Monks Might Be the Master Grapplers in D&D Moving Forward

 Grappling a foe can be pretty powerful in 5E. Because being grappled or restrained usually takes an action to escape, if you can cling to a monster and hold them in place, you have a lot more control over the battlefield. You can keep a foe from getting within melee range of your squishier party members, and you can put them in disadvantageous positions.

As one of only three obligate melee classes (the others being Barbarians and Paladins - Fighters can always build around Dexterity and ranged weapons) Monks have, since 2014, had a lot of little asterisks that make them a bit less capable throwing enemies around.

I think the new PHB is going to change that.

Let's talk about why:

The first major difference is that the Martial Arts feature will now allow you to use Dexterity in place of Strength when setting the DCs for Saving Throws against the Shove and Grapple attacks. (Notably, these are also no longer Athletics checks.) In other words, a Monk who prioritizes maximizing Dexterity as much as a Barbarians prioritizes Strength will be just as good at this (actually, I realize this is a slight nerf to Barbarians given that they'd normally get advantage on an Athletics check to grapple or shove thanks to Rage). While a Monk might only have a +1 or +0 to Strength, they'll probably have a very good Dexterity modifier, and thus get a decent DC on these.

The second difference is that Shoving and Grappling is now under the umbrella of an Unarmed Strike. Thus, if a Monk uses something like Flurry of Blows, getting two (or even three at level 10 and higher) Unarmed Strikes as a bonus action, you can make one of these a Grapple, leaving you many other attacks for damage.

Here's where things get even crazier than I realized:

The rule for Grappling requires you to have a free hand. That's usually going to prevent someone wielding a two-handed weapon or maybe two weapons or a weapon and a shield from actually grappling (honestly, this has made me realize that wielding a versatile weapon without a shield makes better sense than I previously thought.) But as a Monk, especially if we get our hands of +X Wraps of Unarmed Mastery (which I think are going to be in the new DMG,) you can easily fight without any weapon in hand.

And that means two creatures can be grappled!

Now, moving a grappled creature uses the language of costing 1 extra foot of movement for each foot you move.

If only we could, you know, Dash as a bonus action for free. Oh wait! We will be able to thanks to the change to Step of the Wind!

If you're a 5th level Monk with a base species speed of 30 feet, your movement speed will now be 40 feet. So, let's imagine that, as an action, we make two Unarmed Strikes. We use both to Grapple a pair of, oh, let's say two Ogres (assuming we're Medium - we can only grapple monsters that are one size larger than us or smaller). We get lucky and they fail their saves. So we now have an Ogre in each hand. That effectively reduces the speed we can move to 13 feet. But we still have our Step of the Wind, so we can make that into 26 feet (not all that much slower than a normal person walks).

Now, that will take up our turn. But being able to drag two large creatures 26 feet (likely rounded down to 25 if you're playing on a grid) is pretty good.

Naturally, this becomes really nasty if we have something terrible to drag them into - if your Druid (or maybe Dao Genie Warlock) slapped a Spike Growth on the ground, you can drag a foe through it. It might be awkward trying to get both of our Ogres through the spikes, but if we go down to one of them we now get to move 20 feet with them (or 40 with a dash). If we drag this guy along the edge of the spike growth, 40 feet is essentially 8 squares of it, meaning 16d4 damage, or roughly 40 damage.

One of the problems you might imagine here, of course, is that Monks don't generally like to stay in melee range because they have lower AC and lower HP than those standard tank characters. But here's the thing: Deflect Attacks kind of solves this for you. While it'll only deal with a single attack, you're looking at probably 1d10+9, or about 14.5 damage. Our Ogre's standard Greatclub attack deals, on average, 13 damage. Thus, if it's just the Ogre, there's a good chance that even if it hits us, we're not even taking any damage (and can even spend FP to deal damage back to them - 2d8+4 at this level, or that same 13 damage).

Now, let's throw around some shenanigans:

Let's say we're a Warrior of the Hand. When we Flurry of Blows, if we hit, we can force a Dex save against the target or they fall prone.

We might need to rearrange our action economy a little - luckily, though, Flurry of Blows no longer requires us to have taken the attack action. So we'll now start off with a Flurry of Blows, using the first Unarmed Attack as an actual hit (which I think you need to do to activate Open Hand Technique) and then use the Topple option. Hopefully with their -1 to Dex and your DC at this level of 16, they'll fail. Now, you use your second Unarmed Strike to grapple them (in this case they do get to use their Strength save, so +4 versus a 16 DC - still favors you, but more of a toss-up) and now you have your movement and action to start dragging that fool.

Now, obviously, the real thing you want to do is push them off a cliff. Or into a pool of acid or a river of lava. Maybe you want to kick them off your airship?

Your Shove Unarmed Strike can now also use your Dexterity to set its DC.

So, with your high movement speed, you can grab that enemy, pull them right over to the edge of your ship, and then use your next unarmed strike to shove them.

In 2014's version of the Monk, there are a lot of reasons why I think you're well-advised to continue using a weapon for your main attack action. But with the addition of the Wraps (first seen in the Book of Many Things) and these changes to how grappling works, I really think that Monks are going to be phenomenal at this kind of thing.

And the best part? Even if your arms are both being used to grapple, you can still make Unarmed Strikes! You can headbutt, kick, knee them, use your tail if you're a species that has one of those.

Frankly, while I did play a Monk a fair amount around 2019 when I was doing Adventurer's League, I'm really tempted to play another one when the new PHB comes out.

Reading the Latest Draw Steel Playtest Packet

 Well, I became a Patreon Patron to MCDM in order to get my hands on the latest playtest for MCDM's new RPG, Draw Steel. (Having already backed them on Backerkit, I am weighing instantly cancelling my patronage, only paying the 8 bucks to get a glimpse of this - not out of any disappointment, but only to avoid double-dipping too much.)

There has obviously been a lot of iteration on the game, but here are the basics as things stand:

At the core of the game is the Power Roll. Rather than rolling a d20, you roll 2d10, adding an appropriate attribute (Might, Dexterity, Reason, Intuition, or Presence, for which you'll generally start with scores ranging from 2 to -1) and then determining which of the three tiers of results it lands in. 11 and lower is a tier 1, 12-16 is tier 2, and 17+ is tier 3. Essentially, I think players will gradually just start to internalize 12 and 17 as the thresholds.

    The ranges of the power roll results are interesting - 11 is the average roll for 2d10, meaning that unless you have a positive score in the attribute you're rolling, you're more likely to get the lowest tier result. Having just a bonus of 1 will push you over the edge, statistically, so you'll be more likely than not to succeed at least a little with the things that your character is good at.

The Power Roll is part of both Tests (like "can I climb up that wall?" or "can I convince this palace guard that I am, in fact, Prince Jacques de Vontare?") and attacks ("I'm going to stab this guy.")

In combat, your attacks will deal damage based on the power roll - notably, there is no missing in this game; you'll always hit your target, but the power of your attack and potentially other effects that might be added to the damage are determined by the tier of your power roll result.

Rolling a natural 20 - in other words, getting a 10 on both dice (which is only a 1% chance) - will cause the roll to automatically get a tier 3 result and also, in combat, gives you an additional action on your turn.

Now, there are also situational bonuses and penalties called Edges and Banes. If you're attacking a creature who is prone, for example, you'll gain an Edge to your Power Roll, which adds 2 to it. If you're trying to climb a wall that is slick with rain, you'll get a Bane, subtracting 2 from your roll.

If you get two or more Edges, you get a Double Edge, which simply guarantees that you can treat your Power Roll as having gotten one tier higher. Double Banes work similarly, and reduce your result to one tier lower. The +2 or -2 bonus goes away, but that's fine because this will either have the same or a better effect every time.

    Notably, this means that if you really put in the effort to set yourself up for success, you won't still wind up getting the worst result.

Character creation involves picking an Ancestry, a Culture, a Career, a Class, and a Kit.

Ancestry is your classic fantasy race/species, such as Dwarves, High Elves, Orcs, or unique Draw Steel options like the Memonek or the Hakaan (also, Devils are apparently just people in this game, and are an option). Ancestries give you a small number of abilities and adjustments.

Culture has you piecing together the elements of the society that you were brought up in, picking the environment, the organization of that culture, and your upbringing within it, along with languages you speak. Each of these choices then provides skill categories from which to choose your particular skillset.

Career is basically what you were doing before becoming an adventuring hero, giving you some skills, a "Title" (which is like a bonus feature that you normally earn in-game) and some other benefits like Renown or Project Points (the exact details of which I haven't gotten to yet).

Your Class, of course, is the biggest choice, and determines what kind of things you can do in your adventuring, from the battlefield commander Tactician to the magic-slinging Elementalist.

Finally, your Kit is kind of a generalized representation of your equipment and the style in which you fight and adventure. Kits will tell you the kind of armor and weapons you're carrying, and will affect your attacks and your spells, and give you a few other features. For example, a Shadow (the sneaky thief/assassin class) might pick the Cloak and Dagger kit if they want to mix it up and confound enemies while tossing knives at them, or they might go with the Sniper kit if they want to be far away from the action and taking out enemies from long range with a bow.

Each class gets a fair number of things at level 1, but it appears it's mostly about choices: you'll be able to choose a Signature Ability - which is something you can do free - and various Heroic abilities, which you'll need to spend a certain amount of your Heroic Resources to use.

It appears that a 1st level character will only have their Signature ability and then a single 3-resource cost ability and a single 5-resource cost ability, but as you gain levels, you'll be able to choose more abilities from these lists, and get some higher-cost abilities as well (though we only really have the details to build 1st level characters).

    In other words, I think that every character will require some big choices when you level up, but once those choices are made, you'll actually have a pretty small, curated list of abilities to use. Ideally, this means that combat will go quickly because you only have so many things you can do, but players will feel a sense of control and agency over their characters because they get to make all these choices.

    What I'm curious to see if how the classes evolve with each level. There is, frankly, a lot of front-loaded choice to make upon character creation, which I think could overwhelm a new player (and we're all new players given the game isn't even out yet). I also wonder if, as character level up, if they'll largely just be making choices from the same pool of options or if they'll get new and exciting options as well (the existence of 7-cost abilities is encouraging).

Heroic Resources vary from class to class. Some classes will carry over their resources from battle to battle, and might sometimes use them outside of combat, while some really only have these resources in combat.

    The design here is to ensure that the game is not attrition-based - heroes will generally have more resources to work with at the later stages of an adventure than they have in the beginning. Each time the party overcomes a combat encounter or has some other significant triumph (maybe they solved a complex puzzle or successfully got what they wanted when negotiating with an important NPC) they earn a Victory. When combat starts (Draw Steel!) characters gain an amount of their Heroic Resource equal to their Victories, so you'll be better prepared to face down the final boss after you've fought all of their minions.

I'm still figuring out the exact flow of combat - this packet goes heavily into character creation before laying out the exact rhythms of it. But as I understand it, characters get an Action and a Maneuver on their turn, the former being pretty straightforward and the latter either being your movement or some other feature you can use in place of movement.

    Overall, I think that the game could be very fun - I'm definitely used to D&D's style, which tends to be more limited in the features it gives to players (except spellcasters, which admittedly are the majority) and I think it will take some familiarity with the game before it becomes easy to really know what options to choose.

I actually really like how vague the Kits are - it gives players a ton of license to really reskin their characters to make them feel the way they want them to. I could even see genre-bending in this way - if your Tactician uses the Rapid Fire kit, who's to say that you aren't using a six-gun and have a total wild west vibe? Likewise, the fact that your classes are pretty agnostic about what kind of gear you're carrying opens this up.

I haven't quite figured out whether there are limitations on which classes can pick which kits beyond a simple Martial/Magic divide - can a Shadow pick the Shining Armor kit? On one hand, that would be a really weird choice, but on the other, it might allow for some really original character concepts (imagine an order of benevolent Shadow Knights who strike from the darkness to safeguard the innocent.)

Anyway, I'm just over halfway through the packet. I don't want to give away all the specifics, but I think I've been speaking generally enough not to run afoul of MCDM's effort to incentivize people to pay them for their work.

Draw Steel is the Name of the MCDM RPG

 You know what, that's pretty cool.

It's clear to me that Matt Colville and his employees/collaborators have a real affection to the stylized language of classic fantasy. The fact that their monster book was not something like "Magic Bestiary" or "Compendium of Monsters" but was instead "Flee, Mortals!" (I always try to include the exclamation point) really emphasizes the pulpy, over-the-top style that a somewhat subdued "Monster Manual" makes optional.

If you've ever watched Matt Colville's videos, he clearly lets his geekiness shine when he's reading fiction (either his own or when he's reading someone else's, like a passage from Dune).

Draw Steel (and boy it feels good to have an actual name for it) is jumping into some crowded waters - after the OGL fiasco, many longtime D&D 3rd party creators shifted gears toward making their own games, from Darrington Press' Daggerheart to Kobold Press' Tales of the Valiant, not to mention a "remaster" of Pathfinder second edition and other games beyond that (I've been seeing a lot of stuff about DC20 on YouTube, but I don't know if that's because it's actually gaining traction or because the YouTube algorithm has decided I would be into it). And, of course, there's WotC's own D&D revisions coming in just two months or so.

Two things make me more excited about Draw Steel than these others (well, barring the D&D revision).

One is pedigree. Matt Colville's Running the Game (and later, Designing the Game) videos have been really insightful and interesting. Even if I don't always agree with Colville's philosophy on game design (I'm still not convinced that fantasy RPGs like D&D are inherently better as short, self-contained adventures) I still think that his opinions are arrived at based on real thought and consideration, and that thoughtfulness is something I respect. Colville has strong opinions (something I think was better-reinforced for Gen Xers, whereas as a Millennial I feel I was trained to always couch my opinions in qualifications that allowed for other perspectives) but I feel like he's someone you could have a really interesting friendly argument with.

And all that philosophical introspection on the design gave us Flee, Mortals, a book that really made me re-think how monsters should work, and how the design of them can make for exciting encounters without forcing the DM to come up with some clever hook.

The second reason is that Draw Steel is doing something audacious: they're attempting to create a competitor to D&D that focuses on the element of that venerable game that most people think is its strongest, namely the combat.

But while I understand and to some extent am glad that the 2024 D&D rulebooks will be backwards compatible with older 5E content, I'm also really excited about how the entire ethos, it seems, of creating Draw Steel has been to toss out anything that doesn't work to make the game more fun. In almost diametric distinction from D&D '24/5.5E, this is a game that took such basic assumptions as "I have to roll to hit" and tossed them out the window.

In a lot of ways, the existence of Draw Steel is actually making me more satisfied with the conservative approach that WotC has taken to their 5.5E - WotC is focusing on making sure that, while the game improves, it's still going to be very familiar to your players.

Draw Steel is going to require players to learn a very different rules system.

And yet, at least what I've seen so far, it doesn't seem like it's going to get overwhelming in its granularity. Colville and lead designer James Introcaso have talked a lot about making sure that players aren't overwhelmed with choices to make at character creation. A 1st level Draw Steel character is going to be a bit more complex than a 1st level D&D character, but it doesn't look like they'll be much more complex than a 3rd level D&D character (and with only 10 levels in Draw Steel, that's nearly an equivalent level anyway).

Ultimately, this post is just about celebrating the fact that they've finally announced the fucking name of the game, but I've got to say I'm pretty hyped to see this getting closer to becoming real.

Alice Wake: Secret Hero, Potential Threat?

 Alice Wake is a key figure in both Alan Wake games. Alan's wife is the reason why Alan gets swept into the Dark Place, and in all of his thirteen years trapped within it, Alice is his motivation - no conclusion to his story would be acceptable, in his mind, unless Alice is safe in the end.

In the first game, Alice is, honestly, just kind of a damsel in distress. We get some flashbacks to the Wakes' lives in New York, and we see what looks like a happy marriage with just a few odd elements: Alice has an intense fear of the dark - a phobia that goes beyond the mild unease that adults typically get (I'll confess here that I might be a little abnormal as a 38 year old who still gets a little spooked sometimes when I wake up needing to use the bathroom in the middle of the night - though typically only after I've been thinking about some kind of scary story - but Alice has it a lot worse than I do).

There's even a bit of male-gazey portrayal of her, as she is taken by the lake and washes up on its shores wearing nothing but a t-shirt and some lingerie panties. (I think it was the Lady of Lore's overview of the game that really called out that she needs to find some pants).

Really, though, if there's one note that sticks out as more specific and also, well, more problematic, it's that Alice reveals after they've arrived at the cabin that she wasn't just arranging this vacation for Alan to get away from the stress of his writer's block, but that she contacted a psychologist to treat Alan without getting his consent beforehand.

Now, Alice has no way of knowing what a monster Emil Hartman is, but there are some serious ethical concerns about this. I think that Alice thought she was doing the right thing, but it does mean that she ultimately manipulated Alan into going there. There's some room for debate, of course - Alice's move seems almost like an intervention, except without the tried-and-tested safeguards to make sure it's effective and fair.

The Alice of Alan Wake II is, I think, a far more interesting character. We only see her via the video diaries of her "The Dark Place" photography exhibit, making her one of the characters in the game who never shows up within in the actual game world.

The victory of the first Alan Wake game is that, while Alan has trapped himself in the Dark Place, at least Alice has been allowed to escape. What we discover in the sequel, though, is that this escape has not been all that it's cracked up to be.

Initially, Alice is in mourning. As far as anyone can tell, Alan drowned in Cauldron Lake and died. This, after a period of mental instability and drug abuse, is a depressingly plausible scenario. And while the game never really touches on it, the family and loved ones of victims of suicide are often held responsible for not doing more - I remember when Robin Williams died, his daughter Zelda was harassed on social media. Hard enough to lose a parent, but now the world is after you as well?

Alice is an artist, like Alan, but between the two of them, she's not the "successful" one. Alan is the breadwinner for them, his Alex Casey novels selling enough (even in our modern era, when there are so many other forms of media to distract people from reading books) that they can afford a pretty comfortable life. Alan brought work Alice's way by having her do photos for the covers of his books - which is simultaneously kind and also kind of devastating. Alice's most lucrative expression of her art has been in subservience to her husband's art.

When Alan disappears, not only does she lose this life partner (and it doesn't seem like the Wakes were particularly social - Alan basically had a best friend in his agent Barry Wheeler, and Barry and Alice didn't even really get along. And that's all we know about their social lives) but she also loses the foundation of her financial security.

Her decision to get Alan help from Dr. Hartman was probably motivated out of concern for Alan, but there was probably also a fear that if Alan didn't start writing again, they'd run into financial difficulties.

I don't mean to paint Alice as a villain because of this. I just think it's worth noting that Alice was in a really tough position.

Mourning and grief are one thing. The financial problems get more or less solved (or at least deferred) by licensing the rights to the Alex Casey novels so that Hollywood can make movies of them. Artistically, it's not really satisfying, but then again: it's never really made explicit if Alan's novels are actually, you know, good. They're popular, for sure, but I think there's this lingering insecurity in Alan's personality that he doubts his own skill as a writer - his fear of messing up Return keeps him in the Dark Place for 13 years. And I could imagine that there's a part of him that judges himself for writing pulpy detective novels. They're popular, sure, but can he really call himself an artist?

(My stance is that all art is art - there's no minimum quality something has to have to be art. It might not be good art, but it counts.)

Alice earns enough money from the film rights that she's not destitute, but money's the least of her concerns - she starts seeing Alan... or a monstrous thing that looks like Alan, in her home. She's forgotten about her own time in the Dark Place, and so it's the sort of thing that she would be inclined to write off as a grief-induced hallucination, except that she can't. So, she uses her art to solve the problem: she sets up cameras to take photos of Alan's visitations, rigged to motion sensors.

The success of this venture - capturing the screaming, horrific visage of "Mr. Scratch" - simultaneously reassures her (that she's not just imagining things) but also disturbs her (because, you know, weird supernatural stuff happening).

We know that she visits The Oldest House at one point, invited by the FBC to make statements about the photos and what she remembers of what happened to her husband. Her proximity is what sets off the transformed Emil Hartman and his rampage in the Investigations Sector.

Now, here's a point that I'm going to argue that I haven't seen anyone else make: In her video diaries, she talks about meeting with an "organization" that helps her retrieve her memories from her week trapped in the Dark Place. Every single online content creator I hear talk about this story says that this organization is the FBC, typically stating it as an objective fact.

I don't think it is.

I think Alice's interactions with the FBC are limited to the time she visits the Oldest House to talk about the photos she has been taking.

Instead, we in her emails that she and Barry Wheeler have become friends after Alan's disappearance, despite their earlier friction (the details of said friction being left unsaid). Barry has been handling the film rights, and moved to Hollywood to act as executive producer to the Alex Casey movies, feeling a responsibility to Alan to try to make sure the movies are faithful to the author's vision, but also to ensure that the money that they make is helping Alice.

And it is in Hollywood that Barry Wheeler is brought into what he jokingly refers to as a Cult in Hollywood, which anyone who played Control (well, anyone who played it and also followed the between-the-lines stories in the various collectable memos and audio tapes) will recognize as the Blessed Organization - what appears to be a paracriminal organization that, among other things, has killed FBC employees and seems to cause chaos with many of their experiments in the paranatural.

The presence of "Blessed" branded moving boxes in Alice's apartment and her use of the word "organization" to describe the people who helped her recover her memories points, in my opinion, to the notion that through Barry, Alice was put in touch with Blessed, and it was they, not the FBC, who aided her.

Another bit of circumstantial evidence: "organization" maybe can be used to describe a government agency or bureau, but I often associate it with independent entities - I think she'd be more likely to say "I met with some people from the government" or "from a government agency," but "an organization" not only fits the default noun for how we've named the Blessed Organization, but seems broader than necessary if she were talking about the FBC.

The exact goals and philosophy of Blessed are unknown - we see them primarily through the lens of the FBC, though even they haven't necessarily put all the dots together.

If we imagine that the FBC is all about control and suppression (and safeguarding things, to be fair) the Blessed Organization might be the direct opposite - a force of radical freedom, where they just unleash chaos to see what happens.

And for that reason, I think it's plausible that a curious, consequences-be-damned Blessed representative (maybe Chester Bless himself) would be eager to draw forth the hidden memories in Alice Wake's brain.

From there, though, what of Alice?

Well, Alice serves as a kind of guiding light for Alan in the second game. But she does this in a pretty painful way.

The real climax of the story, or at least Alan's story, is when we discover the truth about the shooting in the Writer's Room. One loop's iteration of Alan finds the manuscript supposedly written by Scratch and tries to edit it to prevent its horrors from being unleashed. Another loop's version walks in, and, believing that it's Scratch there editing those pages, shoots him in the head. Why is he so full of anger, so willing to jump at the chance for violence? Well, sure, there's Tom Zane's exhortation to kill Scratch for all that he's done to them (right before Zane pulls a weird, sinister move, grinning and flipping it so that he's holding the gun to Alan's head, only for their deadly confrontation to wind up being a trick of filmmaking) but the real reason is that, in Alan's final trip into Parliament Tower, he finds the final video from Alice's Dark Place exhibit, which purports to conclude with footage of her suicide, jumping into Cauldron Lake.

A narrative has been constructed - that Scratch haunted and menaced Alice unceasingly, and that Alice felt the only way to escape the horror was to end her own life. Blaming Scratch for her death, Alan shoots his prior self, thinking that the man editing the manuscript is the monster. It's a twist of irony - Alan's the monster all along. And it's right at that moment - maybe because of that moment, that Alan awakens on the shores of Cauldron Lake, summoned forth by a ritual that has not yet even taken place.

But it's doubly ironic: the rage and grief that pushes Alan to his most monstrous self is based on a lie. Alice didn't kill herself. She entered the Dark Place. And she even acknowledges that the horror and pain that Alan has gone through was her doing, there to put him on the path he needed to ultimately succeed.

In other words, she manipulated him.

The morality of this is ambiguous. After all, Alan believes he needs to write a horror story in order to save the world, but in doing so, he condemns everyone from Carl Stucky to Cynthia Weaver to become monsters whom we have to then kill. Was it possible to succeed without all this death?

So, was Alice's plan, which involved convincing her husband that she had killed herself and then also getting in a position to murder another version of himself, all for the greater good?

I think it's all done with the best intentions, but you know what they say about those and the road to hell. As we said before, Alan's actions are all done for a higher purpose, but how much of it is strictly necessary? Could a less tortured mind have solved this all a lot more easily?

And what would it mean for Alice to now be an agent of the agenda of the Blessed Organization? What darkness has she brought with her? Alice comes off as a source of wisdom in Alan Wake II, as if she figured all of this out much, much quicker than Alan ever did. But does she actually get it all? Or is she also out of her depth?

How Backwards Compatibility Will Work (As Far as I Can Tell)

 The 2024 Core Rulebooks are, officially, not a 6th Edition. The designers kept a major goal in their rework, which is the preservation of what has come before. Everything you have for 5th Edition that you've gotten since 2014 should, theoretically, still work just fine.

But compatibility goes farther than you might think. According to the folks at WotC, you should be able to have characters built by the 2014 rules able to sit next to characters built with the 2024 rules.

There's actually an analogous situation I have in my Ravnica game - when Monsters of the Multiverse came out, I allowed players whose races (now species) appeared in that book to convert to the new version of it. Our Changeling Artificer swapped to the new version, which among other things now has the Fey creature type (and boy have I been having a field day with that lately). We also have two Goblins in the party (fitting given how common Goblins are in the worlds of Magic the Gathering, including Ravnica) but in this case one of them, the Rakdos Bard, updated to the new version of the species while the other, the Boros Fighter/Paladin, stuck with the old version. The main difference is that the Boros character can, at this level, pump an additional 17 damage into an attack using Fury of the Small, but only once per (short, I think?) rest, while the Bard only does 6 extra damage, but can use it 6 times before they need to recharge (essentially he has nearly twice as much potential damage from it, but must spread it out).

Now, there is a hazard here, which is that players might forget what they have - the newer Goblins have Fey Ancestry, giving them advantage against being charmed, while the old ones do not. I could imagine a scenario in which some monster does some kind of mass charm, and the Bard remembers they have advantage with it, which might cause the Fighter/Paladin to erroneously think that they do as well.

This problem won't necessarily go away, because the choice of which version to use is presented as a player one, not a table-wide one.

So: how do we prevent cherry-picking to take all the most overpowered options?

The general rule will be that if you want to use anything from the newer books, you have to take them as package. Essentially, if you want to play the updated Oath of Devotion, you'll be forced to take the new Paladin (hooray bonus action Sacred Weapon, but sadly you're going to be using the nerfed Divine Smite).

Now, officially you can just allow players to make their own choices. But I think I'd recommend that you instead talk with your group and collectively decide if you want to embrace the new rules or not. (Generally, I'd recommend that you do). This way, the carefully rebalanced versions of the classes, subclasses, spells, and such should fit together well.

When you do this, you effectively eliminate the older version of any option that previously appeared in another source. If you opt into playing the 2024 version of the Wizard, you can still play any previously-published subclass except for the Schools of Divination, Evocation, Abjuration and Illusion, because each of these has been replaced with the Diviner, Evoker, Abjurer, and Illusionist. If you want the old version of those subclasses, you need to play the old version of the Wizard. Likewise, if you play the new Wizard, for any spell in a previous book that gets a new version in the 2024 PHB, you need to use the new version. However, if there's no update to the option you want - maybe you want to play a School of Conjuration Wizard and take a spell I assume isn't coming in the new PHB like Ashardalon's Stride, you can still pick both that subclass and that spell as they appear in the 2014 PHB and Fizban's respectively.

In most cases, there should be little friction in figuring out exactly how the pieces fit together. There are a couple of common-sense adjustments, though. All classes now get their subclass at level 3, so Druids, Wizards, Clerics, Sorcerers, and Warlocks will need to delay these features. The Cleric presents two extra wrinkles to this: 2014 Clerics get their second subclass feature at level 2. It appears that in the new versions of the subclasses, you'll just get what you previously got at level 1 and 2 both at level 3, and so I assume if you want to play, say, Twilight Domain, you'll just delay when you get Domain Spells, Eyes of Night, Vigilant Blessing, and Twilight Sanctuary to level 3.

You might notice that I didn't mention "bonus proficiencies," one of that domain's 1st level features.

Clerics, again, have a weird wrinkle, in that some features that used to be tied to subclasses, like armor proficiencies (now called training) and weapon proficiencies (still proficiencies because they involve your proficiency bonus) are now a separate choice made within the base class. Likewise, all pre-2024 Cleric subclasses have either Divine Strike or Potent Spellcasting. Using the new Cleric, this is replaced with a choice in the base class called Blessed Strikes (which also comes a level earlier!)

Backgrounds in 2024 will carry a bit more heft than they did in 2014. Here, I don't know what the official guidance will be on using old backgrounds, but I imagine they'll essentially take on the new role as source of ability score bonuses and also an Origin Feat. There will apparently be guidance on creating custom backgrounds in the DMG, so it shouldn't be very hard to use that guidance to tweak existing backgrounds.

Now, what about adventures?

Well, here's where I'm really curious to see the game in action: the new Monster Manual promises to have every monster that appeared in the 2014 one (though I'm curious to see how it handles "Orc" now that Orcs are a core playable race). All the old adventures should still be runnable, but now when you have a bunch of werewolves to fight in the Svalich Woods while running Curse of Strahd, you can just use the werewolves that appear in the new Monster Manual instead.

    I honestly think that it should be pretty smooth transitioning to the new books. Here's how I'd recommend handling it:

If you're running an ongoing campaign and considering converting, you should let players ultimately decide which way they want to go with it. While I do think most people will enjoy the new versions of classes and species more than the old ones, there are two major factors that can make changing mid-campaign a problem.

The first is simply familiarity. I'm over four years into an ongoing campaign - that's nearly half the lifespan of 5th Edition! Big changes can be tough to deal with, especially when players are already deeply familiar with a character they've taken from 1 to 17. I'm not ruling out converting to the new rules systems, but I really want everyone to feel enthusiastic and on board, and don't want to force anyone into changing.

The second reason is that some things will just get flat-out broken. For example, while it's not a build I've seen much of, in the 2014 rules a multiclassed Barbarian/Paladin is pretty viable - swing in with Reckless attack and then divine smite because you're critting more often.

But because Divine Smite is now a spell, the 2024 version of this build will never be able to Smite while Raging. And that kind of breaks the entire multiclass combination. If you had a player who built a character like that, forcing them to convert would basically mean breaking their character.

So proceed with caution and respect.

However, I think that for any new campaigns, you'll be pretty well-served just running the new version of the game. Let players build and strategize around the new way things work. In this case, I think it'd be reasonable for a DM to mandate that players play the new version of each class (obviously allowing the "outdated" Artificer because there hasn't been an update to it here). And from that, requiring that they use the new versions of spells and subclasses. But this doesn't eliminate other options that haven't been updated - feel free to allow species from Monsters of the Multiverse (except, perhaps, the old Orc, Aasimar, and Goliath) and subclasses like the Kensei Monk or the Undead Patron.

This is going to require a bit of homework. While the bones of the game will remain pretty much unchanged, there are going to be enough subtle distinctions that I, for one, plan on reading the new core rules cover-to-cover.

Games as a Medium for Ambiguous Storytelling

 Video games are a young medium, though perhaps not that young.

The argument over whether a game can be art or not long ago left the realm of interesting philosophical question and into the realm of tired takes from people who only assume they can't because they didn't have a formative experience with them when they were young.

Indeed, I think that as I've gotten older, even games from a simpler era that were around before I was born are, I would say, still works of art. It's just that we didn't have the context to appreciate them. Consider Super Mario Bros., which came out a year before I was born: in terms of narrative, it's very simple - you're a hero trying to rescue a princess from a monster who captured her. No one is claiming that it's a deep or nuanced story, but what does have depth to it is the way that the design of the levels and the feeling of the momentum in playing it come together to create such an exhilarating experience. Every little block and pipe is laid out to create an experience for the player - like having the first Goomba in World 1-1 walking under a block with a Super Mushroom is there to get the player to hit said block, and that the pipe and the small gap between it and those blocks is to try to get the player to accidentally hit the mushroom and discover it's actually a good thing.

Over time, though, games got better at telling stories - RPGs developed (borrowing heavily from tabletop RPGs like D&D) their own complex narratives.

What I have found, though, is a new kind of obsession: the ambiguous narrative.

When I was 19, a sophomore in college, I watched my first ever David Lynch movie: Mulholland Drive. I was into weird and twisty stories already - I'd discovered Fight Club and Memento already in high school (the former of which I always feel like I need to put an asterisk next to because there are a lot of young men who watched that movie and grossly misinterpreted it as an endorsement of the schlocky fauxlosophy that Tyler Durden spouts) - but I still really felt a story needed to land at something concrete - to hold within it a singular canonical interpretation, which might be obscured but could still ultimately be resolved.

Mulholland Drive... I don't think it has one of those. I didn't like it.

In part, though, this was because it bummed me out. There's one interpretation that a good half of the movie is a character's dying dream before she commits suicide, and I've always felt deeply disturbed by that kind of notion of witnessing the... I guess final hours, the feeling that the end is imminent and unavoidable.

But I also found myself frustrated that I just didn't know what actually happened in the movie.

That was half my life ago.

I can't say that in the time since I've become some sort of David Lynch superfan - in fact, I think I've seen only a little more of his work - Blue Velvet and then all of Twin Peaks (including Fire Walk With me and The Return,) and I guess I tried to watch some of his Dune, but... look, we have the Villeneuve movies now, so we can just pretend like that never happened. Still, I've come to really appreciate his oneiric style.

Indeed, I think that art, in general, is about communicating ideas and emotions that cannot be put into direct words. Yes, direct words, which I'm distinguishing from poetry, fiction, and other word-based art forms. Although...

I think if I were less lazy, I'd be a YouTube essayist. One of my great pleasures is watching someone with something smart to say ramble for a long time about a topic I find interesting.

Most recently, I gladly sat through Monty Zander's 5 hour, 21 minute essay "Beyond the Lake," in which he goes into great depth on Alan Wake 2. I think it speaks to that game's depth and density that someone could be inspired to make an analysis of it that takes about a quarter of the time it takes to beat the game itself. Seriously, if you have the time and mental stamina (don't feel bad if you need to watch it in chunks) and you find Alan Wake 2 as interesting as I do, check it out - this is a video game analysis video with multiple original songs and a modern dance piece, an act of collaboration the likes of which I've never seen before in the YouTube essay medium.

It's funny to me that I only discovered Remedy a little over a year ago, because I feel such a kinship and belonging within their style of storytelling.

Readers of this blog will be well aware of my affection for From Software. No, I haven't beaten the DLC  yet. I honestly think I'll be fine if I never do, if only because it will leave me one last thing to do in the game (a bit like how my oldest friend and I used to play Secret of Mana together in middle school and never actually beat the final boss until we were in college).

It's pretty clear to me that the auteurs behind each studio - Hidetaka Miyazaki of From and Sam Lake of Remedy - share a love of lore.

It's funny, because the games from the respective studios are quite different, I think, in structure.

FromSoft's games deeply reward replaying them - your first time through a game like Bloodborne is going to be an endless parade of torment and death, but your second will probably be... not too bad. And you'll be incentivized to play again because there are so many ways to build your character - admittedly, less so with Bloodborne but definitely when it comes to Dark Souls or Elden Ring.

I would have loved a New Game Plus mode, or even just multiple save files, for Control. As it stands, just starting the game over will, as I understand it, reset you to the power level you were on whatever chapter you choose to start from, and if you then go back to the "Endgame," you'll only get what you had when you first beat the game - wiping out anything you acquired in the post-game.

I liked exploring the Oldest House and fighting as Jesse Faden so much that I would still continue starting up Control in a state where basically everything had been done, but I would just wander around, blasting away Hiss because I liked being there.

There's actually no real reason not to replay Alan Wake II, and I did when the NG+ mode, The Final Draft, came out. But maybe I just didn't vibe as much with the survival horror gameplay, or maybe it succeeded in making me feel trepidatious about wandering around Cauldron Lake once more - and maybe it's because the narrative elements of the game, which were so exciting the first time around, created friction on a second play.

Actually, it's interesting: the first time I played the game, I enjoyed Saga's stuff more than Alan's. The second, that flipped - Saga's had so much story, so many characters, and it was really exciting to learn all about them, but having learned them, going through the same mysteries over again was less compelling. (Like, I felt proud that I figured out pretty early on that the Cult of the Tree weren't bad guys, and having that confirmed was really cool, but the tension of that reveal was missing the second go around. In another universe in which Remedy had a way bigger budget, I could have imagined a NG+ that really profoundly shifted the narrative in significant ways... actually not unlike FromSoft's Armored Core VI).

Don't get me wrong: Alan Wake II is one of the most amazing games I've ever played, and will always sit among my top games of all time, but I don't feel the need to replay it over and over. There's plenty of art like that. The Lovely Bones was an amazing movie and I don't think I could stand to put myself through it again.

What ties these together in my mind, and I think the hook that keeps me obsessing over both of them, is that level of ambiguity.

The ambiguity is more total in FromSoft's games - there's an ongoing question when you play a game like Bloodborne or Elden Ring: why am I doing this? Why am I hunting these beasts through the city? Why am I hunting down demigods to kill?

A particularly salient example here, I think, is Malenia. In Elden Ring's base game (pre-DLC) the boss most people generally agree is the hardest is Malenia, a demigod and an empyrean (the latter meaning that she could potentially become a god, and if we are to take official boss titles literally, she does halfway through our fight with her) who sits amongst the roots of the Haligtree - one of two (and as of the DLC, three) divinely important trees in the game. Malenia strikes with insanely high-damaging combos that are really hard to dodge, and worst of all, whenever she damages you (or any summoned spirit or ally) she heals a little, meaning you can't just rely on a high HP bar to win a war of attrition.

You might think, given how deadly she is, that she's a menace and a threat to the world.

But no, when we find her she's reclining in a chair, seemingly overcome with grief and woe over her missing twin brother. No one forced us to come to her, to invade her home, to threaten her.

Does that make us the bad guy? Or are we justified in slaying any demigod who possesses a part of the Elden Ring, the kind of "programming code" or reality, to try to recombine them and bring order back to the world. Is it best that we slay her, as she's a vessel of the Scarlet Rot, which spread across the land of Caelid and turned it into a mutated, post-apocalyptic hellscape?

These kind of moral questions then also sit alongside questions of actual meaning and fact: in Bloodborne, our apparent goal is to "Seek Paleblood to transcend the Hunt" but there are several things that could be this "paleblood" and we never get a straight answer.

Now, I have to be cautious here. Ambiguity does not always mean successful art. I think that the key to ambiguity is to encourage us to set aside our rationality. As I said before, art is different from argument because it's not appealing to us on a rational level. An artist does not need to be able to put into words what they're trying to achieve or communicate with their work of art. The whole point is to communicate something ineffable through the art.

But just making things not really make sense can also be a copout.

In the mid-2000s, I got really into two big genre shows that were popular at the time: Lost and Battlestar Galactica. In both cases, there was a tremendous amount of mystery swirling around the stories of, respectively, a group of plane crash survivors on an uncharted island in the Pacific, and the last survivors of humanity in a futuristic interstellar society that was struck in a surprise nuclear attack by the rebellious robotic Cylons.

Lost had some intriguing plot threads - like a boy who has some kind of mystical connection with animals, seemingly summoning a polar bear on a tropical island - that wound up not actually going anywhere. Battlestar Galactica got some early "big twist" energy by revealing that some of the main characters were secretly Cylons built to seem organic, but after mentioning twelve "models" and revealing seven of them, they made a big ballyhoo about the "Final Five" that ultimately felt weird and irrational - most infamously, the opening recap before each episode showing the machinations of the Cylons ends with "and they have a plan," only for the end of the series to come and it becoming very clear that if the Cylons had a plan, the writers did not.

I think it's fair to worry that folks like Miyazaki and Lake don't necessarily know where they're going with all of this. And the process of crafting a story - especially one in which you aren't releasing it all as one complete unit - does inevitably force you to refine and redefine things.

But I think there's value nevertheless in following the dream-logic path.

In the case of Elden Ring, the game supposedly has a bible created by George R. R. Martin (author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the books that Game of Thrones was based on - and notably a show that went downhill when they surpassed what Martin had already written). So, in theory, there are explicit answers to a lot of the questions the game raises. But Miyazaki has also said that he never wants to publish the "definitive" lore of his games. Philosophically, he prefers giving the final authorship of the story and lore of his games to the players.

I don't know if we're in quite the same world with Remedy and Sam Lake. There's a question that you need to ask yourself as a player - would you be ok if there was no clear explanation?

See, I think that one of the most fascinating and compelling mysteries in Alan Wake II is the character of Tom Zane. Zane is utterly different from his appearance in the original game, and feels like an entirely different character who has just taken this name. The fact that Zane is played both in appearance and voice by Alan Wake's physical performer could be anything from a meta-joke to a deep hint at a connection between the two (and given how Alan Wake is all about stories coming true, a meta-joke can also have a real impact on the story).

Basically, there's a swirling storm cloud of questions surrounding this character. Would it be a betrayal if we were somehow able to hack into Sam Lake's personal computer and read his notes and find out that even he, the closest thing the game has to an auteur, doesn't really know what the hell Tom Zane is?

See, I'm not sure.

Regarding Lost: it was a show created by J. J. Abrams, a figure who has become huge in Hollywood, but whom I have felt less and less impressed by over time. Abrams has long touted the "mystery box" as a style of narrative, saying he prefers to live with the ambiguities in his stories rather than answering them.

I do think that this can be a problem when you're using mysteries to string an audience along - oh, just watch one more episode, one more season, one more movie, and we'll... answer a question you never had (why did Jack Shepherd have tattoos is a question I don't think a single audience member ever asked, the answer clearly being "because Matthew Fox has a tattoo and didn't want to have to cover it up in make-up every single episode") and tease that it'll be the next episode we finally reveal all.

But in a weird way, I guess the problem isn't the mystery persisting. It's the promise that you'll get an answer at all.

We can speculate all we want, but I don't think Alan Wake II ever implies we're going to truly figure out what the fuck Tom Zane is. We can theorize about it, sure. But the plot of the game does not hinge on knowing this.

(As a side note, I think Abram's real problem is that he's unoriginal - he just wants to make the Spielberg movies he grew up with or to just make Star Wars all over again with the same villains and the same basic arc.)

So, I'm pretty far into this post and haven't really gotten to the real question:

Are games particularly well-suited to this kind of ambiguity?

I think one of the reasons why games struggled to earn respect as art is the notion of a game objective. Most games (I won't say all) want you to accomplish something, to "beat the game." There are systems in these games, systems like HP, or resource management, or numerically valuing your various character strengths through a stat system.

Games are very combat-oriented. So many games are about killing your enemies (true in both the FromSoft games I've mentioned and the Remedy ones). It's tempting to dismiss the violence-simulation in games as bypassing any real thoughtfulness and just sending pleasure to our lizard-brains.

But I think that this might actually be what makes games so effective at drawing you through something strange and ambiguous.

In most games, you know what is asked of you - you progress, you open up new areas of the map, you face new foes, meet new people. There's a thread to follow. And with that thread, the game's creators give you momentum to carry you through the mysteries.

You don't need to understand what Mergo's Wet Nurse or the Moon Presence are to beat Bloodborne. On a certain level, a player can engage with and feel a completeness with the game by beating it. It's there for the player to really just decide if they want to delve into those murky waters.

Dex is King?

 While I was tempted to take either my pure-Faith Pyromancer into the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, or to take my Faith/Int Necromancy spellcaster, I thought about how I've been coming across so many weapons in the DLC that scale primarily with Dexterity. While I don't have any pure-Dex characters, I do have a Dex/Int character who, in the base game, alternated a bit between Moonveil (and a Cold Ichigatana) and the Wing of Astel, both of which worked pretty well with those stats.

Bringing him into the DLC, I've been able to make good use of the Backhand Blades and the Milady (both given Cold infusions, which seems to scale best with the stat spread I have and obviously also does the Frostbite debuff) and... boy does it feel good.

I went through most of Castle Ensis in order to get both Milady and the Wing Stance Ash of War, using the Backhand Blades, upgraded to +24, and I was surprised at how quickly I was getting frostbite on the enemies there (especially as I struggled to get the debuff up with my Darkmoon Greatsword before I just took foes down). But as cool as that was, Milady coupled with the Wing Stance has been even more effective. For one, I can afford to equip a shield, so I have been able to make use of block counters (which do a nice double-hit - only a liability if the first hit staggers them and the second knocks them out of it) but primarily I've been using the stance with the L2 attack to leap up in the air and dive in at the foe, hitting really freaking hard.

I also got the Firespark Perfume Bottle, though this scales exclusively with Dexterity and can't be infused with cold or magic (admittedly the former would be a little counterintuitive) and so I decided it wouldn't be right for this character unless I re-spec him (and I seem to be finding more of the DLC larval tears, so that shouldn't be too hard to do) to focus on pure Dex - though at the levels I'm reaching, I wonder if going with a straight one-stat build is even worth it.

Anyway, while my leaping Strength/Faith double-greatsword build carried me very well through my first go in the DLC, and I haven't tried any of these set-ups against an actual boss (though I had an easier time than usual with the knight who drops the Solitary Armor,) I suspect that Dex will be very effective throughout this DLC.

Hopes for Exhaustion

 Exhaustion has a problem in 5E.

It's just too damn punishing.

Failing to get a full night's sleep, trekking through extreme heat or extreme cold (though the latter can be mitigated with some warm clothing,) failing to eat enough in the course of a day - these all inflict (often with a Con save to avoid it) Exhaustion.

But Exhaustion causes problems that really compound over time - the first level, disadvantage on ability checks, is more of an annoyance. But when you speed is halved, you start getting disadvantage on attacks and saving throws, your HP is halved, and you just start spiraling, the ultimate meaning of this is that basically just one level of exhaustion prompts any player to stop everything and try to remove the exhaustion. It just kind of interrupts the narrative.

Now, as a DM, you might be tempted to put them in a position where they can't just clear it easily by taking a day off - maybe you have them trapped in some dangerous region or there are bad guys hunting them.

But on the flipside, because it's so damn bad to get more than a level or two of this debuff, you risk overtuning the challenge of your adventure if you don't give them opportunities to clear it.

I don't know whether this change is making it live to the PHB, though there are some comments and signs from various YouTubers that suggest it will, but here's the version that was found in one of the early UA playtests:

Rather than a series of different debuffs that end in death, Exhaustion in this system is actually a little closer to Stress as introduced in Van Richten's: each point of exhaustion reduces your attack rolls and ability checks by 1 (I believe saving throws are exempted, which is smart given that usually avoiding exhaustion requires a save) and on top of that, the DC for saving throws you force other creatures to make is also reduced by 1. If this reaches 10, you die (so we're keeping that aspect, but allowing a few more levels of exhaustion before we hit it).

This last part I think is really smart, because without it, you might find yourself in a situation where a Wizard or Druid who primarily casts spells wouldn't really be all that adversely affected by it. Now, regardless of your build, exhaustion is going to penalize you.

But the best part is that I think this is not as bad of a debuff. Reducing any of these values by 1 is only a 5% nerf. It'll mean that you're succeeding and your enemies are failing a little less often, but only to a small degree.

And that means that players can afford to let it stack up higher.

Like, no one loves it when the target they're attacking is behind cover, but you'll usually be willing to try even if they're getting a +2 or even +5 to their AC. You can still be pretty effective even if your bonuses aren't quite where they normally are.

And that means that Exhaustion can be a far more common threat.

Consider this: under the 2014 rules, a monster whose attacks forced a character to make a Con save or become exhausted would be a balancing nightmare. This thing gets its thing off three times on a PC and you're looking at someone who is going at half speed and has disadvantage on everything, and it'll be days before they're back to normal unless you spend some really expensive diamonds and 5th level spell slots.

But under this system... it feels kind of fair. It's definitely still scary, but rather than letting this monster utterly ruin the party's day, you now just have an incentive to focus-fire it.

See, I like having lingering problems for the party to deal with. I think it allows you to tell more dramatic stories. I think using a monster that can inflict exhaustion could really work well in a Ravenloft-like adventure, maybe striking at the party before retreating to take its own short rest while the party is getting this slowly building debuff that cannot be cleared as easily.

I will also say that this could make the Ranger's eventual ability to clear a point of exhaustion on a short rest far more useful. Exhaustion is so rare in today's games that that feature is kind of nothing. But if monsters are frequently inflicting this condition, the Ranger becomes the person who is far more capable of tirelessly pursuing those kinds of monsters.

The fact that almost everything resets on a long rest is useful for bookkeeping, but it ties our hands a bit as storytellers. I think an Exhaustion that is balanced enough that you can use it more freely would really give us the opportunity to tell a tale of grueling conflict.

War Within Pre-Patch!

 So, yeah, after nearly 18 years of playing WoW, you may have noticed that my World of Warcraft-related posts on this blog that started as an exclusively WoW-focused one have thinned a bit.

Dragonflight has been an interesting experience for me: objectively, it was a very good expansion. It marked a real shift in philosophy that saw greater respect for players' time and interests, rather than falling back on outdated notions of what the game was supposed to be. (Arguably, Shadowlands' final patch was really where this shift started).

But again, I started playing in the tail end of vanilla, so I've been through multiple cycles of WoW at its peaks and valleys.

Today, once the servers come up, we're embarking on what comes next. I'm sure that Blizzard is really hoping that its "Worldsoul Saga" that will take place over the next six years will be a new height of WoW storytelling, and will make the stakes feel high in a way they haven't necessarily since Legion or even Wrath.

It's far too early to judge this - we haven't even started the first act of it.

But there are signs that, on a gameplay level, Blizzard has learned a lot of lessons.

Pre-patches are always a kind of weird reset - we remain the god-like powers we were from fighting through the expansion's final raid (though I'll confess I didn't participate much in season 4, so gear-wise I'm probably way behind and imagine I'll be able to replace lots of gear with the pre-expansion event rewards). But we'll be seeing major shifts in talent systems, likely bigger shifts than we'll see until Midnight's pre-patch in 2026 (at which point I'll be 40 and will have been playing WoW fully half my life).

11.0 is going to bring one really exciting new system: Warbands. For over a decade now, I've talked with my best friend about how we always wished we could have player housing in which we could see our various characters hanging out together. We're both altoholics (see the name of the blog) and I know it always seemed like it would be cool to have a townhouse in Stormwind where I could go in on my human paladin and see my Dwarf Hunter, my Draenei Death Knight, and my Night Elf Demon Hunter just lounging around - maybe allowing me to access their inventory rather than having to log out and back in over and over to see who had that one account-bound item I needed.

While I think to a certain extent this is going to be a somewhat cosmetic change (Warband-bound will more or less just mean Account-bound) I'm eager to see how things like a single reputation/renown level across my characters will feel. I struggled to get my renown maxed out with the Dragonflight factions - I never did it with the Loamm Niffen or the guys in the Emerald Dream. In part, that's because I liked to just check in on each of my alts and do things like take down the world boss and maybe do my weekly "escorting the big treant" quest and then move to a different character.

This does mean that my human main will be losing the beloved Diplomacy racial - I'm sure it's necessary to avoid making every player feel like they needed to play a human alt to help grind reputation, but it'll be sorely missed.

There's definitely a FOMO feeling I've gotten with Dragonflight - because I haven't been playing it as consistently as I did earlier expansions (which I think is partially just the fact that I have other games drawing my attention more - Elden Ring is certainly a factor) but I also think I'm fine not really pushing myself too hard. There's a mentality I think especially when your main character is a tank that you really need to keep up with other players - a DPS character who is at the minimum gear level for a piece of content isn't really holding anyone back, but a tank who can't maintain threat against super-geared DPS is a bit of a liability, even if they're in content that they're totally appropriately-geared for.

Still, I think it's healthier for me if I take a bit more of a casual approach to the game. I have a sentimental attachment to a lot of my characters, but you know, it's just a game in the end.

I'll also note that I think D&D has, to a large extent, better satisfied my desire for organized play. My guild kind of dissolved over time, in part because I wasn't there to organize raids as much (as the guild's main tank, the responsibility to do so kind of fell to me when our original guildmaster - who was great at running raids - stepped away from the game). But given that I now have three weekly D&D games (one of which I run, and is probably the most consistent of them) I'm sort of happy to stick with LFR. Frankly, I think I'm likely to run the follower dungeons when leveling up in War Within if only to let me see the dungeons at my own pace (I'll probably run some with my best friend, who if anything is less tolerant of the "go-go-go" mindset of so many dungeon groups). Actually I'm really excited to feel less guilty about running as DPS on characters that can tank, and I might (might) even try my hand at healing again.

I will say, while I'm a bit skeptical about the wisdom of doing a big, multi-expansion Saga (at a time when the cinematic equivalent in the MCU feels like it's floundering) I am very excited about the long-term thinking about characters and villains that Blizzard seems to be doing. No final boss of an expansion, in my mind, has felt quite as epic and built-up-to as The Lich King in Wrath, because we had spent Warcraft III, The Frozen Throne, Vanilla WoW, and Burning Crusade building up to it (and Arthas' appearances throughout the leveling process and even some of the raids leading up to Icecrown Citadel also helped build the anticipation).

A villain like the Jailer had the potential to be really cool (though I thought his "shirtless buff dude" design was profoundly underwhelming) but as such a huge and powerful force, we needed way, way more build-up to him. Like, we should have first started hearing whispers of him four or five expansions prior.

I think they learned that lesson, and they seem to be really working hard to make Iridikron feel like a worthy bad guy. I don't know if the intention is for him to be the final boss of The Last Titan (though that seems likely, assuming Xal'atath is going to be the boss of War Within) but he is getting his build-up this way, introduced as a credible threat in Dragonflight but studiously unfought (well, outside of the time travel dungeon). And hey, if he's the boss of The Last Titan, that means we're getting four expansions of build-up, which will allow them to really flesh him out (personally, I love that he seems more wary of us - it's so easy to make an arrogant villain, but a villain that respects the fact that the "heroes of Azeroth" tend to kill every big bad that threatens the planet instantly earns my respect for being much smarter than the others. Hell, Iridikron was smart enough to make sure that Fyrrak was the expansion's final boss instead, and I could see the next couple expansions in which he carefully maneuvers to make sure that he doesn't have to fight us for as long as he can manage).

We're at the outset here. Servers aren't expected to be up for like 5 and a half hours, so I guess I'll just chill until then.

The Golden Order? Or Is It Just Yellow?

 Several years ago, I think either while 30 Rock was still on the air or shortly thereafter, I read a memoir by Tina Fey called Bossypants. The book was largely about how Fey came up in the world of comedy and the challenges of being in a leadership position as a woman in a field (like so many fields) that has a lot of historical and structural sexism. One weird thing that stood out to me was that she took a moment to complain about the primacy of blonde hair as a desired feature in our culture, one that tends to be associated with attractiveness. She pointed out that, with other hair colors, we simply call it the color that it is - brown hair, grey hair, red hair (though personally I've always felt that most red hair is closer to orange, maybe "copper" if we're being a little more granular, which again I think is closer to orange than it is to red). Blonde, though, has its own special word that, perhaps outside of non-chocolate brownies and I suppose milk-heavy coffees (I think? I don't drink coffee) is used pretty much just to refer to this hair color. And yes, it's a hair color that we place a high value on - consider movies like "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." One of the most common ways in which people (women in particular) are encouraged to change their appearances is by bleaching their hair. While blonde hair is certainly something that occurs naturally (I, arguably, have blonde hair, though I tend to refer to it instead as light brown, perhaps because my baseline for blondness was set by the kids who lived next door when I was little, who truly had very light blonde hair) it's funny to me that some of the most iconic blondes who really defined the modern "blonde look", like Marilyn Monroe, were not naturally blonde themselves.

Tina Fey argues we should just call it yellow hair.

In the world of Elden Ring, colors are important. And while red could give it a run for its money, I think that gold is really the crucial color in the whole story. The Grace of Gold is what those who are part of Marika's Golden Order are meant to possess, and this color manifests in hair color and eye color. Sir Kenneth Hight, one of the few NPCs who seems to have a relatively happy ending for his questline (though for all I know there's some detail I've missed that makes him actually totally evil,) despite reading as an older man who you'd think would have grey or white hair, instead has pretty brilliant blonde hair and golden eyes - a man fully possessed of Grace.

There are a lot of meaningful colors in the game. Blue is often associated with glintstone, sorcery, and the stars. Red's all over the place, associated with fire and fire giants, Radahn's Redmane forces, Malenia's Scarlet Rot (though it's quite specifically Scarlet, a pretty particular shade of red that is slightly oranger and slightly pinker, I think,) Rykard's magma-based magic, and Messmer's deep red flame.

Gold shows up a ton as well, naturally most often associated with the Golden Order, but arguably also with the lightning-focused Dragon Cult, as well as the faithful of Miquella (with him perhaps skewing a little more toward a kind of white-gold).

But what is gold if not just a metallic yellow? Is gold not just the more appealing, more valued version of yellow when we talk about shiny things? Much like blonde hair, we have this other word that, yes, corresponds to a specific mineral element that has some special properties (not rusting or tarnishing - the latter word of course being pretty important to this game) but also means more broadly just, you know, shiny yellow.

And there's one thing in Elden Ring that is very specifically referred to as being not gold, not blonde, but yellow: The Frenzied Flame.

This isn't FromSoft's first rodeo with Yellow - the Old Monk boss in Demon's Souls is draped in a massive yellow robe that wraps around his head, and seems to actually be the true monster puppeteering the monk. I believe there is an invader NPC in... possibly both Dark Souls and Dark Souls III (no idea about 2). Ironically, From's true cosmic horror game, Bloodborne, might be one of the few that doesn't have such a reference.

This figure is almost certainly a reference to The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, a series of short horror stories all revolving around a play of the same name that drives any who see it to madness. The King in Yellow was a massive influence on H. P. Lovecraft, who inducted the eponymous king into his pantheon of horrific false deities in his cosmic horror oeuvre known collectively as "The Cthulhu Mythos." In fact, Chambers borrowed names from the short story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" by Ambrose Bierce, which tells the story of a man searching for his titular home city, only to stumble upon his own grave and realize that he's dead and that his home long ago fell to ruin.

The color yellow can be associated with illness - liver failure can cause jaundice, and often fluids that come from sores and untreated wounds can be yellowish in coloration. I think, as such, it makes sense as a color that can really signify something being truly wrong.

Elden Ring, more than Dark Souls did, really cranks up the cosmic aspect of its fantasy background. If Bloodborne gives us a gothic horror world underpinned by cosmic horror, Elden Ring gives us high fantasy underpinned with an almost science-fiction-like cosmic element. (I'll even mention that the spiral shapes associated with the Crucible and Enir-Elim point to a weird sort of awareness of the structure of DNA).

In Shadow of the Erdtree, we get some surprising revelations about the nature of the Two Fingers - we find out that they were created (along with the Fingercreepers) by a being known as Metyr, herself a bizarre mishmash of limbs that look very much like giant human fingers. Metyr is said to be a daughter of the Greater Will (creating a weird parallel with Ebrietas from Bloodborne, but we'll have to save that for another post). Notably, Metyr's tail, itself a kind of double-helix that recalls both the spiral pattern affiliated with the Crucible and also the Two Fingers, carries in its crux a spherical void, and it is said that this void is (at least meant to be) a conduit through which she can receive the word of the Greater Will, which she can then convey to the Two Fingers, who in turn convey this to the Finger Readers and thus the rest of humanity.

I think we can pause here a second and think about the imagery here: glintstone is associated with the stars, and we have other elements of the story that take the moon(s) as their affiliated symbol. But Metyr's void and the Dark Knights that guard Ymir, and indeed, the hole in Ymir's miter-like cap, all seem to represent the pure dark void of space... or a black hole.

We can discover, while dealing with Metyr, that the crucial role she plays in the world's order - not just the Golden Order, but all conveyed messages from the Greater Will, including the ability for the Two Fingers to pronounce certain individuals as empyreans and thus worthy of ascending to godhood - is all just... wrong. Metyr has not heard from the Greater Will is ages, likely since long before Marika ever achieved her apotheosis. Ymir diagnoses the problem with the world as the fact that the whole thing has been built on what are either Metyr's lies or her delusions.

Ymir laments that any attempt to build anything resembling a functional order for the world is inherently going to be flawed and irredeemable so long as it's built on the words of the Fingers, which includes both the reign of Marika and the prospective reign of Miquella. Of course, Ymir also goes kind of nuts, trying to take over Metyr's role as "Mother of Fingers," so even his word is somewhat suspect. (Honestly, I feel like I need to really examine more about Ymir to figure out what his whole deal is).

Throughout the world of Elden Ring, we come across various locations affected by the Frenzied Flame - some soldiers up on Mt. Gelmir, a village on the Weeping Penninsula, a ruin in the Consecrated Snowfield, and of course most notably the deepest depths of the sewers under Leyndell.

Oddly, the Frenzied Flame is one of multiple spreading infections in the Lands Between, though unlike the Scarlet Rot and Deathroot, the Flame seems to infect only people, and not places. (The one exception here being the Abyssal Woods in the Lands of Shadow). The Flame of Frenzy has its adherents - usually people who have suffered tremendously. Ironically, it seems that the mistreatment of those suspected of being infected with Frenzy can lead to the development of that frenzy in a population - my personal interpretation of what happened to the Great Caravan (of which the wandering merchants we meet in the Lands Between are the few survivors) is that, as pariahs and scapegoats, they were accused of bringing the Frenzied Flame with them, and were locked away in that horrific tomb beneath the capital, and the starvation and horror of being sealed away to die slowly (and maybe not even die, because this is Marika's Golden Order after all) was actually what brought the Frenzied Flame into them in the first place.

Why does the Frenzied Flame feel so different than other powers at work in Elden Ring? Why does it seem to be able to just appear not because of any physical transference to its locations, but seems to just emerge naturally where conditions are right for it?

Could it be because it's actually a form of Grace?

If Ymir is correct to say that all guidance from the Two Fingers is ultimately just the maddened ramblings of an eldritch being cut off from the source of genuine divine truth, then holiness itself in Elden Ring is just a kind of weird eldritch madness. While it clothes itself in a ritualized orderliness, I think that grace might just be one half of the same coin as the Frenzied Flame.

Indeed, Midra's remembrance (I think - either that or from one of his remembrance items) suggests that the appeal to submitting to Frenzy is that it's actually a huge relief - letting go, letting chaos consume you, removes the agony of one's suffering. When we fight Midra, the first part of the fight has him utterly delirious from the horrifying weapon embedded in his body, in a manner that should by all rights have long ago killed him (given that it's even sticking right through his brain). This first half of the fight is awkward and kind of pathetic. Yet, after the utter horror of seeing Midra pull his own head off (and I am so grateful to FromSoft for cutting to black before we actually see the head detach - I'm not here for Mortal Kombat-level gore) the decapitated body of Midra, with the head replaced by the orb of Frenzied Flame, moves with surprising grace (ahem, grace). There's a confidence, a fluidity to his movements. One gets the impression that either the pain has left him, or that pain no longer means anything to him.

But what about that head, though?

The face of the Lord of Frenzied Flame is a kind of circle of chaotic yellow flame surrounding a dark spot in the middle. We see this in the Lord of Frenzied Flame ending of the game, as well as when Midra shifts into his true boss fight. We also see it projected at the top of a tower in northeastern Liurnia, near where we fight the Vyke as an invader to get the Fingerprint Grape (which, as we all know, is not a grape at all).

Now, is it just me, or does the visage of the Lord of Frenzied Flame look at least a little like Metyr's tail void orb? The orb is, of course, pretty perfectly spherical, whereas what I'll call the Visage here is more roiling and irregular.

In keeping with the cosmic themes - both in terms of cosmic horror and also using actual objects in space - might we interpret the Visage as being something like a Black Hole?

As a side note, growing up, I was pretty curious about science. I don't think I ever wanted to pursue science as a career, but I liked knowing how things worked. My dad is a scientist, and even (if I recall correctly) majored in Physics as an undergraduate before moving on to the then-very-new field of computer science (this was like the early 70s). So, I learned about a lot of space things when I was pretty young.

And Black Holes scared the absolute shit out of me.

I'm fairly prone to anxiety, and the fact that it was extremely unlikely that I'd ever encounter a black hole didn't really assuage the fear of it on a conceptual level. I mean, it's an object that will consume you, utterly inescapable (ok, yes, there's Hawking Radiation, but I don't think you'd be very recognizable after the billions of years your mass takes to leak out one photon at a time).

Black Holes are surrounded by an accretion disk - essentially, all the matter that gets drawn into a tight orbit around the event horizon but not quite passing through it, and that stuff gets so squashed together that it smashes together and burns as an utter inferno, giving black holes a kind of halo-like ring around them.

One theory (which might have been debunked recently, but don't look to me to have the latest on astrophysics) about black holes is that they have what is called a Firewall - that the stuff that is just outside of the event horizon (the radius from the black hole's center at which even the speed of light is too slow to be escape velocity, meaning light cannot escape and hence the "black" part of black holes) is so crushed by the gravity and the other matter being pulled in that this kind of all-destroying barrier of enormous energy will obliterate anything on its way into the black hole, burning it to some fundamental level of physical matter.

Indeed, there's a weird paradox where it's not clear how something could pass through the Firewall to even make it past the event horizon, even though it must be able to. Things get really freaky, where the actual physical location of something passing into a black hole depends on your perspective.

However, the point is that this Firewall burns and melts everything into a mass of glowing fiery stuff. Not unlike the Frenzied Flame.

And is it really that distinct from the Golden Order? One of the key principles of the Golden Order is the Law of Regression - that things yearn to return. When Hyetta is touched by the Flame of Frenzy and acts as a Finger Reader for the Three Fingers, she says that all was once part of the One Great, before the Greater Will split off the Frenzied Flame.

I almost wonder if this is referring to an event like the Big Bang (something Ymir also seems to allude to). Is the Frenzied Flame a manner in which things might return to that singularity that birthed the cosmos - but in reversing creation, utterly destroying all that now exists?

The End of Riven

 I can't say that I completed the game without any help, but I do think I really understood all the puzzles in a way I hadn't before.

I'll also say that my previous post was somewhat disparaging of the graphics - while there are some environments that are maybe a little lower-rez than a AAA-level game could do nowadays, I've actually warmed up to the NPC models.

The remake of Riven changes some of the puzzles. Most notably, it introduces a new area, the star fissure, which becomes a convenient way to travel between the game's five islands as well as being a necessary part of what is probably the most complex puzzle in the game - empowering the book to the 233rd Age.

One thing I found surprising was that the remake actually gets rid of what I thought was the most memorable puzzle in the original, which was finding the little rotating balls set into certain places with D'ni numbers and hidden animal shapes that are required to solve the puzzle that leads into the age of Tay, where the Moiety rebels have taken refuge (ironically, the cover art for the original Riven box portrays the giant tree-village that is actually in Tay, not Riven).

The replacement for this puzzle does involve finding hidden animal shapes, but it's also randomized and requires learning the Rivenese number system.

This, actually, is kind of hilarious. The original game required you to learn the D'ni numbers (which I had previously assumed to be native to Riven,) but I suppose after 27 years they figured enough people already knew that, so they introduce an entirely new numerical system that you can only learn if you also known the D'ni ones. I believe the Rivenese one is just base 10, but builds its digits in a sort of base 3 system. While it's probably easier once you know how the Rivense one works to convert larger numbers (as every Rivense digit corresponds to an Arabic one, though I don't know if they have a zero, instead seeming to have a digit for 10,) I find the cleverness of the D'ni one - being sort of base 5 and base 25 at the same time - a little more satisfying.

Really, the thing that felt very gratifying is that I actually think I understood the multiple aspects of the puzzle required to empower the link to 233. I think it was also made a little easier because rather than having to place the fire marbles on a, like 25x25 grid, it's now just a 5x5 grid - easy enough to just draw it and mark where the marbles for each island go.

One funny note is that when I found one of Gehn's journals, I saw that he made note of when I accidentally destroyed the bridge to Boiler Isle - given that I don't think that you need to do that to progress, I wonder if this entry either disappears or is different if you never do that.

And boy, if you had any doubts about his malice and thought that Gehn was maybe just a misguided but well-intentioned person, the journal betrays an utterly callous and cruel colonialist mindset that makes me feel pretty ok trapping him in a broken linking book forever. You can find some holograms in his bedroom in the 233rd age that do hint at the complexity of this family tree.

I remember buying the Book of Atrus when I was like 9 or 10, but never read it. I've heard that the Myst books (at least those released in the 90s - not sure if there have been more) are actually pretty good, and the book is literally sitting on my bookshelf here, but I still haven't read it.

Anyway, it's been nice revisiting this. While I did also play Myst 3: Exile when it came out, I don't think it really left as much of an impression on me as the first two games did. Riven, indeed, ends on a note that could have been a pretty good grand finale for the duology.

Will Weapon Mastery Slow Down Combat?

 Weapon Mastery is one of the coolest new features coming in the 2024 PHB. If you haven't been paying any attention at all to the Unearthed Arcana playtests that came out over much of 2023 and a bit this year, here's what Weapon Mastery is:

Certain classes - Barbarians, Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, and Rogues - will get a new feature at early levels (it might be 1st level for all of them, actually) that lets them take advantage of a new special property that each type of weapon has. You'll be able to choose a couple weapon types (I believe starting at 2 and going up at higher levels, with Fighters in particular getting I think 3 to start with instead because they're the most weapon-focused class) but you can swap these out on a long rest, so you should pretty much always be able to have the masteries of the weapons you're regularly using.

These Mastery Properties have various effects - most of them adding an effect after you hit an enemy with the weapon, though some will work a little differently.

In a lot of ways, these masteries allow weapon-focused characters to gain the kind of secondary effects spellcasters often get with cantrips - a wizard casting Ray of Frost will deal some cold damage but also slow down an enemy by 10 ft. if they hit, and now a character with a weapon that has the Slow mastery will get to both do their damage and also slow that target down some.

This does, I think, two big things for the game: the first is that it gives martial characters more interesting capabilities in the middle of combat, where damage becomes only part of what you're doing when you hit an enemy.

The other major thing is that it gives the designers new room to really distinguish different weapons from one another. Mechanically, under the 2014 rules, you have instances like Battleaxes and Longswords or Glaives and Halberds, where the weapons are functionally identical (other than minor considerations like cost and weight). These new masteries let weapon choice feel like a more meaningful choice, while still allowing you to pick things based on aesthetics thanks to the fact that the different masteries are all reasonably good.

However, if there's one critique of the system, it's that it risks slowing down combat in a game that can suffer from slow combat. Giving players another thing to track and remember and choose, they argue, will balloon the time it takes for each round leaving each player all the more impatient for their next turn to come.

Personally, I think that some of this argument is based on faulty premises.

First off, player characters don't switch weapons all that often. Chances are that, until you get a +1 weapon around level 5 or so, you'll probably be using the same mundane weapon in each combat. This means that players will quickly learn about their masteries and know to apply it on each of their hits.

Second, this is not a system every player is going to be interacting with, so it really depends on your party composition how many instances of resolving mastery properties will happen per round.

The third objection, though, will require a little more investigation: I think that most of these masteries are simple enough that it should not actually be too hard to weave the effects into the flow of combat.

But this does depend on the mastery, and so what I wanted to do with this post was to look into each mastery and rate how much it's going to actually slow things down.

Note that this is using the Mastery definitions from Playtest 8, which was the final Unearthed Arcana playtest for the 2024 core rulebooks. I don't expect any of these to change.

    Cleave:

Found on: Greataxe, Halberd

When you hit a creature with a cleave weapon, you can make an additional attack once per turn against another creature that is within 5 feet of the first one if it's within your reach. If you hit, the creature takes the weapon's damage, but you don't add your ability modifier to that damage unless the modifier is negative (however, I would think that rage bonuses, magic weapon bonuses, and extra dice from class features and the like do apply here).

I will concede that this one will most assuredly add time to a player's turn simply because it introduces another attack roll into the mix. The good news is that a level 20 fighter isn't going to be getting sixteen attacks when they action surge because of this - the once-a-turn limit puts it more in the category of the bonus action attack you get with the 2014 version of Great Weapon Master. So, yes, slower, but it's also damage, which means that the net effect might actually speed up the fight.

    Graze:

Found on: Glaive, Greatsword

Unlike most masteries, this goes into effect when you miss an attack. If you miss the attack roll, you can still do damage (of the weapon's type) equal to the ability modifier you used to make the attack. This damage cannot be increased in any way other than increasing your ability modifier (so nothing like Divine Smite or the like - this is still a miss, after all).

This one I don't think will slow combat down at all. In fact, it will probably speed it up, because using a weapon like this means you'll be guaranteed to get damage in every turn as long as you can get in range to hit.

    Nick:

Found on: Dagger, Light Hammer, Sickle, Scimitar

While wielding a Nick weapon, when you make the extra attack of the Light property, you can make this attack as part of your Attack action, rather than as a bonus action (you can still only make this extra attack once per turn).

I suppose you could argue that now that the Rogue gets to make a main-hand attack, an off-hand attack, and use their Cunning Action, they're technically doing more on their turn. Bonus actions are limited, though, and I think most players who have a real use for their bonus actions are going to know what they mean to do with it most of the time. (I will say that a Monk who gets their hands on Weapon Mastery is going to be pretty nuts, as this won't prevent also making an unarmed strike or flurry of blows after getting your dual-wield strike).

    Push:

Found on: Greatclub, Pike, Warhammer, Heavy Crossbow

If you hit a creature with a weapon that has Push on it, you can push the creature up to 10 feet straight away from you if it's Large or smaller.

I think this is likely to be one of the most iconic weapon masteries, as it feels like a real battlefield-manipulation ability. I will say that it depends very much on the player whether this slows things down. A player who plans ahead and has a real idea of what they want to do by pushing their enemy will probably get through their turn pretty quickly. However, if a player hems and haws over what angle they want to push from, this could introduce a real delay in the game.

    Sap:

Found on: Mace, Spear, Flail, Longsword, War Pick

If you hit a creature with a Sap weapon, the creature has Disadvantage on the next attack roll they make before the start of your next turn.

Arguably, survival abilities inherently slow down combat, but players going down slows it even more. The point where this might really delay things is if a player is indecisive about spreading this debuff to multiple enemies, as this can potentially affect as many monsters as you have attacks.

    Slow:

Found on: Club, Javelin, Light Crossbow, Sling, Whip, Longbow, Musket

Hitting a target with a Slow weapon will reduce their movement speed by 10 feet until the start of your next turn. Hitting the same creature more than once with this property, the reduction in speed doesn't exceed 10 feet.

The caveat here is sensible - you can't just lock down a creature if you can hit it three times in a row (or just twice for a zombie!) However, like Sap, a player might be tempted to spread this out across multiple foes using multiple attacks. The feature is literally called slow, of course. Ideally this keeps foes from reaching ranged player characters, which means that DMs might need to burn a turn having them dash.

    Topple:

Found on: Quarterstaff, Battleaxe, Lance, Maul, Trident

If you hit a creature with a Topple weapon, the creature must make a Constitution save (based on the ability you used to make the attack) or fall prone.

So, this is the mastery that I think has been called out the most as potentially slowing the game down, because it introduces a saving throw to every hit. I will say that because it's a Con save, rather than the more common Strength save to avoid being knocked prone (or sometimes Dex,) there's a good chance that monsters will usually succeed on this save, which means that they'll be making a lot more of those saves. So, look, I think that, yeah, it will probably slow things down a little.

    Vex:

Found on: Handaxe, Dart, Shortbow, Rapier, Shortsword, Blowgun, Pistol

When you hit a target with a Vex weapon, your next attack roll before the end of your next turn (note end, not start like most of these) has Advantage.

I think maybe more than any other property, this is going to speed combat up. For one thing, it's going to make it way, way easier for Rogues to get sneak attack, and will just generally result in more attack hitting and more critting, which of course speeds things up.

    So, that's all the masteries. (While Pistols and Muskets are graduating to the PHB, I'll be curious to see if masteries are given to modern and futuristic firearms as well - we know that the Soulknife's psychic blades get the Vex property).

Overall, I think that the worry that they might slow down combat isn't entirely overblown - some of these really do introduce new choices to make on the battlefield.

Here's why I'm not worried, though: this is still far, far less choice to worry about than a full spellcaster looking at their big spell list and trying to decide what to do when it gets to their turn.

I think the real culprit in the slowness of D&D combat is not really mechanical, but a question of attention. Look, I have a lot of friends with ADHD, and I love them very much. But I think the real thing that makes D&D combat go slow is when players aren't keeping a close look at what other players and the monsters are doing, and only returning their attention to the battle when it's their turn, then having to go through the entire process of assessing the situation, determining what the party most needs to deal with, and then looking at their abilities and seeing what they can do.

My hope, then, and maybe it's a vain hope, is that players who might feel disengaged because all they do is make a couple of attack rolls each turn, will start to think more tactically, and start to feel more engaged as they think about the larger impact they'll have on the fight, and thus feel more interested in what is actually going on.

Will that happen? Maybe for some people. Probably not for all.

But the benefit of all of this is, I think, worth it. Even if combat does wind up slowing down a little, I think there will be a slight tip toward balancing the capabilities of martial characters and spellcasters, even if the latter will inherently still be more complex classes. Combat is supposed to be fun, of course, and I think the scenarios that come to mind when looking at these masteries really sound enticing.