Expedition 33, A Year Later

 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, with its typically French "subtitle for a non-sequel" title, took me and many by surprise last year. My first time hearing about it was when Jacob Geller mentioned being impressed with its turn-based combat that called to mind Sekiro (the one FromSoft souls-like I've never actually played). It was relatively cheap (I think 50 bucks) and I decided to get it on a whim, despite the fact that I was not quite done with Lies of P, which I came to a couple years after it came out (and as it turned out, just a couple months before its excellent Overture DLC).

Especially given that I had found myself frustrated by Final Fantasy XVI's complete and total abandonment of any sort of RPG gameplay (especially galling given how beautifully the FFVII remake series has come up with a fantastic blend of action combat with tactical, menu-based gameplay that I think of as being definitional to the series perhaps because I am old), it was really exciting to drop into a turn-based RPG, and one that also glowed with originality.

After beating the game, I found myself pining for a game like Expedition 33, only to lament that, well, there wasn't really anything like it. Now, I'll concede that the gameplay system is arguably not wholly original - I've never played the Persona games, but I'm given to understand that there's a lot of that that inspired Expedition 33. But the world of the game is truly unlike any other, with creature design, world design, and music that I really don't think I've seen anywhere else.

The folks at Sandfall have said that they intend to make sequels, and I can very easily see the "Clair Obscur" series going on to have other entries.

The nature of the game's story, though, makes me feel that it would best make sense to take the Final Fantasy approach and have each entry be connected by themes and motifs but not by plot - perhaps allowing only the "Writers versus Painters" narrative that is vaguely hinted at in E33 carry on.

E33 (yeah, I'm abbreviating it about as much as I can) is a gorgeous game and also one of the bleakest stories I've ever seen in video games. The prologue, which establishes the stakes and the initial premise of the game, is both horrifying and gutwrenchingly sad, but as the layers are pulled back and the truth of what is actually going on comes to light, it gets even tougher. Players are left with a binary choice at the end of the game that inspires a lot of philosophical debate, and basically, there's no way to feel 100% comfortable with what choice you make unless you refuse to engage in any philosophical nuance.

The story, the art direction, the excellent vocal and physical performances, music, etc., are all extremely praiseworthy. The gameplay is also deeply satisfying, but I do feel like I need to place an asterisk here:

This is a game that you can start to break at higher levels. There is a level cap (99, fittingly three times 33, the game's main arc number) but there is no cap on Lumina (wait, did I confuse that with a similar resource in Pragmata or do they use the same word?) The game encourages you to come up with "builds," and while I think early on, when you have very limited lumina and pictos, this is a fun bit of figuring out which bits work best for you (I focused a lot on parrying, and tended to load up on stuff that benefited that) but at the extremes, you start to hit a point where characters are doing insane one-shot combos. Meanwhile, it feels like enemies (especially in the free DLC) are built based on the assumption that that is what you're doing.

Likewise, because dodging and parrying allows you to fully avoid all damage (the only exceptions are undodgeable debuffs that lower your max HP,) late game monsters have such absurdly long attack combos and deceptive parry timing, and hit so hard, that it feels like you need to have those broken builds to beat them (ok, to be fair, this was mainly just Simon in the base game - I was able to beat Clea sort of conventionally by just figuring out the parry timing, and I think she probably counts as the second-hardest boss of the base game).

To be honest, I prefer a game where the potential for power coming from a build is sort of bounded, which then imposes reasonable restrictions on how tough a foe can be (they can still be insanely tough - I have beaten Promised Consort Radahn in Elden Ring - though only once, and after the patch that nerfed him a couple weeks after Shadow of the Erdtree came out).

Still, the experience of the main story campaign, and most of the post-game stuff, was tuned really well, I thought. (I might have made it clear that there was a post-game, as I assumed the game would just end after I finished the main story and so did all that stuff first, except maybe Simon, and was thus way over-leveled for the final boss).

I also recall early on that the tutorialization of specifically Pictos and Luminas was a little confusing. And another nitpick is that I think the weapon upgrade system was a bit flawed - the final upgrade nearly doubles the weapon's power, and given that there are a finite number of items to make that final upgrade, that felt bad. In FromSoft games, which use a similar weapon upgrade system, the final upgrade isn't much more of a jump in power than any other upgrade, and that means it's easy enough to try out a bunch of weapons at just one level below, for which upgrade items are unlimited if you get enough resources (at least in Elden Ring. I think maybe in Bloodborne Bloodstone Chunks were also finite).

I haven't gone back to play through the game a second time - I believe that you can make multiple save files (something I've always lamented you couldn't do in Control, which is a very different game but one that also captured my imagination) but I've been caught between impulses to just start fresh or do NG+. And also, I don't know if I'm ready for the game to hurt me so bad again.

I do hope to see a new Clair Obscur game, and hope it will address some of the gameplay quibbles I have (though I understand that these are more matters of taste, and the folks at Sandfall might not feel the same way). Whatever the story of the next one, I hope we get the whimsical creature design, the over-the-top Frenchness, and I also hope that Gestrals will be the Moogles/Chocobos of the series, showing up in all of them, because I adore the Gestrals.

Pragmata: Hacking and Blasting Bots on the Moon

 Having heard good things but not a whole lot else, I decided to roll the dice and get Pragmata, the latest entry in what is apparently a very good year for Capcom.

In Pragmata, you play as Hugh, one of four technicians sent to the Delphi moon base to respond to some kind of technical problem. Shortly into your arrival, signs of strangeness abound: the augmented gravity is offline, there are no people, and there are signs of chaos. And then, a moonquake hits and two of your buddies are blasted into the vacuum (though everyone's in space suits, so I'm not convinced that they are dead) and then your commander gets crushed by a falling beam.

Hugh gets knocked out, but is patched up by an android who appears like a little girl. The android, a "Pragmata" that is of a separate kind of technology than the rest of the base, teams up with you to fight the base's robotic laborers who have all gone crazy and homicidal, and eventually Hugh comes up with an alternative name to her long serial number: Diana.

Gameplay works the following way: Hugh has a number of guns to shoot robots with, but in order to damage them, Diana needs to hack them. Targeting one of these bots in classic 3rd person shooter style will pull up a grid, and you'll use the face buttons (Triangle, Circle, X, and Square on a PlayStation one) to navigate through that maze until you get the robot to open up, exposing itself to attack and thus actual significant damage.

Strangely, it recalls Alan Wake, where the monsters must be exposed to light from your flashlight (or other sources) to remove the darkness shield before you can damage them. After a while, the bots will close up their armor again, so you'll need to hack them repeatedly if they're longer-lived foes like a boss. Various wrinkles appear that make hacking more complex. At base, you have a number of nodes that can increase the damage that Diana does with a hack, and you'll also get to pick up yellow upgrade nodes that can add effects when the target is hacked (these are treated like ammo - using them will consume them, but you can sometimes find them out in the field). Other complexities arise as the game goes on, including some negative ones, like barriers your hacking path cannot go through, or some enemies who get red shields that block off parts of the hacking grid.

While made on the RE engine, this game allows you faster movement options, like a thruster-assisted dodge that can assist both in navigating various jumping puzzles and also dodging out of the way of enemy attack (the third major boss, which I just beat, I managed on my first attempt to sit at just 36 out of a few thousand HP by being very good at dodging, though I did eventually fall and have to make a second attempt).

Hugh will be able to carry weapons in four categories, but he'll always have a weapon that simply recharges instead of being limited in ammo. The more specialized weapons (which are more or less high-damage, crowd control, and defensive) will only have a few shots, but you can also find more in the world.

There's a very slight Dark Souls element here, where enemies will respawn when you go back to your Shelter, the home base for Hugh and Diana, but this lets you then farm the Lumina that is used to buy upgrades.

While Hugh is fairly fast on his feet, the pace of combat is a little closer to those Survival Horror games the engine was built for, which is good because you're going to have moments where you have to pay attention to the hacking game. Figuring out when you have an opening to do so is part of the tactical gameplay you need to learn.

The base is divided into levels, but you can always come back to places you've visited (except possibly the opening prologue area). That said, after three such areas, I've gotten only one ability that opens up previously-blocked pathways, so I don't know that it's meant to be a true Metroidvania.

Story-wise, the base is exploring some substance discovered or at least developed on the moon that is some profoundly effective medium for 3D printing. The second level centers around a bizarre facsimile of Times Square built out of the stuff. While most of the enemies are pretty classic robots, it's in this area that we come across the first genuinely unnerving robot designs, which are towering humanoids with vaguely infantile proportions. The "goomba" robots are also humanoid, but are more realistically proportioned and only a little taller than Hugh.

The antagonist is IDUS, the base's controlling AI, which seems to have determined that any living human is an intruder. While it pops up (in the form of a floating holographic logo) periodically, it hasn't really demonstrated any personality other than an intent to kill Hugh.

The emotional core of the game, of course, is the bond between Hugh and Diana. Interestingly, I don't think you ever "die" in the game - Diana drags you back to the shelter and patches you up, and if you fall to a boss, there'll even be some dialogue between you about how you might do better next time. Even as Hugh is introduced as a skeptic toward "bots," he very quickly starts to treat Diana both as a person and as a child he intends to protect. Hugh mentions being single and childless, and was adopted, so he knows a thing or two about finding family outside of your bloodline. Diana has only ever existed on the moon, and knows very little about life on Earth (despite the fancy high-tech in the game, life on Earth is depicted as pretty modern - New York taxis are still yellow. Given all the talk about taking Diana to Earth when they're done here, I'm expecting some kind of tearjerker ending.

The game encourages you to play defensively. Healing items out in the world are quite rare, and while you can load up on healing cartridges, these can only be recharged back at the Shelter. You'll discover passages back to the Shelter in each level, which function a bit like your Dark Souls III bonfires, letting you warp back to the hub to upgrade things and also restore ammo and healing.

Again, exploration is rewarded because you'll find lots of items to upgrade your duo's capabilities. Your map is maybe even less useful than it is in Control - you'll want to form a mental map instead to understand the spatial relationships between the various locations. In the first level, there's a big room where you need to find five lock nodes to hack, and the exercise in one in figuring out all the tightly-packed routes you need to take to reach each node in a relatively small but vertical space.

I feel like I've been charging through the game, but I guess it's a sign that the gameplay is fun if I spent most of my waking hours today playing it. The second major boss was a fantastic set-piece, and I look forward to other epic experiences moving forward.

Monstrous Assaults and Timing the Hunt in Deathblow

 Van Helsing and Lucy's Suitors see Dracula long before they get the killing blow. While horror often thrives by keeping the monster out of sight, its presence still needs to be known before we reach a story's climax.

In cinema, we can easily cut away from our protagonists to see the monster doing its thing, but in TTRPGs, generally speaking, the focus of the narrative tends to stay on our heroes. Again, that doesn't preclude an appearance by the monster.

Generally, as I've been conceptualizing Deathblow as a game, I've treated The Hunt as a period in which filling out your Tracking Points is crucial to finding the monster in order to fight them. But I think there's a bit of a problem in that, to begin with:

The longer you take to track down the monster, the more opportunities you have to find clues and, as we discusses in the previous post, gain Wrath to fight it with.

We need, then, to incentivize finding the monster faster. And we do this by coming up with a punishment: the monster kills again.

Again, my dream for whatever "monster book" the game comes with (conceding that this would probably all come in one volume) is that each entry has, yes, a stat block, but also an entire guide to building an adventure around them, including what sort of environment to run it in and literally how many NPCs we should be working with.

One of the reasons to have a set number of (manageable) NPCs is so that we have victims that can be killed off by the monster if the party takes too long.

Again, most of these stories take place in isolated locations, though even in an urban environment, it might be limited to a palatial townhouse or a slum in some neglected neighborhood. I'd like it if GMs could reasonably expect to know every NPC in the adventure environment, or at least give them a name and a one-sentence description ("Hob the Butcher, young man who took over after his father died, bit standoffish").

The Night Hunters are here to prevent more death at the hands of the monsters, so the threat of that "more death" has to be a thing.

Tracking time in TTRPGs can be difficult - it's one of my issues with, in D&D, effects that last an hour versus ten minutes, because functionally there's very little difference between them in gameplay. But there are games that have tried to solve this: Blades in the Dark introduces the idea of clocks, where players want to fill in clocks that represent their progress toward something, while they want to prevent bad clocks from filling up (like the guard becoming aware of their activities).

I think we can borrow something like this, but it will require that we be a little more mechanical with each of our "scenes." If we imagine that a PC going to perform some investigative task takes a certain amount of time, we can say that, success or failure, that adds a notch to our "Hunger" clock.

Indeed, this might be a way to incentivize the players to split up - if we use an initiative-like system to take turns performing Hunt tasks, the players might be able to find multiple clues before the Hunger clock gets a single tick.

This also solves another issue: penalizing failure in non-life-threatening situations. In Draw Steel, Negotiations give important NPCs a Patience score, which diminishes as the players make arguments. Successes can raise their Interest, and thus secure better outcomes from the Negotiations, but once their Interest is exhausted, the Negotiation ends. And what this does is solve a problem of players trying to get the perfect outcome by overcoming their bad rolls with insistent roleplay. I'm all for roleplay, but negative consequences for failure are important.

In this case, we could actually be more lenient with players who want to collect all the clues and might keep working at something for which they failed a check - say the Hunter failed their survival checks after discovering a set of tracks going into the woods, but they want to try to pick it up again - well, that's fine. You just fill the Hunger clock up on the same clue to try again.

What happens when the Hunger clock fills?

Well, I think that the most obvious thing is that an NPC is killed by the monster. But I also think that we have the potential for the monster to attack our Night Hunters.

There's risk here: it would be really anticlimactic for the party to fail their way into killing the monster. And I think for this reason, this kind of attack (we could call it a Monstrous Assault, maybe?) probably can only end with the monster fleeing, and not dying. I think we could maybe have the monster trigger its Escape immediately upon becoming Bloodied (at half Stamina).

The consequence here, naturally, would be the loss of Stamina, but also potentially the loss of Wrath that had been gathered previously, as the party will likely need to expend some of their Wrath to fight off the monster or heal up injured allies.

Indeed, I had talked about having lesser monsters appear on some Hunts where it makes sense (if we have some kind of Lich-like monster at high levels, they might have undead zombie minions) and while I think that these could exist as normal environmental challenges (maybe to get to the ruined shack on the island in the pond outside of town where some clues to the town history are held, you need to face off against the monsters that wait in the silt at the bottom of said pond) I also think that a Monstrous Assault might include sending minions to attack the party.

There could even be Discipline-spending abilities that help speed up one of these attacks - an Inquisitor might have a "Divine Abjuration" ability that can compel a monster of certain types (undead, demons, for example) to flee, which could just work instantly or maybe it raises the remaining Stamina at which the monster flees.

Again, the game doesn't have opportunity attacks, and uses a more narrative-based logic on how easy it is for a monster to run away from a fight because that's true to the genre. Monstrous Assaults should be harrowing encounters and not be seen as opportunities for the party to get a quick kill in - though we might still reward the party with Identify points, given how much information can be gleaned by glimpsing the monster.

Skills and the Hunt in Deathblow

 I think the most challenging aspect of design for my hypothetical Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG Deathblow is figuring out how to do The Hunt.

The intent for Deathblow is that hunting the monsters should feel as exciting and engaging as fighting the monster. While the final fight ought to feel epic and climactic, the sort of "detective work" that constitutes The Hunt needs to feel engaging as a piece of mechanically rich gameplay, but without being so heavy-handed that it crowds out roleplay opportunities.

In 5E, non-combat gameplay engages primarily in the Ability Check mechanic - a very simple mechanic in which players attempting to do various things get a success or a failure based on their total roll and the difficulty class the DM chooses. There are other systems that can be engaged: spellcasters can often have spells that function best out of combat, and using them can create an interesting tension between the desired utility of a non-combat spell with the sacrifice of that spell slot's use in combat. I think Ability Checks, though, remain the primary way that the Exploration and Social pillars of the game are executed, mechanically (though I think the 5.5 redesign tried to grant out-of-combat features to non-spellcasters that sometimes involve the same trade-off, like a Barbarian using Rage to enhance various skills and use Strength with them instead of their normal ability modifiers).

Spending resources in order to use character abilities is one of the most popular ways of making engaging gameplay - by limiting an action, and potentially other actions by expending a more universal resource, to a certain number of uses per adventure/day/whatever, the player is forced to think strategically about when to use that ability so that it has the greatest impact on their potential success.

At the same time, though, I think a good system needs some unlimited character abilities. If everything is limited, using up all of your resources means you start to also lose some of your identity as a character. If I have the Mage Hand cantrip on a Wizard in D&D, I might have blown through all my spell slots, but I can still do something that feels wizardly and magical.

Currently, the idea that I find really fascinating and would love to move forward with if it could work is that The Hunt, as I'm calling the non-combat part of an adventure in which you seek out the monster, is where you generate your resources to then use in combat.

I think it makes a certain thematic sense - the more you can learn about the monster's habits, history, and nature, the better prepared you'll be when you confront it, and this would reward a thorough hunt with greater power to bring against it.

    So, let's lay down how we imagine The Hunt working on a broad level:

An adventure begins with the Night Hunters (our PCs) called in to deal with a deadly monster. They arrive at the adventure location - which would probably most classically be some rural hamlet out in a dark wood, but could be an aristocrat's manor house, an urban slum, or some work camp like a quarry or a mine - and begin to look for signs of the monster.

The Night Hunters have a couple of goals they can work toward in their Hunt. Right now, I have it broken down into just two categories: Track and Identify.

Tracking the monster is all about finding its location. While the monster might be on the move (it is, after all, preying upon the people in the area) it ought to have a resting place somewhere in the area, like a vampire's hidden coffin in which they rest during the day (note that in this game, we're going with Dracula-style vampires, who don't burst into flame with the sun, but just lose some of their abilities - definitely easier to kill them in the day, but not so simple as ripping the curtains down).

Identify would be to figure out what kind of monster it is. The idea would be that the people being preyed upon only know that people are going missing or bodies are piling up, and there would likely be some confusion over what kind of monster it is - I like the idea of a False Vampire (I think it's a minion type for Draw Steel's summoner) that, in this game, would probably be a more Lovecraftian alien than a classic undead blood-sucker, but might leave victims exsanguinated and thus confuse those investigating.

Collecting clues of these categories (and others if I can think of them) would grant certain benefits to the party - indeed, I imagined that we could note on a stat block what information getting a certain proportion of the Identify Clues would give the party, literally spelling out that they have, say, resistance to fire damage. One of the key things Identify could help with is if the monster has special Deathblow requirements, like using a silver weapon to kill a werewolf.

Each monster would, in its stat block, show how many of each clues you're supposed to seed in a adventure, and then have a list of suggestions of what the nature of the clues might be.

The intent here is that the GM who wants to run a Deathblow adventure would pick out a monster they find interesting (and level-appropriate for the party) and from the monster entry get some suggestions on where such a monster might operate, what its lair might be like, and then that list of clues to seed. The GM then builds an adventure location that can fit all those things, and ideally this makes it pretty easy to feel like you've got the adventure sorted out.

    But let's return to a focus on the players:

The clues can't just be like objects to collect off the ground like you're in an N64-era Rareware platform game. While they have a clear and precise mechanical meaning, the clues should still feel situated in the world and as part of an unfolding narrative.

For example, if your monster is a powerful ghost (we'd probably have a variety of ghost-like monsters - we'll say a Specter is a level 1 or 2 threat. Remember that we're probably looking at a level cap of 5). Maybe the kind of ghost it is leaves ectoplasm as a residue in places where it has appeared.

If it's just some weird goo, it feels like we might be able to identify it with a quick skill check - something that in D&D would probably be an Arcana check (or Religion, as that's officially the knowledge skill related to Undead). But I think we're looking for something more compelling.

Let's imagine that there is an Ectoplasm clue to find, but in the world of our game, that stuff isn't immediately obvious - maybe instead of dripping clear jelly, it's an invisible residue, and so you need a Mechanist with a Residue Identifier ability or an Occultist with a Read the Signs ability, each of which might do somewhat different things but can both secure this clue.

I think these abilities need to be somewhat broadly designed: the joy of a TTRPG as opposed to a digital game is that you can be flexible and tailor the experience to the players. Indeed, I think that my Mechanist ability in the previous paragraph is a little too specific - you'd only use that to get precisely this clue.

Read the Signs, though, as an Occultist ability, has more potential: Let's say that the ability lets you detect the presence of supernatural activity. The ability just gives a Yes or No binary response, but the supernatural energies could be anything from ectoplasm to demonic energies to alien spatial warping.

What this would then open up is a roll-based check to determine what kind of "Signs" the ability detects. If our Occultist rolls well on their Investigation, they might find that, yes, this is specifically ectoplasm and therefore we're dealing with an incorporeal undead spirit. That, then, might give us an Identify Point.

Now, do we have multiple resources?

In Diablo III, the Demon Hunter class (which truly fits a "classic Night Hunter" aesthetic, and might be a major inspiration for our Hunter class) has two resources, Hatred and Discipline, other than the other classes that only use one. Generally, Hatred is the shorter-term resource used for damaging abilities, which comes and goes at a fast rate. Discipline, then, is more for utility abilities and I don't think there are any abilities that generate it - you just need to let it regenerate over time.

I think we could take a similar approach. While I like the idea of each class having its own resource name, we could probably get away with just giving them all the same resources. But the dual-resource system could help us figure out how to do the Hunt versus Combat.

Perhaps players begin an adventure with full Discipline (which I think is a reasonable name for the more utility-focused resource) but an empty tank for Wrath (ooh, yeah, I like that). Discipline can be spent on abilities like the Occultist's Read the Signs, and the expectation is that you're going to largely be spending it on non-combat abilities.

Each time you successfully discover a clue (so, for instance, our Occultist uses Read the Signs and then succeeds on their Investigation roll to determine that there's Ectoplasm) you gain some Wrath. Maybe it's just one, or maybe each clue counts for 3 Wrath (we'd need to figure out how many clues that we're expecting you to find before you face the monster).

Now, two things, I think, ought to be true:

First is that you should be able to discover some Clues with clever thinking or lucky rolls without spending Discipline. Let's say that the party's Warrior finds a fellow veteran in town, buys them a round of drinks, and through effective RP and some good Persuasion checks (currently I'm just using 5E skills as examples - we'll get to that) discovers that there's a rumor that the kindly old lady living at the top of the hill actually killed her abusive husband when she was younger, and that the community has just agreed not to speak of it because they all agreed she was in the right and didn't want the authorities to punish her for it. That could be a major clue to the location (Tracking) and type (Identify) of ghost we're dealing with, even if the Warrior didn't expend any resources to get it. Just a great boon for the party.

The other is that using an ability shouldn't always automatically net you that clue. The party's Hunter might have heard some stories about livestock going missing and choose to use some ability, maybe "Listen to the Wild," to figure out if some monster was snatching chickens, but then finds that it was a mundane fox and unrelated to the monstrous killings.

Now, what the rewards for these successes should be is a little up in the air: I like the idea of identifying the monster being something the whole party is rewarded for. I'm tempted to say that only the character who discovers a clue gains Wrath (maybe a player using an ability to assist them gains some Wrath as well). But horror thrives on isolation, and I think giving the party an incentive to split up is actually really good for us (even if, as GM, you'll want to be sure not to linger too long on any given scene to ensure that the players feel that they're getting an equal share of the spotlight).

I honestly think that skills might work pretty similarly to D&D. While I'd want to use modifiers rather than D&D's archaic score-versus-modifier thing, I think the fundamental idea that we have a modifier that combines something with our basic stats and try to hit a target number works. I might go for more of a 3.5 idea in which we get a certain number of skill ranks to invest in particular skills each level so that players can specialize a little more (and overcome low stats - maybe our Assassin doesn't read a lot of books, and has a low Knowledge stat, but they're very good at reading a scene, and have a lot of ranks in Investigation). (Also, thinking of changing the Assassin class name. Cuthroat? Outlaw? Nothing final yet).

A lot of creative work needs to go into figuring out what Hunt abilities each class would get. As I see it, each class should get the same number of them (and the same number of combat abilities,) and I imagine that at level 1, we're probably coming in with, like, two or three. Each would be thematic to the class fantasy - the Hunter is going to use non-magical tracking abilities, maybe they can set a trap (something that could potentially create bonus clues?). Meanwhile, the Witch or Occultist is going to have stuff that's more like magical spells, speaking to the dead or viewing things that happened in the past (the sort of thing in the latter case that might yield an opportunity for a perception check).

I think when it comes to skills, the Monster should determine target numbers for it. As I see it, clues would come in various difficulties, with each monster requiring a number of easy, moderate, and difficult clues to find, and the monster would set the difficulties for each of those types of clues.

Ideally, the monster would leave only a little work to the GMs - to come up with a setting and NPCs, and then just make sure there's room to place all the clues in their environment.

Next thing I want to talk about is the duration of the Hunt, and potential early encounters.

Solo or Boss Monster Design in Deathblow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, I wonder if we could take this further.

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

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

So, what if we did the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that ok? Are we ok with that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Null Results and Gothic Monster-Hunting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That being said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, two things to keep in mind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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