Solo or Boss Monster Design in Deathblow

 I learned a harsh lesson early on in my tenure as a DM for D&D. My players had had a couple of short encounters in their adventures, but I had them go to The Tomb of Sed, an ancient ruin dedicated to a no-longer-worshipped deity (the truth was that Sed was actually an angelic servant of one of the real gods who had not yet revealed herself in that era,) which was a small dungeon with basically a trap, some Shadows, and a Spectator waiting for them as the dungeon boss.

Spectators are CR 3, and the party was, I think, either level 2 or 3 at this point (they were XP leveling, and with the undertuned encounters from the 2014 DMG, leveling was a bit slow).

However, when they got to the final room, a sort of concave inverted step pyramid, with the Spectator hovering near the bottom, the Fighter and Paladin both beat it initiative and killed it before it could get a turn, with a lucky smite-crit sealing the deal.

Spectators are odd because they're a little on the complex side to be just a minion, but they're not legendary creatures like Beholders (they're also not assumed to be evil-aligned).

Gaming tradition holds a very popular trope: the Boss. I don't know exactly where the term originated, but it makes a certain amount of sense - the biggest, toughest enemy is in charge of all the little minions you've been fighting leading up to that point, even if, narratively, that's not really what's happening.

To define what a boss is in games, I guess we should narrow it down to various points:

They are a tougher enemy that requires more time, effort, and strategy than a normal enemy.

They are typically unique, or at least rare compared to other monster types (this depends a lot on genre - some games have far too many levels/areas for every boss to be totally unique, though repeating bosses are sometimes considered more mini-bosses).

They tend to come at the end of a level/dungeon, or at least after a significant stretch of non-boss enemies. (There are exceptions here when they want to subvert an idea, like Phantoon in Super Metroid, whom you fight first before all the enemies on the Wrecked Ship activate.)

They are often fought alone, or if fought among other enemies, they are by far the biggest threat. (Again, there are exceptions here, with dual-bosses like Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls, where the biggest part of the challenge is that you have to fight two bosses at the same time.)

    Both D&D and Draw Steel - the systems that are clearly doing the most to inspire Deathblow's mechanics - have ways of doing Bosses.

In D&D, these are Legendary creatures. Legendary creatures have two explicit design elements that other monsters don't. First, and probably most impactful, is Legendary Actions. Ordinarily, a monster can only do anything when it's not their turn using a single reaction. Legendary Actions give them three opportunities to do something in between players' (or other monsters') turns. Next, they have Legendary Resistance, which allows these boss-like monsters to automatically succeed on saving throws. I think the intent here is primarily to avoid crowd-control abilities and spells that would end the fight immediately, like Banishment. A third aspect of Legendary monsters in 5.5 that doesn't get as much of an explicit call-out is that they tend to have either proficiency or, at higher levels, expertise in Initiative. This makes it far more likely that the monster gets to act first.

Draw Steel approaches things somewhat similarly, but also tends to be more explicit in how a boss is distinct from other monsters. Leaders are designed to be those fights with minions, but Solo monsters have several features that try to make them serious, epic threats.

For Deathblow, the focus on combat would be high-stakes boss fights, effectively. A bit like Shadow of the Colossus, this would be a game in which (nearly) all combat is against singular, memorable, epic monsters.

That means that every "headliner" monster, which would be the majority of those found in any monster book the game might have, would need to be cool, unique, and interesting.

Monster design is a tricky and subtle thing: I saw a sneak preview of Cthulhu's stat block coming in the upcoming Ravenloft book, and initially I was underwhelmed, as he just kind of has a grab attack and then something that can deal psychic damage to grappled creatures, along with some teleportation abilities. But then I saw that in his spellcasting trait, he can cast both Dream and Geas, and can target creatures with Geas while invading their dreams. This is... well, it's pretty Cthulhu, isn't it? And it creates some interesting opportunities for gameplay before Initiative is rolled (I'd have to probably run him to see how he feels to play actually in combat).

Still, broadly speaking, boss monsters need to overcome the problems with the action economy. If your boss monster is outnumbered by the party (which should be the case every time) they run into this problem where the party just has more opportunities to do things than they do. The party can respond with many different things to each act that the monster performs.

Notably, I think that something like Multiattack among D&D monsters doesn't really solve this - Multiattack tends to commit you to doing one major "verb," as in "attacking," and while they might split their attacks between targets, chances are that they're all coming toward a single PC, so it's actually not all that different from just one big attack.

Legendary actions, thus, are a big part of fixing this. But Legendary Actions are also often limited. In 5.5, typically you get two or three Legendary Action options, one of which is a standard attack while the other one or two are going to be more flashy things that might involve movement or imposing conditions on PCs, but can only be used once per round.

Draw Steel has rough equivalences to a lot of 5E tech: Legendary Resistance is replaced with a feature that lets the boss pay health to end conditions on it - another way of eliminating the "null result" and giving players a consolation prize for imposing conditions. Villain Actions are like Legendary Actions, but each only gets used once per encounter, and they tend to be bigger and flashier because of this.

But I think the really fascinating bit of tech in Draw Steel's solo monsters is that they get multiple turns per round. In Draw Steel, there's no set turn order determined by individual initiative rolls - instead, the party and the monsters alternate turns (with weaker monsters getting to act in squads on the same turn). Solo Monsters get to take two turns a round, and just need to let at least one PC go between their turns.

This, naturally, lets the monster do a lot more in a fight because they're literally getting twice as many turns (unless they get killed before they take their second turn of a round).

However, I wonder if we could take this further.

In Daggerheart - a system I am admittedly far less familiar with - there is no established initiative whatsoever. Instead, players can take turns until something causes the "spotlight" to revert to the GM. I know that this happens when someone rolls with Fear (which happens roughly though a little less than 50% of the time - now I want to figure that out mathematically,) but the GM can also spend Fear to take the spotlight. I also think that in Age of Umbra they might also get it when an attack misses, though I might have misunderstood that.

The point is, in that game, the monsters can potentially act far more often, and I get the sense/vibes that the game was designed to make individual monsters far more threatening because of this.

So, what if we did the following:

What if the monster gets a turn after every PC's turn?

The consequence here, which could be good or bad, is that the monster scales significantly with the number of players at the table. If you have a tight band of three Night Hunters, the monster gets three turns per round. If you have a hefty squad of 6 players, the monster gets six turns.

The good thing here is that the monster naturally has scaling action economy. I don't think we need anything like Legendary Actions or Villain Actions when the monster is constantly on the move. The party is never going to be able to overwhelm the monster with sheer numbers, because the more they bring, the more the monster can fight back.

The bad thing is where that throws all the other elements of scaling. Having a large party will still let you kill the monster in a shorter number of rounds (assuming the Stamina doesn't scale up as well with the party size) but if the monster is getting more turns, that means that damage-per-round on both sides is scaling up by a fair amount, and thus, the target of the monster's attacks is going to take more damage between each of their turns.

To illustrate: a party with a Witch, Warrior, and Assassin is confronting a Banshee. The Banshee has some kind of Death Wail attack that deals, say, an average of 10 psychic damage. The Warrior, whose abilities are probably focused on holding a monster's attention and protecting allies (basically tanking) is getting her full ire. So, on a round, the Warrior is taking all the Banshee's attacks and so can expect to take 30 damage per round if we're using the "monsters act after every turn" approach.

But if the party now consists of the Warrior, Witch, Assassin, and also a Hunter, Inquisitor, and Occultist. The party is putting (on average) twice as much damage out, but the Banshee is now getting twice as many turns, meaning that the Warrior is now taking 60 damage per round, rather than 30.

Is that ok? Are we ok with that?

Because there's a world in which that might be all right - maybe the challenge of playing in a large group of Night Hunters is that you need to be more specialized and coordinated. Not only does the Warrior focus on keeping the Banshee from attacking their allies, but the other players need to use abilities that help keep the Warrior up - the Witch might need to use more healing abilities, and the Hunter might need to use abilities that reduce a monster's damage output or perhaps draw them away (physically) from their target. And perhaps, in a larger group, Warriors (or anyone who takes on the task of tanking the boss, which I could see being something that Inquisitors and maybe Mechanists would be decent at - maybe Assassins could as well, but in more of a "focus on me as I run away" manner) would need to focus more on defensive abilities while in smaller groups they can contribute more to damage.

One of the things I really like about Draw Steel's solo monsters is that they have way more Stamina than lesser monsters of the same level. A Werewolf (one of the two level 1 solo monsters) has 200 Stamina, compared with 26 for a level 1 Platoon creature (platoon being the organization level where you can have roughly one monster per player in the encounter if they're the same level). In other words, if I had four level 1 players in Draw Steel, I could have them fighting four Dwarf Gunners, who would have a total of 104 Stamina, or a Werewolf with a total of 200 Stamina.

While that might seem inappropriately spongey, I actually think it's smart - even with the various action-economy enhancements like the second turn and Villain Actions, it's still not quite matching what four less powerful monsters could do. Having the beefy stamina means that the monster is going to be able to stick around long enough to actually get to do their cool stuff.

If we really want to scale the monsters to the party size, what if they had Stamina based on the size of the party as well?

Again, if we've got this Banshee, maybe she has 50 Stamina per party member, so in that group of 3, she's got 150 Stamina and if it's the larger party, she's got 300.

Now, are we worried about double-dipping? The monster is already doing twice as much damage to the party if we're letting it act after every PC's turn. Now, we're making it last twice as long. Thus, doubling the party effectively quadruples the monster's total damage output, because we can assume it's going to get twice as many turns before it's taken down.

Assuming an average damage output among players - say 15 per turn - we can then assume that regardless of the number of players, the monster should last a certain number of rounds. 3 players doing 15 damage per round each would mean 45 damage per round and thus could put out 150 damage some time in the middle of round 4. 6 players doing 15 damage per round would do 90 damage per round in total, and thus would have hit 300 damage again some time during round 4 on average.

    But there are other ways to scale monster damage with a party.

The biggest, most obvious one, is just multi-target damage. If that Death Wail doesn't just hit one Night Hunter, but damages everyone within 60 feet or something, that is probably going to hit the majority of the party, if not everyone. And in that case, the monster is literally dealing more damage the more players there are.

One of the goals I'd have with combat design (which is likely to take a lot of cues from Draw Steel, though I'm going to stick with real-world measurements like feet, even if under the hood it'll really be units of 5 feet that act like "squares" in Draw Steel) is to make sure that creatures don't get locked down in place. In cinematic fights, movement is a huge thing - you almost never see two combatants just standing in the same place (the lightsaber duel in the original Star Wars is notable in how kind of dull it is, which got corrected in Empire Strikes Back with the deadly cat-and-mouse game between Luke and Vader).

Deathblow would eliminate Opportunity Attacks in order to encourage constant re-positioning and use of terrain.

But to get to the point regarding boss design, I think that bosses are probably going to also jump from target to target a lot - indeed, I'm not sure that I'd really design tank-y abilities, or at least taunt-like abilities. Tanks would be built to endure attacks, but I think they won't be able to compel monsters to strike them instead of their allies except by doing things like grappling or otherwise reducing the monsters' movement abilities.

This could, in a weird way, actually benefit the players because if the monster is not going to focus down a single player, the size of the party effectively raises the total Stamina of the party.

That being said, we don't want monster design to rely on GMs playing suboptimally. If the monster is going to be jump from target to target, they'd want an incentive to do so.

And surely, different monsters might act differently. I could imagine a Banshee being evasive and using ranged screams that damage multiple PCs, so the challenge is reaching her and getting your strikes in. A Hexen (again, my vaguely Hag-like equivalent) would probably want to place curses on each of the party members, which might require them to get up close to them sneakily. Maybe the curses scale up in damage as the monster puts more of them on the target. A vampire, on the other hand, probably tries to isolate and exsanguinate individual targets.

Multi-target attacks plus action scaling per player once again double-dips.

So, while it might be the most boring way of doing this, I think that maybe the right call for monster scaling here is to simply have the Stamina scale up with the number of party members. I do think that this should, all in all, actually favor the players because a larger party is covering more bases, and can specialize in ways to tip them over the top - say the Occultist has various ways of boosting the damage of other players through eldritch rites while the Hunter can make the monster more vulnerable with certain attacks, opening up the Assassin to land some insanely high-damage blow that is more than what they would get if they were just each individually trying for their best damage abilities (like a Grave Cleric doing Path to the Grave before a Paladin hits with a Divine Smite in 5E).

Still, we'll want to at least boost the action economy of a monster. I really like Draw Steel's "two turns per round" approach, which is a flat boost rather than a scaling one, but does simplify the math and also allows the monster to mostly adhere to the same action economy rules as the player while still letting them do more things.

If we're really worried about scaling Stamina double-dipping with AoE effects, we could target-cap AoE abilities. I think melee-focused monsters like a werewolf might not be much of an issue - if their "Sweeping Rake" (a hypothetical ability) does slashing damage and maybe puts a bleed on every target within 5 feet of them, that's naturally going to limit it to those characters who are grouped up with them in melee. But our Banshee's Death Wail is going to be a huge radius, and so we might say that it deals its damage to only three targets, so there's a cap on the total damage it can do.

Another idea, if we were to have turns scaling based on the party, is to limit monster resource generation to rounds - the resource (I'm thinking Darkness, though it's really not too different from Malice in Draw Steel) would need to be spent to use a monster's more powerful abilities, and thus those "extra turns" that it gets might feel a bit more like legendary actions, which tend not to give a monster their full multiattack in 5E. The GM could choose to spread out their expense of Darkness over the round to do cheaper abilities, or they could blow it all on one big ability and then spend the other turns doing the monster's basic, weakest attacks.

Resource generation is something we really need to figure out for the game - both how it will work for PCs and how it will work for monsters.

To be fair, I'm getting very theoretical and some of these might need to be ironed out via playtesting.

But I think we need a core concept here that we can apply to our monsters. Monsters in Deathblow need to all feel like big, epic fights, because the whole point is that the adventure is building toward the confrontation.

I think that means we need to A: give them a lot of "action economy slots" to do iconic things. A Vampire ought to be able to grab a creature, drag them off somewhere, and bite them all in one turn, but we also need some opportunities for shapeshifting and disappearing in shadows. And B: we need to give them flashy, memorable, and unique mechanics to distinguish them from the rest.

Players should remember each headlining monster they've fought. Special Deathblow mechanics are certainly one way to make them memorable, but I think building bespoke mechanics for each kind of monster is also really a good idea. Again, looking at Draw Steel's Werewolf, there's a unique "condition" that the Werewolf imposes called Accursed Rage - the longer you fight it, the more likely you are to succumb to a berserker rage and strike your friends (wonderfully, if you're the lycanthrope-adjacent Stormwight subclass for the Fury class, you're immune to this because you're kind of already a were-creature anyway).

To be frank, if this game were to be finished and published, I imagine the monster book would actually be a fair degree thinner than it is for its main inspirations. But I also imagine that a monster stat block would be a lot more complex.

Null Results and Gothic Monster-Hunting

 This blog started as an exclusively World of Warcraft-specific blog. The game, which will hit its 22nd anniversary this year (and in September I'll have played it for 20) has gone through a lot of system changes, with biannual expansions giving them the biggest opportunities to overhaul things.

Back in the day, you had to have Hit Rating on your gear (or Spell Hit Rating when they made those things separate - Light help you if you were a magic/melee hybrid like an Enhancement Shaman) spells/abilities and auto-attacks had a chance to just miss the target. You could also find pieces of gear that raised your skill with a weapon type, which was later turned into Expertise (which worked for all weapons) and thus reduce the chance that a creature could dodge, block, or parry your attacks (because monsters could only dodge attacks from behind them, damage-dealing melee characters could be satisfied with enough expertise to eliminate dodging, while tanks were expected to get enough to prevent any parrying as well).

At some point (I want to say Warlords of Draenor,) they ripped this out of the game - from then to today, if you are fighting level-appropriate foes (and given the scaling world of the game, that's more or less any you'll come across) your spells and abilities (things with a name you push a button for) will always connect, and the only thing that has a chance to miss is your auto-attacks if you are dual-wielding weapons (auto-attacks, which used to be a huge portion of player damage, have also been de-emphasized as a source of damage compared to active abilities).

The only thing that was lost was a weird sort of stat-juggling where you wanted to have just enough Hit and Expertise ratings to meet your threshold but not have much more than that, as it would be redundant. Gameplay-wise, though, that meant that, properly geared, missing wasn't really a thing.

It is, kind of, a distinction between D&D and games that don't bother with attack rolls like Draw Steel (I know they're not the first to try this, but it was a big part of their pitch to the audience).

Missing in D&D is not really fun. It's especially not fun in early levels where your entire turn might have no effect because you only have one attack. Extra Attack or the unique scaling of the Eldritch Blast cantrip can smooth this out - if you have a 75% chance to hit, getting another chance to hit means that the chance of not getting a single hit during your turn goes from 25% to 6.25%.

Essentially, the more attacks you're making, the more your actual damage output is going to resemble what your average damage output ought to be, because there's a larger sample size and each outlier has a diluted influence.

Still, even if the chance that you get nothing for your turn's efforts drops as you get some of these mid-to-late-game enhancements, it doesn't eliminate the problem completely. You could have a 95% chance to hit (the most you can get without advantage because a Nat 1 always misses) and even with four attacks, technically you could just get really unlucky (though that would be vanishingly rare).

And furthermore, the game slows down as you get to higher levels because there are more actions taking place. Extra Attack doubles the time it takes for a character to describe their action. Now, sure, it's still going to probably take way less time than someone casting nearly any spell.

But let's talk about it in terms of fantasy:

Draw Steel eliminates attack rolls in part because the point of the game is for the player characters (and the monsters) to feel awesome. The game pumps everyone up to be these epic heroes (with a little superheroics at work) and an epic hero totally whiffing doesn't really feel like it's true to the tone they're seeking out.

Deathblow, the kernel of a game system that I'm rolling around in my head (other than DMing a lot of D&D, I should note that my game design experience is largely limited to homebrew monsters and obviously a lot of homebrew adventures - I'd love for this all to turn into something real, but I make zero promises,) is not quite that in tone.

The Night Hunters in Deathblow are not epic heroes, and they're not the kind of people who are going to save an entire city from a rampaging Kaiju (unless I really figure out the game system and find it can scale up beyond where I've conceived it). While Night Hunters are meant to be more capable and prepared to fight gothic monsters than the villagers they come to protect, they're still very much mere mortals for whom victory is no guarantee.

So, does that mean they should have a chance to miss?

Here's the thing: missing as a player in D&D feels bad. Getting missed by a monster in D&D feels awesome. My long-running Eldritch Knight Fighter was built around having an absurd AC - between a +1 Shield, the Defense Fighting Style, and the Shield Spell, once I got plate armor I effectively had an AC of 27 as long as I had any spell slots left. While I've found in the past that AC isn't really as good at reducing average damage taken as things like Rage or even Deflect Attacks, that might start to change when you start pushing the AC to those absurd limits.

But more than that, on a feeling level, it felt really good to be so untouchable. In a recent episode of Critical Role, Luis Carazo's character Azune is a Sorcerer/Paladin multiclass, and so could combine the high AC of a Paladin with the Shield spell, so that when pitted against a group of what I assume were Bandits, each needed to roll a natural 20 to hit him, and none did (evidently DM Brennan Lee Mulligan rolled several 19s, but to no avail).

In early design for Draw Steel (then just "The MCDM RPG") they gave some classes triggered actions that could fully negate a foe's damage to them, but the final design at best let damage be reduced, but never eliminated. For both players and the Director, the intent is for every turn to move things forward.

Again, though, I think that there's an efficiency to removing attack rolls - while Extra Attack doubles a martial character's damage at level 5 (not to mention the higher hit chance due to a bump in proficiency bonus,) I actually think the "feels-good" part of getting it is more about that statistical smoothing effect. Even if you miss on one attack, getting one in will at least make you feel like you did something. In a system without attack rolls, though, you could double damage simply by... doubling damage. Sure, there are cases where you might prefer the split damage (like if you can kill a monster with one attack and then move on to the other with the second attack) but especially in a game where I'm imagining most monsters should be fought solo, pouring it all into one bit of damage is probably ideal (especially given Deathblow mechanics, where you need to hit their threshold with a single attack to get the kill).

I think the only thing, then, to really consider is how this impacts things like equipment.

In Draw Steel, armor is very abstractly represented via Kits as just higher Stamina. The argument for this was that if heavier armor reduced the damage you took by 20% on average because of the higher chance for monsters to miss you, you could achieve the same effect by increasing your Stamina and healing received by 25%  (given that healing in Draw Steel is almost always proportionate to your max Stamina). (I think I have that math right - 100 is 80% of 125, just as 80 is 80% of 100).

I'd be tempted to use armor as damage reduction, but damage reduction always runs into two problems: first, if it's a percentage reduction, that might require everyone bust out calculators (something you generally want to avoid in TTRPG design) unless it's always something flat and easily done in one's head, like the 50% reduction from resistances in 5E. But if you want different kinds of armor reducing damage by different percentages, it gets messy. Alternatively, if you have subtractive damage reduction, it becomes insanely powerful against a lot of little hits and proportionately weaker against individual, massive blows.

So, yeah, without a hit chance to consider, I guess I'll hand this to the MCDM folks - just raising Stamina is probably the most elegant solution.

That being said:

The subtractive damage reduction issues might not be as big of a deal when we're dealing with a game that focuses on individual, powerful monsters. Minion fights against, say, zombies or wicker blights (the latter being the kind of minions I think a Hexen would have, which are sort of this game's version of hags) might really favor Night Hunters with heavy armor, because they might be able to shrug off the minions' blows unless they can roll particularly high on their damage, but then when facing off against the starring monster, that reduction is less proportionately powerful because every attack is going to do at least a bit of damage.

On the other (are we on third or fourth now?) hand, subtractive damage reduction might be too powerful if PCs are also only killed on a Deathblow.

Eh, yeah, for now, I think sticking to the Draw Steel style of armor is probably the best course.

Actually, How Should Class Resources Work in a Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG?

 Like many who got their start in digital RPGs, I was surprised to discover the Spell Slot system in D&D when I first started playing. It is a pretty weird one, even if you figure it out pretty quickly.

I believe in early editions, "preparing" spells meant that you literally chose how many of each of your known spells you would have ready for the day - having three (numbers chosen arbitrarily) Fireballs ready might mean that you couldn't cast Fear (also not sure those spells were around then, though both feel likely to be very long-established ones).

Anyway, the gradual attrition in D&D is great for a survival-horror challenge like an old-school dungeon, but as the folks at MCDM (mainly Matt Colville, though I think he was acting as mouthpiece for his company) pointed out, the more heroic fantasy that D&D tends to lean toward in this day and age favors a build to a big climax.

Draw Steel's resource system is built both to make individual fights ramp up in intensity (as players start off with little of their heroic resources and need to work up to their more epic moves, as well as how the Director gains Malice to build up to their monsters' own big moves) and also encourages the players to push forward because of the way that Victories give them a head-start in resource generation so that fights toward the end of an adventure go to 11 earlier (Directors also get a head-start on Malice the more victories a party has, so it's mirrored).

But I was thinking about how resources in Deathblow, my concept for this Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG, ought to work.

Elements of both D&D and Draw Steel work their way in - I like the "every attack hits" aspect of Draw Steel, but I also think it really plays into the major distinction between losing stamina and actually getting slain by a Deathblow. Because the monsters are all very deadly, I think the narrative of "taking damage" is really more like "avoiding a lethal blow at the cost of some of your energy to continue the fight."

I certainly have some ideas about how surviving a Deathblow might still have certain impacts (like lasting injuries). But that's not the current think I'm considering:

Thematically, does a game about monster-hunting - an element of classic fantasy RPGs to be sure, but we're really zeroing in on the idea of building to a big climactic fight at the end of a hunt - feel more attrition-focused or something where resources build up to be spent?

I think the problem with traditional attrition is that, ideally, an adventure in Deathblow only has one big encounter, and zero to like, three at the most encounters against less powerful monsters (here, we want an opportunity for monsters that are more threatening in numbers, like zombies. While I'm imagining a Ghoul as a truly deadly threat on its own, zombies provide us with the more minor challenge, though the difficulty vibe I'd go for is more like RE2 Remake's spongey, serious threat zombies and not something to be mowed down in the dozens).

Anyway, given that I want this to be a game where it's perfectly reasonable (and fun) to have a multi-session adventure that has just a single combat encounter, the attrition one tends to endure over the course of many fights in a game like D&D doesn't really make sense.

I'm tempted, then, to go for something more like Draw Steel's system of heroic resources. But this also might not be the right fit: after all, Draw Steel is about charging forward from action set-piece to action set-piece, where recovering Stamina is just a matter of catching your breath and taking a moment (unless you've exhausted all your recoveries and really need to retreat to a safe location and take some serious time off). Deathblow isn't about racking up several small victories over the course of an adventure - it's about getting that one definitive victory at the end.

In writing this, I have come up with one possible option:

Tracking and identifying the monster in Deathblow will probably (everything I say about the game is tentative, and I'm not making any promises about whether this game ever gets finished, much less distributed to the public) be a core mechanical element of the game. While an adventure like this in D&D might involve some loosely-structured Survival, Investigation, maybe a knowledge skill check or two to discover what monster is threatening things, based largely on narrative, I would want to have this phase of the adventure, The Hunt, to be a really core and important part of the game, in which every class has relevant abilities to bring into play (and here, I'm using the Draw Steel meaning of Abilities, as in specific, mechanically-defined actions that your character can take, sort of like spells in D&D).

The point of The Hunt in a monster-hunting narrative is to prepare yourself for the eventual encounter with the monster. In Dracula (and surely that's a classic Gothic monster-hunting story,) Van Helsing and the other vampire-hunters spend the entire book trying to figure out just what exactly Dracula is (it's actually a bit awkward because Van Helsing seems to know but kind of draws it out to the extent that he even fails to prevent Lucy Westenra from getting turned by the Count) and the final confrontation, as Dracula flees England and tries to return to his castle, is a mad rush in the snow to take him out before the sun sets. (The Texan cowboy - and yes, there's a Texan cowboy in Dracula - doesn't make it).

Anyway, I had this idea: if the whole point of The Hunt is to prepare the party for their eventual confrontation with the monster... what if that's how they generate the resources that they use in the fight against the monster?

Let's say that you're a Mechanist, and you have a resource called Ingenuity. You spend Ingenuity on your powerful abilities (in the Mechanist's case, probably individual devices and contraptions you've created).

We'll say you're hunting, oh, a Hexen (kind of this game's equivalent of a Hag, but with a more tree-like appearance, blurring the line between hideous nightmarish humanoid and plant-life) and you use one of your Hunt abilities - let's say Residue Analysis (or maybe Residue Detector). If you do find some Bloodmoss in the washbasin of the ailing town priest, you move toward being able to identify the monster, maybe toward tracking it, and maybe you gain an Ingenuity.

Now, two things to keep in mind:

First, I think that there needs to be a fail state here. If you don't get the clue, you don't get the point of Ingenuity. Players should try to really focus on efficiently and effectively Hunting the monster, and reap the reward of more resources if they do (or, from another perspective, pay the price if they don't).

Second, there's the question of player overlap. If the Mechanist uses their Residue Detector while the Witch wants to use, oh, say, "Ken of Thorn and Blood," a spell that might animate trace amounts of poisons to bring attention to themselves, who gets the resource? Maybe the entire party gets a point of their resource for each clue they uncover - this is probably the most elegant solution.

Alternatively, different kinds of clues might empower classes differently. Maybe the Mechanist actually doesn't benefit from this particular piece of information, but by discovering it for the party as a whole, the group's Witch and Assassin both gain a point in their resource.

Here, perhaps, stat blocks could help build adventures (something I generally think is wise). We might say that different monsters will have a quota of different kinds of clues that you'll need to seed into the adventure's setting.

Let's imagine some clue categories: maybe witness accounts (including repressed memories that might need to be brought out with various abilities,) victim remains (which could be literal physical remains or maybe evidence of strange behavior) and then Signs of the Beast (which would be things like tracks, claws, teeth, other things that the monster has left behind). I really like Signs of the Beast, and I think we should come up with interesting names for the other two.

So, if you have a Vampire, say (probably a high-level monster - though I love the idea of a False Vampire that is actually some kind of Lovecraftian monstrosity that is commonly mistaken for a vampire but also actually a bit lower-level) they'll have some quota of clues for you to leave for your players. And then, each class probably generates resources on two but not all three of the clue categories.

I'm tempted to thus say that, to keep the pressure on, the party basically has limited attempts at finding these clues before they are attacked, and thus might not have all the resources they want. That said, being ambushed by the monster feels... slightly counter to the whole premise of the game. At the very least, I don't think every monster should ambush the party.

But I think if there's a failure state on investigating clues, that creates pressure to figure them all out correctly and thus have all the resources you can get for the eventual fight.

The Escape mechanic, where a failed Deathblow allows the monster to escape, adds additional tracking time. In my initial conceptualization, the price paid here is the need to keep Hunting the prey, and maybe doing so with diminished resources (the Monster is also diminished). But I think if we used something like this, it would also create this new scenario where the party has an opportunity to recoup some of the resources they expended in the failed attempt to slay the monster.

Truly, I do really like the idea of generating resources over the course of The Hunt to then use in the big fight. But it's a system that has some kinks to work out.

(Also, what do we think of Deathblow? It's a core mechanic of the game, but is it not Gothic enough? I could potentially imagine that if the system is fun enough, maybe tweaks to it could make it work in other speculative fiction genres, at the very least other kinds of monster-hunting. Maybe they're all Deathblow, but this would be "Deathblow: Night Hunters" and other versions could have a different subtitle. Anyway, I think Deathblow is the working title unless something more fitting comes about.)

Ideas for a Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG

 This is extremely tentative - I literally just had the idea in the last hour while having lunch.

The first thought that came to me was how Curses in D&D are kind of disappointing. They are mechanically distinct from other magical effects, but only in that there are other spells (Remove Curse, mainly) that can dispel them. If anything, this means a Curse is actually less of a problem than other kinds of magical afflictions, which feels utterly wrong.

I was thinking about how in Dark Souls, getting cursed required you to go through a pretty involved process to cleanse it, and the notion was that a Curse could never just be eradicated, only transferred to someone else. Even the items you could get to cleanse them were technically a person's spirit who was just taking on that curse. True to the game's themes of entropy, on a long enough timeline, everyone would be afflicted with this curse, which feels very, you know, curse-like.

But that got me thinking about how it would be cool to have a D&D-like system that could handle curses in this way.

I've long been drawn (as documented in this blog) to the idea of Monster-Hunters in a world of Gothic Horror. In my homebrew setting, there is a group called the Nachtjagers (and then I expanded this to an older branch in another kingdom called the Night Hunters - same term, just in English) who play that role of secret monster-hunters who go village-to-village fighting monsters. It's actually not too dissimilar to The Witcher in concept - this is an archetype that goes way back. And while Van Helsing from Dracula is not precisely this archetype in the novel, he's been portrayed that way in reimaginings (like the Hugh Jackman movie from the late 2000s where he looks like Solomon Kane, although to be fair, Van Helsing is Dutch and Kane's a puritan who might have adopted Dutch fashion while there in exile from England - I don't know actually when Kane's books take place).

Anyway, it's just scattered thoughts for the moment, but I think this would be a bit more than just a 5E hack. Here are some concepts I'd want to build around:

1. Borrowing Draw Steel's "Everything Hits"

I really like the idea that there's no Null Result in Draw Steel's combat, but I also think that the Power Roll is not the only way to implement this. In D&D, after all, we have damage rolls, and I think you could play around with those rather than standardizing to just three potential results.

2. A Focus on Fighting Individual Monsters

Monster-hunting as a subset of the dark fantasy genre does really tend to focus on a single, interesting monster. It should be a shocking reveal when there's more than one of them. There can be exceptions, of course.

But not only are they usually only fighting one monster at a time, I think that a monster fight needs to be a really climactic effect. If you figure that a monster hunt should be the rough equivalent of an adventure, that means you'll want to potentially allow the party to spend multiple sessions going after an individual monster. This, then, inspires two other pillars:

3. A Focus on Hunting, not Just Fighting

Every character must have some skills that contribute to tracking down the target, with different classes having different methods of doing so. There needs to be interesting gameplay related to finding the target, and we might actually have to reinforce that mechanically, like you need to earn a certain number of "tracking points" to actually find where you can fight the monster.

4. Deathblows

This, I think, would be the radical change compared to most RPG combat systems. I think we'd use Stamina in place of HP like Draw Steel does, but we are really going to reinforce the notion that Stamina is merely your ability to keep fighting. If you are knocked down, you're basically out of the fight but kind of just have the wind knocked out of you.

I think that actually killing a creature (whether a monster, NPC, or PC) would require separately taking a moment to get the killing blow. And this moment would require dice to be rolled to determine if you successfully kill it.

A failed Deathblow would probably net the monster some Stamina, but just enough to give them the opportunity to flee. Certain class abilities might give you a better chance at successfully executing a Deathblow, and maybe other class abilities could mean that a Monster that survived a Deathblow is easier to track and maybe is less likely to survive the next. Monsters probably wouldn't have abilities that make it harder for PCs to survive Deathblows (especially because, given the genre, we probably aren't going to have any kind of resurrection mechanics).

Deathblows could also help give iconic monsters some of their iconic features - you can't Deathblow a vampire unless you have a wooden stake to drive into their heart, for example. Likewise, you might not be able to Deathblow a werewolf without a silver weapon.

The actual mechanics of the Deathblow are something I don't quite know how I'd handle - I think potentially it's that you need to do some minimum amount of damage in a single attack (or turn - we could count someone stabbing a monster a dozen times in quick succession as one collective attack). Each monster could have a Deathblow threshold that needs to be met, and certain player abilities might add to the damage of their Deathblows, or perhaps make certain types of damage count as higher when used for a Deathblow.

5. Thematic Classes

Part of why we'd want to build a new system is to ensure that we don't fall into the same genre conventions as D&D. I think like Draw Steel, we'd also want class design that gives just as much versatility and options to martial characters as it does to spellcasters.

I have three spellcaster concepts in mind:

A Witch who deals in natural magic, with a very mud, blood, and thorns aesthetic.

An Esotericist (that might be a mouthful, Mystic could work better. Alchemist could also work, but we're leaning more toward the esoteric traditions than the "beakers and bottles" aesthetic). Oh, Occultist is probably the best: this is the archetype of the person who employs deep and forbidden magic, with hellfire, rune circles, and dark tomes as their aesthetic.

Inquisitor would be the "divine" spellcaster, with a really harsh fire-and-brimstone aesthetic using searing light and white-hot silver.

For "martial" archetypes, truthfully we're probably talking roughly the Fighter, Ranger, and Rogue in broad terms. But I think we'd have some different terms:

Warrior is probably our only heavily-armored (remember that everything hits, so this would mean lots of Stamina) class fighting with big medieval weaponry, and I think their tracking capabilities are more about keeping morale up on the move.

Hunters (a name that might need to change if the game were just called Night Hunters - I'm between that and Deathblow) are all about special techniques and knowledge about monsters, and likely would have some mechanic where they can prepare special poisons for their weapons, or if that doesn't work mechanically, they might have a lot of abilities that impair the monster (slowing it, reducing its damage, etc.)

Assassins are your quick, nimble, and sneaky monster hunters who likely fight with daggers or other small weapons, and probably have very high mobility.

6. Thematic Stats

I like the flavor of using alternative stat names - while I think Draw Steel kind of goes contrarian in its insistence on calling everything something else (Strength is fine - though as someone whose first class-based RPG was WoW, Agility does actually feel kind of better than Dexterity) here we're narrowing the tonal focus of the game and would want the stats to reflect that.

For example, Brutality would be the stat for raw physical power - Warriors would likely want to focus on this, but I'd also want the stats to be appealing to more than one class. Cunning would probably be the spellcasting ability for our Occultist, reflecting, yes, cleverness and forward-planning but with a somewhat sinister vibe. Will might be what an Inquisitor uses - a raw channeling of one's power and conviction upon the world.

We don't have to have 1:1s for all the classic D&D stats, and I'd even be kind of curious to play in a space where some classes might want to split their stats a bit, like how in Soulsborne games you sometimes would rather have 40 Dex and 40 Int instead of 80 Dex.

Maybe we can design class abilities that scale with two stats, but in a limited manner - if you're going for more of a melee Inquisitor build, you might want to have 3 Brutality and 3 Will, while if you're going for a pure spellcasting build, you'll want to have a full 6 Will (the numbers are made up here, but I imagine we'd want to just make the scores whatever you add to your rolls).

Like, say we've got an ability called Purge the Wicked, which deals holy/radiant/whatever we wind up calling it damage. Say it does 3d6+Will. Then, we have another Inquisitor ability they can pick called Searing Brand, which does 1d10+Brutality (max 3) physical damage and 1d10+Will (max 3) fire damage. If you have 6 Will and nothing to Brutality, you'll be doing 16.5 on average with Purge the Wicked and only 14 with Searing Brand, but if you're split between the two, you could potentially do an average of 17 with Searing Brand.

7. Relatively Flat Levels

I think it was wise for both Daggerheart and Draw Steel to compress to just 10 levels. The legacy of 20 levels in D&D has left a lot of campaigns ending well before the level cap.

I think this game has an even lower level cap. Like, probably 5.

The reason is that, while we do want our players to be fighting scarier monsters as they get more experience, the core tone of the game is for them to be these rough-and-tumble killers for hire, not superheroes. If any of the characters gain the ability to fly, it's going to be very limited, and probably just one person (the Witch, most likely).

I wouldn't want the power escalation to get to the point where the party can just teleport across the globe or phase through walls. A monster that is extremely dangerous at level 1 should still remain a threat, even if it's a more manageable one, at the cap. At no point should a vampire be a trivial encounter (to be fair, that's the kind of monster I imagine being beyond the players' capabilities until the later levels, like 3 at the absolute earliest.

8. Extensive non-combat mechanics

I always get a little wary of complicating non-combat situations with a bunch of mechanics. At least with my players, naturalistic roleplay tends to be what we want to focus on when we're not looking at minis on a battle grid.

I was, thus, pretty skeptical of Negotiations in Draw Steel. I have yet to actually run one (or even see it in play) but I will concede that its solves some issues, like preventing players from just brute-forcing social encounters after failing a ton of charisma checks.

Actually, I think I wouldn't have a "Charisma" equivalent stat (beyond Will, being only roughly equivalent) in order to make it feel like players don't feel they need to be a certain class to be the party face and interact with NPCs.

What I think would really need to be robust would be a system for detective work.

I'm tempted to adopt something like the Time Clocks in Blades in the Dark - while we'd mostly want to situate the monster hunt as a narrative thing, we'd also have an underlying numerical system to track how close the party is to finding the monster.

9. Resource System

I definitely like the Draw Steel Heroic Resource system, but that really truly only functions fully while in a fight. Out of initiative, the use of Heroic abilities is kind of kludgy. I'm tempted, then, to borrow ideas from Daggerheart, where combat and non-combat situations operate along similar lines.

But that might be a later consideration.

    Ideas are Cheap. I'll be honest, I'm kind of getting excited about this concept, but I also know it would be very difficult to put it all together. If I could figure out at least an initial core dice mechanic system (I actually don't hate ability modifiers and proficiency bonuses with a d20 - just that it wouldn't be so common to roll d20s in combat) and put together a rough level 1 for some classes and a monster, we might see if we get any traction.

Ability Score and Characteristic Flexibility

 I haven't posted about Draw Steel in a while, because, well, I have still not had a chance to play it. I need to be the one pushing my friends to try it out, and between the D&D game I play in and the one I run (and hoping we can one day return to the Sunday game I play in that hasn't played in like 7 months) and everyone having packed adult schedules, I've been struggling to find the oomph to actually set a date and get it running.

Still, while my admiration for the game is still theoretical at this point, I wanted to point out one other thing that I really appreciate about the game:

Naturally, this is going to be in comparison to D&D - the 800-pound Gorilla of the TTRPG space, to which Draw Steel was designed largely in response to.

If you are playing a Bard in D&D, you will most likely have Charisma as your top stat, potentially even if you're going for a melee build like Dance or Valor. While I think they only get simple weapons now, back in 2014, they got proficiency in Longswords as one of the specific martial options they were granted. A Longsword is not a finesse weapon, so barring something like True Strike or Pact of the Blade, you'll need to attack using Strength with it.

Now, I like the idea of a strong Bard. But because Bards are limited to Light Armor, if you don't invest pretty heavily in Dexterity (or somehow upgrade your armor type through multiclassing or a feat) you'll have a pitiful AC, which is a real liability (though I do think monster attack bonuses outpace AC growth unless you get lots of magic armor).

We do, in theory, have a lot of options for how we want to express our characters with different stats, but it's quite difficult to make it impactful without hindering our characters. Basically every character wants at least a decent Constitution score, and to have decent armor, you need at least a 14 in Dex unless you can wear heavy armor, in which case you will want at least a 15 in Strength. (Armor Artificers are a rare exception, who truly don't need a good stat for AC, but given that the armor you wear still contributes to the weight you're carrying, if your table uses any kind of encumbrance rules, you might still consider investing a bit in Strength).

Different classes have different degrees of flexibility here - a Rogue really only needs high Dexterity and probably decent Constitution, though certain subclasses will then want to invest in Intelligence as well, and possibly Wisdom to aid in important perception checks and the like. A Paladin, though, who really wants to maximize their Strength, Charisma, and ideally Con as well, has very little flexibility on getting decent Dex, Int, or Wis - in fact, the "optimal" build using Point Buy is to take 15s in Str, Cha, and Con and 8s in the rest.

There are two ways in which Draw Steel, to me, really fixes the friction here:

First, there's the way that Stamina (the equivalent of HP) is calculated - there's no Constitution stat, and so your Stamina is determined by your class, level, and potentially your Kit, all of which are basically divorced from your stats. There is also no concept of an Armor Class - all attacks will do something, it's just a question of how much of an impact they have (think of it as damage rolls without attack rolls). Again, there is no stat minimum for your Shining Armor or Cloak and Dagger kits.

The second element is that your class guarantees that the most important stats for you go up, hitting the maximum for any stat you could have at each level it could reach that (basically each echelon of play - their version of tiers of play).

The Censor, which is the rough equivalent of the Paladin, for example, always has Might and Presence both at the highest amount you could get at any level (the equivalents of Strength and Charisma).

Now, for the other stats, the player has a choice - they can either have a relatively flat spread between the other three stats (Agility, Reason, and Intuition - the equivalents of Dexterity, Intelligence, and Wisdom) or they can actually take a low score in at least one of them to keep another at or near the level of their primary stats.

I realized this when I was building a Talent - the psionic class that doesn't really have a 5E equivalent until they come out with the Psion, presumably in some upcoming Dark Sun book. Talents earn more of their heroic resource when a creature is force-moved near them, and while that would most classically take the form of some kind of telekinetic movement, it actually works just fine if you shove someone.

A Talent is among the "squishiest" classes (meaning purely that it has lower Stamina) and so you wouldn't think it would be a class that lends itself to having a high Might. But there's actually nothing really stopping you from doing that. Thus, I built a Hakaan (think sort of Goliaths but made of stone and literally one size category larger than most characters, though they still fit on one grid square) Talent whose Might was just one point lower than his Reason and Presence (the core stats for Talents). Because you can shove creatures as a maneuver (think bonus action) I figured he could start off a turn if someone was up in his face by shoving them away, thus immediately gaining some extra Clarity, and then drop some nasty psionics on them.

By contrast, it's very unlikely that a Sorcerer in D&D would be able to afford having a high Strength when they need to have a high Charisma, decent Con and decent Dexterity.

It does honestly make me wonder if D&D would be better off if armor was less stat-dependent, and if we could make room for weirder stat arrays.

Raven Beak in 3

 Well, 5 years later my re-play of Metroid Dread saw me take down Raven Beak in three attempts. While I love this game as a fitting follow-up to the series, my biggest complaint as someone getting a bit older is that it's tough on the hands - when you get either the Plasma or Wave Beam, you can start damaging bosses with your uncharged beam weapons, which is theoretically a good thing but given that Dread's beam weapon more or less shoots as fast as you can hit the Y button, I just found my thumb getting extremely tired doing it, and so I wonder if I actually would have taken him down faster if I had stuck to missiles with a slower fire rate but I assume still higher damage-per-hit. When I got the parry-cutscene damage opportunities, I just shifted so that I could tap the Y button with my pointer, which was was better-rested and made it easier to really rapidly blast the guy.

My first go I got absolutely trounced, but I got better at reading his tells, and in both attempts 2 and 3 I barely took any damage on his flying phase. I also remember hitting his void-bombs with Storm Missiles 5 years ago, but this time I had trouble getting the lock-on and launch in time, and found it easier to just aim Ice Missiles at it.

Despite having very little screentime, Raven Beak is a really memorable and compelling villain. For one thing, we've generally seen the Chozo as benevolent figures. For all the cosmic horror we encounter in Dread, the fact that the final boss and main villain is just a philosophically evil conqueror and tyrant is an interesting twist. Given his end, though, it seems very unlikely that we'll ever see him again.

Kraid and Ridley have died multiple times and come back via cloning or whatever - it's not super clear how the Mawkin captured Kraid (to be fair, Kraid just kind of sinks into the ground when we beat him in Super Metroid, the last time we canonically saw him, so maybe he got off Zebes before it blew up. Or, again, could be a clone). But given that Kraid appears as part of an X-Parasite (the same that infects Raven Beak and creates the truly horrific Kraid/Raven Beak Hybrid. Kraven Beak?) does that mean he's perma-dead?

If memory serves, there's a Ridley clone in Metroid Fusion (oh, and it turns out I can't play it on my Switch because they have a tiered subscription) but even though Ridley shows up more than any other Metroid villain, I believe his canonical death happens in Super Metroid (he literally blows apart).

My total play time was 8 and a half hours, though there's also a counter for when you're on the map screen, which bumped mine up to 11.5. I cannot imagine I spent a full 3 hours looking at maps in this playthrough, but I assume I left the game paused for a long time while doing something else. I saw that a previous speed-run of it I'd taken only 3 hours and maybe 40 minutes, but only had like 37% of the items. I believe you get art rewards for getting under 4 hours, and I just never got that on Hard Mode (doubt I ever attempted it).

100% But for Raven Beak in my Revisit to ZDR, and Thoughts on Super Metroid

 I seriously doubt that I'm getting any reasonable completion time, but I've gotten 100% of all items in my 5-years-later play of Metroid Dread.

I was shocked that I managed to pull off the difficult shinespark puzzles in Burenia and Cataris in only a couple attempts. I also realized that the one I recalled struggling with in Ferenia actually doesn't require you to use the shinespark until the very end, rather than having to preserve it on slopes, which might explain why I had so much trouble with it back in the day as well. This is the one in the lower left part of Ferenia, through a hidden passage next to the lift that goes down to Dairon. You have plenty of space to get the speed boost up, and then you just slide under a small gap, run up a slope, wall-jump to another slope, and then get your shinespark activated right at the top of that slope and shoot straight up.

Similarly, the one in Artaria (upper left) that I thought required you to get the shinespark, bomb through a wall, and then flash-shift through one of those barriers that will close if you step on the ground near them... could also be done much more simply, as you actually have just enough space to get the shinespark on the other side of the bomb-block barrier, making it actually pretty trivially easy (you can just space jump over the barrier with plenty of time to get in position to spark up through the speed blocks).

I really love Metroid Dread. I still think that I like Super Metroid's world design better - particularly, I find that Dread locks too many doors behind you, so that frequently the zones feel less like an expanding world than levels that you have to commit to completing before you can go back where you came from. I appreciate that you can use the teleporters to go to any other teleporter after getting to Itorash - it was convenient for my item hunt - but I also kind of prefer the way that Super Metroid only rarely traps you where you are - you can usually return to the ship if you want (the exception being I think when you go down into Lower Brinstar and I think you really need the Ice Beam to climb back up).

Also, Super Metroid's soundtrack is among the greatest of all time, and I don't know that any of Dread's music achieves the same iconic memorability. Indeed, Dread re-uses some music from Super Metroid - its theme now sort of functions as Samus' theme (which is funny because she has a theme, which plays near her ship in Super Metroid) and they use the Red Brinstar theme when Quiet Robe gives you the mid-game lore dump. (I remember when I first played the series after discovering Samus in Super Smash Bros., I was surprised that I didn't hear the Brinstar theme in Super Metroid. This, of course, had been the Brinstar theme for the original game, which has a far more heroic space-adventure vibe compared to the brooding and dark stuff from Super Metroid (even if the Green Brinstar theme is kind of a banger, there's still a bit of a "what a weird and mysterious world we've found" tone to it).

Actually, fun fact, when I first played Super Metroid, I was a Middle Schooler in, like, 2000, and at the time I had very strong and strict opinions on what kind of music was cool, and objected to the kind of dance-y, synth-y vibes of that Green Brinstar theme. Naturally, I'm a much more mature person now and understand that it's one of the game's best tracks (with solid competition).

I think that the issue I have with Dread's music is that it feels like it pulls back on its bombast a little, as if it's afraid of being distracting. But given that the gameplay cues in Metroid Dread are largely visual, I don't think it would be a problem for them to go bigger and really claim their space the way that the Super Metroid tracks do. Lower Norfair has always been a favorite of mine because it truly makes Ridley out to be demonic, these fire-and-acid-filled ruins feel like hell, and the music evokes some kind of Latin choir. Upper Norfair is much more subtle, and arguably is one of the more forgettable tracks from Super Metroid, but it's kind of a prelude to the insane bombast you get when you go after Ridley.

Also, coming back to Green Brinstar's theme, I love how it's especially designed for when you first arrive in the zone. You've only been to Crateria at this point (as well as a somewhat ironically rearranged, I think, version of both the first room from the first game and the original Mother Brain boss room and escape shaft - though I think that neither is counted as being in Brinstar or Tourian, the zones each were respectively in in the first game). But Crateria is mostly lifeless, just bluish rocks (which honestly sounds a bit more like the NES version of Brinstar). As the music changes when you go down into Brinstar the first time, you hear the little rhythmic intro while Samus is in the elevator shaft, and right as the main melody kicks in, you see the area covered in thriving plant life, green moss and different, maybe healthier-looking creatures.

Actually, while ZDR's destruction kind of becomes a necessity after the X Parasite infection rabidly spreads (damn, how the hell did Raven Beak manage to quarantine them in Elun in the first place? Like, minutes after it's opened up, the entire world is basically dead,) it honestly feels a bit of a shame 32 years later that Zebes was destroyed at the end of Super Metroid. I think it's the only world that the Metroid games have ever revisited (at least among the ones I've played).

In some ways, even though it is explicitly a sequel, Super Metroid is also kind of a remake of the original game. Released only 8 year later, the game's a showcase for both the evolution of the design and the big jump in power from the NES to the SNES. But it's filled with callbacks that flew over my head the first time I played the game - not only the rooms from the beginning and end of the original game that you find very early on, but also the kind of creepy faces in green and purple metal right before facing Kraid and Ridley, respectively. The weird bubble area of Norfair, and some of what I thought were odd choices for terrain design.

While I'd prefer that they keep moving the series forward, I've found myself wanting a remake of Super Metroid using the engine, controls, and perhaps some mechanics from Metroid Dread. Dread isn't easy - I think that the greater precision of control you have in it allows them to be far more punishing with their bosses (does any boss have an attack that doesn't do a full energy tank's worth of damage?) Certainly some challenges in Super Metroid would be trivialized by things like Samus' ability to slide. But if you could rebuild Super Metroid to control like Metroid Dread, I'd be really eager to try it.

Anyway, with literally nothing left to do but fight Raven Beak, I suspect that this trip back into the heady days of 2021 is drawing to a close. Bake a loaf of sourdough in a saucepan and cut your own hair if you feel nostalgic.