My Wizard vs. Death Knight

 So, I've been doing all these builds at a hypothetical campaign- or at least tier-boss fight against a Death Knight. At CR 17, these monsters would be a serious challenge for a level 10 party of an average size, but within the realm of encounter-building guidance in the DMG (a high-difficulty encounter).

It just so happens that my Wizard is, in fact, also at that threshold at the end of tier 2 (and given the campaign has been going for like four and a half years, it's about time!)

Now, I've talked a lot about hypothetical builds, with feats and all that stuff. But let me talk about my own actual character and use the spells I have available.

This is going to be simple - much quicker and easier than our previous builds. It's going to revolve around well-documented and busted spell combo, Conjure Minor Elementals and Scorching Ray.

With a bit more energy and space to get into it, let's talk about how we use these spells and how my subclass, the Order of Scribes, affects it:

Conjure Minor Elementals is a 4th level spell that creates a 15-foot emanation around you. The area is difficult terrain for your enemies, but more importantly, whenever you land an attack (spell or weapon) on a target that is inside that emanation, you add 2d8 damage from your choice of Acid, Cold, Fire, or Lightning damage (though as a Scribe, that's even less restrictive).

This spell, notably, had to be nerfed with errata after the PHB came out, because it used to scale up by 2d8 with each level up upcasting. That was nerfed to just 1d8, but this scaling is still incredibly good if we can manage to make lots of attacks.

That is where Scorching Ray comes in. This spell is a 2nd level spell that shoots 3 rays of fire at our target. Each ray does 2d6 Fire damage on a hit. When upcast, rather than increasing the damage of each ray, it instead adds additional rays.

At level 10, we have two 5th level spell slots, 3 4th, 3rd, and 2nd level spell slots, and four 1st level slots. The latter won't factor into this - we'll save them for Shield and Absorb Elements if needed.

Now, there are a couple things that benefit us as a Scribes Wizard:

First, we can always swap one damage type from a spell with that of another spell of the same level that we have in our spellbook. For example, Bigby's Hand can do Force Damage, so if we cast a 5th level spell, we can change any of its damage types to Force (though if it does multiple types in a single instance, like Destructive Wave doing thunder and... fire, I think?, you can only choose one of those to swap).

Second, we can also use Manifest Mind, which gives us a little incorporeal buddy (it can only be destroyed with a spell like Dispel Magic) that we can move around as a bonus action on our turn, and a few times per day, we can cast spells as if we were in its space instead of our own.

This should work with Conjure Minor Elementals - once cast through the Manifested Mind, the emanation will radiate out from it, rather than from us.

But let's talk pitfalls:

Against a Death Knight specifically, we're in trouble: the DK can cast Dispel Magic twice a day. This can apply both to the Manifest Mind and the Conjure Minor Elementals spell. Arguably, having it waste an entire action to do so might be worth it, but it will require us to re-cast the spell and start our rotation over again.

Another thing is that Death Knights have Lunge as a legendary action. While this only allows them to move up to half their speed, and we're also putting them in difficult terrain with our emanation, they can use Lunge three times per round, meaning that they could potentially get up to 75 feet of movement, which would easily be enough to get out of our 15-foot emanation and even beyond our ability to catch up with them.

Manifest Mind can only move 30 feet on a turn, and given its vulnerability to Dispel Magic, we might have to skip it. Thus, it'll be us and our squishiness that we need to employ within 15 feet of our target.

If the Death Knight flees (rather than just trying to attack us to break concentration - which we'll get to) we could use Phantom Steed to give ourselves a speedy 100-foot mounted speed. The Death Knight also has this spell, though. Also, Phantom Steeds are not resilient in combat - any damage dispels them.

But let's say that the Death Knight is boxed in - maybe we have allies with Sentinel (not in my current party) or just terrain that prevents them from getting away.

The Death Knight deals an average of 25 damage on a hit. That's serious damage that could take me down in just a few attacks. But assuming I have the healing to survive an assault like this, my chance to maintain concentration is thus: I have a +3 to Con saves. We have two Paladins in the party, and so especially if I'm standing relatively close to the Death Knight, I'm probably within their auras, meaning an additional +3. So, against 25 damage, it's a DC 12 Con save, and I also have Warcaster. Even if the Paladins can't use Interception to reduce the damage, I'd still save on a roll of 6 or higher, meaning only a 25% chance to fail, and with War Caster, that becomes only a 6.25% chance. Not nothing, but pretty good (I also have the Coat of the Crest, which has three charges and can give me resistance to the Death Knight's slashing damage for a round as a reaction if I get hit, which would make the damage closer to 19).

I do have Counterspell, which I've never actually used. While Dispel Magic would automatically work against Manifest Mind, I'm planning on casting CME at 5th level, so the Death Knight would have to roll an 11 or higher to successfully dispel it. If I saved my reaction for Counterspell (dubiously safe given that they're probably also coming after me with their legendary actions even if they're using Dispel Magic) my DC is 17, so with a +5 to Con, they'd have to roll a 12 or higher to save. They do have advantage, so the 55% chance to successfully prevent the spell is reduced to 30.25%.

In other words, against this monster in particular, this strategy would have a lot of potential problems. It might be diluted a bit if the rest of the party were causing other problems the Death Knight needed to be able to deal with, for sure, but given the power of this spell combo, I would probably make myself a priority target.

    But let's just imagine a world in which this all works.

Very simply, turn one, I cast Conjure Minor Elementals. Any damage it does is fine. We cast it at 5th level, so we now add 3d8 in addition to whatever our attacks do.

Turn one is just that - no damage done, which isn't amazing, but we start to make up for it quickly.

On turn two, we want to save a 5th level slot in case we lose CME for whatever reason, so we'll cast Scorching Ray at 4th level instead.

That's 5 rays. Each does 2d6+3d8 damage (again, the Fire works fine, but we can actually swap it with any of the damage types from CME because we're a Scribes Wizard and it's being cast at 4th level).

The damage on average per ray is 20.5 on a hit. Because it's all dice, we can roll in the crit chance to the hit chance to get our average damage per attack. With a +9 to hit (I rolled stats and got an 18 Intelligence at level 1, so I was able to get 20 Int with War Caster and Keen Mind - the latter maybe not being the most powerful feat, but very in-character) I'm hitting on an 11 or higher, which is 50% of the time. Add in the 5% chance for a crit and we get 20.5x55% for each ray, or 11.275 on average per ray.

On turn 2, we're doing five rays, so we get 56.375 damage. We do this again on rounds 3 and 4. At this point, we alone would have done 75% of the Death Knight's HP, so we can probably assume that the combat is over by this point. Frankly, I think 3 rounds is more likely, and we'll calculate based on that.

Because of the round of set-up we need, this does significantly reduce our overall damage per round. Over three rounds, we're looking at 37.58 (roughly).

This falls behind the Aberrant Sorcerer build, but we also didn't average that out with the set-up round. The Sorcerer does still get to do some damage on that round, and I also think the Sorcerer is in much better shape to actually maintain its spells, but looking back on that post, they do 19.95 damage on round one and 53.34 damage on rounds two and three, so their average beats us pretty handily with 42.21.

What I will say is that ours is going to scale better at higher levels, probably.

While this would be a terrible idea against the Tarrasque (which is both immune to spells that have attack rolls and also fire damage, the latter of which we can deal with as a Scribes wizard, but not the former,) if we fought that Death Knight again in tier 4 (not impossible, though he'd need a lot of minions to be a serious threat to 17th level characters, and thus we might focus more on AoE spells,) and were willing to burn a 9th level slot for CME and go down the line with all the high-level slots for Scorching Ray, we'd be shooting 9 rays with an 8th level Scorching Ray, and each would be dealing 2d6+7d8 damage on a hit, which is 38.5 damage per hit. If we somehow still don't have anything to boost our spell attacks, we'd still have a +11 to hit, so a 60% chance to hit. 65%x38.5 is 25.025, and with nine rays, that's 225.225, meaning that in theory, we'd nuke that Death Knight in one turn if we didn't lose the spell after our first turn.

Probably not what we'd actually do with our spells, though - I think using Shapechange or True Polymorph to turn into, like an Adult Gold Dragon or something might have greater utility.

Aberrant Sorcerer vs. Death Knight

 All right, we've been doing this with a lot of classes and subclasses that tend not to be big favorites of the optimizers in the D&D community. But what about a class that many argue is the most powerful in all of 5.5?

The Sorcerer is a pure caster, and while it doesn't have as broad a spell list as the Wizard nor as much flexibility (notably, it lacks the killer Conjure Minor Elementals) it also has tools like Innate Sorcery and Metamagic that lets you boost those spells to greater power.

I'm not picking subclasses based on the purely highest damage output, so I'm going to choose the subclass I'd probably be most eager to try (though admittedly, maybe less if I got to play my OG Goo-lock in a campaign that went higher than level 1.)

Aberrant Sorcerers have a lot of cool tools, and they and the Clockwork sorcerer kind of became the basis for what you get with a new Sorcerer subclass. They're also appropriate for a horror-themed campaign (though the Shadow Sorcerer, getting a revamp in the new Ravenloft book in a few days, is also very much in that genre wheelhouse).

Working kind of backwards, by level 10, a Sorcerer has two levels of subclass features. Mainly, an Aberrant Sorcerer will have Telepathic Speech, Psionic Sorcery, and Psychic Defenses, none of which are likely to affect open combat against a Death Knight (weirdly, Death Knights don't have Fear as a spell).

There are some damage spells we could consider using here, and of course Spells are going to be at the core of what a Sorcerer is doing.

Stat-wise, we're obviously taking whatever background we can get that gives us a boost to Charisma, and then with Point Buy and that bonus starting off at 17. Our other stats are probably not super relevant for this.

    Feats:

Generally, my go-to for any spellcaster is to get War Caster as soon as possible. Sorcerers are arguably less reliant on it thanks to their native Con save proficiency, but the two together make maintaining concentration all that much easier.

Spell Sniper is a possibility if we want to focus on attack-roll spells. Elemental Adept is probably better for a Draconic Sorcerer (unless it's redundant). I might go for Fey Touched just to get Misty Step taken care of (though grabbing Hex or Hunter's Mark is probably not as good as some other Sorcerer spells we might take instead).

I do think that pure casters are a little less Feat-dependent than martial characters. Inspiring Leader could be very good to help the party with survivability.

Still, even if not feat-dependent, there are enough good Charisma-boosting feats that we probably want to take another at level 8, meaning we'll have a 19 in Charisma at level 10, and thus a +4 to Charisma.

    Metamagic:

Quickened Spell is probably our best option here, allowing us to get a free cantrip in each time we use it (either quickening the cantrip or whatever other spell). Empowered Spell can also boost our damage a bit, though if we're doing that and Quickened Spell, we'll burn through our Sorcery Points pretty quickly. Heightened Spell can help us get over the Death Knight's magic resistance, but it's also very costly. Seeking Spell works for us if we are focusing on attack-roll spells, and we only burn the SP if we miss.

We'll have four options at this level, so definitely Quickened Spell, and I guess we can say Empowered Spell, and then we could actually just pick both Seeking and Heightened to free up spell choices.

    Spells:

This is the real core of it: what spells are we casting?

Generally, I think the usual plan for a spellcaster is to start up with some concentration spell at the start of combat that empowers them over the course of the rest of combat. So:

    Concentration Spell:

Jumping to 5th level spells, Animate Objects, Bigby's Hand, and then from our subclass, potentially Summon Aberration might be a good option. Bigby's Hand has an advantage that it's Clenched Fist attacks have us making the attack roll, so we should have perpetual advantage thanks to Innate Sorcery. While Grasping Hand is arguably the better option most of the time, that's a saving throw that the DK could use Magic Resistance and Legendary Resistance to avoid. Bigby's Hand does 5d8 (22.5 average) damage on a hit. Animate Objects I believe has optimal damage with a two large objects and one medium object. And that winds up being two instances of 2d6+3+Cha (so 14 average) and then one instance of 1d4+3, (5.5 average), which totals up to 33.5, but we wouldn't get advantage because the objects are the ones doing the attacks.

Notably, both spells will require our bonus action to activate them each turn, which actually makes Quickened Spell less exciting.

By contrast, Summon Aberration is a fire-and-forget spell (well, we do need concentration, but it doesn't take up any of our action economy). If cast at 4th level (we could do 5th level, but that only adds 2 damage per turn, and I think we can do better) the options vary a bit: I think in pure potential terms, the Mind Flayer option gives us the most damage, as while its attacks hit for less than the Slaad, it also has its Whispering Aura, which can (on a failed save) deal an extra 7 psychic damage.

But in the real world in which AoE damage flies around, your best bet is probably the Beholderkin, who can fly off 150 feet away (which can out-range the Death Knight's Hellfire Orb) and plink away at a safe distance. So let's go with that, honestly: The Beholderkin will do 1d8+7 damage on its two hits, or 11.5 average (and thus 23 average, but without the advantage we'd get with Bigby's Hand) but also just do its thing and let us pack our turn full of spells.

So, if we have the Beholderkin firing its two beams each turn, we're looking at a hit on a 12 or higher, which is a 45% hit chance, and then a 5% crit chance. Hits land for 11.5 and crits add 4.5, so 11.5x45% is 5.175 and 4.5x5% is .225, giving each attack an average damage of 5.4, and then we double that to 10.8 for our total damage per turn.

    Other Spells:

If we're using Quickened Spell, we can cast a cantrip with our bonus action each turn and sustain that for 5 turns (and then even potentially burn some lower-level slots to get some back, though dear lord the DK should be dead before that point).

    Cantrips:

In terms of Cantrips, Mind Sliver could certainly help the party some, but its damage is somewhat low. That said, the Death Knight's Int save bonus is only +1, making this a pretty good saving throw to target. With +4 to Charisma, our save DC is 16, but we also bump it to 17 with Innate Sorcery, so the DK has to get a 16 or higher to save against it. That's a 75% chance to fail, though because of Magic Resistance, it actually becomes a 56.25% chance instead. Our damage is only 7 on average, so it's roughly 4 damage on average when adjusted for failure chance. Mind Sliver does have a great knock-on effect that could really help the party, but if we're trying to be the big damage dealer, we might look at some other options.

True Strike, now actually a good spell, is an option: we can use a Light Crossbow, and this will deal 1d8+1d6+4 at this level, or a total of 12 on average. Now, if our DM wants to be really nasty, you could argue that this doesn't technically involve a Spell Attack, as we're actually just making a weapon attack using Charisma. If we do allow Innate Sorcery to affect it, though, and assume we get advantage, let's figure out what it does, damage-wise.

We'd have a +8 to hit, which would require us to roll a 12 or higher to hit an AC of 20, so it's a 45% chance. But thanks to advantage, that actually becomes a 69.75% chance and a 9.75% chance to crit. A hit is 12 on average, and the bonus crit damage is 8, so we're looking at 8.37 plus .78 for a total average damage of 9.15.

Sorcerous Burst is, of course, the Sorcerer-exclusive cantrip, and the math here becomes a little crazy. Sorcerous Burst can take on many different damage types - we could pick Thunder or Acid or Psychic to be safe, though actually any but Poison would work against this particular target.

On a hit, Sorcerous Burst does 2d8 damage, but if any wind up rolling an 8, we get to roll an additional die - up to 4 extra (thanks to our +4 to Charisma).

So, let's start with the non-explosive damage. 2d8 is 9 on average, and because it's all just dice rolls, we can lump in the crit chance, so we add the 69.75 to the 9.75 for the hit and crit chances and get 79.5%, so our average damage before the explosive dice is 7.155.

Now, here's where my nightmare begins:

On a hit (that 69.75% chance) we have two dice that can each roll an 8. There's a roughly 23% chance that one of those two dice rolls an 8. There is a 1.6% chance that both of them roll an 8. I think (I think) the way to do this is to basically take the average damage of a d8 (4.5) and multiply it by 23% and also 69.75%, and then double it to account for the two chances. I think. No, hold on. That's wrong.

Ok, instead, in this 69.75% of the time scenario, each of the dice has a 1/8 chance (12.5%) to wind up an 8. So instead, we just find 4.5 (1d8) times 69.75% times 12.5%, which comes to about 8.7%, giving us .39 damage. Then, we double it because it's two dice, so that's really .78.

Now, in those 8.7% chances, there is then a 12.5% chance that those extra dice also roll 8s, exploding for another 1d8. Ok, so that's very close to 1% of the time, which is great, because that's just .05 average damage (.045 to be precise, but rounded off).

I'm going to make an executive decision: the chance that you explode on the extra dice from a crit is going to add so little damage on average that it's negligible. We'll just take that .05, double it to .1, and say that we're now doing an extra .79 because of the exploding dice and call it a day, which means our average damage is now 7.945.

And thus, I think we set Sorcerous Burst aside and just go True Strike - assuming, again, we get to use advantage with it even though it's technically not a spell attack. (SB might scale better at higher levels, but for now, True Strike is the way).

OK! So, we've got our Concentration spell. We're burning two Sorcery Points each turn to get a True Strike off as a bonus action. What are we then burning as our main action on turns 2 onward?

    Leveled Non-Concentration Spell:

We've got some big AoE spells that probably do the most damage in general. Cone of Cold does an average of 36 damage on a failed save, but it's very hard to avoid hitting our friends with it (and we'd burn through SP if we do Careful Spell).

While spells of this ilk have the advantage of still doing half damage on a successful save, I'm tempted to look at Scorching Ray, which would benefit probably more from our Innate Sorcery than the single-point buff to our saving throws, and notably requires no management to avoid hitting allies. It also scales decently (though not as insanely as if we had Conjure Minor Elementals).

Given that we preserved our 5th level slots by casting Summon Aberration at 4th level, we'll have two of these to start with.

At 5th level, Scorching Ray does 6 beams, each of which hit for 2d6. Again, we have a 69.75% chance to hit and 9.75% chance to crit, and because it's all dice, we can just add that up together. 79.5% of 7 (the average damage for a single beam) is 5.565. Thus, a 5th-level Scorching Ray is going to do 33.39 damage.

To compare, a Death Knight has a +5 to Con saves, meaning they save on a roll of 12 or higher, so it's a 55% chance to fail, but with magic resistance, that becomes a 30.25% chance to fail. 36x30.25% is 10.89, though it's also a 69.75% (huh) chance to take 18 damage, so that adds in 12.555, meaning the average damage of a Cone of Cold is 23.445, so for sure we're sticking with Scorching Ray.

    Bringing It Together:

Ok, so, beginning of turn 1, we pop Innate Sorcery. We cast Summon Aberration, and then we Quicken True Strike. True Strike deals 9.15 damage, and the Beholderkin deals 10.8, so on turn one we've done 19.95 average damage.

Then, turn two, both of those things happen again, but now we're adding 33.39 damage from Scorching Ray, for a total of 53.34 damage.

We can do this on turn 3 as well, burning our second 5th level spell.

At turn 4 (and by this point we've dealt a sizeable chunk of the DK's HP on our own) we have to downgrade to mere 4th level Scorching Rays, which reduces our damage per turn by 5.565, so we're doing a pathetic 47.775 damage for the next two turns before we need to downgrade to mere 3rd level Scorching Rays.

    Conclusion:

Yeah, this blows the rest of my scenarios totally out of the water. Make no mistake, this is absolutely emptying the tank, but if you can come with all of these resources to a confrontation with a Death Knight at level 10, you can do this.

One other huge advantage to this is that you can do all of this from 80 feet away (the shortest range is the Light Crossbow). If your DM doesn't let you get advantage on your True Strike, Sorcerous Burst is going to be another option, or Fire Bolt, and I don't think it will affect the damage here by a huge amount. They'll also up your range to 120 feet - which will put you just within Hellfire Orb range, but if you can actually maintain that distance, you might draw fire away from your allies that way (also, Absorb Elements can help mitigate the damage somewhat.)

Weaving a Ravenloft Campaign

 While I've now spent over ten years running games of Dungeons & Dragons, the vast majority of that tenure has been only running two campaigns. The first, which ran from 2015 to more or less 2018 (with a sputtering bit of attempt to continue it into 2019) was in my homebrew setting and was very much an attempt to figure out how to run the game, its best stretch probably being a chapter in which the party was trapped in the Shadowfell (not the Domains of Dread, but the dark reflection of my world in a region known as Red Scar Plains, which was born from a time my best friend had a dream in which I was bothering him about a non-existent World of Warcraft dungeon by that name). Then, in 2020, literally two weeks before the Covid lockdowns started, I began a campaign set in Ravnica that I'm still running, the throughline of which has been the plot by the Phyrexians to try to take over the plane as a stepping stone to take over the entire Magic multiverse (by this point, the campaign largely takes place on other planes, though the grand finale final boss fight is intended to take place back on Ravnica).

My biggest lesson with the Ravnica campaign is that you'll often be tempted to make campaigns in "cycles," like, for example, dealing with a major villain in each guild. This will stretch your campaign out to insane lengths. While the players are level 18 at this point, it's still a campaign that's been going for over six years (the Wildemount game I'm in has been going nearly as long and we're only level 10.)

I'm probably returning to my homebrew setting for the campaign after the Ravnica one, but I've been fascinated by Ravenloft since first becoming aware of it, and of course, with the new Ravenloft book coming out, it's especially on the mind.

The setting is a very flexible one: it's actually remarkably well-suited to one-shots, where the party might be swept into the Mists and have to escape by the end of the session. It can also briefly jump in and interrupt the ongoing story of an existing campaign.

Likewise, you can do more limited adventures set in a single domain. Everyone knows Curse of Strahd, probably the most popular published adventure in 5E (and while I was able to play through most of it, I'd actually be willing to do so again. We never actually entered Castle Ravenloft, though we were level 8 and inside the Amber Temple by the time it fell apart). Curse of Strahd isn't that limited - it gets you to level 10 - but you could imagine a simpler one (more like the original module, which was more limited in scope and mostly pushed you into a dungeon crawl through the castle) that could be completed in a month or two.

Of course, the grandest, most ambitious type of Ravenloft campaign is a Mist-hopping one. As presented in Van Richten's, the domains are quite separate, but historically, the Darklords have been aware of one another and even contend with one another as rivals. Even if they didn't, the party might need to cross the Mists over the course of a campaign in order to achieve their goals: either to escape or simply protect what little corner of their nightmarish world they come from.

There is one huge question you need to figure out when you begin your campaign - a good thing to ask at session zero, which is: are the characters from Ravenloft, or from elsewhere?

While the place is a series of nightmare prisons, there are real, sentient people living there, and even if it's a bleak and scary world, there's still pockets of sustainable life. The weirdness - the nightmare logic that the place runs on - is something that the local inhabitants grow up with.

If your player characters are from Ravenloft, you have a few other questions to answer: are they from the same domain? How aware of the nature of the Mists are they?

If the PCs are from the Material Plane, are they from the same world? In our Curse of Strahd game, I and one of the other PCs was from my best friend/the DM's homebrew world, while others were from the Forgotten Realms (my Paladin and the party's Cleric were both devoted to Grave gods, but she was a worshipper of Kelemvor while I was a worshipper of Ekeroth, the latter of which I'm sure you haven't heard of because, you know, homebrew).

I do think that it's probably best if you lean a bit toward familiarity - the party need not be all personally acquainted to start, but having a little bit of a shared base of reality could be useful.

If the party is from outside the Mists (they could even be from the Shadowfell, but just not this particularly bad corner of it) the clearest goal for a campaign is that they escape.

For characters that are from the Mists, they might also wish to escape, but they also might have other goals. The key, though, is that the goal is not "saving the world." The Domains of Dread cannot be saved, because their very purpose is to torment their Darklords, and often do so by tormenting the innocents there as well.

A goal might be to take revenge on a Darklord, but this revenge is inherently going to be temporary - the Darklords always come back. I therefore think that the goals are probably better defined by personal stakes: A PC might want to find a missing loved one, to retrieve a lost heirloom, or at best to thwart a particular plot.

Another thing to really bear in mind is that not every villain in Ravenloft need be a Darklord. Consider Baron Rudolph von Aubrecker, who is ostensibly the ruler of Lamordia, even though it's actual Dr. Viktra Mordenheim whose will shapes the domain. You can play a character like this as either an aggrieved victim who might ally with the party, or himself as a deadly monster who might threaten them.

It would be tempting, I think, if you are going to have a Mist-hopping campaign, to try to hit as many of them as you can. But I actually think this can be a trap: trying to visit every featured domain in Van Richten's is going to wind up either making your campaign last several years or you'll be forced to do very limited adventures (not unlike the short adventures I've been pitching lately on this blog).

Instead, I'd say pick two or three domains to really dial in and focus on. This way, you'll have plenty of time to flesh out the relationship between the party and the domain, and to explore its various regions and locations.

Now, there are a few ways to run a campaign. My tendency has been to direct the players toward goals and challenges I've figure out for them, but if you're comfortable with it, having a more free-form campaign where the players set their own goals is also very viable here (though it might fly in the face of my "limit yourself to just a few domains" thing).

In our Wildemount campaign, my best friend/DM had us all provide a backstory, with goals and "prophecies" as described in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. Essentially, you might come up with a short-term prophecy like "I will find the journal of my long-lost mentor," and the DM then weaves in hints and clues that eventually lead the party to that location, and later you might have "I will take part in the creation of a powerful construct with consequences that I had not anticipated." Such a pair of prophecies (there's usually a third one that describes where your character's journey comes to an end, for good or ill) could mean that your Reanimator Artificer must steal into the libraries of Castle Ravenloft to take the journal of your instructor, in which they had schematics for some powerful construct like a Colossus, and then later on, you might find yourself working alongside Viktra Mordenheim to build that thing, only for her to retain total control of it as it rampages toward Neufurchtenberg.

If all party members have these prophecy goals, you can actually get a lot of mileage in a campaign out of just taking turns (not necessarily in a strict order) helping the rest of the party follow their paths.

The key, though, is finding a satisfying conclusion: either the threads need to all weave together into a single thing or there needs to be something above all of them that connects into them, even if only tangentially. For example, maybe we plan the finale of the campaign should take place in the Amber Temple in Barovia. How does a Colossus rampaging through Neufurchtenberg relate to that? Maybe it unearths something within the city - an amber sarcophagus that must be returned to the temple. Perhaps this is necessary to keep Strahd or some other Darklord from escaping, or perhaps the Dark Power within the sarcophagus promises a path to escape if the party does this task.

Horror stories don't necessarily need to have unhappy endings: while Quincy and Lucy (and the honestly quite innocent Renfield) don't make it out of Dracula alive, it still ends with the vampire hunters successful and Mina saved from becoming a creature of the night. But to borrow an idea from Alan Wake II, for the a horror story to end well, the heroes must make a sacrifice.

I have a couple of pitches for Ravenloft campaigns. I don't think they are totally compatible.

The first actually begins in the real, modern world, or perhaps a little nostalgically in the days of my childhood, which were the 1990s. The players would play as teenagers in an American suburb, only for a slasher-style villain to begin killing off classmates. We might even use a different system like Kids on Bikes for this. Eventually, the players discover that the killer's house holds an Amber Sarcophagus within its basement, and when the killer (or perhaps the killer's evil parent who drove them to their violent ways) crosses some line, the Mists of Ravenloft come and sweep the town away, pulling it into the Domains of Dread. From there, the players are separated and spend years in different domains, developing the skills of D&D classes, and are finally reunited when the borders of the domain that was their hometown open. Still young, but with terrible memories of the experiences in their various domains, the players must fight to escape back to the real world.

The second is a bit more traditional, but is also focused on escaping the Domains of Dread. Here, we hammer heavy a theme of doppelgangers, mirrors, doubles, etc. In their travels, the party will have regular encounters with Firan Zal'honan, the archmage that Van Richten's never explicitly confirms is actually Azalin Rex, the former Darklord of Darkon, though both earlier edition materials and some very clear clues in Van Richten's indicate is the case.

I know that Horrors Within is said to answer the question of where Azalin got to, but in this version of the story, Firan knows that he was able to create a clone of some sort that would essentially be left as Darklord in his place. What he doesn't understand is why he was able to leave Darkon but not the Mists entirely, but in exchange for various dubiously moral tasks, Firan will lead the party to the Amber Temple (yes, I like this as a climactic location) and secure them the same deal: that the Dark Powers will create a copy of them.

The horror-twist, though, is that none of them will know if the copy is the one allowed to escape, or if it's the one left behind. And Firan winds up being our final boss, as he goes mad with the realization that he's the version of himself that is still trapped in the Mists, and that his escape will never come. (I literally know how I'd end the campaign: as the party emerges back into whatever world they came from, I'd ask each player: do you think that you're the original, or the copy?)

Short Adventures in Ravenloft: Hazlan

 When I first read through Van Richten's, I struggled a bit with Hazlan.

A realm of magical experimentation gone wrong, the vibe of the place felt, yes, bad, but not really "horror"-themed. It felt too bright, too open.

Then, finally, something clicked for me.

In Dark Souls III, there's an area you have to go to in kind of the latter part of the middle act of the game (it's not explicitly divided into acts, but it's where one of two major bosses you need to beat are that unlock the final, sprawling area where the penultimate boss is). The region is called The Profaned Capital, where the locals engaged in dangerous experiments to try to preserve the world by messing around with a kind of primordial chaos.

The area is potentially very short and linear - you can go to the boss there pretty directly, and you might not even realize that there is more to it. But if you do some exploring, you can find some new weapons, items, and spells. You'll also find these bizarre creatures that are like a small elephant, or maybe an enormous baby with a big hand for a head, and a creepy maw in the center of that hand that you'll only see if they use certain attacks.

And I think that's really they key: the monsters that players encounter in Hazlan should be utterly surreal and bizarre.

D&D uses the aberration creature type in a couple different ways. It's honestly a little frustrating, because some aberrations are very clearly "alien, Lovecraftian beings" like the Mind Flayer or Star Spawn, and some are "the experimental results of misguided wizards."

But this latter definition can also be used to describe some Monstrosities. Arguably, it'd be better to use Aberrations for the experiments given how Monstrosities cover such a massive span of creatures.

(Actually, Aberrations has also expanded in 5.5 to include creatures that are more or less humanoid but have some psionic powers, like Gith or Kuo-Toa.)

Regardless, I think we can focus a Hazlan adventure around monstrous experiments.

Now, in a game like Dark Souls, all but a tiny fraction of the beings we encounter are hostile and there to be fought (or fled). In D&D, you can certainly be in a hostile environment, but there are a lot more "verbs" the players have access to.

I think the party needs to get their hands on some kind of McGuffin - something that may set up a future adventure, or simply something that is desired by a quest giver who can reward them. We'll say that they are hired by one of Hazlik's apprentices, an archmage named Kytho Dree.

Dree tells the party that they're leading an expedition into an uncharted region of Moonstone Valley - last new moon, there was a massive explosion that seems to have broken through the surface and revealed what they believe is a long-lost civilization, which may hold within it powerful ancient technology.

However, there's a strange, shimmering barrier that surrounds the region - Dree postulates that it could be some sort of ancient defense mechanism for the ancient city beneath the surface. Experimentally, they've determined that living, conscious beings cannot survive crossing the barrier, but if one is rendered unconscious first, the barrier can be crossed safely (yes, this is sort of borrowed from The Southern Reach series).

Dree will lead the expedition, and will have their own assistants cast Sleep on the party.

Here, we have our first uncannily weird thing: the party is encouraged to voluntarily fail the saving throws for the spell (which you can always elect to do,) but if a party member resists it (I realize that things might be complicated if you have an Elf or other sleepless party member - adjust as needed) they will actually just fail to go through the barrier and instead be shunted into the Ethereal Plane without an obvious way to get back.

By the time the party awakens from the spell, Dree has somehow gone missing. Within the meteor-blasted valley (which I imagine looking like a more colorful version of the surface of the moon) there is, indeed, a crater that seems to have broken into the surface of the world, and only by hopping from floating rock to floating rock (or just having Fly or Feather Fall or something like that) can the party safely descend into the crater.

As they go down to the "ancient city," the party will start to see strangely familiar things: while Dree was sure that this predated Hazlik and his reign over the region, the Eye of Hazlik can be seen on the buildings and engraved in the pavement of the city.

Making their way to the center of the city, the party encounters strange monsters: Gibbering Mouthers and Nothics, probably (we're probably talking either late tier 1 or early tier 2 for the adventure level). The Gibbering Mouthers are, of course, just horrifying monsters, but the Nothics show signs of being former members of Hazlan society.

Investigating ruined buildings, they find that this city, simply called Hazlan (suggesting that perhaps this was the original form that the Domain took?) sought to transform its inhabitants to better survive the nightmare that is the Demiplane of Dread, and there is a lot of optimistic talk that their new forms will better be able to plumb the depths of the arcane.

When they reach the city's center, they find a grand plaza where there is a series of concentric rings controlling the magical energy flowing into a central conduit. If the party moves the rings, they find that fragments of Dree begin to phase into being - as if a third of their matter was separated by each of the rings.

Depending on how much your players enjoy puzzles, you could make a pretty simple one or a more complex one (maybe you can only rotate two of the rings at a time, not just a single one, and must align them correctly). Once the rings are aligned properly, Dree's body is reconstructed, but something is deeply wrong with them.

The power of the city that transformed its inhabitants has now been channeled through Dree, and while they initially look like their former self, they have only a moment of horror before their body melts into a gory sludge, before reconstructing itself into a monstrous form. I'm tempted to suggest you use a Hydra stat block, but rather than a reptilian/semi-draconic appearance, this Hydra bears a horrid, fleeing memory of Dree's face on each head.

When the transformed Dree is slain, the party awakens on the edge of the crater, which now is a simple rocky divot in the earth.

    I'll confess, this one still took me a while to figure out. I really think that in order to make the horror hit in Hazlan, you need to emphasize the weirdness of it all. Hallucinations, troubled dreams, and really going out of your way to describe the monsters in unusual ways will help sell it. Gibbering Mouthers are pretty gross and scary monsters (and feel like they should be higher CR) but I think you could also reflavor them to still bear the appearances of the people absorbed into them - maybe faces, half-familiar, seem to form and then dissipate in their ever-shifting forms.

A non-hostile Nothic NPC could also help flesh out the history of what happened here, though you run the risk of humanizing them and thus dulling the alien wrongness of the place. Perhaps instead the players could find the notes of an arcane researcher who eventually became one of them.

Now, if we're going for nightmares and losing touch with reality, our next stop on this tour of the Domains is all about that, with the dream world of I'Cath.

Hollow Warden Ranger vs. Death Knight

 So, I'm doing something a little unconventional: in a little less than a week, early access for Ravenloft: Horrors Within will open up, giving us access to the new book with its various subclasses, species, feats, etc. Among them is the Hollow Warden Ranger, which leans into a kind of spooky cryptid vibe.

I actually love the idea of a Domain of Dread with a Pacific Northwest vibe - while I'm a New Englander originally, and will always advocate for spooky stories set in the Northeast, I also do love the temperate rainforests and funky monsters of the region.

I'm going to be using the version of the subclass previewed in the recent "State of the Game" video, which should be the final version (barring some digital errata, which is rare).

Ok: Rangers are, unfortunately, generally considered one of if not the weakest class in 5E, and while we saw massive glow-ups for, for example, the Monk (even if the absolute damage output wasn't buffed enormously, their overall quality of life and survivability did get some significant boosts) most argue that the Ranger didn't quite get the love it needed.

I'll confess that it's not a class whose fantasy appeals to me tremendously - but I do think that the vibes on the Hollow Ranger could draw me to it (though I've got a ton of character concepts I'd want to play first).

Still, as I've been doing this series figuring out damage output against a Death Knight, which is a very Ravenloft-appropriate monster (Lord Soth is featured in Horrors Within, and while he's now got a bespoke, slightly-higher-CR stat block, we're on theme), largely going with classes that aren't always known for being the kings of damage output, I figured we should check in with the Ranger. But I'm more excited about this subclass than the others currently available (Gloomstalker is, to be fair, certainly a spooky option as well).

But how will the subclass affect our damage, if at all?

The core feature for the Hollow Warden is Wrath of the Wild, which allows you to transform into a kind of cryptid monster as a bonus action, expending a use of Favored Enemy to do so - notably, this no longer requires you to concentrate on Hunter's Mark (in fact, it uses up one of your free castings of it), though it only lasts for one minute (or if you get incapacitated, die, or end it voluntarily). The transformation increases your AC by 1 (and then 2 at level 11). It also allows you to make an Opportunity Attack when a creature within 5 feet of your deals damage to you or an ally.

Naturally, this latter feature will strongly encourage us to play a melee character, though the changes to Sharpshooter in 5.5 were doing that already anyway.

Still, this is going to be a source of significant extra damage, as we will probably be able to use it every turn as long as we stay glued to the Death Knight.

Finally, Wrath of the Wild lets us impose Frightened on any creatures of our choice within 10 feet who fails a Wisdom saving throw every turn - once when we activate it and again at the start of each turn. The fear effect lasts until the start of your next turn. This is not going to work on the Death Knight, but it's actually quite good generally (and again, encourages us to get into melee).

In terms of subclass spells, Wrathful Smite is the only real damage option we'll have at level 10 - given that I'm going to be building with dual-wielding in mind, we'll probably save this only for crits, as we'll normally just being making an attack with the Dual Wielder feat. (Ranger can go the Strength route and pick up heavy melee weapons, which might work well with this subclass, but I think there are other benefits to going with a Dex build and dual-wielding. Also, going one-handed and taking the Dueling fighting style is actually not a terrible idea here, though I think Dual-wielding will probably wind up doing better - even if we can probably reliably get three attacks per round thanks to those Opportunity Attacks, the benefit won't make up for missing the Dual Wielder feat attack - though a less damage-focused, more tanky Ranger actually makes some sense with this subclass).

At level 7, Hungering Might gives you a bonus to Con saves equal to your Wisdom modifier (minimum +1) and also, when you hit a creature with an attack while transformed and you're Bloodied, you regain HP equal to 1d10+Wis. But this doesn't affect our damage output (other than keeping us alive a bit longer).

I actually wrote out the entire 11th-level feature before remembering this was a level 10 build, so we'll stop there.

Ok, so let's talk gameplan:

    Weapons:

We're definitely doing a melee build here. Classically, Rangers in melee tend to go with dual-wielding (particularly a shortsword and scimitar). But what about some other options?

You can make a Strength-based Ranger, and I actually think that there are some reasons to consider it in this case: because of the reaction attacks we'll be getting, the harder-hitting the weapon, the greater value that has. If we go with a Greatsword, for example, what would we need for our stat-spread?

Well, I'd want to get a 17 in Strength and then a 16 in Wisdom to start off. We can get these and the Tough feat (which will help us survive in melee a bit better) from the Farmer background, which also feels good for a folk-horror-themed character.

Using Point Buy, we're a little stretched out here given that we want to have a 14 in Dex and then as high a Con as we can get. Grabbing 15s in Strength and Wis leaves us with 9 points left. A 14 in Dex is then another 7, so we're spending our last points just to get a +0 to Con. Not... ideal.

But let's try something a bit more off-beat. If we take the Druidic Warrior fighting style, we can pick up Shillelagh as a cantrip. From there, we'll be able to focus entirely on Wisdom as our primary stat. Now, this won't let us go with Great Weapon Master, but it will let us go with Polearm Master if we fight with a Quarterstaff. The cost is that we have to cast the spell as a bonus action, which does get in the way of getting Wrath of the Wild up.

That said, we might need a good concentration spell at the start of our first turn anyway that takes an action to cast (we'll come to that later). The Quarterstaff has Topple, which could potentially knock our target prone or at least burn through some legendary resistances. The downside is that by picking this, we're not going to get the Dueling fighting style that would complement a single one-handed weapon. Eventually, the higher damage die would make up for this (by the time it's a d12, it's doing as well as a d8 weapon with a +2 bonus).

All that said, I don't think that this is the highest damage option, which means we're probably going to have to go the conventional route and dual-wield. So, yeah, the usual Shortsword and Scimitar combo.

This also means I have to deal with Vex, though I think the math should hopefully be at least similar to what I did with the Rogue.

    Feats:

If we're dual-wielding, we'll take Dual-Wielder, though this won't come online on the first turn because we need our bonus action to activate Wrath of the Wild. Indeed, with other bonus actions like Wrathful Smite, we might consider leaving it on the table - though in any fight where we're not burning through all our resources each turn we'd probably want to have this as a free option.

At level 8, I might be tempted to just take an ASI to cap our Dexterity, because if we do go into higher levels, getting higher Wisdom will wind up being pretty useful. So, we'll just assume 20 Dex.

For Fighting Style, we're going Two Weapon Fighting.

    Spells:

At this level, we have 3rd level spells. While something like Conjure Barrage will be great in AoE situations, for single-target, I'd suspect that we're going to be best off with Summon Fey. (Spike Growth would be great if we had a lot of pushing and pulling, but that doesn't play super well with our "stay stuck to the target" playstyle.)

    Gameplan:

So, here's how we do this:

We start off on turn one closing with the Death Knight, and then we activate Wrath of the Wild. With our action, we cast Summon Fey, probably picking Fuming as the Fey's mood (/mode.)

Hopefully, the Death Knight attacks either us or an ally (though hopefully not our poor Fey because they might die immediately) and triggers our reaction attack.

Then, from turn 2 onward, we make our two attacks and then have our Fey attack if they're alive.

    Calculating Damage:

Given that they get to attack first, we'll figure out what the Fey does first.

Our Wisdom is only +3 at this level, so the Fey only has a +7 to hit. Against an AC of 20, that's only a 40% chance to hit. However, because our Fey spirit is fuming, they can start off their turn with a Fey Step to get advantage on their attacks (alternatively, if we want to keep them alive, we might have them Fey Step after their attacks to safely get out of range of the Death Knight's melee, though we lose this advantage).

On a hit, the Fey spirit gets 2d6+3+the spell's level, which can only be 3 at this level. So, it's an average of 13. Then, you add 7 on a crit.

With advantage, they have a 64% chance to hit and a 9.75% chance to crit, so that's 8.32 plus .6825, or an average of approximately 9 damage on an attack with advantage.

Without advantage, for their second attack, they have a 40% chance to hit and 5% chance to crit, so 5.2 plus .35, or 5.55 on average for the second attack.

(Oh, duh: it's a 3rd level Fey Spirit, so it only gets one attack.)

Thus, the Fey is doing, from turn one, about 14.55 damage per turn. (Actually, no, it's just 9 damage)

We assume, then, that we'll get our Opportunity Attack. Here, we have a 50% chance to hit and a 5% chance to crit. We use our Shortsword, which deals 1d6+5 damage on a hit (8.5 average) and 3.5 extra on a crit, so we're looking at 4.25 plus .175 or 4.425 average damage there.

Then, we have our second turn:

We should be able to make full use of our Nick and Dual Wielder off-hand attacks, so this amounts to four 1d6 weapon attacks per turn.

We'll attack with the Shortsword for our two main attacks as part of the attack action. The Scimitar we will only use for our Nick attack, which then allows us to use the Shortsword again for our Bonus Action Dual Wielder attack and then our reaction attack that we can expect to get each round.

Of course, Vex vexes us by making the math far more complicated. But at least we have some precedence with the Rogue, who also had a +9 to hit. Using the math we figured out from that, if we got an opportunity attack between turns one and two, we've got a 62.5% chance to hit and a 7.375% chance to crit. 8.5x62.5% is 5.31 (we're rounding it to the second decimal, which is honestly more generous than we should be) and 3.5x7.375% is .26, giving us 5.57 average damage with this attack.

Then, we have a second Shortsword attack on our turn. Our hit chance overall is now 65.625%, and our crit chance is 7.975%, so that's 5.58 plus .28, or 5.86.

Now, compared to the Rogue, we have one more attack in the middle here, our Scimitar attack. This has a 65.625% chance to have advantage. Again, let's round off for sanity. 66% of the time we're talking a 75% chance to hit and 9.75% chance to crit, and the other 34% of the time, it's 50%/5%. So, 49.5% plus 17% is a 66.5% chance to hit and 6.4% plus 1.7% is 8.1% chance to crit. That's then 5.65 plus .28, or 5.93 with this attack.

Our bonus action attack actually winds up being very simple, as we don't have a source for advantage, so it's just the same as that initial reaction, or 4.425. Then, our next reaction would be like that initial attack on this turn, or 5.57.

Whoops, forgot that the bonus action attack doesn't add our Dex. So it's just 3.5 damage on a hit. Thus, it's actually 1.75 plus .175, or 1.925

Bringing it all together:

On turn one, we only do 9 with our Fey spirit and 4.4 with our reaction attack, for 13.4 damage.

Then, turn two, we'll get 5.57 on attack one, 5.86 on attack two, 5.93 on attack three, and 1.93 on attack four, for a total of 19.3ish. Our Fey spirit then does another 9 damage, so we get 28.3 on our turn.

Then, we get 5.57 with our reaction each round, bringing us to 33.9 damage per round.

    Let's talk pitfalls:

The Fey spirit only has 30 HP and an AC of 15, so we might prefer instead to have the Fey swoop in with their movement and then Fey Step away. This takes their advantage away, so they'll only do 5.6 damage per turn, meaning we reduce our total damage done by about 3.4.

Even with 30 feet of clearance, the Death Knight could still choose to go after it - broadly speaking, if a monster diverts away from attacking you or your fellow party members, it's worth it, but the Fey could also get caught in a Hellfire Orb or some such thing as well.

Indeed, with only a single attack, we might actually just go Hunter's Mark. This would have to wait for turn two, though it would let us attack on turn one. We'd still need to worry about maintaining concentration, though we do get a nice bonus to Con saves with the subclass.

I think we can actually figure out how much Hunter's Mark would add (starting on turn two) by simply adding all the hit and crit chances together and multiplying them by 3.5. If I did that right, it's actually adding 9.6 damage per turn, roughly, which outpaces Summon Fey.

Damn it, WotC! You got me to cast Hunter's Mark!

The Math on Savage Attacker

 Of all the Origin Feats in the new Player's Handbook, there's only one that really directly increases the damage of a weapon-based character. Sure, Lucky could arguably count as well, giving you advantage on a few attacks per day, but I'd generally prefer to save that for big Saving Throws or story-crucial ability checks.

Savage Attacker comes with the Soldier background, a pretty common choice for many martial classes (in my original campaign, two of my initial three PCs took this background, though that was in 5.0).

Still, my instinct was that, while this does technically boost one's damage a bit, that it wasn't actually all that good. That being said, I wonder if I lumped this in too much with the Great Weapon Fighting Style feat, which itself wasn't that great in 5.0 and got even worse in 5.5. Might Savage Attacker be better?

First, let's remind ourselves what it does:

Once per turn, when you hit with a weapon attack, you can roll the damage dice twice and pick which roll to use against the target.

As it turns out, this is a little more complicated than something like Great Weapon Fighting - in that case, whether it's the new or the old version, you first roll and then can re-roll, or just take the flat result. For example, with the 5.5 version, you count rolls of 1s and 2s on appropriate weapons as 3s. Thus, the way you'd calculate damage on a d10 weapon, for example, would go from adding up the results, 1 through 10, and dividing it by 10 (which would normally get us a 5.5) and instead just add 3 three times and then 4 through 10, and divide the result by 10, giving us 5.8.

But in the case of Savage Attacker, it's more like Advantage, which is a bit more complex.

Let's start simplest: say we're attacking with a d4 weapon like a dagger.

First off, we'll use this on our first hit of the turn - it's best on a crit, when the potential difference is higher, but we probably aren't going to count on getting a crit, so we should just use it on that first hit.

Normally, we have a 25% chance of getting a 4 on a single roll of a d4. But if we are rolling two, the chance that one of them rolls a 4 is now 43.75% (the way we get this is by calculating that there's a 75% chance that we don't roll a 4 on one die, and so that 75% is squared because we need that to happen twice, which comes to 56.25%, and the remaining chances become 43.75%).

I think the next step would be to see how likely it is we get a 3 or higher - not just 3 specifically, which would also be 43.75%. But what we do is get the 3 or higher and then subtract the chance that we get a 4 instead, as we'd prefer that. This winds up being pretty simple, because it's just a 50% chance here normally, which means it's a 75% chance one of the dice come up on the upper half of their range. However, we then subtract the chance that we get a 4, because we'd prefer to keep that if we get it. Thus, our chance that, rolling twice, 3 is our highest result winds up being 31.25%

Next, we find the chance that we roll a 2 or higher. This winds up being pretty simple as well, because it's just the chance we don't roll a 1 on both dice. That's a 25% chance on a single die, and thus just a 6.25% chance on two dice (25% squared) meaning it's a 93.75% chance we get a two or higher. Now, though, we're going to find those cases where the 2 is our highest result, and so we subtract that 75% chance that it's higher than two, giving us 18.75%.

And then, we have that 6.25% chance that we've rolled double-ones.

Finally, we take each value and multiply it by its likelihood. 4x43.75% is 1.75, 3x31.25% is .9375, 2x18.75% is .375, and of course 1x6.25% is .0625. Then, we sum them all up and get 3.125, which would be our average roll with a d4 on Savage Attacker.

Once per turn, thus, with a dagger, we're effectively doing .625 more damage.

But what about a harder-hitting weapon? I'm going to set aside 2d6 weapons because there are essentially 36 permutations of how the dice could go, but we'll do a d12.

So, once again, we do basically the same thing, but it takes longer:

There's a (and we're going to round off here, because the decimal places are going to go long) 16% chance on two dice to roll a 12.

Then, there's a 31% chance to roll an 11 or higher, meaning that we've got a 15% chance that the 11 is the higher of the two values.

For 10, there's a 44% chance to roll a 10 or higher, so subtracting 31% gives us 13%

For 9, the chance is 56%, so subtracting 44 gets us 12%

For 8, we're at 66%, so that means a 10% chance that the higher is 8.

For 7, it's 75%, and thus we get 9%.

For 6, it's 83%, so we get 8%

For 5, it's 89%, with a difference of 6%

For 4, it's 94%, with a difference of 5%

For 3, it's 97%, so we're at a difference of 4%

For 2, it's 99%, so a difference of 3%.

And then 1 happens about 1% of the time (actually a little less).

So, then, we take these and again multiply each by their frequency:

12x16% is 1.92, 11x15% is 1.65, 10x13% is 1.3, 9x12% is 1.08, 8x10% is .8, 7x9% is .63, 6x8% is .48, 5x6% is .3, 4x5% is .2, 3x4% is .12, 2x3% is .06, and then 1x1% is .01 (obviously).

Adding these together, we get 8.55 as our average roll on a d12.

That is 2.05 damage higher than we'd previously rolled.

So, comparing the low and high ends of damage dice, our d4 went from 2.5 to 3.125, which is a 25% jump. Our d12 went from 6.5 to 8.55, which is about a 32% jump.

But that's just the raw dice damage. When we take modifiers into account, this bonus is diluted: if our Battle Smith Artificer with a Repeating Musket and +5 to Intelligence is rolling our d12, and thus adding 6 to the damage rolls, we're talking 12.5 versus 14.55, which means an increase of damage by about 16% instead.

And, let's also remember that this is only once per turn. So, if we think of this as two attacks, either both doing 12.5 on hits or one doing 14.55 and another doing 12.5, we're talking 25 versus 27.05, which means that our average damage has only gone up by 8%.

Again, this feat does increase your damage done. But I'd argue that the effect is marginal enough that I'm not sure it's really worth taking compared with something like Alert or Tough or most other Origin Feats.

    Now, what if we were to redesign it?

I believe the old version (and maybe I'm confusing this with Great Weapon Fighting) allowed you to first roll and then decide to reroll an attack's damage once per turn.

Here, the math becomes far simpler, because I think there's a clearly optimal way to use this: if you roll below average damage, you reroll.

Thus, on a d4, we reroll if we roll a 1 or 2. Thus, when calculating the average damage of the die, we treat the 1 and 2 places as if they were actually the same as a d4's average damage roll, which is 2.5. So, it's 2.5+2.5+3+4, and then divide that by 4. That gives us a 3 on average. Interestingly, that's actually worse than this. What about for a d12? Again, any roll of 6 or lower is below average, so we're replacing each with 6.5. The average winds up being 8, which, again, is lower than what we get with this version.

So, ok, credit where credit's due: this is a little bit better than getting to reroll when you want, which honestly surprised me (if anyone cares to check my math, please let me know if I got something wrong).

Still, once again, my conclusion is that I don't know that this feat would feel all impactful. I think there are cooler Origin Feats, and even something as simple as Tough might be better (the math would require far too many assumptions to really nail down how effective Tough is at keeping your character up, and I think it's possible that it's not as impactful as it might first appear, but whatever.)

Fighting Styles and You

 Fighting Styles, in 5.5, became feats that can be taken by other classes at levels where you can pick up a feat, while the three classes that always got them - the Fighter, Paladin, and Ranger - just get a free one at the level when they would pick one up.

Unlike General Feats, Fighting Styles don't come with any ability score bonus, and as such, they really need to punch hard for them to be worth taking over something that might also help with your primary stats.

Some of these Fighting Styles are going to wind up being probably strictly better than others, but are intended to better-enable some off-beat character builds. Let's see what their effect ultimately winds up looking like:

    Archery:

This adds a +2 bonus to your attack rolls with ranged weapons. Notably, while a thrown melee weapon does have you make a ranged attack, it's not a ranged weapon. Still, the archer archetype (or even a gunslinger if you're using firearms) is a classic trope in the genre. Honestly, I think this Fighting Style is a really obvious choice for anyone who wants to play with ranged weapons - it's thus more likely to be chosen by Fighters and Rangers than Paladins.

If we compare it to just raising our Dexterity by two points, we're getting a higher bonus to hit than that, but no bonus to damage when we hit. How much, then, does it raise our damage by? It depends a bit on what weapon we're using and what our target's AC is. In absolute terms, it raises our chance to hit by 10%, but that can be a deceptive way of thinking about it - if we had a 60% chance to hit that then goes up to 70%, that's not going to result in 10% higher damage compared to what we were doing before.

Let's imagine we're using a longbow and deal 1d8+5 damage (9.5 average) on a hit (maybe we have a +4 to Dex and a +1 Longbow, or perhaps we just have a mundane bow and a +5 to Dex). If we have a 60% chance to hit our target without this, we're doing 5.7 damage on average, and then our crits add .225 (4.5x20%) so we wind up doing 5.925 damage per attack.

If we add that +2 to hit, our hit chance gives us a 70% chance to hit. Our crit chance is the same, so we're now adding that .225 to 9.5x70%, which is 6.65, so that's 6.875 damage per attack.

Thus, our damage is about 16% higher than it previously was.

This is just one example. Say we're lower-level, and only do 1d8+3 damage (7.5 on average) and only a base hit chance of 50%. Now, we're doing 3.75+.225 per attack, or 3.975. If we bump that up to 60% with our fighting style, we're looking at 4.5+.225, or 4.725. This means we're doing about 18% higher damage.

If we go to another extreme - let's say that we're very high level, tier 4, with a +3 Heavy Crossbow using +3 Bolts and we're fighting some minion monster with only a 15 AC. At this stage, we're capped on Dex. Thus, without the fighting style, we've got a +17 to hit. You don't even need to do any math to realize the Fighting Style isn't actually doing anything for us, because we can only miss on a Natural 1. But say it's an AC of 20. Now, without the fighting style, we have an 85% chance to hit. Our average damage is 1d10+11 (16.5) and our crit bonus is .275. So, we're getting 16.5x85%, or 14.025, and then .275 for crits, so it's 14.3 damage. If our fighting style bumps that to a 95% hit chance (actually the highest hit chance you can get) it becoems 16.5x95%, or 15.675, plus .275, or 15.95. And thus, in this scenario, we're looking at a boost of only about 11.5%.

In other words, the overall damage output benefit of this feat winds up being probably around 10-20%ish, with the benefits naturally being larger the harder something is to hit.

All of that said (and boy I don't think the other feats are going to have as extensive a write-up) there are few Fighting Styles that benefit a ranged character, so this is a good default option (and hitting always feels better than missing).

    Blind Fighting:

This gives you Blindsight out to a range of 10 feet.

This is situational, but will feel great when it comes into play. If you have a Warlock with Devil's Sight or a Shadow Sorcerer or Monk, you can now play well with their Darkness strategies. Also, if you don't have Darkvision, this will let you fight effectively in total darkness.

Notably, though, the short range means that this won't totally safeguard you - if a ranged attacker targets you from outside that radius, they'll still get advantage on you. Likewise, it won't help if you need to attack unseen creatures at range.

But if your campaign has lots of invisible monsters that like to sneak up on you to attack, this will be amazing. I also think that this could potentially be useful if you need to find invisible objects, like a hidden key in a wizard's sanctum.

Again, it's situational, but it's a pretty cool superpower.

    Defense:

This grants you a +1 bonus to AC if you're wearing any kind of armor (Light, Medium, or Heavy).

This is boring, but never bad to have. A +1 bonus to AC isn't that enormous - it only shifts your chance to be hit by 5% in absolute terms. We're kind of in a similar situation with Archery, but in reverse: the harder a monster hits, and the less likely they are to hit you in the first place, the bigger the damage reduction this provides. On my Eldritch Knight, I had a +1 shield, adamantine plate, and the Shield spell, as well as this. What that meant was that if a creature had a +7 to hit or less, they needed to land a crit to actually hit me. By mid-levels, you do start to get creatures within +8s, +9s, +10s, to hit, but even in that case, if a thing had a +10 to hit, this Fighting Style reduced their chance to hit from 25% to 20%.

Basically, I don't think you'll ever hate having this, but I also think it's one that works best if you're really piling on the AC with a sword-and-board build.

    Dueling:

This adds a +2 bonus to damage when you are wielding a melee weapon in one hand and no other weapons. (Notably, this will work fine if you have a shield in the off-hand.)

On its surface, this might not seem like much, but I think it adds up quite a bit. For one thing, this will apply to all of your attacks, making it actually pretty good for a character who makes a lot of attacks, like a Fighter.

My general temptation is to compare this with Two Weapon Fighting, which we haven't yet covered. But another way to think about this is that it kind of upgrades your damage dice by two sizes - a d6 weapon starts to look more like a d10, or, more likely, a d8 weapon starts to hit as hard as a d12 (slightly less because crits don't scale as well, but given that we're talking about a difference of two average damage 1/20 of the time, that's basically a difference of .1, which is pretty marginal).

This is a very solid choice for a sword-and-board build. I guess we'll save comparing it with Two Weapon Fighting when we get to that one.

    Great Weapon Fighting:

When you make an attack with a melee weapon that you are holding with two hands, you can treat any 1 or 2 you roll on a damage die as a 3. The weapon has to have the Two-Handed or Versatile property.

Now, I think the wording on this might have been changed, because I thought it explicitly excluded bonus damage like Divine Smites or Sneak Attacks. Still, the old version of this allowed a re-roll, which means this version is less powerful.

D6s with this, such as when you're rolling for a Maul or Greatsword, will go from an average of 3.5 to an average of 4. A d12 (like a Greataxe) will go from 6.5 to 6.75. A d10 (like most versatile weapons or heavy polearms) will go from 5.5 to 5.8. So, at best, we're looking at a boost of around 14% - but on the dice, not the full damage. If we have a Greatsword, for example, and have a +4 to Strength, we're talking about going from 11 to 12 average damage, which is only a 9% increase in damage. And on a Greataxe, going from 10.5 to 10.75 damage, the boost is only about 2% more damage.

This is the only Fighting Style that will directly increase damage done with two-handed melee weapons, so if you're purely interested in damage, you can still take it, but it's definitely not as powerful as the other options (that said, Great Weapon Master is probably the most powerful General Feat for damage output).

If we rule that this applies to bonus damage such as from a Divine Smite, it might start to shine a little more. If we take our Greatsword example and then drop a 2nd level Divine Smite, doing 3d8 additional damage, the d8s go from 4.5 damage on average to 4.875. Thus, the Smite damage goes from 13.5 to 14.625. Overall, then, adding each to the 11 and 12 from the weapon itself, we have 24.5 average damage versus 26.825, which is an increase in damage of about... ok, it's still just around 9%.

    Interception:

In our Wildemount game, we have two paladins who both have the Interception fighting style, and without a Cleric or Druid or other full-caster healer, it has done a great job of keeping us alive.

Naturally, the main point of comparison is going to be how this does compared to the Protection fighting style, which we'll cover next. Against foes that hit extremely hard, the damage reduction might start to feel devalued. But I actually think that in most situations, it'll wind up being better.

Another thing to compare it to is a healing spell. Cure Wounds obviously does a lot more than it used to - if we figure a Cleric would heal for 2d8+3 to start with, that's about 12 healing on average. But if a Paladin with Interception instead reduced incoming damage, they'd do so for 1d10+2 at level 1, or 7.5 on average. That's certainly less, but this costs only a reaction and no other resource (you do have to be positioned in the right spot).

An advantage it has over Protection is that you get to wait to see if the attacker actually hits - if the attacker rolls poorly, you can save your reaction.

Finally, Interception can be used even if you don't have a shield equipped, making it versatile for various weapon loadouts. You can use a shield, or a simple or martial weapon.

We'll do some math to compare them when we cover Protection, which is right now.

    Protection:

If you have a shield, you can use a reaction to impose disadvantage on an attack against a creature other than you if they're within 5 feet of you.

Ok, so the question is this: disadvantage or damage reduction.

Notably, if a target is hitting for a total equal to 1+ your proficiency bonus or less, Interception will fully negate an attack. But that's pretty rare. Disadvantage can negate an attack entirely, but it also doesn't guarantee any reduction in damage.

Let's go to an extreme example: the Tarrasque is targeting our Druid healer with their Bite attack. The Druid only has a 15 AC, so the attack can only miss on a natural 1. Protection will thus reduce their hit chance from 95% to 90.25%. They deal 36 damage on a hit and get an extra 26 on a crit. With disadvantage, the crit likelihood is reduced from 1 in 20 to 1 in 400. Thus:

Without Protection: 95%x36 + 26/20, which is 34.2 plus 1.3, or an average of 35.5 average damage.

With Protection: 90.25%x36 is 32.49, and 26/400 is .0065, so we're looking at 32.4965, meaning we've reduced incoming damage to about 92% of its previous value.

If, instead, we had Interception, at this level we'd be reducing the damage by 1d10+6, or 11.5. Thus, our hit damage goes from 36 to 24.5. 24.5x95% plus 26x5% winds up being 24.575, which is about 69% (nice) of the damage they would have taken otherwise.

Now, I was trying to get the hardest-hitting hit here, but I think the Tarrasque's massive attack bonus also made Protection less powerful.

Let's take something like a Stone Golem (a pretty reasonable mid-level threat) that is attacking a better-armored ally with an AC of 18. They attack with a +10 to hit and deal an average of 24 damage (mix of bludgeoning and force - basically 4d8+6). If we're level 12, say, we're working with a PB of 4. Thus, the Golem's hit chance without disadvantage is 65%, and the usual 5% crit chance. 24 damage on a hit and an extra 18 damage on a crit.

Without Protection: 24x65%, or 15.6, plus 18x5%, or .9, for a total of 16.5 average damage.

With Protection: 24x42.25% (65% squared) or 10.14 plus 18/400, or .045, for a total of 10.185, or only about 62% of the normal damage.

But then, if we use Interception, we're reducing that hit damage by 1d10+4, or about 9.5, so the average damage on a hit becomes 14.5. 14.5x65% is 9.425, and then the .9 for crits gets us to 10.325, which is around 63% of the original damage.

Which does mean that in this case, Protection does reduce the damage taken by slightly more.

Here's my call, though: between the weapon versatility that Interception lends, and the fact that it will make Concentration saves a lot easier when it does reduce incoming damage, and the fact that you only have to use it when an attack does actually land, I think that in most situations, it'll be better than Protection.

    Thrown Weapon Fighting:

Returning Weapons probably should have been in the Dungeon Master's Guide, as I think that a character built around throwing weapons is a very cool one (see Vax from Critical Role). The damage bonus here is identical to the one from Dueling, though I'll note that if you're throwing Light weapons, you will get this bonus on the extra bonus action attack, so with just your standard extra attack that you tend to get at level 5, this could add up to 6 damage over the course of a turn.

That said, thrown weapons tend to have lower damage dice, so this +2 bonus is half paying that tax - UNLESS you're using Tridents, which I think became the best one-handed weapons as of 5.5. If you have a Returning Trident, you could hit twice for 1d8+Strength+2, which is nearly as good as 1d12+Strength. Given that you wouldn't be able to add Strength to a bonus action attack with light thrown weapons, the Strength would cancel itself out, so we're talking 3(1d4+2), or an average of 13.5 versus 2(1d8+2) or 13, so it's just slightly less powerful with a Trident (and indeed, if we've got Returning Weapons, that does add an extra point of damage to each hit, so it further favors things like daggers - though note that you will need at least two Returning Daggers/Light Hammers, etc. as the Light property does require multiple weapons).

Fundamentally, this scales the more attacks you can make in a turn, which favors Fighters (very much in the same way that Dueling does).

    Two-Weapon Fighting:

This allows you to add your ability modifer to the damage of the extra attack granted by the Light Property. What this ultimately translates to is a kind of cap on the damage this adds to your turn: at most 5 (unless you can push your Strength/Dex to 22 or higher).

In this way, this will often outdo the damage you get from something like Dueling or Thrown Weapon Fighting if you're only making two attacks. But once those styles can get in a third attack (such as with a Fighter's second Extra Attack at level 11,) this starts to fall behind. I will note that if you want to get three thrown attacks without being an 11+ Fighter (aside from Action Surge,) you're also probably downgrading from d6 weapons to d4 weapons.

So, if I'm throwing, say, darts and daggers (going Dex because Darts are actually natively ranged weapons and thus I think have to use Dex) with Thrown Weapon Fighting and like a +4 to Dex, I'm doing 1d4+6 on the darts (let's ignore Vex for now) and 1d4+2 on the dagger, so about 21.5 damage overall. If I'm instead attacking with a Shortsword and Scimitar and Two-Weapon Fighting (again, ignoring Vex for my sanity) we're talking three attacks that all do 1d6+4, or 22.5. It's a little more damage and I don't need magical weapons (or a big dagger budget - Darts are dirt cheap, but daggers and light hammers will add up).

That said, if we compare this to Dueling, where we might be using a d8 weapon, I think we start to see this fall behind.

If we have just two regular attacks, our Two-Weapon Fighting character is getting that 22.5 we got earlier. By comparison, if we have Dueling with a d8 weapon and the same primary ability score modifier (maybe it's a Rapier and we still use Dex, though Strength would work in both cases) that character is now hitting for 1d8+6 on each attack, which is 10.5, so we get 21 damage on average. The Dual-Wielder is doing better here, but the Duelist can have a shield.

But a Fighter using something like Action Surge or even just being level 11 or higher will get to scale up that damage while the Two-Weapon Fighting character will only ever get to add that single instance of their Strength/Dex (even if they get another off-hand attack via the Dual-Wielder Feat).

If we stick with our stats and just add in Action Surge, we're now looking at the Dual-Wielder doing 5 attacks that all land for 1d6+4, so that's 37.5 (not really, as we aren't taking a lot of things like crits and hit chance into account) versus our Duelist doing 1d8+6 four times, or 42.

Even if we've capped our ability score, the Duelist damage goes up by 4 and the dual-wielder goes up by 5, which doesn't overcome this difference. Even if we add in an additional bonus action off-hand attack from the Dual-Wielder feat, that only adds 1d6 more damage, bringing them from 37.5 to 41, which is still slightly behind.

    Conclusions:

I don't really see this post as a reason to say you have to take one feat or another. A lot of these are trying to accomplish different things. In the case of the Two-Weapon Fighting option, you might have other reasons to stick with it over Dueling, whether on an aesthetic level or because you've got a really awesome pair of magical light weapons.

DMs should try to award magic items that fit into players' preferred playstyle. The differences here are usually marginal enough that you'll be fine either way you go.

Mainly, I just wanted to give myself, more than anyone else, a real understanding of what these Fighting Styles wind up doing for you. I honestly feel like Great Weapon Fighting might be less terrible than I previously imagined. It also confirmed my instincts about Interception versus Protection.