What Will Happen With All of New TTRPGs?

 A friend of mine served as Editor for the new far-future/post-human weird sci-fi RPG Stillfleet, the core rulebook for which I received as a gift for the holiday this year. The game is a departure from D&D's d20-based systems. There is combat in this game, but it's not emphasized the way it is in D&D - the game is built to allow "killing aliens and robots" to be a focus if that's what you're going for, but also focuses on a kind of far-future Dutch East India Company laying the track for a colonialist expansion across the cosmos and the players' role in either facilitating that or opposing it (the latter generally through subversion than direct opposition, given the concentration of power.)

There are options for crunchy optimization, but it's a very different kind of system - class progression is more about getting more options of what you can do than hitting harder.

It's always hard to get into a game that you haven't played - I'm going to try to look up some actual play videos to help me wrap my head around it as I work my way through the textbook-sized rules, but I've had discussions with this friend and in general about the challenges of, well, being an RPG that isn't Dungeons & Dragons.

    When you watch videos by Matt Colville, he'll often dismiss 5E's popularity as more a function of luck than anything special about the system. He is, naturally, inclined to downplay 5E's popularity given that the RPG system he is working on is explicitly being built to compete with it, but we can also reverse cause and effect here as well - he is eager to make his own RPG because of the flaws he has identified in 5th Edition.

The "OGL Debacle" or whatever we wind up calling it from the early part of this year set off a bevy of new projects from longtime 5E contributors.

As I see it, there are four notable projects arising either out of this crisis that were either conceived because of the crisis or, more likely, given higher priority because of the fears of the death of the OGL.

Now, Wizards of the Coast did backpedal hard - 5E's SRD (the sort of primary corpus of the rules that includes things like "this is how Rogues work" and "this is how Advantage works" and, I believe, things like "these are the stats of a Goblin") has been fully handed over to Creative Commons, taking it fully out of Wizards' hands and, essentially, perpetually making the SRD usable by anyone who wants to publish and sell 5E content. I don't know if the changes coming in the 2024 rulebooks will be added to this SRD, but at the very least, nothing is being taken away from content creators, and none of the overzealous language of the original OGL change announcement appears to have survived.

But, these projects were announced and are moving forward:

Kobold Press is working on Tales of the Valiant (under the umbrella of "Project Black Flag.") Kobold Press was founded by former D&D designers and worked on early 5E projects like the Tyranny of Dragons adventure books and Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, and has published massive monster books in their "Tome of Beasts" 1 and 2 and Creature Codex, among other things. At least in their initial playtest documents, their RPG looks to be replicating very closely the overall form of 5E, but with some interesting new ideas like separating Ancestries and Heritages, for example.

Pathfinder of course came out during 4th Edition, and was built essentially to be a more direct successor to D&D's 3rd Edition (and 3.5th Edition) after 4E had made massive changes. Pathfinder came out with its 2nd Edition a few years ago, but given that it was still built on the OGL, Paizo underwent a project to come out with "2nd Edition Remastered" which sought to utterly strip the game of anything that could be construed as being built on D&D's rules systems. Pathfinder was, for a time, more popular than D&D, but I think 5th Edition pretty handily won back the community, and of course the TTRPG hobby has exploded with 5E's success, meaning that any edge Pathfinder had had before 2014 is basically negligible at this stage.

MCDM's as-yet-unnamed RPG is, of course, the one of these I've been paying closest attention to, but it seems to be built with a mission statement to drop any mechanics that the designers feel are only still around because things have "just always been that way." While Colville and lead designer James Introcaso have been very candid about the design process, I'm not currently aware of how it will all work, exactly, but the core of their design has been to start with four keywords - Tactical Cinematic Heroic Fantasy. By dropping things like intense inventory management, I think they're trying to get the game to play naturally the way that a lot of tables handwave uninteresting (or, more accurately, out-of-genre) mechanics, and with things as radical as getting rid of attack rolls, they're hoping to minimize uninteresting moments in gameplay.

Finally, Darrington Press is working on their Daggerheart game, which is meant to be a more role-play focused fantasy RPG. This latter one is interesting because Critical Role (the parent company of Darrington Press) played a big part in popularizing 5th Edition and the actual play style of entertainment in general (though I always feel a need to shout out Acquisitions Incorporated for both being my introduction to D&D and also sort of inventing the format,) and thus they have a big platform to promote this system - I would not be shocked to find that Critical Role's fourth campaign will use this instead of 5E.

    Now, obviously, there have been plenty of non-D&D systems out there since the genre was born in the 1970s. But I think there are points of inertia that make it harder for any of these systems to get the kind of popularity and cultural relevance.

To be sure: lots of these games are successful and profitable. My friend's game, Stillfleet, has now published additional supplements like published ventures (note: not adventures) and they've got other stuff cooking that I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about, so it seems to be going well.

But because TTRPGs require a pretty thorough understanding of the rules to play and certainly to run, it's much harder to just "try out" another system, especially if it has a complexity level similar to D&D. I got the Starfinder core rulebook and its first Alien Archive (and in fact the second one and "Armory") a while ago and have never been able to get my friends to play it, and barely have the energy to run it.

While I jumped into DM'ing immediately, I still benefitted greatly from both watching Acq Inc and having a player who was already familiar with the system. But that requires a kind of continual lineage of familiarity - I ran it for my friend Tim who now runs the game professionally (and has an actual play show: Watch Legacy of Fools on Tuesdays!)

In other words, there's a lot of inertia. WotC is, wisely I think, working very hard not just to achieve the goal of making the 2024 rulebooks compatible with all the 5E products from the last nine years (I don't think they'll accomplish this with 100% compatibility, but it'll be close enough that no table should have any trouble navigating the changes - call it 97.5%). So, they have both the 50-year brand recognition and the 10-year familiarity with the system to make it particularly easy to get into the game.

The other challenge these games have set for themselves is that they all appear to be fully in the same genre as D&D. These days, if you want to play a modern-ish cosmic horror game, Call of Cthulhu is probably your obvious go-to. If you want to play a modern-day goth vampire game, you have Vampire the Masquerade. And if you want to play as fantasy heroes fighting monsters, D&D has you pretty much covered.

So these games need to be really good - they need to be not just better than D&D, but so much better that players will set aside the system mastery they have developed (both in running and playing the game) to go through the growing pains of figuring out a new system.

And to be clear: I hope they succeed! 5E is basically the most fun game I've ever played. So any game that is better than this one that I've become obsessed with for the last eight years would be a phenomenally good game indeed.

I think that a world in which more of these systems are not just around but also popular enough to compete with D&D should, I hope, spur one another to improve. Is 5E's 2024 revision conservative? For sure. Will it not accomplish all the things I hope it will? For sure. But maybe, if we see other games grow in popularity, the designers at WotC (the ones that Hasbro hasn't laid off, at least) will feel more confident in trying new and innovative ideas.

There's a new frontier in TTRPGs opening up, and like any new frontier, it's going to be filled with dangers and failures, but there's the potential for greatness.

The Games that Stuck with Me in 2023

 With 2024 just around the corner, I thought I'd do a little retrospective on the past year, which by most peoples' measure, was a fantastic year for gaming, even if we saw some real nastiness on the industry side of things.

Addressing that, I think as I've gotten older and perhaps even a bit wiser, is that we continually see how the shortsighted, everything-to-raise-stock-price late capitalist world is making things really rough for talented and creative people who want to make beautiful things. The shift required to take us out of this downward spiral is a lot bigger than just the games industry, so the best we can do as fans of games is to reward creativity and cleverness and support a ground-up movement for the people making these games to demand and receive the respect and security that they so richly deserve.

But, being outside that industry, and just being one dude with a blog, right now I'm going to focus on my own personal experience and talk about the games that have meant a lot to me this year.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon:

    I'm a newbie to the Armored Core franchise. Like a lot of people who got on board the FromSoft love train with the Soulsborne games (ironically, I've generally liked the non-Dark Souls games of theirs I've played better) but in a weird way, ACVI was a throwback to an older style of game that I didn't realize I was nostalgic for.

    Remember levels? See, for those of you Zoomers or even Gen Alpha folks who were born after 2000, video games used to nearly all be divided into discrete mission environments we called levels. A level would start, and you'd play through it, and once you had beaten it, things would kind of reset to a status quo.

    These days, "open world" games have become far more ubiquitous, which emphasize a kind of continuity between areas of the world. Designers have gotten good at nevertheless making paths through those worlds that can set up elaborately-staged setpieces, but there is a certain lack of punctuation. Often, victory in some big event will spur you on to the next big event.

    Levels, however, create natural moments in a game's pacing to pause and even potentially take a break.

    Armored Core VI has, of course, a lot more to recommend it beyond levels, but as someone who was playing Gamecube and PS2 games in high school and college, ACVI hits a note of nostalgia. The PS2 had a crapton of games, and a lot of them were forgettable, but it was also an era in which I felt I could be more free to try something unlike what I had played before and still enjoy myself. ACVI recaptured that feeling and was, on top of it, made for really satisfying gameplay. Even as someone who usually leaves it to online sources to optimize builds, ACVI feels built to reward understanding all those weird statistics on each of your parts and to really get into specializing a build for the challenge ahead.

    It's also the most audacious use of New Game Plus modes I've ever seen - not only are there two different endings to go for that you can play through one after the other, but an entirely new ending and mission line emerges after you've already beaten the game twice.

    And somehow, even though it's not going to take you all that much time to beat the game the second time, it never feels like the reason it's so fast is that the game doesn't have enough content.

    Also, I had been somewhat turned off by its announcement trailer, which portrayed, with its muted colors and synth score, a depressingly bleak world for a game. It's not that that portrayal is wrong, but somehow, despite its characters appearing purely as emblems and voice over, there are some real personalities and dramatic arcs - I mean, who didn't fall in love with V.IV. Rusty? (I maintain the third ending is the canonical best one if only because Rusty might survive it).

Baldur's Gate 3:

    I'll throw a caveat in here: I never beat Baldur's Gate 3. I got to the cusp of the city and found that my drive to finish the game had kind of dried up. There's something a bit overwhelming and intimidating to the sheer volume of possibilities that can happen in that game.

    But this is something I feel is more my issue than the game's. The fact is that this thing is an utterly mindblowing achievement. BG3 takes the framework of D&D's 5th edition rules and adapts them very faithfully to a digital medium, while arguably making a lot of improvements that the TTRPG should consider implementing as well.

    BG3 is filled with a cast of well-written party members and side characters, with some real dramatic stakes and interesting fantasy ideas.

    This might be more of a song of praise to my computer, but I was also overjoyed that an enormous game like this was running smoothly on my not-particulalry-a-gaming-computer M1 Macbook Air.

Control:

    So, this is a bit funny: Control came out in 2019, but I didn't check it out until this year. However, upon getting into the game, I have become a zealous convert to the cult of Remedy Entertainment. This was a game that helped me find a term to identify the style/genre of writing I've been doing since I was 17, and juiced a lot of my own creative impulses, which spurred a huge spurt of my own writing earlier this year.

    Control left such a huge impact on me that, in writing this, I could have sworn I played the game last year - the idea that I've only been familiar with it for about 9 months seems far too short.

    The game's action combat is extremely fun and satisfying - after finishing the game I spent a good amount of time wandering around the Oldest House looking for Hiss to fight just for the fun of it - but far more is its incredible world-building and mixed approach to storytelling. It's fascinating to me that my favorite character in the game is one who only ever appears as a live-action actor in various film strips.

Alan Wake II:

    So, it should come as no surprise that, upon discovering Remedy's games in the first of their releases to push for this idea of a connected universe, I decided to finally go back and check out Alan Wake, which has sounded intriguing back in 2010 but which I never got around to.

    I liked Alan Wake a lot, but it definitely also showed its age, even in its Remastered Edition. Still, it was enough to pump me up for October's release of the long, long anticipated Alan Wake II.

    And by God is that an incredible game.

    I will say that purely in terms of personal tastes, I think I like Control better overall, but in terms of stunning achievement, Alan Wake II sets a new bar for artistic ambition within the medium of games.

    I mean, holy crap. Holy crap, guys. This game feels like you're playing through a top-shelf season of prestige television while also reading a mind-bending novel. The game is so rich in thematic meaning as well as engrossing mystery. It's funny. It's beautiful. It's terrifying (but never in a cheap way, unless you count the occasional jump scare). It's fascinating. It's exciting. It's just... dear lord.

    This movie has a fifteen-minute avant-garde art film that you might even miss if you don't stick around to let it play!

    I'll confess that the survival-horror gameplay, as someone who has never played such a game before, took me some time to adjust to - my initial fight against Robert Nightingale (which I realized on my second playthrough is literally the fourth enemy you'll face) was brutal because I had to spend most of it scrounging for two more bullets to fire at the guy, and I think the genre evokes more of a frustrated grumble than a shriek of fear, but on a second playthrough I found myself much better-adjusted to the rhythms and cadences of the gameplay.

    Still, this is the sort of game where whatever flaws or points where my taste varies from their choice of direction is kind of moot because of what a profound achievement it is.

Questions about MCDM's RPG System

 MCDM, the beloved indie TTRPG developer, is working on their own RPG system that aims to bring more exciting tactical, cinematic, heroic fantasy monster-fighting than the mainstream options like D&D.

Nearly everything I've heard about the system makes me excited - I think the point of inertia is that, with almost a decade of 5E D&D under my belt and maybe a thousand dollars' worth of books for the game, along with a subscription to D&D Beyond and all the built-in infrastructure to make running and playing this game convenient, the big challenge is whether the new game will be so much better that not only I, but also my friends, will feel inclined to try out a new system.

Optimistically, I'd like to say it would be easy enough to simply continue running 5E games and also run games in this new system - indeed, that's what I hope I'll be able to do. But running a TTRPG is a big commitment.

Adults, infamously, have busy schedules, and RPGs are never the top priority (even if, as someone who is a bit of a homebody bum, it's high on my priority list). I'd also say that my friends are not necessarily all big gaming nerds - a lot of them enjoy video games, but tabletop games require a certain rules familiarity and mastery because things cannot be automated the way they are in a video game. Playing Baldur's Gate 3 is, on a mechanical level, very similar to playing a game of 5E D&D, but the barrier to entry is way lower because most of the rules are automated by the game, and on top of that you can easily play it solo.

In my mind, a game like Pathfinder needs to struggle to justify itself. At its heyday, during 4th Edition, I suspect the reason that Pathfinder was so popular was because it was a closer continuation of the 3rd Edition (or 3.5) system - it had the familiarity advantage in a way that 4E did not.

MCDM is, admirably, I'll add, boldly slaughtering sacred cows in the interest of shaking off the rust of nearly 50 years of game design. The thing most people are talking about is the fact that you won't be rolling to hit with attacks.

And that raises the first of my questions: How likely is it in a round of combat for your character to emerge unscathed?

    The preview page for the Tactician (the Fighter analogue with a Battle Master emphasis) shows that a first-level Tactician will likely start with something like 40ish hit points (maybe more, as a "Kit" can add a lot). That's almost four times as much as a 5E Fighter would start out with at the same level. Now, we know that there's no attack roll, but characters can still have armor and defenses.

I think to some extent this will just contribute to piling on more HP.

After all, if you don't account for healing capabilties, having a higher max HP is basically equivalent to taking less damage. If your HP and your healing received go up, then it's truly equivalent to taking less damage.

Still, I'm thinking about my Eldritch Knight, whose modest build strategy was to severely reduce the chance he had to get hit by an attack - with a +1 Shield, the Defensive Fighting Style, plate armor and the Shield spell, he effectively had an AC of 27 as long as he had a reaction and a spell slot. So, unless there were save-for-half offensive abilities, he'd only rarely get hit (he did tend to receive a lot of critical hits, though I wonder to what extent I was just more aware of them because they made up a higher percentage of the hits he took).

Therefore: I wonder if I could build a character who, similarly, takes very little damage.

I know that in earlier designs, there would be some kind of roll for defense - you could reduce damage by rolling some dice, and even that if you reduced it to zero, you got to make a counterattack.

I believe this idea has been scrapped because it required too much rolling not on your turn, but I wonder if there will be some statistic governing the ability to reduce incoming damage.

The math gets tricky, of course: if you have a subtractive system - say, with your heavy armor you get to subtract 5 damage from each attack - that becomes really powerful when your foes are rolling, say, 2d6 (nearly half the time you're reducing the damage to zero) but becomes pretty pathetic when you're getting hit for a roll of 4d12+7 by some gargantuan titan.

A fractional system is more balanced - a Raging Barbarian taking half damage from six weak attacks by a group of skeletons and also taking half damage from the claw attack of an ancient dracolich is getting consistent value out of that feature - but if you go into more complex fractions than simply halving, the math gets a little more difficult. How scalable is this?

See, it could be cool if as you get better armor, the damage reduction gets more powerful, but while this is a common feature in digital RPGs - like how Armor works in World of Warcraft - it's potentially a lot of math at a tabletop - do you really want to have to figure out what the damage of that attacks was when you have a five-eighths damage reduction?

So, my suspicion is that we'll likely just see much larger health pools, but will not, by contrast, see monster damage scale up proportionately. In other words, players will need to adjust a bit in terms of what they consider a big scary hit - a monster hitting you for 5% of your maximum health in 5E is basically negligible - just a scratch. But because that's going to be a consistent drain rather than on occasional event, taking the 20 hits of that size necessary to be taken down is going to happen a lot quicker.

    Really No Attrition?

To be fair, I think James Introcaso has already acknowledged this, but while the primary class resources are meant to build up over the course of a fight or even an adventure, it seems there will be some things that are dwindling resources. They've talked about creating a tension between Victories and Recoveries: Victories are earned when you win fights or accomplish other serious goals over the course of an adventure, and each class will have some way to capitalize on Victories. The Victories go away (and are converted to XP) when you Rest, which is meant to signal the end of an adventure in most cases, which is meant to encourage players to push on and forward.

Recoveries, however, will be another resource that you start with a lot of, and which you'll spend over the course of an adventure to regain HP and possibly some other things. These, however, do dwindle, and the idea is that if you run out of recoveries, you'll start to really have to seriously think about resting.

Now, I like that these two are in tension - it creates a dramatic and strategic choice and could solve an issue in 5E, which is that if you can afford to do so, it's usually best to rest as much as possible, usually with only narrative tension serving to keep players from resting at every opportunity (or a threat that DMs will add more monsters if the party does rest - which I, for one, am usually too lazy to do - probably should learn to rebalance encounters and have an "if they rested" version of fights, but oh well).

Heroic Resources, though, of which each class has a unique one, are said to not be built on an attrition model.

Now, we don't know what this version of the Talent will look like, but certainly the 5E talent, while not using spell slots, does for sure have an attrition-based resource system. Talents accumulate Strain, and Strain eventually puts them in a position where they have to tap the brakes on their powers or risk just straight-up dying (and on top of that they're also building up other negative effects).

But if we assume Strain is going to work similarly to how it does in its 5E version, that puts it in contrast with other heroic resources, such as the Tactician's Focus, which seems to easily build up in combat and, far from running out, the Tactician is going to get more to play with the longer they adventure and fight.

Now, this could certainly create more tension at the table - our Talent is starting to look really ragged, but our Frenzy is itching to push forward and get more Rage - but I'd really like to see how the balance is going to be struck. Will Talents feel unfairly like the wet blanket holding the rest of the party back because they need to rest and release some that strain? Or are only half the classes going to really get this feeling of having the heroic will to push on regardless of how long the adventure has gone?

    The Martial/Caster Divide:

One of the deep... I hesitate to say flaws, but one of the deep issues in 5E and I think most of D&D design, is that you have this giant catalogue of spells, which are sort of the ultimate customization options for a lot of classes, and which are utterly meaningless to other classes.

Essentially, the spell list in the back of the PHB (and in rules supplements like Xanathar's and Tasha's) are a giant grab-bag of ways that your character can do unique and interesting things. Sure, some spells are favored a lot more than others, but the point is that, beyond combat, there's a core system for "various cool things you can do" that half the classes usually don't have access to.

The 5E Talent, interestingly, does not use any of 5E's existing spells, getting its own class-specific bespoke catalogue of Psionic Powers. Many of these powers look very similar to spells - with casting (manifestation) times, levels (orders,) and even schools. This allows the Talent to be nearly as customizable as all the 5E spellcasters (and potentially just as much if they released more psionic powers).

But I think that one area where D&D suffers is that the utility options of all those spells can just never be replicated for non-caster classes. A Rogue, in addition to being the stealthy, underhanded combatant, is supposed to be "the guy who can do it for you," and while things like Expertise and Reliable Talent make them really good at succeeding on skill checks, there's no real Rogue ability that lets you, say, automatically find an object nearby - even if that's flavorfully something that  Rogue should be very good at. Thus, a Wizard with Locate Object can often be more effective at searching for something than a Rogue who's got expertise in Investigation.

I'd love to see a system in which classes that aren't necessarily casting magical spells still have the versatility of a spellcaster.

    How is non-combat stuff going to feel?

We don't have a super strong idea of how skills and such are going to work in MCDM's RPG. I suspect that it will look pretty familiar - the Tactician, for example, is given a number of skills they can learn, and I'd guess we're looking at a similar system.

But I don't think it's something they've talked about in their design diaries.

And I think this ultimately comes down to the following question:

Can I run the same sort of adventures I run in D&D using this system?

The goal, I think, of the MCDM RPG is to do what current 5E players like to do, but better.

And to be fair, a lot of the roleplay and storytelling that has made D&D a compelling entertainment medium in the form of Actual Play shows has been pretty independent of the gameplay systems. I like tactical combat, and in a way I think that's the thing I'm least worried that this game will screw up.

Perhaps, therefore, it's silly to worry how well it will handle such things, because in theory any system that doesn't get in the way of RP will be fine.

So, then, here's my last question:

    How easy will it be to customize and homebrew stuff for it?

In a Q&A, Matt Colville gave a somewhat flippant answer to whether there will be guidance on homebrewing monsters in the rules, saying that the way to build monsters is to playtest them, and that should be obvious.

But I think maybe he was thinking about that from the perspective of a professional game designer: obviously, the monsters of Flee, Mortals were tested and tweaked by lots of professionals, and the result was a beautifully polished product.

The thing is, sometimes for the story you're telling, you don't always have quite the pieces that you need. And I have made regular and ample use of the "Quick Monster Stats" in the 5E DMG to build monsters of my own design.

What we need, basically, is a similar table that can show you roughly how much HP a monster of a certain level should have, and how much damage it should typically do. This isn't a precise science, of course, but it's incredibly useful for putting together something that will challenge your players without overwhelming them.

So, I'm hoping that there is a similar chart here. I'm someone who likes genre-mixing a lot, and so if I want to make a monster that is a vending machine animated by the strange radiation of a glowing meteorite, with an attack that lets it launch a volley of soda cans at its foes, it would be nice to know if, for a second-level party, I should make it launch three cans for 2d6 each, dealing a total of 21 damage on average, or if I should decrease that damage given that I also want it to have a lot of HP.

I don't know when we'll start getting sample pages or a basic rules release, and I'm sure that this coming year I'll be focusing more on the 2024 D&D core rulebooks (and seeing if it's going to be easy enough to let players in existing campaigns convert).

But I am excited about this game, far more than I have been about things like Pathfinder 2E Revised or Tales of the Valiant.

Cleaning Up Cult Stashes, Nursery Rhymes, and Lunchboxes

 With my intention to be as much of a completionist as I can, with boltcutters in hand I am collecting all of the various odds and ends.

I just got the penultimate Nursery Rhyme and received a package from the FBC with a new doll - the Father doll (which... looks a little familiar) - and a suggestion that a new site has opened up at Cauldron Lake.

One of the issues I'm running into, though, is that I'm completely out of healing items, so I'm finding it generally wise to turn off my flashlight and give any Taken I come across a wide berth (it turns out there is a reason to turn off the flashlight - the Taken are less likely to see you if you do).

I realize I'm actually not right up to the point of no return, as I think the first confrontation with Mr. Scratch happens before that point, and of course with most of Alan's story left to play through I'll be swapping over to him for a good long while.

Alan, of course, has fewer obvious collectables - basically just his many Words of Power, and thankfully I think I've met Tim Breaker in each of the levels, so I believe I already have them all marked on the map.

One thing that has been helpful here is that if you find all of the Setter for Mayor posters, you'll get a sign announcing that he's meeting people at Suomi Hall in Watery, and if you meet the very good boy of a mayor, you'll get a charm that will show any collectables near you on the map.

I think I have only two lunchboxes left to find - somewhere in the Bunker Woods west of Bright Falls, I believe, and the only Cult Stash I have "yet to find" is the one that's automatically open on NG+ because it contains the crossbow - I think we'll need a patch or something to let it count for the case board.

I've been thinking about which half of the game I think is "better."

Naturally, Alan's "Noir York City" is the more mind-bending part of the game. It's interesting that Alan doesn't really have any boss fights in the same way that Saga does - with her three Overlap Guardians and her two fights with Mr. Scratch. Alan's Plot Board is simpler in some ways than Saga's Case Board, but it's also a little trickier.

The Restless Shadows as enemies are interesting - Alan is constantly surrounded by potential threats, but only one in ten winds up being an actual enemy. It definitely creates an uneasy sense, where you're either paranoid and potentially wasting batteries on harmless shadows, or you grow to underestimate something and wind up getting a big chunk of health knocked out when that shadow turns out to be a real foe.

I have noticed on this playthrough, though, that if a Shadow is holding a non-shadowy weapon, it's a sure sign it's the real deal.

Noir York City, as I'm calling it, doesn't have any of the fun cutesiness of Bright Falls - even if Bright Falls and Watery are under siege from a terrifying supernatural menace, a big part of the fun of the setting is all the idiosyncrasies of the small-town culture there. There's a real charm to these places even if it sometimes gets creepy. Alan's nightmare reality is basically free of anything remotely charming - it's the grittiest, grimiest version of New York you could imagine.

Also, one of the reasons a big city like New York tends not to feel so creepy is that there are, you know, people there. When I was in college in NYC, sure, there was a kind of anonymity to the city (also, given that I started college three years after 9/11, there was a dark shadow hanging over the whole place,) but it was rare I didn't feel safe there. Walking around at night, there were always tons of other people out on the streets and bright lights shining everywhere. Cities, after all, were built by humans to be a safe place compared to the wild woods filled with hungry wolves (holy crap are the wolves in this game scary).

So, Alan's nightmare NYC is all the fears and imagined terrors of the city with none of the counterbalancing reality.

I actually think it's kind of a brilliant juxtaposition. I remember a Cracked After Hours episode that was talking about how American horror stories almost all take place in rural areas, compared with British stories that take place in cities.

Now, the argument (which is made by a fictionalized version of the person in the episode) is a little more cut-and-dry than reality. Candyman, for example, is a definitely urban horror story that was very popular (though also written with a different perspective than the typical white suburban one that most horror stories of its era had).

But we kind of get both styles of alienation - for Saga, being from a more cosmopolitan home (I believe she's meant to be from D.C.) going into this remote, rural place (I suspect Sam Lake opted to avoid going too deep into the racial politics aspect of the urban/rural divide, given that he's not an American, but it's got to add a whole other layer of unease to be a woman of color out in a rural area - though there's some interesting questions of interpretation about the origins of Tor and Odin's conflict with Saga's father, and whether race played a role, much as I'd hope that the old rockers wouldn't care about that). Alan, on the other hand, is basically in the NYC from his Noir-inspired detective novels, and Noir is all about that isolating urban alienation. Particularly in the 70s and 80s, which is when Alan would have been growing up, there was a strong cultural association of cities with crime and danger - one point of inspiration for The Dark Place's NYC is the movie Taxi Driver, which has a protagonist who cannot see anything in the city but the sleaze and corruption.

If the rural horror is being too far away from anyone else to get any help, urban horror is the idea that your problems are minor and personal enough that the vast majority of the city's populace doesn't care to help you solve them. In that sense, the fact that the Dark Place is, in fact, densely populated, just with shadows that are indifferent to you, kind of nails that feeling.

Anyway, with only one full day before I fly off for the holidays, I'm skeptical I'll be able to make much progress - I might be able to clean up Saga's side of things, but then I think I'll maybe be able to scratch the surface of Alan's next chapters (if memory serves as well, The Oceanview Hotel was the longest "level" of his side of the game.)

So, in that case, it's unlikely I'll be finding out how the Final Draft ends (though I'm stumbled across some spoilers).

I don't know if we have a timetable for the Night Springs and Lake House DLCs, but I'm not holding my breath. I am, of course, looking forward to other DLCs from other games, like Shadow of the Erdtree (I believe the recently-released Valhalla expansion for God of War Ragnarok is free, but while that game was pretty good, it's not as high on my priority list of exciting stuff.)

I'm sure it won't be for a few years, but damn am I excited for Control 2. I'm hoping we don't need to wait thirteen years for it - I'd like to play it before I'm 50! Alan Wake II has so much polish on it compared to the first game, and even if I'm freaking out a little about healing items, I think I'm getting the hang of the combat (getting those lunchboxes has helped). But with Control, I came back to the game after beating basically everything just to run around and fight random Hiss spawns for fun - the combat is that satisfying.

If we could have a Control 2 with the production value of Alan Wake II (not to say the original was lacking) I'd be freaking overjoyed.

Echoes of the Past and Alan Wake

 I followed through on my threat to do both Local Girl and Old Gods one after the other, meaning I've left a lot of Alan's half of the story to go after I've finished up Saga's.

One thing that I had forgotten is that you don't actually get the Bolt Cutters until you're fully in the Overlap after going to the Valhalla Nursing Home, so you really can't access all of the game's areas until you're really near Saga's endgame.

I don't know how many of the manuscript pages I've found are truly new or just that I missed them the first time - or even that I just forgot them.

But we do see a little more about the sequence of events:

Local Girl and a Crossroads: Progressing through The Final Draft of Alan Wake II

 So, as it turns out, you have to do Alan's first (full) chapter, "Casey," before you can switch between characters at will in Alan Wake II.

I think I'm going to try to do all of Saga's stuff before going into the rest of Alan's stuff this playthrough, if only to mix things up compared to my first playthrough - and I'll be honest, part of this is delayed gratification to save "We Sing" for as late as possible. (I think my first go around I did We Sing before Local Girl, but then did Local Girl before Room 665.)

I don't think I had realized you can find a map of all the Cult of the Tree stashes in the hideout toward the end of Local Girl, but it marks all of them on your map, making the collection a bit easier. There are lists of where the Nursery Rhymes are, but it's less explicit, and the lunchboxes are... I don't know if there's any clue to them other than "keep an eye out for colorful yarn thingies."

Another thing that I think has really helped me is that I actually got the Dark Place map as soon as I got out of the studio - which in the first playthrough I didn't until pretty late in the game. I don't think I ever got the map for the health center at Valhalla Nursing Home, so I'll try to get that too.

Anyway, I think I have everything out of Watery I can get so far - I don't have the Bolt Cutters yet, so there are a couple things beyond my reach. More frustratingly, the stash near the little hut across the river from Coffee World was already open, despite being marked on my map. I don't know if this is a very weird Final Draft thing or if it's just bugged - I've been opening other stashes I had previously found in the original playthrough, so there's nothing about this one that suggests it should be different.

With the Screwdriver, I can open a few of those park service supply boxes at Cauldron Lake, but I don't know if there are any other "major collectables" that I can come across there.

On Alan, I think I got absolutely everything out of Caldera Street Station, including all the Words of Power.

As it turns out, I suspect that these upgrades might be making the game more manageably easy, which is nice. I took a few shots form Thornton and Mulligan, but knowing how to beat them of course makes the fight relatively simple.

Once again, though, I have a couple clues in "The Story" that say "for later," which in my first playthrough I never wound up being able to put on the case board. I'm hoping that by being really insanely thorough I'll get every case buttoned up.

I'll be curious to see how Night Springs and The Lake House fit into the game - if they'll be standalone chapters like the ones from the first Alan Wake, or if you'll access them in-game. I honestly think the former might be better, given that I think the last "autosave" spot you get is well past a point of no return.

This game is, of course, more of an open world like they conceived for the original Alan Wake, but it's really primarily a narrative-focused game, and so the openness is really more to reward backtracking.

I'm going to be looking up lists of all the manuscript pages and other collectables to make sure I don't miss anything.

So far, the Final Draft has not seemed all too terribly different. I imagine the "real world" stuff would go roughly the same, though. We're not looking at a whole other game here, after all. I'll be keeping an eye out for a different ending, of course.

That being said: Alan Wake II is already a complete game, and much as I'd love to have more, more, and more of it, I'm going to get ready for the DLCs and the other Remedy projects in the works - even if they're going to be probably years off (will I play Control 2 while I'm still in my 30s? We've got about two and a half years!)

Wrapping My Head Around What We Know of the MCDM RPG

 The recent infuriating news about Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, which comes at what I imagine is the worst possible time from a strategic standpoint (unless some Hasbro folks assumed that the work on the 2024 books was basically done and they could thus afford to fire a bunch of people who had just done said work) has had me taking more seriously the idea of a broader TTRPG space.

Don't get me wrong: I love D&D, and I think it's important that the infamously nuance-blind online community realizes that there's a distinction between the passionate game designers and artists who make D&D and the corporate parasites that pull shit like the OGL fiasco and lay off people to improve their own year-end bonuses. The public faces of D&D, which these days is primarily Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, are not the enemy here.

The enemy, as usual, is basically capitalism (or whatever horrifying mutant "increase share value at the expense of all else" version of capitalism that exists today is).

Anyway, I love D&D, but I've also been playing it long enough to start to question some of its underlying assumptions. The game is nearly 50 years old, and while 5th Edition is very different than 1st Edition was (not even getting into the complexities of what "1st Edition" even means) there's clearly a strong effort to preserve elements of the game for the sake of nostalgia.

And thus there's a place for a game that's willing to upend the table.

I think that's the core premise of MCDM's as-yet-untitled TTRPG. (As a note, I'm not labeling these posts until we have a name to talk about this game.)

This game is still in development, and likely won't be released until 2025 (fitting, perhaps, that I'll get it ten years after I started playing D&D) so all of this is somewhat speculative, but I figured I'd go through what we know:

    2d6 Rather than 1d20:

D&D's most iconic die is the d20, which is notably the largest die (sort of - you could argue percentile dice simulates a 100-sided die) used in the game, but it's also the one most commonly used. This means that for most rolls you make, there's the widest swing. And, as a single die, there's no greater chance for it to roll near its average than at its extremes.

The MCDM RPG uses 2d6 for most of its rolls, and will evidently be using d4s and d8s for other systems, but probably not any higher-value dice.

This means that you're more likely to roll average, and the absolute lowest you can roll is only ten lower than the absolute highest you can roll.

Now, it seems that this will be used both for combat and for skill checks, so we'll need to adjust our expectations. In 5E, as a DM I tend to set a DC of 15 as my standard "moderate difficulty" for a skill check. At early levels, a player who's perfectly set up for that kind of thing is going to succeed about half the time, but for other players you'll need a little luck, but it's still very doable.

We don't know how "characteristics" (their name for abilities) will scale with level, but it appears that the Tactician starts with 3 Might (the values here are your modifier - there's no weird raw score that is rarely ever referenced) so it would seem that a good base TN (Target Number, rather than using "Difficulty Class") might be 10 (though we don't know what kind of value that Skills might add, so it could be more like 12).

We don't know how critting will work. Supposedly it'll be more frequent than in 5E, which to me suggests it could happen any time you roll a 6 on either die, which would be about 31% of the time.

    Classes, Subclasses, and Ancestries:

One thing that will be familiar is that there are a number of classes, each with its own subclasses, and that you'll be able to play various ancestries like humans, elves, dwarves, and presumably some weirder original creatures.

The classes that have been previewed look like they largely fit into familiar fantasy archetypes, but use unconventional names. Some will have obvious analogues: the Fury is the Barbarian, the Shadow is the Rogue, the Tactician is the Fighter, the Null is the Monk, the Conduit is the Cleric, the Censor is the Paladin. But we'll also see a little bit of unusual flair with some ideas like the Summoner as a kind of Necromancer/Conjurer and the Elementalist as a classic blasty mage. The Talent, of course, we've seen in 5E now, and while you could argue for it being vaguely similar to the Sorcerer, it's kind of its own thing.

    Roll for Damage, No Roll to Hit:

One of the exciting and curious things about the game is that there's no roll to hit a target. Instead, it looks like damage will simply happen, but monsters and player characters will have ways to reduce incoming damage.

That said, it also just seems that we should expect higher damage numbers. In the Backerkit preview pages, we see that the Tactician begins at 1st level with 38 HP plus their Endurance score (Endurance being basically Constitution) and gets an additional 8+END with each level.

Compare this with a 5E Fighter, who's going to have 10+Con at 1st level, so likely only 12 or 13. There's a good chance you're going to have more than three times as much HP - but perhaps that's necessary given that you'll likely be taking more damage.

    10 Levels:

The range from beginning adventurer to demigod-like hero is shortened here. The intention, according to Matt Colville, is that players should level up after an "adventure," which he suggests is something like a 32-to-64-page published adventure. The hope is that most campaigns will see players hit max level, and that all that exciting max-level content will not be a hazy dream the way it typically is in D&D.

    Kits:

Equipment is handled very differently. The game's emphasis is on the tactical fighting of monsters, and so the nitty-gritty about every piece of equipment you're carrying (and how much it all weighs) is left abstracted into something called Kits.

We're given some examples of Kits, and different classes will be able to use different kits. For example, one of the kits a Tactician (and presumably a Censor) could take is "Shining Armor," which is described as being heavy armor, a shield, a medium weapon, and a thrown weapon, and grants bonuses like adding 20 HP, 1 Speed (speed is measured in squares on a grid, so this is the equivalent of 5 feet,) +1 damage with weapon attacks and +5 range with weapon attacks (I'd assume this applies to thrown weapons). It then grants a once-per-encounter ability called "Lead the Charge," which lets you and all your allies within 10 squares of you to move up to your speed.

Kits thus feel like a sort of mix of equipment and "vibe."

    Initiative:

There's no initiative roll - instead, the players and the monsters take turns, and the party can discuss which order they want to take their turns in. The intention here is to encourage cooperative tactics - maybe the Fury has an ability that will knock those two kobolds closer to their allies and then the Elementalist can bring a Fireball down on them.

I'll be curious to see how this works when the party outnumbers the monsters (such as if you're fighting a deadly giant) and, by contrast, what happens if the monsters outnumber the party (such as a horde of zombies). Minions, like from Flee, Mortals! will likely be part of the game (the idea right now is that most of the monsters from Flee, Mortals! will probably also be in the base monster book) and will presumably attack as a unit, but we'll have to see how it works when you've got a party of five players facing off against, say, three hags.

    Default Setting:

MCDM is working on three settings, all of which take place in the same cosmos, but which serve different fantasy subgenres. Vasloria is their classic heroic fantasy setting of roving monsters, ruins to explore, and small villages in need of defenders. Capital is their grand city of intrigue, where politics and social maneuvering are central. The Timescape is their science-fantasy setting, which Colville pitches as having a 1970s Used Future aesthetic, though is certainly more on the fantastical side of things than having any really hard science-fiction (if they hit the Star Wars balance I'll be pretty happy with it).

However, the assumption that Colville suggests is that most people will play in their own homebrew settings. I know that, despite my longest-running campaign taking place in Ravnica, I generally prefer to use my own lore and setting.

What I hope we'll see is some guidance on creating customized stat blocks, akin to the chapter in 5E's Dungeon Master's Guide, which I've used extensively to create my own monsters, and which has generally been pretty effective at making cool and appropriately-challenging monsters in my experience.

    My Hopes for the System:

So far, the impression I've gotten of the game is that its core mechanics are relatively straightforward. The huge hurdle I think any new RPG system has to jump over is to tell us why we should play this instead of the system that we're already familiar with.

I think that, even if this game is everything I could hope it would be, there will still be an uphill battle convincing my players to try it.

Among my gaming friends, we're not the type that jumps around to a lot of systems, or even campaigns, very much. I have lots of friends who would rather not play than roll up a new character for a one-shot, and so the promise of a short, one-to-three-session adventure trying out this game will take a lot of convincing.

Furthermore, this game is promising to focus on a particular aspect of TTRPGs - the tactical combat side - which is, I'd guess, the thing most people think D&D does best. While I don't think there's any intention to be the "D&D Killer," in the sense that it would take all of the audience from D&D (which I just don't think is going to be possible in the short term when D&D's brand is at its most popular - terrible corporate decisions notwithstanding) it's clear that the intention here is to be the RPG that does what D&D does best, but better.

Given that I freaking love playing D&D, and think its combat system is super fun, I'd be overjoyed if it succeeds, because that'd both mean an even more fun game and create a pressure on D&D proper to improve.

But it remains to be seen if this will ever grow big enough to rival D&D, the way Pathfinder managed for a time during 4th Edition.

For my own personal predilections, I'll be curious to see how well this does the weirder aspects of fantasy. Colville's stated tastes strike me as erring toward tradition, with perhaps a generational preference for a kind of genre purity. But that's just based on what he says in his videos. By contrast, the actual design coming out of MCDM has proven to be a little more diverse - The Talent is by no means a traditional fantasy class, borrowing more from science fiction and horror (not that it's a "dark" horror-themed class, but that psychic powers often come along with paranormal stuff associated with horror) and if they come out with the Operator, we've got a very sci-fi-style class that could wind up fulfilling the promise of the Artificer better than 5E's version does (albeit with a narrower focus).

I've already pledged by own bucks toward the project (I'm considering shelling out for physical books, but it would more than double the amount of money I'd have to put in) and so I'm hoping to get some updates as the game takes shape.

I don't want to give the impression, though, that my interest in this game means I'm any less excited for the 2024 revamp of D&D 5E. I'm for sure getting the new core rulebooks when they come out, and will likely talk to my players about allowing them to convert to the new versions of their classes for my ongoing campaigns (and check in with my DM about converting to the new Wizard in our Wildemount game).

But I'm hoping that, moving forward, I'll have the chance to bring this game to the table as well and at least give it a good try.

Further into the Final Draft

 One of the challenges in comparing the Final Draft New Game Plus version of Alan Wake II with the original playthrough is that when I played the game the first time, I was not being much of a completionist. So there might be things I'm discovering this go-around that were actually there in the first version of the game.

I've finished The Heart chapter, which concludes with the boss fight against Nightingale. I can definitely tell you this: going into that fight with something like 16 shotgun shells and the pump-action shotgun from that you normally don't get until late in the game makes that fight way, way easier.

My first playthrough I was very low on ammo and battery charges (though I'm finding that not everything requires the flashlight) and so I'd basically get two shots into the undead ex-FBI psycho before having to run and scrounge for more ammo. This time, I did get grabbed a couple times, but it didn't seem to drain my health as much and I was mostly able to stagger him and fend him off, shooting him enough that he'd vanish and I'd have time to reload and heal up before my next confrontation.

At this point, I'm planning to do a thorough exploration of the Cauldron Lake area before heading back to Bright Falls, which has led to a couple encounters with the Taken Wolves, who take three full shotgun blasts to the face before they go down, but I have a better sense of how to deal with them - carefully track them as they circle around you and don't shoot until they're facing you, prowling forward.

It's actually kind of surprising how few enemies there are to fight before the first boss fight - really it's just the single Taken Cult of the Tree member in the convenience store and the two guys who come out of the water right before you get to the place where you need to put the heart into the hole in the witch sign.

While this game certainly doesn't have the insane endless waves of enemies that the first did, later parts of the game, as I recall, definitely had enough foes to really drain your resources. Maybe I've gotten better at pulling off headshots (I have the perk that staggers them if you land two headshots with the pistol in short succession) but this go around has felt a lot smoother so far. Still, we're very early in the game.

I've been keeping an eye out for differences - I'm finding, I think, more manuscript pages, but I don't know if that's because these are new or just that I didn't catch them the first time I played.

Oh, and I also noticed in my exploration of Cauldron Lake that there's a gate leading to the Lake House, which we know will be one of the two DLCs for the game, the Lake House being an FBC laboratory set up to study the lake.

I haven't decided if I want to change the order in which I play the game. Last time I basically alternated Saga and Alan chapters, so I did the Heart, then Casey, then Lost Girl, then Room 665, then... the one that takes place at the Nursing Home, and then Zane's Film. I've been toying with the idea of just playing through Saga's story in its entirety and then doing Alan's stuff, but we'll see how the mood takes me. My general recollection is that Saga's "levels" are easier but she has the bosses that are hard, and then Alan's levels are a little harder but of course don't have bosses.

Presuming that's still the case, of course.

Anyway, the game's gorgeous and I'm happy to jump into it, and happy to be doing so at a more relaxed pace (not sure if I'll finish it before I fly off for the holidays, so we might not roll credits on New Game Plus until next year.)

Fyrrak's Downfall and The Conclusion of Dragonflight

 With the release of the final LFR wing for Amirdrassil, we're now basically in the Dragonflight epilogue.

First, let's talk about those last two fights.

I think since Aberrus, Blizzard has seemed to choose to make the difficulty of the raids a little more forgiving, and I actually think that this final wing of Amirdrassil might be just as easily runnable to farm gear and such as the earlier wings - which I would not say was the case with Raszageth. Sarkareth was not too hard, but this one really doesn't seem to be significantly more difficult than the previous wings of Amirdrassil.

All in all, even though Fyrrak is a deliciously fun villain (shout out to having two Critical Role people playing the final bosses of Aberrus and Amirdrassil, respectively) one cannot help but feel a slight notion of anticlimax to this expansion.

In a sense, Dragonflight has been partially a unified story of the struggle with the Primal Incarnates and their Primalist followers, but it's also been kind of episodic stories about the various dragonflights. Ending with the new World Tree, the story of the Green flight, and closing the chapter that started with the burning of Teldrassil is certainly an epic tale, but it does leave some other stories behind rather than leading to a grand culmination.

Also, while Fyrrak is the immediate threat, the main villain of Dragonflight has managed to escape the expansion unscathed. I think this is, overall, smart, because it lets us build to a fight with Iridikron and lets us build him up as a villain in a way that some previous final bosses (the Jailer most infamously) didn't get to be.

In a certain sense, this expansion feels like a callback to the very early concepts of WoW design - where the location was the more important aspect of an expansion (or the original game) than the "plot" of the expansion. The Dragon Isles as a place are kind of the star of the show here.

Now, plot-wise we know that there's more coming with future patches before we go to The War Within. But I doubt we're going to be getting any new raids (maybe, just maybe we could get a 2-3 boss mini-raid, but I doubt it) and raids are typically where the climactic moments of an expansion take place.

Ok, now for real, let's talk about the fights themselves.

Tindral Sageswift is probably the cooler of the two fights, conceptually, if only because of its unique intermission phases. Tindral himself is fairly straightforward - there are some AoEs to avoid, some plants to squash, and an incentive to try to stack the raid a bit. Tanks get to soak some fiery mushrooms.

But it's the two intermissions, where you hop on your dragon mounts and fly across practically the entire Emerald Dream zone that are pretty exciting. On LFR this phase is pretty safe - as long as you don't run out of Vigor, you'll be fine (hope you've gotten all of the dragonriding medallions). But given how central dragonriding has embodied the appeal of this expansion, it's a fitting thing to have in the raid.

Fyrrak is simpler in the sense that the entire fight takes place in a single room (which, to be fair, is true of most final bosses) but there are several phases. I think it's largely that on LFR these phases go by quickly enough that none feel like a huge threat. This might be a product of running these on the Tuesday the wing came out on LFR, but I did not wipe once on either boss when tanking this on both my Protection Paladin and Blood Death Knight. (The DK sadly is still wearing Explorere and Adventurer-quality gear, and still has his Aberrus tier chestpiece).

There are some cool things going on in this fight, though it's funny that we don't really fight him in his dragon form until the final phase. Also, things were going too quickly for me to check, but the guy summons Infernals, or at least something that uses those models. Will have to see if they count as demons or elementals (I'd guess the latter, given Fyrrak's affiliations).

The final cutscene shows Amirdrassil empowering the Dragon Aspects... and Vyranoth, making me wonder if she'll technically count as a Dragon Aspect moving forward.

Another curiosity is that they make it clear that the power of Azeroth is distinct from Titan magic, lending evidence to the theory that the World Soul is not inherently a Titan in the making, but perhaps something with the potentially to be all sorts of other things.

So, with Dragonflight nearing its final, completed iteration, what do we think of this expansion?

In terms of gameplay systems, I think this might be WoW at the best it's ever been. The new talent system, which took the best parts of the original vanilla version and the Mists of Pandaria version and put them together, is fantastic. The game is also a lot more flexible in allowing you to play the aspects of it that you want to. Dragonriding has made traversal a lot more fun.

In terms of story and aesthetic, I'd say this is on the high end of the mid tier for me. I think there's some fantastic character work (Iridikron genuinely feels like one of the best villains they've introduced because he actually respects how powerful Azeroth's heroes can be). But I also think there's nothing in this that has utterly wowed me, going beyond the baseline fantasy stuff I expect from WoW. It's been good, solid stuff, but nothing totally unique. (Here, despite all its problems, is an area where Shadowlands excelled).

Overall, though, if Dragonflight represent the new baseline for how WoW expansions are designed and the overall design philosophies that it represents are enshrined, this bodes very well for WoW's future.

Starting the Final Draft in Alan Wake II

 Alan Wake II's New Game Plus is now live, and I figured this was the right time to delve back into the game that's been swimming around my brain for the past month and a half.

Knowing most of how the plot is going to go, I'm resolved to take this journey slow. I finished the "Invitation" chapter, which doesn't really have any combat other than the initial "this is how you fire a gun" tutorial (that I managed to die on once because I forgot you don't need to shine light on Nightingale in the morgue and spent too many precious seconds fumbling for the not-yet-active "shine your flashlight" button).

However, there are already a couple differences - the first being that the opening monologue by our eponymous writer is different, suggesting that, perhaps, there are not only monsters and victims, but a third category: heroes. That really starts us off on a positive note, though the gruesome scene of Nightingale crawling out of the lake and getting hunted down by the Cult of the Tree is, as far as I could tell, unchanged.

I was a bit more thorough on exploration, so I got three Lunchboxes worth of manuscript fragments in the daytime exploration of the Cauldron Lake region (given that this is the only time you get to go there without any hostile Taken, I figured it was a good time to be very thorough) and also found a Cult cache that I hadn't gotten in the first run.

As far as I can tell (and we'll see if things change when we return to Cauldron Lake for the true first mission) the only thing you keep is any weapon upgrades you got and any music collectables you got.

But the big appeal here is that there's going to be new and changed cutscenes and manuscript pages. I've found one of these, talking about Saga experiencing a sensation of deja vu when examining Nightingale's body outside the abandoned convenience store.

In addition to trying to be a bit more of a completionist, I'm also going to really try to stay on Normal difficulty for the entire game. There's a new Nightmare difficulty mode, which I have... basically no interest in.

Anyway, let's see if we can find this miracle illuminated.

Pray For My Soul: My Party Has Hit Tier 4

 There was, in it all, a bit of a fakeout.

The premise, in short, of my current D&D campaign is that, on the city-plane of Ravnica, there is a conspiracy to bring the glistening oil of Phyrexia to convert the massive population into a horde of mechano-organic hybrids serving the hivemind of Magic's oldest villains.

Ravnica is a city ruled over by ten Guilds - groups that run aspects of society but have wildly different worldviews and goals. Half the population of the world is a member of one guild or another. And so, the Circle of Yawgmoth, the cult that seeks to bring Phyrexian corruption to the world, has representatives from amongst each of the ten guilds, each taking the title of "Praetor," which is a position of great and grand authority amongst the Phyrexians.

Their first Praetor was a merfolk in the Simic Combine (the biomancer doctor guild,) and the buildup to that fight was the entirety of tier 2 (levels 5-10).

Thus, most of the campaign has taken place in tier 3. My initial goal was to simply have them level up with the defeat of each Praetor - there were 9 left starting at level 11, so by the time they defeated them all, they'd be level 20 and we'd have the finale of the campaign take them to New Phyrexia itself (the corrupted plane once known as Mirrodin).

However, I decided that there was more that I wanted to do, including some adventures taking place amidst the many planes of the Magic multiverse. So I had to pull back on that - the new promise to the players was that once all the Praetors on Ravnica, the one for each guild, were defeated, they would hit tier 4. Before that, they'd still level up at these major milestones, but we'd stick at level 16 for a bit until everything was cleaned up.

But...

House Dimir is something special.

When I first discovered Ravnica upon its original release in 2006, I fell in love with House Dimir. It's the ultimate conspiracy, the shadowy organization with spies embedded everywhere. Beyond simple Magic the Gathering, it really cultivated within me a fascination with stories about deep, hidden secrets and spies and all of that.

If you've read any of my fiction on another blog here, you might be aware of "The House" in my Otherworld stories, and... well, you don't have to guess what inspired that.

In all honesty, in my mind, I think House Dimir became more powerful and more mysterious even than the game's designers meant it to.

And it does not play by the same rules as the other guilds.

So, upon the defeat of the penultimate Praetor, the Lich Traven Nazar, who had been a high-ranking banker in the Orzhov Syndicate (he ran Vizkopa Bank, which is the vast vault directly next to the guildhall, Orzhova Cathedral,) the party sort of took a moment to catch their breath after a difficult and deadly encounter, and then a high-pitched whine began to sound within their own heads and...

They jumped forward about a week, being celebrated as the heroes of the city for having defeated the Circle of Yawgmoth and saved the plane from the Phyrexian menace.

And, keeping with this narrative, I allowed the party to level up to 17.

But this also led to the entire world, including the player characters, forgetting that House Dimir exists, and forgetting about anyone they ever met who had been affiliated with the guild (including one of the characters of a player who has been unable to play for a while).

Now, the nuances of all of this are going to unfold as we play at 17th level, and you could make the argument that I wasn't even lying that all of the Praetors have been defeated.

While I've loved running the campaign, dramatically it's been a little one-note: pretty much any major threat is, once again, the Phyrexians. And with what is going on in House Dimir, let's just say... it's more complicated than that.

I've been setting this up for a while, showing that people across the city have been forgetting about House Dimir, but now it's truly everyone (you might wonder, given that half the populace is affiliated with one of the ten guilds, what has happened to the members of House Dimir? Well, that'd be telling).

I'm hoping that things will start to get a little more free-form. The challenge for me is to avoid derailing what I have planned for levels 18 and 19 when I use level 17 to foreshadow things that are going to go down at level 20.

Alan Wake II's "The Final Draft" New Game Plus Out on Tuesday

 While Alan Wake II has sat lodged in my consciousness since its release over a month ago, I haven't gone back to replay the game. There are a few factors at play there - for one thing, WoW released its latest raid, and I've been spending a lot of my gaming hours getting my many alts (see the name of the blog) through the released LFR wings.

But also because while brilliant, Alan Wake II felt like an experience akin to watching a movie or a fantastic season of television - you want some time to digest it. That and, well, to be totally honest, the survival-horror action of the game wasn't quite as "fun" as, say, the telekinetic action of Control, a game that I'd have happily blasted through a New Game + mode and wanted to replay immediately, but have felt hesitant to do so because of its bizarre lack of multiple save files (you can replay chapters, but my understanding is that if you return to "endgame," meaning the parts of the game after having beaten the main story, you'll revert to the progress on side-missions and exploration that you were at when you started that chapter - meaning I'd have to beat the various bonus bosses and such all over again - some day when the urge to re-experience it is greater than the fear of losing progress, I'll start it over from the beginning).

However, in addition to later DLC that I don't think has an official release date, Alan Wake II is getting a New Game Plus mode called "The Final Draft," which purports to have significant alterations to the story.

Spoilers Ahead for both Alan Wake II and Stephen King's Dark Tower series:

Why Does Crunchy Combat Work So Much Better Than Crunchy Just About Everything Else in TTRPGs?

 Listening to the Eldritch Lorecast a couple weeks ago, I heard them talking about MCDM's upcoming TTRPG, which I've been intrigued by enough to throw money through my computer at the company and backed the project for my very own pdfs of the core rulebooks when they come out in like two years.

The discussion point was "Negotiations," which is this new RPG's attempt to make important - once-an-adventure - RP moments with powerful NPCs into something with a mechanical basis. The way that Colville and James Introcaso (MCDM's lead designer) described it was that this would be like bartering with a Lich for some crucial artifact or convincing a villain's ally to step back from a grand battle and hold back their own forces.

The system, as described, uses two measures - Interest and Patience. Essentially, it breaks down "how to convince this character" into a challenge where you want to pique their interest without them losing out of patience. If the patience runs out, you're SOL and best case scenario they just stop talking to you. There are ideas here like (and I may have some of the terminology wrong here) such as Focuses - things you can bring up that would make them more likely to side with you (such as if that Lich you're negotiating with has always wanted to find a path to another plane, and you've got a lead on that) - or Pitfalls, where bringing them up can have adverse effects on their attitude toward you (like, maybe you bring up the paladin brother of said Lich with whom they've had something of a falling out).

I have not tried this, and it's something that's in development. Matt Colville has been very clear that the guiding ethos of this project is "no sacred cows," identifying this as something of an issue with D&D 5E, which, as we've seen in the One D&D playtest process, has strongly erred on the side of preserving what it can, sometimes - Colville would argue - to the detriment of the game.

But I understand, as well, some of the D&D team's reluctance to get into the nitty-gritty of "mechanic-izing" things too much.

I think that RPGs, particularly tabletop RPGs, have a strong push toward the path of least resistance. I'll confess that my own Ravnica campaign initially meant to really focus a lot on the Renown system introduced in Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, but I think that system ultimately became too much to keep track of in the kind of ongoing campaign I like to run, where you could certainly break things into narrative chapters but there aren't as distinct "adventures." Do we gain a renown because we did that one project with Niv-Mizzet for a single session? Do only the Izzet members get it?

Indeed, I can imagine this is why Spelljammer ran into some issues - I think most players who heard about Spelljammer coming out were looking forward to a robust space-combat system, but what we wound up getting was essentially a little text box that said "yeah, your ships can have weapons, but they're utter crap and you should just fight hand-to-hand on the decks."

This was a bit infuriating...

But also, when I've watched streams of Starfinder, which has a pretty serious starship combat system that is very much part of the core rules, I always get the impression that that's the part that doesn't quite work as well - on foot you're basically playing Pathfinder but with power armor, laser guns, and aliens, and that's a system that just kind of works.

I think one of the issues here is that there's a feedback loop - combat in D&D feels pretty good (even if Colville and Co are looking to rebuild that kind of gameplay from the ground up) and so we see the folks at WotC really focusing on that as their main emphasis in revising the game. The One D&D playtest has been primarily about refining classes, and that refinement has really focused on the combat abilities of those classes - indeed, we've even lost some flavorful or utility features like the Monk's ability to do a solo Astral Projection spell (which is, to be fair, something that probably never gets used, but is still rad as hell).

Ship-to-ship combat has its own issues - one big problem I think it has is that if the whole party is one the same ship, there's basically a binary success or fail state. On foot you might see one party member go down or even die and realize that the stakes just got higher, but if it's just the one ship, any loss is a TPK (or the party gets captured and the campaign needs to adjust a lot to account for that).

But in a broader sense, I think that it's hard to bring in a new game system to one that people already feel is working ok.

Essentially: skill checks seem to handle most non-combat moments. Indeed, some simpler RPGs are basically just skill checks, like Kids on Bikes. Blades in the Dark and its ilk have a little more strategy built into them.

Where I think D&D becomes more satisfying is its combat - I think what I find a little underwhelming in KoB is that there's not really a way to "play well." It's fine for getting a story out there and all, and I've been having fun with our game of it. But even if, ultimately, everything's relying on the dice rolling in your favor, there are moves you can pull off in D&D that are just cool and effective. In our latest session, I realized (with some help from YouTube) that I could Misty Step through my Manifest Mind as a Scribes Wizard, and was able to get away from being surrounded on all sides by a ton of Mephits who had just bloodied me. I cast a lot of Fireballs (changed to Lightning Ball thanks to being a Scribe because half the mephits were Steam Mephits) that fight, running out of 3rd level spell slots, but it felt like a reasonable strategic choice - it was basically my only AoE spell I had prepared (we were expecting to encounter giants) and the amount of damage I did on these enormous swarms was pretty huge and would have taken our martial classes way longer to chop through (one of my Lightningballs did a total of 210 damage or something).

Now, can you build an RPG system that has the tactical satisfaction of D&D combat but simulating an entirely different situation? I think it would be foolish to say no, but I do think that it hits a bit of resistance.

I also think that there's some tension between the kinds of roleplayers you encounter. My friends are largely actors or people involved in show business in one way or another, so acting out a scene between their PC and an NPC, or sometimes just between PCs, comes pretty naturally. So there's even almost a sense of awkwardness to the idea of needing rules to resolve a scene. We'll still use Charisma-based checks, but I'm a little disinclined to use the "attitude levels" that are presented in the DMG, and instead go on what feels natural and right for a character.

But that's my play group. There are definitely plenty of people out there who are not as socially adept or even just don't really feel as comfortable getting into the headspace of another character. And having clear and objective rules for how you succeed in a social encounter might be welcome.

The question, then, is how much you want to make that a core part of your game.

MCDM seems to want Negotiations to be a big, dramatic thing that is just as high-stakes as a combat encounter, and even could award Victories (a resource that fuels abilities and later converts to XP when you rest).

The question is: will this get in the way, or will it feel fun and epic?

And will players and "Directors" (their term for GMs) just play without the system?

MCDM RPG's Classes So Far

 So, first off, yes, we don't have a name for the game yet. Apparently they've narrowed it down to a few options, but for now the logic is that if they start calling it by something, the thing people will understand better is "MCDM's RPG." They're going to have to make that switch eventually, unless they decide to just toss flavor to the wind and go with it like G.U.R.P.S. (which, to be fair, is meant - I believe - to work in lots of different settings - it stands for General Use Roleplaying System.)

The MCDM RPG is going to be class-based, which I tend to prefer - while classes can theoretically narrow the archetypes that your character can fill, I often find that skill-based RPG systems then prevent two builds with similar methods from standing out very well from one another - if you're an offensive spellcaster in Skyrim, you're basically using all the same Destruction spells. And in a sense, I think that when you have an optimizer mentality, not having classes pushes you into a certain sameiness. When you have classes, you're essentially giving the theorycrafters one point of "pick one that just seems conceptually cool" and then let them worry about making that particular class work at its most effective.

I've always liked RPG classes. So, what is on the docket for this one?

Well, Matt Colville has said that they will need a minimum of six classes to start with, but the sample pages from the Backerkit crowdfunding campaign shows a few more.

As a note: this RPG is going out of its way to avoid using the terminology inherited from D&D. In some cases this feels wise - I always liked Agility better than Dexterity, though maybe because I played WoW before I ever played D&D - but in some places I think it's meant to simply advertise boldly that "our Paladin is not the D&D Paladin. It's not even called a Paladin!"

Every class has a unique "Heroic Resource," rather than something broad like spell slots. And depending on the class, you might build this up over the course of your adventuring day or you might find it limits you (such as the Talent, who gains a negative resource called Strain - I'll be curious to see how that works out in the finished product, because Strain feels like it should work pretty decently in 5E's attrition-based resource system, but I wonder how it will feel alongside the other classes in this one).

So, let's look at the list. I'm going to list the "primary stats" and suggest what I think they're meant to be analogous to.

The Censor:

    The Censor clearly seems to be the Paladin analogue here, who has a resource known as Seals that they use to deal damage to foes and debilitate them. MCDM's earlier 5E class, the Illrigger, which recently got a revision, is the specifically-lawful-evil, Hell-affiliated version of this class, which will presumably be more heroically flavored. Might (Strength) and Presence (Charisma) are the recommended characteristics, which seems to confirm this as the Paladin-like entry.

The Conduit:

    Conduits are, then, the main analogue for Clerics or Priest-like classes. The idea here is that your power comes from a god or gods (honestly, I'd love to play a cleric that exists in a more historically-accurate portrayal of a polytheistic faith. D&D Clerics and other religious classes tend to be Cultish in the original sense of the word, focused on a single deity despite most people presumably worshipping many). Conduits' resource is Wrath and Virtue, the former of which fuels offensive abilities and the latter of which fuels beneficial effects - apparently it's somewhat randomized how much of each of these resources you generate as you make "prayer rolls," which is pretty neat. Conduits will be using Might (Strength) and Intuition (Wisdom... or possibly Intelligence).

The Elementalist:

    The Elementalist appears to be your classic Wizard/Sorcerer class, but with a stronger focus on elemental magic, blasting foes with fireballs and tidal waves. The heroic resource here is "Quintessence," though I haven't seen details about how it works (though it's a cool idea as the word refers to a fifth element in Alchemy). The main stats are given as Endurance (Constitution) and Intuition (which seems to be kind of Intelligence and Wisdom rolled into one).

The Fury:

    The Fury seems to be the equivalent of the Barbarian, who is rewarded with their resource, Rage (Matt Colville seemed almost apologetic that they were going to this low-hanging fruit, but it's probably the best name for it) by throwing themself into the fray. Their main stats are Might (Strength) and Endurance (Constitution).

The Operator:

    This is the most out-there concept, and has a rough analogue in the Armorer Artificer, possibly. You pilot a constructed "Frame" that is decked out with weapons and serves as a suit of armor, and also has its own mind. Your resource is Power, and your main stats are Reason (perhaps more traditional Intelligence?) and Intuition (Something akin to Wisdom?)

The Shadow:

    The Shadow is your sneaky Rogue/Thief/Assassin class. Its resource is called Insight, and its main stats are Agility and Reason, with an emphasis on being a kind of glass cannon that runs away from foes after striking rather than standing their ground.

The Tactician:

    Tacticians appear to be your Fighter analogue, perhaps being most specifically like a Battle Master, at least in terms of flavor. Tacticians get Focus as their resource, which, like a Fury's Rage, I believe only gets generated in combat. (We also get a preview of this class, though it'll take a bit of understanding the basic rules to figure out what it all means). Tacticians use Might and Reason (it seems to me that it's almost like they've divided up Intelligence and Wisdom and rearranged what goes where. Curious to see how it works).

The Talent:

    The Talent exists in 5E, but I assume this will have some tweaks to how it works to fit into this game's rules. Talents are psychically gifted and can use the power of their minds to generate various supernatural (but not magical) effects like telekinetically tossing foes around the battlefield or muddling enemy minds with telepathy. Their resource is Strain, which can build up as they use their powers and can impose various penalties on them as it gets higher (though never interfering with their ability to manifest powers - no death spirals). Talents like Endurance and Reason.

The Troubadour:

    Clearly an analogue for the Bard, the Troubadour uses a mix of musical power along with weapons to fight in a swashbuckling style. The Troubadour resource is Drama (which is amazing) and they prefer Agility and Presence.

Others?

    Colville has said that their Beastheart class is a likely addition to this list if they can fit it in the main rulebook, as it's one of the first they prototyped. The Beastheart is a little like if a whole class was built around being a Beast Master Ranger, with a system for companion beasts (that are not all mundane beasts - you can have a Gelatinous Cube companion) that can actually exist without the class, but where the Beastheart is particularly built around using a companion. There's also the Null, which is an unarmored, unarmed combatant with clear ties to the Monk, but with an emphasis on being the "antimagic" class.

Obviously none of this is final, and I suspect we'll see some of this being reworked. Each class is going to have multiple subclasses to choose from, and I'll be eager to see how this allows them to branch out. The Operator in particular fascinates me, perhaps because there's nothing I like more than being the guy bringing in so-called anachronism to medieval fantasy.

Backing MCDM's RPG

 I love 5th Edition, and I'm eager and excited to play with the revised rules in 2024. I suspect that it will continue to be my default RPG system I use at my table.

But I think, like some others, that while I appreciate the motivations for keeping "One D&D" compatible with pre-existing 5E content - indeed, I think it's the right choice and will be happy that the many books I've picked up over the years will remain usable - there's another part of me that is looking for something new.

MCDM's as-yet-unnamed RPG system is being pitched as explicitly trying not to worry about the legacy of older RPGs and to rethink and rebuild systems to work at their most fun.

Today they launched a crowdfunding effort, and got their initial funding in less than two hours. And I've signed on (not something I often do) to essentially pre-order the pdfs of the two core rulebooks - Heroes and Monsters.

Now, I'm not here to do advertising for them. If you want to see Matt Colville's pitch for it, he released an hour-long video talking about the crowdfunding campaign and the ideas that they're working on for the game.

But here are what I've gotten as key takeaways:

Not a Game of Attrition:

    D&D owes a lot to its dungeon-crawling roots, and one of the ways that the gritty, deadly vibe was established is by making character resources all limited. Your job, essentially, is to survive until your next long rest.

    And this works quite well in the kind of gritty fantasy story where you're a bunch of treasure-motivated scoundrels treading often in dangerous places that were wisely abandoned years ago. But in my experience, D&D is more often run with stories that emphasize doing good and saving the world.

    So, MCDM's system is meant to encourage players to press on from fight to fight. Some classes gain their resources as they fight, so that combat will build up to the most climactic abilities rather than having every player "nova" at the start and then hope the villain goes down before they run out of resources.

    One of the systems that they've talked about is Victories - as you defeat monsters, you'll get a building resource over the course of the day that will give you some bonus in the next fight - one example given was that the Talent (like their 5E version) is limited by the Strain that their powers can put on them, but they might also get to reduce their Strain by an amount equal to their Victory when a fight begins. Victory, then, at the end of the day, becomes Experience, and that's how you level up.

Nothing Misses:

    One of the most revolutionary ideas here is that there's no attack roll. When you attack an enemy, you roll damage. I believe monsters (and when a monster attacks you, player characters) can have defensive abilities that reduce that incoming damage or otherwise mitigate it, but the intent here is that you never arrive at your turn and fail an attack and then feel you've done nothing.

Ten Levels:

    While I've found that, with some adjustment, I've gotten pretty comfortable running stuff for a 16th level party, there is a general impression that D&D barely ever goes to high levels, and almost never to level 20. So, MCDM is going to only have ten levels, with an estimate of the power level of a 1st level character being around 3 if they were in 5E and a 10th level character being the equivalent of a 20th level 5E character, but with fewer steps in between and thus a higher likelihood that you'll actually hit that level.

    I'm curious to see how well they pull this off - on one hand, I've had players who felt overwhelmed by a new class if we didn't start at 1st level or if we leveled up too quickly, but on the other hand, I might not feel a need to level players up so much if there are only 10 levels to worry about.

Initiative is Looser:

    One idea that I'm... not entirely sold on but curious about is the way that initiative turn order works. Here, the party and the monsters will alternate turns, but the players can take their turns in any order. The intention here is to let players thing tactically about how they can set one another up to do impressive things.

    This will of course require a bit of adjustment on how to track turns and make sure no one is getting skipped. I'm eager to see it in action.

No d20:

    The system will be using 2d6 as its primary dice. You'll notice that A: this is going to have a smaller range of possible results, being 2-12, and B: it's also going to be less swingy, with a higher likelihood to roll near the average. They haven't detailed how Critical rolls are going to work, but they are supposed to be more likely, as the Rogue equivalent, the Shadow, will rely on them to gain a resource. (If it's just rolling a 6 on either die, that's a roughly 30% chance - which seems to me high enough that you'll see it often while still making it exciting when it happens).

We Shall See:

    The chance that a game can dislodge D&D as the most popular TTRPG is low - Pathfinder might have briefly done so during D&D's 4th Edition (through the very anecdotal evidence of my own experience) - but this is of course coming up as a scrappy new project amid a number of similar efforts that have resulted from the earlier OGL debacle from the beginning of this year.

    Given that there are so many coming out - between Kobold Press' efforts, Critical Role/Darrington Press' Daggerheart, Paizo's remastering of Pathfinder 2E to excise any and all D&D-related elements, and of course this, it's unlikely any one of them is going to overtake the soon-to-be 50-year-old beast that is D&D.

    But it's almost certainly a good thing to have more options, and I hope each and every one of those systems becomes popular in its own right, with tables across the world trying the ones that appeal to them.

    Personally, I think that the storytelling aspects of RPGs feel like they work best when the rules system melts into the background, and as a result, I'm a little more concerned with whether the gameplay mechanics can reinforce the story that we're trying to tell. But when it comes to tactical gameplay, a lot of the ideas that MCDM is presenting are really getting me excited. So, I've chucked 65 of my dollars at the project and will try to sell my usual players on trying out a brand-new system when it comes out. Wish me luck!