Getting Down With Disco Elysium

 So, I started playing Disco Elysium.

The game's four years old, and I've heard amazing things about it, but I was, and frankly am still, a little wary of its format. I've bounced off of Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment because I just didn't jive with their gameplay style, even if (especially in the latter case) I'm very curious about the story.

Disco Elysium clearly builds off of that gameplay format. For example, a big part of the game appears to be dialogue streams where you have numbered potential responses. Honestly, it's not actually all that different from the conversation wheels in Mass Effect.

But Disco Elysium might be closer to an adventure game - I haven't had any "combat" yet, and I don't really expect to.

You play as an amnesiac police officer who went on a multi-day bender of drugs and booze and remembers literally nothing, but soon discovers that you're actually there to investigate the apparent murder of a man hanging from a tree behind the hostel in which you woke up.

The world is not ours - I'm scratching the surface of it, but it appears we're in a place called Ravechol, and within that, in a neighborhood or city called Martinaise.

Things are run-down and bleak, just like our character, whose face is frozen through some kind of nerve damage or something into "The Expression," which was apparently something some rock star had as a signature decades earlier when Disco became very popular.

The bleak 1970s-ish setting is one of the signature aspects of the game, but probably the most distinctive is that our character has internal conversations with different instincts and mental processes in his brain, which have idiosyncratic names and distinctive voices.

These elements of our mind are also our main stats - I haven't actually leveled up yet, but you can pick various character builds (I chose "Sensitive," one of the three default ones) that emphasize the influence of certain traits, and these can be leveled up.

And, in various situations, these traits will pop up to give you advice and options on how to proceed.

I have no idea if I'm playing "well" or even if that's a thing one can do.

Back when I was a kid, I used to play the Space Quest games with my best friend, along with some King's Quest and Quest for Glory. The latter incorporated RPG elements and combat, but the former two were pretty strictly adventure games - you explored an environment, maybe collected items for your inventory, and then used those items to overcome the environmental puzzles (often in really non-obvious ways that made using a guide very appealing, even if that sort of defeated any challenge in the game).

And I sort of get that vibe from this - so far at least, it seems to be mostly about uncovering this mystery, and trying to talk to people in a way that helps you progress your case.

But I'm also barely into the game - I've gotten out of the first building, looked at the corpse (and threw up) and talked to the punk kids hurling rocks at it, and then talked to a girl outside a bookstore. Oh, and I might have talked to a ghost over a PA system?

Early on, you meet your partner - actually another cop sent from another precinct who might actually be there to solve the case before you do, but he seems to be working with you for now at least. The fact that you can tell him you have total retrograde amnesia and his response is more or less "hm, that sucks, and you should probably do something about that, but let's take care of this case first" says a lot.

This does not seem to be a great world to live in.

Anyway, I'm going to try to keep plugging away at the game. There's potential here.

Spellcasters of the Monster Manual

 One of the most notable redesigns we got in Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse was the transformation of spellcasting statblocks. The Evoker from Volo's Guide to Monsters, for example, has the Sculpt Spells feature of the playable subclass, and then just has the ordinary spell slot loadout of a 12th level wizard, with a bunch of prepared spells. Their only "action" is to whack with a quarterstaff - something you'll probably never do as a DM, as it causes this CR 9 creature to deal 3 damage a round.

The Evoker Wizard, the MotM replacement, does have spells, and some even that do damage (like Lightning Bolt,) but they don't use spell slots and their primary meat-and-potatoes attack action is a multiattack that allows them to shoot three Arcane Bursts - spell attacks that deal 25 damage on a hit.

The point here is that a creature like this is way easier to run. They can absolutely shoot off a lightning bolt or two, but when in doubt, the DM can just have them shoot these Arcane Bursts and the damage output should be appropriate or the CR (skewing a little more toward damage output given having less survivability - fitting as a wizard).

I really prefer this sort of stat block. Spells and spell slots work very well as a player-facing mechanic, but if you want a conclave of evil wizards for your party to fight as a DM, you don't want to have seven different wizards, each with their own spell slots to track, and with a dozen different spells to pick from on each of them.

This, presumably, is the model moving forward for D&D spellcasters. And we're likely to see all the spellcasters in the Monster Manual transformed in a similar way.

Lots of creatures that cast spells have things like innate spellcasting, but that's clearly not being gotten rid of. Instead, it's the player-facing spell slot system that looks like it will be changing.

This post isn't really meant to go deep on the philosophy or design - I kind of just want a place to list all of these creatures to refer back to. So let's take a look, in alphabetical order, at all the creatures in the Monster Manual who use spell slots to cast spells.

Acolyte

Androsphinx

Arcanoloth

Archmage

Bone Naga

Cult Fanatic

Death Knight

Drow Mage

Drow Priestess of Lolth

Druid

Flameskull

Guardian Naga

Gynosphinx

Hag Covens (special)

Kuo-toa Archpriest

Kuo-toa Whip

Lich

Lizardfolk Shaman

Mage

Mind Flayer Arcanist (a variant option)

Mummy Lord

Orc Eye of Gruumsh

Priest

Sahuagin Priestess

Spirit Naga

Vampire Spellcaster (a variant option)

And there you have it. Of the 450 monsters (give or take) in the Monster Manual, these 25 (again, ish - Covens covers three types are the ones that would warrant a redesign.

Tons of other monsters can cast spells, but they do this via Innate Spellcasting, which in most cases presents such options as supplementary to either weapon attacks or bespoke abilities.

Violence, Morality, Deathloop, and Dishonored

 Dishonored came out eleven years ago. There was a stylish trailer with an off-beat version of "Drunken Sailor," though changed to "Drunken Whaler," given the way that the steampunk world of Dishonored ran on oil harvested by eldritch, supernatural whales. The look of the game was super cool, even if a bit more graphically violent than I tend to prefer.

It was made by Bethesda, and I'd found I really liked playing Stealth-oriented characters in their Elder Scrolls games, so it seemed like a great fit.

And I started it. The story was interesting - I was particularly compelled by The Outsider, this strange being that takes the form of a young man with black eyes who could honestly fill the role of any of D&D's three warlock patron options from its Player's Handbook - the Archfey, Fiend, or Great Old One.

The game is about seeking to dismantle the conspirators who murdered the Empress, who also happened to be the player character's lover, and to rescue your daughter with her, after you're framed for the assassination (you are, after all, in addition to being the Empress' consort, also her weapon).

Dishonored has an interesting mechanic, called Chaos. The bad guys are everywhere looking for you, which means you have to be sneaky - the game is also balanced in such a way that unless you're incredibly skilled, you'll quickly get overwhelmed and killed if you're detected and don't run for cover. But, also fitting that "sneak past them" emphasis on the gameplay, this is also reinforced thematically and mechanically by Chaos. The more people you kill, the more hostile the world gets. There are larger patrols, sure, as you'd expect the guards would want to shore up their defenses in response to such killings. But also, the world itself becomes more hostile - plague rats, for instance, grow in number. I don't think this is meant to simply reflect the greater number of bodies to spread disease, but rather a kind of supernatural judgment of the world you're creating with your actions.

Each "assassination target" that is the objective of your missions can be dealt with in a non-lethal way. These aren't necessarily nice - there's one mission where you can have a slaver sold to work in his own mine. But it means not murdering.

In life, I'm nearly a total pacifist. I get angry, and I definitely got in physical fights as a kid (though not generally past, say, age 11) and I definitely get the normal violent urges to lash out with a fist when I'm angry. But I don't. And the thought of committing truly dangerous, lethal violence, is abhorrent to me. (Also, something you begin to realize as an adult is that hitting someone can become that level of lethal in the right - or perhaps better to say wrong - circumstances. I think that most of the violence we condone culturally is only out of a chicken-and-egg vicious circle out of fear of violence. People wage wars because they expect others to attack them. And I think that even the most violent criminals deserve at the very worst a life sentence (and generally that we need to put fewer people in prison,) and that capital punishment is a barbarous relic of a dark age we should strive to move past.

And so, philosophically, I like this idea - that to get the "good" story and ending in these games, you need to commit to, if not total non-violence, then at least a serious effort to be better.

It's not easy. Sneaking past a guard is a lot easier when they're dead on the ground.

Now, until I get into my deep, Philosophy 101 navel-gazing, I don't think that the characters in a video game have any sentience - any inner life or experience, capacity to feel pain or loss. When a sniper bullet in Fallout 3 shatters a raider's skull, sending brains and eyeballs flying in different directions, I don't feel the shock, revulsion, and regret that I would feel if I saw that happen to someone in real life (maybe a little of the revulsion). What happens in these games, or indeed what happens in any work of fiction, has a crucial and important distinction from reality: it didn't actually happen.

Technically, Dishonored lets you play as a violent killer, slaughtering everyone in your way. But not only does it then raise barriers of difficulty in response, but it also makes the story play out differently.

Violence is common in video games. Even in the most all-ages games. Mario's basically the Micky Mouse of video games, and Mario games are basically designed to be any kid's first video game. But even in Mario games, you stomp on enemies' heads or drop the bad-guy turtle-dragon dudes into lava. Zelda games, which are also generally appropriate for young audiences, still have you playing the role of sword-slashing hero slaying monsters.

I mean, human stories have tended toward violence as a marker of heroism. The traditional masculine roles of hunter and protector are both about using violence to help their community.

Ok, I might be getting in the weeds here.

The point is, I started both Dishonored and more recently Dishonored 2. And I liked them. And then I gave up, just sort of walking away from them.

But I played the shit out of Deathloop.

Deathloop is made by the same studio, and actually takes place in the same world as Dishonored, though a hundred years later (and unlike many fictional worlds, they allowed this one to change significantly in that time - the world is updated from a Victorian Steampunk to Mod-1960s chic).

And Deathloop does not in any way penalize you for killing. Indeed, the only way to beat the game is to figure out a way how to kill a bunch of different people (which will probably require killing a lot of other people) all in one day - an elaborate checklist that is broken down as various missions to complete.

The thing is, the whole conceit of Deathloop is that you're in a world without consequences. There is no Chaos that rises with more death, because everything resets when the day ends. This is the world that the hedonistic "Eternalists" have decided they want to live in. The goal, essentially, is actually to restore consequences.

And, in a weird way, the murder spree you go on in Deathloop is actually an act of mercy. The Eternalists, I think, assumed they would all be able to remember the previous loops even if their physical bodies reset. So, yeah, you get decapitated to splatter after jumping off a cliff, and then the next thing you know you're waking up that morning. But at the point you're at, no one except you and someone named Juliana is actually aware that this isn't, in fact, the first day of the loop. Or... it is, but that there have been previous first days.

Mechanically, this allows you to, Majora's Mask-style, know where characters will be each time through the loop, and is how you're able to orchestrate the one-day massacre of the people whose lives are tied to the loop.

Success causes one last reset - everyone you had killed (and many of them several times over) is alive again, but with no reason for Juliana to sic them all on you, they don't even remember that you're supposed to be enemies.

Jacob Geller, with whose video essays on games I've become a completionist, suggests that there's something a little disconcerting about this. In time loop stories like Groundhog Day, the protagonist often start performing acts of self-destruction in either an attempt to escape the loop or just out of boredom. Groundhog Day disturbed me a lot as a kid thanks to the sequence in which he starts killing himself over and over in various ways. When I came back to the movie as an adult, I recognized it as a work of genius, not that my childhood dislike of it was invalid.

But in most of these stories, Geller points out, this violence is self-inflicted. The victim is a knowing and consenting participant in this experiment in chronologically-undone destruction. In Deathloop, we're the one aware of the loop, and we're the one blasting peoples' heads off with guns or running them through with a machete.

The people in Deathloop are not aware of the loop, but they sort of are. One of the earlier (at least when I played it) targets is at the top of what is a kind of space-themed paintball/laser tag arena, only because everyone will pop back to life the next day, they play this game with actual guns. Real violence is no more real to them than simulated violence.

The island in Deathloop is a place of consensual brutal violence (among other, I'd say less disturbing, indulgences - though there's also a party where guests who are not seen as sufficiently brutal are ground into meat for the others to eat, which is probably the most fucked up thing in the game). The reason they brought so many guns there wasn't out of fear that they needed it for security. It's that they thought it'd be great fun to kill each other over and over again.

And as players, we have lots of fun killing them over and over again.

I don't know that the commentary goes much deeper than that. Is the loop a metaphor for our own rationalization? These people don't mind doing fucked up shit to one another because, hey, it's not real! We just reset afterwards!

And we don't have any issue with killing people in the game because hey, they aren't real people! It's a game!

Juliana effectively serves as the main antagonist of the game, given that she's the only one who understands that the loop is already in effect. But when we learn more about the relationship between Colt (the player character) and Juliana, the fact that each has killed the other countless times, over and over, becomes even more nightmarish.

I think you could even argue that the whole premise of the game - you need to kill these people to save them - is problematic. In the final moments where I beat the game, I put a bullet through Juliana's forehead - and unlike normal, when a killed character either bursts into "time energy" or their time-frozen corpse kind of shimmers with that energy, she was instead slumped in a chair with a kind of realistic bullet hole in her head.

And I did this to save her, too. Maybe most of all.

Redemption through violence is a kind of horrific pillar to worldviews I find utterly destructive. Mad Max Fury Road explored this excellently - the War Boys are told that their only value is in how gloriously they can die in Immortan Joe's service. Interestingly, that movie ends with an act of sacrificial, suicidal violence that does manage to kill a whole bunch of people, but feels totally different because the end goal of that violence is to save lives. The deaths are a side-effect.

So, is Deathloop less deep because of its forgiveness of violence?

That's reductive, of course.

The premise of the time loop is, of course, fantastical. People don't exist in these loops in a literal way - though there are ways you could treat it as a metaphor - either for the stagnation of routine or even on a spiritual level, the cycle of reincarnation that is central to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs (the former viewing that cycle as something you want to eventually escape from, even).

But as science fiction in particular is effective at doing, the hypothetical of the time loop is one that opens up opportunities to talk about heady concepts. Things like transporter clones in Star Trek (or my favorite Christopher Nolan movie) introduce new ways to think about identity, and what it means to be an individual person. 

I think Deathloop also invites a kind of meta-examination of how video games work.

The first time I really remember being confronted with this in games was in Bioshock. You spend the first half (maybe more like two thirds) of the game following the guidance of a character named Atlas, who speaks in a lilting Irish accent and, seemingly as a dialect-specific idiosyncrasy, prefaces every direction with the phrase "Would you kindly...?"

The truth of what that phrase means is, of course, gaming history. But even though the player is not psychologically condition to do anything someone tells them to if that phrase comes before the request, you still wind up doing it anyway. After all, the game wouldn't go anywhere if you didn't. Maybe we are psychologically conditioned to do what we're told? After all, we want to progress through the game.

Playing Deathloop, you'll notice after your first couple loops, that the experience of being in a loop, seeing the same video game enemies walking in the same patrol patterns, having the same canned dialogue, acting with clockwork consistency each time until you interfere with their loops is... familiar.

This is, in fact, how pretty much all video games work. That Goomba at the start of World 1-1 will always appear there, moving toward you and encouraging you to jump at a point where you'll get the first Super Mushroom.

Super Mario Bros came out a year before I was even born, and yet, 38 years later, we all pretty much know the patterns and landscape of that level (well, at least the beginning of it).

In fact, nearly all of our video games are deathloops.

And you know what? Juliana's not even wrong - a lot of people enjoy slaughtering their friends time after time. It's fitting, actually, that the "single player mode" or Deathloop is about someone trying to get through the story and close the loops. The multiplayer mode, where you play as Juliana and invade others' main games, had no defined end. Just like PvP systems tend not to. After all, no single person can "beat" a competitive multiplayer game. You can win the round or even make the top rank of the season, but the appeal in competitive games is to jump in, play, and always have other players to test your skill against. The single player game can have some of that replayability - even if you break the loop, and the story says that the loop has ended, you can still keep playing Deathloop with all of your acquired skills and weapons, saved with the loop-resistant magical substance known as Residuum.

But Colt is trying to win. Juliana's trying to keep the game going.

Most video games are about violence, or at least place violence as your primary means of interacting with the world. That's not new. I mean, the ancient board game, Chess, represents clashing nations at war. The Eternalists in Deathloop have turned their lives into a video game.

We commit a massive amount of violence to break them out of this loop. We end their game. The ending does leave some ambiguity, though: did we actually do them a favor? Certainly, Colt wanted the hell off that island, and he had every right to leave it. But the world that is now visible following it seems to have undergone some world-altering catastrophe.

I'm not well-read on world religions. But generally, my sense is that Western religion is afraid of death as a cessation to existence. Our religions (and while not "Western," I think Egyptian myth also has an influence on this view) generally promise eternal life, unending existence, as a reward for moral behavior and adherence to divine law. Judaism is vague about whatever comes next, but Christianity places an enormous emphasis on heavenly eternity - that the main thing Jesus did through his resurrection was to open up the possibility of eternal life.

And while I'm not a Christian, that idea does appeal to me. I'd like to feel that I'm not just going to blink out of existence, every memory and thought I've ever had, and the continual stream of consciousness that I've been since it first awoke, simply lost to oblivion, when this body stops functioning.

But with Buddhism, at least, my understanding (and again, I apologize if I'm misinterpreting this) is that the eternal existence is assumed - that you'll keep reincarnating into different bodies and identities, but that your soul/consciousness will persist over and over. And that then, the goal of Buddhism, is to stop existing - to end that cycle of life and exit the whole suffering wheel of existence.

Now, sure, what that looks like could vary. Nirvana could mean something more akin to Christian heaven - a new kind of existence in which you've left behind all suffering and instead existence in a painless, rich, enlightened state. Or, Nirvana could be the very thing I fear the most - utter annihilation.

Is the loop something to be desired or to be feared? Something to be sought, or something to flee from?

And are we already stuck in it, yearning to break out, or are we trapped outside, wishing we could get in?

In some Christian thought, the idea of being in heaven is an existence without sin. But what is sin, after this mortal world is left behind? Is sex a sin? (I don't think it is as long as it's between consenting adults, but the moral view of a lot of traditional religious worldviews forbids many expressions of sexuality, sometimes treating it as a necessary evil whose only purpose is to create babies.) If heaven exists, do people have sex there?

What about violence?

I mean, in the mortal world, the obvious reason violence is bad is because it causes pain, loss, and death. But if you're in a world without death, where nothing can be permanently lost... is there no problem with violence?

The Eternalists seem fine with a world where they can happily play William Tell and, if they get shot in the head, no worries - they just wake up the next loop without even a headache.

Are they in heaven or hell?

Hold Up: Is Turn of Fate's Wheel Just Planescape: Torment?

 The 96-page adventure module coming with Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, is summarized on this blog post thusly: "In the 96-page adventure Turn of Fortune’s Wheel, your character returns to life in Sigil. There, you’ll explore this curious city at the center of the multiverse as you aim to rediscover who you are."

If you are at all familiar with the 1998 computer game, Planescape Torment, this ought to sound... also familiar.

Torment sees you playing as the Nameless One, who wakes up in a morgue in the city of Sigil - you're totally covered with scars and have dead, grey skin, but no idea who you are. The game (which, I'll confess, I've only played the first couple minutes of because I just cannot get my head around that Baldur's Gate style of gameplay - hoping that BG3's turn to more D&D-like turn-based combat will be easier on me) follows the Nameless One as he uncovers the secrets of his past and starts walking a path toward redemption.

Spoilers to follow:

Anticipating Playtest Packet 7

 The survey for One D&D's Playtest 6 is out, and I filled it out yesterday, with a lot of feedback that you could glean from reading this blog - in short, I think the Monk needs more substantial buffs (even if it means killing Stunning Strike) and that the nerf to Divine Smite is bigger than you might realize. But, as usual, my actual overall impression of the playtest as a whole has been largely positive.

Much of what is happening here is an attempt to clean up the messy parts that we had in 2014 but preserve the overall feel of the game. And I guarantee you that the overall feel of D&D will not change with these new rules.

We got a look at seven classes, each with four subclasses apiece (though some, at least for now, simply used subclasses as they exist already in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything).

Thus, I think it's pretty likely that we'll see the other five classes looked at in this next playtest packet - namely, the Barbarian, Fighter, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard.

I think it's likely we'll see a similar format, with each class being presented with four subclasses. I looked earlier at how my subclass predictions had gone, getting about 75% of them right (which is honestly not great, as it was a gimme that all the 2014 PHB subclasses were going to be reprinted, which accounted for 40 of the 48 subclasses in the new PHB, so honestly it was more of a coin flip on whether I got anything right.

One thing I noted is that I think popularity had a greater effect on a subclass' inclusion than thematic iconic-ness.

Classes, of course, also got changes.

I think we're still in a class-focused stage of the playtest - I hope we'll see some monster designs and other systems to test, but I think the developers know that the game mostly lives or dies by its class design, so it makes sense that this is what they'd focus on.

So, let's go class-by-class and see what we think will change.

Barbarians:

The Barbarian in the earlier playtest was actually very solid, getting some nice quality-of-life buffs (like being able to maintain Rage with a bonus action if you weren't able to attack,) so I don't see a ton of changes.

I suspect Weapon Mastery might be brought closer in line with what we see with the Monk - having only two at a time that can be swapped on a long rest. I suspect "class groups" as a thing are being swept under the rug, so Barbarians get no special claim to Weapon Mastery - though this could also mean their losing Fighting Styles, which I think would be a shame.

The Berserker and Totem Warrior are, I think, a lock for inclusion. Now what remains to be seen is what the other two subclasses will be. In terms of popularity, I'd guess Zealot and Ancestral Guardian are the most likely inclusions, even if, on a thematic level, I'd like to see the Storm Herald included (though with some buff to it - and perhaps the option to swap storm types on a long rest).

I'll also be curious to see if the Bear option for the 3rd level Totem Warrior gets nerfed - it's one of those really amazing features that leaves a lot of people wondering why you'd pick any other subclass, and thus probably needs to be nerfed or moved to a higher level.

The new Brutal Critical is probably better, but it does have the odd consequence that even Barbarians will prefer a Maul or Greatsword over a Greataxe (though weapon mastery then complicates that again, which might mean this is fine.)

Fighters:

Honestly, I loved the previous playtest Fighter and don't really see anything to change about it. Indomitable is finally useful for saves you're likely to fail, and the way that Fighters play around with Weapon Masteries is really cool.

The Champion, Battle Master, and Eldritch Knight are locks for inclusion. I expect we'll see loosening of spell school restrictions for the EK like the Arcane Trickster got, though I really hope they get the Valor Bard's feature to let them use a weapon as a spell focus.

In terms of popularity, the Rune Knight is my guess for the fourth subclass, largely because it doesn't have much competition. The Wildemount subclasses haven't seen much reprinting (the Echo Knight is actually really cool and good) and beyond those, I basically never see anyone playing Samurai, Arcane Archers, Cavaliers, Psi Warriors (this one being actually kind of cool, if not really as good, in my opinion, as the EK) or the... Purple Dragon Knight (which is maybe my least favorite subclass in the whole game).

I do think we're likely to see some revision to the Battle Master's maneuvers, given that a lot of Weapon Masteries will have similar effects. Stuff like knocking foes back or tripping them is covered by masteries, so we'll perhaps see these cut down - or we might see some maneuvers that play with masteries, like letting you swap out a mastery for a single attack.

Sorcerers:

I think we'll probably see some revision to the Sorcerer-exclusive spells, many of which were a little underwhelming, at least in a vacuum.

I also think, given the uproar over Twinned Spell, we might see another crack at it.

Subclass-wise, again, Draconic and Wild Magic are a lock. Storm Sorcery is one that I could see being added here, and I wonder if they might change it to involve some access to the Primal spell list. If we were getting the Tempest Cleric and Storm Herald Barbarian, I'd put the chances lower here, but without the former and probably without the latter, the only other "storm" subclass is the Druid Circle of the Sea. This could make it in.

The next is kind of anyone's guess. Shadow Sorcery is less likely if we get the Undead Warlock and/or Necromancer Wizard. Given the popularity of the Tasha's subclasses, I would not be shocked to get one of those.

We'll have to see how the Sorcerer-exclusive spells shake out to predict how tied-in the subclass features will be to them.

Warlock:

I imagine we'll see another take on Warlock spellcasting. Personally, there's maybe no change that upset me more than the idea of having Warlocks as half-casters, so I'm really hoping we see some new take on Pact Magic.

I'd hope, though, that we could keep the new design for the Pact Boons, which I think is generally very good.

It remains to be seen how central they expect Hex to play a role in the class design - as long as it remains a concentration spell, I don't want to be forced to use it to get access to class features.

While I hope for a big redesign of the Great Old One subclass, I'm not counting on it - the only subclass to be totally rebuilt was the Four Elements Monk, which was I think the most poorly-rated subclass in the 2014 PHB. GOO is a little lacking in power, but still sees play. I just want some of its features to be tossed in favor of something more thematic (Entropic Ward, primarily).

And I still think Undead makes the most sense as the fourth subclass option. Hexblade is popular, to be sure, but really only for its mechanics, and a lot of those mechanics have been made either baseline or part of Pact of the Blade. I could see Genie here, and I love the Genie. If they want to give more options for a less "Dark" Warlock, it would be a better option than Undead. But for classic Warlock flavor, Undead makes a lot of sense.

Wizard:

So, some of the issues with the Wizard-exclusive spells could do with some tweaking and clean-up, but I think the class overall is fairly solid.

And I think I predicted Evokers, Diviners, Necromancers, and Conjurers (though admittedly, Necromancers and Conjurers tread similar territory - both summoning minions - so one of these might be dropped).

I don't know when we're likely to see the packet. Generally, we've been getting packets roughly every two months, so packet 7 is probably not coming for about a month - late August.

The Augmentation Evoker Needs Some UI Love

 In an unprecedented move, 10.1.5 introduced a new specialization for a class in the middle of an expansion. The only time we've ever seen a class gain a new specialization before was in Mists of Pandaria, when the new (now-defunct) talent system required Feral Druids to be split into two specs (for those who started playing afterward, Druid Tanks used to also be Feral, but would choose different talents to ensure that they had the survival in Bear form to effectively tank).

The Evoker - itself only introduced this expansion - began similarly to the Demon Hunter, having a single DPS spec and a single non-DPS spec. The Demon Hunter had been introduced in 2016 with only two specs out of a desire to concentrate all the iconic Demon Hunter abilities into the specs people would play - they said that they didn't want to do a ranged DPS spec for them because they felt that Havoc would have to lose Eye Beam to give it to the ranged spec.

But given how long development on these things take, there's no way that Augmentation wasn't in the works from the start. My theory was that they were still ironing out the kinks in it by the time they had to have things ready for launch, and rather than have another Azerite Armor situation on their hands (a feature that didn't make it to the Beta until mere weeks before Battle For Azeroth launched, and proved to be a headache for the rest of the expansion - arguably one of the worst mechanics in WoW history, which is why you don't even get it anymore when you level up through BFA content) they instead chose to tinker at it until they felt it was presentable, which wound up happening after Dragonflight's second raid tier had already come out.

On top of that, and probably the reason why it took them so long to figure it out, Augmentation is weird.

Now, in the past, a lot of classes/specs were built around buffing allies. DPS Shamans used to get a lot of their utility out of totems that buffed their parties (back in BC, Bloodlust/Heroism only affected those in your party, so high-end raiders wanted to have a shaman in each group within the raid - and Time Warp and other variants wouldn't come in until later). Paladins also used to have to distribute Blessings across all the different classes (I don't recall when Greater Blessings came about - these would put the buff, either to attack power or mana regeneration, or if you were specced for it, some other blessings, on everyone in the raid of the same class, and last a whopping 30 minutes, but consumed a reagent, so when I was raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, I'd always restock up to 200 Symbols of Kings before heading out to ICC so I wouldn't run out of them).

But even then, there was still a sense that the main power of DPS specs like Enhancement was meant to be their own damage output.

Augmentation is different.

Secondhand, I've heard stories about Augmentation Evokers being kicked from groups because of their low DPS. And yes, the damage Augmentation does itself is definitely lower than Devastation, the Evoker's more conventional DPS spec. On the raiding target dummy in Valdrakken, my Evoker can put out something like 57k dps with an item level of 409 or something (with full tier set bonus.) That puts it ahead of a lot of dps specs at that item level (my poor Demonology Warlock, at about the same gear level, is like mid-40ks). But my Augmentation Evoker has to push really hard and nail the rotation to get to like 30k dps.

But, of course, that's not their point.

Through buffs like Ebon Might (that one most of all,) Augmentation significantly boosts the damage of their allies. By how much? That's hard to tell. And that's part of the issue.

Damage meters - the addons like Recount that allow you to determine how much damage you're pouring out - don't know how to handle the contribution that Augmentation Evokers are providing. What we see instead is that the allies who are benefiting from the Evoker are doing significantly higher dps.

Other systems, like Warcraft Logs, have managed to find a way to show their contribution, and it turns out that, if you count the extra damage that the Evoker is providing to its allies as its own rather than the allies', it actually looks like Augmentation might be the best DPS spec in the game currently.

I'd even consider that Blizzard might aim to keep them that way - certainly some players will enjoy the novelty and just the rotation of the spec, but I think if Augmentation was only on-par with other DPS specs, players might be turned off from it.

Balancing specs has always been a huge challenge, but I think Blizzard has made the challenge even greater with Augmentation. Granted, I really respect a big swing.

Aesthetically, also, I actually love Augmentation. My favorite of the five main dragonflights is the Bronze one (I've always been obsessed with time travel) and I was bummed that Devastation really focused more on the Red and Blue ones, leaving Green and Bronze to the healers (every now and then I tell myself I'm going to try playing a healer, and then I get stressed out just thinking about it and remind myself that I play lots of tanks, so I'm still making queues shorter for people that way). Augmentation focuses on Black and Bronze (though admittedly more Black,) and I really dig the erupting earth and sands of time aesthetics to it.

What I'm hoping - and I have very little sense of what this would entail - is that Blizzard can find a way to make it easier for add-on makers to track the contributions that Augmentation is making. We do see in the in-game UI little orange numbers that I assume are meant to represent the greater damage our allies are doing because of our Ebon Might, but I don't know if damage meters are able to parse that.

The spec is very new, of course, so I'm hopeful that such changes will make it in.

Until then, I'll have to kind of remain faithful that when I play my Evoker in Augmentation spec, I'm making a good contribution to the group.

Hopes and Fears for Planescape

 Last year, I wrote a post about what I'd want out of a Planescape sourcebook for 5th Edition. I know that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft has its detractors, but it's my favorite 5E book published by WotC. People might have disliked the changes to some of the Domains of Dread, or the pages dedicated to talking about genre, or the notion that the Domains are now afloat in the Mists rather than countries bordering one another on a massive landmass.

Of course, those people are wrong.

The point, though, is that I felt the book was a great model for how to do campaign setting books in the future. Sadly, though, when Spelljammer: Adventures in Space came out, we saw that that model was abandoned. Spelljammer is probably the most disappointing product to come out of 5E - a setting that was very hyped, had been missing for 30 years, and promised to provide a really new and fun twist on the game and... we got some new playable races (one of which unfortunately, and I think unintentionally, though with a naivete that an established company like WotC should have known better about, replicated a few problematic racial tropes) and an actually pretty good bestiary, but practically no "setting" for the setting.

My Planescape proposal was very much based on using Van Richten's and to an extent Guldmaster's Guide to Ravnica as a way to cover the enormous amount of ground you'd want to with Planescape - covering the Factions of Sigil and the city itself, all 17 Outer Planes, the four Elemental Planes, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell, with monsters and playable races and subclasses.

But then, the actual title: Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse was announced, and that it would once again be a box set of three slim volumes (with more overall pages than Spelljammer, but still less than Van Richten's had,) I got worried. And those worries will remain until we actually get our hands on the product.

However, I've started to see it advertised on Facebook (I guess Glory of the Giants is close enough to release that they want to get it hyped up,) and the biggest draw the ad presents is new backgrounds and feats.

Let me be frank: that's not exciting.

Spelljammer foregrounded its playable races because, ultimately, those wound up being the most exciting part of the product (though again, Boo's Astral Menagerie does have substantial content). If mere feats and backgrounds (the latter of which is basically being eliminated in the One D&D playtest, with "background" really being just some free choices of feats, skills, and ability score bonuses when you create your character) is the best thing they're putting forward...

I mean, look, I'm probably getting it. While I'm not at 100% collection (I doubt I'll ever pick up Strixhaven and I don't have Call of the Netherdeep, though my roommate has both) I have gotten most 5E books, and Planescape is the setting I'm most excited to run something in (or play in, if I can find someone who wants to run it).

But I also think that the stakes get so much higher due to 5E's general approach to campaign settings - they don't really tend to revisit them. 5E has gotten a grand total of one Eberron book (at least from among WotC's products - Keith Baker wrote another one expanding on Rising From the Last War,) for instance. As such, you really hope that when they do a setting, you get something really substantial and good.

I worry about Planescape because the setting is so profoundly enormous - Sigil is obviously the centerpiece of it, but the setting also comprises all the otherworldly realms in the multiverse, and each of these is a universe unto itself. A place like The Beastlands is itself three layers (one always day, one always at sunset/sunrise, and one always at night) with realms and towns and characters and organizations.

There's a massive amount of ground to cover.

    And, indeed, in the midst of writing this, I found an article from May of this year that breaks things down:

The three books will be Sigil and the Outlands, at 96 pages, Morte's Planar Parade, at 64 pages, and Turn of Fortune's Wheel, at 96 pages.

So, taking a step back and a deep breath: it looks like the "setting" part of the book will be laser-focused on... Sigil and the Outlands. To be fair, in the original Planescape campaign setting book, this was also the focus. The other planes were in later supplements like Planes of Law and Planes of Chaos. 96 pages is also... more than Spelljammer's 64 in the Astral Adventurer's Guide.

It's not huge, though.

However, another reason to have a little bit of hope is that one of the biggest problems with the Astral Adventurer's Guide was that an enormous chunk of those scant 64 pages were dedicated to two-page spreads for each type of Spelljamming ship, giving us deck plans and... yeah, just really deck plans.

I expect that, instead, we'll have the 96 pages of Sigil and the Outlands first giving us the player options (those feats and backgrounds,) which will probably take fewer than 10 pages, leaving us with 86 (well, subtract a couple for the table of contents and introduction, so conservatively say 80). We'll need to cover each of Sigil's factions, of which there are (or were before the Faction War,) 15. Giving each of these two pages would mean 30 pages total (or 45 if we're at 3 pages) leaving us with, say, 50 (or 45, but I think the feats and backgrounds won't take too much, so I'll err on 50).

Then, maybe we get a few magic items and/or spells, but probably not taking more than three or four pages.

So we're down to 46ish.

And then, well, if we're ignoring all the other planes, we can divide that between Sigil and the Outlands. Say 26 to the Outlands and 20 for Sigil.

And... I think that actually works out decently. Ravnica dedicated 22 pages to fleshing out the Tenth District, and Eberron took 32 to talk about Sharn, so if we maybe skew things a little differently (maybe giving Sigil 23 pages and the Outlands 23) we're in a similar ballpark.

I think I'd err on doing more with the Outlands, given all the locations out there - the Gate Towns in particular would give us a bit of a peak at the other Outer Planes, given that it doesn't look like we'll be covering them directly.

Now, if we compare this with the original 2nd Edition book, the "Sigil without a Guide" chapter is 21 pages. If we include the "Doorway to Sigil," which includes the fifteen factions, it's a lot more substantial, at a total of 53 pages, but we're also up at that number if we put in our 30 pages of Faction stuff.

Indeed, "Sigil & Beyond" is, in fact, 95 pages, which is shockingly close to our 96 here.

At least my PDF of the full original Planescape Campaign Setting box set from 2nd Edition is 236 pages - 20 pages short of Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse.

Now, of course, that one doesn't have over a third of it dedicated to an adventure, so it's not a perfect comparison.

The thing is, I think there's a high enough page count here that we could get something with actual substance here (and, again, if we don't have 35 fucking pages of nearly-identical deck plans).

However, it's the broader pattern that saddens me: Planescape was supported with tons of additional, massive products detailing all the planes, with adventures and monsters and stuff. Unless WotC leans heavily into Planescape moving forward, this might be the only Planescape thing we get for a decade or more.

So, I want to get the new Planescape stuff, but I'm really hoping that, at some point, we'll get a Manual of the Planes or other guide to the heightened fantasy of Planescape.

Does Stunning Strike Need to Die?

 The Monk struggles.

Conceptually, the Monk is fun - bringing a beloved heroic archetype and making a class out of it. But it struggles because of a few things:

1. Defensively, it's the most fragile of the classes that are forced to fight in melee (the others being the Paladin and Barbarian). It typically has a lower AC and has a lower hit die than both of these classes, along with two classes that can easily be built around ranged attacks (though Fighters are gently encouraged to go melee in most cases).

2. Damage-wise, they don't get a big, exciting upgrade to their damage output at higher levels. Yes, by level 5 you can, with relative frequency, get off four attacks in a round, but it generally doesn't go up beyond that. Furthermore, Unarmed Strikes, the central "thing" of the class, doesn't get buffed by any magic weapons - while a Fighter could get their hands on a Flame Tongue Longsword, getting an extra 2d6 damage on each hit (usually 7, or 14 on a crit,) your punches/kicks/headbutts/tail-slaps at best get the level 6 change to make the hits count as magical (or, in the new version, do Force damage). But you're not going to get a +1 weapon, making your chance to hit fall behind.

3. Next, the Monk is resource-starved. Not only do they have a lot of things to spend their Ki/Discipline points in the base class, but most subclasses add more things to spend them on, making Monks extremely dependent on short rests to recover them.

4. And, while I think this might be less of an issue if we fix the other things, they're also spread a little thin in terms of ability scores. Monks really want to have high Dex, high Wis, and high Con. Now, there are other classes that also want three ability scores to be high - Paladins, for instance, like to have good Strength, Con, and Charisma. But a Paladin, even at high level, with only a +3 to Con and Charisma will still be pretty functional. For a Monk, it's almost like the expectation is that you're going to have all of these super-high.

5. Finally, with the advent of Weapon Mastery, it's really sad to see the Monk unable to use these masteries with their unarmed strikes. This is a new thing, but it pushes the Monk to have to wield weapons with their action, and makes their signature moves - their unarmed strikes - into mere supplements to their damage.

Take this with a huge grain of rock-salt, as the source here is "a Youtube comment," but it seems plausible: Supposedly, WotC considers the Monk to be on-par with a Fighter with Crossbow Expert, and that Stunning Strike is a big part of that power.

I played a Drunken Master Monk as my first Adventurer's League character. And I loved him, even if the subclass leaves some things to be desired (Redirect Attack didn't work nearly as often as I'd hoped it would, and Drunkard's Luck is a terrible, worthless, awful ability). But I remember, getting a Stun off was great. It turned the tide profoundly in a battle - suddenly the whole party was attacking with advantage, and the target couldn't even do anything on its turn.

But boy was it swingy - to stun something, I'd have to invest pretty heavily in Ki points most of the time, as the monsters would usually get off a save or two before I could actually get them stunned.

The thing is, from the DM's perspective, it was also kind of a bummer when it worked, though, as it prevented them from getting to actually use the monster.

So: if Stunning Strike is the reason they're afraid to buff the Monk, let's propose that we get rid of it.

That's obviously a nerf. We could possibly give them a less powerful replacement - perhaps something like Dazing Strike, where we can spend a Discipline Point to daze the target (and maybe make it a Wisdom save, so it will land a little more often?)

But, if we do that, let me propose things we could give to address the issues that were listed above.

1: First off, easy: give the Monk a d10 hit die. (I could even argue for a d12, but if we want that to be an exclusive thing for Barbarians, I understand). But that's not going to be enough - their HP gets better - about one point per level, but at least now keeping pace with Fighters and Paladins. But we also want their AC to go up. And that's where a certain theme you might notice begins to develop: Change Unarmored Defense to no longer gain any benefit from Wisdom, but instead get twice your Dexterity modifier.

    This one's big. With the Standard Array, you can typically get one +3 modifier and two +2 modifiers, or two +3 modifiers and no +2 modifiers. Generally, I assume that a character who hasn't rolled stats (or hasn't rolled exceptionally well) is going to have a +3 to their main stat, and for the Monk, that should be Dexterity. This would mean that a Monk starts off with an AC of 16. You might notice that this is precisely the AC that heavy-armor classes start with, thanks to Chain Mail, and also that anyone that starts with medium armor can have if they have at least a +2 to Dexterity and begins with Scale Mail (which, at least in the 2014 PHB, is all medium armor classes other than the Druid).

    Now, once their Dex goes up to +4, that means an AC of 18 - which is as good as anyone can get with mundane armor and no shield. And when they get to +5 (typically level 8,) they'll be at 20 AC, which is as good as plate armor and a shield.

    So, this is one I could see some pushback to, but Monks can hit this eventually if they spend all their ASIs on getting their Dex and then their Wisdom maxed out, though not until level 19.

    If this scaling is too strong, we could do something more controlled - you could have your Unarmored Defense start off giving you a +3 (which I think is perfectly reasonable, given what I said about heavy and medium armor three paragraphs ago) and have it scale up slower - maybe getting one higher with each tier of play. This would means starting with 16, going to 17 at level 4, 18 at level 5, 19 at level 8, and 20 at level 11, and then possibly 21 at level 17 if we want to keep up with this. Adjust as necessary.

    With this change, you no longer need to be so heavily invested in Wisdom to get a decent AC. While I think the flavor of Wisdom increasing your AC is really cool (you are more aware of the angle and velocity of incoming attacks - which makes more sense to me than Barbarians getting a higher AC because... their skin is just tougher? Like, if it was because of their brawn, they should really add their Strength instead of the Constitution) it means that you're typically doing no better than a Rogue in Studded Leather, but without things like Uncanny Dodge or Cunning Action to disengage (we do have Step of the Wind, but that cuts into our damage output and also costs a precious resource).

    Now, with HP on par with Fighters and AC on par with Fighters... I think this is acceptable for a melee class. If the AC winds up a little higher, even, I don't mind, because isn't that part of the fantasy? Being so agile that you can dodge your enemy's attacks?

2: So, I like that the new monk gets its damage dice upgraded, mainly because rolling a d4 is always a pain in the ass (I need to get those pill-shaped d4s). But it's not nearly enough of a damage boost - an average of one extra damage per hit.

    A lot of martial classes get a big damage boost at level 11 (to go along with casters getting 6th level spells). Fighters get their third attack, Paladins get their extra d8 of radiant damage on each hit. Ranger subclass features tend toward this as well at level 11 (at least in the playtest). Barbarians, in the playtest, get Brutal Critical at 11 (which... I need to do math on how good that is). And Warlocks, like Fighters, get their third attack at this level (yes, Warlocks are secretly a martial class).

    Monks, typically, don't get such a bonus at 11, aside from upgrading their martial arts die. What might they get, then?

    More attacks doesn't feel that great - Monks already do a lot of attacks, and that means A: their turns will take forever if we add more and B: another attack will be diluted and C: the Fighter already does that.

    What if we, then, made them hit harder? Let's toss out the following: when you deal damage with a Simple (or Monk, if they restore Shortswords to them) weapon or an Unarmed Strike, you deal additional damage of that type equal to your Wisdom modifier. Call it "Focused Strikes."

    While we might not be pushing Wisdom quite as hard, this will give it some oomph. We could also make this only work on Unarmed Strikes if need be.

    We're not done with 2 though - the other thing I'd do is extremely simple: add +1, +2, and +3 Wrist Wraps as standard magic items to be found in the loot tables of the DMG - when you wear these wrist wraps, you get a +1 (or 2 or 3) bonus to attack and damage rolls with your Unarmed Strikes. Bam: scaling synchronized.

3: Ok, now, Discipline Points. You run out of them really quick. And almost every Monk feature costs them. So, a couple changes (and credit to d4 and Treantmonk's Temple and their Monk discussion that came up with the general idea for this:) Discipline Points reset when you roll initiative, perhaps with fewer at your disposal.

    Either that, or far fewer things need to cost them - Patient Defense and Step of the Wind could be free, and a lot of subclass features could as well (or use a different resource).

    Rather than having your Monk level in DPs (nope) in Discipline Points, you perhaps get like twice your proficiency bonus, or perhaps that amount if you were going pure Monk (so 4 from level 1-4, 6 from 5-8, 8 from 9-13, 10 from 14-16, and 12 from 17-20) but when you take a short rest, a long rest, or you roll initiative, you get all of them back.

    This could cause some issues with features like Hands of Healing, and I am always a bit wary of "when you roll initiative" features because DM style comes into play (in my Monday game, my players are essentially in the middle of a battle that is sort of a rolling combat encounter - each "encounter" comes in when the last group of foes is nearly all down, meaning it's technically one long fight,) but this will make the fact that everything costs Ki/Discipline more strategic, I think (the Astral Self might be less of a pain).

    The total you get, and even whether you get all of them when you roll initiative (in the playtest you get back four when you do so at level 15, though only if you're totally out, which is crazy - why should you be stuck at 2 points simply because you didn't think to spend those two out of combat?) or just some of them, is something to iterate on, but for a class that burns through this resource as quickly as it does, you either need to slow that rate of burn, or give them ample access to fuel.

4: Ok, well, we kind of covered this with #1, but one way to address the spread-thin nature of the Monk would be to reduce or eliminate their reliance on Wisdom. I actually love, flavorfully, that Monks use wisdom, as it makes total sense and distinguishes them from Fighters - who are also people who discipline and condition their bodies. But letting Monks focus on Dexterity for their AC certainly would help.

    And if we want to go farther, we could have them even determine their Ki save DC using Dexterity as well - much as the Rogue's new Cunning Strikes do. Without Stunning Strike, some Monks might not even need to have a DC at all.

    But, if we also kept my "Focused Strikes" feature, it would let Wisdom still be appealing, but not as make-or-break. Getting from +3 to +4 would definitely boost your damage, but only by 1, so you could weigh whether that's worth it.

5: And lastly, Weapon Mastery. Again, D4 and Treantmonk made a proposal that I think is fine - just let Monks apply weapon masteries to unarmed strikes. Which ones? Well, screw it - any of them. Indeed, I actually think giving Monks access to masteries they could never get with their weapons, like Graze, Cleave, Push, or Topple would be really cool (though the Open Hand Monk would need a serious redesign).

    If letting you use multiple options for your unarmed strikes would be too powerful, or more importantly step on the Fighter's toes, you could maybe force the Monk to choose one of them for Unarmed Strikes on a long rest (leaving their other for their actual weapon,) but this would be really cool.

Together, I think this would more than compensate for the removal of Stunning Strike. I think you'd have a Monk that was working much more the way that the fantasy of it suggests. Would it be too powerful? Possibly. But I'd be ok with Monks being overpowered after spending so long struggling to keep up. And without stuns, it's not going to be annoying to have them be powerful.

Is The Desire for Backwards Compatibility Holding One D&D Back?

 Ok, short answer is yes, obviously.

The more interesting question, though, is whether it's worth it.

There are now more people playing D&D than ever in the game's 49-year history, meaning that for a huge swath of players (probably a majority, especially given that it's been the "current" one for nearly a decade now) 5th Edition is D&D.

5E did a few things to simplify the game, though as a 5E baby myself, I can't say exactly what it was like playing the older editions.

The point is, there are fundamentals to D&D that I wouldn't want them to change, and overall, Wizards of the Coast doesn't want to create a rift in the playerbase. They don't want to have play groups fighting over which version of the rules they want to use, and so they've presented the revised species, classes, subclasses, spells, feats, etc., as content rather than systems.

To put it another way, we're getting modular updates - but they want to keep those modules compatible with the system that allowed the old modules to work.

So, in theory, next year if your party has two Bards, one could be using the one that saw print in the 2014 PHB and another using the one in the 2024 PHB, and they should be able to play nicely together.

Actually, it's more profound than that.

Rather, WotC wants to make sure that you can play a 2024 version of the Bard that uses the College of Whispers from Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Or, even, if you want to go nuts - they want to let you make a 2024 Bard that can use the 2014 College of Lore, even though there will be a new version of the Lore subclass.

There's a certain comfort to this.

Most classes are getting additional subclasses in the new PHB - each class will now have four, when most had only two or three in the 2014 version. However, Clerics and Wizards each got well over four, and so there will be some that don't make it to the 2024 PHB. Assuming they stick with the options presented in Playtest 6, Clerics will not get a new version of the Knowledge, Nature, or Tempest domains.

But, despite there not being a new version of these subclasses, WotC wants to give you no reason you can't simply pick the old version of these domains to use with the new Cleric. Nothing is lost; at worst, something you hoped to gain might not be.

But indeed, there are gains that we will miss out on should they be committed to this.

The Bard, for some reason, only gets subclass features at three levels - other classes typically get subclass features at four levels.

In an earlier version of the playtest, they changed it so that all classes got their subclass features at level 3, 6, 10, and 14. But they reverted this.

Why? Well, I think one reason is that old subclasses could become confusing or even unbalanced. In the case of the Bard, actually, there' not a ton of confusion - you just skip level 10 and everything else is the same. The only problem is that the new subclasses would get an additional feature.

But it could create issues. The Paladin, for example, gets its final subclass feature at level 20, and this typically takes the form of what I call its "Ult," typically a big transformation that has powerful effects in combat and can only be done once a day. Getting these six levels earlier, at 14, might be an issue - sure, you're powerful at 14, but should you be powerful enough to banish every monster you hit that fails a saving throw, like the Watcher Paladin does at level 20?

So, in some cases, reverting this preserves the feel and rhythm of these classes. And, honestly, a lot of these classes already got their subclass features at these levels anyway, with one or two that are a level off.

But Bards, and Rogues - the latter of whom have to wait all the way to level 9 before they get their second subclass feature - wind up losing out here.

And yet, there are some preserved changes - Clerics, Druids, Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards each currently pick subclasses at level 1 or 2, but they're pushing all subclass choices back to level 3, and that's sticking.

I realize, though, I'm getting stuck in the minutiae. But the point I'm trying to make is that for all the things we want to carry on from the existing 5E material, this focus on backward compatibility might also force us to take along stuff we don't want.

Wild Shape, as presented in the Druid & Paladin playtest, was broken. It was basically not worth using ever in combat, and was even hard to use effectively outside of combat (they had made the ability to shift into a Tiny form a level 11 feature, for example).

The next take on it in Playtest 6 was, I think, far more popular and restored some of the utility to the feature. But I'll confess - I liked the idea of the feature using scaling stat blocks rather than Beast stat blocks from the Monster Manual. Yes, there are utility elements that you lose, but I sort of which that they had built a more rugged and versatile way to customize the stat blocks rather than throwing the doors open to all Beasts of a certain CR.

Now, it isn't as if we haven't seen radical class redesigns - the Warlock, for instance, is pretty profoundly changed, not just in its Spellcasting feature (which the 2014 one doesn't have - it has Pact Magic instead) but also in that your choice of Pact Boon (now swapping with the patron, level-wise) also determines your spellcasting ability. This means that if I updated by original D&D character to the new version, I'd also have to rebalance his ability scores, because Pact of the Tome doesn't get the option to use Charisma.

That said, given what we've seen with the pull back toward more conservative design (though I'll shout out Cunning Strikes as a great and welcome addition to Rogues that I hope to see make it to print) I wonder if, in the end, we'll actually wind up seeing the Warlock reverted to using Pact Magic just like in 2014.

See, I actually really want to see some changes specifically to the Warlock and the Great Old One Patron, because I think that the subclass at least was held back by an overcautious (or even just uninspired) design back in the day (Entropic Ward, the GOO's 6th level feature, remains the one I dislike the most because it seems to have nothing to do with the cosmic horror entity that the Warlock is aligned with, and Awakened Mind is bizarrely limited compared to the telepathy granted by later subclasses).

Part of the conservatism in the approach here has been in the hopes of maintaining that continuity of 5th Edition, and avoiding alienating people (though I've talked to a lot of people who have a knee-jerk rejection of it without having looked at it - I think those people might be surprised at how, for the most part, similar things are). But I also think some of the conservatism is more about fear of trying something new - they know 5E works, or at least works enough to be popular - and that we might not, then, see cool innovations that will carry us on to the future.

We'll see - the test is ongoing, and again, for all my concerns that they're not going far enough, there are some changes that are still pretty big (indeed, I'd even prefer Warlocks to get Pact Magic restored to them, though I think there's got to be some new design that solves the issues with the 2014 Warlock without demoting the Warlock's spellcaster status).

But I do think it's important that we see enough new, fresh ideas, and a commitment to resolving the problems that have plagued 5E since 2014, because there's also the element here that they're presumably expecting to sell us three new books, each for 60 bucks (though I'm sure there will be a bundle,) and I sure hope that there's enough in those to justify the purchase (I'm still feeling burned by Spelljammer, and feeling worried that Planescape is using a similar format).

Conjuration, Necromancy, and the Future of Minion Spells

 In the 2014 PHB, there are a few spells that let you put more creatures on the battlefield to fight alongside you. These come in four schools of magic - Transmutation does this via Giant Insect and Animate Objects. Necromancy, as one might imagine, transforms dead bodies into undead creatures to fight for you with Animate Dead and Create Undead (and Finger of Death, which does the transformation as a secondary effect). Illusion gets to create a mount with Phantom Steed. And Conjuration, of course, has the largest number of these effects, with the permanent "Find" spells (familiars and steeds) and several "Conjure" spells, namely Woodland Beings and Fey (Fey creatures,) Minor Elementals and Elemental (elementals), Celestial (you get the idea) and Animals. There's also Planar Ally, which requires you to pay the summoned creature.

Now, these all work using existing stat blocks that are designed for DMs to toss creatures at the party to fight.

Generally, I think, moving away from that model for player features is a good thing. We've seen in the One D&D playtest that they've done this with Find Familiar and Find Steed, creating instead scaling stat blocks that use the summoner's spell attack bonuses and the level at which the spell was cast to scale the creature. We also saw this with the Beast Master's pets, first introduced as an optional change with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

They also initially tried this with Wild Shape, though the kind of crappy quality of those stat blocks, and particularly the lack of various appealing bonus-effects like Pack Tactics saw them instead reforming Wild Shape to still use Beast stat blocks, but now limit how many the Druid can have "prepared" at a time to cut down on grinding the game to a halt when the Druid uses that ability. (Personally I'd kind of prefer they go back to stat block templates and give a menu of bonus features to choose from when shifting, but I also recognize that this is probably going to be the most satisfactory solution for the most people.)

What we have not seen, however, is how this will apply to most of the in-combat summoning spells.

As currently written, the School of Necromancy Wizard gets Animate Dead for free at 6th level, and gets to summon one additional Skeleton or Zombie with the spell, along with getting a bonus to their damage rolls.

Upcasting Animate Dead adds two more minions per spell level above 4th, so the damage potential, and the utility potential, goes up considerably with each upcast. But there are some big drawbacks:

The first is that you're going to wind up dominating a lot of combat time. Even at base level, you're now adding two creatures to the fight, which are each going to need their own movements and actions, with all the attack rolls and such that this entails.

The other is that the stat blocks don't really scale up. If you've got a bunch of zombies at your command, that's fine if you're battling mundane threats like Duergar or Goblins, but if you're dealing with supernatural creatures that are immune to nonmagical weapon attacks, they're at best going to be able to act as meat (or bone, in the case of skeletons) shields.

The Tasha's summon spells are elegant. And, if WotC had not been demonstrating such a conservative approach to the new core rulebooks, I'd have suspected we might get full replacements - replacing Animate Dead with Summon Undead, or Conjure Elemental with Summon Elemental.

Now, granted, I still think there's a chance that we could see something similar to that - we might not lose Animate Dead, but the spell might undergo a serious redesign to work basically like Summon Undead - using a single scaling stat block, rather than summoning multiple zombies and skeletons.

Now, I'd also be tempted to implement some kind of codified mass-attack feature if we wanted to retain the ability to summon multiple minions. The Minion Rules, derived from 4E and iterated on by MCDM, make it easy to let a group of monsters attack en masse.

I love the spell Danse Macabre, which summons the same number of minions as a 5th level Animate Dead (without the Necromancer bonus) but inherently gives a boost to both attack and damage rolls - making it far easier for these low-CR monsters to actually hit high-level monsters as well as dealing significant damage to them (barring immunities).

But, of course, this brings back that problem of having 5 new creatures to manage.

There is, of course, also the issue with some of the summoning spells and how it relates to spellcasting. Conjure Woodland Beings can spawn eight different Pixies, each of which can cast Polymorph once a day. It's a 4th level spell, so the party is presumably at least level 7, meaning that you can, with this single spell, effectively cast polymorph on the whole party (and perhaps some friendly NPCs) to turn them all into Giant Apes.

This is, so obviously, clearly, not the intended use of the spell. But it works.

At this point I think we're only able to wait and see what WotC shows off when we get the big spell list - I can imagine there will be an enormous UA that goes through spell changes (those that aren't being left unchanged - I think staples like Cure Wounds, Fireball, or Mage Armor are all likely to get through this totally unchanged).

And as for the Necromancer, I don't know if that's going to actually be in the 2024 PHB (though I really hope it is). But, in the meantime, I'm tempted to do my own homebrew revision to compare notes when if and when we see it.

Final Fantasy XVI's Strengths and Weaknesses

 I haven't finished the game yet - I suspect that I'm past the halfway point, as there's a clear indicator of plot progression visible on the world map, and it seems very likely that I have only one more "thing to do" on it.

Being vague to avoid spoilers.

But I wanted to reflect on the game and how I feel about it.

Final Fantasy games have been moving away from traditional turn-based battles since XII (or XI, though that was an MMO, so I don't think anyone expected it to work the same way). I'll confess I'm a bit of an old crank, then, who wishes that instead of abandoning this format, they had found ways to make it modern and more dynamic.

XVI takes this to its logical endpoint by becoming a full-on action game. There are "RPG elements" in the sense that you can level your character up, and indeed if you are diligent about doing side quests and not avoiding fights with monsters, the game gets easier because you'll be higher-level.

But the gameplay reminds me, if anything, far more of the recent God of War games. Like in those games, you'll be able to focus on certain special abilities and invest points you gain while leveling up to make them more powerful.

The magical, Eikon-based abilities you learn all work the following way - each is affiliated with one of the Eikons whose power you have received (you begin with only that of the Phoenix, but as you encounter and often defeat the Dominants of other Eikons, you absorb some of that power. You can then "equip" up to three Eikons at a time, changing what your special ability (linked with the circle button) does, and also the elemental damage type of your triangle-based ranged magic attack (which does pitiful damage unless charged up). Each of the Eikons has three abilities associated with it that you can invest ability points into and assign to R2+Triangle or R2+Square.

These abilities, I only found out well into the game, can actually be assigned to other Eikon "stances," so really you just have up to three sets of two abilities to swap around mid-combat.

Anyway, like the special attacks that Kratos has for each of his weapons in God of War 4/Ragnarok, these do a big effect and then have a cooldown. But once you have three Eikons, you can generally swap between them and by the time you use all of the abilities, the first pair are likely to have recharged (unless you get the extra-powerful ones for each Eikon, which tend to have longer cooldowns).

The result, then, is that there's not a ton of tactical choice to make. You basically want to use these abilities as often as you can. Sometimes, you can save them for when you stagger a foe, but they also make it easier to get foes to that point.

Clive has a lot of attacks and moves he can make in combat - I often do jumping attacks after charging at monsters.

The thing is, if there's a "right" way to time these attacks, I don't really see it. Most non-boss enemies are trivially easy and will usually die before they can hit me, so I'm not paying a price for any tactical sloppiness.

And, well... that's a little disappointing.

Final Fantasy combat has never been extraordinarily complex - you have buff spells to toss up on your party members and sometimes discover a foe has a weakness to certain damage types - but XVI feels far less tactical than previous games. For one thing, you're only playing as the one character, with perhaps some light management of your pet wolf, though his effect on foes tends to feel pretty minor.

What's a bit frustrating about this approach is that I know SquareEnix can do more.

Final Fantasy VII Remake transitioned the classic game to a much more modern gameplay system - yes, it ditched turn-based combat for something based more on action. But they kept a lot of the menu-based tactical options as part of it. Now, however, you basically do the action part of it in the parts of the turn-based system when you'd normally just be waiting for the ATB system to get you to your character's next turn. Buffs, heals, and elemental spells, along with abilities that didn't cost a resource other than filled-up ATB meters managed to bridge the tactical thinking of the old games with the fast-paced action of the new.

Not to mention, you'd often swap between characters, which usually helped fill their ATB meters faster, but also gave you other things to focus on.

Clive is rarely alone in Final Fantasy XVI. You often fight alongside the wolf Torgal, and usually with your childhood friend Jill, and sometimes with the altruistic outlaw Cid. But other than a few commands for Torgal, you only interact with Jill, Cid, and other sometime party members passively, letting them do their thing while you do your thing.

Furthermore, your big, flashy abilities all work on the same cooldown-based system. You do have limited resources in your Potions, Hi-Potions, and other things, but the big blow-out stuff is all limited only by the amount of time you wait for it to come back.

And, as such, there's no price to using those abilities. It's not really a decision to use them.

Now, the combat can feel thrilling thanks to the speed and flashiness with which Clive fights. And there's a particularly satisfying moment in fights when you perfectly time a dodge and come back at a foe with a counterattack (I have a necklace that gives me a few seconds of pseudo-Limit Break when I do this,) which is the closest the game comes to FromSoft-level satisfying combat.

All this said, what the game perhaps falls short on in terms of fundamentals, it might make up for in spectacle.

The Eikon fights are scattered throughout the game. Like in FFVIIR, you can't just summon Ifrit in every fight. But the story revolves around Dominants - people who serve as living hosts to the godlike Eikons, and who can transform into these massive creatures to do epic battle. While technically a spoiler, I think anyone with any modicum of literary comprehension will be unsurprised that the player character Clive is the Dominant of Ifrit, which in this world is the previously-unknown Eikon of Fire, in contrast with the Phoenix (the Dominant of which is Clive's younger brother Joshua).

And when Clive turns into the towering fire-demon, that's when the game hits its most epic set-pieces. Each one more or less evokes in the player a sense of "how could this possibly go more over-the-top?" only for the subsequent fight to somehow top it. (One element is how Ifrit is like ten stories tall and is smaller than most of the other Eikons you fight.)

Now, that being said, the Eikon fights actually use pretty much the same combat system as the main game - the numbers are about three or four orders of magnitude higher, and the setting and sense of enormity tends to be much grander. But just as I often default to jump attacks on Clive if I'm not burning through all my special abilities, I basically do the same as the Kaiju Ifrit.

There is challenge to the combat here - but I think a lot of it is about dodging attacks, which is more about twitch reflexes than careful tactical considerations.

Actually, is the Paladin Nerf Too Much?

 The Paladin is one of the strongest classes in D&D - and I think probably the strongest "martial" class (though the Fighter probably gives it a run for its money, being far more customizable). The 6th One D&D playtest has seen a nerf to their biggest damage ability, Divine Smite.

To reiterate what has happened to it:

In the latest version, Divine Smite is now considered a spell. It, along with all the other smite spells, works the following way:

The spell's casting time is a bonus action, but you still get to wait until you see if you've hit (or crit) or not before you choose to cast it.

This is actually a buff to all the smite spells like Searing Smite or Wrathful Smite, as you no longer run the risk of missing with the attack and then losing concentration on them while trying to hit again, and you can also decide to blast one of these out when you land a crit.

But Divine Smite has suffered a pretty substantial nerf thanks to this change, in the following ways:

• Divine Smite can now only be used once per turn, because you have only one bonus action.
• It can't be used on an opportunity attack or other reaction-based attack (such as from a Battle Master's Commander's Strike)
• It has a Verbal component, which means that you cannot use it when silenced or gagged.
• A multiclassed Barbarian/Paladin cannot use it while Raging.
• It can be counterspelled
• It cannot be used on the same turn as any number of bonus-action features.

Now, this last point in the current version of the Paladin might not be so bad - in the PHB subclasses, the only feature I can think of off the top of my head that uses bonus actions is Vow of Enmity for Oath of Vengeance. Now, this would be a pain - to get advantage (and thus nearly double your crit chance) but be unable to Smite - but we need to take a look at how other features have been buffed by making them bonus actions:

Lay on Hands has become a bonus action. Divine Sense is a bonus action. Other Channel Divinity features like Devotion's Sacred Weapon is now a bonus action. The level 20 subclass "ult" features are now all bonus actions.

So, yes, your max-level Paladin can go full-on Avenging Angel, fly over to some otherworldly monstrosity, and be unable to smite until their next turn.

    So, what does this ultimately mean for the class and its ability to pump out damage?

It's always a little hard to calculate damage potential when resources need to be expended. After all, Paladins have never been able to Smite on every hit over the course of an adventuring day unless there's very little combat.

A 5th-level Paladin can Smite a total of 6 times over the course of a day - four at 1st level and two at 2nd level - if they aren't casting any other spells. But this hasn't changed that fact.

What it has changed instead is that the Paladin can't nova by going through all of those spell slots in three rounds (or two if they've got a consistent way to make reaction attacks).

And, to be fair, the competition for bonus actions doesn't really create a new problem - you can't currently Smite on a turn that you use Lay on Hands or Divine Sense because, well, you haven't used your action to attack anyway.

So, it might be that I'm seeing the potential of some of these buffs, and that the nerf to Divine Smite just makes them somewhat less amazing of a buff.

Short Rests, the Warlock, Pact Magic, and Spell Slots

 I think the initial reason for the Warlock redesign was out of a sense that some groups don't take short rests.

Or, at least, WotC says they think that's the case. I think every campaign I've played in, we've taken short rests pretty frequently, largely because it's a great way to heal up after a tough fight or two - something everyone can appreciate.

But Warlocks have also suffered from a perception that they just have a tiny number of spell slots, and some players are fairly precious with them. Again, in my experience playing a Warlock through Descent into Avernus (which went up through level 13 - I think we officially hit 14 after we finished, but I haven't touched the character since then) it was actually the fact that I could recharge my spell slots on a short rest that let me feel pretty liberal with them - I knew that I could toss out a Synaptic Static here and there and know that I'd get them back with relative ease, and that if I did run out, my souped-up Eldritch Blast with both Agonizing and Repelling Blast invocations would still let me be a pretty useful ranged damage dealer.

The truth is that, aside from a few tweaks, I'd be kind of ok with keeping Pact Magic more or less as it is. I like that Warlocks feel totally different than other spellcasters while still being a class focused on magic.

In fact, the redesign for the Warlock in One D&D makes them, I think, more akin to the Artillerist or Alchemist Artificer - half-casters that still rely on spellcasting as their primary combat function. And while I've considered playing an Artillerist, I think both subclasses feel hampered by the fact that they're half-casters, which is why I've tended to lean more on the Battle Smith and Armorer as my preferred subclasses - as "martial" subclasses, being half-casters doesn't feel like as much of a downside.

One of the things I really like about Pact Magic is the way that spells that it encourages you to pick spells that scale well with level. Armor of Agathys, for example, is (currently) a Warlock-exclusive spell that is so-so at 1st level, but gets significantly better as it is upcast, because the temporary hit points become more likely to last through multiple hits and the reflective damage it deals goes up as well.

Now, this hits a wall after 5th level spell slots. I think the reason why Warlocks swap over from Pact Magic to Mystic Arcanum is probably to keep things from getting totally out of hand - A, they don't want all your spells scaling up to 9th level, and B, they don't want you to have more 9th level spell slots (or 6th, 7th, or 8th) than other casters.

However, this also creates the impression that Warlocks can cast fewer spells than they can. If you simply look at the number of spell slots a Warlock has, it looks like they max out at 4, and some people might read this as if they can only cast four spells per day (and then only at level 17+). But by the time you're 17, you have 4 short-rest-recharging slots and effectively four other spell slots that can only be used to cast a specific spell as each of them.

Ok, so let's take a step back: Is the problem the short-rest recharge, or is it the lack of spell slots?

The One D&D Playtest has not eliminated all resource recharging on short rests. Fighters still get Action Surges back on a short rest. Monks still get Discipline Points back on a short rest. Druids still get Wild Shape back on short rests. Bards, after level 5, get Bardic Inspiration back on short rests. Clerics and Paladins still get one use of Channel Divinity back on short rests (which is as good as current Paladins ever got).

Now, you could argue that of all these classes, only the Monk has to take a short rest to get back its central, primary resource, and the Monk was given a new ability at level 7 to let them get the effects of a Short Rest after only a minute, once a day.

Still, it doesn't seem like it would be too game-breaking to give Warlocks something similar - indeed, their current capstone feature basically does that. If we had that come earlier and gave them a cooler capstone feature, it might solve this issue.

But I don't think that the problem they really want to solve is the short vs. long rest. I think it's the small number of spell slots.

Warlocks need to choose what they spend their spell slots on carefully. On my Wizard, I can easily just toss a 1st level spell slot at something like Feather Fall or Mage Armor or a quick Magic Missile, because I have a total (currently) of nine spell slots (four 1st level, three 2nd level, two 3rd level,) and because this is my lowest-level slot, it's the most expendable. But on a Warlock, I wouldn't want to do that unless I absolutely had to, because any leveled spell is going to cost me the chance to cast one of my most powerful spells.

Now, this is one of the challenges of the class - to spend a spell slot or not - but I also recognize that, due to the fact that the answer is usually "no," you can lose out on some of the interesting gameplay choices that, say, a Sorcerer has - at high levels at least, a Sorcerer is probably spending a spell slot on most turns in combat, and so they're making decisions on which ones to cast.

So, turning Warlocks into half-casters does sort of address these issues - you have more spell slots over the course of a day (a level 9 Warlock would have nine spell slots, which a current Warlock wouldn't even get if they had two short rests over the course of a day). To balance that, though, these spell slots are not as high of a level - the current Warlock gets 5th level spell slots at level 9, whereas the playtest one would have four 1st level slots, three 2nd level slots, and two 3rd level slots.

And that means that it's down to you whether you would prefer having more spell slots, or more powerful spell slots.

As you can probably tell by all the posts I've made about this, I prefer the latter.

And I think a big part of that is about staying true to the fantasy of the Warlock.

Setting aside the Artificer (which I love, but I also sympathize with some of the critiques to it,) the other half-casters in the game are the Paladin and the Ranger. Both of these are, at their heart, "Martial" classes. The Paladin, in nearly every RPG version of it I've ever seen, is a heavily-armored melee combatant who has some magical power, but only uses it to supplement their martial ability - they're a hybrid. The Ranger is also all about its weapon attacks - most classically shooting with a bow - and the magic is almost less being some magical spellcaster than just having a deep and thorough understanding of nature and a heightened ability to track - thing Aragorn knowing how to do some rudimentary healing when Frodo gets stabbed with the Morgul blade or when he is able to piece together exactly what happened with Merry and Pippin at the site of the massacre of the orcs in a way that no one else could.

But a Warlock, lorewise, has typically been grouped with Wizards and Sorcerers as people who are pushing the boundaries of arcane magic, delving into the deepest secrets and channeling the most powerful forces. To put it another way, "I didn't sell my soul to be a half-caster!"

Granted, the playtest version does include a way for Warlocks to keep pace with other spellcasters in terms of the most powerful spells they can learn, through Mystic Arcanum.

Setting aside the fact that these now eat into your Eldritch Invocations, Mystic Arcanum creates some other weird problems.

The first is that Mystic Arcanum, as before, doesn't actually give you a spell slot to cast the spells with, but only lets you cast it at base level once per day. As a result, you can never upcast the spells you learn with Mystic Arcanum, and you can never upcast spells to 6th or higher level (this is particularly sad for the excellent Tasha's Summon spells, most of which the Warlock does get access to).

These were already issues with the old version. But the new version adds a weird wrinkle - that you have a really awkward spell progression.

Consider this:

At 11th level, you can pick up a Mystic Arcanum that teaches you a 6th level spell. For the sake of argument, we'll pick up Summon Fiend (one of those Tasha's spells). If we want to upcast Summon Undead to 4th level, though, we need to wait to get a 4th level spell slot. In the current version, we can do that at level 7, like any other full caster. But in the new version, we have to wait until level 13 to do so.

These spells scale in the same way, increasing damage but more importantly doing more attacks with every two spell levels. And as a result, the new Warlock will be able to cast a 6th level Summon Fiend before they can cast a 4th level Summon Undead.

That seems just wrong.

(I've also previously pointed out that Warlock players will be strongly encouraged to swap out the Mystic Arcanum spells frequently as they level up - you might pick up Fireball at level 5, but at level 9 you don't need Mystic Arcanum for it anymore, and you'll instead prefer to use that invocation on a 5th level spell.)

Ok, so where do we go from here?

Here are my proposals:

First, bring back Pact Magic. Short rest recharges, smaller number of scaling spell slots that go up every two levels until you're level 9 and the slots are level 5.

Next, give us something akin to Eldritch Master - letting us get our spell slots back without resting once a day - but far earlier, such as level 7, like the new Monks get their equivalent.

Next, maybe give us like one more spell slot. Actually, I think two at a time is good for tier 1 (and bumping it up at level 1) and then maybe raising it with each tier as before, but of course ahead by one - so you get a third at level 5, a fourth at level 11, and a fifth at level 17.

Finally, have Mystic Arcanum a full class feature rather than Invocation, as it was in 2014, but also make it so that we now get a spell slot of the given level with which to cast the single spell we learn, but have these spell slots only recharge on a long rest. So, at higher levels, we can choose to upcast spells past 5, but with spell slots that are a more limited resource.

The fear with the Warlock is that giving them too much of the full caster benefits would require nerfing some of their unique features. But I suspect that these changes wouldn't be enough to make them overpowered, but would possibly allay the qualms that people have about the class.

How'd We Do on those Subclass Predictions?

 So, the whole One D&D playtest is, of course, not final. That's the whole point. But with Playtest 6, we finally went beyond the single subclass options of the previous playtests and got four for each of the seven classes - a total of 28.

There are some brand-new subclasses with the College of Dance Bard and the Circle of the Sea Druid, the former of which had already been mentioned by WotC.

So, in the interest of keeping me honest and accountable, let's look at how my predictions turned out.

Bards:

Here, I was dead-on. College of Dance, as predicted, is a melee-focused subclass that borrows elements from the Monk. The other addition here was the College of Glamour, which, as I had suggested, winds up actually striking the flavor vibe that I think most Bard players actually go for - the diva/rock star.

Clerics:

Ok, I do pretty well here. My final list for the Cleric was Life (that one was a freebie,) Tempest, Trickery, and War. That turns out to be a solid C - the only one I got wrong was Tempest Domain, where Light wound up being the actual choice.

And honestly, I think the logic behind Tempest works for Light as well. Light is perhaps not as emphatically damage-focused as Tempest, but still gets some fantastic damage spells (who can argue against Fireball?) and it also fits the Cleric aesthetic more clearly than Tempest, which does stray into that Primal magic field (though I'd also argue, what's more Divine than a Lightning Bolt? That was Zeus' whole thing!)

Druid:

Ok, Druid I basically didn't get. For one thing, I think I've been predicting more radical subclass redesigns than what we've been getting. A few have gotten big changes - the Elements Monk, outside of its general concept, is basically unrecognizable from the old Four Elements one (which was evidently the lowest-rated subclass in the 2014 PHB - and for good reason). The Land Druid is, I think, more or less an iteration upon the old version - still being the spellcasting-focused subclass, but one that I think got a little polish and a little more oomph to make it compete. 

I had also predicted that the Circle of the Shepherd would make it in to focus on Summoning as a theme. Now, we've seen the use of scaling stat blocks in the "Find" spells, but these always summoned a single creature. The real question we have yet to answer is if the Conjure spells are going to work the way they currently do - basing what they summon on CR, and often summoning multiple creatures - or if they'll be reformatted more like the Tasha's "Summon" spells - which I far prefer for numerous reasons. But it's not in there.

I'd also predicted a "Circle of Wrath," that placed a strong emphasis on elemental damage spells, allowing Land to be more of a healing-style Druid. In a certain sense, Land gets to kind of play both of these roles.

So, what did they actually put in?

Well, there's the Circle of Stars, which at least currently is unchanged from Tasha's. Stars is a good subclass, and definitely has a different vibe than other Druids, and so it makes perfect sense.

There is, however, a brand-new subclass in the Circle of the Sea. Now, I'm not totally sure what I think of Sea Druids. My initial impression was that it seemed kind of cool, but I doubt it will be popular as the other options here. It seems to encourage being at close range, but you're still focusing mainly on spellcasting (as opposed to the Moon Druid, which remains focused on Wild Shape). Now, if you squint hard you could maybe consider this to be my "Wrath" Druid, but I will not be insulted if you just chalk me up as a 2/4 (and only getting the gimmes).

All this said, I enjoy the symmetry of the Druid subclasses - Land and Sea, Stars and Moon.

Monks:

Oof, another miss (I'd actually thought I did better until I checked). So, Open Hand, now simply "Hand," and Shadow I did get. But I had predicted that Four Elements was so unpopular that they'd actually cut it from the PHB. Instead, they just tore it down entirely and rebuilt it, to the extent that I think it might actually be a decent subclass now (the base class needs a bit more love, though).

Despite the fact that Way of Mercy is currently my favorite Monk subclass, I didn't think it was "core" enough in Monk class identity to make it to the list. Well, I guess I was wrong.

So, that leaves me with two incorrect predictions.

The first was Way of the Astral Self (or, what would now be called Warrior of the Astral Self). Astral Self is a subclass whose premise - the psionic, ascended, enlightened Monk - I love, but whose mechanics - which all eat through Ki (now Discipline) Points like Hungry Hungry Hippos, left me deeply unsatisfied. Astral Self is a subclass that I'd love to see them revisit and improve, and the new PHB seemed a great place to do so. And again, the idea of a Monk who, via mental, physical, and spiritual discipline, has learned to manifest powers of higher planes of existence seems totally perfect for the high-magic world of D&D.

The other was the Kensei, or something along the lines of the Kensei - a Monk who focused on weapons. But oh well, they're not in.

Paladin:

Well, the first three here were easy, I just got the wrong fourth subclass.

Here's the thing: I never really liked Oath of Glory. I found it kind of uninspiring for character-building, and it's not really different enough from the other Paladin oaths to make it feel like a meaningful choice.

The thing is, the Paladin in particular has always had this issue: it was originally a class that could only be Lawful Good, and so the type of paladin you could be was kind of narrow. The more modern conception of it has loosened that, but I think no subclass (other than the DMG's Oathbreaker, which to be fair kind of means that some part of your paladin-ness has broken) demonstrates the broader potential of the class than the Oath of Conquest.

But my sense is that WotC has decided that non-Good Paladins are too off-brand to make it into the PHB. Glory Paladins can be obnoxious and vainglorious (well, that latter descriptor might be somewhat circular in logic) but are at the very least portraying themselves as a figure of inspiration and heroism (even if that heroism is more in the Greek "really impressive" sense - fitting that they came from the Theros book initially).

So, obviously I got this wrong, but I kind of feel like WotC was the one that got this wrong. But hey, I'm just some dude with a blog.

Ranger:

Ok, did a little better on this one. Naturally, the Hunter and Beast Master weren't getting cut. And I predicted that the very popular Gloomstalker would make it in as well.

Now, perhaps my fixation on Gothic horror monster hunters has biased me, but I predicted/was hoping that the Monster Slayer would make it. Here's the thing... They kind of did? Ok, really it's that The Hunter gets Hunter's Lore, which is similar to the Monster Slayer's Hunter's Sense. The Hunter is probably sounder mechanically (the Monster Slayer suffered a bit from having a lot of really niche abilities - though I do like Slayer's Counter a lot). But the point is, I think that this kind of gives permission to treat the Hunter as being able to fill the same role the Monster Slayer does.

Now, the Fey Wanderer is the actual fourth spec. I'll confess I've never paid much attention to this one. Actually, one element of this subclass is that it has Summon Fey built into it. The subclass could change, but I wonder if those spells will simply make it into the PHB, or if Conjure Woodland Creatures will take its place (though that's a 4th level spell, and Summon Fey is a 3rd level spell).

Rogue:

Nailed this one. But then again, of the four - Thief, Assassin, Arcane Trickster, and Swashbuckler, the only one I'd argue is not a classic Rogue archetype - the Arcane Trickster - is nevertheless probably the most popular Rogue subclass and often considered the most powerful one.

So this was kind of a no-brainer. The Swashbuckler is such a classic archetype that it would be crazy to add anything else.

Overall:

Ok, so, 28 potential points to be earned - four subclasses for each of the seven classes shown here.

My final score was 21/28, or 75%. A C overall - not great, but not as bad as it could have been.

Looking Forward:

So, we have five remaining classes that have not yet gotten their second round or their additional three subclasses - the Barbarian, Fighter, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard.

And, for the record, my predictions, as of when I wrote those posts months ago, are:

Barbarian: Berserker, Totem Warrior, Zealot, Storm Herald

    Confidence level: So, Berserker and Totem Warrior are a lock, I'm basically certain. The others... I think that popularity plays a bigger role here than conceptual quintessence. I think I'd actually even considered Ancestral Guardian here, but now I think it's even more likely. Zealot I still think could make it, but I don't think anyone plays Storm Heralds, and so I'm far less confident that will make the list.

Fighter: Champion, Battle Master, Eldritch Knight, Rune Knight

    Confidence level: This is probably still what I'd pick. Champion is confirmed, and there's no way they cut the Battle Master, but also I think basically no chance that they drop the Eldritch Knight (though please, for the love of the upper planes, let EKs use their weapon as a spellcasting focus! You did it for Valor Bards!) Now, Battle Masters are so popular that I don't really know what other subclasses are popular, but I think Rune Knights are one of the popular ones - certainly more than Samurai, Cavaliers, Arcane Archers, Psi Warriors, and *cruel, dismissive laugh* Purple Dragon Knights. The Echo Knight from Wildemount is actually really cool, but that's the one setting book (other than SCAG) that didn't see their subclasses reprinted in Tasha's, and I suspect that the fact that they don't own the Exandria IP (and that Critical Role is working on their own RPG) means they might want to edge away from incorporating any CR stuff (and might not even have the right to do so).

Sorcerer: Draconic, Wild Magic, Storm, and either Aberrant Mind or Shadow

    Confidence level: Man, I don't know. I think at this point the only PHB classes losing any subclasses are the Cleric and Wizard - anyone with fewer than four is getting to keep all their existing ones. So, Draconic and Wild Magic is in. Storm, I think, is a solid choice for the third option, and has been printed twice already. Now, of the Tasha's subclasses, I know theorycrafters love the Clockwork Soul. I think that puts it in the running. But I also think the Aberrant Mind and Shadow also fit. The only other ones we haven't covered are Divine Soul and Lunar. I don't know about Lunar - with the Circle of the Moon leaning into a bit more of its moon theme, they might shy from this one. Divine Soul is certainly played, and you could very easily just say "you get access to the Divine spell list." I don't feel any strong confidence here, practically at all.

Warlock: Archfey, Fiend, Great Old One, Undead

    Confidence level: So, on one hand, I think popularity has been weighted more in the decisions about subclasses here than I previously felt, and that would, I think, make the Hexblade more likely. On the other hand, Pact of the Blade has been buffed to basically do for you what the Hexblade had been doing - and all Warlocks are getting Medium armor. So, I'm probably sticking with these options. I think the Genie could possibly give the Undead a run for its money (and give us a second option that has the potential to be Good) but yeah, it might be wishful thinking, but this is what I think we'll see.

Wizard: Evoker, Conjurer, Diviner, Necromancer

    Confidence level: The big question is whether they'll decide Conjurer and Necromancer are too similar as "summon" subclasses. Diviner I think is so popular that it stands a better chance of being included. Evoker we know. If I had to choose between Conjurer or Necromancer, I'd choose Necromancer, as it's such a classic archetype. Granted, if we get Undead Warlocks, this becomes less likely, as there's a lot of thematic overlap. And I think Necromancers will need to either get Summon Undead instead of Animate Dead, or Animate Dead will need to be redesigned to make it play better at the table. If they drop any of these four (well, again, Evokers are in, obviously) I could possibly see Transmuters jump in. But I'm skeptical that we'd be getting Enchanters, Illusionists, or Abjurers.