Stats for the Darklords

 As it periodically does, my mind drifts back to Ravenloft, D&D's horror-themed setting. It's one of, if not the most unique setting for the game (the only other I can think that competes is Planescape). The setting is also built with a kind of inherent object in mind - how do you escape your current domain? While it's truly the DM's call whether you can escape the setting as a whole, as escaping one domain might just deposit you in another, there's actually a pretty solid mechanical hook here: each domain is ruled over by a Darklord, and by will alone, that individual can close off the borders of the domain, preventing anyone from escaping.

Thus, a confrontation with a domain's Darklord is the most obvious objective - if you kill them, you have a brief window to escape before they come back. Now, you need not kill them to accomplish this - Darklords are evil, but they aren't inevitably antagonistic. A Darklord might agree to open the borders of their domain if the party does something for them, and depending on the campaign or adventure, the borders might not be closed in the first place.

Darklords are, classically, powerful monsters of some sort - the most famous, of course, is Strahd von Zarovich, who is canonically the first vampire in the D&D multiverse, and also the first Darklord within the Mists. There's also Azalin the Lich, whose current status is a little mysterious (though Van Richten's has some pretty clear clues hiding in plain sight as to where he's at now).

But not all of them are such powerful beings. In fact, a fair number of them are downright weak. Van Richten's presents its Darklords as having statistics "similar to" various stat blocks in the monster manual, except in the rare cases where the monster is in Van Richten's itself (which, to my memory, might only be Harkon Lukas, who is a Loup-Garou, which is an extra-powerful werewolf - Loup-Garou is actually just the French name for werewolf).

That presents us with an interesting challenge as DMs. Some Darklords are particularly low-CR, like Ivan Dilisnya, who is a Noble - a CR 1/8 creature that would be cannon fodder even for a 1st level character.

Now, in terms of realism, this kind of makes sense, actually - these stat blocks are meant to represent real people, and as Brennan Lee Mulligan so eloquently stated in Fantasy High Sophomore Year, it turns out that for most people, if you stab them with a sword, they die. Adventurers are notable both for their ability to slay dangerous monsters and also their ability to endure the attacks of such creatures.

Now, each of these is technically a suggestion of a stat block, rather than giving you a specific one. The stat blocks for Srahd in both Curse of Strahd and Vecna: Eve of Ruin are not quite the same as the Monster Manual's Vampire stats, but Van Richten's presents this as the most obvious one to use (and given that Strahd is D&D's quintessential vampire, we can largely treat that one as a totally appropriate stat block for him - especially the 2024 one).

2024's Monster Manual also gave us many more high-level humanoid NPC stat blocks - while Ivana Boritsi, the co-Darklord of Borca with Ivan, uses a Spy stat block, we could imagine using a Spy Master (or Assassin, frankly) stat block instead.

But I do think we need to really consider how to play these characters if they are just those low-CR stat blocks.

First off, if we're expecting to largely have social rather than combat encounters with them, their HP isn't much of a concern. And while they might have poor, say, Insight or Perception bonuses, this might actually just mean the players have the ability to talk around them or more easily pickpocket them.

In other words, don't exclusively build adventures around Darklords that require them to be all that challenging. It's all right for the players to get one over on them. Because the one thing Darklords will never run out of is time - their domains always revert to the way they were, and the Darklords have time for vengeance.

Social encounters are, of course, also something that DMs have a lot of leeway to interpret and run as they will. If players choose a particular tack that isn't logical, no Persuasion or Deception or Intimidation check is going to force the Darklord to act the way that they want.

Now, what about keeping the party trapped? If you want to ensure that there is a challenge in getting out of a Domain, but the players understand that killing a Darklord allows for this, what might you do?

Well, the first is that Ravenloft works on nightmare logic - did you really kill the Darklord? And did their death actually cause the Mists to open? One of the classic tropes of horror movies (especially slashers) is when the villain seems to be dead, but isn't.

Another thing to do is just to make it hard to get to the Darklord. Viktra Mordenheim, the sort of Frankenstein equivalent, is of course famous for her creation of Flesh Golems. Yes, a CR 1 Spy is not too tough for any party, but you surround her with an army of constructs (maybe re-skinning other types of golems as Flesh golems) and now you've got a real challenge.

Finally, if you really want to build to a big boss fight, there's always the possibility of a transformation. It might be that if you slay the Darklord in their default form, like Mother Lorinda, who is a Green Hag, maybe she comes back as something far, far deadlier (the Arch-Hag from the new Monster Manual would be a profoundly terrifying jump in power). Naturally, some Darklords are already quite scary, legendary monsters in their own right - Strahd being a Vampire (I could also see him being a Vampire Umbral Lord) and Anktepot as a Mummy Lord.

One thing to seriously consider is whether the player characters actually know who the Darklord is. Meta-knowledge here can be a bit of a problem, and even just general knowledge of how Ravenloft as a setting works, so a player might be able to tell that if the people of a Domain are always seemingly talking about this one individual, there's a good chance that they're the Darklord. That said, there can be red herrings - Lamordia (which is probably my favorite domain - I guess I'm just that into the whole steampunk aesthetic, even if I don't think I could name you an actual piece of media that is within that genre that I really care that much about) has as its Darklord the aforementioned Viktra Mordenheim, but the domain's legal ruler is Baron Aubrecker, a sometime rival, sometime collaborator with Mordenheim.

Indeed, Kartakas is a domain in which the anonymity of the Darklord, Harkon Lukas, is actually central to his torment - an artist and performer who is perpetually washed up, only able to shepherd others toward fame and fortune. Lukas is kind of an ideal Darklord to seem friendly and kind at first, but the lurking wolf within eventually makes itself known.

The Shadowfell, and especially Ravenloft, is very much about stagnation, which means that merely killing a Darklord isn't going to ever end their reign of terror. They always come back, and the world and the minds of its people conspire to paint over any inconsistencies.

Notably, Barovia plays the entire setting of Curse of Strahd and the location of one of the chapters in Vecna: Eve of Ruin, but there are full-on continuity errors - or, not errors, but intentional inconsistencies. In Curse of Strahd, the default level 1-3 intro adventure in The Death House (which is sort of a domain-within-a-domain in the village of Barovia) has you meet the ghosts of children named Rose and Thorn. When you arrive at the Death House in Eve of Ruin, Rose and Thorn are living children. That's very much intentional.

One reason to not take these suggested stat blocks so literally is that the Darklords themselves are probably inconsistent. For Jacqueline Renier, the Darklord of Richemulot (a domain that goes through cycles of plague that go from people dying of illness to maddened fever-dreams - possibly inspired by Werner Herzog's 1970s remake of Nosferatu) the obvious stat block for her is a wererat, it's all really about whatever stat block feels appropriate in the moment.

There are a number of cool monsters in Van Richten's that aren't explicitly used as any Darklord, but could be a form that they take at one time or another (I love the Relentless Killers, who are meant to embody 1980s slasher villains like Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers). Like Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola's version, even the quintessential vampire could take on many different forms (they do call him "The Devil Strahd," and so maybe he takes on the form of a Pit Lord at some point!)

The Spectacular World of Smites

 The 2024 Paladin got a lot of changes, and it's the one class that I think you could argue got nerfed by the update to the PHB (the Ranger might have not been buffed as much as we wanted it to be, but I still think it's more powerful than before).

Two things, I think, could be counted as nerfs.

The first is less important - Divine Sense becoming a use of Channel Divinity, rather than its own resource, means that it will be competing with things like Oath of Enmity or Sacred Weapon (both of which got nice buffs).

But I think the change that is going to get most people to seriously hesitate on updating to the 2024 version of the class is that to Divine Smite.

No longer merely a class feature, Divine Smite is a spell that A: has components (including Verbal, so you can't cast it while silenced) and B: takes a bonus action to cast. While the bonus action still happens after you hit a target, thus ensuring that the damage is never wasted, and that you can hold off until you land a critical hit, it does cause a couple other issues: you can't cast it multiple times per turn, or if you hit a target as a reaction such as via an opportunity attack. It'll also shut down other bonus actions, such a the new Lay on Hands, and will prevent you from casting other leveled spells (though given that you probably need to use your action to attack, it was unlikely you'd be able to do that anyway). Also, Barbarian/Paladin multiclass builds are probably dead, because you can no longer Divine Smite while Raging.

That being said, I think I understand the design intent here - Paladins have, through most of 5E, treated spell slots as little more than "Smite Slots," and while that works pretty well, there's a whole world of spellcasting that Paladin players tend to ignore because of this.

However, there's another compensation we get here: all the other "Smite" spells now work the same way.

While previously, something like Thunderous Smite or Searing Smite required you to cast it as a bonus action and then hope you got a hit in before you lost concentration on it or the enemies all died, now no smite will be "wasted" because you only choose to smite after you hit.

Now, some still involve various saving throws for their additional effects, so you can still get a suboptimal result from a Smite, but the damage itself will be there.

Let's look at the various Smite Spells, of which the PHB has eight.

Divine Smite:

Our classic, we actually get one free casting of this per day, which, interestingly, also means that because we're not spending a spell slot to cast it, we can cast another spell along with it - though given that we have to attack with a weapon or unarmed strike, I don't know that there are a lot of other leveled spells we could mix with it. Divine Smite, of course, is particularly good against Undead and Fiends, but given that its sole purpose is damage, it's the baseline against which we'll compare the other smites. At 1st level, this deals 2d8 radiant damage, and then 1d8 for every spell slot beyond 1st (there's no longer any restriction on spell level, so in theory if we multiclassed as, say, a Sorcerer, we could potentially cast a 9th level Divine Smite one day (in fact, a Paladin6/Sorcerer14 would just barely hit 9th level spells at level 20). There's an extra d8 against fiends and undead, which will for sure change the math. Just so we have it for the record, against most foes, it's an average of 9 damage at 1st level, then 13.5 at 2nd, 18 at 3rd, 22.5 at 4th, and 27 at 5th level.

Searing Smite:

Searing Smite is actually also a damage-focused smite, and you might be surprised that it actually might outdo Divine Smite once you start upcasting it. At 1st level, it deals 1d6 fire damage when it hits, but then the target burns until they succeed on a Con save. They take the burning damage before they make this saving throw, so they're guaranteed to burn at least once. At 1st level, of course, this is only 7 damage. But the scaling of this spell increases both the initial damage and the burn. On average, you'll not do more damage with that initial burst than Divine Smite, but even if they succeed on their first save, they start taking more damage once you upcast the spell, and of course if they fail their save, they keep taking damage. When a foe succeeds on the first saving throw, our 1st level damage is 7, our 2nd level is 14, our 3rd level is 21, at 4th level we're at 28, and at 5th level we're looking at 35, all with the potential to do more if they fail those saves. It is fire damage, to be fair, which is resisted far more often, but it's still quite good, and the damage is coming in at the start of their turns, so while a boss might get some more legendary actions in there, for most enemies it won't matter that the damage isn't instant. The one place this becomes somewhat less advantageous is on a critical hit - the periodic damage won't be affected, so a Divine Smite might wind up doing more damage from a crit.

Thunderous Smite:

This one's a little more straightforward. It does 2d6 thunder damage when you hit with it, which is slightly less damage than Divine Smite, though Thunder is a damage type very few things resist. The target then gets a Strength save, and on a failure, they're both knocked back 10 feet and knocked prone. The ability to save against this of course reduces the effect's value, but given that you're only paying 2 average damage to have a chance at that means this is going to be worth it quite often. And there's no size restriction on this. Damage scaling here adds 1d6 for each spell level above 1st, so in terms of damage, you're going to be falling behind Divine Smite, but again, not by a ton.

Wrathful Smite:

Damage-wise, this is the weakest of the 1st level Smites, doing only 1d6 Psychic damage. The target then makes a Wisdom save or becomes frightened of you for 1 minute, though it can repeat the save at the end of its turns to end the effect. It also scales up by 1d6 for each spell level beyond 1, but this is a smite you really are using more for the fear than the damage (though psychic is also not resisted by lots of monsters). Frightened is a pretty useful debuff, especially to help protect yourself and your allies. And, like Searing Smite, there's no concentration here, so you could potentially get a lot out of this if you tag a foe early on in a fight.

Shining Smite:

A 2nd-level smite, in terms of damage we need to compare it to Divine Smite's 13.5 average damage when at 2nd level. Shining Smite is significantly less, doing only 2d6 (comparable to a 1st level Thunderous or Searing Smite). However, the smite applies a debuff to the target, causing it to glow and be unable to go invisible, and giving attacks on it disadvantage. This spell, unlike all previous ones, is a concentration spell. The advantage is the biggest reason to pack this, but if you're a Vengeance Paladin with Oath of Enmity, that might not be as appealing. Probably a niche thing - take it if you're expecting to fight sneaky or invisible enemies. The advantage is great, of course, but we can get something like that with Thunderous Smite in most cases.

Blinding Smie:

Our natively-3rd-level Smite, Blinding Smite does 3d8 when our Divine Smite is doing 4d8, scaling at the same rate. So, what do we get for our d8 of damage? Well, our target must make a Con save or become Blinded for a minute, getting to repeat the saving throw on the end of each of its turns. Blinded is a pretty fantastic condition, but a lot of foes will save out of this, as there are very few monsters that don't at least have some positive modifier to Con saves (and there are monsters with Blindsight). That said, if we do blind them, we're getting part of the effects of both Shining and Wrathful Smite, imposing disadvantage on their attacks and giving us and our friends advantage on attacks against them. Once again, this doesn't require concentration, so if you can get it off early on in a fight, with luck this can be a huge gamechanger.

Staggering Smite:

Our 4th level Smite (meaning we're well into tier 3 at this stage,) Staggering Smite's effect isn't quite as long-lasting as others, but if the target fails a Wisdom save, they are Stunned until the end of our next turn. Robbing a creature of its turn, more or less (though remember that stunned creatures can now move!) is a pretty big deal, and targeting Wisdom instead of Con (like a Monk's Stunning Strike) is going to be slightly more reliable. The damage here isn't nothing, but it's way behind our more damage-oriented options, dealing 4d6 (14 average) compared with our Divine Smite's 22.5 at this level.

Banishing Smite:

The sole 5th level smite, this one's a bit different. Dealing 5d10 Force damage, that's an average of 27.5, which means that this just flat-out out-damages Divine Smite on average, except against a Fiend or Undead. Searing Smite will do more at this level, but this is also a spell that can potentially take a major enemy out of the fight for a minute. While it can't permanently banish a creature like the Banishment spell, taking one of the big bruisers out of a fight can be very good. Now, there's a catch - the target has to be below 50 HP (after taking the damage of the attack and the smite) and also gets a Charisma saving throw to resist it. Now, luckily, a lot of creatures have crap Charisma, though most of those are big brutes with a lot of hit points. In other words, this is not a spell you start the fight off with. The trick here is that you're going to ideally hit someone for whom a weapon attack and this Banishing Smite puts them just under 50. 50 damage isn't nothing, but it's starting to be pretty marginal by the time we're talking tier 4 damage (a GWM Paladin at this level is probably hitting for 2d6+11 with each hit). However, if we consider the banishing effect to be just gravy on top of the damage, this is a pretty nasty spell to throw down, and on a crit, when it's doing 10d10 (or 55 average damage,) it's probably going to be worth doing anyway (and also more likely to put them in banishing range with that amount of damage).

    So, what's the conclusion to take here?

I suppose the proper internet way of doing things is to rank them.

Divine Smite is moot because we get this prepared automatically regardless of subclass. This is going to be our go-to option for critical strikes at least until we're level 17, and is also going to be our best damage option against Undead and Fiends until we've got 4th level spells (and even still using it when facing fire-resistant or -immune foes, which is actually most fiends and certainly incorporeal undead). Almost never bad, this gets an A.

Searing Smite should be a serious consideration for damage, especially once we hit tier 2 and half second-level spells. Against creatures that take full fire damage, and when we aren't critting, this is going to actually have our highest damage potential even if our foes cannot fail a Con save. If they do fail one (and depending on how many rounds they last,) we can get even better returns on it. It is still only damage, though. Even if the target dies before it takes its burn damage, the extra damage of a Divine Smite would have been just as wasted, so this also gets an A.

Thunderous Smite does nearly as much damage as these other two, but with an added bit of utility. Strength saves vary widely between monsters, so if you can hit a more spellcaster-style enemy with this one, it's likely to be effective. If you have a Push mastery weapon as well, you might be able to really knock an enemy far back. In an arena with hazards and high precipices, this is going to be insanely good, but even in a "flat field" battlefield, this is quite strong. Damn, I guess we get another A.

Wrathful Smite is, situationally, a spell that could save your bacon. If it frightens the target, that's awesome, and can help keep you and your allies safe. The damage, though, does fall behind significantly, and I think that makes this a more situational spell, so I'm giving it a B.

Shining Smite, again, is very situational, but I think that we're talking about a situation that is far rarer than needing to move things around the battlefield. The advantage is nice, but there are so many ways to get advantage against a target now (such as knocking them prone with Thunderous Smite or just the Topple mastery). I was going to rate this a C, though the fact that there's no save against it is actually pretty good. That said, it's also Concentration, so there is a way for them to break out of it, so yeah, we'll take this down to a C again.

Blinding Smite is pretty strong - essentially a "downcast" Divine Smite, but with the potential to put a pretty strong debuff on the target is not bad (especially good against a spellcaster with spells that require them to see their targets). What keeps this form being A-ranked is that it's a Con save to avoid being blinded, which means there's a strong chance that the foe will save against it. But the relatively low damage cost compared to Divine Smite and the high reward if it does go off brings it to a solid B, even B+.

Staggering Smite has you pay a fairly high cost in damage, and its effect is short-lived. On the other hand, more or less stealing a turn from a foe is a big deal - this is going to almost certainly force bosses to burn a legendary resistance if they fail. And targeting a Wisdom save is more reliable than targeting a Con save, though I would put that as one of the more commonly-high saving throws. It's a real gamble, as you're never going to have a ton of spell slots to cast something like this. I'll admit here that I'm doubting by own ranking ability, but I think we're looking at a B.

Banishing Smite should be your choice of smite over Divine Smite even if you're only going for damage, with the only possible exceptions of A: you're fighting undead or fiends or B: you need your concentration for some other spell. Even if you don't get the whole banishing effect here, it's just more damage than your Divine Smite, and so outside of those situations, 100% you should cast this if you crit unless you're very sure that the target is going to die to normal weapon damage anyway (or if you think a lower-level Divine or Searing Smite will be enough to take them down). The banishment can just be icing on top of the cake if you happen to get them under 50. So, that's A-tier.

One of the frustrating things about the new rulebooks is that it's just not that often I get to play new characters. I really want to rebuild my characters from campaigns past (apart from struggling to hit 20 Strength thanks to the ability scores associated with the Sage background, my Dragonborn Eldritch Knight Fighter would be downright beastly with all the changes) and I really want to try all sorts of new builds (top priority is an Elements Monk, which I never thought I'd even remotely consider given how crap the old version of that subclass was - but if I read things right, an Elements Monk can potentially grapple a target and hold them far enough away that the target can't actually strike back against them).

One of my favorite characters I played was an Aasimar Vengeance Paladin in Curse of Strahd, built around Great Weapon Master (and rocking the +2 Greatsword I got off of the leader of the revenants in the ruined castle of Argynvostholt). While that seems like a campaign that is very unlikely to ever pick up again, I still really like the idea of playing that character again (originally conceived as a man, I gender-flipped them for the campaign, but might play "Atrus" once again instead of "Atria" if I have the opportunity. Also, damn to I love Ravenloft as a setting).

Fixing Blight

 Blight is a 4th level Necromancy spell available to Druids, Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards. The spell is a single-target burst of necrotic damage that plant creatures (like a Shambling Mound or Treant) automatically fail against, and which will automatically kill nonmagical plants.

It's also deceptively bad.

Spellcasters, with the exception of the Warlock, are generally built to be not as good at single-target damage-dealing than martial classes. A Fighter or Barbarian is meant to be more effective in such situations, because spellcasters can A: have a lot of utility to shape the battlefield in their favor and B: have lots of options for dealing damage to groups of enemies.

Still, there are single-target damage spells. At higher levels, Disintegrate and Finger of Death pour out boatloads of damage - those 6th and 7th level spell slots remain precious resources even at level 20, but these spells, when the saving throw is failed, do 75 and 61.5 damage, respectively (why does the 7th level spell do less than the 6th level one? Because Finger of Death still does half damage on a successful save while Disintegrate is fully wasted if they dodge it).

If we compare the damage of these spells to AoE spells of the same level, Circle of Death and Otiluke's Freezing Sphere both do roughly 35 damage (Circle of Death does 36 on average,) so Disintegrate is going to be twice as effective against a single target. We could compare Finger of Death to Firestorm, the latter of which does 38.5 average damage, or Delayed Blast Fireball, which does vary in power, but if triggered immediately does 12d6 (which to be fair is the same as a 7th level Fireball) or a max of 22d6 (though how often are you going to let it cook for a full minute?) - so minimum average is 42.

Thus, to really get our bang for our buck, these AoE spells ought to hit two or ideally three or more targets to match the power of our single-target spells.

Going back down to Blight, though, the damage is 8d8, or an average of 36 (actually it's the same as Circle of Death). That's not an insignificant chunk of damage, but it's not much more than AoE spells we can get at this level. Just Fireball is 8d6, and when upcast to 4th level, that's 9d6, or 31.5 damage, which is not that far behind but potentially hitting several targets.

Now, is that fair, given that Fireball is intentionally overpowered to maintain its iconic status? (It probably could be 6d6 and still be a perfectly good but probably more balanced spell.) I suppose we could compare this with Ice Storm, a natively 4th level spell, which does 2d10+4d6 damage (a mix of bludgeoning and cold,) coming out to an average of 25.

The question, I think, is what ratio our AoE spells should have versus our single-target spells. In the case of Disintegrate versus Circle of Death, it's a little over twice the damage - though Disintegrate's "save for none" does effectively lower its overall damage-per-casting. Finger of Death, then, might be our better model, as most leveled spells are save-for-half. In this case, then, our average damage of 61.5 is roughly 1.6 times as much damage as Firestorm (or around 1.4 or 1.5 times Delayed Blast Fireball except in extreme cases).

Our ratio for Blight is actually pretty comparable to Ice Storm (though Ice Storm also creates difficult terrain) but is only about 1.1 times the damage of a 4th-level Fireball. It also targets Constitution, a saving throw that basically no creature has a negative to, and almost all have a positive modifier for.

So, what could we do to make this a more appealing spell? What could make this a fun spell to cast on a scary boss monster?

One thing I really like about both Disintegrate and Finger of Death is the solid chunk of guaranteed damage. If you had profoundly terrible luck (and in fairness, it would be a 1-in-16,777,216 chance) you could theoretically do only 8 damage with a Blight. But a Finger of Death, on a failed save, does at least 37 damage because it's not all die rolls, instead being 7d8+30.

I like this "flattening" of the damage. You could achieve similar damage to Finger of Death by rolling something like 18d6 (which gets you to 63,) but not only is that a lot of dice to roll, it also creates a lot of swinginess. That version could do anything from 18 damage to 108. The current version does 37-86.

It seems like this could be a general model for single-target spells.

So, then, how much damage should our new Blight do?

Well, we want to make AoE spells worth it, and the way things are currently balanced, it looks like this should be optimal as soon as there's a second target. So we want Blight to be less than twice the damage of a comparable-level AoE spell.

If Ice Storm does an average of 25 damage, and a 4th-level Fireball does 31.5, I think 50 seems like a reasonable target for our ideal damage (and this for sure is a buff). Now, how do we achieve that?

We need to pick what our flat damage should be - Finger of Death adds 30, while Disintegrate adds 40. I think we could go with 10 or 20, but I'm leaning more toward the later.

So, with 20 flat damage, we then want to do somewhere around 30 (maybe skewing lower) damage with dice. Given that the spell historically has used d8s, let's continue to use those. 6d8 does an average damage of 27, so this looks pretty good to me.

Thus, to make this spell feel really good, I think rather than 8d8, it should be doing 6d8+20.

Will this be utterly nasty against Plants? You betcha. But Plants are also one of the smallest creature categories in the game.

Naturally, some playtesting is required. 47 damage is a lot to be able to put out in a single spell at level 7, but I don't think it's completely outside the realm of reason.

Nitty Gritty: When a Warrior of Elements Monk Should Use Elemental Burst

 The Warrior of Elements monk subclass is the 2024 update for the Way of Four Elements, but the folks making D&D clearly recognized that the old one was just not... good. It was bad. It effectively gave a way to spend precious Ki points on spell-like effects that were quite underpowered.

The new version... I like, but I don't know whether it's truly powerful powerful or just decent. I'm skeptical of the need to spend a focus point to go into Elemental Attunement, but unlike, say, the Astral Self monk, you still have some things you can do when you aren't in your "activated mode," and the cost is far lower (especially since Focus Points are easier to recover now).

But this is getting real narrow in focus - we're going to talk specifically about the 6th level feature for the subclass, which is Elemental Burst.

As an action, you can expend 2 Focus Points to send a fireball-sized (and with the same range, I believe) explosion of elemental damage. Creatures inside make a Dexterity saving throw, taking damage equal to three rolls of your Martial Arts die on a failure or half as much on a success.

Now, while Focus Points are a precious resource still, they're a little easier to throw around. What my question asks is this: when is it optimal to use this feature?

That is actually two questions, though. One concerns action economy, and one concerns Focus Point efficiency.

If we assume no magic items (though I hope a DM would find an opportunity to give their Monk some Wraps of Unarmed Power,) and we assume that the Monk started with a 17 in Dexterity and a 16 in Wisdom (the latter being open for debate,) and taking a feat at level 4 that bumps that Dex up to 18, we're looking at a +7 to hit and a saving throw DC of 14 at level 6.

At level 6, our Martial Arts die is a d8, so each attack assuming these stats has a +7 to hit and deals 1d8+4 damage. This feature deals 3d8 damage.

We can assume that our most efficient use of Focus Points in a single-target situation is Flurry of Blows (yes, there's Stunning Strike as well, but I'm going to set that aside for now).

We also have to make certain assumptions about enemies' ACs and their Dex saving throw modifiers. For that, I'm going to (perhaps arbitrarily) assume we're fighting things at this level with an AC of 15 and a +2 to Dex saves.

In order to determine when it's optimal to use this feature, we need to compare it to the alternative. What we want to know is how many creatures we need to be able to hit for this feature to be worth it. Thus, we find out the average damage against a single target and then the average damage of our alternative (Attack action in one case and Flurry of Blows in the other,) and see what we need to multiply the Elemental Burst damage by to make it better than its alternative.

Action Economy Efficiency:

Normally, our action will be two melee attacks. In most cases, by this level, we can just use our unarmed strikes for damage, as our hardest-hitting weapons do a d8 at most.

With a +7 to hit and attacking monsters with a 15 AC, we need to roll an 8 or higher to hit, meaning we've got a 65% hit chance. We do 8.5 average damage on a hit, and we add 4.5 damage on a crit. Thus, our damage per attack is:

8.5x65%+4.5x5%, or 5.525 + .225, which comes out to 5.75 average damage per attack.

Then, we make two attacks with our action, so this becomes 11.5 damage per Attack Action.

Our Elemental Burst does 3d8 damage, or 13.5 damage on average, but on a successful save, we only do half of that, or 6.75 damage. If our enemies have a +2 to Dex saves, they need to roll a 12 or higher to save, meaning that we're looking at a 55% chance to fail and a 45% chance to succeed. Thus, we take 13.5x55%+6.75x45%, or 7.425 + 3.0375, which comes to 10.4625 damage against a single target on average.

That's actually pretty damn close. We might have underestimated what kind of Dex saves our foes will have, but even if that damage were significantly lower, it would be optimal (in terms of action economy) to drop one of these on just two foes - and quite a bit better, in fact, than attacking a single one.

Now, what about as our martial arts die goes up?

Well, I suspect that Elemental Burst gets slightly better - by this point, without magic items, our Dex modifier will only go up once more (at least until we get our level 20 capstone). Then, essentially, as our martial arts die goes up, the dice we roll for each attack both go up (adding two average raw damage at level 11 and then again at level 17) while all three for Elemental Burst go up at the same levels (adding 3 average damage at level 11 and again at level 17).

But let's consider the other thing:

Focus Point Efficiency:

Flurry of Blows effectively adds one more attack for us to do each turn, but it's also half the cost of our Elemental Burst.

In other words, if we look at the average damage we get for a single Focus Point from Flurry of Blows, it's essentially that same 5.75 damage we calculated earlier for a single attack. If we halve the damage of the Elemental Burst to represent its "damage per Focus Point," we find that it's the same exact ratio as what we had before - Elemental Burst comes close to doing the same damage per FP, but not quite, and so as soon as we have a second thing to hit with it, it becomes more efficient.

But: what about at level 10?

At level 10, our Flurry of Blows now lets us do three unarmed strikes over the free single attack, rather than two. That means that each Focus Point is granting us two additional attacks.

If we made some assumptions about things being proportionately similar damage, we might say that you then need to be hitting four creatures. But let's look at some new assumptions:

Let's say at this point that we're fighting things with higher ACs and maybe higher Dex save modifiers.

We'll say we're fighting things with ACs of 17, and they've got +4s to Dex saves.

We'll say we took an ASI at level 8, so we're now at 20 Dex, but still at 16 Wis. Our PB has gone up to 4 now. So, we have a +9 to hit, and our saving throw DC is 15.

Now, at level 10, our martial arts die is still a d8, but only for this level. So, just for the hell of it, let's look at level 11 instead, at which point we'll have d10s.

Attacking with Flurry of Blows, our Focus Point buys us two additional attacks, each of which deals 1d10+5, or 11.5 damage on average, adding 5.5 on a crit.

With a +9 to hit and against an AC of 17, we're going to hit on a roll of 8 or higher, which is actually the same hit chance we had before (I hadn't intended that consciously, but here we are).

So, per attack, we're going to do 11.5x65% plus 5.5x5%, giving us 7.475 + .275, which comes out to 7.75 damage per attack.

However, because we're getting two of these per Focus Point spent, we're going to double it to 15.5.

Our Elemental Burst is now doing 3d10, which is an average of 16.5 damage on a failed save, and half that, or 8.25, on a success. Our monsters are now going to save on a roll of 11 or higher, meaning a 50% fail/success chance. Thus, we essentially take the average of the two, or 4.125 plus 8.25, giving us an average damage of 12.375 damage against a single target.

However, because we're spending 2 focus points for our elemental burst, we once again have to halve this damage to represent its damage "per focus point spent," meaning it's 6.1875.

Thus, simply hitting two targets with this won't be as efficient a use of your focus points as using Flurry of Blows. But if you can get a third target in there, it's actually going to wind up doing more damage overall.

    Caveats:

This is all very abstract. For one thing, we're making big assumptions about AC and dex save bonuses that might not bear out. One of the benefits of Elemental Burst is that it does guaranteed damage, whereas you could totally whiff on a Flurry of Blows or Attack Action.

The other big consideration is what requires damage here and now. The benefit of AoE damage is the way you multiply the damage across each target. But as powerful as that is, focus-fire can often be a more important consideration in a fight - the sooner you take down one monster, the less damage your party will wind up taking overall. And sometimes, you'll want to prioritize certain monsters. Maybe there's a powerful "controller"-type monster that can stun or charm or otherwise take one of your allies out of the fight. That monster probably needs to go down quickly, while the minions that make a couple melee attacks can be worried about later.

These sorts of calculations always kind of make an assumption that what's most important is the amount of damage you can put out, rather than how much damage you actually need. Consider Disintegrate versus Finger of Death. The former does more damage (75 on average versus 61.5) but if a monster dodges your Disintegrate, you get nothing for that 6th level spell, whereas a monster who saves against Finger of Death is still going to probably take about 30 damage. If your foe is sitting at 50 HP, it's probably going to die on a failed save to either spell.

At its maximum, Elemental Burst is going to do 3d12 damage, or 19.5 on average. At level 17 and higher, it's unlikely that that alone will take out even the weakest minions (unless your DM is a masochist who wants to roll attacks for the 90 zombies or skeletons that would be required to challenge just one 17th level character, according to the DMG's encounter-building guidance,) but on the other hand, you could soften up a big group that might then take the Sorcerer's Fireballs and the Paladin's Destructive Waves. If it means that the Fighter or Barbarian, or you, the Monk, only need three attacks instead of five to take down one of these minions, you're potentially speeding up the fight a lot.

But yeah, anyway, I think generally speaking you can use this on two or more monsters, and then maybe wait to be able to hit three after you get to level 10.

Why I'm Considering Going Back to XP Leveling in My D&D Campaigns

 I've been running my Ravnica game for five years now, which is honestly crazy. We had two home games before the Covid pandemic forced us to go remote, and while vaccines have allowed us to play in-person again, this game has remained primarily online just because I've got people living all over LA County (and one player in Orange County).

At this point, the party has spent over a year at level 17 - in fact, they hit 17 right at the end of 2023. Now, in terms of plot points and story, this has been justified. But it has been a minute since they powered up.

At this point, we're really only a couple sessions away from finishing the current arc and having them all hit level 18 (if it's one combat encounter per session, we're talking four-ish) but I, frankly, am feeling a bit guilty that they've been stuck at this level for so damn long.

Now, I overloaded this campaign with goals the party would need to complete. Set in Ravnica, I built it around a conspiracy by famous MTG bad guys, the Phyrexians, with a "Praetor" seeking to infect the plane of Ravnica hidden in each guild. The final one is the Praetor in House Dimir, who is a bit different, being an Elder Brain from the primary D&D multiverse who is hoping to use Phyrexian technology to further the Ilithids' "Grand Design."

Even what I have left in the campaign is pretty substantial - level 18 is going to see them traveling different Magic the Gathering planes to piece together the fragments of the Golgothian Sylex, which the ancient planeswalker Urza used to defeat his Phyrexian-corrupted brother Mishra long ago. Level 19 is going to be a delve through the nine layers of New Phyrexia (some taking longer than others - the Bleak Facade is basically going to be one combat encounter and then a big hole down to the next layer). And then, level 20 is where they get connected to the D&D multiverse and spells like Plane Shift, Astral Projection, and such finally become fair game, which will culminate in a climactic fight against Elesh Norn at the massive portal connecting Ravnica and Sigil, which will remain a canonical thing in my future campaigns (even if I'm unlikely to spend much time in the Magic multiverse in future campaigns).

This is all well and good.

The campaign has been milestone-based, which has given me a lot of control over the pacing of the campaign. It's also why a 5-year campaign allowed players to honestly hit level 10 quite early and then spend far, far longer in tier 3, and of course will spend nearly a year and a half at level 17 (my poor Storm Sorcerers are champing at the bit for their 60 foot flying speed).

My original campaign was XP-based, and I remember feeling somewhat frustrated at the slow rate of leveling in that one. But I think a big part of that was that my combat encounters were undertuned. D&D 2014, for one thing, was balanced around dungeon-crawls, where a party would have many encounters each day. And as such, a single encounter being kind of trivial, like when I had them fight a single Spectator at level 3 that died to just two turns by the Fighter and Paladin before it could act, make sense in the context of a dungeon that keeps sapping their resources, but is not as well tuned for big, climactic fights.

The new rules, notably, don't actually tell you how many encounters a party can expect in a single day - which I think is a flaw, to be clear - but it does suggest that, with the encounter building guidance, we're talking about fewer, bigger fights.

And that also means that each fight is going to award more XP.

The very first session I ran, the party (3 players at the time) fought first two Kobolds and an Octopus (the latter of whom they befriended and kept as a pet) and then a second fight against a single Thug - none of my monsters even got a turn.

Today, even if both were designed as low-difficult encounters (which they sure as hell were, and were even supposed to be) we'd be looking at 6 Kobolds in that first fight and then maybe a Tough (the new equivalent of a Thug) and two Bandits. So, we'd be going from a total between both encounters of 160 xp to 300 xp, nearly doubling it. And, I bet those would have been more interesting fights as well.

Sure, you'd need four more low-difficulty encounters to level up a party from 1 to 2, but using the old guidance, it would have taken even longer.

At the very earliest levels, it's easy to feel a bit impatient to level up. At high levels, it's not quite as urgent. One reason I don't feel as bad as I might otherwise feel for keeping my party at level 17 for over a year is that they're in tier 4 - they have their highest-level spells (unless our Artificer decides to suddenly jump ship and multiclass into Wizard for some reason) and most of their cool abilities.

But I really do feel like the amount of crazy stuff they've accomplished and the fights they've had means that they really ought to be more powerful than they are now. Just looking at the current dungeon they're in, we're talking about six low-difficult encounters and one high-difficulty encounter (along with a couple optional moderate-difficulty ones, one of which they did and another they turned into a social encounter). Per player, that's 4,500 per low-difficulty encounter and 11,700 for the high-difficulty encounter, so that's 38,700 xp per player for just the mandatory encounters in that dungeon. The xp required to go from 17 to 18 is 40,000, so just the single moderate encounter they've done in this dungeon alone would give them more than enough. And to be clear, this is the fourth major chapter of what they've actually done this level.

So: one thing I intend to do in future campaigns is to narrow the focus a lot more. Ten major villains, none of whom are even the campaign's final boss, is a little insane (Matt Mercer expressed a similar sentiment about having had five major ancient dragons for Vox Machina to fight, and I've doubled that!)

But I also think, on a certain level, leveling up should feel like the players' accomplishment. If the big bad is underpowered compared to them because they've leveled up higher than I had originally planned, that might just be the reward they reap.

Of course, one of the issues that arises with this is that it incentivizes a certain kind of play. Awarding XP from defeating monsters is very straightforward, but sessions that are much more RP-focused have a less clear reward structure. You might say that "quest rewards" can be used, but there's less explicit guidance here. If the party meets with the local King and convinces him to send troops to guard the excavation site of that ancient temple, do you get the XP value of the king and his guard? It's tough because such an accomplishment could hinge on a single good Persuasion check - and is that really as much of an accomplishment as taking down some tough monster?

Milestone leveling is certainly a way to make sure that leveling up feels like a major event. But I do think there's something kind of "honest" about XP.

I've been rebuilding the adventure that I had just started when my original campaign fell apart, and I'm going to try and see if I can get some of the players from said campaign to jump into it (along with some of my more recent players, who could join in). Of course, there's also a scheduling challenge - my Ravnica game is the one I run each week, and I've got two other campaigns that I play in. Still, it would be really cool. And it would be a good way for me to feel out the pacing going back to XP.

Monster Stats: The Little Guys

 While I'm generally a big fan of the revisions that have come with the new core rulebooks, there is maybe one omission from the new DMG that bothers me the most: the loss of the "quick monster stats" table.

In the old DMG, this section of the DM's Workshop chapter has been invaluable in aiding in the creation of brand-new monsters from scratch. The new DMG has some idea for customizing monsters, but it really seems almost to discourage actually creating new creatures wholecloth.

Let's talk about this on a philosophical level:

I've watched a lot of Matt Colville's D&D videos on YouTube, and find his insights interesting enough that I do genuinely want to try out his company's upcoming fantasy TTRPG, Draw Steel, amidst a sea of other D&D competitors coming out.

While I don't always agree with his takes on how a game like this should be played, I do think he makes a good point when talking about the way that corporations like to control their IPs. D&D is an inherently creative game - the game encourages you to come up with your own character, and for DMs to come up with their own stories in which those characters will struggle and strive.

But corporations really like to have control of a narrative. They would much rather that you play in their spaces. In video games, this is basically inherent, except when you get into the world of modding, but in TTRPGs, the analogue nature of the game means that there's not a lot of control over what the game really should be.

The designers of D&D get it, I'm sure, because you couldn't work on a game like this without loving it for its grand potential, but I think that the larger company really likes the idea that these rules are there to get you to play through their published adventures.

In particular, I think the Spelljammer and Planescape box sets didn't really give players and DMs what they really wanted out of it (and it hurts me to say this, because I think that the Planescape book did actually have some very cool stuff in it. The Spelljammer one... well... Plasmoids and Thri-kreen are cool?) Overall, though, these campaign setting products felt like they were built less around opening up a broad new world for DMs to create in than they were about setting up a single adventure for a party to play through and then move on to the next thing.

This is in stark contrast with my favorite 5E product, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which was entirely about "here's how to make this your own."

So, the absence of this "here's how to build a monster from scratch" guidance not only disappointed me, but made me worry a bit about the direction the publishers are taking the game, despite my enthusiasm for how things have been revised and updated (though I'll also say, we got a revised Bladesinger already. Maybe focus on the brand new stuff).

Which brings me to my purpose here.

The Quick Monster Stats table in the 2014 DMG has helped me create lots of fun and challenging monsters. I had been hoping that we'd get an updated version (that, if nothing else, didn't cap Armor Class at 19 - it's patently absurd to suggest that a CR 28 monster would have an AC under 20) but we got no such thing. And so... I decided to build it up myself.

The way the old one worked was this:

There were 34 rows, from CR 0 to CR 30, showing what an average monster of each CR should have when it came to Attack Bonuses, average damage (if all attacks/abilities hit), saving throw DCs, AC, and Effective HP.

The latter of these is itself somewhat complicated, as various coefficients are applied to the actual total HP if the creature has resistances or immunities, but the coefficients change depending on the creature's target CR.

You can just use these to build your monster around, but if you want a tanky creature that doesn't deal as much damage or a glass cannon, you ultimately want to calculate the Offensive CR and the Defensive CR (OCR and DCR) for each and try to get their average to hit your target. And how do you get those? Well, you average the CR of their attack bonus (or save DC if they use abilities that call for those more) with their damage output (also accounting for AoE attacks by assuming they'll hit two targets when calculating the damage output) to get their OCR, and then averaging the CR of their AC and EHP (effective HP) to get their DCR, and then averaging both.

In other words, you have some sliders here to really customize your monster. Let's say you want to build a "Spike Devil" whose role is to strike down heavily armored foes, you might lower its damage output to raise its attack bonus.

All of this gets nuanced and complicated - attacks that inflict a condition will require you to lower their overall damage to keep the same CR value.

But with the redesigns of classic monsters, what are those values?

Well, I'm going to take the new Monster Manual and see if I can find out.

For this post (and we'll see if we do more of these) I'm going to start with the creatures of CR 1/8. I'm skipping CR 0 creatures largely because they're designed to be trivial even to first-level adventurers, often only doing 1 damage on a hit and having 1 HP. Depending on how laborious such a process is, I might continue on to 1/4 and 1/2 monsters in this post, but I'm going to try to keep this manageable.

Because we're basing this off the revised rulebooks, we only have one truly, fully up-to-date source, which is the Monster Manual.

Let's talk methodology: to start off with CR 1/8 monsters, we're going to take their average damage (assuming everything hits/isn't saved against,) their average attack bonus, their average AC, and their average HP, unless they have resistances or immunities. Notably, there is a potential to skew things here if a particular CR has, for example, more glass cannons versus more tanks, but we'll go in with the potentially naive assumption that each selection of creatures at every CR (especially the low ones) has a broad enough selection to give us a healthy mix. There are also passive benefits like a Kobold's Pack Tactics that could skew things - potentially making their attack bonus effectively higher - but we're going to ignore it (perhaps at our peril).

We'll list the values here before finding averages to let you play along at home:

    Bandit:

Damage: 4.5, Attack: +3, AC 12, HP 11

    Blood Hawk

Damage: 5 (maybe skewing closer to 6, but we'll say this for now), Attack: +4, AC 12, HP 7

    Camel:

Damage: 4, Attack: +4, AC 10, HP 17

    Cultist:

Damage 4, Attack +3, AC 12, HP 9

    Flumph:

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7 (with a vulnerability)

    Flying Snake:

Damage: 6, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 5

    Giant Crab:

Damage 4 (with condition), Attack +3, AC 15, HP 13

    Giant Rat:

Damage: 5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 7

    Giant Weasel

Damage: 5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 9

    Goblin Minion

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7

    Guard

Damage: 4, Attack +3, AC 16, HP 11

    Kobold Warrior

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 7

    Manes

Damage: 5, Attack +2, AC 9, HP 9

    Mastiff

Damage: 4 (with condition), Attack +3, AC 12, HP 5

    Merfolk Skirmisher

Damage: 5 (with condition), Attack +2, AC 11, HP 11

    Modron Monodrone

Damage: 6, Attack +4, AC 15, HP 5

    Mule

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 10, HP 11

    Noble

Damage: 5, Attack +3, AC 15 (with a reaction to make it 17, technically), HP 9

    Pony

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 10, HP 11

    Slaad Tadpole

Damage: 5, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7 (5 damage resistances)

    Stirge

Damage: 5.5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 5

    Twig Blight

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 7 (vulnerability)

    Venomous Snake

Damage: 7, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 5

    Warrior Infantry

Damage: 4, Attack +3, AC 13, HP 9

    Now, we're going to take averages on all of these (for creatures with different attacks that do different damage, I found the average for them) with the exception of damaging attacks that impose a condition (I've included a 10-foot slow as a condition,) because we want to learn what penalty we should impose if we add a condition to an attack. Honestly, we should maybe do the same for creatures with Pack Tactics. Hopefully this will get us reasonable values for what a CR 1/8 creature ought to be doing.

    Our sample size is 24 stat blocks. 3 have attacks that impose a condition.

Damage: The average damage here without conditions comes to about 4.7, which we will round up to 5. Our three CR 1/8 creatures that do impose a condition deal an average of 4.3, which we'll round down to 4. Does that mean we need to subtract 20% of the damage to justify the condition? We'll start using that for now, but because damage is so low at this CR, we might be dealing with a "pixelation" problem, where the actual penalty is not quite that amount. Still, we'll stick with 5 as our main number.

Attack: Here I got 3.7, or 4 on average. Again, this might effectively skew higher given the existence of things like Pack Tactics, but likely sticking around 4, rounded off.

AC: Here, I got 12.5, which we'll round up to 13. (I did initially get a lower number, so check my work, because the first time I think I entered fewer than 24 values when calculating the average).

HP: We're going to ignore the ones with resistances, immunities to damage types, and vulnerabilities to try to get a sense for how this might skew things, which again leaves 21 stat blocks to average. This comes to 8.7, rounded to 9. Two of these creatures have vulnerabilities, with an average HP for them of 7 (both have 7), which is, ironically, lower than the average for those without. The one with five different resistances has 7 as well. Not really enough of a sample size to see how these affect things.

However, let's say, for the sake of argument, that the average CR 1/8 creature should have the following stats:

+4 to hit, deal 5 damage on a hit, have an AC of 13, and 9 HP.

And let's compare that with some random choices. In theory, if a creature has a high AC and/or HP, they should have a lower attack bonus and damage.

Looking at the Guard, their attack bonus is +3 and their damage is only 4, both below average, if only by a little. They have I think the highest AC of all 1/8 creatures, with a 16, and 11 HP, which is a bit higher than average. So, while we don't know if this is quite balanced, it at least seems to fit with a lower OCR balanced by a higher DCR (appropriate for an NPC who is there to defend and endure).

Let's contrast this with a Goblin Minion - a stealthy skirmisher who is there to strike fast and get away. Their attack bonus is average, and their damage is actually a bit low at 4. Their AC and HP are both also lower than the average. So, what gives? Well, a Goblin Minion does have the Nimble Escape bonus action. Does this make up for being decidedly below-average on most of its primary measures?

As a last bit, let's talk about the Manes - a creature that should have zero sense of self preservation, as it's a gruesome demon who just wants to kill. I realize I messed up and forgot to account for its three typical demonic damage resistances (cold, fire, lighting) and its immunity to poison.  Despite the fact that it has all these ways to ignore or mitigate damage, it has the average HP of 9. However, its AC is significantly lower, requiring only a 9 to hit (meaning a brand-new character with a +5 to hit is going to do so 80% of the time). Its attack does average damage but only has a +2 to hit. In other words, the creature is below-average on AC and attack bonus, but can be a problem for spellcasters (a tier 1 Fire Bolt cannot take one of these down on its own, as the damage would cap out at 5, though a Monk or dual-wielder at level 1 would probably be able to take one down pretty easily if they're doing 1d6+3 on both hits, the average damage of which would be 13).

The truth of all this is that there are a lot of moving parts. A creature having a flying speed, for example, can effectively make it much harder to hit, as melee-focused characters will have a much harder time attacking it, often doing suboptimal damage because they've switched from a hefty Greataxe to a Javelin or the like. And a creature with an aura that charms people nearby is also effectively harder to hurt.

Still, even if a table like 2014's monster stats is never going to be able to handle all those nuances, surely the designers at WotC have some formulas for creating their creatures. This is something that they need to make available to customers - both for those of us who like homebrewing things (no TTRPG publisher is going to make my New Weird/Urban Fantasy stuff quite to my specifications) but also for those 3rd party publishers who create content for their game. D&D Beyond has become a marketplace for 3rd party materials, which I think is fantastic, but help out those creators to keep things in line with D&D's design philosophies!