondor, whose ascension to kingship marks the beginning of a golden age that lasts for centuries. Indeed, Aragorn would be the unambiguous main character in most similar tales, but Tolkien's values, which among others, stressed humility, put this greatest and most righteous of kings into the role of a supporter and ally (while I'm by no means a royalist, and in fact feel deep in my bones as an American that the idea of a king, or any tyrant being above the law, is repugnant, I do really like that the proof that Aragorn is the rightful king is not from winning battles but from healing the seemingly unhealable, reviving Eowyn and Merry after the blow-back from their strikes against the Witch King of Angmar).

All of which is to say: I have restrained myself from coming up with a "big bad" until my players hand in their character backstories.

I do actually have one of them, and so the wheels are already turning.

Luckily, my world is pretty fleshed-out, so it's not very hard for me to come up with some options of what the loose plot threads in the backstory might refer to.

I actually have to hand it to this player for giving me some very evocative story elements that are pure mysteries to him.

Here, I'll detail them, but on the cosmically-small chance that my players are even aware of this blog (for the most part I like to keep my online and personal lives quite separate,) here's a warning to said players: thar be spoilers in these here waters!

Many Encounters or Few?

 The combat encounter is sort of the heart of D&D. While the game is ostensibly built on three pillars - combat, exploration, and social - it is the former of those three that gets the most mechanical heft. Some classes have next to nothing outside of combat abilities, beyond the simple universality of ability checks.

Combat in D&D is also fun - though perhaps not as fun to watch unless you have some really gifted DMs and players (Critical Role, fantastic though the players are, usually drags the most in its combat segments).

The thing is, the dirty truth about D&D is that it's not built for climactic combat encounters. Yes, there are legendary monsters that can serve as major bosses. But outside of the early levels, when resources are extremely tight, it can be very hard to run a one-shot with a major villain that doesn't wind up being something of a rout - the players have their highest-level spells and a full bank of Action Surges, Focus Points, and the like to unload at the start of the encounter.

Certainly, boss monsters can do this too - your first turn in any fight with a dragon is probably going to be their devastating breath attack - but as a DM, you'll only rarely feel like you get many turns with a boss, even if they're a major villain.

No, D&D, to my mind, is built more around having many small fights while exploring a dungeon environment. I had this realization while playing in Curse of Strahd as my Great Weapon Master Aasimar Paladin (actually, I don't think I had the feat yet because I wanted to max her Strength first - she started at 18, so was able to get it maxed at 4 and then pick up the feat at 8 - which I'd do differently with the new rules and also just generally if I understood the power of that feat).

I believe it was at the Wizards of Wine, the winery that provides Barovia with its deeply-needed alcohol. The winery is beset by Blights - little corrupted plant creatures that are spawned by vampiric corruption in the region - something that Barovia, as you might guess, is more or less ground zero for.

The Winery (or at least something in its vicinity) is besieged by Blights after the players arrive, forcing them to fight room-to-room against these monsters.

Ultimately, though, what this means is that there are a lot of small fights against CR 1/4 or 1/2 monsters, all at a level where such a thing is a pretty trivial monster to deal with (I think we were level 5 or 6?) Each fight had us facing only like two of these things, and so in some of them, we didn't even take any damage.

But the effect is that each time some damage is taken, or a player expends a resource like a spell slot to deal with the encounter more quickly and efficiently, their power for the rest of the fights is diminished.

After five or six such fights, the cumulative losses - very small in each individual encounter - started to add up to something that felt pretty scary.

Given that this was a campaign where we finished the Death House introduction by somewhat easily killing the Shambling Mound at level 2 - a CR 4 or 5 monster that we are meant to flee instead - it felt like this series of fights against a whole bunch of little blights captured the desperation and fear that a horror campaign is supposed to evoke.

In the 2024 DMG, the formula for building a combat encounter has you determine an XP budget for each player, based on their level and the difficulty of the encounter you want. For example, at level 1, each player has a budget of 50 xp for a low-difficulty encounter, so if you have four people in your party and want an easy encounter, you should aim to have a total XP of all the monsters present of 200.

Needle Blights, which I think were the main things we were fighting, are CR 1/4, worth 50 XP. Thus, for a four-person party (we were more often five or six) these would theoretically be an easy encounter for us at level 1 if there were one of these per party member. But we were level 5 or so, and facing only two at a time - an utterly trivial fight.

And yet it works.

The difference, though, is that the number of encounters expected per day is a little skewed. Strangely, I don't believe the new DMG actually tells you how many encounters you can expect in a day. The old one had "the adventuring day," which usually skewed a little higher than I tend to see people run in D&D, likely thinking more along the lines of dungeon-crawling adventures that have, at least at my table, largely given way to more narrative-based adventures, where monster fights must be climactic set pieces, and not the equivalent of "trash mobs" to borrow WoW parlance.

Indeed, I'll often have an entire session go by without anyone fighting anything, simply to get through the story beats and breadcrumbs that lead up to a dangerous, monster-fighting scenario.

But, with a game of attrition like D&D, these minor combats can slowly drain characters' resources in a manner that makes future combats more harrowing. In fact, MCDM's Draw Steel, meant to appeal to people who enjoy D&D combat, has an entirely different resource system in order to make the flow of combat build, giving you more resources, not fewer, when you reach the final boss of an adventure.

So, D&D works maybe a bit better when you have more, smaller fights. Classically, you might have a dungeon crawl in which the party comes across a lone Manticore, for example, that they can either fight or navigate around. This kind of single-monster encounter, if it's not tuned to be a big boss with legendary actions, is the sort of thing that can reward clever resource management or roleplay.

But here's the problem:

If your two Needle Blight encounter ends with the blights missing on every attack and dying to cantrips and a Barbarian who decides to conserve their Rages for now... what have you accomplished? The players can feel satisfied that they made it through a fight without expending any resources, but you're also left with what is probably a significant chunk of time out of your game session having a fight where nothing really happened.

It's not strictly true: the blights' being dead means that that room is now safe and secure, and there are fewer blights to encounter in the future. The overall "HP of the dungeon" has been lowered.

But consider wilderness encounters. It's rare that you have a particularly deadly encounter while traveling across the wilderness. And given that these are almost exclusively a once- or twice-a-day occurrence, the resource drain winds up being somewhat meaningless.

On the other hand, these sorts of fights to give players an opportunity to feel cool - they can unload on a couple Ankhegs or Chimeras that have nothing to do with the plot. But it does take up time that you might otherwise be using for your story.

Players don't really have a clear telegraph for whether a fight will be easy or difficult unless you're using monsters they're familiar with. If I'm playing and we're fighting two rank-and-file goblins, I'll understand that we're not in a deadly fight. But if my DM pulls out a couple of "Gloam Harbingers" that I've never heard of and are from some third party monster book and possibly even a re-skinned version of such monsters, I really won't know whether this is the encounter to blow my single 4th level spell slot (my Wizard is level 7, though probably going to hit 8 relatively soon) or if I need to take my time and stick to cantrips and maybe a 2nd level spell like Nathair's Mischief (one of my go-to spells on that character) while I wait for a much scarier fight with a Gloam Reaver or some such nonsense.

It's a tough balancing act: you don't want to tell your players "there will be five combat encounters in this adventuring day," especially if you don't necessarily control that (the dungeon that my players are on the cusp of entering is designed to be theoretically beatable in a single adventuring day, but it would be a very drawn-out and difficult one - but there's no ticking clock on it, so the party can retreat and take long rests in the middle of it if they choose to, getting some much lower-difficulty random encounters in previously-cleared rooms). But you run into this issue of how much you want to fake out your players - do you have them fight something early in the day that they blow their resources on and then leave them gasping at fumes? How do you communicate that they shouldn't do that, and furthermore, do you communicate that, or make that the challenge of the adventure?

Ideally, a final boss fight ends with everyone gasping, their HP below half, their highest-level spell slots all expended, and having won by the skin of their teeth and some clever plays. You'll almost never accomplish this if you throw the party at a big boss monster immediately after a long rest. But you don't want to land your party in a TPK because of ill-informed decisions they made three sessions ago.

The real thing, here, is that you have to ask what kind of game you're running. As a DM, I have few qualms about killing a PC (especially if it's at higher levels where resurrection magic is available). I've never TPK'd a party, and I think in most cases, unless the party does something really dumb, that's an error on the DM's part more than the players (and even if they do something dumb, you have to ask if that's because of a grave miscommunication on the DM's part).

And yet, for the stakes of a game, there has to be some risk of a TPK. That's the balance. A more by-the-book and perhaps more "game-y" D&D campaign is an unforgiving one - where the DM will not change their monsters' behavior based on the remaining survival capabilities of a party. I'll confess that my inclination sometimes skews too favorable to the party (such as a fight where I nerfed a homebrewed monster mid-fight because I feared it was too powerful - it did have a lot of incapacitation effects, though, which are not really fun to be affected by). But there's an example in which my DM futzed things on the party's behalf:

In my Wildemount game, the final boss we fought before hitting level 5 was a corrupted druid with a couple of giant toad minions. The toads rolled really well and, despite having something like an AC of 11 or 12, we rolled really poorly against them. It is a fight in which literally every player had expended every resource by the end of it - all our spell slots, action surges, Lay on Hands charges - everything. And when the final foe went down, my Wizard and one of our Paladins were unconscious. My Wizard rolled three successful death saves in a row, so I was fine. But the Paladin rolled a natural 1 on her first save, and then, after all the enemies were down, rolled another failure.

Rules as written, she was fully dead.

Now, there were some choices to be made: I think it could have been dramatic for that character to die in that moment. Consider the climactic fight against the Uruk-Hai in Fellowship of the Ring. Aragorn solos like twenty orcs and then has his one-on-one fight with the Uruk-hai commander, where he's clearly down to like a quarter of his hit points (Aragorn is, however, starting that campaign at level 17 or something, so he's still basically ok). Boromir (maybe level 6 or 7), however, has been on death saves for that entire final duel, and he's not rolling high. That whole fight is a real mixed bag - they kill most of the Uruks, but Merry and Pippin are kidnapped, Frodo and Sam flee the battle (smart, given that they are like level 3 at best at this point). It's a big climax, perhaps not as flashy as the Balrog (Gandalf is level 18 or 19, and hits level 20 when he beats the Balrog and comes back as Gandalf the White,) so it feels earned that Boromir would die here (and I don't know, the player rerolls as Gollum, going a way different direction).

But, it was still early in the story of our campaign, only just hitting tier 2. And the paladin had not really had a chance to explore much of her own story in that campaign. So, my DM made the call - yes, technically while still in initiative, that character should have died. But retroactively, he decided instead that initiative had ended when the final monster died, and thus the conscious characters had an opportunity to do a Medicine check to stabilize her, which succeeded.

These are the stakes, basically - not necessarily the death, but the burden on you as the DM to adjudicate whether you want to have that death really land when it does come around.

Depending on your encounter balancing, you can easily have a four-encounter adventuring day in which the players aren't really in any danger of getting killed.

It's also a matter of level. The real distinction between a low-level character and a high-level character, as I see it, is flexibility. At level 1, your pure spellcasters only have 2 spell slots (actually, half-casters do too now) so a Cleric casting Cure Wounds is going to be a full half of their healing for the entire day. There's basically no room for this lengthy attrition - one fight against a group of goblins or skeletons or bandits can leave you with nothing left in the tank, even if you play very well and carefully. A high-level party can kind of adjust their resource expenditure - you might notice that the monsters you're fighting are rolling 10s and 11s to hit, meaning they must have less than a +10 to hit in the first place, and thus you can probably risk killing them slowly given they're not likely to deal much damage.

In other words, at lower levels - tier 1, broadly - the difference between a trivial encounter and a challenging one is far narrower, so you can't really afford to have a long slog of minor encounters, even as this becomes, I'd argue, mandatory at higher levels.

Of course, the irony is that at higher levels, it's far easier to skip encounters entirely. Have a bunch of earth-bound foes, like a bunch of giants? Well, your Storm Sorcerer will just freaking fly over them if they're level 18 or higher (excited and nervous for when two of my Ravnica party will be totally out of reach of non-flying monsters without ranged attacks. At least the Barbarian with the artifact sword that lets him fly has to get into melee with foes to fight them.)

So, at the points where you really need attrition fights to challenge your player, you're going to have to contrive to get them not to skip them, or at least expend a resource to do so.

My D&D Lore Philosophy

 I've talked a lot about mystery in fantasy. You'll notice that a ton of posts on this blog are concerned not so much with the gameplay, but the implications of the lore in games like World of Warcraft, Elden Ring (and the rest of the FromSoft oeuvre,) Alan Wake (1&II, probably more the latter) and Control. To greater and lesser extents, each of these games has a depth of lore - beyond the surface-level story (which in FromSoft games is extremely thin, actually) there is a whole cosmos of implication and suggestion.

Naturally, these games all have an influence on the way that I build my D&D worlds, whether they be my wholly original setting of Sarkon, or borrowed, "official" settings like Ravnica or Ravenloft.

Looking especially to Sarkon, I've spent the past nine-and-a-half years, since getting my original 5E core rulebooks in the summer of 2015, fleshing out the world, doing major retcons in some instances (I recently shrank its timeline since recovering from an apocalyptic era of chaos from 20,000 years to 2000 years) but for the most part, I've just been building it up, fleshing it out, coming up with various historical eras, various locations, and various factions and forces at play.

It is, frankly, a huge amount of lore, and while I think I've mostly gone in broad strokes - marking the major cities and towns on four continents (and one underwater realm) with a couple sentences describing each.

But, for example, I can tell you about the evolution of a clan of post-apocalyptic scavengers evolving into a powerful group of mages, their conflict with an ancient gold dragon that ultimately led to an alliance with said gold dragon, the mages' development into a true magocratic city-state, which then receded into the shadows when they were conquered by a barbarian warlord, only for this council of mages to evolve into a hidden conspiracy that, in the modern day, seeks to manipulate and control events from the shadows.

What a player is likely to encounter, though, is just rumors of some sketchy figures in black cloaks appearing at notable events.

See, I think that the best approach to lore is to know it but only rarely show it, and even more rarely tell it.

As a DM, you want to know as much as you can about the world that the players will be inhabiting. The more details you can keep in your head, the easier time you'll have portraying a fleshed out, lived-in world. It'll also help you improvise things in your world that remain consistent - for example, I just thought of a town where they have some kind of fox-themed ritual, a ritual that was, for a long time, outlawed. The actual reason for this is that the Fox was the heraldic symbol for the dynasty that rivaled the local noble family, but this ban expired after a few generations following the Fox-affiliated Shaw dynasty was wiped out.

And yet, the importance of this Fox festival could be a hint to the players that something involving the Shaws might become relevant to the plot of the campaign. If not, though, it's just a detail about the world that makes it feel more real.

Now, there is a risk here: the singal-to-noise ratio risk. D&D players are trained to consider every detail important. Consider the thing in Critical Role's campaign where Matt Mercer took slightly too long describing a chair and the party became convinced that this chair had been a crucial part of some magical ritual, and not, just, you know, a thing someone had brought to sit on.

DMs live in their world more than their players - a player basically only gets input on the path their character takes through the world during the 4 hour session they get once a week. But as a DM, you spend a lot more time preparing things (if you're like me). Yes, the day-to-day session planning can go quickly (especially if there's combat - which always takes a lot of time for my players) but because you have the most control over a world as a DM, you also have the constant opportunity to think and plan out what will happen and what the players will discover.

Consider, also, what kind of players you have. I have one player who will devour any lore document I send him, and will take detailed notes to connect all manner of hints and ideas - this player is both a blessing and a curse: a blessing in that the various foreshadowing breadcrumbs I leave are actually seen and appreciated, and a curse because if I slip up at all and say something inconsistent, he'll catch it.

But I think most players will only really follow the surface-level story. They're worried more about their character and what they do in the world.

And that is why you really want to be careful to avoid a lore-dump.

Lore is powerful, and I think it's actually one of the most appealing things about fantasy as a genre - the feeling that the world you've entered has depth, three-dimensionality. But, for example, when the hobbits are attacked by the Barrow-Wights in the early part of Fellowship of the Ring, their escape from the undead monsters is more immediately relevant than the deeper implication that these were humans who worshipped Sauron way back in ancient times (I can't remember if this was in the time of the Witch King or not - my Tolkien knowledge is probably deeper than the average guy, but I've only ever read the novels, not the other sources).

Where you want to be explicit is in that surface-level story. Frankly, a FromSoft-style campaign in which the players are told to do something like "light the beacon of night" and then punted out the door to go do whatever the hell that even means doesn't really work in something as open-ended as D&D. I mean, you take the opening of Bloodborne, where you're only kind of told to seek Paleblood, which... I've played through that game multiple times, and I only sort of think I know what that even means. But in D&D, that first guy who gives you the blood transfusion is someone players would probably not leave without interrogating them as to what the hell Paleblood is.

In other words, the actual surface-level plot should be something that the players can understand clearly, even if there are mysteries with twists and turns. The lore is the structure that that plot is built on, and by showing elements of the lore that are relevant to the plot, you can help the players get a sense for how their story fits into the larger setting.

But to do this, you need to have that dense, strong foundation.

Ranged Weapon Combatants in 5E'24

 There's a big advantage to being a ranged combatant. We can see this in real-life history. Basically ever culture has, at one point or another, developed the Bow, or at least some means of attacking at range. The development of gunpowder weapons transformed warfare, to the extent that basically any soldier in the modern era basically never wants to be up-close and in melee range with an enemy.

In D&D, this is also very true, especially given that most monsters are incapable of fighting at range - you can do a lot for your own survivability if you can attack your enemy from a distance where they need to take their entire turn just getting to you, if they even can.

As such, it makes sense to me that melee characters should have more power - they take more risk and should thus get a greater reward.

Two feats in the 2014 version of D&D were fairly dominant in terms of damage-dealing potential: Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter. Both of these feats had a few aspects, but the primary one was similar: you could take a -5 penalty to your attack roll and, if you hit, get a +10 bonus to your damage. Given the massive size of that damage boost, the reduction to your hit chance winds up, in most scenarios, to be a worthwhile trade, except against targets with very high ACs.

And, in a way, the size of this boost also flattens, slightly, the damage deficit from using a ranged weapon - while a Longbow only does 1d8 damage compared to a Maul that does 2d6 (a difference of 2.5 average damage) when you're adding a full 10 to that, the distinction is kind of tiny.

2024's PHB, though, redesigns both of these feats. The new Great Weapon Master grants a smaller damage bonus, but this is automatic whenever you are attacking with your action, with no reduction in hit chance. I've found that, in most scenarios, especially as you get to higher levels, this feat winds up being better than the old one. But the new Sharpshooter no longer actually grants any bonus to damage at all - it still allows you to attack at long range without disadvantage and avoid half and full cover penalties, but rather than this damage boost, it instead allows you to attack with a ranged weapon in melee range without disadvantage.

In a vacuum, this would seem to put ranged characters at a major disadvantage. And I don't know that this is entirely wrong.

Melee characters have a few feats that can boost their damage - the three that I find most notable are Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, and Dual Wielder. Depending on how high-level you are, and thus how many feats you can afford to pick up, I generally find GWM to be the most powerful of these.

Another thing that really complicates the whole damage narrative is weapon mastery. Graze, found on the Greatsword and Glaive, is a pretty significant damage boost (and, psychologically, has the nice effect of letting the player feel like they've done something on their turn even if they "miss"). This mastery is not found on any ranged weapons (or any light weapons that a dual-wielder might use). For ranged combatants, however, there are a few weapons that have Vex - a mastery that gives you advantage on your next attack against the target if you hit them. This is also, indirectly, a damage boost.

In fact, only three weapon masteries show up on ranged weapons (not counting the modern/futuristic weapons found in the DMG,) and these are Slow, Vex, and Push, the latter of which only shows up on the Heavy Crossbow. (The Shotgun, a modern weapon, also has Push, which is finally a real reason to use it instead of a Revolver).

Of these, if we're talking about damage potential, I think we can only really consider Vex weapons, which are the Dart, the Shortbow, the Blowgun, the Hand Crossbow, and the Pistol (how is the Blowgun a martial weapon?)

Among these, the Pistol has the highest damage die, dealing 1d10 damage (plus Dex) on a hit, which actually puts it on par with some of the most powerful melee weapons (just shy of the max-12 ones). Firearms, however, have the following problem: they have the Loading property, This is also an issue for Crossbows, but the Crossbow Expert feat allows you to ignore this. The Gunner feat, from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, solves this problem for you, and certainly as a DM, my intention is always to allow old character options (you can take my Undead Warlock patron from me when you pry it from my cold, dead, hands... and then I'm going to take it back from you). But, this does mean a feat investment where someone with a Shortbow would not need one.

But, absent the old Sharpshooter feat, what might we use to gain more damage?

Among the old classics is the returning Crossbow Expert. This feat I believe got some tweaks compared with the old version, but still allows, essentially, Light Crossbow dual-wielding. While Light Crossbows can technically be dual-wielded by anyone, the feat explicitly allows you to hold one in each hand and not worry about loading them. In terms of damage, the feat actually only adds your Dex modifier (or I suppose Int if you're a Battle Smith) if you don't already have something like the Two Weapon Fighting Style. I still think it's probably necessary to deal with the loading issue - but it's also arguably nerfed because you won't get benefits from a magic hand crossbow for all your attacks, unless you have two magic hand crossbows.

The damage here is pretty comparable to a melee dual-wielder, as Hand Crossbows deal 1d6 damage on a hit. The downside, though, is that because Hand Crossbows don't have the Nick property, you won't be able to get two off-hand attacks the way that you can with the Dual-Wielder feat.

There is, however, a weird thing you can also do:

Go Great Weapon Master.

The new version of GWM requires only that a weapon have the "Heavy" property in order to gain its bonus damage. As it so happens, there are a couple of Heavy ranged weapons - the Heavy Crossbow (naturally) and the Longbow.

Now, the downside here is that this feat both requires a 13 in Strength and also grants you a point to Strength - an ability score bonus that you're probably not all that interested in if you're building a ranged martial character.

Still, this will mean giving you a pretty big boost to damage - especially at higher levels.

The Heavy Crossbow of course suffers when you get Extra Attack unless you have the Crossbow Expert feat - I'd go for that at level 4 and worry about GWM at level 8, given that 3 extra damage on a hit is not going to be worth losing your second attack at levels 5, 6, and 7.

But the Longbow can pick this up as soon as you want. Again, the lower damage die will be less of a problem as you pile more static damage bonuses.

Of course, neither of these have Vex.

So...

Which do we think does more damage?

Yes, the dreaded math is now coming for us.

I'd guess that our Vex option with the highest potential is the Hand Crossbow. We'll need a free bonus action in order to take full advantage of the Crossbow Expert feat.

Setting aside Battle Smith Artificers, as well as weapon-using Clerics and Druids (who might be into it if they can pick up True Strike somehow,) our three main ranged-weapon-using classes are the Ranger, Rogue, and Fighter. The Fighter is probably the least precious with their bonus action. Rangers might want it for spells like Hunter's Mark, and the Rogue might want their Cunning Action.

I think I want to look at this at level 5, when each class has had the opportunity to get one feat and the Fighter and Ranger have Extra Attack. For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to mainly look at this for the Fighter, though most of this should apply for the Ranger, especially if fighting a big boss monster that doesn't require a lot of moving Hunter's Mark around.

We'll assume that they're starting with 17 in Dexterity. This will mean that the Hand Crossbow (HCB) build will have +4 to Dexterity thanks to Crossbow Expert at level 4, while the Longbow-using GWM build is still at +3. Each character has two attacks with their action.

Vex, of course, means we can't allow equal hit chances to cancel each other out (and we don't have equal hit chances anyway).

Let's assume that, at level 5, we're generally fighting monsters with an average AC of 15 - a mix of higher-armored toughs and probably still a lot that have like 11 or 12.

And Vex makes this a bit nightmarish, so we'll start with the Longbow.

Our Fighter/Ranger has a +6 to hit at this point, with +3 Dex and a PB of 3. Thus, to hit, we've got to roll a 9 or higher. That means we're hitting 60% of the time.

Our hit damage is 1d8+6, 3 from Dexterity and 3 from our PB. So, hit damage is an average of 10.5.

Our crit bonus damage is 4.5.

So, total damage per attack is 6.3, plus 0.225 for our crit damage, giving us a total average damage per attack of 6.525. Two attacks then give us 13.5, nice and clean, for our damage per turn.

Boy, that was quick and now I have to deal with Vex.

There are a lot of ways we might actually start with advantage, and Vex will carry over to our next turn, so it's kind of a nightmare. But, in a vacuum, if we assume that we're, say, attacking a new target each turn, we'll only apply Vex to our second and third attacks (the third being our Light, off-hand, bonus action attack).

So, we'll need to break it into separate things. First, we look at our first attack:

We have a +7 to hit, and thus hit on an 8 or higher, meaning a 65% chance to hit.

Hit damage is 1d6+4, or 7.5, with a crit bonus of 3.5.

So, for the first attack, we're looking at 4.875 plus .175, giving us an average damage of 5.05.

Now, things get complicated:

In the 65% of scenarios where we hit, our second attack has advantage. However, in the 35% where we missed, we don't.

The miss is easy because the average damage is just 5.05 like the first scenario, which we multiply by the 35% miss chance, giving us 1.7675.

But, with advantage, our hit and crit chances increase. We now have an 87.75% chance to hit.

Actually, I'm going to be lazy. Here's the thing: if our average damage of the un-Vexed first hit is over a third of the GWM damage, we can expect that the damage of the second and third attacks will be higher. Thus, the overall damage per turn should be higher with our Crossbow build.

But, there are some reasons why, at higher levels, we might see things change.

The first is that, eventually, the GWM build will be able to catch up in terms of Dexterity, erasing some of the head start lead that the Crossbow Expert build has. The other is that GWM scales up better over time. The extra damage gained from CBE is just a single flat bit of damage on one attack. A Fighter in particular will get a lot more out of GWM - at level 11, not only will the PB at that point be up to 4, but they'll also get another attack that's part of the action, meaning that you're getting potentially 12 damage, compared with CBE's 4 or 5. Hell, at level 20, you're talking 24 extra damage.

But, in these earlier levels, my general sense is that you could probably go dual-wielding hand crossbows.

Notably, the Rogue is more or less limited to this, as they won't have proficiency in any heavy weapons. I also think that the benefits of Vex are really huge for a Rogue - advantage not only makes it more likely for them to hit (and getting just any hit during your turn is huge because of Sneak Attack) but also because advantage gives you sneak attack. The extra-attack scaling of GWM is also pretty useless to them anyway, given that they don't get Extra Attack.

Rangers might be more inclined toward the GWM build, given that they have lots of uses for their Bonus Action. Still, dual-wielding can be a good option for them, especially if something lives long enough for them to get a full turn of all three HCB attacks against a Hunter's Mark'ed target.

2025 is When We'll Get D&D '24 For Real

 The 50th anniversary of D&D, and the 10th anniversary of its most popular edition, 5E, has come and gone. This year, the game will be celebrating its somewhat less momentous 51st anniversary. The 2024 revamp to 5th Edition, with brand-new core rulebooks, was meant to honor this anniversary, at least in part. But it was also an attempt to sand down some of the rough edges of 5E and to address issues of balance and tuning, while also introducing a few exciting new ideas.

We now have two out of three of the pieces of that puzzle fully-released.

"Converting" to 2024's 5th Edition is something you can do right now, pretty much. The "rules" part of the game are actually pretty much entirely confined to the Player's Handbook, which was the first core rulebook to be released. The Dungeon Master's Guide does offer a lot of guidance on how a DM should run the game. I think this new one, in particular, would be a great read for anyone just starting out as a DM, and I'm happy to use it for reference and to even re-think how I structure my games. But once the PHB came out, with all the changes to how classes work and how certain rules work (the Surprise change is probably for the best, though it's definitely one that sacrifices drama for gameplay balance,) you could more or less play the real version of the revamped game.

But only more or less.

This year, and still over a month away, we'll be getting the final piece of that puzzle: the Monster Manual.

Of the core books, the Monster Manual is simultaneously a crucial part of the game and also the most replaceable. It's replaceable because perhaps the most common thing that has been added to D&D is new monsters to fight. In fact, I have several 3rd party books full of monster stat blocks (Tome of Beasts I&II and the Creature Codex, as well as the pdf version of Flee, Mortals!) along with tons of Wizards-released ones like Monsters of the Multiverse and all the bestiaries from the various campaign setting books.

To be frank, I think I only occasionally actually use creatures from the Monster Manual.

But that is, in part, because these are the oldest creatures in the game, with the least amount of refinement based on the developers' experience of playing 5E. Consider, for example, that all the chromatic dragons are... basically the same stat block with minor tweaks (with different variations depending on age). Worse are the Giants, who are mostly just simple melee fighters without any really distinctive abilities.

And yet, because the Monster Manual is the core monster book, it also has all of the most iconic creatures - the core fantasy monsters like the aforementioned dragons and giants, as well as your Hydras, your Zombies, your Golems, your Goblins, etc.

It's also no secret that the monsters in the new Monster Manual are going to be tougher - for a long time, 5E has had this issue where the monsters don't really present the challenge they're expected to based on their CR. Between the new DMG's encounter-building guidance (which I find leans more difficult than just about any previous system, including the one in Flee, Mortals!) and monsters being harder to fight, I think that the general buffs we've seen to most of the classes will probably be balanced or even balanced against the players.

Which is the whole point: people have generally thought 5E has been too easy.

We have gotten a few of these new stat blocks previewed in stuff like the Scions of Elemental Evil free adventure, but it won't be until next month that we truly get the full list, including some brand-new monsters I'm very excited about (there's a high-level vampire monster that could be great as my "final boss" of the Innistrad branch of my Ravnica campaign).

But let's address the other issue:

I've found, generally, that most of my players are hesitant to convert their characters to the new system. I think most of this is simple inertia - while I obsess over D&D more or less every day, my players often don't really give much thought to their characters except when it's time to play, and without the kind of fixation on this stuff that leads you to make regular blog posts about it, it's a lot to actually consider when looking at a 17th level character going from the old version to the new version.

In other words, I think it will be far easier to start using this stuff for real when I start a new campaign. Now, I've kinda sorta done that - I'm putting together a light back-up campaign for when my DM on Wednesdays isn't available. By necessity, I have no real long-term plans for it, though I want to experiment in player-driven adventures. And this does have all the players using the new version of their classes and species and everything (well, to an extent - we have a Shifter using the Monsters of the Multiverse version, but the others are a Dragonborn, Goliath, and Gnome using the new PHB's version).

Still, this is a back-burner campaign. I don't think I'm likely to truly, fully move into the 2024 edition world until I wrap up my Ravnica game, which could honestly go for another year or more (like, we're definitely past the midway point, but I've got the final dungeon of level 17, then six adventures on different Magic planes for level 18, the New Phyrexia chapter for level 19, and then, well, Planescape for level 20). So it could actually be a few years before I fully settle into this new quasi-edition.