The Effect of Magical Ammo on Ranged Martial Builds

 D&D's 5.5 edition for the most part empowered player characters, but also made tougher monsters (and tougher combat encounter balancing,) to the point where I'm not actually sure if the game is "easier" or "harder" than it was.

But I think one archetype that truly got a nerf was ranged weapon users. In 5.0, Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter were basically the equivalents of one another for melee and ranged builds, respectively. Each allowed you to, on each attack, choose to take a -5 penalty to your attack rolls in order to get a +10 bonus to your damage. In the vast majority of cases, this wound up giving you more damage on average, and I'd argue was even more appealing to Rangers and Fighters that picked up the Archery fighting style, as you'd already have a higher-than-usual chance to hit anyway.

Now, I don't think you can't build a ranged-weapon-focused character with 5.5 rules, but it requires taking some odd paths. Weirdly, Great Weapon Master actually works pretty well if you use a Longbow or Heavy Crossbow, which are the only two ranged weapons with the Heavy property. (It feels frustrating that Muskets don't have this,) but the feat is awkward because it buffs Strength, a stat you're not going to be worried much about if you are focusing on ranged weapons, and its Hew feature won't work with ranged attacks.

Generally, when I go into this math-heavy theory-crafting, I tend to assume that we don't have any magic items, unless it's about an Artificer (whose easy access to magic items is a class feature - which is honestly a bit tricky as a bit of design because the class becomes far more powerful the stingier a DM is with magic items).

But realistically, most campaigns I play in have plenty of magic items, and it's basically an assumption that by level 5 or 6, you should at least have a +1 weapon.

+X weapons do flatten out the difference between weapon types a bit - if you have +4 to Strength and are comparing a Longbow and a Glaive, you're looking at 1d8+4 versus 1d10+4, which is 8.5 average versus 9.5 average, or a difference of about 12%. But if you have +3 versions of those weapons, it's now 11.5 versus 12.5, which is a difference of about 9%.

Ranged weapons tend to have lower damage dice than melee weapons, but that difference becomes less meaningful the more flat damage you add to both.

The thing is, ranged weapon users actually can, potentially, double-dip with these +X bonuses, because not only can you get a +3 Longbow, you can also fire +3 Arrows with that bow, which means that overall, you're getting a +6 bonus to both attack and damage rolls.

And I think that starts to make a pretty significant difference, especially because it's affecting both attacks and damage.

If we took some character with no class features other than martial weapon proficiency and had them make attacks against the Tarrasque (an AC of 25,) someone using a +3 Greatsword who had a +5 to Strength and +6 PB would be hitting on a roll of 11 or higher, and so they'd hit 50% of the time, with a 5% chance to do an extra 2d6 with a crit. So, the normal damage of 2d6+8 (or 15) gets cut in half to 7.5, and then we add in that 5% of doing 7 more to give us an extra .35, so it's doing 7.85.

Our ranged character with a +3 Longbow and +3 Arrows is going to hit for 1d8+11, or 15.5 on average, but they're also getting a +17 to hit, so they only need to roll an 8 or higher, meaning a 65% hit chance. So, 15.5x65% is 9.75, with a 5% chance to get an extra 4.5, so toss in .225, meaning they do an average of 9.975.

Obviously, this is a bit of a vacuum. Maybe our melee person has Great Weapon Master, which adds 6 damage to each of their hits. So, that means the average goes up by 3, giving them 10.85 average damage. They're now on top.

But if our ranged character has the Archery fighting style, they now actually have a +19 to hit, so they only need to roll a 6 or higher, meaning an additional 10% of that hit damage to their average, bringing them up to 10.95, meaning they're now on top, if only by a little bit.

The rub, here, though, is that magical ammunition is not something I see a lot of DMs giving out, and I think there's a good reason for that: players are often very hesitant to use consumable magic items. It's a classic problem: if something isn't easy to replenish, players won't want to use it, saving it for when its impact is going to be biggest, but that can also lead them to actually forget they have it when they're, say, fighting the Tarrasque.

There isn't an item like "+X Quiver of Infinite Arrows," which would just allow you to count on always having such ammo available to you - though maybe there should be.

I think it's actually ideal for ranged characters to be somewhat less powerful than melee characters simply because you're not taking as big of a risk if you can fight from 120 feet away. I think the design problem in D&D with that, though, is that in a game where most classes are spellcasters, there's none of that downside if you're 120 feet away and tossing fireballs and hypnotic patterns.

Star Wars Could Give Us the Science Fantasy D&D Spelljammer Failed To

 My relationship with Star Wars is kind of funny:

When I was a kid, we were the only family I knew of that had a Laser Disc player. Laser Discs, for those of you too young to remember (though plenty of people my age might have never encountered one) were a video format that were an alternative to VHS, and basically consisted of vinyl-record-sized optical discs. This pre-dated DVDs, of course, and became totally obsolete once that technology caught on, but the point is, it was higher-quality than VHS (which was honestly kind of crap, and worse than Betamax, a different magnetic tape format that only failed to catch on because Sony made it proprietary to their own players, a mistake they learned from and thus made BluRay open source).

Anyway, that was the format on which my dad got the original Star Wars trilogy. There were several versions that came out - I think the remastered VHS set came out after these ones (the last format, I believe, before the Special Editions came out).

While I was terrified of the series after seeing the scene where the dancing girl was dumped into the Rancor pit from Return of the Jedi (and in my childlike imagination, I exaggerated the details of that scene, thinking that her liquified remains were bubbling up from the vent in the floor - something that categorically is not in any version of the movie) upon seeing it when I was maybe 6, I eventually watched the movies in full when I was maybe 9, and I became obsessed.

As I've probably written about before, I spent at least several days (I remember it being months, though I suspect it wasn't actually sustained for that long) watching and re-watching the trilogy in order, two movies per day.

I had already been a big Star Trek the Next Generation fan, growing up with that show, and I was nuts about cool spaceships (I actually remember finding Luke's confrontation with the Emperor and Vader at the climax of Jedi tedious, as I wanted to get back to the giant space battle - a very 9-year-old take on it).

Anyway, the special editions, which were released in theaters, were a big event that I went to see with my friends, and then, a few years later (though at that age, it felt like a big gap,) the Prequels came out. And... well... that was where my love of the series took a hit.

I know that there are younger Millennials and Gen Zers (and I guess even some older Millennials like me) who adore the prequels and consider it an indispensable part of the saga, but while I tried to like them at the time they came out, they just didn't have the same magic. Admittedly, I haven't re-watched them in decades, but I guess having the Lord of the Rings movies come out around the same time, I kind of moved on.

As a franchise, Star Wars is truly a mixed bag, and I think Disney's strategy of expanding it out into more and more properties using the MCU model hasn't served it very well - though there are some works within the Disney era that are quite remarkable (I have still not seen the second season of Andor, but I thought the first was incredible. I also thought the first season of The Mandalorian was cool, but the series started to suffer from being used as a platform for backdoor pilots).

Obviously, there's also the debacle of the sequel trilogy, which started out promising (while Force Awakens tread a lot of familiar territory, I liked the new characters it introduced) and its polarizing middle chapter, the Last Jedi, made some bold and interesting choices, the Rise of Skywalker basically seemed designed to please absolutely no one and kind of ruined the whole endeavor retroactively. (I don't think J. J. Abrams is interested in doing anything original, as I first learned after Star Trek Into Darkness.)

Now, I might be being kind of harsh to the Disney era of Star Wars. After all, long before the Mouse got their hands on Lucasfilm, there was a vast Expanded Universe that got retconned into its convenient "Legends" box (from which the Disney canon has sometimes plucked elements like Admiral Thrawn but not, like, Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo). It's always been a world that people have wanted to play in, to flesh out.

Naturally, it's also been the setting for other TTRPGs, like Edge of Empire. So it's honestly not strange to see it as a property to be adapted for D&D. Indeed, D&D and Star Wars got their starts around the same time (D&D coming out three years before Star Wars).

But I think there's another element to Star Wars that makes it an exciting prospect for use with D&D: it is the definitive science-fantasy setting.

Now, yeah, at least in the movies, the only real "magic" of the Star Wars universe is the Force, and the only way we see that magic expressed is through the vaguely-defined powers of the Jedi and Sith, both of whom I'd argue are, well, closest to the Paladin class in D&D (I think that Darth Vader is the most iconic Death Knight in pop culture. Yes, he's not technically undead, but he's sustained by cybernetics and the Dark Side of the Force, which... is kind of close enough. And then, he's got a mask that looks like a skull and is a former champion of goodness who fell to darkness for selfish reasons... I mean, you see it, right?)

But if the World of Warcraft book is as thorough and innovative as it sounds from what I've heard in interviews, it stands to reason that the Star Wars book will also be pretty ambitious in playing with the 5E chassis to create something that works for its setting.

Indeed, I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out that by partnering with bigger companies like Blizzard and freaking Disney, the books have higher budgets than what WotC can produce on their own, and thus they might have more resources to pump into them, which could, potentially, allow them to go bigger.

Now, the World of Warcraft book is going to have a fairly easy time, given that WoW already has Paladins, Druids, Rogues, Monks, and Warlocks, and then has pretty 1:1 class equivalents like Priests, Hunters, and Mages. Even if there's no Bards in WoW, it's not like they wouldn't fit there (indeed, the Windrunner sisters' younger brother Lirath is said to have been a gifted musician, and I wouldn't be shocked if he had had some kind of magical ability with his music).

I think we could probably squeeze Fighters, Rogues, and Paladins (as Jedi/Sith) into the Warcraft setting, and maybe even broaden out the Jedi/Sith with stuff like "Jedi Knights" versus "Jedi Consular," where the Knights are more up-front melee characters and Consulars use their force powers more than their lightsabers (I think the Sith have different names, but equivalent classes in The Old Republic MMO). But, like, how do we use Druids?

I know that SW5E, the fan-made free Star Wars 5E hack, just presents and entirely separate roster of classes, some of which are more like altered versions of existing D&D classes. But you could imagine that in a true Star Wars D&D campaign, you might want to stick only to the options that are strictly for that setting.

That being said, what I'm really excited for is the opportunity to have true Science Fantasy stuff for D&D.

Spelljammer, in fairness, never really promised that. The concept was always "tall ships sailing across the stars," and while I do think there's a place for that whimsical, colorful notion, to me, the most compelling vision of space travel is one that aligns with that used future aesthetic of Star Wars.

Basically, I want my space ships to be enclosed and air-tight, but I'm fine with artificial gravity and faster-than-light travel (don't get me wrong, I loved The Expanse, but even that story eventually starts dealing with alien technology that breaks the hard-sci-fi rules it mostly restricts itself to.)

Vehicle combat in D&D is always a little tough: having a different kind of battle system for something that probably isn't going to be as central to the game as your normal battle system can, at one extreme, feel disconnected and undercooked, and at the other extreme, get in the way of the the characters' individual stories. (Another challenge is that if the whole party is in the same spaceship, that ship being destroyed means a TPK, so getting the stakes right is also tough).

But I think this would be a really good opportunity to come up with some good starship combat systems. I know that Legends of Avantris is working on that with Neon Odyssey (one solution is that the party might have multiple ships, which is honestly not unlike Luke flying around in his X-Wing while the rest of them are in the Millennium Falcon - they don't actually fly into battle that way, but you get the idea).

Beyond that, I also think that there's some fun to be had in using futuristic weapons. I'm 100% certain there will be Lightsabers in the Star Wars book. Might they just be a different weapon type, like Tridents or Whips? And might we also see Blasters, Bowcasters, and such?

Interestingly, there is, actually, armor in Star Wars, which you tend to see less of in modern/futuristic genres. That said, Jedi, despite being pretty close to Paladins as a class, are usually unarmored (I think there's an argument that they're also kind of Monks, except that they fight with a weapon. Maybe that's just the East Asian influence on the George Lucas' worldbuilding. Did you know that he originally wanted Toshiro Mifune for Obi-Wan?)

I honestly think that this is one of the weird challenges of adapting D&D to genres outside of medieval fantasy, because medieval armor is such a big part of the look of the game and how characters are imagined. (I like that in Dimension 20's Unsleeping City, they rationalized Ricky Matsui's "plate armor" as just being so hot that A: people had a hard time attacking him and B: he'd get disadvantage on Stealth checks because he drew attention because of how attractive he was.)

But yes, while I've gotten into the weeds on a lot of issues, I think we can acknowledge that, for the past 49 years, Star Wars has basically defined what space-faring sci fi is expected to look and feel like. Any space opera naturally invites comparisons to Star Wars. So, if this book doesn't get D&D to give us that quintessential sci-fi feeling, I don't know what will.

Can We Do Souls-Like D&D?

 Starting really with Demon's Souls back in 2009, the Souls-like genre was popularized primarily with the success of 2011's Dark Souls, a spiritual sequel that featured some of the most impressive puzzle-box level design and deep, deep lore that left tons up to interpretation.

While fairly niche at first, the genre grew in popularity, exploding with the massively ambitious and massively massive Open World take on the genre with FromSoft's Elden Ring in 2022. It's influential enough that other studios have either borrowed elements of the genre or just flat-out made their own that conform with basically all the defining traits of the genre.

The games have been a big influence outside of video games, and Critical Role's Matthew Mercer has cited the games as among his favorite. Daggerheart's Age of Umbra campaign frame was designed to try to capture the dark, apocalyptic feeling of these games.

But can a TTRPG really capture the vibes of a Souls-like?

I guess to approach that question, we need to define those vibes.

The gameplay mechanics of a Souls-like won't translate perfectly to a system like D&D. Ironically, the "anti-attrition" Draw Steel arguably has the best equivalent of the Souls-like healing system with its Recoveries.

Souls-likes are famed for their punishing difficulty, and while I do think that's a near-universal aspect of the games, I don't actually think it needs to be a defining one. What nearly every Souls-like game has, though, is an in-universe explanation for how you can keep playing after you die. The difficulty is basically accounted for within the game itself, and that means that your multiple attempts to get through a difficult section or boss are actually canonical.

In a strange way, this makes it more forgiving than D&D, where player character deaths can only be reversed using expensive magic (and, interestingly enough, banning resurrection has been a popular element in certain Actual Play campaigns, such as Critical Role's Campaign 4, as well as Dimension 20's A Crown of Candy (whose dire stakes and seriousness is part of the joke, because the PCs are all candy people in a world of people who are all some kind of food-person, basically Game of Thrones meets Candy Land).

How you want to approach this element of the game is open for debate: you might lean into TTRPGs' standard difficulties and make death rare, but then make it permanent. Alternatively, you might come up with a mechanic where death is frequent, but impermanent.

I think the latter is certainly more faithful to the genre, but you need to make death feel punishing in some way.

Ironically, Souls-likes make death punishing by actually making it less punishing that it would be in a traditional game. Here's what I mean:

In a classic video game, if you die halfway through a level (assuming there aren't checkpoints in that level,) you start over and all that progress us undone. In a Souls-like, the XP/Currency you've collected (which has a different name in most of its games, though it's Souls in Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls trilogy, so we'll call it that) is left near where you died. You have one chance to collect the dropped souls, but if you die on the way there, they're lost forever (I think Lies of P actually has you only lose part of them, and you can get upgrades to lose less). Even though this is arguably more forgiving, it creates a tension, because dying earlier in that level than you did previously carries a greater potential for loss.

Here's the thing, though: I don't think the kind of repetitive combat you have in Souls-likes works as well in D&D. When combat with an enemy or group of enemies might last four seconds, it's not that bad to have to fight something over and over again. But if your party needs to fight the same damned group of stone golems over and over, it's going to feel a bit tedious.

I will say that I think it could be fun to build a full game system inspired by Souls-likes, where there aren't strict classes, and instead you can build around certain stats and even certain mixes of stats (my best Elden Ring character is heavy on both Strength and Faith, for example, with weapons that scale with both).

But assuming we're using D&D as a system, I think we need to approach combat design, and adventure design in general, with D&D in mind.

That, then, leaves us the world building and tone.

I think this also offers a lot of challenges.

Again, I think you could build a Souls-like that doesn't work this way (I'm curious how One Crab's Treasure works, which seems tonally very different,) but generally, a Souls-like has the following story elements:

It's set in a world that has undergone some kind of apocalyptic catastrophe, with only bare vestiges of the civilizations that previously existed.

Our protagonist (and the player) is dropped into the world with very little in the way of context, given some vague mission whose significance isn't immediately clear.

Characters have very mysterious motivations, and use language and jargon that we need to piece together in order to glean the true meaning (and some of that stuff will never be fully explained. What the hell is Paleblood, anyway?)

There's barely any safety to be had - often we have some small hub where friendly NPCs gather after we find them in the world, but the degree to which those places are truly safe is debatable.

Most NPCs have side quests associated with them, which tend to end tragically.

They tend to have multiple endings, but the relative "goodness" or "badness" of those endings is deeply uncertain. (Though I'll certainly say I think the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending for Elden Ring is a bad ending, and I think Lies of P's Rise of P ending feels about as good as you could hope for).

Vagueness, though, needs to have something beneath it. While I'm not sure that FromSoft always has a strictly canonical interpretation for some of its story aspects (I'm half-convinced that they deliberately provide evidence for Marika and Radagon having originally been separate people and also evidence that Radagon was always an aspect of her, where there) I do think it's important that any weird details have some thought behind them.

This is, also, a very tricky thing to do in D&D, because unlike a video game protagonist who will only say things that are pre-programmed, if an NPC speaks in vague riddles, there's nothing preventing your players from, you know, asking follow-up questions.

One thing I think you can do is limit your cast of friendly NPCs to a small few. There aren't going to be multiple towns where you can buy weapons and armor; there's one friendly Blacksmith.

I actually think that a more sandbox-like approach could actually work quite well for the genre. This could let you place important progression materials in out-of-the-way places, so perhaps your Blacksmith NPC needs a magical grinding wheel of some sort to upgrade weapons to +1, which could motivate the players to travel to some "Altar of the Mining God" that is its own dungeon. (Rather than just dropping magic items, I might instead create upgrade materials that the players can collect.)

Another challenge here is that I think that a big part of the feel of a Souls-like is the sense of loneliness - though to be fair, that's not strictly the case all the time. Since Dark Souls at least (not sure if Demon's Souls did,) there have been online multiplayer elements to the games. Here, we must bow to the mechanics of D&D, which is built very much to be a co-op game.

Another adjustment I think you'll need to make is that D&D is a game where players should have multiple ways to deal with problems. In Bloodborne, you can't just talk to the wandering beast-hunters and explain to them that you're not a threat to them, no infected with the Curse of Beasts. But in D&D, there should be opportunities to resolve things outside of combat. This requires a more complex approach to quest design.

Primarily, I think the key here is tone - a surreal world, with lots of horror elements (particularly Dark Fantasy,) and a sense that defeating the villains is only half the challenge, while the other half is figuring out what, exactly, is going on, and what consequences our actions will have.

Lords of the Fallen

 Having hit a point in Cyberpunk 2077 where I'm high enough level and kitted out with such advanced Chrome that basically no fight is really a challenge anymore, and with what I imagine are a bunch of different bummer endings to choose from (I assume,) I found my attention wandering.

A couple months ago, Lords of the Fallen was one of the free PS+ games, and I decided to uninstall the absurdly enormous Diablo IV (it was over a hundred GB) to make room for it.

I've only played one non-FromSoft Souls-like game before, which was Lies of P, a game that, frankly, did an excellent job of evolving the formula and trying out new and interesting tones and stories.

Lords of the Fallen is a bit more in tune with the Dark Souls-like formula, giving us a medieval fantasy world where barely-explained elements are at play. Ages ago, the demon god Adyr was locked away, and the prison holding them is under threat. While the initial guardians of this were empowered by the benevolent (we assume) deity Orias, it turns out that in order to deal with the evil monsters assaulting the land, we need a "Dark Crusader," who walks outside of Orias' light.

The Dark Crusader carries an Umbral Lantern, which allows them to return from death, and that's our central justification for our character being able to respawn.

One of the core gameplay mechanics that sets the game apart is the Umbral, the realm of the dead that exists in parallel to the living world. When we die, or when we use the Umbral Lantern to go there, we actually transition into the Umbral. This gives us a sort of second chance at life (I believe there's a similar thing in Sekiro, the only FromSoft Souls-like I haven't played). While we can still fight enemies in the living world while in the Umbral, more monsters appear there. But there are also elements of the environment that are different in the Umbral. Bridges seemingly made of massive spinal columns will appear where there are just deadly gaps in the living world, and it seems the Umbral is devoid of water, so deep lakes suddenly become traversable depressions in the ground.

The Umbral is the most impressive thing about the game. Even when we are in the living land, we can shine our lantern into the Umbral Realm, which lets us, for example, pass through gates that are unobstructed - though funnily enough, if we happen to shine the lamp where an Umbral-only monster is, it can attack us.

The Umbral's dual role is where some of the frustration in the gameplay comes from: sometimes you'll need to shift into the Umbral in order to progress through an area, but doing so will also mean you can't get your second chance at life. Leaving the Umbral requires you to either rest at one of the checkpoints (which are flavored as reliquaries of various heroes) or to find certain nodes that allow you out, but which can only be used once until you reset things by dying or resting (the thing that, like most Souls-likes, also respawns enemies).

Combat works similarly to your standard Dark Souls, but like Lies of P, they incorporate a parry mechanic. You can block with a weapon or shield, and this will cause some of your health to become Withered - if you hit the enemy back, you can regain that withered HP. If you perfectly time your block, you won't get withered and you will wear down their stamina. Enough perfect blocks and you will stagger them to get the chance for a critical hit. (So, quite a bit like Lies of P).

Playing on the standard difficulty, the game's opening is pretty forgiving, though I've faced a few challenging areas. Right now, my biggest challenge is just navigating a labyrinthine swamp where enemies use various poison abilities - multiple times, I've found myself looping back around to the checkpoint and not sure where I'm supposed to go to proceed.

In terms of stats, there's the usual Strength and Agility, and Endurance and Vitality give you more Stamina and HP, respectively. For magic stats, there's Radiance and Inferno, with the former allowing you to cast more classical "holy" magic and the latter giving you more kind of warlocky fire magic. There is, however, a third option, which is Umbral magic, which seems to scale with both Radiance and Inferno, kind of like Pyromancy in Dark Souls III (or Death Magic and Golden Order Fundamentalism in Elden Ring).

In terms of story, I'm naturally skeptical about any perceived benevolent authorities. Indeed, after beating the second boss that got a cutscene (I've had three seemingly minor bosses) I was able to get a flashback where someone (I'm given to understand Orias) said something like "Come to Orias, grant me your flesh so I may retain my divinity," which sure seems to suggest that this Orias figure ain't the benign figure that people claim them to be.

So far, it looks like the game is a bit more linear than the likes of Dark Souls or Bloodborne, with regions leading into one another. Our first major boss leads us into our hub where NPCs gather, including, actually, the first major boss, who says she was resurrected by Orias' grace and acts as our healing item upgrader.

The game is pretty cool, but I hit a point going through that swamp area (the Forsaken Fen) where I just started to feel kind of trapped and frustrated and so told myself to take the rest of the day off from it.

I'm also playing this about as blind as I can - normally with this genre of game in particular I try to be a real completionist even on my first playthrough, but I'm just sort of letting it wash over me. I haven't yet tried out any spellcasting, though my plan is to do a mix of Strength and Radiance as my key stats (I just haven't found a weapon that scales with both yet).

Doors and What Details We Can Glean from IGN's Control Resonant Preview

 By a wide margin, my most anticipated game of 2026 is Control Resonant. Its antecedent, Control, seized me in 2023 and made me a Remedy Entertainment obsessive (the timing was great, because it got me to play Alan Wake Remastered right in time for the release of Alan Wake II). Basically, I am expecting to be obsessed and posting lore theories about it on this blog for years, so get ready.

For now, though, we are only getting some glimpses at the game, and I think the previews are focusing a lot more on the gameplay than the narrative, which makes sense - not only do they want (need) to sell it to a larger audience who might not yet be initiated into the mystery cult, but they also don't want to spoil too much of the big twists and reveals of the game.

Given how satisfying it was to control Jesse Faden in the first game, it's a real gamble to both swap protagonists and also change from a 3rd person shooter to a melee brawler. I have faith in Remedy, though - not that the gameplay will necessarily be the best, but that the gameplay will be good enough that it won't get in the way of enjoying the story. (While Alan Wake II was a huge achievement, I don't think anyone adored its take on survival horror combat. It was my first survival horror game, but I then went on to play the Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil 4, and Resident Evil 2 remakes, and... well, I think those were a bit more polished).

I did play Devil May Cry 3 way back in college, though I had to set it to the easy difficulty (which you only unlock after dying several times). I often find that action games can sometimes feel a bit weightless when you have to hit an enemy ten times or more to actually kill them, contrasted with something like Dark Souls where every strike feels impactful (and it's just a matter of actually finding the opportunity to get that hit in). But what I've seen of Control Resonant's combat seems like it's trying to give the impact of your attacks a satisfying, chunky feel. We'll see once I get it in my hands.

Anyway, IGN posted a video of some previously-unseen mission, which takes you into a spatially-warped train station. Somewhat less combat-focused (though there appear to be some Mold enemies - I don't know if we're mostly going to be just dealing with the Hiss and the Mold outside of the Resonant bosses, though Remedy games tend not to have an enormous amount of enemy variety, so I'm going to assume those will be the main ones,) the bigger challenge seems to be navigating the environment while trains shoot past at strange angles, forcing you to dodge out of the way.

It does really look like levels will make ample use of the gravity-shifting capabilities that Dylan has - I'll be very curious to see how difficult it is to remain oriented as you explore these warped spaces. In an earlier preview, as you passed through some series of replications of the same apartment, there was guiding colored light and music that helped you get out of it, and I expect the level design team will have some clear visual cues to help you understand what the path forward is.

One thing I noticed is that the strange doorways we saw in the Paranatural Manhattan trailer appear to be our fast-travel nodes. Given the game is going to have a pretty huge world, it looks like, you had to expect that there would be something like this, basically equivalent to the Resonant Points in the first game.

In terms of story, it appears that Dylan does actually have some way to communicate with Jesse while in The Gap (the weird extradimensional mental space, not the clothing store). Jesse claims that she woke him up to give him the opportunity to run, not for him to help.

I'm really curious to see how this sibling dynamic plays out. Jesse is the older sister, of course, and while there's obviously the whole "ex-Hiss" part of Dylan's backstory to process, I also think it'd be interesting to see where the points of tension in their relationship were before the Ordinary AWE. After all, even siblings who are close still have issues (my older sister and I are close, but we have our conflicts now and again).

Jesse's protectiveness is admirable, but I can also imagine that Dylan might have been sort of underestimated. I mean, after almost 20 years being raised by the FBC, he's sure to be all kinds of messed up in a lot of ways. I can imagine that Dylan might struggle with the fact that Jesse formed an image in her head of what he might have been, and not necessarily what he really was like. Dylan probably isn't really sure who he is, especially after the trauma of being part of the Hiss.

It also probably doesn't help that the FBC has affixed a device to the back of his skull with an explosive in case he becomes a danger to them.

One of the complaints I've heard about Control is that Jesse's characterization is a little inconsistent - she expresses a kind of impatience and indifference to the FBC at some points but then also seems to be fascinated by the strange paranatural world that it represents. Monty Zander, a YouTuber whose critiques I enjoy a lot, felt that "The Sibling" in Alan Wake II's Night Springs DLC, which is a kind of version of Jesse, felt more lived-in and compelling as a character.

What's going to be really interesting about Control Resonant is that, even if Dylan was a major character in Control, his role in that was primarily to be a mouthpiece for the Hiss. We didn't really get much of the "real" Dylan there.

That brings up an interesting question though: When people are changed by diseases and other things that happen to them, are they not just as much the "real" versions of themselves? I really wonder how Dylan is going to reckon with what it felt like to be part of the Hiss, and also what it feels like to no longer be connected to it. Like, I imagine that the terrifying thing about it was that it probably felt really good, even if he understands on another level that it was warping his body and bringing about apocalyptic terror.

I want to say it's like 46 days until the release?

Dual-Wielding in 5.5

 I'm sure I did an exploration of this when the 2024 PHB came out two years ago, but I thought I'd do a revisit.

When you're a weapon-wielder in a fantasy RPG, there are basically three ways you typically go: you either have a weapon in one hand and a shield in the other, a big two-handed weapon, or you wield a weapon in both hands. (There was a paired set of shields in Dark Souls III that I always wanted to build a character around, though I think you couldn't even get it until you made it into the Ringed City DLC).

It's pretty obvious that the intent behind a "sword and board" build is that you're sacrificing a bit of damage in the name of survivability (though depending on the game's mechanics, this need not always be the case). But both the dual-wielding and the "great weapon" style (we'll call it that because that's the general language used for it in D&D) are oriented toward doing lots of damage. Generally, the way they work is that the two-handed weapon is meant to hit very hard with each swing, whereas you make up for the lightness of dual-wielded weapons by making more attacks.

This is very true in D&D, and is, I think, even more true in 5.5.

Broadly speaking, I think that there's a feat that's designed for each playstyle, though there are others that might come into play (Polearm Master works great with two-handed reach weapons, though it can also work quite well with a spear-and-board or quarterstaff-and-board build).

Great Weapon Master was significantly changed in 5.5, but I'd argue it's more powerful now. I initially did a bit of math to compare it to the 5.0 version and found that even in tier 1, when the bonus damage is only +2, it's going to do a bit better than the old version.

(Quick and dirty version: if you've got a +5 to hit with your weapon, attacking a Goblin Warrior with the old version gives us +0 to hit and we deal 2d6+13 on a hit. With an AC of 15, that means we have to roll a 15 or higher, or a 30% chance to hit. So, our 20 average damage is only 6. With the new version, we need to roll a 10 or higher, so we've got a 55% hit chance. Our damage is only 2d6+5, or 12 on average, but that means 6.6 average damage, so we're ahead. Crits aren't really affected by this. Against a Zombie, to be fair, it's 65% of 20, or 13, versus 80% of 12, or 9.6, so it's not a always better.)

Still, the Great Weapon Master feat is an obvious go-to for players who want to wield a Heavy weapon. Indeed, it's actually recommended even if you're a ranged weapon user, as this will buff Heavy Crossbows and Longbows (it feels like a Hunting Rifle should also be a heavy weapon, and maybe a Musket. Let firearms be viable in D&D!)

Now, there's also a fighting style for Great Weapons. The bad news is that it actually sucks. Even its best-case scenario, a 2d6 weapon, winds up getting only a very slight increase in damage, going from 7 to 8 average damage.

By contrast, the Two Weapon Fighting style actually adds a fair amount of damage each turn, letting your bonus attack from the Light property to add your ability modifier. Not only does this mean potentially 5 more damage per turn (which someone with the Great Weapon Fighting style would need to make 5 attacks to get from its fighting style feat, which is going to require something like an Action Surge) but it also just makes the character easier to run because you don't need to remember not to add your ability modifier to the damage...*

Then, the corresponding General Feat is, appropriately enough, Dual Wielder. The 5.0 version of this allowed you to dual-wield non-light one-handed weapons, such as Rapiers, Longswords, or the like. It also let you draw and sheathe them together (which is kind of now just a base ability in the game) and would give you +1 to AC while dual-wielding (half-making up for not having a shield).

In practice, though, this only winds up raising the damage of the weapons by 1 each, as you go from d6 weapons like Scimitars and Handaxes to d8 weapons, the highest value for a one-handed weapon (with the exception of the 5.0 lance, though only when you were mounted).

The new version of the feat looks really weird when you first read it - it allows you to make a bonus action attack without adding your ability modifier with any one-handed weapon, as long as you attacked this turn with a light weapon. If you wanted the pseudo-Titan's Grip (that's a WoW reference) effect, you might find that odd. But the point is not to let you wield heavier weapons. Instead, it comes down to weapon mastery, and specifically, the Nick property.

Nick allows you to make your off-hand bonus action attack as part of the attack action, preserving your bonus action. This is great if you need the bonus action for something like Smite, moving Hunter's Mark, or whatever.

But the Dual Wielder feat then allows you to take that unused bonus action and do what you were going to do with it anyway, which is to make another attack. This one doesn't add the ability modifier, so you will still need to remember that (if it did dual-wielding would be significantly more powerful).

Thus, I think the intent for most dual-wielders in 5.5 is that they will be making two more attacks than they would if they only had a single weapon.

Now, I don't know if this will always work. In 5.0, the three classes that got Fighting Styles had curated lists, and Paladins, for example, didn't get Two-Weapon Fighting. While they now have access to it, the change to Divine Smite has also made it a little less appealing, as we might want to save our bonus action in case we land a critical hit.

The math is very complicated, because many light weapons have the Vex property, so while you'll need a Nick weapon for your off-hand (the Scimitar generally being the optimal one, though a Dagger can also work, especially if you want to pair it with a Shortsword and take the Piercer feat,) and so the actual hit chance you get three attacks into a turn where previous hits are granting advantage is, well... you've seen me slog through that on this blog.

Still, I think generally when I've done all that math, it's pretty rare that a dual-wielding build actually outdamages one based on Great Weapon Master, regardless of class.

That being said, I don't generally build for pure optimization. I'm not doing all sorts of funky multiclass builds, and vibes are, to me, more important than being super-powered in D&D, because, well... the game's kind of balanced to let players win most of the time. I wouldn't make a, say, Paladin who had a +0 to Charisma (which one of my friends threatened to do when we were starting a campaign - now he's multiclassed into Warlock, so obviously he didn't) but "not doing the most possible damage" isn't the same as "doing terrible damage."

With all of that out of the way, then, how would we want to build a dual-wielder?

First off, let's talk classes that it works for. Obviously, you'll want to play a class with Weapon Mastery. This does mean it's not as appealing on a Bladelock (who also runs into the problem of only having one Pact Weapon at a time) or a Battle Smith Artificer. Valor Bards might go for Sword-and-Board instead.

But this means that Fighters, Rogues, Paladins, Barbarians, and Rangers are all decently situated to be dual-wielders.

I think the playstyle fits thematically well with Rogues and Rangers in particular. You can play a Strength-based Ranger (I did for the first 5 levels of Tomb of Annhilation, though the campaign fell apart shortly after we got to Omu) but both classes I think are intended more to be Dexterity-based. For Dex-focused characters (with the exception of heavy ranged weapon users,) Great Weapon Master isn't an option, so you're sort of forced to try something different anyway.

Fighters, Paladins, and Barbarians are all typically Strength-focused, but Strength-based dual-wielding is totally doable - the feat lets you use either Strength or Dex as a prerequisite and as the stat that gets boosted by it. This means that your options are slightly expanded, as you can use Handaxes, Light Hammers, and Sickles, which are all Light weapons that don't have Finesse.

I think where you might run into some friction is in how much you need your bonus action. Barbarians will need it at the start of combat to get into their Rage, but typically, once that is active, they'll have it up for the rest of the fight (and if you have multiple fights in quick succession, or burn a rage outside of combat before a fight, you might not have to pay that price). And then, getting to add their rage damage bonus to another attack is nice.

Fighters are actually among the least bonus-action-dependent classes, with mainly just Second Wind to use in an emergency. The only downside to dual-wielding as a Fighter is that they're already the class that gets the most attacks (well, Monks might disagree,) thus diluting how proportionately higher the damage overall is by adding attacks. That said, Fighters don't actually hit this point until level 11, so in tiers 1 and 2, it should be a pretty good benefit. Also, because Nick makes one of your off-hand attacks (and if we get really into the nitty gritty, technically by using the Nick attack as part of your action, this then lets you attack with your "main hand" weapon with the Dual Wielder feat bonus action attack) part of your Attack Action, that means you should be able to do it again when you Action Surge. So, by level 5, if you have the Two Weapon Fighting Style and a Nick weapon in the off hand, you can make 6 attacks in a single turn when you Action Surge. I think the fact that you can get so many attacks at higher levels does start to favor Great Weapon Master more, but prior to level 11, dual-wielding is going to be pretty sick on a Fighter.

Paladins, I think, are going to run into the most trouble, because they're actually quite bonus-action-happy, with Smite spells all taking a bonus action, but also with things like Lay on Hands now using a bonus action. The dual-wielder feat can still be good when you want to play conservatively (if your campaign is a bit more focused on slow dungeon crawls) but it might not be worth the feat if you're constantly skipping that attack to use Smite. All that said, you get a little more benefit from Radiant Strikes at level 11 if you're making more attacks, and while a single d8 more damage isn't going to be as good as the 8 damage you'd be getting from Great Weapon Master each turn, it does bring dual-wielding up a bit.

Rangers, of course, are classically depicted as dual-wielding when they're not using a ranged weapon. They are, to be fair, also pretty Bonus Action-dependent, thanks to Hunter's Mark, but at least as we've seen with the Hollow Warden, the folks at WotC are starting to give players some options that don't revolve as much around that spell (something I wish they'd realized when designing the 5.5 PHB - Hunter's Mark is a perfectly cool spell, but as long as it's preventing you from using any other concentration spells, it shouldn't be a central class feature). Honestly, outside of Hunter's Mark, they don't necessarily have a ton to do with their bonus action (except for the Beast Master and Drakewarden). I expect that if future Ranger subclasses follow the lead of the Hollow Warden, dual-wielding could very well be the default for Rangers (the Demon Hunter surely ought to be focused on dual-wielding).

Now, Rogues: Rogues do like to use their bonus action a lot. But they have sort of the opposite of the Fighter's issues, which is that they're the only martial class that doesn't get Extra Attack. Thus, that additional attack is worth that much more, proportionately. Furthermore, Sneak Attack does a lot more damage per turn if you have more chances to hit. To demonstrate: a level 8 Rogue has, say, +7 to hit and does 4d6 (14 average) damage with Sneak Attack. If they're attacking a target with an AC of 18, that's a 50% hit chance. So, the Sneak Attack damage is 7 average (ignoring crits). But if we attack twice, there's a 75% chance one of those hits, so it's now 10.5 average damage. If we attack three times, it's a 93.75% chance to hit, or 13.125 average damage. Yeah, there's diminishing returns, but getting that second attack pretty significantly increases the damage we can do, before we even get into the weapon's damage itself (Rogues don't get Fighting Styles innately, but it's maybe worth considering picking up Two Weapon Fighting at an ASI level even though it doesn't help us bump Dex).

    Now, I think what I'm starting to realize about this is that, in a vacuum, just fighting with two light weapons can be quite good. In a world without General Feats, it might even be better than using a two-hander in some cases. I think the main thing that makes it seem less viable is just how powerful Great Weapon Master is (even if we're only paying attention to the added PB's worth of damage to each Attack Action attack). The Dual Wielder feat is a little finicky. It's the most obvious feat to pick up if you want to enhance the damage output of a dual-wielder, but it's also a feat that I don't think is quite as mandatory for a dual-wielding character as Great Weapon Master is for a character using Heavy weapons.

Ironically, this is sort of the opposite of the Fighting Style feats, where I think you'd be a fool not to take Two Weapon Fighting if you're dual-wielding, but I'd actually recommend not taking Great Weapon Fighting because its benefit is so marginal that you'd probably be better off getting some non-damage-oriented Fighting Style (Defensive's always great, though I also like Blind Fighting). To be clear, Dual Wielder is far better of a General Feat than Great Weapon Fighting is as a Fighting Style feat, but I do think there are some circumstances where you might just enjoy the benefits of the Nick property and call it a day. (I think I did that with by Oath of Noble Genies Paladin build, though that might have also gone for a Dex-based Sword-and-Board Dueling build).

Building a WoW D&D Adventure: The Cube of Agham

 There's such a wealth of factions and locations in World of Warcraft, an MMO that has been around for over two decades, and which has had a new expansion release every two years. If you're unfamiliar with how an MMO like WoW works, a new expansion is an enormous endeavor: Typically, it involves the addition of a new landmass (a "continent" in game terms) with multiple zones (kind of thematic regions) that have extensive storylines told through quests, usually with one major throughline quest chain and then various side quest chains. Then, each expansion also comes with several dungeons and raids (raids are basically higher-stakes dungeons that you have to have more players for, and are where the major villains of an expansion's story are confronted in very elaborate boss fights). Expansions even have major patches, spread out over the two years between their launch and the launch of the next expansion, which will often add new zones and new raids (sometimes also new dungeons and other such thing,) so it's truly a massive amount of content, and they've done this every two years since the game launched in 2004.

What this means is that there's just an absurd number of places and storylines existing in-game that you could crib from to build a D&D adventure around, basically simulating an existing questline.

But we're not going to do that, obviously. We're going to come up with something original.

Now, I had a first draft of this post that detailed an adventure in which a Scourge Death Knight allies with the Coven of Drustvar to open a conduit to the necromantic powers of Thros, the realm form which the ancient Drust drew their death magic. I think that could work fine, but I'm going to try to do something a bit different.

WoW's game mechanics are focused primarily on combat. A dungeon is really a series of combat encounters, with the rare and occasional bit of puzzling (there's a dungeon from the Legion expansion in which the final part involves you going into a party disguised as an elven aristocrat looking for rumors over who is the secret Burning Legion agent hiding amongst the guests). But if we're going to have the flexibility of a TTRPG, why don't we try for some kind of plot that involves the other pillars of play?

First off, let's pick a zone. We'll go with the Blasted Lands. This region, in the southeastern corner of the Eastern Kingdoms, is central to the history of Warcraft, as it was here that the Guardian Medivh (basically the most powerful living Mage, sworn to protect the world,) possessed by the Dark Titan Sargeras, opened the Dark Portal, which linked the world of Draenor to Azeroth and allowed the Orcish Horde to invade Azeroth, leading to the First War (aka Warcraft I).

Originally the Black Morass, a vast, dark swampland, the energies of the Dark Portal desiccated the land, turning it into a barren desert. Since that initial invasion, the Burning Legion used it to try to invade Azeroth again (at the start of the Burning Crusade, WoW's first expansion) and later, the portal was hijacked to link Azeroth with an alternate timeline and allow the alt-history Iron Horde to invade through it.

Now, if we assume we're setting this during the modern WoW timeframe, the Legion has been pretty much scattered to the winds, the Iron Horde failed and its Mag'har Orcs were incorporated into this world's Horde, and the Horde and Alliance have been at peace for a few years (with Alliance forces even permitted to stay in Silvermoon, the Blood Elf capital).

So, here's how I see the Blasted Lands looking: both Alliance and Horde need to maintain a presence there to keep watch over the Dark Portal. Tensions between them have certainly lowered since the end of the Fourth War (the events starting in Legion and ending in Battle For Azeroth,) but there are still some simmering resentments and rivalries.

Perhaps the party is sent there by the Kirin Tor, a major faction (neutral, but perhaps Alliance-leaning, as it was the ruling magocratic body of the Human city-state of Dalaran, which was sadly blown up at the start of The War Within). A mage, Eldridge Cosper, had sent a message to Archmage Modera (one of the Kirin Tor's Council of Six, its highest office) that they had discovered something very important that he couldn't discuss via remote communication, but that he would travel to Stormwind to meet with her and speak in person. Cosper never arrived, and so Modera sends the party to go find what happened to him. 

Cosper was Forsaken (sentient, free-willed Undead and members of the Horde), so when the party gets to Nethergarde Keep, they find that the leadership there was not too happy about having him around, and refused to give him quarters in the fortress. The party might then travel to Dreadmaul Hold, the Horde base in the Blasted Lands, but find that they were also sort of hostile toward Cosper, and refused to allow him to stay there.

So, the party then has to search the Blasted Lands for wherever Cosper actually is. Along the way, they might have various side quests (I'm really eager to start running more sandbox-like adventures once I wrap up my Ravnica campaign - I just don't know that that style would work for players in tier 4,) which could hint at a few things:

First, that the Shadow Council, insidious warlocks who controlled the Old Horde from behind the scenes and were working in league with the Burning Legion, has actually infiltrated both the Alliance and Horde garrisons here.

Second, that the Dark Riders of Karazhan have been seen in these parts - the Dark Riders being cursed undead horsemen who seek out powerful artifacts, commanded initially by the possessed Medivh to gather them all and bring them to his tower of Karazhan nearby in Deadwind Pass.

Third, that no one has heard anything out of Surwich, the village on the southern coast founded by refugees from Gilneas (the kingdom whose population is mostly Worgen now,) for several days.

Eventually, the party will discover that Cosper had uncovered a powerful artifact carried by a member of the Shadow Council into Azeroth during the First War. The artifact, the "Cube of Aghan," has similar properties to the Sargerite Keystone (a relic used by Illidan in Legion to create a portal in the sky between Azeroth and the Legion's home planet of Argus - which is also where the Draenei originally came from). The Cube could be used to connect the Dark Portal to any number of other worlds, which, naturally, makes it extremely dangerous.

The party would have to deal with Shadow Council forces trying to follow them in their search for Cosper, and maybe need to expose the double-agents in Nethergarde and in Dreadmaul Hold. Then, they'd need to find out what happened to Surwich:

There, Cosper accidentally activated the Cube. While it is less powerful if not connected to something like the Dark Portal, it did manage to conjure in a number of dangerous creatures - perhaps these are aggressive plant creatures that have taken over the town and the nearby Tainted Forest. Maybe they need to get to Cosper and the Surwich residents, who have been taken into the forest by the plant-monsters, before they're consumed.

And then, of course, they would be harried by the Dark Riders - though perhaps they might decide that Karazhan would be a good place for the Cube to be stored, which is not the solution that Modera or Cosper would be happy with. Maybe the Riders take the Cube and the adventure culminates into an incursion into the famed haunted Wizard tower (which is, by the way, one of the most popular raids in the game's history, back in Burning Crusade - it was later also revamped as a "mega-dungeon" in Legion, though they learned their lesson and kept the original raid accessible by giving the dungeon a different entrance).

Naturally, I'd like to see what kind of monsters we get in the book, but I think you could do a lot of this with stuff from the Monster Manual. Shadow Council members could use Cultist stat blocks (maybe using Fiend Cultists for their more powerful forces). Depending on the level, the plant monsters at Surwich could use Blights. Dreadmaul Hold also has its fair share of Ogres. Depending on level, you could make the Dark Riders either Wraiths or Death Knight Aspirants. And the various monsters out in the Blasted Lands could include a number of monstrosities like Bulettes and Basilisks. There would also be plenty of demons there (I think fiends in general can stand in for Burning Legion demons - arguably they're more Lawful Evil in contrast to the Void's Chaotic Evil aberrations).

I think this premise for the adventure could be relatively linear if you wanted, but if you took the time to sprinkle in subplots and sidequests, you could make it a pretty fun sandbox adventure. I actually think this might work as a tier 1 adventure (though maybe start everyone at level 3) or it could be good for early tier 2. Cosper, I'd say, is probably either a Mage or, if you wanted to make him more vulnerable, maybe just an Apprentice Mage. I think the quest can be completed whether Cosper survives or not, as long as the Cube is secured.

Now, I think this could also be relatively self-contained, or it could be part of a larger campaign about resurgent cosmic threats. If you wanted this to lead into a larger plot, perhaps you cut the Dark Riders part and the Cube has already been claimed... but maybe the Shadow Council didn't get it, and now it's in the hands of Twilight's Hammer (or Twilight's Blade, the newer version of it) or perhaps the Cult of the Damned (though why they'd want interplanar capabilities would raise even more questions).