Dreaming Up Control 2

 So, in case you couldn't tell over the course of the past few weeks, I've become kind of obsessed with Control. In part, it's inspired my delve into the "New Weird" literary movement that the game is meant to be a part of, and the realization that a lot of my own writing could be classified as New Weird (as a note, I think that these specific, granular genre categories are useful when used descriptively, rather than proscriptively. In the past I've described my writing as "modern fantasy" or "surreal fantasy." I don't really like the Magical Realism descriptor because I tend to associate that with works that seem kind of embarrassed to include the supernatural or paranormal and seem to try to reassure readers that it's all pure metaphor and not taking the unreal on its own terms).

I've watched a pair of long video essay critiques of Control, one by Monty Zander and the other by Eric Crosby, neither of whom are video essayists I've seen anything else of, but they had interesting angles to look at the game in their essays. Zander begins his essay with a poo-pooing of the very idea of having to specify what the New Weird is, claiming that you could simply use a broader label like Science Fiction.

Personally, I actually like having the label, though again, as a way to describe a work done on its own terms, noticing patterns and tropes, rather than as a set of rules one must follow to earn the "new weird" certificate.

Control was explicitly and intentionally made to be a "New Weird" video game, and borrows ideas and tropes from some of the key pieces of that genre, like the Southern Reach trilogy (of which I've only read the first, though that was only a week ago, so give me some time).

Remedy Studios has made clear that they had an ambition to link up their games in a kind of shared universe. Alan Wake's in-world-fictional protagonist of the books he writes, Alex Casey, is likely meant to be a legally-distinct equivalent of Max Payne. And while it's hinted at in the main game, Control's second DLC, AWE, makes explicit that the events of Alan Wake take place in the same world as Control (and given Alan's reality-warping powers from that game, might have actually been the reason for the events of Control in the first place).

While Alan Wake is clearly inspired by the works of Stephen King and David Lynch. Lynch's Twin Peaks is a deeply oneiric take on the soap opera (you could argue, and many have, that Twin Peaks: The Return is a similar look at the gritty "peak TV" dramas like Breaking Bad or the Sopranos) but if you squeeze through the disorienting formalism of Twin Peaks, you could interpret it as a sort of investigation into the paranormal with a branch of the FBI dedicated to investigating such weird things. (The X-Files also took a lot of inspiration from Twin Peaks, toning down Lynch's dream logic to tell a more straightforward but nonetheless weird series of paranormal mysteries). The FBC in Control (which is of course also inspired by the internet-born SCP Foundation) plays an odd role as both the vast government conspiracy that covers up the truth but also the Scully and Mulders of its world, who go and actually seek the truth about the strange and paranormal.

However, I think you cannot discount Stephen King's influence. I started reading King when I was 17, and I picked up The Gunslinger, the first book in his Dark Tower series. The Dark Tower series is fantasy... of a sort. But while there are, yes, wizards and some kind of demonic dark lord in it, our knight errant on his quest looks more like the hero of a Spaghetti Western, who lives in a world that is part medieval fantasy, part post-apocalyptic hellscape, part wild west. Robots, sentient trains, mutants, invisible demons, and freestanding doors that lead into the minds of three separate people from New York in different decades are all parts of this story. The World Has Moved On, which means that the very rules of reality are breaking down, so why should anyone be bound to any specific genre conventions?

I've read other King books, and though he is of course the most popular living horror writer, I'm always tempted to argue that he's not really a horror writer at all. Certainly, he writes stories in which profoundly scary things happen, but they also tend to have really weird elements.

In the Shining, yes, the Overlook Hotel is filled with some sort of evil presence (that is probably not simply ghosts and more like some cosmic horror... thing). But in that world, Danny Torrance also happens to have psychic powers, which help him and his mother escape the madness the hotel infects his father with. In 11/22/63 (admittedly one of the less horror-genre works of King's), there's a doorway in an old diner that lets you go to the same precise moment in 1958 (I think I've got the number right,) resetting any changes made to the timeline each time you step back into it, and there are people from some other time or universe whose job it is to monitor that portal.

The point is, I think you could make an argument that, though the term only came about after most of the Dark Tower series had been written, it might count within that category of New Weird. Or maybe it's just Weird Fiction. King, after all, was inspired by Lovecraft (though replaced, for the most part, Lovecraft's misanthropy and bigotry with a much more caring dose of humanism). But in that case, you could argue here that Weird Fiction is the larger category, not far off from just Speculative Fiction in general.

Which now brings us back to Control.

The sequel, which has been announced, has the following problem: the original game's most iconic element is its setting, the Oldest House. Now, you could in theory set a new game still in the House, and merely have us explore other sectors we didn't see on our first trip. Of the two DLCs, the one I enjoyed more was AWE, which took place in the abandoned Investigations Sector, while the Foundation DLC took place in natural caverns beneath the House. Foundation is certainly a larger departure in terms of aesthetics, but I personally found the look of it less inspired - the advantage to the Oldest House was that, even if many of its spaces purely served to act as places for you to fight Hiss and navigate the labyrinthine corridors, there was a sense of purpose to it all - people worked here, and there might be someone who had to find this one particular office every day at 9 am. The caves of the Foundation were sort of... just video game spaces.

But setting a second game entirely within the House would, I think, also be a mistake. The open-world elements of Control make the end of the game a little depressingly non-final. Jesse is still trapped there, even if the worst of the crisis has passed. And while, yes, she's now embraced her role as the Director of the FBC, I'd have loved to have some cutscene at some point show her and Pope walking out the front door, being able to finally relax and go home before coming back to work the next day.

Another question I have about the game is whether we'll get any more of Doctor Caspar Darling. Much of the story involves a changeover in leadership, and by the end of the game, Pope has taken over from Darling as head of research. Darling's sins under the Trench regime are certainly not something easy to forgive, and his own status is ambiguous. But his videos over the course of the game are some of my favorite parts of Control, and in particular, his final video (which could be only Jesse's imagination, but I like to think it's a message intended to cheer on and pump her up from Darling himself). But could we really justify his continued presence in the story?

I could imagine a much different structure to a future game, in which Jesse goes out to various AWEs to investigate and solve problems. More conservatively, the game could simply focus on a single AWE in which Jesse is largely on her own, which would allow for the same kind of vaguely Souls-like Metroidvania structure.

The key, though, to retaining the strengths of the original game, would be to maintain the excellent environmental and breadcrumb storytelling. I suspect that the documents found across the Oldest House were in part inspired by the vast amount of lore you can pick up in FromSoft's games from item descriptions.

Luckily, if the story is about Jesse investigating some AWE, there's plenty of room to have fun FBC memos scattered around some devastated base camp for what you could imagine was some FBC task force sent there that has mysteriously vanished or otherwise been... incapacitated. But we could have all this take place in a new environment.

I will say that I think I agree with Monty Zander's criticism of the game's loot system. While I enjoyed the fact that the crafting materials were incorporeal concepts, appropriate to the psychic basis for the Service Weapon, I think that the loot chase has gotten a little too prevalent in gaming these days, and I don't think the system as implemented really serves to make Control more fun.

What I think would be better is to have a smaller number of bonuses that each sit at a single power level. This makes the choices feel more impactful - you're not just upgrading from a +12% damage boost to a 24% damage boost, you're instead deciding whether you want to spend less energy on Launch or allow Seize to take effect faster (these are both existing mods, but I don't think we need to have them existing in a hierarchy of quality).

It was, in fact, quite refreshing playing Alan Wake, in which there was no character progression system at all, other than perhaps sometimes finding more powerful flashlights. Video games had a long and storied history of letting you play the whole thing without getting explicitly more powerful. In traditional Mario games, the only way in which you get more powerful is that you, the player, gets better at playing the game. Now, I love a good progression system, but these are best when it's more about expanding the potential for strategy and tactics, rather than simply making numbers go up.

(I realize the irony of making that statement on a blog that started primarily as a World of Warcraft blog, but at this stage in my 16 and half years of playing WoW, I'm really in it to see the environments and witness the story and get cool transmog appearances, and only really worry about my DPS numbers so as not to be holding the group back.)

What I definitely want to see is a story in which the Hiss is over and dealt with. The Hiss worked fine as a villain for the first game - I really like the idea that the Hiss isn't even really intelligent, but just a sort of infectious frequency that perpetuates itself. But while The Dark Presence feels like it would have to continue to be the main problem of Alan Wake 2 (albeit taking new forms and demonstrating new capabilities) I think the promise of Control is that, while the Hiss crisis is bad, it's only at the top of the crises the FBC has dealt with. The presence of The Mold, for example, shows that even during the Hiss crisis, there are other problems the FBC is dealing with, and so it seems that a sequel should have a brand new crisis to deal with.

Again, like Monty Zander, I think some of the open-world elements of the game struggle to justify themselves. Pretty early on I found myself just ignoring the Bureau Alerts unless I was in the area already, and while Ahti the Janitor is one of my favorite elements of the world and the story, his janitorial tasks were pretty pure "open world busy work." Langston's Runaways, on the other hand, were great - each being its own unique little puzzle with its own unique set piece.

My general hope would be to nix any side quests that are dull "find x things to interact with in this section of the game and just click a button near them." Doing this and scaling back on the loot system would work together to better streamline the game.

And, don't get me wrong, at this stage I find myself wanting to go back and play more, only to realize that with most of those side missions complete (I think at this point the only things I have left to do are, like, the harder modes on SHÜM and the Jukebox) there's really not much point. But I think a game that leaves you wanting more is better than a game that wears out its welcome (though, of course, as I've just argued, Control hasn't).

As a last note, I think that, despite all the mods you can get for the Service Weapon, one of the problems in Control is that Launch as an ability is so much more fun and on top of that so much more powerful, that I often feel like the Service Weapon itself is more of a "filler" ability as you wait for your energy to recharge. And, of all its forms, I never really found a form I liked better than the standard "Grip" form. There wasn't really much of a sense that different scenarios called or using different forms, with a few exceptions.

Still, I loved Control, and I'm eager to see what they wind up coming up with for a sequel. I believe Alan Wake 2 is due this year, so I'll be checking that out.

Anticipating Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse

 So, Spelljammer was a letdown.

It's not that what was there was really flawed - we got cool new playable races, interesting fantasy-space-physics (which I... tend to ignore for a more sci-fi style worldbuilding) and a book filled with cool monsters that is actually larger than the bestiaries we typically get with campaign setting books.

But there was a problem, which is that there was so very little "there" there. There's a description of the Rock of Bral, a cool location to be sure, but very little discussion of how one is to build an adventure that feels "Spelljammer-like." It felt in some ways like it was just telling you to use the ships to get from one established setting to another.

Calling the Planescape book for 5E "Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse," which is so similar to "Spelljammer: Adventures in Space" makes me a little nervous. Because this nomenclature suggests that Planescape could be seen as a sort of "transitory" setting that you simply use to jump from one world to another. Also not helping that idea is that the idea of "multiverse" has kind of been blurred - are we talking about different worlds of the Prime Material Plane, or are we actually embracing the weirdness of the Outer Planes and Inner Planes?

I never played D&D until 5th Edition was out, but as detailed on this blog, I read through the "Planes of Law," "Planes of Chaos," and "Planes of Conflict" products from 2nd Edition, along with, of course, the Planescape Setting book. The stuff in these is really, really interesting and cool.

What I hope for in a 5th Edition Planescape book is something that will at least touch on the weird and wild locations of the planes.

What I don't want, and what I'm nervous we might be getting, is simply a description of Sigil as a location and a vague "and there are portals there to just about anywhere in the multiverse!"

Now, sure, Sigil is a beloved part of the Planescape setting, and would certainly have to play a role in any sourcebook. It is designed to be the hub from which your adventures radiate into the planes.

But given that 5E does not have a Manual of the Planes or really much description of the planes outside of a few blurbs in the DMG, I'd be sad if they went unexplored.

Now, I'll keep my fingers crossed that we'll get something more in line with Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which is to date my favorite 5E supplement - a book that went deep on how to run adventures in that setting and really zeroed in on tone and vibe while simultaneously throwing in a lot of cool character options and monsters.

I realize, of course, that having read all that 2nd Edition stuff, I'm versed enough to run a Planescape game that has the feel I'm looking for. And WotC's philosophy on how much they publish is very different than how TSR's was in the 90s. Inevitably, the 5E Planescape sourcebook is not going to be able to cover as much ground as the many books that came out in the 90s.

But I'm hoping they learned some lessons from the response to Spelljammer: Adventures in Space.

The Oddness of Magic's Instant Storytelling and the Lack of Block Structure

 When you have four or five primary releases a year in a game that is mostly about narrative-agnostic gameplay but that nevertheless has deep lore and stories, things get weird.

March of the Machine is the grand climax to the Phyrexian storyline that, at least in its current chapter, started perhaps with the arrival of Vorinclex on Kaldheim. The Phyrexians were the big bads in the earliest days of Magic, and while the notion of a grand, ongoing story that would go on for many years, rather than more thematic visits to periods of time, places (mostly on Dominaria,) and such, the first real lean-in to Magic as a storytelling (rather than vibe-promoting) medium came with Tempest Block (sort of Mirage Block before it, which introduced many of the key players).

The thing is, there's a kind of compression that happens. This is particularly true given the shift in recent years away from year-long block storytelling and to largely standalone sets.

As an example, the original Kamigawa block introduced a world where spirits were at war with mortals, and how that conflict shattered what had previously been a comfortable status quo. We then had two sets to see that conflict escalate and then come to its conclusion.

Perhaps more specifically relevant to the current story, Invasion Block took three sets to play out the invasion of Phyrexia, with the initial victories and defeats, the, again, escalation and ultimate climax of that war playing out over a year of releases.

But in recent years, Magic has tended to only get to the "war" part in a single set. War of the Spark was certainly built up to - the seeds of Nicol Bolas' plan were planted over the course of a few years, with elements like the Immortal Sun and the Planar Bridge seeded in earlier sets.

But Bolas' arrival on Ravnica and his defeat all took place in a single release, meaning a story that was temporally compressed such that you were getting the beginning, middle, and end all at once.

War of the Spark came out the same year as Avengers Endgame, as well as the final season of Game of Thrones. 2019 was a year of grand finales (little did we know that it would also be the beginning of a plague of epic proportions, though at least in the US, we didn't really see much of it until 2020.)

But once the cards were previewed, every moment of that eponymous war was on display, from the initial invasion, the terrifying dreadhorde invaders, to Gideon's heroic sacrifice and Nicol Bolas' banishment.

We're getting exactly the same thing here.

Indeed, the parallel with the MCU is rather fitting. Phyrexia: All Will Be One was something like the Infinity War to March of the Machine's Endgame - the story in which we find out heroes are outmatched and they suffer their worst failure before they can turn around and find a victory.

The thing is, we have to ask a question: what is the unit of Magic storytelling?

Invasion Block in its entirety, which included the Invasion, Plane Shift, and Apocalypse sets, I'd argue, was a singular story, with the sets representing the beginning, middle, and end. The larger saga had been continuing for some time - Tempest Block, with its own parts being Tempest, Stronghold, and Exodus, was a story that was part of that grander narrative. Urza's Saga focused more on the past as a kind of backstory-filling-in flashback/prequel. Mercadian Masques continued the story of the modern heroes, and then Invasion Block brought that story to a conclusion. I can't tell you how successful it was, because this mostly took place during what I think of as my first "Magic Interregnum." Tempest Block was the last set I played primarily with physical cards during my first foray with the game from ages eight through eleven. I wouldn't really play again until Kamigawa's block in 2005/2006.

The thing is, I sort of get the sense that, in the rush to showcase new planes and the game mechanics of those planes, Magic kind of rushes through the story.

This is particularly noticeable with March of the Machine. The trailer for the set shows us a literally broken and dismembered (but still alive) Karn lying helplessly before Elesh Norn, only for a newly ascended Elspeth, who has become an angel, to come down and fight her. The trailer ends with a card preview - Mirrodin Avenged, which shows a restored Karn holding Elesh Norn's severed head up.

So, perhaps my very first exposure to the plot of March of the Machine is what I imagine is its climax and ultimate victory.

And sure, it's possible the story will be more complex - that killing Elesh Norn doesn't put a full stop to the invasion. But... it must, right? The way this is presented, this moment is clearly meant to show that yes, the good guys win.

And I love it when the good guys win. Phyrexia is a great, creepy villain, but we like scary villains because it makes it that much more satisfying when our heroes take them down. I never doubted for a second that this climactic clash with the Phyrexians invading basically the whole Magic multiverse would end with the Phyrexians defeated.

But it's jarring to see that moment before I get a sense of basically anything else that happens during the war.

See, I think that only a few years ago, March of the Machine might be released in the fall as the first set in the "War of the Machine" block, and maybe we'd get something like "Triumph of the Machine" as a second set where things look particularly bleak, with a conclusion in the spring called "Fall of the Machine" as the heroes manage to turn things around and finally defeat the invasion.

Now, to be fair, this year has been set up as the Phyrexian conflict year. Dominaria United put their threat front and center, and the modern-era story of Brothers' War was a continuation of that. And Phyrexia: All Will Be One could be said to take the form of that first, failed attempt to solve this issue.

But I still feel that, in the old block-based design, this would be at least two blocks - one focuses on the looming, insidious threat as a kind of mystery, ending with the unleashing of the multiversal conflict, with the next focusing on the conflict itself.

This also has a mechanical aspect.

On a mechanical level, blocks historically (Mirrodin onward) focused on a new plane, and those planes tended to have unique mechanics or themes. Mirrodin was the artifacts-matter plane. Kamigawa was (at the time) the "legends matter" plane. Ravnica was the "two-color deck" plane.

And so, in each block, the first set would broadly introduce the themes they were working with. Then, those themes and mechanics would be played with in subsequent sets.

Say, for example, you had a mechanic called "Fubar 2." During your upkeep, you can spend two mana to create an artifact that has "at the end of your turn, this artifact deals 1 damage to any target." You play through the first set and every card with Fubar specifically has Fubar 2. But then, in the next set, you get cards with "Fubar: pay two life." Now, the mechanic starts to become more interesting, and might work in decks that couldn't really make use of the old Fubar 2 cards. And then, in the third deck, there are now spells that do something when you Fubar - "when you pay your Fubar cost, discard a card and then draw a card."

Because we hop between stories and settings with nearly every set these days, we don't tend to see these mechanics develop and evolve.

What's even stranger is that even when we do stick around, they still don't.

Consider our most recent trip to Innistrad. As someone who loves the aesthetics of Gothic Horror, but never played during the original Innistrad or the Shadows over Innistrad blocks, I was very eager to play those. And to be fair, I liked Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow a lot (I think probably leaning more toward the former). But it was strange to me that in some cases, mechanical ideas that were introduced in one were absent in the other. Midnight Hunt created "decayed" as a zombie keyword that was a penalty, but allowed (in theory at least) much cheaper creature token creation.

But, in the next set, which was set on the same plane and took place right after Midnight Hunt (as far as I know,) rather than expanding upon this mechanic, they simply used a different mechanic for zombies, Exploit.

Are the two synergistic? Absolutely - getting cheap creature tokens that you can use as sacrifice fodder for exploit cards works great. But there are no exploit cards in Midnight Hunt and no decayed cards in Crimson Vow.

Now, I realize that there might be some element here of being an old man yelling at clouds. And it's not as if I can complain that some new designer is ruining everything - Mark Rosewater was lead designer during my second Magic heyday such as during Ravnica's original block, and he still is.

But I do wonder if this direction for the game has undercut it both mechanically and story-wise. When I look at the most popular decks, they tend to fall into classic archetypes, scooping up all the most efficient and powerful cards that fit in a certain array of colors. It's rare that any of these put a strong thematic focus on any interesting new mechanic, because the likelihood of such a mechanic being strong enough on its own in a single deck to beat out some strategy that just picks all the best cards from the scattered sets in the Standard format is low - you're only going to find cards that care about that mechanic in one out of eight sets in Standard.

Alan Wake: The Signal and the Writer

 Alan Wake is a fairly quick game, and the DLCs that are packaged as part of the Remaster from a couple years ago (and the version of the game I've played) are similarly short. Each can be done in an hour or two, I think - I definitely did The Writer in a single sitting.

Somewhat similarly to Control, the enemies in Alan Wake aren't terribly distinct from one another (I'd say Control has a much clearer variance in things to fight, though the vast majority remain Hiss-corrupted FBC employees) but I think Alan Wake isn't really interested in providing a menagerie of strange beings to fight.

The ending of Alan Wake's main game places some limitations on the nature of its DLCs, so I'm going to put a spoiler cut here for a 13-year-old game.

Damage Types and Rage

 We don't know whether we'll be getting the "Mage" group or the "Warrior" group next in the One D&D playtest. But while I am very curious to see how the Warlock will change (I suspect Wizards and Sorcerers will get relatively minor reworks, though the spell preparation changes could have major implications for the Wizard's spellbook) I think I'm more eager to see how the Warriors - Fighters, Barbarians, and Monks - will be transformed.

Of these three, the Barbarian is the class I've played the least - I think in total a single one or two hour session with possibly no combat, and at level 1. I've run a campaign with a Barbarian now for three years, though, so I've seen it from the other side.

The thing that I find curious is a sort of implication of a lot more recent game design. First off, a lot of creatures that were republished in Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse had the damage types of their attacks changed. This is most notable with powerful legendary creatures like the various demon lords. (MPMM actually marks their second reprinting, as they were first published in Out of the Abyss before showing up with various archdevils in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes).

If we look at the MPMM version of Demogorgon and compare it with the ToF/OotA version, we see a couple of changes - the newer version has a bit more HP, for instance. But one of the most important differences, I think, and particularly for Barbarians, is that the old version's Tentacle attacks deal bludgeoning damage, whereas the new version deals force damage. Interestingly, the legendary-only tail attack deals a mix of bludgeoning and necrotic damage in both versions, but the new one's primary melee attacks deal force.

And that means that a Barbarian (who is not specifically a Totem Warrior with the Bear Totem defensive ability) will not be able to halve the damage of those attacks thanks to Rage - when they are hit, they'll take just as much damage as a Fighter or Wizard would.

Why might this change have been implemented? One possibility could be a very intentional nerf to the damage reduction of Rage, but I suspect that's not the reason.

Instead, there's this persistent oddity in 5E's rules where bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage are actually kind of each two different damage types. Supernatural monsters, usually like fiends, celestials, incorporeal undead, elementals, and golem-style constructs, often have resistance or immunity to these sorts of damage if they are coming from a nonmagical weapon.

As such, there's a sort of graduation point that you expect to happen around level 5 or so in which the weapon-wielding classes get access to a magical weapon - the most typical being a +1. While a +2 or +3 or other variants on the magical weapon types are often better, there's a profound transformation as soon as the character gets any weapon that counts as magical. They go from dealing the most commonly resisted damage types to a damage type that almost nothing resists - by higher levels, if you're fighting a demon lord, who has resistances to cold, fire, and lightning, and immunity to poison damage, the Fighter with a +1 longsword is going to have much more reliable damage than a Wildfire Druid whose main damage spells are all getting resisted (though to be fair, that's a subclass that should really consider getting Elemental Adept in Fire).

In addition to these changes to monsters, we've also seen that some of the class features in One D&D work a little differently.

Take, for example, the Devotion Paladin's Sacred Weapon. In the current game, this lets you add your Charisma modifier to your attack rolls and also causes the weapon to count as magical. But in the new version, it gives you the Charisma bonus but instead lets you choose whether you want the weapon to deal its normal damage or radiant damage (a type that, helpfully, very few monsters resist).

My suspicion is that One D&D intends to get rid of the distinction of magical or nonmagical bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing, and instead make it so that magical weapons deal some other type of damage, likely force in the case of your simple +X weapons. This will simplify stat blocks by letting a demon lord like Demogorgon simply be immune to those kinds of damage, on the assumption that the Paladin attacking them is using a magical weapon that does other kinds of damage.

So, how does this affect the Barbarian?

Well, Barbarians' defensive bonus from Rage doesn't actually care about whether damage coming in is magic or not. You can hit them with a +3 warhammer and that damage still gets halved, magic or no.

Historically, a lot of these magical creatures with resistance or immunity to "kinetic" damage (to borrow a term from Starfinder) have a trait called "Magic Weapons," which causes their weapon attacks that deal kinetic damage to count as magical. This trait is notably absent from, for example, the new version of Demogorgon, likely due to the fact that their main attack does force damage anyway - and there aren't any traits or features that resist "force damage from nonmagical weapons." Interestingly, this does mean that the old Demogorgon has a slight edge on the new one if they were to fight one another, because the new one's tail attack would not do as much damage to the old one, as the bludgeoning damage from it is not magical.

Player characters almost never (with the exception of the Heavy Armor Master feat, I think - something that you'll note works differently in One D&D) care whether attacks are magical, so these traits seem to exist primarily to allow one monster stat block to be used against another - you could imagine a fight where the party is fighting a group of Demogorgon's demonic minions while the demon lord faces off against a Solar who is the party's ally. That trait on the old stat block would mean that Demogorgon could deal full damage to the angel, and the angel's equivalent trait allows them to deal full damage to the demon lord.

But it does seem that this change could, potentially, screw over Barbarians.

A Barbarian will typically have a lower AC than other front-line fighters. With Point-Buy, if you absolutely tanked all your "mental" ability scores to 8, you could get 16s in Strength, Dex, and Con (taking the +1 to three scores "racial" bonus), which would mean you start off with a 16 AC (or 18 with a Shield). Over the course of your Barbarian career, you'd probably want to get Strength to 20, and then spend two more ASIs getting Con to 20. Maybe you'd get Dex up to 18 with your last if you don't want to get any feats, which would give you an AC of 19 (21 with a shield) at level 19 or 21 (23 with a shield) at level 20.

So, you know, it's possible to have a high AC, but remember that this assumes you've taken -1s to three different ability modifiers.

More likely, your Barbarian is going to hover around 14 or 15 AC to start with and only raise it by a couple over the course of a campaign. But you counterbalance your low AC by halving most of the attack you're taking. (Having a d12 hit die does also mean more HP, though compared to a Ranger, Fighter, or Paladin, you're only really getting one more HP per level on average).

Now, perhaps that's enough - maybe Barbarians are too hard to kill in the 2014 rules (they do, after all, have other traits that make them very tough to take down). But I'm curious to see whether the designers are accounting for the fact that this new design philosophy is a serious nerf to Barbarians' survivability.

I could imagine a new version of Rage where, rather than resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage, it's instead resistance to the damage of attacks (or even more narrowly weapon attacks). We'll have to see what it looks like when the Warrior class group UA comes out.

Alan Wake's Episodic Structure and the Trends of 2010

 One of the things that's interesting about playing Alan Wake (Remastered) is that it's a glimpse into an era of gaming that, while I was certainly around for it, came over a decade ago and thus feels something like a time capsule.

There are some aspects that I find actually quite refreshing. There's zero sense of "progression" in terms of Alan's power as you play through the game. Most segments see you lose all the equipment you've amassed over the course of the previous one, and there's no resources that have you making a "build" where you choose, say, to increase your health or the power of certain attacks.

Now, I realize that this might sound like a veiled critique of Control, Remedy's more recent game. I don't mean it to be, but I just think that it's interesting and kind of fun to have a game where you're there to play through the story and the levels without thinking about "stats."

Another thing that is unconventional, though perhaps only today, is Alan Wake's division into "Episodes." Despite the fact that the story is about a novelist who seems to have somehow written a manuscript of the Stephen King-style horror story he's now living through, the game is broken up in a manner similar to a television show. (Evidently Remedy Studio has actually sold the rights to make a TV show based on the game, which I actually think could work pretty well). The game originally came out in 2010, during the era of "Peak TV" or the "Golden Age of Television," which... it's possible we're no longer in. Serialized dramas on TV were the center of the pop culture and, frankly, "screen art" conversation.

This was also an era in which some game studios envisioned a new structure for delivering game content - with "episodic" releases as a possibility. Half Life 2 (which had come out several years earlier, to be fair) had two DLC chapters that were referred to as "Episodes," and if memory serves, this was also embraced by TellTale's various story-centered games.

Now, you could argue that really what the episodes in Alan Wake are are simply a different name for "level," a gaming structure that dates back to Super Mario Bros. in 1985.

But Alan Wake leans heavily into the idea of approaching the story as if it's some serialized TV drama. Episodes begin with a "previously on" recap, just as you'd get with any serialized TV show (which can feel very silly when you've just finished the level they're recapping, but is great at helping you catch up if you take a break).

While Stephen King is an undeniable influence on the game (the shadowy "Taken" are perhaps more broadly from any kind of horror story, but the weird idea of selfish people trying to gain power by manipulating artists and a protagonist who has some other version of himself on another plane of existence "writing" this reality into being feels very Stephen King) another strong influence is David Lynch and his show (with Mark Frost) Twin Peaks.

King and Lynch are not usually included in the same conversations - King is generally seen as a popular but not really critically "important" writer (though I think as generations raised on King's books begin to have a say in the critical, literary "canon" that's changing) while David Lynch is an arthouse movie director that exists about as far as you can imagine from "popular entertainment" (though again, Twin Peaks in its original run was actually a hugely popular water cooler-conversation-starter,) there's actually a lot of shared DNA there. Both like to examine the darkness lurking underneath America's idyllic, small-town seeming utopias and often approach that with an eye toward the strange and the dreamlike (or nightmare-like).

Indeed, I sometimes think that David Lynch might actually play in the genre of cosmic horror, but his narrative style is so unconventional that critics place his works outside of the "genre" and into the "literary" or "arthouse" space.

Expressed as a video game, I think Alan Wake is fun, though I do sometimes feel like the actual "game" parts can feel like a sort of interlude within the meat of the game's entertaining value. Luckily, at least so far, none of the "trudging though the woods" segments of the game has felt so long as to wear out its welcome, but I think you could rightly criticize it for getting a little samey - ultimately, most of these segments have you just follow a relatively simple path and then do the same "shine your light as much as you can until you can pump some rounds into the Taken you're being attacked by" or, if you get overwhelmed, you usually get flares or flashbangs to take out a large number of them at once.

One thing I find interesting is that one of the "patients" at Doctor Emil Hartman's lodge on Cauldron Lake, where Alan spends a brief time being told that he's actually a schizophrenic who has had a psychotic break after his wife drowned and died (something he and we never believe for a second,) is a video game designer. At one point, we hear him ranting about how producers come in and force him to make changes to a game so that they can feel like they've got a fingerprint on it, and there's a joke about adding a Mullet to a game character, and how now the game has something called "Mullet Time," which I have to imagine is a reference to the heavy use of bullet time in Max Payne (Remedy's original claim to fame.) It even makes me wonder whether this is a critique of Alan Wake's own slow-motion camera effects when you dodge one of the Taken's attacks.

This slow-motion kind of speed-ramp is the most visually dated element in the game - something that feels like it was probably mind-blowing and cool in 2010, but now calls way too much attention to itself and kind of slows down the action.

There are also segments in the game where you can get in a car and drive around - sometimes using the headlights and the weight of the car to easily take out Taken who would otherwise be a bigger challenge. Now, don't get me wrong - I really like when an on-foot game can also see you getting into a vehicle, but it's also something that feels very much like a trend that was big in 2010 and maybe not as much of a deal nowadays (thinking back, I remember how the original Mass Effect had planets you could go to and drive around in the Mako, but those worlds were often pretty empty aside from one or two buildings you could explore. Half Life 2 also had extensive sections with a... hovercraft, I think? And later a little dune buggy).

Something I actually really love that feels dated is that the game makes use of filmed actors at times - specifically, when you find televisions that have another version of Alan speaking through them, we see the actor for Alan's appearance, Ilkka Villi, rather than the CGI facsimile that serves as the character model. This was something I loved about Control, which was peppered through with live action video of Matthew Poretta as Doctor Casper Darling (who is also the voice actor for Alan Wake).

Back in the 1990s, in the early days of video and computer games, this was more common - CGI was so rudimentary at the time that a lot of game studios simply chose to dress actors in costume and film them, and then insert the videos as cutscenes (for me, the most memorable performances were Rand and Robyn Miller as Achenar and Sirrus - and then the former also as their father Atrus - in Myst). This fell out of fashion by the 2000s, but I like that Remedy has chosen to keep this method in their toolbox - something that might have felt dated in 2010 but now feels novel once again.

What I'm finding exciting about the story of Alan Wake is that the "scary shadow people" as the main monsters you face are just the jumping off point. There's weirdness afoot, and these guys with axes and chainsaws who can only be killed after you've exposed them to enough light are just the obstacle to uncovering that.

Legacies: Back to the Forbidden Reach, a Tauren's Trauma, and a Human's Homecoming

 Patch 10.0.7 went live today, and in most expansions you'd get maybe some rebalancing and maybe some new bandaid on a partially functional game system in a patch like that, here we've gotten access to a new (well, technically not new, but new for most characters) zone and some interesting story quests.

Emberthal has tracked the Sundered Flame to the Forbidden Reach, where this less cooperative and altruistic group of Dracthyr have come to claim the power left there by Neltharion. They're not alone, of course - the three surviving Primal Incarnates, released at the end of Dragonflight's opening raid, have also come here to look for resources in their fight against us (it's actually kind of cool to see that Iridikron is not arrogant - he recognizes that we're a real threat, and that his team needs something to even the odds.) But while the Incarnates are there more or less just to tease the trip underground in 10.1, we're treated to a series of quests that show us around this new zone and deal with the dark legacy of Neltharion.

And, in fact, legacies - particularly problematic legacies - are kind of a running theme here.

Spoilers for quests that just went live ahead, specifically the intro quests to the Forbidden Reach, the Baine questline in Ohn'aran Plains, and the Human Heritage Armor quests.

Nyctophobia with Alan Wake

 Having consumed Control and its two DLC expansions, I found myself eager to explore the connected game (made abundantly clear in Control's second DLC, AWE) Alan Wake. This was a game I remember being intrigued by when it first came out in 2010, but never got around to playing. A few years ago a remaster came out, and given a relative cheap cost on the Playstation store, I got the game for my PS5.

The very first words of narration in this heavily narrated game are "Stephen King," and so it should be no surprise that the story of Alan Wake is meant to feel like it could be a King story. Taking place in the town of Bright Falls, it trades King's typical northern New England for the Pacific Northwest (a choice that might reflect the other influence of David Lynch and particularly his TV show Twin Peaks) but Bright Falls could easily exist in Maine as well.

In my delve into the idea of the New Weird, I keep finding myself thinking about the way that, despite his being the most popular living Horror writer, I've always felt that Stephen King doesn't quite fit into that genre neatly. That might be in part because my first King novels were the first few of the Dark Tower series, which set out to be an emphatically American epic fantasy. But the thing is, King's stories tend to get a little weird one way or another. Usually, whatever paranormal or otherworldly monster or threat is only one element.

Take The Shining, for example. The Overlook Hotel has some kind of evil presence (more complicated and alien than just ghosts, though it would be easy to mistake it for that) that drives Jack Torrance to homicidal rage, but at the same time, Danny Torrance has his eponymous Shine, which is some kind of enigmatic psychic power that isn't connected in any direct way with the presence at the hotel, other than that it helps him and his mom escape.

Alan Wake could be a King protagonist, not least because he's a writer (though he seems to be a kind of neo-pulp crime novelist rather than a horror writer).

Things get weird quick for Alan Wake. In fact, things start weird because the playable tutorial is set within a nightmare that just so happens to mirror future events, where a character he's written to have some nasty fate in one of his books comes after him for revenge - to the character, Wake is basically God, assigning a cruel fate solely for the purpose of drama.

We find that the nightmare occurs as he's sitting in his car on a ferry to Bright Falls (telling us this is an isolated little town if you can't just drive there) with his wife, Alice. While things are more or less normal in those first moments - just a local with a late night radio show asking for an interview with the famous author - things get, in this case, decidedly Lynchian as he enters a diner that must have been designed to look like the RR from Twin Peaks, and when he goes to pick up the key for the house he and his wife are renting, he has a bizarre interaction with a spooky woman with a black mourning veil, who gives him the key. Naturally, as he and Alice pull away, the man they were renting from runs out, yelling that they forgot their key.

To sum up: they get to the house, and we learn that Alice has a severe case of Nyctophobia - fear of the dark. Alan has to reassure her and get a generator running before she'll enter the dark house. Once she's settled in there, she reveals that she actually rented the place as an opportunity for him to try writing again - he's been suffering from three years of writer's block. They argue, he goes out to take a walk and cool off, but then something... strange happens. The lights shut off, and Alice screams, and he sees her sinking into the lake, and then...

He's in his wrecked car, teetering on the edge of a cliff. Trudging through the woods to get to a gas station where he hopes to call for help, he's assaulted by people from the town who are covered in some kind of veil of shadow.

This is where the game's combat loop takes form - Alan finds a flashlight and a gun, and you learn that you need to shine light on enemies to dispel the darkness that makes them invulnerable before you can shoot them.

And the nature of this corruption feels very Kingian - the named enemies (kind of bosses, but often also characters we've encountered previously) rant and rave with words they would normally use. The first "boss," a guy named Stucky, who was supposed to give you the key to the house on the lake, rants about renting cabins in a voice that gets distended and distorted.

But the truly Kingian elements that start popping up are when things get less straightforwardly scary and more weird and unexplained. Alan begins to find pages of a manuscript to the book he's been struggling to write, and the story he's evidently written describes almost prophetically what is happening or about to happen in the next moments. One of these pages describes being blinded by a television that spontaneously turns on when he gets to the gas station, and sure enough, that TV turns on, showing him in the cabin his wife had rented, ranting about his need to keep writing reality so that the world wouldn't end.

It's possible I just haven't yet gotten the rhythm of the game down yet, or it's possible that thirteen years is long enough for a PS3/Xbox 360 era game to feel kind of dated, but at least so far there are elements that feel a tad out of line with what I've come to expect from other games - particularly after playing through Remedy's Control. To be fair, the latter game's protagonist is, for lack of a better word, pretty much a magically-enhanced superhero shortly into the game's runtime, while Alan is just a guy trying to survive a nightmarish scenario.

One of the elements of the gameplay is that the sprint/dodge button causes near misses to slow down the action momentarily so you get a kind of speed-ramp shot of Alan dodging out of the way of a deadly swung wrench or bat. I can't decide if this is something that might have felt really cool thirteen years ago but now looks a little cheesy.

Light is your weapon and shield in the game - you need to shine your flashlight at foes for a certain amount of time before you can take them down, and you can expend the battery of your light to do so with greater speed, making batteries as valuable as bullets.

I'm not super far into the game, but one thing that's very unusual is that the story is broken up like episodes of a TV show. When you reach the gas station and are brought back to town by the sheriff, there's even music that plays that you could imagine playing over the ending credits of an episode. Next thing, you get a literal "previously on" recap and a flashback cold-open to Alan and Alice's life back in New York, reinforcing the idea of Alice's fear of the dark when they suffer a blackout due to a blizzard. The action then returns to the present, where we find that Alan has a missing week between his wife's disappearance and waking up after the car accident. Furthermore, he's told that the cabin on the island on Cauldron Lake hasn't existed for decades, raising the question of where the hell Alice could even be.

I'll leave the recap off here, but there's a general sense of mystery that goes beyond "why are these people getting turned into shadow-people who want to kill me?" And given the influences, there' no way it's going to be simple or expected.

Withdrawal from Control

 So, I really liked Control.

Having now completed the main mission of Control's second DLC expansion, AWE, I'm at a point where there's not really any big story-relevant things to do in the game anymore - just some side-missions that don't really promise a lot of interesting revelations (I could be wrong, to be fair).

AWE, to me, leaned in to the game's strengths more than the Foundation one. Foundation was, I think, longer, and did delve into the deep lore of the FBC and the Oldest House, while AWE served primarily to confirm that Control and Alan Wake take place in the same fictional universe. But most of what I got from Foundation was simply a series of elaborate puzzles in the Astral Plane - one of those blank voids that tends to have more power as a setting the less time we spend there. AWE takes place in a lost and locked-down sector within the FBC - the Investigations Sector - where the darkness that is the main threat from Alan Wake has infected things and mixed like chocolate and peanut butter with the Hiss. In Wake's words, the two enhance one another in terrible ways - a sound made darker, a darkness made louder.

Returning us to the brutalist offices and warehouses of the Oldest House in contrast to the more natural (if weird) caves of Foundation, there's more of an invitation to speculate on the functionality of these rooms that are, admittedly, really meant as a challenge for traversal.

We're probably past the statute of limitations on spoilers here, but just in case: Spoilers Ahead:

Actually, also, Spoilers for Stephen King's Dark Tower series as well.

Into the Depths of Control's Foundation

 I have now played through Control's first DLC (I think first,) Foundation. Taking place after the events of the main game (while I do think it's the first one they released, I also believe that the second, AWE, can be started while still in the middle of the main plot,) this sees you descend into cavernous depths of the Oldest House and resolve a crisis in which the house and the Astral Plane are bleeding into one another.

DLC, or its previous iteration, the Expansion Pack, is always kind of funny. It's not quite a sequel, but you hope that it sort of becomes a big, memorable part of the game you've already enjoyed.

But, inevitably, it's going to be a tighter, smaller experience. And if, like I've just done, you play it pretty much immediately after the completion of the main game, sometimes that smallness can feel disappointing.

Not counting World of Warcraft expansions (which, despite technically being expansion packs, truly are essentially sequels) the DLC content I've played the most of in recent years has been that of FromSoft games. Bloodborne had its excellent Old Hunters expansion, while Dark Souls III had its so-so-except for an insane final boss Ashes of Ariendele and its somehow-even-harder-than-the-main-game The Ringed City.

I got both of these games as whole pieces, and played through (what I could beat of, in the case of DSIII) the DLC before finishing up the main game, making them feel like thematically connected side-quests. In a way, you could almost liken DLC to a post-finale movie based on a TV show - the show has hopefully resolved its main plot by the time of its finale, but that also means that at best the movie is going to be an extra-long episode.

Foundation is a challenge, and is absolutely a change of scenery - we spend most of the DLC in the natural (though with otherworldy bright red sand that is reminiscent of that salt planet from the end of The Last Jedi) caverns that lie beneath the Oldest House, or out in the white void of the Astral Plane.

But I think the DLC loses some of the stuff that really appealed to me about Control in the first place. It's mostly concerned with environmental puzzles, and while we get some lore about the discovery of the Oldest House and the FBC's move-in there, along with the birth of the Service Weapon-derived authority of a Board-appointed Director (interestingly it looks like Jesse is only the third such Director after Trench, and before him, Northmoor - interesting how that name feels connected to Polaris, the north star). Still, tragically missing are the wonderful Doctor Darling videos, and given that only a short segment of the DLC actually takes place in FBC offices (a department that was for some reason sucked down into the Foundation) there aren't nearly as many fun notes and memos to read and collect.

I do wonder if I'd have liked it more if I had played the game when it first came out in 2019, and had to wait for more Control content. I'm almost tempted to try to hold off on playing AWE for a little bit and see if that whets my appetite a little more.

It is funny, though - given that Control takes place in a shared universe with other games by the same studio, I wonder if it would actually make sense to never make a direct sequel to it, but instead explore some other corner of the world they're building. I could imagine playing some future game in which Director Faden of the FBC is a friendly NPC who helps us out.

I'm also tempted to go back and play Alan Wake, if it's playable on the PS5.

Control, the New Weird, and the Conspiracy Theorist's Wish

 When I was first introduced to the concept of a conspiracy theory, it was sort of benign.

Oh, spoilers for the main plot of Control.

Taking Control

 So, I beat the main story of Control.

It's interesting: Control is sort of a Metroidvania game - you get various things that allow you to explore more of the Oldest House, where the game takes place, and then find new items and abilities that let you explore further in those new places - but it's also playing around with being an open-world game. Frequently over the course of the game, you'll get side missions and even randomized, periodic alerts that require you to complete their missions within the next 20 minutes (this actually reminded me a bit of the turf wars from GTA San Andreas, actually).

Of course, Control's Oldest House is almost the opposite of an Open World. The brutalist nightmare is all labyrinthine corridors and artificial lighting. In that sense, it shares a bit of the Metroid-style exploration where sometimes the challenge is more about how one gets from here to there.

The version of the game I got (unsurprising given that it's a 4-year-old game) comes with DLC, which I'm sure I'll get around to, though it felt like a good stopping place to pause when the credits rolled (the real credits, I should say).

While the source of the major threat is removed with the game's (or, perhaps we should say, the main mission's) ending, the justification for allowing you to continue on with other content in it does have the sort of bummer effect of never letting you truly consider the crisis resolved. If the Hiss-infected people in the building were all gone, there wouldn't be much game anymore, but also, you know, until then, you can't actually leave the building.

I guess that's just the nature of video games - you can't go beyond the boundaries of the spaces they've actually built.

I've been feeling kind of sick and gross the last couple days (possibly food poisoning) and to an extent I think maybe I should have held off on playing more of this until I was feeling physically better. The aesthetic of this New Weird genre that I find so interesting is, in part, interesting because of the kind of unpleasantness of its mundanity.

I don't really know what I think of the thing overall. I think mostly positively - though as is often the case I kind of see this as a lot of really good first ideas that maybe need refinement (I'll have to see how the DLCs are).

Entering the Oldest House in Control

 I have a soft spot for kind of mid-century aesthetics and government conspiracies around paranormal events. When I was a kid, the X-Files was a really popular show (one that I didn't watch until I was in my 20s) and I think, to a large extent, thanks in part to that show (which itself owed a lot to the far more surreal Twin Peaks) but also to the end of the Cold War and questions about what that massive intelligence apparatus was up to now that the Soviet threat was gone (in 2023, the notion that we wouldn't have to worry about a sinister, autocratic regime in Russia seems very naive in retrospect,) there was a lot of interest in cryptids and UFOs and that sort of thing during my childhood.

As an aesthetic, it's something I dig.

On a friend's recommendation, I've started playing Control. The game is an enigma from the get-go. You play as Jesse (or do you? She seems to address the player as a kind of unseen partner,) who finds the Federal Bureau of Control - a secret government agency that investigates and contains paranormal stuff. We've got fragments of a backstory - Jesse mentions her brother was taken by the FBC 17 years ago, and so we assume she's trying to find him, though she's also evidently drawn by the mysteries the FBC investigates.

However, as soon as she shows up, things are already in a bad state - the place appears to be empty. She meets a janitor who somehow opens an elevator that wasn't there at first, and you go into the building. Jesse finds the director of the bureau, evidently dead of a self-inflicted (or probably not) wound. Upon taking up the gun, though, Jesse is contacted by an eldritch intelligence that takes the form of a pyramid known as The Board, and is anointed the new Director.

The building is under threat by a presence that Jesse identifies as "The Hiss," and, being director, that terminology is quickly adopted by the other employees who have not be infected by its essence.

I'm in the early stages - I've got some crafting materials that I don't yet know how to use. It's early goings, but I really dig the vibe, even if I sort of wish there had been a little slower of a build-up to the truly otherworldly stuff going on.

The game does seem built to have a lot of rug-pulling twists. I'm definitely skeptical of the friendly NPC I've just met. I'm also curious about who "I" am, as Jesse does a lot of narration speaking to the player - I think.

God of War Ragnarok

 When I was a Sophomore in college, I heard about a game called God of War - it was supposedly amazing, where you fought your way across the world of Greek mythology. I've been a big fan of Greek myth my entire life, and so I was intrigued.

The game, which had come with the most amazing reviews and recommendations... I didn't really like it. I played through a substantial portion of it, but gave up at a late stage where you had to climb up these bloody pillars in the underworld where if you made any error you had to start the whole thing over. It didn't really feel worth my time. The protagonist was the epitome of mid-2000s edgelords, who seemed to just kind of hate everyone and not really have any redeeming qualities. It was just a rage simulator (though admittedly one that was also built around a lot of platforming puzzles).

The game went on to finish out a trilogy, where the non-Ares Olympians were revealed as villains as well that Kratos would go on to slaughter, but even as people raved about how good the games were, I kind of ignored them. They were also gore-fests - I remember seeing a clip of the fight against Cronus in which viscerally gross violence was performed to his titanic fingernails and I said "eh, pass."

So, when "God of War" (actually God of War 4, but this was at the height of the "name a legacy sequel the same as the original" trend) came out in 2018, showing Kratos relocated from the realm of Greek myth to one of Norse myth, I was skeptical.

But what I saw of it also looked, well, fun. And furthermore, the characterization had shifted significantly. Kratos was no longer the young, hot-blooded rage monster, but instead an aged, weary figure whose primary goal now was raising a son he struggles to understand.

Kratos is still kind of an asshole at the start of the fourth game, and he's not a good father. But the journey that he and Atreus take together to grieve Atreus' mother (who is only kind of a suggested presence in that game) along with the confrontation with the "Stranger" who is actually a key figure to the apocalyptic prophecies of Ragnarok, lead to a complex and interesting narrative.

The 2018 game was good, though I think some of its promise is left a little underbaked - you get the sense that the budget was big enough to qualify as a AAA game, but they were figuring out a lot of things - not the least of which a radically different gameplay style and visual tone.

God of War Ragnarok does a lot of things really well - one is that it fulfills the promise of 4's massive open world that allows you to travel to all 9 realms of Norse myth (admittedly, even here a couple of the realms are reserved only for specific story chapters).

What is particularly effective, though, is the way that it actually feels like a fitting end for this saga.

Again, I never finished 1 nor played 2 or 3, so I can't comment very well on the Greek portion of Kratos' journey. But over the course of these past games, we see something that is sadly rare in this era of endless franchises. Kratos changes - significantly. By the end of the story, you actually feel that maybe, just maybe, Kratos is going to know peace and actually feel he's truly redeemed himself.

Now, a lot of figures from Norse myth are going to have to die for that to happen, but this isn't a wholesale slaughter - the Aesir are portrayed as complex and nuanced (well, except Heimdall, who's just a total bastard). In particular, while Thor plays an antagonistic role and certainly has a lot to answer for, at the same time you can see how he became that way, and I think he's not straight-up a villain, per se.

Odin absolutely is, and is unquestionably the prime antagonist of the story. Given that these games have always been an examination of western culture, Odin is naturally the representative of patriarchy. What I think is amazing about his portrayal (played by the West Wing's Richard Schiff, whose likeness is used for the in-game model) is that you can absolutely see that there is some kernel of something sympathetic within him. His goals are not strictly evil - it's just that the only way he understands how to deal with others is to manipulate them. He constantly belittles Thor as a dumb brute in order to keep him the dumb brute he can send after his foes. And he offers to teach Atreus magic in exchange for help with his quest, but really winds up just having Atreus use his skills and powers to aid Odin's goals without really doing anything for him in return.

Now, I'll admit that having played a ton of Elden Ring, my expectations for Open Worlds is quite high - there are elements of Ragnarok's world that I found frustrating (in particular, when returning to an area I'd completed earlier in the game to fight one of the Berserkers that are part of a major side quest, I got lost for like an hour going in circles just trying to get out to one of the Mystic Gateways that allow you to travel the realms, and got genuinely panicked and frustrated) and I think the difficulty of the game swung wide and unpredictably (I eventually wound up playing on the lowest difficulty when confronting one of those Berserkers in Alfheim and just kept it low so I could see the story - though even on that difficulty setting, the Berserker, who has two side-bosses with them, was still very hard).

Still, this is an emotionally satisfying game experience, and one that I think anyone with any affection for this series will probably think is a fitting end to it.

We'll of course see whether it is - corporations love branding. But I think that it would be kind of sad to see Kratos dragged into some new conflict when this could be the close of his story.

Anticipating Weapons in One D&D

 Cryptically, we've gotten a number of hints in the One D&D playtest documents that we'll be seeing some changes to how weapons work. This is likely going to come with the Warrior class group UA, which will give us the Barbarian, Fighter, and Monk (I hope we get all together instead of breaking them up like they did for the Priests).

What we do know that Warriors will share is Fighting Styles - Rangers and Paladins are given them as a sort of exception, but it appears this will be the uniting feature the way that Expertise is for Experts and Channel Divinity/Nature is for Priests.

That's actually interesting given that in 5E (I'll be using this to describe the current version of the game - I'm trying to decide on a good abbreviation for One D&D - maybe ODD, or One, or 6E) only one of those classes gets them.

But the change to weapons will have implications for many classes - not just Warriors (that is, unless only Warriors will benefit from these special properties).

The thing is: we have no idea what those properties are or how they will differ from the current system.

In 5E, there are sort of four broad categories of weapons. There are Natural Weapons and Unarmed Strikes, which are outside of the purview of this post, and then Simple and Martial Weapons. In 5E, classes are often given specific weapon proficiencies, though some simply get "Simple Weapons" or "Simple and Martial Weapons" if they're not really restricted. Furthermore, there are Melee Weapons and Ranged Weapons.

(Actually, in point of fact, Firearms, which exist only in the DMG, but then again so do +1 weapons, are technically just Martial Weapons, which means any Fighter, Barbarian, Ranger, or Paladin could show up to a fight with a machine gun.)

There are, then, a number of properties that are applied to different weapons, and there are kind of damage penalties for each feature:

If we look at the most powerful weapons (not counting firearms) - Mauls, Greatswords, and Greatxes - they deal 2d6 or 1d12 damage. These are all heavy, two-handed weapons. Glaives, Pikes, and Halberds are bumped down to 1d10 in exchange for Reach. The Heavy Crossbow gets bumped down in damage twice for being a ranged weapon, but then back up one for having the Loading property (which prevents you from using it with Multiattack, for example). The Longbow is bumped down twice, but lacking loading doesn't get bumped up again, so it has 1d8.

The Longsword, Warhammer, and Battleaxe are only bumped down once to 1d10 if wielded in two hands, but bumped down twice if you use their versatile property to wield them in one hand. Flails, War Picks, and Morningstars are bumped down the same amount, but without the versatility to get a d10 for using both hands (also, oddly, Morningstars are both heavier and more expensive than War Picks, making them strictly worse).  Rapiers are in a similar category to these last few, except they get the finesse property without paying any additional cost. (While not as heavy, they're substantially more expensive than the other 1d8 piercing weapons).

Thrown weapons take a penalty as well - Tridents, Spears, and Javelins are all 1d6 weapons (though Tridents and Spears can also up their damage to 1d8 if wielded with both hands). Likewise, the Light property seems to inflict a penalty to damage on top of being one-handed, as no light weapon does more than 1d6 damage. The Dagger, then, pays a bunch of penalties - it's light, thrown, and finesse, so it gets downgraded all the way to 1d4.

There are some oddities - the Quarterstaff is similar to the Trident or Spear in that it's 1d6 in one hand or 1d8 in two, but cannot be thrown. And then you have the stranger "Special" weapons, such as the Lance, which gets to do a full 1d12 damage but has the very odd properties of being designed to only work well at max reach (if you attack someone within 5 feet you have disadvantage) and only allowing you to wield it one-handed if you're also mounted (and given that mounted combat is a sort of underdeveloped part of the game, that's somewhat rare).

But anyway, that's a lot of data that sort of boils down to the following: if you're willing to wield a heavy, two-handed weapon, your damage caps at 12. If you want a one-handed weapon, the best you can get is 1d8, and only then if you're not wielding a weapon in your off-hand. If you want to dual-wield, you'll be using weapons that do d6s.

And this also then means that a lot of weapon types are almost never going to be good as others. Why would you use a Greatclub when a Quarterstaff does just as much damage but can also be one-handed and can be used if you're small-sized?

In a lot of cases, the answer is basically flavor. On a character who always uses a shield, there's no real penalty to using a Flail instead of a Warhammer - even if the latter is strictly better other than costing 5g more. As a DM, I sometimes like to hand out unusual magic weapons to encourage people to try them out (one of these days I'm going to drop a +3 Lance in a tier 1 party and see how much they'll bend over backwards to make use of that bonus).

But the weapons could certainly be more interesting and impactful. In particular, I like to point out that Glaives and Halberds are actually functionally identical. Like, they do the same damage, weigh the same amount, cost the same amount, and are both affected by the Polearm Master feat in the same way (something that cannot be said for Pikes, which are otherwise similar weapons that do piercing damage).

One example we've seen referred to, though not yet identified, is that Shortswords and Scimitars are meant to "play different roles" in ODD (I guess I'll use that abbreviation).

In 5E, both are one-handed, light martial melee weapons finesse. Oddly, Rogues get proficiency with Shortswords while Druids get proficiency with Scimitars. Scimitars are significantly more expensive, and weigh a little more, and they deal slashing damage while shortswords deal piercing damage.

In ODD, the only change we've seen is that Shortswords have been made into Simple weapons, rather than Martial ones, which more or less makes them usable by all classes. This move to use broad categories actually means that Druids will be swapping their Scimitars for Shortswords, as the former are still Martial Weapons, but Druids now just get proficiency in Simple Weapons and not a long, broad list.

So, other than the damage type difference, what will separate these two?

I must confess I'm at a bit of a loss - how much of an impactful mechanic can you place on these weapons before they get busy and possibly mess with gameplay balance?

But let's also ask a different question: what do we want to incentivize here?

The groups I have played D&D with have typically been fairly flavor-first. We're a bunch of writers, actors, and creative types, and so while we enjoy the strategy game of it all, we're here more for the big dramatic moments that RPGs can allow. As such, we usually have a good mix of melee and ranged characters.

But one of the balance issues that has always been part of RPG design is how to reward melee characters for making the choice to go right up to the monster and risk getting smacked in the face - not to mention the need to get up to said monsters in order to smack them.

As a Warlock, I can pelt my foe with Eldritch Blasts from 120 feet away. With Agonizing Blast (an invocation I think like 99% of Warlocks take at level 2) I'm hitting for 1d10+Cha Force damage - the equivalent of a Heavy Crossbow but without the loading property and dealing damage that almost nothing can resist (and matching a Fighter for number of attacks per round, even leapfrogging them at level 17, getting a fourth attack three levels before they do).

If I'm somewhat selfish and just looking to be the best single-target damage dealer in the party, why would I want to risk my hide getting into melee with that Frost Giant when I could be chilling way back here with a Margarita at a spot said giant will have to spend three turns (or one and a half while dashing) just to get close enough to attack me (boulders notwithstanding)?

Certainly, there are tank characters focused on drawing attacks from those foes and locking them down as best they can (and thus keeping the Margarita-sipping Warlock free to blast from afar) but if we're just trying to deal damage, why be in melee?

So, one thing I wonder about is whether we'll see melee weapons gain new properties to improve their effect. What might this look like beyond bigger damage dice, though?

Ok, so let's talk about Short Swords versus Scimitars. The former is now a Simple Weapon, while the latter is Martial.

It seems obvious that Martial Weapons should be more powerful than Simple Weapons - they require special training to use effectively, after all. And this is, of course, born out in the 5E versions - a Mace is not as good as a Flail, despite both being one-handed melee weapons that do bludgeoning damage.

But the Shortsword and Scimitar are used basically the same way in 5E.

Now, I could possibly imagine making light weapons that deal 1d8 damage in ODD, but that does kind of shuffle things around - now there's even less of a reason to use a Morningstar.

What if, instead, Martial Weapons conferred a defensive bonus?

Shields are used to block and deflect attacks. But a skilled swordsman also uses their weapon to parry attacks. What if Scimitars added a +1 to your AC? Perhaps you need to be wielding two of them to get this property (otherwise having two would give you the same bonus as a Shield). This actually makes flavorful sense - someone with flashing scimitars in both hand seems like they'd be able to knock incoming attacks out of the way.

That defensive benefit is certainly a possible universal trait, but what if we went a little crazy?

Again, this could contribute to rules bloat, but let's let our imagination run wild and then see how close it is to the actual solution.

One of the main reasons, historically, that things like Warhammers were used historically was their ability to puncture armor. Actually, if you google images of War Hammers and War Picks, you kind of get almost identical images - both looked not all that dissimilar to a hammer you might find in a toolbox, though rather than the Peen (yes, that's the term for the forked bit on the other side of a hammer that you use to pry up nails. Get your mind out of the gutter) it's more of a spike (really the pick side, as opposed to the hammer side). Given that a lot of armor like chain mail was designed to stop bladed weapons, the hammer either ignored the inability to penetrate by just hitting with massive concussive force, and the pick/spike could, when coming in with all that weight behind it, go right through the loops of chain mail or even sometimes a metal plate itself.

Perhaps, then, something like a War Pick could ignore a certain amount of armor - maybe you get a +1 to hit the target, though no extra damage (or vice versa).

If we wanted to get really crunchy, a War Pick might reduce the target's effective AC by 1 only if they're wearing armor. By contrast, a Flail, given its unpredictable arc, might reduce the target's AC by 1 only if they are gaining some benefit from Dexterity (as in, if they're not wearing heavy armor).

That's all well and good, but dear lord would it make things complicated. AC itself is an abstraction in order to keep things from getting too complicated (I've tried multiple times to homebrew an armor system that distinguishes between armor and your overall evasiveness, and while it could be cool, it's basically a different RPG system at that point).

One thing I'd hope here is that if we got interesting but playably simple enough distinctions for these weapons, we might find a way to balance Firearms and make them an easier option to add to the game. (It's funny, in real life I'm very anti-gun, but my urge to escape medieval stasis in fantasy makes me a major opponent of fantasy gun control). (My favorite solution is to make firearms use two weapon dice, similar to the modern guns in 5E, but have you not add your Dexterity modifier to the damage - highly Dexterous characters will get consistently higher damage with a bow, but guns are more exciting on a crit and can be used more easily by people with lower Dex).

Given that we're not even getting the survey for Druids and Paladins for another two weeks, I think we've got a bit of a wait before we really see what they're working on here. (Hell, we might get Mages next.) Still, put me down as intrigued.

Fixing One D&D's Wild Shape

 The most recent One D&D playtest document gave us updated versions of the Druid and the Paladin, filling out the set of "Priest" classes and leaving us with the Warriors and Mages to get all twelve of the PHB classes (I'm still bummed the Artificer isn't being put in the PHB, but oh well).

The Paladin's changes were relatively minor, with a slight nerf but an expansion to the versatility of Divine Smite, and a few other tweaks that will need iteration, but leaves the class viable as it was before, if not a little more.

The Druid got a more extensive redesign, specifically regarding Wild Shape. While the Druid can serve as the game's nature-mage, and that's actually the core of the class, the ability to transform into various beasts is arguably its most iconic ability. Druids in other fantasy RPGs tend to also get shapeshifting abilities, making the Druid kind of the "shapeshifter class" when going through classic RPG archetypes.

The revisions to the Druid put this capability front and center, allowing you to use Wild Shape at 1st level through the new "Channel Nature" feature that is basically identical to Channel Divinity for Clerics and Paladins. We've seen "wild shape charges" used as a resource for subclass features, like the Cirlce of Stars, Wildfire, and Spores, and so I suspect that most subclasses will be using this in some other way (Circle of the Moon, our one example subclass, does not, but given that it's the "Wild Shape" subclass, I think that's all right).

So, before we propose any tweaks, we've got to talk about the core concepts we'll be keeping.

One D&D's Wild Shape no longer has the Druid player crack open the Monster Manual and search for Beasts within a certain Challenge Rating range. Instead, you get access to a stat block, and later two others, which cover any transformation you choose - a Wolf, Tiger, Bear, Spider, Elk, or Snake are all covered by the Animal of the Land stat block.

I actually think this is a good change. It is certainly a limitation, but it's a simplification that will free future design to make as many crazy beasts as the designers want. As long as these stat blocks are tuned tightly, I think this is the right direction to go for the ability (I also suspect that Conjuration spells will get a similar rework, as we've seen with Find Familiar and Find Steed). So, I'm happy about this change - it's a question of tuning those stat blocks.

I actually think this is the block we need to focus on the most, as the Sea and Sky animals necessarily sacrifice a bit of power for their alternate mobility modes. You could argue that Sea in particular should not be that much farther behind, which I'd probably agree with, but we'll kind of set them aside and make the assumption that the latter two blocks will receive similar changes.

So, let's look at the Animal of the Land as presented in this first Druid UA:

Animal of the Land

Small, Medium, or Large Terrestrial Animal (Your Creature Type Doesn't Change)

Armor Class: 10 + your Wisdom Modifier

Hit Points: You continue to use your Hit Points and Hit Dice

Speed: 40 ft., Climb 40 ft. (requires 5th+ level)

STR, DEX equal your Wisdom Score

CON, INT, WIS, CHA use your scores

Senses: Darkvision 60 ft.

Languages: the languages you know

Proficiency Bonus: equals your Proficiency Bonus

Keen Senses: You have advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks

Actions:

Bestial Strike: Melee Weapon Attack: your Spell Attack Modifier to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 1d8+your wisdom modifier Bludgeoning, Piercing, or Slashing damage.

Multiattack (Requires 5th+ level): You make two Bestial Strike attacks.

    So, let's break this down:

First off, you choose your size when you transform. I think that's fine, and can be a strategic choice - being larger makes you harder to push around. What I think is odd is that you don't change creature type. An elf druid who transforms into a Panther will still be a humanoid. This actually removes some of the benefit, as you remain susceptible to spells like Hold Person or Charm Person, and almost makes this seem more like an illusion than a real transformation. I think it'd be fine to just have you turn into a Beast (yes, I realize that this lets you turn into an owlbear and get over the beast/monstrosity divide - maybe you could choose one or the other).

Now, let's talk AC. This one might be a long discussion, as it, along with HP, are kind of at the core of my issues with the new system.

In One D&D, Druids get training with shields and light armor (no weird "medium armor as long as it's not made of metal" stuff). A druid could have a decent Dexterity, but let's assume it never goes up to more than a +2 - say you start at 14 and never touch it again. In Studded Leather (which is cheap enough to be able to get pretty early on) and with a shield, you would thus have an AC of 16.

This stat block is meant to be something of a front-line fighter - you only have melee attacks, after all, and the whole flavor and fantasy of Wild Shape is about turning into a bear or other mighty beast and mixing it up in melee. But until you hit level 20 and get new new Epic Boon feature, or if you get the very rare stat-increasing magic book for Wisdom, you will never have an AC higher than 15 here.

Now, with the old (current) form of Wild Shape, it's true that most beasts you can transform into also have pretty low ACs. A Dire Wolf only has 14, and a Brown Bear only has 11. So, you might look at this and say that that's fair.

But that's because we haven't accounted for HP.

Here, we need to look at the Wild Shape feature itself for clarification: in the old/current version, when you transform, you assume the creature's hit points and hit dice - and that becomes a separate pool from your own. If you're a Dire Wolf and you take 40 damage, the Wolf form absorbs 37 of those, and only 3 are then deducted from your own humanoid form's HP.

Thus, while yes, your AC is certainly lower than a Fighter in full plate with a shield, you can take a lot of punishment because you can absorb a lot of damage.

Now, I will certainly concede that making a Druid in Wild Shape as powerful as a Fighter would be overpowered - the Druid has the massive versatility of being a full spellcaster, after all, while the Fighter only has their martial abilities.

But as this currently functions, one begins to wonder why you would even use this in the first place.

At level 1, a Druid could have the Shillelagh cantrip, and thus use a quarterstaff with their wisdom modifier to deal 1d8+Wis on a hit - which you'll note is the same damage as the Animal's attack. The Druid, as we've seen earlier, likely has a higher AC. The only things they're missing are the increased speed (unless they're a Centaur, though admittedly many aren't) and the Keen Senses. But their damage output is the same, and their survivability is slightly better. (I'll concede that one slight bonus is that, by using Wisdom to determine Dex and Str, it makes their saving throws better - though there are some format issues where technically they lose proficiency with all saving throws here, so...)

At 5, to be fair, things get a little better for the Wild Shape form. Shillelagh doesn't scale up with level, and cantrips that do will do so slower than the damage here - Produce Flame doing 2d8 fire damage is not quite as good as 2(1d8+4).

So, then, how do we fix this?

As it stands, Wild Shape provides no defensive bonus, and actually a defensive penalty, when it should absolutely be providing a bonus to allow a character who is primarily a squishy spellcaster to mix it up on the front lines. (Hey! It's the thesis of the post! We got there!) This, I believe, is the core of the problem with the new design, and fixing it would mean the rest of the changes would be mere polish (like letting you turn Tiny way, way earlier than level 11).

As I see it, there are three ways you can achieve this.

The first, and the one I'm going to actually just reject out of hand, is giving the form resistance to "kinetic" damage. We don't actually know how Rage resistance is going to work in One D&D, but I think this likely steps on the Barbarian's toes a little too much. It's also not very flavorful - why should your Druid's animal form be more resistant to damage than the creature you've transformed into?

The second is buffing HP. This is how the current/old Wild Shape works, with a big pool of HP on top of the Druid's regular HP. It's also kind of imitated in the Spore Druid's Symbiotic Entity, which gives them Temp HP equal to 4 times their Druid level, and grants its benefits as long as those Temp HP are up. Essentially, you deal with the fact that your Druid is going to get hit much more by not really caring so much about the damage they are taking.

The third change would be to increase the base AC of the Animal forms, putting your AC on par with other dedicated melee combatants.

Now, these three aren't mutually exclusive, but I think that if you combine them, you run the risk of making the Druid too powerful - again, we don't want a Druid to be as powerful as a Fighter, Barbarian, Paladin, or Monk in melee (we haven't seen the updated Monk yet, but the Monk should absolutely be as powerful as those others in melee).

Let's talk about fixing the AC first because I think it's simpler to do.

Both Heavy and Medium armor-wearers can easily start the game with an AC of 16 - the former simply gets that flat amount from Chain Mail, while the latter only needs to have a +2 to Dexterity to achieve that with Scale Mail. On top of that, a Shield provides 2 additional AC. As such, many such characters can push that up to 18 from the very start if they're willing to sacrifice the ability to use two-handed weapons (or, in the case of my Eldritch Knight, drop their weapon every time they want to cast a spell).

Without looking at magic items, medium-armor wearers can push that up to 17/19 when they upgrade to half-plate, while heavy armor wearers can get to 17/19 with Splint armor. Heavy Armor than caps out with with Plate armor, which allows them to achieve 18/20 AC.

I think it would be reasonable, then, to allow Druids in Wild Shape to match, say, a Hexblade Warlock in terms of AC. A Hexblade can wear medium armor and a shield, meaning they can get up to that 19 level before talking about any kind of magic armor.

And, as it turns out, it's pretty simple to accomplish that. As it stands, the Animal of the Land has an AC equal to 10 + your Wisdom modifier. If we bump that up to 12+Wis, we get an AC that starts at 15 on most Druids and caps out at 17. If we wanted to incorporate the Shield, we simply make it 14 + Wis.

This means that a level 1 Druid could take on a form with a 17 AC (slightly less than someone with scale mail and a shield) but who will eventually get 19 once they max out their Wisdom (and up to 20 when they hit max level and presumably give their Epic Boon ASI to Wisdom).

So... honestly, does that solve it? Have we fixed it just by tweaking this number?

I think this would be a somewhat decent solution, if a bit uninspired. The benefit here is that you absolutely gain a combat benefit here unless your Druid has for some reason maxed out their Dexterity. This would certainly help fulfill the fantasy of Wild Shape better than the current version.

But I'm kind of inclined to go a different way - maybe just out of a sentimental attachment to the current/old version.

What would we need to do to make this worth it even if the AC remains pitifully low? How would we approach the HP situation?

This actually has, potentially, another simple solution, which is to just give the Wild Shape form its own pool of HP. Just as it is on the "live" game, you'd be knocked out of Wild Shape if the form's HP is reduced to zero, but the humanoid underneath is ok. The exact amount of HP each form should have would be sort of open to debate - you probably don't want a whole other Druid's worth of HP, because I think that's the reason for this nerf in the first place.

But what if we take a page out of the Spore Druid's book and say that the HP of your Wild Shape is equal to 4 times your Druid level?

That sounds good until you look at how that would look at level 1: you spend your action to get into your Tiger form, and a Zombie happens to land a hit and rolls a 3 on their d6 and you pop out of that form immediately.

Granted, at level 1 your Druid probably has like 10 HP, so that's still a 40% increase. But it seems kind of weak.

Maybe we need to just tweak the numbers. Six times your Druid level?

That looks a little better at early levels - your Druid having 16 HP and then a Wild Shape with 12 HP seems pretty good - indeed, under current rules, you could take the form of a Wolf at level 2 with 11 HP.

What about much later, though? A level 15 Druid with, say, +3 to Con, will have 123 HP, and their Wild Shape under this form would have 90. That's slightly under-par for a Moon Druid, but of course much better than other Druids whose CR caps out at 1.

Honestly, though, that's not really that bad, actually.

Now, I don't know how important it is to the designers that they rid Wild Shape of the whole "extra HP" thing. If they've identified that as the big problem with the feature, then perhaps this latter solution is too similar to the old version. Certainly, there are builds like the Barbarian/Druid who stretch that extra HP into insane damage absorption.

Still, I think that either the HP buff or the AC buff are necessary (and maybe both) to make Wild Shape fulfill the fantasy it's meant to.

Now, the rest of the issues I think are more about semantics and tweaking. Right now, the way the ability is described causes some weird interactions like losing all your skill proficiencies. I think it's obvious that if you keep your mind when you transform, you should also retain your knowledge about Religion or your ability to have Insights into the people around you.

This is all stuff that I think can be changed with relative ease, though.

We also didn't touch on damage, so I'll address that real quick:

The damage is a little low, but it's sort of in line with a Warlock's Eldritch Blast, at least at low levels. I'm actually kind of fine with the damage being sort of low if you don't take a subclass that focuses on Wild Shape - the Moon Druid in this UA gets to add d6s of elemental damage, which I think is plenty when you put it on top of the powerful full spellcaster a Druid is. This should be a situational option for most Druids, and not have to be the full, most efficient damage-dealing feature for the class.

Again, the key here is making Wild Shape something that grants you enough of a defensive benefit to justify wading into melee - a realm of D&D combat that is way more dangerous than being at ranged (as someone who has played a bunch of melee characters, playing my Wizard now has been a very different experience - in the whole campaign so far I've probably taken less than 50 total damage).