5.5 Class by Class: Paladins

 I'm at a bit of a loss here because, well...

I think Paladins are the best-designed class in the PHB. I think all three of the existing subclasses both represent classic paladin archetypes and are powerful enough to be worth playing.

So, what do I think needs changing?

Um... not much.

I guess if we're going to get into it, we should get really, really into it.

First off, there's already been some errata, but I think that they need to just change the name of Improved Divine Smite. Divine Smite and Improved Divine Smite both involve adding d8s of radiant damage to your attack, but they are otherwise entirely different abilities that don't interact in any way. At level 11, your attacks do more damage, which actually outdoes a Barbarian's rage bonus on average (not only is a d8 4.5 damage on average, but this also scales with crits) on top of not having to spend any resources to get it. Divine Smite is a resource-limited ability that adds additional damage but requires the expenditure of resources (though, delightfully, no action).

One thing I sort of wonder about is why Divine Smite is limited in its damage bonus - essentially, you get no more damage for using a 5th level spell slot than using a 4th level one. I... don't really see the need for this limitation. I mean, upcasting is upcasting, right? And Paladins get 5th level slots. I mean, a Guiding Bolt doesn't suddenly cap out when you cast it at 4th level, and that can crit too. I suppose this might be intended to prevent cheesy 2-level dips on an otherwise pure caster so that they can't do a 9th level divine smite, but honestly, doing 10d8 (or 11d8 to a fiend or undead target) extra damage to a single target doesn't seem like an overpowered use of a 9th level spell. Even if you account for the fact that you can wait for a crit, that's still at the very most 22d8 damage, which is still not as much as something like a Meteor Swarm.

I love the Paladin capstone - it's the only class whose final subclass feature comes at 20, which allows for a variety of these really cool "ult" abilities. While part of me would want to move it up to allow more characters to use it, the truth is that there should be better capstones in general in order to encourage groups to take their campaigns all the way to 20.

So, I find myself wondering if there are other avenues for the Paladin to explore.

One thing that's always been a bit odd about the Paladin is that they make for decent secondary healers - but they can't really focus on it. D&D is, admittedly, less flexible in who can be a healer, in part because healing spells are not as crucial to overall survival - you hope that most of the party is going to come out of a fight with only minor damage at best, and short rests can patch people up quite well if things are tough earlier in the day.

The Oath of Redemption, from Xanathar's, feels like it could have been a fairly healing-focused subclass. Granted, I don't know how effective Alchemists generally are as a half-caster healer, but I like that they get access to a 6th level spell they normally wouldn't get as a half-caster, and think Paladins would make sense to have a subclass that enhances a different element of their toolset.

Perhaps, though, the underlying paladin class is so strong as a damage-dealer that giving them the capability to do serious work as a healer might make them overpowered.

Now, this is also a class that got a bonus subclass in the DMG - one designed for villainous NPCs. Personally, I think giving NPCs character classes (or rather, literally giving them all the abilities of a character class) is not really great - a class is supposed to be complex enough that it takes a player's full concentration to run it, and having a DM run a fully-fledged character on top of several monsters is not great.

That said, I think that both the Death Domain and Oathbreaker are core fantasies. I do understand how, by putting them in the DMG, it takes them out of the players' hands if the DM doesn't want to have outright villainous characters. On the other hand, the School of Necromancy exists, and Warlocks can have evil flavor pretty easily.

I'd love to see a more nuanced exploration of the Oathbreaker - or rather, some kind of dark paladin. In some ways, I feel like Oathbreaker only makes sense if your Oath was a good one - an Oath of Conquest paladin breaking their oath seems like it would give them a shot at redemption.

Indeed, Conquest might be the clearest player-facing "dark paladin" archetype (though Vengeance, if done a certain way, can feel pretty dark).

I think there's room to create both a less morally straightforward Oathbreaker - one that emphasizes freedom (or in D&D terms, chaos) rather than evil. But I also think that there's room for a "dark paladin" option. While a lot of undead in D&D default to chaotic evil, due in part to the way that Orcus is seen as the origin of necromancy, I actually think that they make more sense as lawful evil - especially undead as the minions of some dark overlord (in fact, skeletons are lawful evil). I think it would be cool to have some kind of Lichbound paladin that uses necromancy to raise undead minions.

It would also be cool to have some kind of witch-hunter, inquisitor-style paladin oath, though I suppose you can easily skin Oath of Vengeance to act that way.

I think this would allow for more classically heroic Paladins like Oath of Devotion to shine in contrast to these edgelord types.

But yeah, mechanically... can't really complain. Reprint it as is and I'll be pretty happy.

5.5, Class by Class: Monks

 Ok, so Monks:

When I first got the core rulebooks, I was not much of a fan of unarmed fighters in general, and kind of breezed past the class. However, I went back and read through it again and fell in love - this is a class that gets an absurd number of really interesting abilities. In fact, my second-ever D&D character was a monk.

But how are monks in terms of real strength?

In terms of damage output, Monks have a big advantage in that they effectively get three attacks per round on most turns (after getting extra attack at level 5) and can spend a resource to turn that into four attacks. But there are also downsides: first off, the type of weapon you can use is limited. The best weapon a Monk can naturally use is a Quarterstaff, which, when two-handed, deals 1d8 damage. Thus, even though you don't have a shield, you'll be fighting with what is doing the equivalent of another martial class's one-handed weapon (or an archer's longbow). It's perhaps a minor issue, but if Monks need to deal a ton of damage to justify their shortcomings, this holds them back slightly.

The next is that their unarmed strikes never get to "scale up" if you get magic items. Compare this with a Fighter - they might get a +3 weapon and thus find themselves hitting much more frequently and for more damage, but a Monk never gets to boost those elements. At the very least their two "regular" attacks can use magic weapons, but it creates an odd imbalance.

But maybe these are nitpicks. Let's get to the meat of it:

Monks have amazing abilities centered on themselves. Indeed, I love the fact that Monks get something new basically every level - even levels when they get ability score improvements. These range from the flavorful (Timeless Body) to the situational (Deflect Missiles) to the just plain really good (Diamond Soul).

What, fundamentally, is the Monk supposed to bring to the party? I think that's the core question that needs to be answered to see if we can improve its design.

As I see it, as it currently stands, the Monk's two biggest elements are: Multiple Attacks and Stunning Strike.

Monks get to make two attacks every turn from the get-go. And even if their weapons aren't as strong as, say, a paladin wielding a maul, the ability to get a second attack in at level 1 is pretty huge. That paladin with +3 to Strength (a reasonable assumption for level 1) is going to be doing an average of 10 damage on a turn where they hit. A Monk with +3 to Dexterity and a quarterstaff is going to hit for 7.5 with the quarterstaff on average and then 5.5 with their unarmed strike, for a total of 13, if they hit both times.

At level 5, if we assume both got to +4, the paladin (ignoring Great Weapon Fighting) is now hitting for 22 with two strikes on average, versus a Monk hitting for 8.5 twice (17) and then 7.5 with their unarmed strike, meaning we're still leading in damage with 24.5 (without spending ki on flurry of blows).

So maybe we're not actually being very fair. Even with the extra damage from a fighting style, we're still in the same ballpark.

Still, given that the Monk is relying on those unarmed strikes to balance out their slightly lower "attack action" damage, I could imagine that in some scenarios, the limits on the Monk start to add up. And it also means that a Fighter, who eventually gets three and then even four attacks per action, starts doing what the Monk does but better.

Now, let's look at Stunning Strike.

Getting a stun off on an enemy is enormous. Honestly, just taking away their turn is huge, but then giving yourself and allies advantage on attacks against them is a big deal. Perhaps, though, that's the reason why it's limited to a Constitution saving throw against a DC that is based on a Monk's secondary stat. With the standard array, you'd probably only be able to max out your Wisdom at level 19 (unless you went with only +1 to Con at level 1, which is a bit risky for a melee fighter).

Con saves are tough to fail for big bad monsters. Thus, it feels often like a Monk's there more to crowd-control minions. That, of course, can be a huge benefit, so maybe we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss them.

Indeed, I think perhaps the issue with the Monk isn't really the base class design. I was watching a recent Dungeon Dudes video giving their impressions of the Fizban's subclasses, and expressing dismay that the Ascendant Dragon Monk isn't very good, and maybe even just bad. And I have to say I think they've got a point.

Their big argument, and one that I think might be the key to all of this, is that a lot of monk subclasses have you doing things that pull you away from the Monk fundamentals - things that take up your bonus action or require you to spend a lot of ki on abilities that might not be terribly useful.

I think the best-designed subclass for the Monk in recent times is the Way of Mercy. This does give you yet more things to spend your ki points on, but they play into the Monk's strength in a number of ways, and grow more efficient as you get to higher levels. Indeed, I figured out that the Way of Mercy's Hand of Harm is actually far more ki-to-damage efficient than doing a Flurry of Blows (mainly because you know it's already connected,) though there's nothing preventing you from doing both.

I think some of the earlier subclasses have features that reward you for using existing Monk abilities - Open Hand prevents your target from using reactions if you use Flurry of Blows and Drunken Masters increase your movement speed and give you an automatic disengage if you do so, both of which allow you to use hit-and-run tactics that will serve the relatively low-health Monk well.

Personally, I adore the flavor of the Drunken Master monk even if there are some shortcomings to its mechanics (primarily I think Drunkard's Luck is insanely narrow and expensive). I think Way of the Four Elements is really cool in concept, and perhaps not as bad as some people have made it out to be, but I might play around with, rather than creating a new thing to spend ki on, instead allowing you to pick disciplines that add effects to your existing abilities.

Like a lot of classes, I think that Monks have that one subclass in the PHB that is the "standard," which is Open Hand. I think that's fine. Way of Shadow is both pretty good and also gives us the classic Ninja archetype (granted, I think you could argue that Rogues in general are closer to Ninjas). In fact, I like that the Four Elements Monk gives us something that is fundamentally distinct from the other two PHB options while still feeling like a central Monk fantasy (and, let's be honest, a pretty clear reference to a very popular Nickelodeon show).

So, perhaps all the Monk needs is to see its PHB subclasses given some empowering redesigns, and maybe tweaking the design philosophy for future subclasses. I'll also say that Dedicated Weapon is a very welcome optional feature - my Wood Elf Drunken Master, if I ever play him again, is going to get much better use of his Sun Blade as a result.

5.5, Class by Class: Fighter

 The Fighter is, in a lot of ways, the simplest D&D class. It focuses primarily on doing something that everyone can do - attacking with a weapon - and doesn't even really make its weapon attacks do anything special - you just get to do more of them, and you get ways to enhance your weapon-attacking-skills.

At a base level, the Fighter has only three unique abilities: Second Wind, Action Surge, and Indomitable, and your subsequent levels are just about giving you more uses of those skills. You have two features that other classes get as well, namely Fighting Style and Extra Attack, with the former being granted slightly earlier (letting you choose a standard weapon loadout at level 1 instead of waiting for level 2 like Rangers and Paladins) and then giving you more Extra Attacks once you get into tier 3, and again when you get your level 20 capstone.

Thus, I think there's a lot of pressure on Fighter subclasses to bring something interesting to bear - which makes it good that Fighters get five levels in which they gain a subclass feature rather than the standard four (Clerics do as well, but the level 8 one for them is always either Potent Spellcasting or Divine Strikes, which practically makes it a general class feature). (Indeed, I think that the biggest failing of the Purple Dragon Knight is that it doesn't really add anything beyond those base fighter features.)

Now, before we get into what I think they could do with subclasses, I want to take a look at one particularly prominent and popular subclass: the Battle Master.

Other than the Beast Master, which got a pretty thorough redesign to make it viable in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, Battle Masters simply got expanded with the addition of new maneuvers.

Battle Master maneuvers have a lot to recommend them: it gives the player more options for customization, and it doesn't even require the investment of a secondary stat (though let's revisit that, potentially). They also have the satisfying Divine Smite energy of being able to use many of them after you've hit, so they don't feel wasted. And on top of it all, you have a fair number to use and get them back on a short rest, making it feel like you can be fairly liberal in their use - which I think is a good thing for a subclass, as it sucks to get something useful that you can only do like, once.

The flavor of Fighters in contrast with other classes is that you're the true master-of-arms - someone who has been very thoroughly trained and, with the exception of a couple subclasses, can hold your own against magic-users purely through your skill.

So, should Fighters just all get Maneuvers?

This is an argument I've made before, but given the development of the game and a new edition (or half-edition) coming in a couple years, I really think that maneuvers are a strong enough mechanic that you can build them into the base class. Fighters could be "the class that gets maneuvers" as their identity.

You wouldn't even need to remove the existing features - you could either make Second Wind, Action Surge, and Indomitable into features you just get at a certain level and then have them, or you could turn them into maneuvers that all Fighters learn.

Furthermore: consider how this could affect the design of future subclasses. Having the existing framework of maneuvers, you could turn a lot of subclass features into maneuvers. Maybe an Eldritch Knight has various maneuvers that have explicitly magical effects? Perhaps Arcane Archers' magical arrow shots are now a type of maneuver. Maneuvers have already shown themselves to be very versatile - there are some that are designed for social encounters rather than combat - and so I think you could do a lot with them.

The one downside, I think, is the other side of the fact that this makes the class more "interesting." Right now, if you are not confident about learning a ton of complex D&D mechanics, the Champion Fighter is a fantastic option for you to be able to play a fairly capable and strong character who nevertheless doesn't need to make a lot of complicated decisions in the middle of a fight. Maneuvers by their nature increase the number of decision-points a character has during their turns. So, the question is: do we need to preserve the Fighter as the refuge for simple mechanics?

Setting that aside:

I actually think that the three subclasses in the current PHB are pretty solid representations of classic Fighter archetypes. The Champion is the pure "I hit things" type, while the Battle Master is the tactician. And then the Eldritch Knight both reminds players that you can be a bit more than just "good with weapons" and can have a little extra flavor in there.

If the Battle Master were to be somewhat sublimated into the base class, though, what would be a good option for the third subclass? I do think it would be good to emphasize that a Fighter is just as effective as a ranged class as a melee one, though I don't know that I really like the Arcane Archer that much as a subclass. Indeed, I kind of like that all three of the PHB subclasses can be built for ranged or melee combat. On a conceptual level I feel like the Samurai is a cool option here, though I don't think the subclass has been popular enough to warrant its inclusion. We might instead have to build a kind of new Battle Master - perhaps one that, now that its maneuvers are a class-wide thing, could be one that has various battlefield-control abilities, like allowing allies the reposition or ways to lock down enemies? It's a thinly-sketched idea, to be fair.

One of the challenges of a major class rework to one of the most central classes, though, is that it could eat into 5.5's intended "backwards compatible" system. I don't know how you'd make, say, a Rune Knight work with this - whether it'd be overpowered by increasing the power of the base class or underpowered because the base class might now be expecting the subclasses to bring more specific maneuver options.

Another thing I wonder about is the DC for maneuvers. The fact that it's based on your Strength or Dexterity (whichever is higher) is very nice for the player - that's going to be their highest stat anyway - but on the other hand, given that Paladins need that secondary investment in Charisma and Rangers need it in Wisdom, and, indeed, currently Eldritch Knights need a bit of Intelligence to make their spells harder to resist, does that seem fair?

On the other hand, perhaps the game has moved in such a direction that requiring that secondary stat investment is now considered too harsh. I don't know.

Obviously, my proposal for how to redesign the Fighter is far more radical than the other shifts I've suggested, and in particular that would make the goal of backwards-compatibility harder. We don't really have a great sense of how WotC intends to allow for that backwards-compatibility - in decades past, they had extensive pdfs that explained how things could be converted between 3.0 and 3.5, so maybe we'll see these more extensive reworks, and just give us the instructions on what needs to change.

The digital game world, especially in the internet era, has allowed far more fine-tuning tweaking. As we've seen, WotC has embraced the power of errata to rework some of the cultural aspects of D&D, though I think they've been very hesitant to use any "functional errata" (i.e. changing mechanics) given that this is still a game where people use physical books they purchased years ago to run it. On the other hand, the whole point of releasing new core rulebooks in 2024 is to be able to make this very sort of big, sweeping change. So we'll see.

5.5, Class by Class: Bard

 I realized as I was writing the Druid post that I had skipped over the second "B" class. Man, they really frontload a lot of classes early in the alphabet, don't they?

Also, coincidentally, I've spent way less time playing a lot of the early-alphabet classes than I have some later down the line, Bards being one example.

Bards of course have the whole "jack of all trades" thing going on, though I think that for the most part, they need to make a pretty solid choice between being a primary spellcaster or a melee combatant, especially given how the subclasses tie into one or the other.

Actually, regarding subclasses: Bards are odd in that they only get subclass features at three different levels. While some of these are quite impactful (especially Valor and Swords) I do wonder if the subclasses would have an opportunity to feel a bit more unique if they impacted the class at just one more level (bringing them in line with most classes). This, of course, would make it harder to make things "backwards compatible" but it could be good for the class.

The Bard is odd - it has an extensive spell list, but pointedly, it doesn't have a ton of big damage spells, and falls behind the Cleric and Druid in terms of healing spells. But that's also kind of by design, so I wouldn't call that out as a "design flaw" or anything - Bards are the most "support" focused class. And, of course, with Magical Secrets, you can actually wind up learning a fair number of non-Bard spells in higher levels.

While I've really liked some of the later Bard subclasses, the two in the current PHB do a good job of representing the two sides of the Bard class - though I think I like Swords a little better than I do Valor. Indeed, it might be interesting to see a melee Bard subclass that deviates more from the vibes of those two, but that might not be necessary here.

College of Lore is a little dull, but I think it's strong enough that people actually play it, so I think some slight tweaks are all it needs. The question, I think, is to determine whether there's a third archetype that feels core to the Bard identity, once you have the main spellcaster and the primarily martial archetypes. I like the sinister flavor of the College of Whispers, but I also think that two of its main features are far too situational. Perhaps seeing a redesigned College of Whispers to act as the third archetype could be a good option.

5.5, Class by Class: Druid

 The Druid is, in theory, the most versatile class in D&D. You can shift into various animal forms for both combat and utility purposes, and then you have a wide array of unique spells. The Druid also gets some features similar to a monk that aren't strictly "powerful" but have interesting flavor implications. However, in contrast with the Cleric, the Druid also just has a lot more class features, especially some really crazy ones that come online at late levels.

The Druid is a class I haven't really played much of, but one that I've been interested in, given how unique it is. The Druid is also, arguably, the only other class that can play a party's primary healer (setting aside the Divine Soul Sorcerer). While there are still some healing spells that Clerics get and Druids don't, the expanded spells granted in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything have made Druids a much more viable choice should your group lack a Cleric.

In 5.5, I'd love to see them lean into that. I don't think any one class should be so good at its role (or rather, so much better at its traditional role) than any other that you'll feel crippled if you don't have one. I think it's all well and good that Clerics should be excellent healers, but I think that a Druid that chooses to heal should be just as powerful in that role.

How one accomplishes that is something I don't really have a specific answer to. I think it's good that Clerics have some unique healing spells that Druids don't get, but I think that this means that Druids should get some unique healing spells that Clerics don't. (There are like one or two, but especially at higher levels, Clerics really take over).

Another thing I'd look at is how Wild Shape works. To be fair, I think that recent subclasses - the Circles of Stars, Wildfire, and Spores - all manage to come up with a way to do something else with Wild Shape that's more unique to their subclass.

And I'm a bit torn: on one hand, it would be nice to see a subclass other than Circle of the Moon be able to effectively use Wild Shape as-is as a viable combat option. On the other hand, I think these "pick anything out of the Monster Manual" features can sometimes be overwhelming.

Now, speaking of subclasses:

Circle of the Moon is solid, grade-A material, and not only feels like a good representation of a key Druid archetype, but is also mechanically sound and feels powerful. Circle of the Land, on the other hand... is somewhat lacking. I like the idea of a subclass that emphasizes a Druid's role as a spellcaster, but surely later options have done it better. Indeed, I think Circle of the Shepherd as written would make for a good inclusion in the PHB. With Moon and Shepherd we get the Druid as shapechanger and the druid as summoner. However, we do still need a Druid-as-elemental spellcaster subclass.

I would basically scrap Circle of the Land and build something new. My inspiration here is kind of the Shaman from World of Warcraft - a spellcaster that calls upon the four elements and has a more kind of primordial connection to not just life, but the ancient material of reality that allowed life to arise in the first place. Perhaps it could be Circle of Elements, or something along those lines.

Again, I think the PHB should have a minimum of three subclasses per class, so going with Moon, Shepherd, and this "Elements" one would have us covered.

I think basically all subclasses should have Circle Spells, with the possible exception of Circle of the Moon. Subclass spells never feel game-breaking but provide an opportunity to give these subclasses something of a greater identity, as well as making it easier to use those rare utility spells that you'd usually not prepare.

5.5, Class by Class: Cleric

 So, we're going to be looking at another class I haven't really spent a ton of time with. I've played a Cleric more than I have a Barbarian, but it's far from my most-played class.

Clerics in D&D are odd - they're explicitly intended to be more powerful than the other classes in order to encourage people to play them, given that their role is typically to be the group's healer and most players find that role to be one that undercuts their monster-slaying fantasy.

I think we've seen experimentation in buffing the ability for Druids to heal, but Clerics-as-healer is a pretty deeply-ingrained part of the way people see the game.

I think that, very much like Wizards, a Cleric's power comes from its spell list. The actual class features are fairly sparse - you basically get Channel Divinity (which is mostly something for subclass features to latch onto) and Divine Intervention, and then Potent Spellcasting or Divine Strike.

Whereas the Artificer then gets some profoundly impactful subclass features, Clerics generally get more of a supplement to their abilities, really emphasizing the use of their spells.

I don't know that there's much here that's broken and needs fixing.

In terms of PHB subclasses, this is one of the two classes that gets a massive number of subclasses (the other being the Wizard). The subclasses for Clerics can tie into worldbuilding, as a DM will want to ensure there are logical deities to fit with each divine domain... if that's how clerics work in their world.

Indeed, I think it'd be good to explore some of the possibilities for alternative interpretations of clerics in the lore write-up in the class section - how a cleric could represent not a specific god, but a priestly order perhaps even in a monotheistic faith. Or they could be some sort of shaman in an animist or shamanic faith. I think that people tend to default to some mixture of Greco-Roman religious pantheons mixed in with medieval catholic imagery, and it would be cool to explore the Cleric from a less Eurocentric perspective.

But that's not mechanics.

Given that a lot of the Cleric's essence is tied up in its spells, the main way to shift the feel of the class - if one wanted to - is to play around with its spells. Now, of course, the other way would be to build more into the class. One of the ironies is that this "healing class" does not, inherently, have healing class abilities, in contrast to Paladins, who have Lay on Hands but are intended to be secondary healers at best (Paladins do far better as tanks and damage-dealers).

I could imagine baking in some feature that allows Clerics to heal regardless of whether they have healing spells prepared. On the other hand, that might rob them of the ability to go another route.

I'll confess, I don't have any really solid ideas for this one. I might like to see damage types broadened for Cleric spells - naturally, giving them plenty of radiant or necrotic damage is on-brand, but I think it would be cool to see more spells that deal thunder damage, which feels like the sort of awe-inspiring damage type a cleric might use. (There's probably a post to be written about how some damage-types could use better representation among spells.)

Anyway, I think that's what I've got.

Nameless King Down

 After years, I've taken down the Nameless King... on my Sorcerer.

As it turns out, blasting away at a distance with Crystal Soul Spear with a +10 Court Sorcerer's Staff is pretty effective. Not only do you avoid the camera issues with the first phase (I only closed in in order to take advantage of a riposte with my Moonlight Greatsword) but, it turns out, while the Nameless King is quick, if you keep running away from him, he'll give you some big opportunities to pelt him from afar.

Thus, I have now beaten a boss I hadn't on my original character, meaning that I've got one of these mixed games - some of it complete on one character and some on another.

I used the ember to attempt Twin Princes with the aid of Sirris of the Sunless Realm, but while she did a good job tanking for me, I wasn't quick enough to keep her alive very far into phase 2.

The only real problem with Crystal Soul Spear is the absurd amount of FP it burns - I have 20 Attunement and I get three casts off before I need to sip some Ashen Estus. But it hits like a freight train.

I'd actually been experimenting on my original character with bows, seeing if I could get some decent damage at range with a reasonably high dexterity build, but sadly, it doesn't really seem viable.

One thing I was shocked to find out is that, apparently, you don't need to be embered to summon Gael in the Fride/Ariandel fight. He only shows up when you get past the first phase, but he's a huge help, drawing the boss's attention and just generally making that fight less absurd. The length of that fight is epic, but the catch of any of these multi-stage fights is that when you've mastered one phase, it can be annoying to fight through it again (dear lord did I get sick of Micolash in Bloodborne when I kept dying to A Call Beyond in the final phase).

I've been exploring the Dreg Heap on the sorcerer, and grabbed the +3 Covetous Silver Serpent Ring, which is nice. I have (beyond) capped out on Intelligence at this point, so while I'm currently working on buffing my Endurance a little bit, I think I might start pouring levels into Faith now, to unlock pyromancies and miracles, and I think some dark sorceries require a bit of Faith as well. At this level, it'll take a long time to get my Faith to decent levels. I believe there is a way in which you can re-spec your character a finite number of times per game - I might consider doing that to drop from 67 Int down to 60 and then invest those levels in something more useful, as I'm given to understand that past 60 there's not much use to getting more Intelligence thanks to sharp diminishing returns. I am a little concerned that I'd already have maxed out the damage I can actually do, given how much left of the game I have (admittedly very little of the base game, but I still have all the Ringed City bosses as well as Champion's Gravetender, as well as the Princes and Soul of Cinder - though if my experience with Bloodborne is anything to go by, the Soul of Cinder should be a cakewalk after I've beaten Gael and Midir).

5.5, Class by Class: Barbarians

 So, caveat: of all the 5th Edition classes I've played, I've barely touched a Barbarian, having played a one-session beginning of Dungeon of the Mad Mage that we did when someone in our Wildemount game wasn't able to make it. I never even raged.

Thus, my experience is more from DMing a Barbarian - one of more consistent players is an Ancestral Guardian Barbarian (a Loxodon in the Selesnya Conclave).

The fundamentals of the Barbarian are things I'd generally try to avoid futzing with too much - there's a lot here that makes the class unique, between being an unarmored tank, getting to halve most of the damage you take (which plays into the prior value,) and being able to dish out a decent amount of damage as well.

Now, I personally have a pathological need to maximize my AC on the characters I play, and so Unarmored Defense for Barbarians always leaves me a little twitchy, given that, unless you roll absurdly good stats, you'll never be able to actually maximize your AC.

That being said, with the standard array, you can get it pretty high. By level 20, if you assign racial bonuses to give yourself +3 Strength and +2s to Con and Dex at level 1, you can eventually max out your Strength and Con. If your DM is generous with defensive magic items, giving you Bracers of Defense and a +3 shield, by level 20 you could have an AC of 26 - which is really freaking high. (If you somehow were able to max your Dex as well, that becomes 29).

However, to bring things down to earth a bit, unarmored defense will give you a slightly lower AC than other strength-based, plate-wearing classes, but the resistance granted by rage will generally make up for that, maybe even more than make up for it.

While I don't have the personal experience to say for certain, my sense is that the Barbarian is fundamentally sound on a class level.

But what about subclasses?

In the PHB, there are only two options currently - the Berserker and the Totem Warrior. I think on a conceptual level, these two do a good job of exemplifying two aspects of the class. The Berserker is its more physical, athletic side, while the Totem Warrior is its spiritual side. However, as we've seen the subclasses come out for the class, it seems that the Barbarian in general leans more into this mystical, spiritual side with basically all of the others. Does that leave the Berserker as the odd one out?

I guess a question to be asked is whether there's room to design more non-supernatural Barbarian subclasses, or if the Berserker covers that so effectively that it takes up the whole room. The oddity is that the base class isn't really tied to magic, yet nearly all of its subclasses are.

I do think the Berserker should be included as one of the PHB options, though I might grant it a few tweaks. One is that its Berserker Rage's exhaustion penalty is perhaps too strong - it makes using this ability more than once a day too heavy a price. I might instead grant some ability that allows the Berserker, while raging, to make the extra bonus action attack a certain number of times a day, maybe equal to one's proficiency bonus (or twice PB). Perhaps you could even allow the Barbarian to overexert themselves, letting them make these attacks beyond their limit at the cost of a level of exhaustion, but giving them a certain number of them free.

The Totem Warrior, I think, also works quite well as the second option. I might tweak some of the animal bonuses - the 3rd level Bear Totem thing is maybe too powerful for such a low level investment, and maybe some of the others should be buffed to compensate.

Now, I think that every class should have a minimum of three subclasses in the PHB. So, what should we give to Barbarians as their third? To my mind, and granted this could be the influence of having played WoW for so long, when I think about this kind of outlander-mystic-warrior class, I find myself associating it strongly with the natural elements. On a conceptual level, I love the Storm Herald Barbarian. That said, I do think its mechanics fall behind compared to the others - Ancestral Guardian has extra tanking utility, Zealots pump out a ton of damage and are eventually unkillable, and Totem Warriors can soak almost any kind of damage (if they go bear).

Thematically, I think that Storm Heralds make a great counterpart to the two PHB subclasses, but I think they could have some of their mechanics reworked. I did attempt a homebrew class inspired by the Millwood Knights in Dark Souls III's Ashes of Ariandel DLC - these hefty knights have numerous abilities that send shockwaves through the earth, and I think it makes sense for an Elemental Earth-themed Barbarian subclass. But Storm Herald already exists, and a "raging storm" sure sounds like something a Barbarian could embody. I guess a revisit to the design could help make it a competitive option with a little tweaking.

If there are elements I've missed here, I'm going to chalk that up to my lack of experience playing the class. Running out of Rages seems really un-fun, but it's also a key element of resource management for the class (and of course hitting 20 means never running out, not to mention your insane buffs to Strength and Con).

Parallel Areas of Dark Souls and Dark Souls 3

 The first Soulsborne game I played was Dark Souls, though I only got it after the PS4 was out and I think I'd already seen a lot of buzz around Bloodborne. And on top of that, I never got close to finishing it. While it's true that I never beat Dark Souls 3 (I could go to the Soul of Cinder, but I want to beat all the optional and DLC bosses first) I have, essentially, seen every location in the game. The first game, though, I got stuck on Ornstein and Smough. I had actually gone to some areas "out of sequence," having beaten the Moonlight Butterfly, Greatwolf Sif, and Pinwheel (all of which I believe you're supposed to do afterward).

The two games are separated by ages of time - it's never explicit in terms of years, but given the deep fantasy nature of these games (deep fantasy I'm defining now as "everything operates on its own logic that defies conventional reason") it's sort of beside the point. I think we're meant to understand that Yhorm, the Abyss Watchers, Aldrich, and indeed Ludleth each bought a vast period of life and light for the world when they linked the fire, meaning that each might be from very different eras.

We sort of get hints of what we are to associate with each of their stories, like how the Catacombs of Carthus probably represent a kingdom that the Abyss Watchers destroyed given its ruler's connection to the Abyss.

I think even within the original Dark Souls we got glimpses of the overlapping eras at play - like how Oolacile eventually became the Darkroot Garden.

The very place in which the game takes place seems to be some kind of logic-defying amalgamation - at one point, Sen's Fortress is referred to as a "plane," and given that Anor Londo is basically the equivalent of Mount Olympus in this universe, it might be better to think of the regions less as just physical locations but their own godly realms, and we merely interpret crossing between them as a physical process. As an example, the Firelink Shrine we go to in Dark Souls 3 as our primary hub is not physically connected to "present-day" Lothric Castle, but the Untended Graves version of them, which exists in a world of total darkness and is seemingly in the past or an alternate timeline, does have a physical connection with the Lothric Castle in the "contemporary" world. (I believe that there are four sort of "load zones" in the pre-DLC game, with no "seams" in terms of explorable space, which are Firelink Shrine and the Cemetery of Ash, then Lothric Castle as seen at the start of the game proper and then in the final chapter of the main game, then the "converging lands" that include most of the game's locations, and then Archdragon Peak.)

While the world does not act in a clearly logical way, there are strong implications that we're actually traversing the same places we did in the first Dark Souls - only that they have changed profoundly over time.

The Undead Settlement is harder to place - it'd be easy to simply say it's the Undead Burgh, even though that area in Dark Souls bears a stronger resemblance to the High Wall of Lothric.

Next, Farron Swamp seems very likely to be Oolacile/Darkroot Garden. The existence of Oolacile's mushroom people (found here only as corpses) is, I think, the best evidence, but also, the Great Wolf of Farron seems like it might have a connection to Sif, not to mention how the Abyss Watchers modeled their order on Sif's companion, Artorias.

The Catacombs of Carthus could be the Catacombs. This is mostly just based on the name, though both are spooky, buried areas.

Irithyl is the easiest, because it's the one we get the clearest explicit confirmation. Once we get past the Silver Knights (as if that didn't give it away) past the various Aldirch Faithful deacons after we beat Pontiff Suleyvahn, we arrive at Anor Londo itself. Ironic, of course, that the highest area in the original game (except maybe the Duke's Archives?) is now in a deep valley. Actually, here we get some clear nods to Tolkien. The two cities on opposite sides of Osgiliath are Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul (the former the de facto capital after Gondor was forced to abandon Osgiliath and the latter being the headquarters of the Nazgul,) meaning "Tower of the Guard" and "Tower of Sorcery." However, before they had these names, they were Minas Anor and Minas Ithyl, the Tower of the Sun and Tower of the Moon, respectively.

Anor Londo was the city of Gwyn, the Lord of Sunlight, and thus "Anor" being part of the name makes a ton of sense (Londo could even be a reference to London, a rather important western royal capital). And when we find it in Dark Souls, it's awash in brilliant sunlight (which I believe turns out to be an illusion - again, I never beat Ornstein and Smough). By the time we find it in Dark Souls 3, though, it's now a snowy city that perpetually has a crescent (or perhaps partially eclipsed, given that we see a full ring of light, similar to the sigils for the various Darkmoon covenants) moon above it. Now, it is Irithyl of the Boreal Valley, which neatly has that Ithyl term for the moon from Tolkien.

An area you could very easily not realize even exists in Dark Souls 3 is the Demon Ruins, which you get to by cutting the bridge before High Lord Wolnir's room and descending the bridge like a ladder. I never got to Ash Lake in Dark Souls 3, but you find a big shallow lake there (with a horrifying corpse-worm and a ballista whose job it seems is to shoot said worm, though they aim at you instead), so I wouldn't be shocked if there's a parallel there.

Just below the Smouldering Lake, though, you find the Demon Ruins. This is, I'll be honest, one of my least favorite areas in Dark Souls 3, given that it's pretty much just a labyrinth with a lot of samey corridors and nasty enemies. But we get a near-explicit identification of the area when we bring the Izalith Pyromancy Tome back to Firelink Shrine, and we are informed that we've found the home of pyromancy. So, yes, this is, presumably, the remains of Lost Izalith (the presence of all the demons sure seems to support that).

An interesting question, then, is what exactly Lothric Castle was in Dark Souls 1 - if anything at all. I don't know exactly what Prince Lothric is meant to be - is he a Lord like Gwyn (and does that make him a god?) Lothric Castle seems to be the "new capital", perhaps replacing the Olympian Anor Londo (I've even seen a really fantastic match-cut between the circular stained glass window at the entrance to the castle - where you fight the Dancer of the Boreal Valley - and the one that is so prominently displayed over the entrance to Anor Londo's royal palace/cathedral. I believe there are some hints that, if Oceiros is Lothric and Lorian's father, Gwyndolin might be their mother, which would make them Gwyn's grandchildren.

Dark Souls tends to use the term Lord a lot, and really blurs the lines between "king" and "god."

I do wonder, though, if the Duke's Archives became the Grand Archives, or if the latter was simply built out of what Seath the Scaleless created. Again, I never got to that point in Dark Souls 1.

Anyway, I think there are some really intriguing ideas at work in these two games (I haven't played 2). I think there's something really interesting about looking at a world that has transformed so profoundly between our visits to it, even while fragments remain the same. I also think it's interesting that these outlying, seemingly human kingdoms like Astora, Carim, Catarina, etc., seem remarkably consistent

5.5, Class by Class - Artificer

 Well, we're starting a new series of posts and we'll have to see if we actually follow through (unlike that subclass one with the Sorcerer). The updated core rulebooks coming in 2024 are in a slightly ambiguous place, edition-wise. It'll be the 10th anniversary of 5th edition, which is a pretty standard span of time to just get a new edition out the door (4th edition was the shortened one, as the reaction that was fairly negative - though I've heard some defenders advocate on its behalf). Still, 5th Edition has been more popular by far than any previous edition of the game, and so I think WotC is reticent to alienate a huge playerbase that knows D&D only by its 5th incarnation (myself included).

5th Edition was seen, after all, as a return to form, so a deviation from its general vibe would be a risk. But there are things that now seem hoary as we've seen the edition iterate on existing systems. Many of the original subclasses need significant work, and some of the baseline classes could use a real tune-up (it's actually kind of shocking how many of them don't, really).

Character classes are the big way in which players interface with the game, so I think that it would be wise to start there.

Philosophically, the idea of subclasses has allowed WotC to be pretty conservative with its core classes - there's a solid framework on which they can build much less conventional ideas. Fighters and Rogues, for instance, had two pretty conventional takes on their class with the Battlemaster and Champion on one hand and the Assassin and Thief on the other, with each class getting a "the class, but with magic" subclass as its third option in the PHB. Subsequent publications, however, allowed the classes to go outside of their conventional comfort zones, giving such varied ideas as the Rune Knight and the Soulknife, which each still play within their class' overarching fantasy even as they provide a new flavor that is decidedly outside of the conventional conception of that class.

As such, the presence of subclasses allows for some great variation in the existing classes, which makes the need for new classes a rarity.

So, here comes the Artificer.

The Artificer was initially intended as a subclass for the Wizard, but clearly, at some point in development, the designers found a hook that could be a much broader archetype, and one that could fit multiple concepts within it. The Artificer is not purely the "steampunk" class - we get a more classically medieval vibe in the Alchemist, and there are plenty of ways to re-think the other subclasses to go outside of the more narrow steampunk aesthetic.

As a key to the class, though, the Artificer is the crafter, the builder. In addition to all of its tool proficiencies, the idea that it can effectively make magic items as a core element of its gameplay gives it something unique compared to the other classes.

The obvious move, here, is to make the Artificer one of the classes in the Player's Handbook. This would free them up to (and also, yes, obligate them to) add new subclasses in any big rules expansion "of Everything"-style book, and also potentially add them in campaign setting books. Being able to just assume any table has access to the Artificer would allow them to build on the class in the same way that they've done with other classes.

That is, of course, a commitment. But I personally believe the Artificer is strong enough both in concept and in mechanics to be worthy of a full edition's worth of iteration. Obviously, WotC decided it warranted being more than just an oddity of the Eberron setting, reprinting it in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and I suspect that its inclusion in future material would be welcome.

That all out of the way, what might they change?

Honestly, probably not a lot. The huge benefit of the Artificer is that it came about after several years of familiarity with 5th Edition. It has a solid mix of useful abilities and those that are more of a venue for creativity (Magical Tinkering at level 1 is a very strong "this might not seem powerful, but a clever player can exploit it" sort of ability).

The Artificer only has four subclasses total, and I don't know if you'd just print all four in the PHB or if you'd choose one (perhaps the Armorer, given that it's the newest) to leave out.

Of the four subclasses, only the Alchemist, in my mind, feels like it might fall a little flat. While the flavor of the Alchemist is fantastic, and I like the way it incentivizes you to use spells that deal damage that you could imagine being the result of some fantastical chemical reaction (if I ever play one, his spells will all be tossing vials of various substances). To me, the only thing that really holds the subclass back, conceptually, is its Experimental Elixir. Random effects can be very fun (see the College of Spirits Bard) but they can also mean getting the wrong thing at the wrong time. (See also the College of Spirits Bard.) Granted, the ability to choose which elixir you create when you spend a spell slot on it does mitigate this significantly.

As I said, the class is very solid as it stands - I think I'd just like to see more iteration. Give us more subclasses and more infusion options. I would also really like to see some Artificer-only spells - they're the only class that doesn't have any, and their inclusion in the PHB would be a great way to open an opportunity to allow it. Making Artificer-only spells would also allow for some bending of their power level. While letting a Wizard or Warlock get 5th level spells that do really crazy things might be too powerful, if you knew that only a 17th level character was going to have access to them, it might allow for some bigger options.

As for the core class, I think the only really crucial thing here isn't for the class itself, but for the DMG - giving a really solid and laid-out rule system for crafting magical items. I might also think that there could be some system for making infusions permanent (though I recognize that the limits on infusions is one of the checks on an Artificer's power). One thing that might be nice is if you could allow for infusions in magical armor. If your Armorer gets a set of Mithral Plate, it seems like they ought to be able to infuse the weapon, boots, and helmet as separate items even if the mithral elements are taking up that slot.

But, more importantly, to come back to crafting magical items: the Artificer has a class feature that cuts the time and money cost for crafting common and uncommon magical items, and as far as I know, the only book with rules for that is Xanathar's. Getting that in the DMG would be very helpful (along with some mechanism to allow DMs to prevent the party from getting items that are too off-the-wall, like a Sun Blade, ahem.)

Also, I'd like to see clearer guidance on how tool proficiencies should be handled. Gotta give Artificers a reason to get excited for that tool expertise outside of lockpicking.

Dark Souls Altoholism

 Sorcery, as a strategy in Dark Souls 3, was something of a revelation. As a playstyle it made some things way easier and a few things a lot harder.

But I'm always in grass-is-greener mode, and while I was excited about all the spells I could learn (though mostly it just became "cast Great Heavy Soul Arrow") I found myself wanting to make a build where I could use some of the absurdly huge weapons.

So, I made a Strength build. As I think will be my standard operating procedure for future runs of the game, I've cleared Irithyl basically all the way up to Aldrich, but before I smash myself up against that fight, I'm heading down into the Irithyl Dungeon.

But today I did a bit of hopping around. I went back to my original main, who has everyone but Midir, Gael, Nameless King, and the Soul of Cinder down. I was actually kind of shocked to discover that he's only got 45 Dexterity - my strength guy just hit 45 strength. My sorcerer has actually overdone Intelligence - I think I have like 67 or something, when the cap (such as it is) seems to be 60. Having done a few attempts on Nameless King on my sorcerer, I wondered if going in to fight him on my much higher-level Dex character would be easy. The answer: no, not really. The second phase of the Nameless King is the deadlier one, but it's also a bit more conventional - you just have to dodge his attacks and get your hits in when you can. The first phase is a nightmare of hostile camera angles, and being able to cast from afar makes it go much smoother.

My Dex character is swimming in titanite - I'm still holding off on fully completing weapons with slabs, but I have 5 of them, on top of a maxed out Hollowslayer Greatsword and Elfriede's Scythe. I looked for a weapon with lightning damage on it, figuring that would help with the King of Storms phase on Nameless King. It did, but Sorcery does a ton of damage to him.

Again, grass-is-greener issues make me really want to try for a Faith build. My understanding is that there's less purely offensive stuff there. On the Sorcerer I've managed to get the Moonlight Greatsword, so I actually have a pretty solid melee option. Right now it looks like more things scale with Faith, but that might just be my warped perspective.

I will say that I think one of the things I like about Bloodborne is that, with fewer stats to level, the route for a "build" is a lot simpler. My favorite build in that game is Arcane (though I was shocked at how effective Bloodtinge can be, even though you have to get pretty far in the game to get the best weapons for it). I only wish that a Bloodborne 2 was in the works, though I am very excited about Elden Ring.

Anyway, with my roommates out of town and my LA family members cancelling plans due to a positive Covid test, it's a pretty lonely holiday, so I've been playing a lot of Dark Souls. Be sure to leave some humanity near the chimney for Santa Lloyd, or something.

Some Wonky Thoughts on Death Saves

 So, in D&D's 5th edition, when you hit zero hit points, unless you've taken enough such that the remaining damage you take in that hit would equal your maximum HP, or if an effect explicitly says that a creature reduced to zero hit points by it automatically dies, you instead go unconscious and begin rolling death saves on your turn.

This is basically the "bleeding out" mechanic - you're not dead, but you're in serious danger if someone can't patch you up ASAP. In practical terms, it gives the party a bit of a grace period to ensure the party member survives. Depending on the tone and difficulty of your campaign, a DM might make monsters opportunistic - seeing a chance to truly kill an opponent (which is a lot tougher on the players) versus moving on to conscious targets (and just so happening to make it more likely the party can heal their friend.) A monster/foe can choose to attack the unconscious target, taking advantage of the fact that melee attacks are automatic crits to quickly give the unconscious character three failed death saves (as any damage gives one and a critical hit gives two,) though my tendency is to avoid doing that in early levels when the players have little recourse, unless I wind up running a grim and gritty-style campaign where we're expecting heroes to die easily - instead I have the foes decide that they can always come back to this target once the others are down (and, frankly, there is something to be said for monsters that fight to survive, rather than to kill the party).

Anyway, the rules on rolling death saves are fairly simple - on your turn, you roll a d20, and if the result is 10 or higher, you get a success, while 9 or lower is a failure (this gives you a slight advantage - 55% chance at success and 45% at failure). This is actually the only other type of roll where, rules as written, rolling a 1 or a 20 has a different result, the other being attack rolls. Here, a 1 means two failures, but a 20 means not just success, but that you come back to consciousness with 1 hit point, meaning you are now conscious, all your death saves reset to 0, and you can actually do things (which hopefully involve healing yourself).

What's interesting, though, is that if you have 3 successes that aren't 20s, you merely stabilize - you're still unconscious, but you are no longer rolling death saves and, as long as you don't take any more damage, you'll wake up in an hour with 1 hit point.

I'll keep the particular show unsaid for spoiler reasons, but in a streamed D&D show, during the climactic fight against the big bad of the campaign, the cleric in the group had gone unconscious. Going for three rounds and rolling all successes, they stabilized. But when the fourth round came (as the group's primary healer, there weren't many who could help them) the player asked if they could roll another death save. I can't recall if the DM said this would mean they were opting into once again being unstable, and thus in danger of dying, but they allowed it. The next roll was a natural 20, which allowed the cleric to get up, heal the rest of the party, and ultimately turn what was getting close to a TPK into a win.

That made me think:

From a game point of view, it makes sense that you'd have to risk something to get the reward of potentially rolling a natural 20 and regaining consciousness. And DMs of course don't need to kill you if you're stable and unconscious - you can always take the players prisoner if you don't want to see the campaign collapse. Still, it makes sense in a game design sort of way that, hey, if you want that 5% chance to spring back into the fight, you're going to need to risk the... I don't have the patience to work out the probability you'll die percent chance, though I think it's bigger than 5% (though the most likely thing is, I'd guess, that you eventually stabilize again).

But from a logical standpoint: doesn't it make sense that if you could jolt back awake in the midst of bleeding out, you could also jolt back awake after your blood has coagulated enough to seal up the wounds? Indeed, wouldn't it be more likely?

So, I could imagine a system in which you simply keep rolling but can no longer fail the saves.

That being said, one of the things that D&D sometimes struggles with is the way that once initiative ends, the precision by which time is divided becomes harder to manage. If you were rolling every six seconds, the chance you'd never roll a natural 20 in the 600 rounds that represent an hour is 43 in a quadrillion (if my math is correct - basically it's 0.95 to the 600th power). So, you know, it'd be pretty rare to go that long without rolling a 20.

So, maybe the rule works out better this way.

And Another New Character!

 My regular Sunday D&D campaign has been on a bit of a sidequest for a few weeks. Our campaign had grown very convoluted, and the character whose backstory was at its center was played by a player who became a dad about six months ago - meaning he had to find an excuse to exit, and our DM decided that she couldn't really make the campaign work without efforts she did not have the energy to make.

So, we are starting a new campaign, and we had our session zero yesterday (though we won't start the campaign until January).

As you might just barely be able to imagine, I've been wanting to play an Armorer Artificer more or less since I got Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. I did play one in a high-level one-shot, but that didn't really count.

The campaign is taking place in the Spelljammer setting, though our DM has emphasized that it will be a while before we get any sort of spaceship of our own. We're all starting off in Leira Trading Center, the major spaceport on the dark side of Selune, Toril's moon (Toril being the world of the Forgotten Realms). The folks in Leira are obsessed with beauty and fashion, and are also convinced that any day now, the people of Toril are going to invade (most people on Toril have no idea that anyone lives on the moon).

My Artificer is a bit of an odd duck, then, as I've conceived of him as a guy who is very much a function-over-form guy, often covered in engine grease.

Unexpectedly, the plans for every character in the party are all subclasses that I'd want to try - we have a Plasmoid Rogue who is going to be going Soulknife (in part so that he can squeeze into spaces and not have to worry about his weapons fitting). Then, there's an Astral Elf Twilight Cleric, a Rock Gnome Aberrant Mind Sorcerer, and a Circle of Stars Druid (race TBD).

Actually, it's a very good spread - we're going to have party members with high scores in nearly every ability score - just not Strength. And if I go Guardian Mode, we'll have a pretty good range of utility, damage, and support covered.

Naturally, it will be a little while before some of us get our subclasses, so I'm starting off with Fire Bolt as my main damage cantrip. I might go with Green-Flame Blade if it becomes clear that I'm always going to be in Guardian mode, but it would be cool to be able to play both styles in different scenarios. I also think taking something like Frostbite would be a reasonable option to give me some range, which could then be my melee option if I'm ever in Infiltrator mode (and unlike on my Eldritch Knight, the saving throw DC would actually be decent.)

Anyway, it's finally happening.

Why D&D Absolutely Needs a Magic Item Crafting System and Also Why It Should Not Have One

 So, to be fair, there is a magic crafting system in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, which uses downtime and allows players to spend money and time enchanting an item with the proper effects. Much in the way that Plane Shift and Dream of the Blue Veil are limited by what material components the DM is willing to give you, here you need a "formula" and some special ingredient that is guarded by (or is part of) a monster of an appropriate challenge rating for the rarity of the item.

The place of magic items in D&D is sort of an odd one. In 5th edition, at least, characters are built to be functional without any magic items - except perhaps just "any magic weapon" for martial classes, given that so many foes can resist or even be immune to ordinary weapon damage.

But while you can run a game generally where what few magic items the party gets are a carefully curated list the DM comes up with, there are various skills and features that make reference to crafting these items.

The Artificer is a class built around using tools to channel magic into otherwise mundane objects. In fact, Infusions are explicitly described as "prototypes for permanent magical items" in the class feature description.

Artificers get a feature at level 10 called Magic Item Adept. In addition to increasing the number of magic items to which you can attune to 4 (eventually you can have 6,) it also says that when you craft a magic item that is common or uncommon in rarity, doing so takes a quarter of the time and half the cost.

But how much time? And what cost?

There are no rules for making magic items in the PHB or the DMG. We do find them, however, in Xanathar's Guide to Everything in the chapter called Downtime Revisited. But these are optional rules.

Which means that a class feature refers to rules that the DM might technically not even have the book for (at least in theory, a group should be able to run a campaign with only the core 3 books and Eberron: Rising From the Last War or Tasha's Cauldron of Everything).

So, I think that there are a couple reasons why you'd want to implement a magic item crafting system into the core rules. For one thing, it would be a way to let those with proficiency in artisan's tools actually do something with them for a change. How often has a player been able to really make use of a jewelry-maker's kit, or woodworking tools? But if the jeweler could produce a Periapt of Wound Closure or the woodworker could construct a +2 Shield, well, that would make those proficiencies a lot more interesting.

The other reason is that I think that the game could use more gold sinks. When you first start off, the Paladin, Fighter, or Cleric (about half of them) will eagerly try to save up in order to eventually buy a set of plate armor. That 1,500 gold is a huge amount in the early levels. But once that purchase is made, it's rare that players are going to find other things to spend their gold on. Crafting magical items is a way to force the players to do a little more than just spend money, but makes spending that money feel like a real boon to their player power.

But on the other hand: maybe not.

See, I made a mistake early in my Ravnica campaign. I had a goblin fighter (now multiclassed as a paladin) who sought out a Sunblade - a magical +2 longsword that, among other things, does radiant damage and an extra d8 of damage against Undead.

And you know what? It's a bit overpowered. Especially given that there are a fair number of undead creatures the party has to fight. Obviously, the whole point of the weapon is to be a great thing to use against the undead, but I think there's a question of the role it plays.

In Curse of Strahd, there's a (I think maybe slightly altered) version of this weapon, but finding it requires deciphering the clues you got in the Tarokka reading at the start of the adventure. This is one of the keys to defeating the vampire lord, and its discovery should be a moment of awe and excitement.

And maybe you shouldn't just be able to walk up to a store and plunk down some cash for it.

In fact, this one item (well, and the fact that I have given so many out that the players need to strongly consider if they're willing to un-attune to any of the items they already have before they take any of the new ones I give them) has made me seriously re-think how I want to handle magic items in the next campaign I run. I want to dramatically increase their rarity, and if I can, build a story out of each one (I'm also tempted not to give them any basic +X weapons).

Players have a lot of sources of power in the way they build their characters, which makes selection of their own magic items perhaps too much. Indeed, I think you could argue that the whole Artificer Infusion system for that class makes personal selection of magic items into a defining class feature - one of their primary sources of power that sets them apart from other classes.

What is the gold sink, then? Obviously, Wizards will need gold as long as there are spells they don't have in their books, but for other classes, they usually hit a point where any additional money they find is about as important as your score in Super Mario World - a vestige of an older game system.

And maybe this post started off about magic item crafting and is turning into one about the role of gold in D&D. I think you could probably run a game of D&D in which you never really deal explicitly with gold as a reward or as a cost, and I think the game might actually work fine that way.

Of course, the real answer to all of this is that it depends on the kind of campaign you want to run. My Ravnica game, which has showered the party with magic items and gold, is a heightened one in which the players are basically superheroes (well, some are supervillains, but they're all on the same team). I want the players to be powerful and even if I can sometimes get frustrated when a monster fails to land a single hit, I like the idea that the players can rightfully feel powerful and unstoppable, as it suits the tone of the campaign I've been running.

I guess the sacrifice you make, though, is that any individual magic item is less impressive as a result. I homebrewed a weapon with a deep story that ties itself to a villain, and which will grow more powerful if they redeem her, but to be honest, at this stage, it's actually probably not as powerful as the Sun Blade.

I think DMing is a constant act of experimentation. You're always adjusting your style, your methods, and your expectations to pursue a more enjoyable game for you and your players. So, you can take either side of the title of this post and decide what works best for your campaign. And if you find you're wrong, don't hesitate to change things up.

The Satisfyingly Unsatisfying Lore of Dark Souls

 In Dark Souls III, the roughly seventh boss (there are a couple optional bosses you might face before him) is Pontiff Suleyvahn. He's the sort of halfway boss in Irithyl of the Boreal Valley, a city below the lands that are being drawn to Lothric, and whose true identity we won't discover until we've beaten him (though there are hints along the way).

Ultimately, Suleyvahn is a roadblock and checkpoint before you get to the area's main event - the horrific Aldrich, who is one of the four missing Lords of Cinder we need to collect in order to open the way to link the fire and refresh the world (if indeed that's what we want to do - I'm fully in the Usurp the Flame camp, as it feels like the most radical departure from a cycle that doesn't seem to be working anymore).

However, it's highly possible that this boss you fight roughly halfway through the game is actually the main villain of the story.

Breaking it down: between item descriptions, environmental hints, and the appearance of particular types of enemy we find in various parts of the world, we can eventually infer that Suleyvahn was born in the Painted World - a realm meant to give people who experienced tremendous loss in the real world a place to escape that pain and live peacefully (though, this being Dark Souls, it's now got its own problems). Living in a place of quiet grief clearly didn't work out for a person who had never experienced loss, so he ventured outside of it and became a sorcerer.

He eventually found his way to the Profaned Capital, where the Profaned Flame burned eternally, fueled by the darkness of the Abyss. That darkness inspired or corrupted him, and he set about doing several horrible things - he fed prisoners including children to Aldrich to increase his power, and he enslaved people and turned them into beasts with magic rings. It's implied that he was the scholar who convinced Prince Lorian to shun his purpose to link the fire and become a Lord of Cinder.

The way that the game is built, though, you wouldn't figure that out easily on your own. Dark Souls and other FromSoft games of the same sort are all about hidden hints and lore to be discovered by going all corkboard conspiracy theorist and linking tiny bits of information.

I think it's appropriate that George R. R. Martin was involved in creating the initial lore for the studio's newest effort, Elden Ring. While his Song of Ice and Fire series (the one that was adapted as Game of Thrones) has a story you can easily follow just by paying attention to the broadest strokes, the books (far more than the show) is chock full of stories-within-stories and lore that is bubbling in the background.

For example, a close reading of a few off-hand remarks can suggest that Lyanna Stark and Rhaegar Targaryen fell in love after Lyanna competed in a tourney in disguise as a man going by the "Knight of the Laughing Tree." There's implications that Euron Greyjoy (whose show version was utter crap) is some kind of dark avatar of a horrifying kraken god, or he intends to become one.

One of the things I really find fascinating about FromSoft games is how it's never really obvious what the "good" endings are. The most complex ending to get for Dark Souls III is the Usurp the Flame ending - this has the unkindled one take the First Flame within themselves and become the Lord of Londor, ruling as the true face of humanity. On one hand, there's this sort of tyrannical feel to it - usurpers generally aren't a "good guy" trope. And this is a land of Hollows, meaning everyone there is kind of zombies, and all look really messed up and undead. But on the other hand, it seems as if the whole Age of Fire was kind of unnatural in the first place - that Gwyn's arrogance really screwed the world up (or maybe his naïveté). Perhaps, after so many ages in which gods have repeated these cycles of cruelty and exploitation, maybe Londor represents something new, recognizing an internal balance of light and darkness, and life and death, and perhaps finding balance between them.

Indeed, in these games, sometimes what we're even actually doing is left vague. Yes, we find these powerful bosses to fight and kill, but what exactly are we accomplishing by doing so?

And, I think, in lesser games, that unsatisfying nature would be infuriating. It would feel like a haphazard scaffold of a story that did not match the quality of the gameplay.

But, somehow, these games make the obscurity of their lore and story a feature, rather than a bug. There's a kind of abstraction to the storytelling here that invites speculation and interpretation, rather than dismissal as meaninglessness.

I wonder to what extent the creative forces behind the games have solid answers. I imagine that some of them, like primary auteur Hidetaka Miyazaki, probably consider their version just one interpretation that isn't inherently more valuable than a player's. The fact that so many hints match up so well suggests to me that they do actually have some firm ideas about hidden lore, and it's not all just a bunch of darts thrown at the wall.

But even if they really do not have the same degree of narrative depth that the fans assume they do, I think it's a testament to the potency of their formula that it can feel this fun to delve into the games and attempt to unpack all the subtle implications.

Building for Versatility with the Armorer Artificer

 In case you couldn't tell, I'm obsessed with the Armorer.

While I have a tendency to really focus on tank-like RPG characters, I love the fact that next to the fantastic tanking capabilities of the Armorer's Guardian mode is the capable ranged damage dealer Infiltrator mode.

Most builds I've explored tend to favor one armor mode over the other. I think you can build a really tough-to-kill tank with Guardian mode, and I think you can abuse your 15th level advantage to get a lot out of an Infiltrator/Sharpshooter.

But with this post, I want to consider how one could build a versatile armorer - one who could excel in both a tanking and ranged damage mode.

So, let's talk about parameters.

First off, I'm avoiding any multiclassing builds. I'm sure there are good arguments to be made for picking up a few levels of Fighter, for instance (maybe going Eldritch Knight to get Shield along with Action Surge and other nice goodies). For me, though, I want to assume you find the Soul of Artifice feature at level 20 compelling enough to go all in on the class. This also reduces some of the insanity given the vast number of options that open up with multiclassing.

So, with that set aside, what choices to we really have to make?

Artificers can prepare different spells on each long rest, so we don't really need to talk about what you're taking for spells other than cantrips. (We do get to change one of these out each time we level, but I'm going to include them as that's a finite number of chances to change them - though as a DM I'd certainly allow swapping cantrips when you get enough XP at level 20 for an Epic Boon).

The next choice is infusions. All Artificers are a bit infusion-dependent - it is the central mechanic of the class, after all - but Armorers in particular get ways to buff multiple parts of their armor, making this extra important.

Finally, we can look at some Feats that could complement both playstyles. Naturally, you'll need to consider where you can afford these feats as opposed to Ability Score Improvements. Any Artificer will want to maximize their Intelligence, and Guardian mode does really favor getting a high Constitution.

I suppose race choice here is also a factor, though thanks to the changes to racial ability score bonuses in Tasha's, you're going to be far more flexible.

So, let's start:

Cantrips:

One of the real sacrifices you'll need to make if you want to be versatile with this subclass is that the SCAG melee cantrips - particularly Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade - only work for Guardian mode. Infiltrator mode uses a ranged weapon, the Lightning Launcher, and thus means that these cantrips become dead weight if you're in that mode.

In either mode, we only have one weapon that uses our Intelligence modifier - Battle-Smiths can have a sword and a gun, and as long as both are infused (or inherently magical,) they're equally capable with both. But Armorers only have the one ideal weapon at a time. For that reason, I recommend grabbing a cantrip that uses a saving throw - when in Guardian Mode, it gives you a ranged option, and when in Infiltrator mode, you have a melee option (since your ranged attacks would be at disadvantage in melee range.)

With this in mind, my favorite options here are Acid Splash and Frostbite. The former has the potential to hit two targets, and does a type of damage that few things have resistance or immunity to. Frostbite has the same range, but requires a Constitution saving throw and only hits one target, doing cold damage, but the bonus effect is quite potent - giving the target disadvantage on its next attack roll. While I think tougher, high-level enemies will likely have strong Constitution saving throw bonuses, this could potentially make it easier to slip away from a foe that gets into melee with you in Infiltrator mode, or help you protect your party against a ranged attacker in Guardian mode.

Naturally, though, I think utility cantrips make a ton of sense for a martial artificer. While Alchemists and Artillerists need to have some damage cantrips, you're far less reliant on these, so you could even skip them entirely (at least after you hit level 3).

Thematically, Mending makes a ton of sense, even if you don't need it quite as much as you might as a Battle Smith or Artillerist. That said, if you wind up taking the Homunculus Servant infusion, you'll be able to use this to patch up your little buddy outside of combat, so it's a good option.

Then, as usual, things like Guidance, Mage Hand, Message, and Prestidigitation are always good to have around.

Infusions:

I will say that there are a lot of infusions that work really well for Guardian Mode and fewer that have a big effect on Infiltrator Mode. Given that your Lightning Launcher doesn't require ammunition, there's no reason to take Repeating Shot over Enhanced Weapon, so just grab that and it'll work for both the Thunder Gauntlets and the Lightning Launcher.

I do think Guardian Mode is going to want Enhanced Defense and Repulsion Shield, as well as Cloak of Protection and Ring of Protection. While none of these make your Infiltrator any better at shooting things from afar, it will have the nice bonus of making it really hard for anything to hit you, even if you're less likely to be taking damage given your range.

Here's something I'd like to see clarification on (or a DM's ruling). Can you wear robes under your armor? The Mind Sharpener is pretty cool - letting you auto-save on Concentration saves (and even letting you see if you'd succeed anyway first) a few times a day. Given that Artificers have proficiency in Con saves already, this might be overkill, but I think it's a strong infusion nonetheless - if we put Haste up on an ally (or ourselves) it'll be very good to not worry about dropping concentration on it.

Resistant Armor is another I'd consider for Guardian mode, if you're in the sort of campaign where you might get some hints as to what you're going to face in the coming days. While a Guardian will probably just want Enhanced Defense on by default, if you're about to fight a red dragon, it might be worth it to drop your AC in order to get fire resistance. Again, possibly less potent for an Infiltrator, but given that elemental damage often comes in ranged or area attacks, it might actually be better than simply boosting your AC.

Goggles of Night will be an obvious choice for any artificer who doesn't inherently have darkvision.

Now, Boots of Elvenkind are probably redundant if you're in Infiltrator Mode. Cloak of Elvenkind actually has an added effect - creatures have disadvantage on their perception checks to spot you (this, by the way, also means a -5 penalty to their passive Perception,) so this could potentially help a bit, though part of its effect is redundant for Infiltrators.

Winged Boots I think are an obvious one - as long as you don't use them constantly, you'll basically have a fly speed in every combat encounter. This will allow you to stay out of range of scary melee combatants if you're in Infiltrator Mode and it'll let you chase down flying foes in Guardian Mode.

Homunculus Servant is also potentially a strong option. It effectively gives you a construct familiar that can deal a little modest force damage. While Artillerists and Battle-Smiths will want to conserve their bonus action to use their Eldritch Cannons and Steel Defenders, respectively, as an Armorer you'll often have a free bonus action (Guardians will often want to reactivate their Defensive Matrix, but that is unlikely to be every turn). The homunculus can fly and also has a very respectable perception bonus - so you could use it to compensate if yours isn't that good.

Belt of Hill Giant Strength is actually something I'd consider looking at as well - this raises your Strength to 21. While you don't need high strength to move unimpeded in heavy armor thanks to your subclass features, this will allow you to carry more things (I think worn armor does count against your carrying capacity) and will also aid with things like Strength saves and Athletics checks. Getting another stat to +5 almost for free is pretty good, honestly. This can also potentially help you diversify your weapon options. While the Thunder Gauntlets' "taunt" effect is, I think, enough to make it an obvious go-to even if you can't ever quite push it to a +3, this will make it easier to fend for yourself in Infiltrator mode or simply be able to use cool weapons even in Guardian mode (though only simple ones). Your Extra Attack feature doesn't require that those attacks be the built-in ones, after all.

I might also look at Cloak of the Bat. Given that your Lightning Launcher can be in the chestpiece of your armor, that means you should be able to use it without using your hands - this means you can use the cloak's abilities to fly - though again, the advantage on Stealth checks is redundant in Infiltrator mode.

Feats:

Now, some of the obvious good feats like Sharpshooter run into the problem of not being useful for both modes. While we can be a little more liberal with infusions, given that we learn 12, ultimately, and can infuse 8 of them into our gear, it's unlikely we'll have more than one or two feats.

Let's get Lucky out of the way. It's good.

Next, I think Alert is a strong option. Given that our role is either to play the tank or the damage-dealer, we're going to want to go early in the combat and start to control the battlefield in various ways. Being able to drop a Faerie Fire on a group of enemies in round 1 can make the battle much easier. Alert is a good feat for just about every class and build, but I think it's particularly well-suited for our roles. This also means you'll never be surprised if you're not incapacitated, and you creatures can't get advantage on you just because you can't see them. Again, being able to act as soon as possible is very nice - the fact that we can don our arcane armor as an action also means that even if we're sleeping out of the armor to recover hit dice, we can very swiftly get into the action - potentially even before the ambushers get to attack us while we're unarmored.

Now, for a bit of a deeper cut: Medium Armor Master. This is stat-dependent - you'll need to have at least 16 Dexterity to take full advantage of it. If you're unfamiliar, this allows you to add up to +3, rather than just +2, of your Dexterity modifier to your AC while wearing medium armor. It also removes any disadvantage on Stealth checks while wearing medium armor. If you can swing a +3 to Dexterity, this effectively turns Half-Plate into quiet Plate. Thus, you get the maximum AC you'd get from wearing heavy armor, but now if you're in Infiltrator mode, you genuinely have advantage on stealth checks, rather than just a flat roll. Whether you can actually get your Dexterity that high while also trying to get good Intelligence and Constitution is a big question, especially if you're giving up an ASI for a feat (unless you're a variant human). This does make the proficiency in heavy armor you get with the subclass redundant, but if you can swing it, this can be a very nice feat.

Tough will get your HP to nearly Barbarian levels, but again, doesn't do much for Infiltrator mode (though of course everyone likes having more HP).

Fey Touched is a popular option for a lot of classes. This gives you Misty Step and any 1st level spell of the Divination or Enchantment school, both of which you can cast for free once a day, though you also get to use your spell slots on them. This could give you some stalwarts like Bless, or you could grab Hex or Hunter's Mark to buff your damage. This also boosts one of your mental stats by 1, so if you start off with an odd Int score, this is practically a freebie (assuming you don't have another stat that's odd that you want to raise.)

    Ultimately, splitting your focus between both of these armor modes is going to make it a little harder to excel in every way that you could. But I think you're not going to be sacrificing a ton. That said, I imagine that most parties will figure out which mode they need more - if you've got a Barbarian and a sword-and-board paladin, you might find you tend to stay in Infiltrator Mode more often. On the other hand, if your party is all Wizards and Sorcerers, you'll probably be finding yourself going Guardian most of the time.

    As such, if you get to play in a consistent group, you might decide that the Versatile build isn't worth the sacrifices. But again, I think you're going to be, like 95% as effective as if you had specialized one way or another, and while D&D does reward specialization, it also rewards creativity, and the flexibility you get here might let you roll with the punches in surprising and fantastic ways.

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty Takes a Bold New Step for Magic: The Gathering

 If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll know that I have no patience whatsoever for people who insist on genre purity. Star Wars, Final Fantasy, and Stephen King's Dark Tower series are all huge influences on my tastes in fantasy, and each of those remixes and shades their worlds with elements of other genres. Star Wars is a fantasy epic that also happens to be filled with robots and spaceships. Final Fantasy games vary, of course, but a game like Final Fantasy VII takes place in a pseudo-modern world with evil megacorporations and motorcycles along with magic and swordplay. And The Dark Tower is a mix of post-apocalyptic wasteland, western, and Arthurian quest mixed into one.

Magic has certainly made use of a wide range of the fantasy sandbox, and it has incorporated elements of other genres before - we have things like the Gothic Horror of Innistrad, Steampunk/Gaslamp Fantasy in Kaladesh, and a plenty of "lost, advanced civilization" stuff in Dominaria.

But from the looks of it, and from what I've read of its first web fiction story, Neon Dynasty is going to be Magic's first foray into true futuristic sci-fi - in a world that was already established as a place of magic.

1,200 years after the Great Kami War, as depicted in the original Kamigawa block, we find a Kamigawa where the kami spirits have long been at peace with the mortal races, and now electronic technology like computers and cybernetics seems to have been developed on the plane amidst all the magic.

There are a couple things that make me really excited about this: the first is simply that this feels so different from any other Magic plane we've gotten before. The other is that it breaks one of the hoariest fantasy tropes - the idea of medieval stasis. While I consider the Lord of the Rings trilogy some of my favorite films, and I loved reading the books (I read them in high school, in the paperback editions that had concept art from the movies with a banner that said "soon to be a motion picture trilogy from Newline Cinema!") I do remember thinking it odd that in the time between the Last Alliance at the end of the Second Age and the War of the Ring at the end of the Third, with over a thousand years of development, things seemed to be locked at the same technological level (indeed, I think canonically things actually regressed, in keeping with lots of myths about how ages past were better than what we have now).

But with Kamigawa, there has been serious technological development.

In a world of magic, sure, you could imagine that magical phenomena might take the place of technologies we've developed in our world. But I do think that humanity has shown a penchant for iteration and development - always seeking to improve on what came before. If physics as they work in our universe works in the planes of Magic, there's no reason why people wouldn't strive to improve technology in tandem with developing a better mastery of magic.

There are, also, already some interesting hints toward greater lore. For one thing, Kaito, the new ninja planeswalker introduced from the setting, has some past with a man with a metal arm - my guess being Tezzeret, whose loyalties seem to have jumped around from Nicol Bolas to, possibly, the Phyrexians (I don't know if we yet have an explanation for how Vorinclex got to Kaldheim - ever since the end of Time Spiral block, only Planeswalkers have been able to actually travel between planes, until the Planar Bridge opened the way between Amonkhet and Ravnica. Now, I believe Tezzeret was the one who secured the Planar Bridge, so could he have found a way to replicate that technology?

The MTG team has talked about what they want to do with this set - Kamigawa had some problematic mechanics, and so they're being careful on what comes back and what doesn't. I'm actually expecting the set to be fairly mechanically independent from the original block, though I could see some fun niche things like Ninjutsu make a return. Just, for the love of God, don't reprint Sensei's Divining Top. No card I can ever remember slowed down the game as much as that one did. I do wonder, though, if Umezawa's Jitte would be as painful as it was back in the day, given the greater availability of removal these days.

D&D At Its Best

 On Monday, the party in the Ravnica game I run had found a secret graveyard behind a manor house belonging to a powerful devkarin house within the Golgari Swarm. In Ravnica, and particularly the Golgari, the idea of a graveyard is a serious violation of their worldview, as all bodies should be recycled through either decomposition or undeath (ultimately both in most cases). Decrepit members of the family rose out of their graves as Vampire Spawn and attacked the party. The Cleric used Turn Undead, causing every one of them to flee - but one of them fled back into the manor house, where there was a party going on.

With the House Captain and several elite warriors coming to investigate after calming the fleeing vampire and convincing the partygoers that everything was all right, the party tried to think of a way to keep the guards away. Initially planning to use Stoneshape to close off the tunnel leading to the graveyard, instead, the Artillerist Artificer cast Shatter on the tunnel above, just as the first two guards entered the area.

They rolled only 9 damage, so what I did was determine that that was 37.5% of the total damage one could do with a base level Shatter. I then had them roll percentile dice - if the roll was under 37.5, the tunnel would cave in. They rolled a 37.

So, rocks fell and the guards died (the house captain had not caught up,) and the Druid, who was standing nearest them, had to make a dexterity saving throw, but only took a little bit of bludgeoning damage from the rocks.

It was not remotely what I expected for that encounter - the guards weren't even supposed to be part of it, mainly serving as a bunch of passive Perception beacons for when they were navigating the party - but it actually solved a big problem for me, which was how to keep the players in the sprawling, multi-level dungeon they had just entered.

Last night, we were playing in our Wildemount campaign, and I was on my level 2 Triton Wizard. We were going to rescue a guy who had been captured by the gang that he and his brother had been trying to get out of - only when we flushed the gang's leader out of his house, he came with the "kidnapped" guy, who seemed to have not actually wanted to leave in the first place.

While we might have just tried to slip away, one of the paladins didn't see this and just decked one of the gang members. Things went very bad very quickly as both paladins went unconscious and we found ourselves surrounded by eight gang members (I assume bandit stats, but at this level, anything can be a deadly threat). So, after doing a bit of pitiful damage with Mind Sliver, I pulled a Hail Mary play - I cast Silent Image in a nearby alleyway, showing a phalanx of Zhelezos (the law enforcement on the Menagerie Coast) coming toward the fracas, shouting "oh shit, is that the zhelezos?" Given that these armored guards were moving silently, the DM had me make a deception check - on which I got a 9. But then, the other Wizard (we are not a well-balanced party,) who is a Chronurgist, used Chronal Shift to allow me to re-roll, and I got a 19.

The bandits each rolled insight checks - and none of them succeeded. Thus, all but the gang's leader and the not-actually-kidnapped brother fled the scene, totally turning the tide of battle. (In fact, we didn't kill anyone - we used nonlethal damage and the other wizard used the Sleep spell to take down the gang's leader - whom we then took off to the nearest zhelezo station, claiming a reward.)

Anyway, these are two examples of what I love about D&D. You'd never be able to come up with these kinds of outside-the-box solutions in a video game - the programmers can't anticipate every possible idea a player might have.

It's a fun game. You should try it.

Reflecting on Shadowlands

 My relationship with World of Warcraft changed a lot when the stories of abuse and harassment came out. Light's the best disinfectant, as they say, but it can still be painful to see a place you had elevated in your mind turn out to be a hotbed of the kinds of behavior you despise. And it has been a confusing time - weighing the desire to support the artists and technicians who work to make the games that mean so much to me against the ickiness of sending money to a corporation that is doing everything it can to avoid meaningful consequences and engage in union-busting tactics to prevent future employees from effectively fighting back against this sort of thing.

If you read this blog, you've probably noticed a sharp turn toward other games (mostly D&D) because, well, my mind has made that sharp turn. I don't play nearly as much as I used to (which was, frankly, a lot) and the name of this blog feels sort of inappropriate given that I more or less just play on my main when I do.

Shadowlands had the potential to be my favorite expansion, but I don't think it'll quite make that distinction. It started off incredibly strong, but the delays caused primarily by the plague we're still dealing with (9.1 did come out before the allegations broke) forced a lot of the expansion's greatness to wither on the vine.

I'm someone who generally likes when WoW leans into its high fantasy element - I found the focus on the Alliance/Horde conflict in BFA to be tedious, and wish that we had gotten more of the cosmic horror elements involving N'zoth. And so, doing, essentially, WoW Planescape, I was really excited.

I also think I'm one of the few people who really enjoyed the Dark Souls-esque punishing mechanics of the 9.0 version of The Maw.

When Warlords of Draenor was cut to only two patches (and 6.1 was barely anything,) it was a disappointment, but also if there was any expansion I didn't mind them taking a breather on, it was the convoluted mess that seemed to be a nostalgia trip for people who didn't like that the story had developed beyond Warcraft 1. I don't know if it was because of the decision to cut Warlords short, but the trajectory of Legion following it was fantastic.

But with Shadowlands, we've been unleashed into a larger multiverse, and so to see that story cut short by one patch and one raid, at least in comparison to the typical expansion, is sad.

I guess we might never know (or at least not until some developer a decade from now talks about it,) but I do really wonder what the longterm ambitions for Shadowlands had been.

To be fair, we're not really looking at a Warlords situation here. Korthia was certainly not designed to give us a year's worth of content, but it did give us something to do in 9.1. And with 9.2 giving us Zereth Mortis, you could argue that in terms of world content, we are actually getting a real expansion's worth of stuff to do. Really, I think the only real distinction is that Castle Nathria retroactively became the first "tier raid" when I had conceived of it as more of a Uldir/Emerald Nightmare/Mogu'shan Vaults-style "intro raid."

One of the interesting notes within the reaction to the whole abuse scandal is that we've seen people like Ion Hazzikostas talk about a changing attitude toward some of their design philosophies - particularly regarding a kind of meta-design-philosophy of "father knows best." Time and again, we've seen Blizzard developers balk at fan-requested features, claiming that what would seem to be a quality-of-life change would ultimately wind up undoing some crucial aspect of the game's mechanics. More openness to change in the way they approach the design of the game could potentially reinvigorate it.

I'm still advocating for cross-faction grouping for things like dungeons, but that's my soap box.

I know there are vocal players who haven't felt a strong connection with Shadowlands' cosmic story. Generally, these players think that the story is best when we're grounded and back in more conventional conflicts with human-like antagonists. I don't think these people are wrong, but I also think that a balance needs to be struck.

I guess the reason I'm saddened by the cutting-short of Shadowlands is that I was hoping for the eye-opening Mists of Pandaria moment - when we arrived in Pandaria, it felt like we'd just left the Warcraft setting and arrived in a whole different fantasy story. But as we explored, we found connections to the overarching plot - the Mogu were revealed as Titanforged races, and we discovered that the Sha were actually the aftereffects of a slain Old God.

We've now discovered connections in the Shadowlands to other parts of the lore - perhaps the most shocking being the revelation that the Nathrezim were created in Revendreth, and have been working for the Jailer all this time. I don't know that any of these have really landed with the same impact, though - feeling less like a grand reveal and expansion of the lore than kind of a retcon that potentially creates inconsistencies with previous lore (like, I thought Nathreza was the homeworld of the Nathrezim).

That, I think is where Zereth Mortis could potentially make things more satisfying - Shadowlands has been reintroducing ideas first explored in Chronicle, with the primal forces arrayed around the material plane (and even showing a different chart, which, as Taliesin & Evitel demonstrated,  is actually the same from a different perspective).

Story-wise, Shadowlands has had a lot of cool things at work - finding Uther in an antagonistic role to start with was a bold move, but one that ultimately seems to be paying off as his capacity for empathy has given us a really interesting and nuanced view of Sylvanas now that her soul has been haphazardly glued back together.

I guess I want to keep steeping in these heady ideas about the cosmos and the moral and ethical implications of agency and responsibility when your soul is literally split into pieces.

The future of WoW is maybe more up in the air than ever before, both on an internal, narrative basis and on an external basis of its players and the company that makes it.

I've often thought about when my relationship with the game would end - most video games I'll be into for a while and then move on, but RPGs that are constantly added to naturally encourage long-term relationships with them. Fifteen years is a long time, which both makes it feel more like I'm on the tail end of it but also make the eventuality of ultimately stepping away from the game feel that much more emotionally fraught.

Having gotten into D&D over the past six years, I do think that a lot of the things I like in WoW I can do more effectively in D&D, but D&D requires scheduling and is more of a to-do than simply logging in and playing for a bit. And I still love Warcraft just as a fantasy setting.

I'll keep an eye on 9.2, and I'm curious to see what they announce as the next expansion (normally, this far into an odd-numbered year, we'd know by now). We'll see.