Back on My Bloodborne Bullshit

 Yeah, I guess the Duskbloods really got be nostalgic for one of my favorite games of all time, wishing that the new game would be paired with a game in the same universe but in a more traditional single-player format.

I return to Bloodborne every now and then. This time, the motivation was to make a character who could get the Uncanny Burial Blade as soon as possible. The standard Burial Blade can only be purchased after beating the final (or second-to-last, depending on the ending you're going for) boss. It's a thick scimitar-like weapon that transforms into a reaper's scythe. So you knew I was going to be obsessed with it. But given its normal acquisition, it's basically designed as a New Game Plus weapon, a mode that I've never really been eager to do in these games.

But! The Chalice Dungeons! There's a code for a Chalice Dungeon that lets you acquire it pretty early on in the game. As with the infamous "cummmfpk" dungeon, you need to do a little legwork first. So, much of my afternoon was spent going through Central Yharnam and Old Yharnam, getting the first Chalice to get into the chalice dungeons. You actually need to go through two layers of the first chalice dungeon to get access to this one (getting the Phumeru Root Chalice,) but especially if you have no qualms about pumping your level up with the aforementioned cheese dungeon, it's not too hard to get through. The enemies in the actual dungeon where you find it are very tough, but with enough HP you can make it through.

The Burial Blade is a little slow, especially in its transformed mode, but it has a huge arc, and puts a little Arcane damage on top of its normal slashing (similar to the Blade of Mercy and other Siderite-enhanced weapons). I actually don't know if it's worth leveling Arcane at all, but right now I'm going hard into Skill (must check to see what the soft cap is).

One thing I sometimes forget is that Skill also determines the damage of visceral attacks, so if you're good at parrying (and I'd say I'm... decent at it) you wind up striking very, very hard with those viscerals. I will say that I do not like the Threaded Cane much as a weapon, and swapped to the Saw Spear once I got it, which doesn't scale as well with Skill but especially at these low levels, it hit harder.

However, I'm going all in on my Burial Blade.

Anyway, having played a lot of Elden Ring in recent years, I'm reminded how that game very kindly doesn't have a super-hard "wall" at the beginning of the game. For some reason Dark Souls I and III and Bloodborne really give you this barrier to entry at the start, and even as a veteran player, dealing with, like, those two full-on werewolves on the bridge in Central Yharnam is really tough (the fact that we can't level up until we either face Cleric Beast or Gascoigne or find that one Madman's Knowledge in the region also makes it pretty rough).

Unlike my previous two playthroughs, thankfully, I made sure to talk to Eileen the moment she showed up to the Cathedral Ward, and then immediately went down to help her fight Henryk. Doing so ensures that I get to complete her quest, and fight the Bloody Crow of Cainhurst instead of her later on in the game. (Reward-wise, I don't know if there's a distinction. Maybe you don't get her covenant rune?) The Bloody Crow is probably the hardest NPC duel in the game, but I love Eileen as a character, and really prefer us to be allies to the end. Just the most badass old (I assume?) lady.

I've now cleared Hemwick (my record of never dying to the Witches is unbroken, though having gotten hit twice by a brain-sucker, I only had one Insight, from my entrance into the fight, so it was at minimum difficulty). I can't recall if you can do Hypogean Gaol yet - I'm sort of tempted to just try to do everything I can before pushing to the Midnight phase of the game, but I suspect that Vicar Amelia is getting impatient with me.

What's Iridikron Up To?

 The other day I ran through the hard-mode of Dawn of the Infinite, the mega-dungeon from Dragonflight, to see how the infinite-themed color schemes for the various customizable drake mounts looked (sadly, not really that great. I think I'll stick with my Infinite Timereaver, or maybe the Chrono Corsair if I'm feeling silly).

Anyway, Iridikron plays a clever trick - while we defeat him there, doing so allows Nozdormu to become Murozond, and so Chromie is forced to rewind time and basically have us do the dungeon again with different bosses (I mean, really, it's just the second half of the dungeon). While we do stop Murozond (and kind of resolve the Bronze/Infinite conflict to the point that the various Remix experiences can now happen in canon and we have friendly Infinite dragons) doing so then lets Iridikron escape with the Dark Heart, which of course plays a major role in War Within and Midnight.

Iridikron obviously made a deal with Xal'atath - we even see her within the void portal through which he escapes distant-past Dragonblight. But what's his endgame?

Well, we might not actually need to wonder, because he basically tells us: the world is going to be thrown into such chaos that he thinks the Titans are going to have to come and intervene, and he's going to be waiting for them.

The Primal Incarnates are powerful - I think we can confidently put them on the same "power tier" as the dragon aspects (though I maintain that Alexstrasza's fight with Razageth would have left the latter dead if the Red Aspect weren't so omnibenevolent that she couldn't follow through with breaking Razageth's neck). But compared to the Titans?

I mean, look, power levels in fantasy are kind of a silly idea that is born, I honestly think, from video game logic. I don't think that Isildur was supernaturally stronger than any other human - he just got a lucky strike against Sauron to cut his fingers off. And the Titans are clearly not omnipotent - their spirits were being held captive by some admittedly powerful demons in Antorus.

But especially with two of his siblings dead and one having turned against him (though notably not to the Titans) you really have to wonder what Iridikron has up his sleeve.

So far, it's felt as if Xal'atath is the primary villain of the Worldsoul Saga, and has certainly been the headliner throughout War Within and Midnight. On K'aresh, sure, she briefly allied with us thanks to shared goals, but our reason for stopping Dimensius (saving what's left of K'aresh) and hers (pokemoning up Dimensius' essence to have an absurd amount of void energy) obviously meant a betrayal was coming - one that we were just slightly too slow to anticipate (RIP Locus Walker).

But if Iridikron's primary beef is with the Titans, doesn't it seem like he's going to play a major role in the expansion called The Last Titan?

See, I have a suspicion that Xal'atath might not survive Midnight. I think we might be heading to her as final boss territory. Sure, maybe it's not a permanent death - maybe we cram her back into that knife.

Xal'atath has been a refreshingly effective villain, one who actually seems to be making some smart moves instead of being just implied to have done so (Jailer, ahem). It's not my favorite trope to establish the threat of one villain by having them off another (I'm still a little salty about something from the last Dark Tower novel,) but Iridikron has been dutifully cooking in the "established villain" oven for the better part of two expansions now, studiously absent.

I don't think we're going to see Irdikron betraying Xal'atath, but I think it's more likely that he's calculated that she will fail for one reason or another, and that will open up an opportunity for him to kick into gear.

Indeed, I suspect that Xal'atath's entire assault on the World Soul is part of Iridikron's game - letting her get to the point where the Titans are forced to intervene. Is he being a little cocky to assume her plans will fail? Perhaps.

I think that if and when we see Iridirkon again, I'd really like to see him put his "avoid being a raid boss at all costs" strategy into practice. Maybe he tries to persuade us to his side, and maybe he keeps setting up others to threaten us (like Fyrrak) and cover his exit.

Again, I think that Iridikron strikes me as one of the smartest villains we've seen in WoW simply because he seems to actually respect the player characters' power. There's no "pathetic mortal" talk here. Xal'atath, mind you, is another one of the better villains we've ever had, but as her plan gets closer to fruition (it doesn't seem like anything we've actually done this expansion has set back her plans) she becomes more vulnerable.

The nature of the game, of course, is that we're going to fight and defeat the bad guys in the end. But I really like the way that, narratively at least, these ones seem to be making us earn it.

Indeed, I think one of the most satisfying things about Arthas as a bad guy back in Wrath of the Lich King is that everything up to the last 10% of his boss fight is actually his plan working as intended. It takes a literal miracle to break Tirion Fordring out of the ice to destroy Frostmourne, and as the king of the Scourge, Arthas was capable of absorbing countless losses if it meant turning the greatest heroes of Azeroth into his mind-controlled minions (note that if you didn't do this boss fight back in the day, you might not realize that at 10% he automatically killed everyone in the raid group. He then starts raising us as Scourge until Tirion intervenes, and then the last 10% was basically a victory lap in which the raid gets resurrected by the ghost of Terenas Menethil, now freed from Frostmourne, and gets to just beat on Arthas as he's held by the spirits that have escaped. It was a hugely cathartic moment, though my guild didn't actually down him during Wrath, only getting him after being like level 83 in Cataclysm).

D&D Warlock Video Game Seems to be Set in Ravenloft

 Baldur's Gate 3 did an amazing job of translating about as directly as possible the gameplay mechanics of 5E D&D into a computer game. Sure, there are a few little changes here and there, like special attacks for different kinds of weapons that are kind of an alternate-universe version of 5.5's weapon masteries, and an in-depth crafting system through alchemy that I must confess I almost never used. But the way it handled combat, and how its spells and other class features worked were really quite close to how it works at the table.

My favorite part of the game (admittedly I fell off in Act Three from a combination of decision paralysis and my computer starting to struggle with a whole city's worth of stuff going on) is Act Two's Shadow-Cursed Lands, where things get very spooky.

I found myself really wishing we could get a BG3-style game set in Ravenloft, which might be my favorite canon D&D setting (I think Planescape could rival it, but at least in terms of 5E sourcebooks, Ravenloft has given me more to sink my teeth into).

Well, the upcoming game, Warlock, does not play at all like 5E - it's an over-the-shoulder 3rd person action game. But it does seem, at least partially, to be set within Ravenloft. This is purely from the gameplay trailer, so I don't know if this is confirmed in interviews or previews or whatever, but in the scene we get, the player character (as far as I know she's only referred to as "Warlock," even by her patron, who is Tasha, but she's played by Tricia Helfer, so we can call her Trish) enters a town on the outskirts of some massive towered keep, with NPCs saying things about "who the mists dragged in," which, to any D&D nerd, is a pretty clear indicator. The Mists are so central to Ravenloft that any use of that word is going to mean those capital-M Mists that the various Domains of Ravenloft float within. Later in the video, Trish remarks to her imp familiar (I assume familiar. Maybe it's Skeever, Azalin Rex's familiar) that the Mists are eating at the base of the tower she descends.

In the current Ravenloft lore, the domain of Darkon is slowly dissolving after the escape of Azalin Rex, its Darklord, and the Mists themselves are basically advancing through the domain, eating away at its reality (the locals calling it the Shroud).

I have no idea if this game will actually be any good. The gameplay preview certainly looks cool, but naturally it remains to be seen how much of that translates into satisfying gameplay. Trish, or apparently Kaatri now that I've actually looked up the character's name, seems to have a lot of different abilities, but I wonder if this is all context-based or if we can pick and choose how they're customized.

Anyway, I get that a place like the Forgotten Realms is closer to the core fantasy of what D&D goes for, genre-wise, but I'm always happy to see them lean into spooky stuff, and a visit to Ravenloft could be a lot of fun.

How Practical Can the Necromancer Be?

 So, I don't have Arcana Unleashed yet, but we've gotten pretty extensive previews from the YouTube world - I'll be referring to the Dungeon Dudes' recent subclass ranking video (basically everything is awesome except maybe Enchanters and Transmuters, which are just fine.)

The Necromancer is a class fantasy that is kind of a tough nut to crack in TTRPGs. While in video games, you can often summon a ton of different monsters and let the computer automate their behavior (the Diablo Necromancer and WoW's Unholy Death Knight, as well as a similar vibe with its Demonology Warlock, each do this sort of thing) there's a real risk in a TTRPG space of struggling with managing such a large group of creatures.

Draw Steel, notably, released its first supplementary new class with the Summoner, which gave us a class entirely built around summoning lots of additional creatures, with subclasses that gave you the Necromancer, Demonologist, and also a Fey summoner and Elemental summoner. This class is intended for advanced players, though, and they warn new players off from trying to class as their first because of the complexity of controlling a lot of minions on the board (I imagine it might be easiest for players who have played as Director first to try their hand at it).

So, the question then is this: how well can we make a Necromancer work in D&D? Arcana Unleashed gives us the Necromancer Wizard, a revision of the School of Necromancy Wizard from the 2014 PHB.

I had assumed that one of the major changes would be building the class around Summon Undead rather than Animate Dead, as these Summon spells really streamline the whole "adding a creature to the battlefield" kind of gameplay. But evidently, instead, WotC has chosen to stick to Animate Dead, which uses the Monster Manual stats for Skeletons and Zombies, and is a concentration-free way to raise or maintain control over a group of undead.

Let's talk about a couple things first.

Skeletons in 5.5 have a +5 to hit, which is actually what we expect player characters to have at level 1, but will fall behind as you gain levels. Zombies only have a +3 to hit. So, how does controlling a lot of them at higher levels work and how does it feel?

In large numbers, even if they do fairly low damage (a zombie hits for 1d8+1, a Skeleton for 1d6+3,) if you can get enough of them, that damage starts to add up. Hit chance, of course, is also a big consideration. Against an AC of 16, which feels like something you could encounter at low and high levels, a Skeleton has a 50% hit chance and a Zombie has a 40% hit chance.

So, it's a numbers game - the more minions we can control, the better off we'll be. Remember that Animate Dead is concentration-free, though we'll need to spend a spell slot every day to maintain it (lest our undead minions turn on us or innocent NPCs nearby).

Off the bat, even before we can cast Animate Dead, Necromancers automatically get Find Familiar and get to use a Skeleton or Zombie as familiar options, and can make their familiar Undead (they can use other familiar forms and make them undead if they wish). Notably, there are new feats that empower familiars in various ways that a Necromancer might want to look into, such as Battle Familiar, which basically temporarily turns a familiar into something more like the Summon spells. But at this point, the familiar can also make attacks instead of you when you take the attack action (using its reaction). At this level, a Skeleton's Shortsword or Shortbow attack is pretty close to par with our use of True Strike (slightly less if we're using a light crossbow, greatclub, or two-handing a quarterstaff or spear), and is a bit better than Fire Bolt, so it's worth considering.

I really like this because it means we get to feel like a Necromancer right when we get the subclass. And that's minion number 1 who should be by our side at all times (unless it gets killed).

Now, at level 6, we automatically get Animate Dead (hey, take Summon Undead to tide you over at level 5). When we cast it, it's automatically upcast by 1 level. This is actually really great, especially at this level, because Animate Dead is the rare spell that actually upcasts far better than its base version: at its base 3rd level, you just get one minion, but every spell level beyond it adds two, so at this point, you can have a total of four skeletons on your side - one from Find Familiar and three from Animate Dead.

Actually, the math here is interesting. If we were level 11, say, and wanted to maximize the number of minions we could get via the spells regained from Arcane Recovery, do we want a 5th level spell or two 3rd level spells? Because they're upcast, we'd be getting 7 minions from a 5th level slot and 3 from each 3rd level slot. So it's actually more efficient to use the higher-level slot.

Anyway, we get one free cast of Animate Dead per day, which also benefits from this auto-upcasting. Now, the other really great thing is the following:

Each undead we create with a spell (not just Necromancy spells, so our undead familiar will benefit) gets additional max HP equal to our Int plus half our Wizard level. If we assume a +4 to Int at this level, that's 7 extra HP, which is a roughly 50% increase for both Zombies and Skeletons. By level 20, we should expect 15 extra HP, which about doubles it (and notably makes it possible that they'll withstand a Fireball, though a Skeleton with this bonus will be right at the average damage of one).

They'll also get to add your Intelligence modifier on a hit with their attacks. Again, that's something that scales a lot with numbers. At higher levels, you can grant undead creatures you create temporary HP equal to your Wizard level once per day, which will make them more resilient.

Ok, again, let's talk practicalities:

First off, your minions are a bit more resilient, but what do you do if they die?

Well, here's one weird thing that you'll certainly want to check with your DM about: is a dead zombie now just a corpse? And is a dead skeleton now a pile of bones? In other words, can you re-animate a re-killed undead creature?

See, one of the things that the Necromancer always has to worry about in a way that the Conjurer doesn't is that, typically, you need materials to raise if you're a necromancer. That's not always the case - sometimes you summon them forth from the underworld/Shadowfell/wherever (my Wizard has Summon Undead and I always flavor it as if they're coming through a portal to the Shadowfell, usually taking on some idiosyncratic personality).

I think a good thing to discuss with your DM is how available materials should be for you - and I'd advise DMs to make it reasonable for a player to use this central mechanical concept to their character. There can, though, still be some social consequences to having a bunch of undead minions around you all the time, but I'd generally try to find a way to let them have their cool thing.

Now, I think it's possible that you'd want to use Zombies, but generally speaking I think the Skeletons are the superior option unless dealing with foes who do bludgeoning damage.

I'm not going to do a full "vs Wyvern" damage calculation, in part because I want to have the book to really build something out with tons of feats and such, but practically speaking, let's figure out what we could do with a barrage of skeletal archers shooting at a target.

At level 10, we have 5th level spells. Assuming we want to invest in our undead army but not use up all of our spell slots, let's say that we've cast Animate Dead at 5th, 4th, and 3rd level to build our army. That's 3 from the 3rd level slot, 5 from the 4th level, and 7 from the 5th level slot, which means we have 15 skeletons. We have a 16th from our Find Familiar spell. Each has a +5 to hit (with either attack, but it's obviously better for them to stay at range and fire their shortbows - preferably spread out quite wide).

If we have +4 to Int at this level (we might want to pick up some general feats at 4 and 8, so we'd be at 19 probably) then each of these skeletons is going to hit for 1d6+7, or 10.5 on average.

If we're attacking a Wyvern (just to be consistent,) that means we hit on a 9 or higher with our +5 to hit, so that's a 60% hit chance. 10.5x60% is 6.3 damage. And then we add 3.5 5% of the time, giving us an extra .175, so we're looking at 6.475 per attack.

With 15 such attacks, that's 97.125 damage. It's heavy spell slot investment, but it's non-concentration, and unless our foes blow them all up with AoE (which isn't impossible,) that's pretty nutso, given that we won't, I believe, need to spend much if any of our own action economy on it.

But let's consider the downsides:

This is going to be rough on your table. It's going to take a long time to position all of your minions, and rolling every attack and all your damage rolls is going to take a long time. So, let's talk best practices:

First off, we're not rolling damage anymore. Using the average damage options for the stat blocks, we'll say that a hit does a flat 6 before we add the Necrotic damage. We can say that a crit will do a flat 10 (the average damage in the stat block rounds down, but 2d6+3 is straight up 10 on average). This way, we're only rolling d20s and cutting down the rolling and counting.

Next, DMs, tell the player what AC they need to hit. Yes, sometimes it's fun to make a guessing game out of just what you need to hit the target, but this way, a player can simply know what they need to roll and quickly roll 15 d20s and say "ok, that's 8 hits and one crit" and quickly figure out that that's 94 damage.

If we want to go to a real extreme, we could also just have a single attack roll for the entire undead horde. This will make things swingy, to be clear: it becomes all or nothing, but you're looking at a monster either taking zero or like 150 damage (or 210 if it's a crit).

Basically, don't play this class if you're the sort of player who isn't thinking constantly about what you're going to do before the DM gets to your turn. I have some players - whom I love, to be clear - who will take several minutes to decide what they want to do on their turn, usually because they've been distracted and not paying attention to what happened since their previous turn, and some who will have a plan and then if circumstances change (like a monster behaving differently than they expected) will take a long time to adapt.

If you want to play this style of character, you need to be on the ball, and even risk some suboptimal choices in the interest of alacrity. D&D combat can go very slow, especially with a lot of spellcasters in the party. Try not to be the reason that three-round combat took over 5 hours to finish.

The Difficult Middle Ground Between Power Creep and Excessive Restraint

 With NDAs lifted, I've seen some previews of the spells and some other features coming in Arcana Unleashed. I want to be clear here that the spells previewed (via Insight Check on YouTube) vary, with some looking like they could be some real new classics. Others, though, are underwhelming, and in the case of the one I'm going to talk about here, disappointing.

Let's talk Detonate.

I had some very high hopes for this spell, but unfortunately, I just don't think anyone will use it because the power level is just inferior to a comparable spell.

Detonate forces a creature to make a Con save, and on a failure, they take 10d10 damage, or half as much on a success, and then each creature within 60 feet of them has to make a Dex save, making that save at disadvantage if the target was reduced to 0 HP by the initial damage, taking 10d10 damage on a failure.

The spell is 9th level, and that's the problem.

Generally, as you get to higher-level spells, and especially 9th level spells, you need something truly transformative. Raw damage usually isn't really justified at this level, which is why Meteor Swarm, the ultimate evocation damage spell, does an ungodly 40d6 damage in total over an enormous area (4 different 40-foot-radius spheres within a mile).

The problem I see with Detonate is that I can't really imagine why you'd cast this rather than Meteor Swarm. A 60-foot radius circle (yes, it's a sphere, but we'll imagine this in a typical battle map scenario) has an area of 11,309 square feet, while 4 40-foot-radius circles have 20,106 square feet of area. In other words, you're going to be able to hit far more foes with Meteor Swarm, and the damage is going to be 140 on a failure or 70 on a success, versus 55 on a failure versus 27.5 on a success. Even with the disadvantage on the save if your target gets blown up, creatures are going to take less damage from this on a failed save than they would against Meteor Swarm on a successful save.

And I kind of feel like this has been something of a hallmark of 5.5 D&D. There seems to be a real fear of power creep, and so a lot of options in supplemental books have been undertuned.

Now, again, this is one example, and it's just a particular spell that I was excited about, but now feel like I'll never see anyone pick it.

It is tough, of course: power creep is extremely hard to prevent when you have a game system that you're continuing to add to over ten years since you first released it. Because of the gradual roll out of 5.5 updates, I've had to have a kind of weird piecemeal approach to updating my long-running Ravnica campaign: the Artificer in the group happily updated when the core books came out in 2024, which was  a pretty simply process, but when the new Artificer came out in Forge of the Artificer, she decided she didn't want to sacrifice the old version of Soul of Artifice (which she hasn't actually gotten yet as the campaign is now at level 19, but my hope is to get them to 20 by the end of the year and hopefully wrap the campaign in 2027). I had initially said that if you wanted to use the new version of spells, you'd have to update to the new version of your class, but I had allowed her to do this before there was a new Artificer, and rather than force her to go back to giving their Artificer the old spells, I instead just caved and let anyone with an old class use the new spells if they wanted (the Cleric doesn't want to give up the old Divine Intervention, and so stuck with the 5.0 Cleric - also, I can't blame them for not wanting to update to the new Grave Domain, which wasn't yet out, of course - but I've now allowed them to use the updated healing spells). I wish that one of the Sorcerers who has Counterspell would use the new version.

The point is, without a clean break, power creep often comes, I think, in the form of cherry picking, creating something that takes all of the good and none of the bad.

The RPG, really, that I'm most familiar with is World of Warcraft, and it's far easier to regulate that because when Blizzard pushes an update to the game, it's mandatory. Sometimes we'll get changes I don't love - it's still fine, but I think they messed with the Frost Mage in this expansion when it had been a spec that I felt was basically perfect from about 2010 to 2026, but you just sort of roll with it.

Anyway, the point is that I understand WotC's real reluctance to put out anything that's going to break the game. We saw in 5.0 as certain options like the Hexblade Warlock really kind of re-shaped the balance of the game.

Now, I did see a really great argument once, talking about Hearthstone, actually: if an option is more powerful than an older option, it's only power creep if that original option was worth taking. It was comparing two creatures (minions, what are they called in that?) who cost the same, but one had strictly better stats, like 5 attack and 4 health as opposed to like 5 attack and 3 health. The thing was that no one was playing the old card with 3 health, so it was really introducing something that had a chance to affect the meta of the game, rather than throwing said meta into whack.

I think, for example, the Hollow Warden Ranger is an example of that sort of thing. The Ranger is infamously underpowered as a D&D class, and didn't even really get much better in 5.5, with subclasses that were improved over their 5.5 versions (other than the Gloom Stalker) but not really to the point where they were truly good. The Hollow Warden seems like power creep if you look at 5.5 Ranger subclasses in a vacuum, but the effect was more likely to just get a Ranger to the point where it could compete with other classes.

It's interesting that we get a sort of microcosm of this in Arcana Unleashed:

Sad to report, but Summon Plant is probably not very good. It works like all the other summon spells, but every Plant choice you can pick has a damage vulnerability, either Fire or Slashing (the latter of which feels like a huge liability). If you can avoid those types of damage, great - it should be fine.

But in contrast, Summon Dinosaur actually looks pretty good: the creature it summons is Huge no matter what. I think its default option will be the Tyrannosaurus version, which has an attack that hits for 2d10+5+the spell's level (base level is 6th, so we're looking at an average of 22 damage on each of its three attacks,) and the T-Rex will grapple and restrain a target if it hits.

In other words, the damage is really kept comparable to existing spells, but a bit higher, and with a powerful but not insurmountable condition imposed. It's also piercing damage, and while the removal of "nonmagical kinetic resistance" in 5.5 has made bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage less of a problem than in 5.0, resistance to these do sometimes come up, so there's a little asterisk by that damage that distinguishes this summon from some of the other options.

It's funny: when I started playing D&D with 5.0 in 2015, about a year after its initial release, new books like Volo's Guide to Monsters and Xanathar's Guide to Everything got me really eager to try out all the new content. As a DM, I was always rushing to use new monsters, and as a player, I was typically drawn more to newer subclasses.

The 5.5 core rulebooks were far more balanced than the 5.0 ones, and I really appreciated the effort put into broadening the options for players (there are still some areas where I disagree with the design philosophy - I find it interesting that Daggerheart has just released an Assassin class that is separate from their Rogue, and I sometimes think that my idea of what a Rogue should be, as in, basically a class capable of very high damage that must rely on stealth and evasiveness to survive rather than toughness and armor, is not what WotC thinks a Rogue should be) but I've been weirdly mixed on the post-2024 (well, the Monster Manual was 2025) releases.

To be fair, though, if you look back at the early stuff out of 5.0, there are some real whiffs. We remember Xanathar's Guide to Everything for the Hexblade Warlock, the Grave Cleric, Swords Bard and Gloomstalker Ranger, but it also had duds like the War Magic Wizard or the Samurai Fighter.

And while Tasha's Cauldron of Everything brought us probably a higher "awesome to crap" ratio, it also arguably (maybe not even arguably) saw some real power creep with things like the Twilight Cleric (I've heard people claim the Peace Cleric is even more powerful, though I think I'd need to see that in action to understand why).

This sort of design is hard - and as Shawn Merwin, veteran game designer and Eldritch Lorecast member, says, no one would want to play a perfectly balanced game. I think the ideal state of game balance for a big exception-based, modular game like D&D is for each option to be useful in particular situations, but no one can control how common those situations actually are. The asymmetry is what gives us the ability to create a character that is our own.

But I also think the importance of at least some semblance of balance is to let us make those decisions that are true to our character and have that rewarded by making the character good at what they're meant to do.

In the case of Detonate, I think there's an easy solution: it just shouldn't be a 9th level spell. Make this spell, like, 6th or 7th level, and now it feels reasonable. It's a wider area and higher damage than a 7th level Fireball, but that's fine - upcasting typically doesn't have as good scaling as natively higher-level spells, with Meteor Swarm being perhaps the ultimate example. I think the design mandate was to make more 9th level spells, but then they got cold feet on letting it actually do 9th level spell kinds of damage.

Calling Dr. Darling!

 We know from various trailers that Casper Darling, the former head of research at the Federal Bureau of Control, will make appearances in Control Resonant. Darling is, maybe after Ahti, my favorite character from that game, which is funny, because he's a video game character who never shows up in anything but live-action segments (Mr. Door in Alan Wake II is almost of a similar category, except when he appears in the kind of early-flash-game shooter in Time Breaker).

Darling is, of course, played by Matthew Poretta, the voice actor for Alan Wake, but Control did a funny thing, getting the VAs from both of its most most famous protagonists to play new characters who actually used their likenesses, the other being James "voice of Max Payne" McCaffrey to play Director Zachariah Trench in both voice and appearance.

For such a ubiquitous presence in Control, seen in many film strips explaining paranatural concepts to FBC employees, Jesse, and of course the player, it's likely that by the time the game actually starts, Darling has already left our universe, using Hedron to transcend this reality and thereby escape the Hiss invasion.

So where is he, and what will he do in Control Resonant?

Well, last we saw him was in the Final Draft of Alan Wake II (the free New Game Plus mode added a month or two after release). It seems that Darling found himself in the Dark Place, but unlike Alan, he's more just curious than terrified of the place he's found himself in. According to his video message (only seen in this Final Draft mode) he's been in what we know to be the Dark Place (or at least assume to be) for 665 days (that recurring number motif, a bit like the number 19 in Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Not sure who invented the trope, but to me 19 is the quintessential "mysteriously recurring number.")

Darling notes that scientific inquiry in a place as subjective as the Dark Place is basically impossible, as reality around him shapes itself to conform to his hypotheses. He posits that he could use someone with more intuitive, artistic ways of thinking, and lo and behold, at that moment, Tom Zane shows up in the video to share a drink with him and discuss a new collaboration. (Zane, of course, looks like Alan but has physical actor Ilkka Villi's voice, so it's literally Alan's body and voice meeting.)

Now, there's a lot in Alan Wake II that leads one to be suspicious of Zane's intentions, even perhaps casting into doubt that he is the same Thomas Zane that we encountered in the first game (who was voiced by James McCaffrey - Remedy is loyal to their actors, though sadly McCaffrey died shortly before Alan Wake II was released).

The footage in the trailers for Control Resonant seems to show Darling in similar videos to the ones we saw in the first game, likely shot within the Oldest House, and so if this is all we see of him, then it might not actually tell us anything about what has happened to Darling since this glimpse of him in the Dark Place. That being said, given the weird way that logic breaks down amidst the paranatural, is it possible that these videos (likely actually film strips, but you get the idea) aren't purely representing Darling in the past, but might be the way that he manifests in our world? Like, is every one of these dorky film strips something he actually shot with a film camera in an office at the Oldest House? Or might some (or even all) of them actually be things that he's brought into existence for the express purpose of reaching out to Jesse?

Certainly his Dynamite music video is for her, though that's a bit different, playing in a room at the Oceanview Motel rather than mundane reality (which the interior of the Oldest House technically is, at least with the exception of its Thresholds).

Darling is a very endearing character - Poretta infuses him with such nerdy enthusiasm that it's hard not to like him. But he's not an innocent, and you could argue he's actually a pretty bad person: it was Darling who oversaw Dylan's abduction and abuse in the name of training him for the Prime Candidate program. Darling might have had good intentions, and genuinely cared for Dylan, but that doesn't change the fact that a government agency (with basically zero oversight) took a recently-orphaned child and kept him locked up inside for 17 years, isolating him from his only surviving family while lying to him and telling him that Jesse was allowed to visit if she wanted.

Dylan seemed to bond with him - we hear him complaining to one of the other researchers after he starts to show violent tendencies that "Casper" isn't there with him. Darling is in denial when Dylan has his initial violent outbursts, trying to minimize the loss of one of his staff, but eventually he concedes that Dylan is a "lost cause," as much as he seems sad to say that.

But he doesn't have the right to wash his hands of Dylan - Dylan suffered a deeply abnormal childhood (which all started with an enormous trauma in the Ordinary AWE) and was denied so many of the things that any kid is owed that help them grow up healthily.

We, like Jesse, have primarily seen this charming side of Dr. Darling, and even a heroic side of him as he first tries to safeguard the FBC from the Hiss and then goes "through the monolith" to seek answers.

But with our perspective shifting to Dylan, who suffered so terribly that he didn't resist when the Hiss took him over (I wonder if this is why it didn't destroy him like it did other hosts, and why he was able to survive being purged of its influence,) I really think we need a reckoning with Darling, even if he's on another plane of existence.

Learning to Cyberpunk the Ninja Way

 You know I like to try different character builds. I mean, see the name of the blog. But while Cyberpunk 2077 is absolutely an RPG, where rather than breastplates and helmets you have Frontal Cortex and Circulatory System cyberware, it's also, I'd say, a more narrative-focused game despite being built around an open world model. I mean, it shares a lot of DNA with something like the Elder Scrolls games.

But while I could keep a save file right at the moment you actually customize your character in Skyrim and start a bunch of different alts who would go off on very different adventures, Cyberpunk 2077 does sort of need to funnel you down the path to telling its specific story, really requiring you to do the heist at Konpeki Plaza that sets the rest of the plot in motion. (It's hilarious to me that we don't even actually get a title screen until the end of that mission, which might come like three or four hours into the game).

Anyway, as far as I can tell, it's after that mission and its lengthy aftermath (necessary to introduce the way that Johnny Silverhand plays into the rest of the game, his presence far more ubiquitous than I had initially assumed it would be) that the game opens up and kind of lets you do what you want (I could be wrong - I haven't explored the whole map on my second character yet,) which means that you do need to do a pretty lengthy amount of main story stuff before you can really just cut loose. And unlike Skyrim, character creation happens before there's any gameplay, so you'll be re-playing the whole intro every time (I do appreciate that the various backgrounds at least start off in different places - I started with a Streetkid and my second character is a Corpo).

Point is: it's not the easiest game to make a ton of alts for.

Anyway, my first character was an Intelligence-focused Netrunner-style character. It's honestly pretty rare that he even uses any weapons, as his quickhacks are good enough to take out nearly any enemy pretty much instantly. The only adjustment I think I might make to him is to actually use lower-grade hacks simply because they're cheaper with RAM - especially when dealing with high-level foes, sometimes it costs a huge amount of RAM to get someone. Given the game's encouragement of stealth, I'm also often layering this with Memory Wipe, which is very expensive.

But Quickhacks really give you a ton of options as a player: my MO when going into some building full of bad guys is to park myself somewhere out of the way and take remote control of their security cameras, using them, rather than my own eyes, to mark everyone in the building and then proceeding to take them down with hacks. Sure, I can't go around hiding bodies, but even if they find them, they won't find me.

It has, to be fair, kind of gotten me to a point where the game doesn't feel like a challenge anymore, and this stealthy approach is kind of unnecessary because I could probably just charge in there with a smart weapon and my monowire, or just not bother to use Memory Wipe and just spread Contagion among my foes.

Naturally, for my second character, I've gone a very different direction.

My female, Corpo V has prioritized Cool as her main attribute. While I haven't fully filled out the perk tree (I mean, I'm not intending to get every Cool perk, but I think a lot of them will help with my build) my growing sense is that my favorite way to go about it is focusing on throwing knives (I've been using the iconic one from Konpeki Plaza).

One thing I really appreciate about CD Projekt Red's approach to the game is how it (mostly) doesn't make us worry about consumables. Healing items, grenades, and even our thrown weapon all just come back after some time. It reminds me of how you could recuperate all of your potions and weapon oils in The Witcher III with ease once you had crafted them the first time. It lets you feel good to go.

Anyway, the biggest, craziest change to how I'm approaching the game is that I'm using a Sandevistan operating system - this allows you to slow down (and I think at higher qualities even stop) time briefly, which I've coupled with Cool's Juggler perk to take down multiple foes before they could react to my presence - actually quite handy when trying not to raise the alarm.

But what this does not allow is any Quickhacks, even the ones you don't need installed that command pieces of technology, like "turn off" for cameras.

It honestly makes the Stealth game significantly harder - on my Netrunner main, even if I wasn't doing the whole "death from your own surveillance equipment" routine, I could at least set off a radio or a light to distract foes and get them to turn around while I hustled past. But it is presenting me with a challenge that I did feel was lacking (though we'll see if when I reach the high levels that Streetkid V got to if it will still feel as challenging. I am also literally playing it on a higher difficulty).

I will say, I appreciate that the game tries to be a bit more of a balanced RPG, with lots of non-combat options to tackle certain situations. But I also do wish there were a few more environments where we could just let loose. I'm constantly seeking out side-gigs, but most of Night City, reasonably enough, is just indifferent and innocent civilians. Makes perfect sense, of course. But it does mean that if I want to test out my combat skills, I often have to drive a pretty long way (or more likely, try to find the nearest fast travel point).