What's the Most Interesting Way to Play a Warlock (in D&D)?

 I've had Warlocks on the mind.

I think largely because the D&D character I'm playing currently (in theory our Wild Beyond the Witchlight game in which I'm playing a Rogue is just on hiatus, but it's been like three months) is a pretty classically heroic character (his biggest flaw is that he's naive - a kid just out of Wizard college, though he's now been adventuring for several months, or years in real-time) I've been drawn to the idea of the Warlock, to the idea of playing the morally questionable member of the party. Honestly, my Rogue was sort of meant to be that in Wild Beyond the Witchlight, though his was a bit more of a tragic "did bad things but meant well" kind of character, and being a prewritten adventure, that doesn't play so closely into the plot.

I actually played a Warlock of this very "token evil teammate" variety when I did an Adventurer's League version of Descent into Avernus (DM'd by a friend who got me to play a bit of AL). This character, Old Knox (not his real name) was an elderly Half Elf who acted like a friendly old grandfather (and was, actually, a grandfather, but was estranged from his family) who had spent most of his 160 years trying to make contact with an entity known as the Blade of the Silent City, an ambition that did get one of his former students killed after accidentally summoning a bunch of Shadowspawn.

The Undead patron hadn't yet been released, and wouldn't be AL legal anyway, so I was playing a Hexblade, but while Hexblade was built for going Pact of the Blade, I actually played him as a Blastlock - pretty much everything else about the subclass worked fine that way. But I wanted to play a kind of Shadowfell-associated necromancer character, which felt like a good fit for going to the Nine Hells without having my patron directly involved in events there (again, it was AL and a pre-written adventure, so no real expectation of his backstory getting involved in the campaign).

I enjoyed playing Old Knox a lot, and loved making other players at the table squirm while still playing him on the plausibly deniable side of True Neutral (I think it's important to think of alignments in uppercase and lowercase, and Knox's evil was lowercase - he was willing to do messed up things to get what he wanted, but wasn't intentionally cruel and didn't wish to spread suffering. Indeed, at the end of the campaign, he and the Bard made some very good persuasion rolls that gave us the best ending, in which Zariel abandons evil and becomes an angel again - Knox's argument was that her acts had done nothing to actually stem the tide of chaos, and had only invited more chaos into the cosmos).

Now, the title of this post is a question: what's the most interesting way to play a warlock?

That has two obvious meanings: how do we RP one, and how do we build one for fun gameplay?

RP is more nebulous: there are countless ways you could determine your character's backstory and the manner in which they interact with others. I do think it's important to consider that Warlocks are a Charisma-based class - you should consider how that is expressed.

It's a little tough: much of even the premise of the Warlock suggests something of a scholar of forbidden knowledge, which would seem to make Intelligence important for them. That being said, Bards are also collectors of stories and songs and such, though it's their performance of those things that determines how powerful their magic is.

For a Warlock, the obvious way to interpret their Charisma as their primary stat is the idea that they've talked their way into a deal with their otherworldly patron, and so a kind of slick, charming, silver-tongued character can make sense.

However, I think there's another way to think about Charisma, which actually lines up more with how I see it with Paladins: there's an iron will behind your words and actions. A Warlock might just be deeply serious, speaking with force. Perhaps this is just pushing Intimidation over Persuasion, but I think that conviction could be a major part of how you were able to siphon this power off of your patron.

My very first D&D character concept (which I've technically been able to play a handful of times) is a Great Old One Warlock whose mind is being made more and more alien the greater his connection to his patron grows. While I came up with the character in 2015 or so, I think the style of Great Old One that I really think fit well was the Board from Control (a video game I write about a lot here). Basically, Great Old One less in the gooey Lovecraftian manner and more in the Monoliths from 2001, sort of inorganic and questionably sentient variety.

Conrad, this character, is, like a lot of characters I gravitate toward, a pretty purely good character, but the danger of his connection with this eldritch world is what creates conflict for him. Old Knox went into his Warlock career with his eyes fully open, and Conrad probably doesn't even know that a Warlock is what he is.

Actually, there's another character I got to play only very briefly. Aldric is a Reborn Undead Warlock, and was basically an ambitious courtier whose court was massacred by a group of Fey, and he was bricked up in the basement of the palace like in A Casque of Amontillado. Aldric woke up maybe a century after this happened, contacted by the Grandmaster of an order of cursed knights who had, long before he did, been betrayed by the same fey court and were sealed in their chivalric order's tower. Basically an entire knightly order of death knights (though cursed to their state, at least as far as he knows, not by their own sins but by this betrayal - or at least that's the official story) serves as his patron. Aldric would have a courtly manner, and act very much as a representative of the Order, with a certain lawyerly professionalism and detachment.

And that brings us to mechanics:

Warlocks are pure spellcasters, but also not.

While a Wizard can build out their spellbook and figure out their spell preparations in extremely varied ways, a Warlock has to contend with the fact that, at the best of times, their spellcasting is limited.

Now, it's not that bad: as a 9th level Wizard, I have a single 5th level spell slot. An equivalent Warlock would have two, and would be able to get both back on a short rest, and one more slot with Magical Cunning each day.

It's certainly less than the 14 total spell slots that my Wizard has, but if you figure even a single short rest in there, you're getting 5 5th level spells a day. Having played a Warlock who got up to tier 3, I had 3 5th level slots at any given time, so on a similar day we're talking 8 5th level spell slots (though I was playing the 2014 version that didn't get Magical Cunning until 20) as well as a single casting of a 6th and 7th level spell. It's honestly not that terrible - you just have no "throwaway" spell slots, like how a Wizard at 9th level can be pretty cavalier with their 1st level slots.

This is going to be true regardless of what kind of Warlock you go with, so I think the big question is the following:

Blast or Blade?

Is that too reductive? I think you can build a Warlock around other options, in theory, but I just do not think that it's ever going to be as good. But also, let's weight Blade versus Blast.

By default, I think every Warlock is probably going to take Eldritch Blast. Even if you really want to focus on a Pact of the Blade build, it's such a great cantrip that will always give you a wonderful ranged option.

The question, then, that presents itself is: why go Bladelock?

Well, I will say that I think there's a better justification for it in the 2024 rules than there were in the 2014 rules, but it still requires a few other things to make it worth it. As I see it, the key advantages are that you get to use Martial weapons, and specifically you'll be able to get magic weapons.

Even then, it's a bit of an uphill climb:

If you have Eldritch Blast with the Agonizing Blast infusion (available as soon as level 2) you're nearly treating your cantrip like a weapon, and its cantrip progression is actually just as good (and in tier 4, better) than a Fighter's Extra Attack progression. With a d10 die, you're going to be doing the equivalent damage of a heavy reach weapon like a Halberd or a Heavy Crossbow (or Pistol, though with far better range).

While Thirsting Blade and Devouring Blade will function essentially like a Fighter's Extra Attack features at level 5 and 11 if you take them, Eldritch Blast gets this functionality automatically, and you get a fourth blast while there's no Invocation to give you a fourth Pact Blade attack at level 17.

Now, if you're using a weapon like a Maul, Greatsword, or Greataxe, you'll be able to outdamage Eldritch Blast. But these, as well as the d10 heavy reach weapons (Lances, Halberds, Glaives, and Pikes) all have the heavy property, which means that you'll need at least 13 Strength to wield them without disadvantage. You can, however, use a Versatile weapon that does 1d8/1d10 to get equivalent damage to an Eldritch Blast.

However, here's where you start to get some benefits: Magic Weapons.

Eldritch Blast, unless you can somehow boost your Charisma beyond 20, is never going to do more than 1d10+5 on a hit. Even with something like a Rod of the Pactkeeper, the rough Warlock equivalent of a +X weapon, the damage of your attacks isn't boosted (though the boost to your saving throw DC is very nice).

If we aren't trying to take our Strength to 13 or more, and we're sticking with something like a Longsword wielded with two hands, a +1 Longsword is going to do 1d10+6 when we have our Charisma maxed out, which does start to out-damage Eldritch Blast.

Much rarer, though, if you can get truly powerful weapons like a Vicious Weapon or Flame Tongue (both of which eschew the attack bonus in favor of adding 2d6 damage on every hit - which I think is almost always a better choice) could add up to a ton of damage, especially if you can get to level 11 and have three attacks per action.

But these are tough weapons to come by, and I think in most campaigns, you rarely get weapons that aren't just +X.

Is that worth it, though?

See, Eldritch Blast can be souped up with a lot of other invocations - Repelling Blast is, I think, one of the most powerful ones, and if you can dip into pre-2024 options, combining that with Grasp of Hadar will give you insane battlefield control (and if you or an ally can toss down a Spike Growth, you can do some nasty cheese-grater damage).

What, then, do we get for our pact blade other than marginally higher damage?

One thing I think was a missed opportunity in the 2024 PHB was that Pact of the Blade probably should have also let us use the weapon's Mastery property, which I think is akin to a lot of cantrip rider effects - Ray of Frost more or less has the Slow property, for example.

We can look at some invocations - again, I don't think Thirsting Blade or Devouring Blade really count because they're just letting the weapon keep up with Eldritch Blast/other Martials (though Warlocks I think are the only class other than Fighters and I guess Monks who can natively get three or more attacks in a round without dual-wielding). Eldritch Smite, interestingly, works like how Divine Smite used to work. Unlike the redesigned Divine Smite, Eldritch Smite still has no action required to use it. Its downside, of course, is that Warlocks' pact slots are precious. Divine and Eldritch Smite are good for big bursts of damage (especially if you wait for a crit to use it) but while a mid-to-high-level Paladin can be relatively cavalier with their low-level spell slots, a Warlock, as discussed before, cannot.

Lifedrinker is also a decent little damage boost and an opportunity to heal. It's actually way less powerful than the old version was (which let you just deal extra damage equal to your Charisma modifier) but given how Pact of the Blade has been redesigned, I understand the reason for the change.

But I do think that Pact of the Blade is going to require a fair investment in Invocations to get it all running.

There's also another problem: You're probably going to need to be in melee, and Warlocks are squishy.

The Hexblade subclass from Xanathar's Guide to Everything became the default choice for basically any melee-focused Warlock. In 2024, they did integrate its "use Charisma for your weapon" thing into Pact of the Blade itself, but what Bladelocks did not get was training in Medium Armor and Shields. As a Light Armor class that doesn't focus on dexterity, Warlocks tend to have pretty low ACs, which is less of a problem if you're built around not letting monsters get near you, though it's always good to have a higher AC if you can manage it.

While you can play that subclass still (there's probably going to be an update to it,) I sort of hate that it's still the one subclass that gives you medium armor training. One thing I think was a missed opportunity was to have an Eldritch Invocation that gave you Medium Armor training. Without that, Hexblades are still, arguably, the best subclass to pick if you're going to go with Pact of the Blade, even though some of its features are now redundant.

Now, there's a partial solution here: Take your first level as a Fighter.

This actually grants you a ton of things that the Pact of the Blade option is missing: weapon masteries, fighting styles, and better armor. And if you start off as a Fighter, you also get Constitution saving throw proficiencies, which will help with concentration (though you lose out on Wisdom saving throw proficiency).

I've actually conceived of that aforementioned Undead warlock as starting of Fighter - a plausible enough class for a courtier - so that he can lean into the more martial aesthetic of someone with an order of Death Knights as a patron.

It's just frustrating that this solves so many problems for the Bladelock that it feels almost mandatory. Notably, this will delay those extra attack features, so at least until level 5, I wouldn't take any more Fighter levels to ensure that you're at least getting two attacks and 3rd level spells by level 6.

Can we build a Bladelock that doesn't multiclass? Well, obviously we can, but we're going to have to deal with a few things: if we're just wearing armor, say Studded Leather (something that's cheap enough to get very early on,) we'll have 12+Dex for AC. It's certainly possible to start off with a +3 to Dex, but unless you're willing to truly dump Strength, Intelligence, and Wisdom, you're going to be paying a price in terms of Con, and even then, you're only going to have a 15 AC and probably not be able to raise it much unless you get some great magic armor (a real rarity) or at much higher levels take boosts to your Dex.

Another option, though, is to just accept the low AC and try to figure out ways to survive regardless of that fact. Armor of Agathys is a pretty good spell - it will punish foes for attacking you, which might be good enough to incentivize the DM to avoid hitting you. But also, its Temp HP will help with your survivability (and it scales pretty well through tier 2). Technically, you can even refresh it if you have an additional way to get Temp HP (an Undead Warlock probably wants to start off a fight with Form of Dread, but you could wait until Armor of Agathys is a little diminished).

You might even just consider taking Moderately Armored at some point (though we only have two feat levels by the end of tier 2, and so you're probably going to want to max out Charisma or at least take Charisma-enhancing feats).

One reason I still gravitate toward the Fighter dip at the start is also that you can pretty easily get 13 Strength and thus both wear Chain Mail (you'll need more for better heavy armor) and also wield heavy weapons, and also qualify for things like Great Weapon Master. We're probably leaving those options on the table if we're not going that route, though.

But let's take a step back: Our question is what version of a Warlock is actually most interesting to play?

Here's what I'll say for the Bladelock: you might fight with a number of different weapons over a campaign. Depending on the magic weapons your DM makes available, you might switch between a lot of different ones. Technically you can even use a ranged magic weapon - while the conjured weapons with Pact of the Blade only gives you a melee weapon, the invocation can let you bond with any magic weapon. Now, is a ranged magic weapon really that exciting when you could just use Eldritch Blast? Maybe not.

I do think the Heavy weapon challenge does wind up being a significant issue for the class - the fantasy, I think, is to be a more or less pure spellcaster who nevertheless can use some of the hardest-hitting weapons in the game, but you'll need to invest significantly in Strength to do so, which might be difficult.

Warlocks don't get Conjure Minor Elementals, but if you use Spirit Shroud (from Tasha's) you can get a somewhat less powerful effect, but there are some advantages, like the fact that it is only a bonus action to cast. When cast at 5th level, it'll add 2d8 radiant, necrotic, or cold damage (radiant's probably your safest bet) to each of your attacks. This will scale very nicely with both your extra attacks as well as Eldritch Blast. You need to be within 10 feet of the target (compared with 15 with CME) but if you're focusing on a melee blade build that won't be an issue.

So, we've been talking a lot about optimization, but what about fun?

That's obviously subjective. One advantage that a ranged build will always have is that you're likely to have the opportunity to make your attacks or otherwise do your thing on every turn of combat, without the need to run to get close enough to your target. Eldritch Blast has a very nice range - at 120 feet, it's going to be very rare that you're too far to hit them (Roll20's default map size is a 25x25 square grid, meaning from one end of the map to the other is 125 feet, meaning that if you and your target are on the map, they'll be within range (though if you actually use Euclidian distances, the diagonal will be longer - that's not the default for the game, though)).

Really, I think what it boils down to is how exciting you find weapons to be, and whether your DM is likely to give you interesting magic weapons.

Pact of the Blade feels really good for classes that are multiclassing into Warlock. It's available at a single-level dip, so if you're a Paladin, for example, you can put a level in Warlock and then focus on pumping Charisma to max, as everything will now scale with it.

Going the Blastlock route can work well with a straight-class build, and also plays nicely when multiclassing with other casters (Sorcerers being able to quicken Eldritch Blast, for example, are going to have a ton of attacks per turn).

I do think I'd probably base it a lot on my character concept. I've come up with a lot of Warlocks. I love the concept of a pseudo-Death Knight Undead Bladelock, but I think that my Great Old One Warlock, who is very much focused on the world beyond the familiar and mundane, makes a lot more sense as a Blastlock.

Under the Goddess Statue and... Still a Fair Amount of the RCPD To Explore

 I'm very late to the party - RE2 released in like 1998, when I was in 6th grade - but comparing it with the RE4 remake I just played through, boy is this a different kind of game.

It's interesting: RE4 famously oriented the game more toward action, and there are certainly arguments to be made that it's more of an action game than a survival horror game. You strip out the macabre aesthetic and gory body horror and you could argue that it's not all that dissimilar to an action game. Resources like ammo and healing items might be kind of scarce, but in most cases I was finding myself near running out and not actually running out.

In 4, you might be kind of expected to fight off and kill all the monsters.

Now, in fairness, I think this tended to be the case in the Silent Hill 2 remake, but in that game, it was super-rare you fought more than, like, three enemies at a time. In RE4, you will often be facing off against a dozen Ganados.

Now, we come to RE2 (remake).

In this, two zombies is a big problem. And if you try to kill them all, you're going to run on ammo. Instead, I've found that a good option is often to just shoot them in the head or knee and run past. On occasion, I've gotten lucky, and that single bullet to the dome takes out the zombie's head, which I think means they're permanently dead (bodies don't despawn, which is something that is probably easier to do when there's a pretty small and finite number of enemies in the game).

Given that there are still a lot of rooms left in the RCPD that I have yet to explore, and also that I haven't met Mr. X yet, I'm assuming I'm not done there (though I do wonder if Claire and Leon get to explore separate parts of the building). But I solved the first big meta-puzzle, getting all three of the medallions for the Goddess statue. I've encountered two Lickers, and aside from a move where I was able to stick a flashbang in its mouth to escape, I've basically tried not to engage as best I can.

Lieutenant Marvin Branagh is still alive, barely, but I have a feeling Leon's going to have to take him out when he turns into a zombie.

I will say, as horrifying as the Ganados' heads exploding with a big weird parasite thing, I think I'm finding the zombies more disturbing as monsters, because it's so clear that they were people. Strange, that, given how desensitized that we as a culture have become with zombies after the huge trend of zombie movies in the late aughts/early teens. But I always found zombie movies disturbing because you can only really find them "fun" if you turn off your empathy a bit.

Generally, I thus feel more scared here than I did in RE4, which is interesting.

I also think, structurally, the way the game encourages backtracking through rooms you've been through many times before is a fun bit of game design - opening doors and creating more routes through the wings of the building gives you a feeling of mastery over the environment. While enemies don't respawn, new ones sometimes pop up. I was going to dip into the Darkroom, where there's a typewriter to save, and turned a corner to find a zombified police officer standing, facing away from me. While this was one of those lucky one-hit headshots that caused the zombie's head to explode, it was still jarring, as that room had been a little safe haven while going around the west wing.

Unlike in 4, key items are stored in the inventory (you also have far less inventory space, though every item is the same size - I don't know when they introduced the inventory-tetris, maybe 4?) but they get a little red checkmark (at least in this remake) when you've opened every door that requires them. It still requires you to manually throw away these key items, which feels... painful. (RE4 remake let you sell key items once you'd used them up, which still felt weird, but because you couldn't sell them until you had gotten all use out of them, it was a way that the game kind of rewarded you for progressing past them).

It's interesting to see Leon in this game after playing 4. He's a nice, young rookie, and not yet the special-forces badass that he is at the start of 4. It lends to the sense of horror. He and Claire have had a couple of interactions, separated by locked doors and such. I'll be eager to see her version of the game and how it differs.

It is interesting to me comparing this with Silent Hill 2's remake. In SH2, you're also thrown into puzzle-box situations, usually with one major overarching puzzle that contains mini-puzzles. This feels more like that than like RE4 Remake. But while I will have to see what the rest of this game looks and feels like, it seems much more focused on the one location, whereas SH2 is a bit more linear - once you clear a "dungeon," you're not going to be able to go back to it.

Even if I never really played any survival horror as a kid (you could argue Bioshock was at least partially of that genre, though I didn't play that until I was out of college) there is a vibe and structure to this that does feel familiar. Again, I've compared it with Sierra adventure games like Space Quest and King's Quest, and I wouldn't be shocked if there are some early-90s adventure games with a similarly ghoulish aesthetic.

A Bit Further Into RE2: The Complex Escape Room

 Well, this is interesting:

After our initial prologue arriving in Raccoon City, at least in Leon's campaign, we find ourselves in the RCPD headquarters, an elaborate building that once was a museum (and I believe was built by the same architect as the mansion in the first game). This helps justify the sprawling and dramatic architecture.

It also gives the game an interesting structure: It's a big escape room.

Now, I'm still pretty early in the game, but I've noticed how much stuff I just have to pass my and note for later. For example, there's a locker room in which all you need is a code for each locker to open it up, but you need to replace some of the buttons in it to get access. Finding one button allowed me to open up the lockers with a 2 in their number, but I'll need another to open up any with a 3 in them.

My sense, then, is that the objective of the game is largely to just get out of the RCPD, though this might only be the game's first act - that being said, as a game from 1998, it's possible that it's a fair bit less epic in scope (we do, after all, have Claire's whole game to play here - which I'm given to understand is similar but different).

Interestingly, one of my frustrations with RE4 was all the points-of-no-return, where I figured I needed to progress further to solve some optional puzzle or finish some task for the Merchant, only to discover that I couldn't go back and do it (I never got the tile puzzle in the village, for instance, needing just one more tile).

Here, though, it seems that the entire thing is built around "you don't have the thing you need for that yet" and backtracking is a huge part of the game (the limited inventory is also a factor).

Interestingly, it reminds me of the old Sierra adventure games I played, like Space Quest. These, to be fair, were often fairly linear, but it was primarily about figuring out how to use various inventory items to solve puzzles. I got, for example, a roll of film to develop in the darkroom, but it seems I need some other chemicals to finish the job.

So far I don't think I've encountered anything other than your standard zombies, but boy are they tanky, and they often play dead only to rise up later, even if you hit them with nothing but headshots (and like, five bullets right in the dome). I did get a glimpse of what I believe is a Licker, which I know are infamous.

Anyway, I already have two of the medallions for the goddess statue in the main hall (a strangely pagan image for a Midwest city, though a couple tweaks and she could be simply Justice,) which to me implies that this is only our starting "big puzzle we need to solve."

Separate Ways Completed: And Now, A Journey to Raccoon City

 I beat the Ada chapter of Resident Evil 4, which serves as a kind of "sidequel" that shows the events of the main game from Ada's perspective. One of the interesting wrinkles to it is that the final boss is not really the last challenge - from Leon's perspective, we free Ada and then she turns up to toss us a rocket launcher to finish off Saddler once and for all. In this, we need to play through her rapid fight across the scaffolds of the big rig while Leon's fighting. With a sharp time limit (though I think I finished with a minute to spare) I was focused less on killing enemies than getting past them.

Anyway, Separate Ways is all well and good, but obviously a lot shorter of a campaign than Leon's main one.

Having beaten it, I decided to put RE4 to a rest and boot up the Resident Evil 2 remake. Right off the bat, there are some interesting differences: The Zombies are spongier than the early-game Ganados in 4. While I did get a combat knife after the first little excursion into the halls of the RCPD, I'm curious to see how much we can get away with using melee here - every time I get even close to a zombie that isn't incapacitated with a bullet, they grab me, and pre-knife, at least, that's guaranteed to take off a chunk of my health. We'll see if I get the chance to cut short such grabs with the knife like I do in RE4.

Still, the overall impression I'm getting is that avoiding foes is more often the right call than killing them.

As horrific as the Plaga parasites are, maybe I just got desensitized to them. The zombies are pretty standard horror movie zombies, but there's a somewhat more apocalyptic feeling here, you know, like a zombie movie, which is what they're going for.

I'm only like half an hour into the game - I was rescued by presumably doomed Lt. Branagh, who seems very pale and is clutching what I assume is a zombie bite wound. Now, Leon's gotten bitten plenty here, but presumably the lore of the game's zombie virus is that it's not, like, a guaranteed conversion if you don't then die. (I know part of the story of the upcoming RE9 is going to have an older Leon suffering from "Raccoon City Syndrome" as one of the few survivors. Man has had some nasty things attacking his body).

I actually initially meant to play Claire's campaign first, but they were listed with Leon first, and I'd just played a fair amount as Ada, so I was willing to go back to our favorite boy scout with boy-band hair. The two meet up early on, but are separated when their obvious route back out of the city is cut off by an exploding tanker truck.

I am bracing for a much simpler set of gameplay systems - RE4 was released when games were definitely heading in that "more is more" attitude toward game mechanics, but it looks like crafting, melee attacks, and any real sense of in-game economy are going to be out. In place, it seems that the RCPD is built more like a big puzzle-box (somewhat akin, I assume, to the Spencer Mansion). Even a big location from 4 like Castle Salazar is still a somewhat linear experience taking you through it, while I get the sense that a good chunk of this game is going to be figuring out the central medallion puzzle in the RCPD lobby.

That's kind of fun, honestly.

Still, I had one of those moments where I had jumped into a new game so shortly after finishing an old one that I realized I needed to take a break and digest what had come before.

An Explosive Ending to RE4, and Now... Probably More Resident Evil

 Ironically, the final boss of Resident Evil 4 is the one that I never died to.

Saddler, the evil cult leader intent on using the US President to spread mind-controlling parasites to the globe's populace (so... RFK Jr.?) undergoes a monstrous transformation and we fight him on what seems to be a big oil rig.

The fight, which I imagine is not too dissimilar to how it worked in the original (though without any quicktime events) has you blasting away at eyeballs on his new vaguely arachnid form to stun him so that you can get a critical knife attack in his... er... mouth-eye. Other than the top half of his old human face, there's very little human about his appearance anymore.

The final phase of the fight felt pretty simple - he becomes a mass of tentacles with a central eye/egg in which perhaps some remnant of his human form sits, and I just shot it a bunch of times with my sniper rifle until Ada tossed me a rocket launcher to finish the job.

There's a last-minute (well, 2-minute) escape sequence in which we run out of the island facility. There's one scary moment with a Ganado that comes after us, but most are writhing in pain with the death of the hive mind monarch in Saddler. We get on a jetski for the second half of this, and while we have some falling rocks to dodge, I don't think the intent here is to be at all challenging - it's a cathartic moment of explosions and speed.

After the Krauser fight - the real fight - in which I died maybe seven or more times (I actually had 14 deaths total in that chapter, which is I think over three times as many as I died in any other chapter, but there are some other hazards there) I was actually expecting to really struggle with Saddler, but maybe it was dumb luck or just a fight that played to my strengths, but I seemed to do exactly what I was supposed to.

The ending of the game fully transitions us out of whatever horror existed, the transformation from the folk horror insanity of the game's opening into this full 1980s-style action sequence completed.

The game is good, though I do think that it does suffer quite a bit after leaving the castle. Other than the sequence that introduces the Regeneradors, which has that real Umbrella "evil science" feel, the military vibes of the island don't really lend to a sense of creeping dread. I've already written about this, so I won't belabor the point.

I've started "Separate Ways," which was evidently a bonus campaign unlocked after beating the game originally, but is now a DLC. I got the whole Deluxe Edition for 12 bucks on the PS Store, so it was well worth the price.

Here, we see the events of the game from Ada's perspective, playing across familiar locations but in a different order and with different tools. Ada has a grappling-gun which lets her play a lot more with the verticality of spaces, at least when the game lets you.

The game mechanics are largely similar - we meet the Merchant and will want to trade him treasures for big chunks of money to immediately spend on upgrading weapons. Given that I never really used it in the main game, I've decided to focus Ada on her TMP submachine gun. Of course, I don't think you can really focus on just one weapon, because you'll run out of ammo quickly enough.

Ada is, of course, also a tonally different protagonist from Leon - she's a mercenary, and only stirred toward heroism against her better judgment. The fact that she's working for Albert Wesker, RE's perennial big bad (though I think he was definitively killed off in 5 - though I would not remotely put it past them to revive him in 9 or some later game) does not reflect very well on her, even if the post-credits scene from the main game does see her realizing just how deadly the thing she's getting for him could be, and has her abandon the job and take her dominant Plaga sample somewhere Wesker can't get to it.

Still, there is some fun to be had in following Ada's journey - we see that she's the one who rings the bell at the beginning of the game to stop the village fight, and we see what happens when she shoots Mendez to distract him from Leon in the village chief's house.

The pace, of course, is accelerated, and I've been struggling to gather the pesetas to spend on all the upgrades I want for her (stupidly, I dumped some resources to try to make room for the crossbow weapon only to send it to storage anyway because I forgot that was an option).

So far, the DLC has been in familiar locations, though I'm given to understand it's not exclusively so.

Anyway, even when I'm done with that, I shan't be done with ResE so soon - I found that the RE2 remake was available for just twelve bucks on the Playstation Store and figured I'd give that one a shot as well. Umbrella and Raccoon City are elements of the series I've been aware of for decades, so it'll be nice to see what it's like (I'm given to understand that, at least between the remakes, 2 was better-received than 3).

RE4's Final Act Leaves Something to Be Desired

 I know that Resident Evil games have a tendency to trade out their gothic or otherwise more classical horror in favor of modern sci-fi terror in their final acts. I wonder if this always accompanies a downgrade in the sense of atmosphere.

I'd known that getting to the island in RE4, which is basically a combination laboratory and military base, was known as a step down for the game, and I must sadly report that this is not wrong: we leave the moldering village and gothic castle in favor of a kind of generic island military base, more the kind of setting for a James Bond mission.

It's not that things aren't scary: this is where we encounter the Regeneradors, and even worse, later on, the ones that transform into Iron Maidens. These are monsters that have multiple parasites inside that can only be seen with a vision-limiting thermal scope and can only be hit with weapons that can penetrate flesh. These guys feel of a piece with the horrors dreamt up by the Umbrella Corporation, and while one is involved in among the most frustratingly difficult parts of the game, where you need to protect Ashley from Ganados coming in to take her away from behind a barred barrier while also fighting off one of these Regenerador/Iron Maiden combos. Initially, I was struggling because I was so low on supplies, so I wound up backtracking all the way to the Merchant, sold my magnum (which I was basically never using) and got a bit more ammo and armor, and even then, I wasn't able to put enough damage into the Iron Maiden's head-parasite and wound up killing it just by having Ashley release her hold on wheel that was holding up a bridge that it was standing on. This was only possible because the Ganados coming after her are evidently finite in number, so I was able to dodge the Regenerador long enough to take out the four or so Genados and then just ran back to her. I imagine I missed out on a gem or something for killing it conventionally.

But while these creatures are truly terrifying, much of the action on the island is just that - action. And the difficulty actually ramps up - I actually died more to the final Krauser fight far more than I have at any point in the game, and the giant race across the island has you fighting an absurd number of Ganados that then requires the game to give you tons of ammo, and it doesn't really feel like survival horror.

Weirdly, I actually think survival horror works best when it's honestly not that difficult - it works best when there's tension, and bursts of action-movie violence aren't really about tension as much as spectacle.

Comparing it with the, you know, other two survival horror games that I've played, I'm thinking about how Alan Wake II and Silent Hill 2 handle their final acts:

Backing up: I think ending a horror story is always difficult. Stephen King, a true master of the genre, doesn't always have the most satisfying conclusions. The creeping dread is really fun to establish early on, and drama typically works best with rising tension, stakes, and action. But what does that escalation look like?

In Silent Hill 2, the final "dungeon" is not all that dissimilar to the rest of the game, but the growing sense of dread is what is growing as James gets closer to his damning realization. But I think one of the ways in which you sense that it's different than before is that, unlike the Apartments or the Hospital, the Hotel starts off looking normal, even nice, but progress through it reveals more and more the state of disrepair and ruin that it's in. But unlike the stark transition into the otherworld, there's this terrible implication that the nice lie of it is the Otherworld, and when the truth is shown to us, the hotel's state of utter ruin becomes bare to see - not as the hellish, rust-filled night world, but as a bleak bright morning light on ashes and pain.

Alan Wake II does give us a giant spectacle with the Dark Ocean Summoning sequence, but as cathartic as it is (though I also found it kind of difficult, and thus not quite the hell-yeah moment that it was maybe meant to be) it's also undercut when we find out that it didn't work, or at least didn't work the way we thought it would. The final challenges are instead the surreal Eternal Deerfest, Saga's Dark Place Mind Place, and another chase with the Dark Presence now in the form of Alex Casey.

In both cases, the tone and overall feel of the genre is of a piece with the rest of the game.

With some exceptions (like the lab where we first encounter the Regeneradors) RE4's Island just kind of doesn't feel like the same game anymore.

I'm still eager to get to the end. I, sadly, think I screwed up the final Merchant request (meaning I failed to complete this one, as well as one I failed to find in the village) by going through a one-way door out of the room with the last blue cult emblem. I can't think of any major characters to deal with other than Sadler (though I feel like Ramon Salazar had a weird insectoid brute that worked for him that I don't think I ever fought).

Still, I'll say that I think the Village and Castle parts of the game were impeccable.

D&D As Survival Horror

 I don't know that I'll necessarily be able to run a true survival horror RPG. My friends, I think, are drawn more to the power fantasy, the high-stakes set-pieces, and the character drama.

Matt Colville has said in the past that D&D was originally a survival horror game, and MCDM's "Crows" aims to take the DNA of their heroic fantasy game Draw Steel and rework it in all the ways that will make for a tough, brutal survival horror dungeon crawler (Draw Steel famously doesn't allow heroes or monsters to miss, while Crows, at its early stage of development, will always allow for bad luck to screw you - casting a spell can potentially open a rift to hell or some such dimension and instantly kill your character, though extremely rarely).

As I've been playing Resident Evil 4's remake (which is, admittedly, a more action-forward entry in the genre, with foes often dropping ammo - a purist could make the argument that it's less survival horror than just an action game with gruesome elements) I've been thinking about that idea: D&D as survival horror.

It's not the first time I've given it some thought, but here are some ideas:

Recovery:

The adventuring day in D&D is a really important resource, and I think if there's one real failing of the 2024 DMG it's guidance on how much adventuring a party ought to get up to in a day. To be fair, I and many other DMs ignored the advice in the 2014 DMG. Complaints that 5E heroes are too powerful might not have been so strong if we were sending our players into the utter slogs that the DMG suggests on a daily basis.

Long Rests almost totally reset everything, even more in 5.5, where even hit dice expended fully recharge rather than only getting half your maximum. That means that a D&D character can more or less go hard every single day, but it also raises the following challenge: if you have a dark and scary dungeon, the optimal strategy for players is to just go in, fight something or do some other challenge, clear a room, and then leave the dungeon and rest outside.

A party might decide to rest inside the dungeon, relying on a cleared room and maybe using spells like Leomund's Tiny Hut (if the room's big enough) or Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion (if they're high-level) to prevent any interruption of their rest.

And even if they don't have that kind of fortification, DMs are forced to do some extra work to create monster patrols to assault the party while they're resting.

And even then, here's a question for you: if the long rest is interrupted with a 3-round monster fight (basically 18 seconds in-game) and the party prevails, they can continue their rest. Unless it was a truly grueling fight, do you, as the DM, feel like you've really made the dungeon feel scarier? Is it really all that much tougher? And are you going to send the same patrols of monsters against them again to show how truly nasty and scary this place is?

Let's look to Survival Horror. One of the big things in the genre (or at least in the three games in the genre I've played) is that there's no single moment that just resets your HP to full (actually, there might be, but they're relatively invisible). Recovery, of ammo and of HP, or any other resource, is something you need to work for, and every error you make - a missed shot or taking damage when you can avoid it (and the deal the games make with you is that you can avoid taking damage) means some little bit of your overall cache of resources is diminished when it might not otherwise have been.

So, what we need to do is make recovery a resource that is not so easily regained.

In D&D, an eight hour rest is what you need for a long rest. Officially, you also need to eat a pound of food per day (and drink some amount of water - a gallon, maybe?)

Let's totally rewrite that rule:

Instead, let's say that a "long rest" is a "full ration." We take time out of the equation (this might complicate things later, but we'll address it) and actually allow an adventure like this to take place over one long and terrible night. The key, though, is that "long rests" are now a consumable item, rather than an activity you can take.

Next, we ban spells like Goodberry or Create Food and Water - spells that conjure food would, of course, eliminate the scarcity that we need. Indeed, if we didn't ban these, the optimal thing would be to cast Goodberry, eat one of those goodberries immediately, and then have 9 left over with all your spell slots.

Short Rests... might be able to work as they normally do, but what I might do is institute a cap on how many short rests you can take. In Baldur's Gate 3 (not a survival horror game) you can only take two short rests before you need to take a long rest (long rests do take up resources, but in my experience I was never unable to take another ten long rests or more after any that I did take, the resources being so plentiful). Naturally, classes like Warlocks, Monks, and most Fighters get nearly everything back on a short rest. I think instituting either a one or two short rest per "full ration" might balance this right.

Difficulty:

One of the other hallmarks of Survival Horror is a certain pressure to execute things perfectly: with no regenerating health and often limited ammo for your weapons, you can't just go whole-hog on enemies with overkill and just shrug it off. You're always trying to take enemies down in the most efficient way.

But, again, the games give you the tools to do this.

Now, D&D has an element of luck, always: it's not a "skill" based game in the way that video games test your manual dexterity. The most wonderfully optimized character might get screwed by the dice.

I think the key is this:

Combat should be low-difficulty. But it should be arduous.

Now, this plays into our recoveries: If we think of the game as being divided into chapters or sub-dungeons (I do think this style of game lends itself to something of a mega-dungeon crawl) we might only let the party find sufficient rations for everyone to get a long rest (though there's certainly some potential challenge to giving them, say, only one ration at a time and forcing the party to strategize on who gets it) after completing a major chapter - to use Silent Hill 2 (remake) as an example, maybe they don't find any rations from the moment they enter Woodside Apartments until they get to the apartment where they hide in the closet right before going to Blue Creek Apartments, and then from there only getting full rations for the whole party after the first fight against Pyramid Head.

But, here's the thing:

Every individual fight they get into should be easy. Like, maybe lower-difficulty than the 5.5 DMG's "Low difficulty encounter balance" math. Like, maybe for a party of four 1st level characters, like a single Zombie.

See, there's a good chance that that single zombie isn't going to even hit anyone in the party before they kill it. A Zombie only has 15 HP (huh, they nerfed it from 2014. Never realized,) and a very low AC. But with Undead Fortitude and just the fact that a 1st level character is probably doing at the absolute most 15 damage with a hit (that's max damage on a Greatsword with +3 to Strength) there's a good chance that that Zombie might survive long enough to take a swipe or two at the party. Maybe one of those hits connects, and at that point, 1d8+1 (oh, maybe not a total nerf, this used to be 1d6) is pretty nasty for just about any 1st level character.

Now sure, there's a good chance they kill the thing before it hurts anyone. That's ideal - that's their goal. And they might favor long-range attacks to make it even less likely for them to get hit. All good.

But you throw like fifteen such encounters at them, maybe mixing it up occasionally - there's two zombies now, or the zombie's in a narrow, twisty corridor, so the only real way to get an angle on them to hit them is by getting up close - and that starts to really add up.

See, I think Survival Horror as a genre lives not in the frantic, desperate moments with boss monsters that can kill you in two hits (though that has its place). I think the genre really lives more in the moment where you're like "damn, I screwed up that fight, and now I'm totally out of ammo, my health is super low, and I'm just desperately trying to find some healing item before I encounter more monsters."

There was a specific moment in Silent Hill 2, in the Otherworld Hospital segment, where I spent a good 10-15 minutes in a state where I had zero ammo whatsoever and was probably one or two hits away from death, frantically trying to open every drawer and cupboard for that delicious health drink.

This is the feeling you want to cultivate in D&D as survival horror - the Cleric is out of spell slots, the Barbarian used their last rage, the Sorcerer has one spell slot they're saving for a Thunderwave but only if they can get three monsters in the area, otherwise it'll feel like a waste, and the Monk is sitting there with 3 HP left hoping desperately that they won't encounter any of those ghouls who have two attacks and might bypass Deflect Attack if they hit twice.

Attack Resources:

So, what about ammo?

The survival horror games I've played have all been in basically modern settings (give or take a decade or three) where the main kind of weapon people use is a gun. Diminishing ammo is a challenge for all involved, and when you look at the single shell in your shotgun and find yourself realizing that using that will only mean having to swap weapons when the monster doesn't go down in one blast, it adds tension.

In D&D, only archers (well, ranged weapon users) really ever worry about ammo. Spellcasters are pretty happy to use cantrips (though I've actually tended to use True Strike with a Light Crossbow on my Wizard since converting to 2024 rules - 1d8+1d6+5 is actually a bit better than 2d10 from a Fire Bolt) and so ranged combat is not really limited.

This is an area I'm a little hesitant to screw around with that much: I think getting rid of damage cantrips, or putting some kind of ammo-like limitation on them, would be getting a little too far into the guts of the game's balance. Cantrips are not as good as a martial character using a weapon, and that's by design (Eldritch Blast, when tricked out with things like Agonizing Blast, comes quite close - but technically it's not going to keep up when magic weapons get involved, not getting the damage bonuses of a +X weapon).

But that's actually kind of great: martial characters are supposed to be better at two things than casters: they're supposed to have better single-target damage (which they don't, really, if you start considering things like Conjure Minor Elementals) and they're supposed to be more sustainable, doing their full damage potential or near it without expending resources.

The thing is, I think that most campaigns (or at least most that I've been in) focus so much on big set-piece combat encounters that this sustainability never really has a chance to shine (and the fact that resting is relatively easy, as we discussed above, means that it's rare that players are really forced into situations that demand sustainability).

Again, in Silent Hill 2, one of the elements of the game I loved was the melee weapon (first a wooden plank and then a steel pipe). Giving the player a melee weapon that would never run out of ammo or require repairs - something that James always has available to him - gives the game's designers the license to take everything else from him: the game never has to worry too much about letting you run out of all of your bullets because you always have that back-up option (an option you're likely to actually prioritize because of the potential for conservation).

I think leaving those cantrips, leaving those martial characters with their powerful weapon attacks, gives you, as the DM, license to hold off on granting the players any recovery items. You can let the players run out of spell slots.

Timing:

Ok, here's our next thing:

In D&D, a lot of spells and other effects (like Rage) last either one minute, ten minutes, an hour, eight hours, or twenty-four hours.

I don't know that this works for us.

One minute is actually fine: the real meaning of a one-minute-duration spell is that it lasts until combat ends. Combat takes place in 6-second rounds, and so a one-minute spell will last 10 rounds in a game where combat rarely goes beyond four or five rounds (for really epic fights).

But the others are trickier: because I've never encountered a DM who actually tracks things minute-by-minute in a dungeon. Functionally, what's the difference between a 10 minute spell and a 1 hour spell? The game doesn't tell you how long it takes to search a room, or how long it takes for you to walk down a corridor.

When in combat, walking speed is typically 30 feet, which is roughly three miles an hour. Can you walk three miles worth of dungeon corridors in the time that a Charm Person spell lasts? Well, probably not, because the dungeon is full of obstacles, traps, and monsters.

I think, then, you need to start thinking about what these durations are meant to mean, much as 1 minute means "one combat encounter."

If we think about it this way, we can propose the following:

10 minutes maybe means "it'll last as long as we're in this room, doing stuff."

Now, this can be a problem, because what is a room? Are we talking about one solitary alcove with nothing but a faded fresco that is like a 10x10 foot square? That seems like it shouldn't take that whole duration. But at the same time, if it's some massive cavern with a giant insect hive in it with various monster-filled mine tunnels catacombing through the walls, that feels like it's maybe too much.

I'll be honest, I don't have a great solution here, but I think that a place to start with is:

1 minute translates to one combat encounter.

10 minutes translates to exploring one fairly large room.

1 hour means exploring a level of the dungeon.

8 hours means exploring an entire sub-dungeon (what in a normal campaign would probably be a whole dungeon).

24 hours means... probably not the whole campaign, but maybe an entire "act" of the campaign.

The key, I think, to communicate to the players, is that we're not saying that "this is the amount of time it takes to do these things." What we're doing is replacing the idea of a time-based duration with more of a "progress-based" duration. A Barbarian's Rage (in 5.5) should be able to help with some kind of jumping puzzle or some challenge that requires lifting heavy things or even making use of Primal Knowledge to do other tricky checks - but it's meant to be there to last that entire challenge, and once it's completed, the rage ends, the resource is expended.

Mage Armor is supposed to basically set a Wizard or Sorcerer up as if they're wearing +1 Studded Leather armor for the day - they invest that spell slot into having halfway decent AC. You give them a good chunk of the dungeon to enjoy it, then.

This, I think, also solves the issue with "long rests" being replaced with recovery items: if it were purely time-based, casting Detect Magic right before noshing on a recovery item would be a pretty strong move, but if a 10-minute effect is only for the room you're in, it might not be so overpowered.

Notably, some spells and effects might need to be revisited: Detect Thoughts can be used in a social encounter (and if we think of 1-minute spells as being "per encounter," that can extend to social ones) but it can also be used to detect hidden enemies, which is more of a "room searching" function, so this might require us to classify it a little differently.

Level:

I think running a game like this is definitely going to work better at low levels. For the most part, I find D&D starts to really hum in its sweet spot in tier 2, but this might be a mode of play that could make tier 1 really interesting: but only if you have full buy-in from your players and are really up-front about wanting to run a survival horror variant of the game.

The genre need not dictate difficulty: Survival Horror games are not inherently harder than other genres, and I think it's a key attitude you need to have when running something like this that the players doing well and even getting lucky is actually fine. The tension in horror is there when the characters are under threat of death: paradoxically, dying in a horror game is a release of that tension. The horror, the real juice of this thing, is if you can get them right up to the edge, like where I was with James Sunderland in that hospital, any minor thing like a mannequin hiding a little too well or a lying figure belching out bile faster than I could dodge could spell the end. And then, maybe even better, drinking that health drink and realizing that, well, I'm still out of bullets.