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).

Doing Conditions the Souls-Like Way

 I started playing D&D around the same time that I first played Dark Souls, two gaming obsessions (oddly not Dark Souls itself - I'm much more into Bloodborne and Elden Ring, but it's all of the same genus of game, from the same studio) that have stuck with me now for a bit over a decade.

While I personally prefer a class-based RPG system, I really appreciate how Souls-likes use a skill-based system to create very different kinds of characters (admittedly less for Bloodborne, which has a narrower style of gameplay for the most part).

It would be fun, I think, to find a way to make a system that works on the same principles for TTRPGs (basically using item scaling and stat requirements to govern what a player can do, and thus allowing different flavors of magic, for instance, to build into by focusing on certain spellcasting stats or spreading between them).

But while that's a really tricky bit of design to work out (we need to keep numbers manageable where you can just roll some dice to get your result and not need a calculator or an abacus) there is one element of these games that I think could be kind of interesting to work out:

The manner in which conditions work.

Ok, for those who aren't familiar with these games, or have never played them, there are often various conditions that can stack up on your character, or which you can inflict on foes. The most basic is Poison, which we'll use as our main example.

Getting poisoned in these games is pretty nasty, as while the condition lasts, you'll continually lose health. But you can avoid it if you're careful:

When an enemy has an attack that inflicts poison, you'll get a little bar on your screen, roughly below your character depending on your camera angle. Each poison-inflicting attack will fill that meter (or if you run through one of the many, many, many poison swamps in these games, it'll tick up for every second you stay in the fetid waters). Until that meter fills, you're actually fine. And if you go for a while without getting any more poison build-up, the meter will start to drain until it's empty and no longer displayed on the screen.

But if it does fill, you are hit with the condition - in the case of poison, that damage over time will continue onward. At that point, the meter will actually start to drain, with the condition lasting as long as the meter still has anything in it. (This actually means that once you are poisoned, you're effectively immune to poison build-up, though the second that the poisoned condition ends on you, if you're still wading through a poisoned waters, you'll start to build it up again.)

This is how all conditions work - some of them have instantaneous effects, like Bleed, which will cause a sudden burst of massive damage, which then instantly drains completely but of course makes you vulnerable to the next bleed. There's often a more powerful poison variant (in Elden Ring it's Scarlet Rot. I think in Dark Souls it's Toxic, and in Bloodborne it's just... fast poison).

Now, one of the interesting things is that often in these games if you equip an item that helps defend against these conditions, raising, say, your Immunity in Elden Ring, you'll actually see these bars appear on your screen, partially filled, and draining.

And that, to me, implies something about the way these work:

Typically, in these games, you have stats that affect your resistance to these conditions (as well as resistances to different damage types). What I think these resistances do (it might be more complicated than this, but bear with me,) is essentially make that meter longer. If you have, say, 135 Immunity, that means that you'll need 135 "poison points" before you actually get poisoned. If an enemy has an attack that inflicts 40 poison points on a hit, you'll thus be fine (other than the damage it causes) if you take three of them, but the fourth gives you this further problem.

The reason that equipping an item that increases your immunity causes that meter to show up on your screen, then, I'd guess, is that if you had 135 and now suddenly have 160, there's 25 points within that meter that suddenly have been added, and rather than just start you off with an empty meter, it's basically treating it like you permanently have Poison Points up to your maximum. I imagine they do it this way to prevent weird shenanigans that might be caused by swapping gear mid-fight. If we invert it - if we figure that with 135 Immunity you're "135 points away from being Poisoned," and suddenly your maximum is 160, then the game needs to drain your now-larger meter to get to your new maximum.

The point, though, is that this could be a system we replicate in a TTRPG.

Poison, of course, is different in D&D - you can be poisoned without taking any damage, and that damage-over-time association that it has in most games is not there in D&D (though there are some effects that have that).

But the way it generally works is that an effect subjects you to a Constitution saving throw, and if you pass the DC set by the effect (and/or the monster producing said effect,) you avoid being poisoned.

But let's say we built a system in which, say, your Constitution Score instead set your Poison Tolerance (Resistance and Immunity already have meanings in D&D, so we'll say Tolerance for now). We might then have monsters that inflict, say, 5 Poison Points on you with an attack. As it is now, higher Con makes it less likely for you to get poisoned, but it's more predictable.

Now, does this make sense in a game where we generally want combat to only last 3-4 rounds? Perhaps not. But if we were to build a new system that has a different attitude toward how fast combat can flow, maybe this would be an avenue worth exploring.

Single-Playing WoW and the State of Online Multiplayer

 So, I have a confession.

And it feels weird that it's a confession and not just a statement of fact, because I'm actually not doing anything wrong.

I basically play WoW solo these days. On occasion, my best friend, who has been playing just about as long as I have, will have me grab a character (usually one of my tanks) to run a Mythic Plus dungeon. But for me, my focus these days has really been on doing things on my own. Solo play. Delves are truly my endgame.

And I think I was always inclined to play this way. Back when hitting level 30 was kind of a big deal, I really didn't even try to find groups for dungeons until I was level 30, or even level 40. I remember eventually figuring out how to look for groups in trade chat (this was before the Group Finder was implemented). And yeah, by the time the Group Finder was implemented in I believe 3.3, I got into a habit of running a bunch of dungeons on all of my characters each week. I've also got to say that the experience of running dungeons back then was wild. When my Troll Mage hit level 80 and geared up just high enough to qualify for a heroic dungeon, I came in understanding that, yes, I'd be sort of getting carried, but by that point in the expansion, these dungeons weren't really a challenge for established max-level characters, with most clears taking under ten minutes. But the players in that group, whether because they resented me for being just barely at the gearing minimum or because they were just assholes, decided to spend the dungeon getting me killed, the Hunter misdirecting enemies to my squishy Mage, and eventually just kicking me as they raced through the dungeon while I was running back as a ghost. Yes, it's been like 16 years since that happened, and yes, I'm still mad.

Now, I think perhaps because the WoW playerbase has gotten older, my experience with them in more recent years has been less toxic, the people less angry and aggressive, more mellow and cooperative. But it's still frustrating sometimes. Just a couple weeks ago, I was brought in for a Mythic Plus Windrunner Spire run. It didn't go wonderfully - we certainly didn't beat the timer. And one of the players claimed they didn't have enough gold to repair their gear, so my friend gave him what he claimed he needed, before that player pretty swiftly "disconnected" and didn't log back in. We were forced to finish the dungeon with four of us, and it was pretty clear the guy had been scamming my friend. A bizarre thing to scam a fellow player for, given that a thousand gold at this stage of WoW's lifespan is a pathetically small amount - I think I got 18k off of a weekly quest on one of my characters the other day.

But it left a sour taste in my mouth.

I think the implementation of Delves is a recognition of the fact that sometimes, playing with others isn't so fun. WoW's an MMO, built on the very premise that it's cool to be in a game where there are tons of other players also playing. But especially given the game's longevity, some of us older players have lost patience over time for dealing with other players' crap.

Yes, this post is partially about The Duskbloods. I saw a Blue Sky post by Jacob Geller, famed video game video essayist, saying "Sometimes I feel the potential of multiplayer is more exciting as a game design concept than it is to actually play." And I feel that. I think there's often talk about how being with other players can lead you down unexpected and interesting roads - you can't predict what is going to happen because other players will surprise you.

It is, thus, kind of funny that a really refined multiplayer game, like WoW, works really hard to funnel that experience into something predictable. If you're running a dungeon, everything works best if the players are acting in clearly prescribed ways. If I'm your tank, you want me pulling groups carefully, positioning them so that you're not fighting with me to max your DPS. The best players to play with are the ones whose actions you can predict, and so as a player, I aspire to be very predictable to my fellow players. That's how we win. That's how we overcome our challenges.

Back during Wrath, when my guild (which is basically a ghost town these days, probably in part due to my lack of enthusiasm to organize raids, a role I fell into as our guild's most consistently playing tank after our original guildleader quit WoW) was running Naxxramas (well past the point when it was "the current raid," but back then they didn't have this idea of seasonal catch-ups, so it was still reasonable to try to progress through to earn gear that would get us into Ulduar,) we were fighting Heigan the Unclean, with his infamous "safety dance." The funny thing is that I think that mechanic is actually not terribly hard with a modern computer, but back then, there was enough lag that you really needed to anticipate the slime waves well in advance. We were, I think, doing it on 25-player mode, and about 75% of the way into the fight, all but me (protection paladin,) and a shadow priest and a holy paladin were dead. The three of us performed that safety dance for 35 full minutes, clinching victory.

It was unexpected. It was a legendary moment. It might have been a bit boring for the rest of the group (though they were cheering us on in TeamSpeak). But the design of the game these days wouldn't allow that. If that many DPS were down, there would be an enrage timer that would end the fight.

Multiplayer games promise endless predictability, but multiplayer game design requires that the possibilities become narrow enough that the game retains coherence.

Game companies have been pushing online multiplayer a lot in the past decade or so. We've even seen marketing efforts to promote it as a superior way of gaming (I can't remember if it was EA or Ubisoft or one of these big game companies people generally dislike, but there was a tweet or something that was like "He's a ten, but only plays single-player games," which, frankly, I think was part of a corporate psy-op.

I actually don't really understand how the money of it all works: WoW obviously is incentivized to keep people playing because it's a subscription-based service. But I know a lot of these games are still ones you just buy once, so I don't totally understand why this business model would be so much more lucrative.

Anyway, the fact that WoW is accommodating this style of play I think speaks to a broader desire for a calm and private gaming experience. You could argue that this is WoW trying to be everything to everyone (remember how they implemented basically Pokemon back in Mists of Pandaria, which they've only just stopped adding onto?) but I will say, after almost twenty years in this game, I have sentimental attachments to it and my characters. I imagine one day my WoW characters will, inevitably, be packed away in Stormwind or Orgrimmar or their houses to gather dust forever, but it's nice to be able to keep playing the game I started halfway through college, experiencing its story and its thrills, even as my appetite for playing with friends is satisfied far more effectively by my D&D games.

Watching Duskbloods is Making Me Crave Bloodborne II

 I think it's actually a violation of the terms of service for the Duskblood Network Test, but there are some videos of footage from the game on YouTube. Is that ethical to watch? Eh, I don't think it's that bad. This is more like a closed beta test, and that's not something you intentionally release to random players without some expectation that stuff is going to get shown around. Honestly, it's not that much more enlightening than the official footage that the various reviewers were using in compliance with FromSoft's stuff.

Also, hey, I wasn't the one who uploaded it.

But ethical issues aside, I find myself reminded that while I'm incredibly curious about the lore of the game and very impressed with its aesthetics and gameplay systems, I just don't think this is the one for me: these sorts of time-limited match multiplayer games don't really appeal to me. And while the Network Test is only previewing one of the game's multiple (I think 3 at launch) maps and only some of its playable Bloodsworn characters, but it's clear that any sense of story progression is going to take place largely outside of the main game (I assume in a similar manner to Nightreign).

I have few doubts that those stories will be fascinating, and, I mean, look, I'm a total sicko for FromSoft's vague and evocative storytelling style, with its surreal imagery and reframing of established tropes to create something truly new and unexpected.

But all of this is basically making me lament that Bloodborne never got a sequel.

Naturally, there are comparisons to be drawn between The Duskbloods and Bloodborne (including, you know, having Blood in both names,) both having a broadly Gothic aesthetic. Now, I am also curious to see if the Duskbloods is quite as (classically) gothic as we're led to believe: the map in the Network Test isn't totally like Yharnam, but has a similar architectural style - the kind of high stone buildings that vampires might perch upon. I'd argue it's not quite the same - I think the city map in the test looks a bit more late-19th-century or even early 20th in vibes, including a very Big Ben-like clocktower (though I think I learned somewhere that Big Ben is actually the bell in said clocktower, and that the actual tower is just "The Clocktower," later named Elizabeth Tower in 2012). Meanwhile, Yharnam in Bloodborne was likely inspired more by Edinburgh, Scotland, and given the tricorne hats that are so iconic to the Hunter's Attire, I've always thought of it as taking place slightly earlier, kind of Regency period (then again, the alternate Hunter's cap is a top hat, and I'm no fashion historian. Actually, one of my best friends sort of is, so I should ask him).

Still, if Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Elden Ring all fit in that broad "medieval fantasy" aesthetic with plate armor, shields, and big weapons, The Duskbloods seems to share a lot more DNA with Bloodborne as a revisit about a decade later to this Gothic vibe.

Bloodborne was intentionally designed to encourage a faster pace of combat, including using the Rally mechanic to make players a little less worried if they wind up taking a hit so that they'd keep up the assault. We've seen with Nightreign and with Duskbloods that From is very much experimenting with faster movement speeds, slowly dialing up the pace of combat since the laborious days of Dark Souls. Indeed, I even think that just giving everyone such high starting Stamina in Elden Ring was in part to let people swing their weapons around more.

The high speed of Nightreign and Duskbloods character, though, also makes sense in a game where there's limited time to accomplish your goals. Duskbloods has you racing other players to gather the most Virtue (gained by doing various things across the map) to avoid being Culled from the competition. Given that you'll be racing to the various sources of Virtue, it makes sense that you can move at such high speeds and jump an insane number of times in the air (I believe it's a quadruple jump that can be followed by an air-dash, and also your initial jump can be charged, so it's way easier for you to overcome vertical obstacles).

I wonder if such abilities would be used in a future single-player game.

Now, look, it has only been two years since The Shadow of the Erdtree DLC came out, and while that was DLC for a game that itself was two years old at the time, it was a massive amount of content, one that would have felt like a whole game if the original hadn't been even more massive.

In other words, I don't want to get greedy. Bethesda seems to only finally be moving toward getting Elder Scrolls VI out a full fifteen years after Skyrim came out (and I'd guess we'll be waiting at the very least until 2027). FromSoft did have its crazy 2014-2016 run of Dark Souls II, Bloodborne, and Dark Souls III, but especially if they're developing new IPs that won't allow quite as many development-saving measures (that said, there are for sure some Pthumerians among the foes you fight in Duskbloods) I can be patient.

The main thing, though, is that I'd really love to get a game that looks like The Duskbloods but has a fully fleshed-out single player experience.

I'm fine with - even encourage - them to futz with the formula a bit. FromSoft invented the Souls-like genre, and I think one of the reasonable criticisms of properties like Bloodborne and Elden Ring is that they do borrow a lot from earlier games by the studio. But I think the saving grace is that those two are two of my favorite video games of all time, and the iteration on the existing concepts feels more like refinement than laziness.

Anyway, if it were somehow revealed that The Duskbloods takes place in the same universe as Bloodborne, I wouldn't find it tremendously shocking on a storytelling level. It's the licensing and exclusivity that makes that unlikely. Bloodborne was a PS4 exclusive (and kind of the reason I got a PS4 in the first place) and The Duskbloods is a Switch 2 exclusive - a console I still haven't gotten, though given that I've had every Nintendo home console from the SNES forward, I expect I will eventually.

But I do think that the exclusivity might be a big part of why there is no Bloodborne II. Like Demon's Souls (which was a PS3 exclusive,) FromSoft instead created a new and similar franchise to keep refining the formula. (Actually, funnily enough, a cut voice line from Bloodborne seemed to imply that it took place in the Demon's Souls universe, though it might have just been a cheeky reference).

So, I could just go back and play Bloodborne again. It's tempting. But I've also played so much of that game. I don't think I've actually beaten everything on all of these characters, but I think I've gotten, like, through most of the game and the DLC on something like six characters. Bloodborne, of course, doesn't have quite the same build variety that Dark Souls or Elden Ring do (indeed, while you might make an effective character that blends Strength and Skill, for the most part, the builds for Bloodborne are just "put more into your main damage stat, and maybe ensure you have, like, decent Health and Stamina"). Sure, one of my Strength-focused characters uses the Whirligig Saw and another uses the Boom Hammer, but it's not much of a distinction.

My real hope here is that, after two games in a row with iconic characters whose entire kit is determined by their pre-determined personality, that From has cultivated a lot of new ideas for powers and abilities that a future game can let us build around. Having a game where we get to choose to invest in stats that enhance, say, the weird rocket attack that Zork in the Duskbloods uses, or going for more conventional Dexterity to wield rapiers and scimitars, or blending them some way to create something really weird - I'd love that.

But also, man, I'm a sucker for the Gothic aesthetic. In a way, I worry that because Duskbloods exists, it's less likely we'll get a single-player successor to Bloodborne from them (whether part of that franchise or no).