Shadow Dragons!

 Of the canonical D&D settings, Planescape is probably the one that I am most drawn to, conceptually. But it's in hard competition with Ravenloft. Both of these were introduced in the early days of the game, both (I think) formally introduced as full settings in 2nd Edition, in the late 80s and early 90s. Ravenloft was initially it's own kind of thing (actually, it might have been part of the Ethereal Plane,) but as of 5th Edition, it was made into a kind of demiplane or cluster of demiplanes that were in the Shadowfell.

The Shadowfell is actually quite new to D&D, only introduced officially in 4th Edition (there was a "Plane of Shadow" before then, to be fair). While the majority of Shadowfell stuff we've gotten in 5E, we don't tend to see a lot of the "greater Shadowfell," which is a more direct mirror of the Prime Material Plane.

And it's this plane that I think might be my favorite of them.

Yes, since a kid, when my favorite holiday was Halloween, I've always enjoyed a kind of spooky, gothic aesthetic (I did grow up in a creaky Victorian house,) and that kind of "Dark World" has always felt like a great place for adventures. What is heroism but being the light within a world of darkness, after all?

No monster is more synonymous with the fantasy genre than the Dragon, and it's right there in the name of the game, so it's fitting that there's a variant on dragons that has been touched by the Shadowfell.

My homebrew setting has a fairly well-fleshed-out Shadowfell and Feywild version, and the most memorable adventure of my original campaign was a journey across a region of the Shadowfell called Red Scar Plains. In it, the party needed to face off against a psychotic Fire Giant who ruled over the realm of Red Scar Plains (the region where the party was trapped). Their ally, a silver dragon named Sirkazan (or Sirk for short) had been captured by the giant, and was being kept there to allow shadow energy to gradually corrupt him (when they escaped, getting Sirk cured allowed me to come up with one of the coolest, grossest ideas I've had - they met a Nagpa who offered to cure Sirk if she were allowed to consume the shadow essence within him, which involved her cutting open his veins and pulling it out like strings of oil congealing into something like plastic, while the party fended off a band of rampaging orcs intent on attacking the Nagpa's lair).

Anyway, while Sirk avoided becoming a Shadow Dragon thanks to the party's rescue, the second-in-command of Red Scar Plains, and direct servant of the demigod emperor of the larger "Dire Kingdom" of which the Plains were just one territory, was an Adult Black Shadow Dragon named Kormod. The intent was never to let them actually fight Kormod, but they schemed with his daughter after killing off some of his younger wyrmling offspring to spring Sirk.

Shadow Dragons in 2014 were designed as a template - you would take a normal Chromatic or Metallic Dragon and change some of their features.

In 2025, Shadow Dragons now have two dedicated stat blocks.

The upside is that they're ready to use from the word go. The downside is that there's not any official guidance on homebrewing more powerful ones. The Juvenile Shadow Dragon stat block is Medium sized, and CR 4. That's on par with Red Dragon Wyrmlings, which are the toughest of the wrymlings.

The full-grown Shadow Dragon is either Large or Huge, but its hit dice are d12s, so it seems more "by default" Huge, and thus on par with Adult Dragons. At CR 13, it's actually on par with an Adult White Dragon, which is the least powerful of the Chromatic ones. Basically, if a Shadow Dragon is "Young," (Large-sized) it's more powerful than any other kind, but if it's an Adult (Huge-sized) it's near the bottom of the hierarchy - at least in terms of CR.

The truly terrifying thing about both Shadow Dragons is that their breath weapon will auto-kill a creature it reduces to 0 hit points - no death saves, just full-on dead and on top of that, spawns a Shadow to fight you.

Now, at the level when you're fighting a Shadow Dragon (level 9 probably at the earliest for a group of 4) a Shadow is going to be scary but not that scary, and easily killed very quickly. However, because you could potentially face off against a Juvenile as early as level 3 (a High difficulty encounter for 4 level 3 players would have a max of 1,200, and CR 4 is worth 1,100,) before you have access to things like Revivify, and when a Shadow is still quite a menace, these can be truly nasty encounters.

I'll admit I'd have liked to see a Dracolich and Shadow Dragon that rivals or even exceeds the most powerful of normal dragons, but admittedly, in both cases they're kind of curses.

A Shadow Dragon doesn't have the inherent magic that most adult-and-older dragons in the Monster Manual do. However, they are kind of the Rogues of dragons, able to hide as a bonus action while in dim light and darkness. Notably, a Shadow Dragon's lair (which only the adult version would get) actually reduces the effect of any magic that would shed bright light to dim light, so within their lair they should always have the opportunity to hide. Now, to be clear: the Shadow Stealth bonus action does not actually confer anything like cover or invisibility, so they will still need to do something like Disengage and get behind obscurement if they're not in total darkness. However, it does have Blindsense, so having magical darkness fill the Shadow Dragon's lair could be very helpful to them.

Generally speaking, I think the tactics with a Dragon are usually to stay at range, using the breath weapon when it recharges and then getting either out of range or behind cover. A Shadow Dragon is probably hiding on turns they can't use the breath weapon.

Now, how would we use one of these in a story?

If your campaigns are really locked to the Prime Material Plane, a Shadow Dragon could be in a place where there's some bleed from the Shadowfell, or, as the Monster Manual suggests, they could be in the Underdark (which tends to be, you know, dark thanks to the fact that it's underground).

Notably, this isn't a natural thing: Shadow Dragons are changed and corrupted by the shadow. So, a Shadow Dragon could have started off as a perfectly benevolent being.

Generally, when I think about the influence of the Shadowfell, I think it's a kind of deadening of emotions. The kind of ennui, depression, and the obsessiveness that comes more from feeling a compulsion to do something rather than genuine excitement about it. Dragons, of course, hoard things, but a Shadow Dragon might be consumed with a kind of hopeless, joyless type of hoarding, and perhaps what they actually hoard are the souls of the dead, trapped as Shadows like themselves.

In a sense, a Shadow Dragon is a pitiable creature, but no less dangerous for this fact.

While the Shadowfell isn't exclusively Ravenloft, and Ravenloft isn't exclusively Gothic Horror, I think you could play on those Gothic tropes, particularly Poe-style characters who behave in gruesome ways because of a kind of deadened sense of empathy - the two of his stories that stick the most with me are The Casque of Amontillado and The Tell-Tale Heart. In both stories, the narrator confesses to murdering someone on a kind of whim - in the former, there's an almost dismissive mention of a perceived insult, and in the latter, it's basically because the narrator is weirded out by his victim's blind, whitened eye.

A Shadow Dragon, I think, could represent a kind of faded majesty. While officially in the rules, only Metallic Dragons can polymorph themselves to look like humanoids, I 100% extend this ability to all dragons (at least those of adult age and older, though I think even a Wyrmling could do it if it fits the story). And I think a Shadow Dragon could present themselves as a regal lord, but one who has probably fallen into a brooding depression. Perhaps their lair - maybe a great castle - has fallen into ruin.

This character could present themselves initially as a friend, but turn more sinister over time. Admittedly, you could more or less use the same RP playbook as a classic vampire.

The other option is that the players hear about some great and powerful dragon, only to discover that their realm has fallen to darkness and despair. Now, the few remaining people living nearby speak of armies of shadows drifting across the land, and a greater shadow that blots out the moon with its wings.

A Juvenile Shadow Dragon could be a menace to a community that turns out to be more intelligent than initially believed. Signs of their activity could be hard to identify - a patch of grass in the woods that very suddenly rotted, or lurking shadow monsters growing in number of late.

Building an encounter with one of these, I'd very much design a map with lots of places to hide. It's always kind of difficult to build verticality into a battle map, especially if you don't have 3D stuff to use for it (I'd love to have Dimension 20's set-building team, but I do not believe I have the budget for it!), but flying monsters are always going to feel like more of a threat if they can, you know, fly.

In my mind, I'm imagining the ruined hall of some grand manor house - a massive staircase leading up to a landing on the second floor, with wide hallways leading off on both the first and second floors. The Shadow Dragon could then use the floor of the second floor/ceiling of the first floor as a way to hide and forcing mostly ground-bound characters to have to chase them.

Now, death from their Shadow Breath does automatically happen if you reduce a character to 0 HP, even if it's a successful save. At the levels where you're fighting the adult version, I'd hope you have at least one character that can Revivify (at level 9, even half-casters can,) but throwing a Juvenile one of these at a tier 1 party is going to be rough. Make sure that your players are bought-in for truly deadly monsters, and if not, make sure that there's some way for them to resurrect characters such as friendly NPCs or remote holy shrines or the like.

Rebuilding Jax: Comparing Sword-and-Board to GWM in my One Particular Instance of an Eldritch Knight

Before my Triton Wizard overtook him, my longest-played D&D character was an Eldritch Knight Fighter. The campaign sadly fell apart when one of our players had to step away (for happy reasons, though: he became a dad!) and our DM had built much of the plot to hinge on his character.

It's a character I really loved to play, and even though I know I really ought to try some new subclasses and concepts, the changes to Fighters and Eldritch Knights, and even Dragonborn, in the 2024 rules have all made me really eager to play an updated version of the character.

But how much of an update?

My default character in an RPG is a heavily-armored character with access to spellcasting. While this often means playing something like a Paladin, the Eldritch Knight gets about as close as one can to my ideal "Battlemage" archetype as I've seen in any game.

My character, Jax (which I didn't realize was an actual name at the time, and figured it was a cool and draconic-sounding fantasy name) was built kind of around the following concept: having the highest AC possible. Our one-shot adventure that turned into a campaign saw us finding a +1 Shield that Jax received, so on top of his Defensive fighting style and eventually getting his hands on some Adamantine Plate, he ultimately had an AC of 22, which could be pushed to 27 with the Shield spell, which was the main thing he cast with his spell slots.

Now, I've done some math on what a heavy-armor-wearer's AC does for damage reduction compared with what you can get with the lower AC of a Barbarian but who gets the damage reduction from raging, and generally it's actually not nearly as good as the damage resistance. I might run such simulations on the assumption that the Fighter also has the Shield spell and see what it looks like, because basically I was almost never actually hit unless I was crit (which gave me, in retrospect, a sense that I was cursed with getting crit more frequently. Might have just been confirmation bias).

Still, at a very basic level, using a shield is a sacrifice of damage for a martial character. I wasn't dual-wielding or using a big two-handed weapon. The question, though, is how much of a sacrifice it was.

See, I've suspected that if I were to return to this character, I might change the way that I had built him to be lighter on defense and heavier on offense. Even without any shield or the defensive fighting style (though given how crap Great Weapon Fighting is, I might still take defensive,) Plate armor plus the Shield spell means pushing your AC to 23, which is pretty good. And, of course, if our damage is significantly higher, we might embrace the penalty to our un-hittableness because enemies that are dead can't hit us anyway.

So, I wanted to go reconstruct Jax's build a bit in both ways, and see how much more powerful a GWM build would be.

Jax was 12 level when the campaign sputtered to an end, meaning he had three attacks per Attack action. The buff to War Magic (allowing us to replace an attack with one of our cantrips rather than letting us make a single bonus action attack after we cast a cantrip) might actually wind up smoothing out some of our damage differences a little.

We will also be continuing to use Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade, because there's no really decent replacement for them in the 2024 rules (I'm honestly a little bummed they didn't make them it into the new PHB, as they're so ideal for this subclass).

Now, let's talk about the basics:

Jax is a Blue Dragonborn. His species means that he will get a Breath Weapon he can use PB times per day - in his case 4. The Breath Weapon can replace one of his attacks (kind of perfect for a Fighter, who has so many) and does 3d10 lightning damage to any creature in a 30-foot line or a 15-foot cone (he now gets to choose, and boy will it be nice to have the cone option). The DC is going to be based on his Con, but this is a save-for-half feature, so it's guaranteed damage.

He has the Sage background, which is actually a problem if we're using the new Sage, because this fails to boost his Strength in any way. Ideally, we'd be able to use the old version of the background and just pick up the Magic Initiate: Wizard feat to go with it. Jax had actually not rolled any stat above a 14, but used his Dragonborn ability bonuses to get that to 16 at level 1, and just pumped up Strength and Con with ASIs until he took Tough at level 12.

Given the way General Feats work now, I'd probably do things a bit differently. If we just went to Point Buy, I'd probably go for a 15 in Strength and get +2 to that from the Background, and then shoot for at least a 14 in Con. I had overestimated the need for a good Intelligence modifier when I first built him, so he actually started off with a +2 to Int and only a +1 to Con. At the very least I'd flip that, though I also always intended to find him a Headband of Intellect (in years of playing, he never had any attunement magic items).

Thanks to how many feats he can get as he levels up, if I could start him off with a 17 Strength, I'd probably then just pick up a General feat at 4, 6, 8, and 12, three of which would be Strength-based ones, and the other being War Caster (Booming Blade as an Opportunity Attack feels really nasty, but it also solves the issue of having to drop your weapon if you need to cast Shield - something that the GWM build is not as worried about because they only need both hands on their weapon when they're attacking with it).

For cantrips, we're obviously using Green-Flame Blade and Booming Blade - the former just when we have a secondary target to hit and the latter in all other situations.

Now, weapon choice of course depends on whether we're going for the Sword-and-Board build or GWM. In terms of aesthetic, I love a Battlemage with a Maul, and perhaps because it's so optimal, I'd almost hope that my DM wouldn't give me a magic Greatsword. But in terms of figuring out the actual damage potential, it's pretty clear that Graze is just by far the most powerful damage mastery for any Great Weapon, so we're going to assume we have that.

For our sword-and-board build, it's a more open question. We basically want to ensure we're using a one-handed d8 weapon, which means picking between Battleaxes, Flails, Longswords, Morningstars, Rapiers, Tridents, Warhammers, and War Picks. Just as a special note, Tridents are actually kind of ideal for an Eldritch Knight because they're the only d8 weapon with the Thrown property (can we get to d10 if we throw it two-handed?) and thanks to Weapon Bond, we can get it back with a bonus action after throwing it - it's fitting that the official Eldritch Knight art depicts one with a Trident). What this really comes down to is the Topple, Sap, Vex, and Push masteries. However, because we by this level have Tactical Master, effectively every weapon we use already has the Push, Sap, and Slow masteries. Thus, we're sort of leaving some options on the table if we don't pick up one that has either Topple or Vex. So, we'll want to grab a Battleaxe, Rapier, or Trident.

I imagine that in terms of damage potential, the Rapier, which has Vex, is almost certainly the right choice. Topple can potentially also give us advantage on attacks, but requires a creature to fail a Con save. So, perhaps this is ignoring a significant bit of damage potential, but I'm going to say we're going with a Trident for this build and furthermore, we're actually going to ignore the Topple Mastery, making an assumption that the monsters we're fighting at level 12 have beefy Con (though boy does the Trident having the Thrown property and also Topple make it feel awesome for downing flying enemies). I'm tempted to, in the interest of fairness, ignore Graze when calculating the damage potential of a GWM build. Actually, given how Graze is in most instances more powerful than Topple, we're for sure going to do that.

Phew, almost there.

Feats!

Naturally, our GWM build is going to start off at level 4 picking up Great Weapon Master. While there are some redundancies, Polearm Master is a good pairing with this (swapping out a Greatsword for a Glaive) but I think I'm going to turn it down, instead getting Mage Slayer (on both builds,) which is so dang good (between that and the new Indomitable, Jax's mind is going to be hard to mess with). Both will also pick up War Caster (while the GWM build will already have a free hand for spellcasting, the advantage on Concentration saves and especially the cast-a-spell-as-an-opportunity-attack features are very nice). That leaves one more feat for GWM and two more for S&B, which will need to be a Strength feat in order to get our Strength to 20.

Now, of course, we could pick up Polearm Master for our GWM build. And it would probably be plenty good, even if the Pole Strike aspect of it would be slightly diluted by our several attacks. Here, though, I might just make an aesthetic decision and say we want to be using a Buster Sword-sized Greatsword. Now, Sentinel is an obvious choice here, but we have the following downside - our Warcaster opportunity attacks will not work as well when doing our Booming Blade trick. That being said, the language of War Caster means that we aren't technically making an Opportunity attack, so Booming Blade would't actually reduce their speed to 0. Then again, we really want to keep our Reactions open for Shield. It's a tough call.

I think in part for consistency's sake, we're going to go with a defensive feat (that still boosts Strength) in the form of Heavy Armor Master. Now, in those rare cases where we do get hit, we can reduce incoming bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage by 4 (and I think this goes up to 5 at the next level). It's not going to be Barbarian-level damage reduction, and of course doesn't help with other damage types, but melee attacks still mostly do these types of damage (and even if it's a mix of, say, piercing and poison, that 4 still subtracts from the overall total).

This leaves what the final feat for our S&B build is using. Shield Master is certainly tempting - it's a little unclear to me whether you get to use your Reaction before or after knowing if you would succeed on your saving throw with Interposing Shield (as written it looks like before, which means we couldn't use, like, Absorb Elements if we got hit by a Fireball and got a 5 on our saving throw) but it does seem to interact well with Indomitable. And honestly, at this point there aren't a ton of feats left to choose from. So, yeah, we'll go with that.

So, to recap, we're going with War Caster, Mage Slayer, Heavy Armor Master, and then either Shield Master or Great Weapon Master (not necessarily in that order, but we're starting off at level 12, so we can have all four).

In terms of spells, I'm going to keep this simple for the sake of my sanity: we're using Booming Blade in single-target situations, and our spell slots are being reserved for Shield, Absorb Elements, or Misty Step.

Ok, finally, let's get those damage calculations!

Because we're essentially ignoring weapon masteries, I think we don't really need to worry about hit chance. We will still generally have a 5% crit chance, which will activate GWM's Hew attack. Again, between our Trident and Shield Master for the S&B build, we can probably actually knock enemies prone frequently, but I'm going to just have to ignore this again for the sake of sanity.

So, we're basically comparing damage on hits, which makes this a lot easier.

S&B:

Starting off with the build closest to our original one, we've got a +5 to Strength and +4 PB. While I had a +1 weapon in the original campaign, assuming some kind of big reset, I'll just act as if it's all mundane equipment.

Thus, our Trident hits are going to be 1d8+5. Booming Blade at this level adds 2d8 Thunder damage on the initial hit and an additional 3d8 if they move, but we'll assume we're both planting our feet.

Thus, on our turn, as the Attack Action, we are doing one attack for 3d8+5 (18.5 damage). Now, regarding our Breath Weapon, we will probably only use this when we can catch multiple targets in it - 3d10 is 16.5 average damage, which is quite good, but it's limited to 4 per day. If we want to go all out, we'll use this every turn, and this will of course dilute the distinction between the builds a bit. But let's assume some conservatism and say that on a single target, we're just sticking to our regular attacks.

Thus, our S&B build is going to hit with 3d8+5 + 1d8+5 + 1d8+5, or ultimately 5d8+15, which comes out to 37.5 damage. Again, this is assuming all hits, so we shouldn't look at this and think it's some really impressive DPR.

GWM:

Our GWM build is going to hit for 2d6+2d8+9 on our Booming Blade attack, and then 2d6+9 on the second and third hits, or a total of 6d6+2d8+27, which comes to 57 damage. If any of our three attacks as part of our Attack action crit, we get another Hew attack as a bonus action. With three attacks, we've got a roughly 14% chance to get a crit on our turn, which only deals 2d6+5 (we don't get to add our PB to this damage). 14%x12 is 1.68, so our 57 goes up to 58.68.

In other words, we're only doing about 64% of our damage with Sword & Board as we would be with GWM.

Now, the GWM build is built far more for raw damage. The many Topples we could do with our S&B build could potentially be very useful in some fights, and I think that the higher our AC, the more impactful even higher AC can be. A 23 AC is impressive, but perhaps not quite as much as a 27 that I was able to pull with my old build, where a creature that had a +7 or lower to attack needed to crit me.

Still, I think I'd be inclined to move more toward this damage-output focus, which would speed up combat. Also, we haven't talked about how awesome Graze is for a Fighter with Tactical Mastery - as a weapon mastery that only actually does something if we miss, this means we can always pick Sap, Push, or Slow when we do connect without sacrificing anything.

Ah, it'd be fun to play that character again.

Can We Build an Unarmed Barbarian?

 Among the changes in the 2024 PHB, one that was kind of interesting was the change to allow Barbarians to get their Rage bonus on Unarmed Strikes as well as Weapon Attacks. Now, this could be a help in a situation where the Barbarian is unarmed, like if their weapon is hit with a Heat Metal spell or stolen or something.

The real question is this: can we actually build a Barbarian that actually does decent damage with unarmed strikes?

Obviously, the Monk is the unarmed strike master, built entirely around them. And while I generally abhor multiclassing, it can sometimes be a last resort to make a build work (I think a Bladelock, for example, gets so much benefit from taking a level of Fighter that it's kind of hard not to).

Let me explain why I'd be looking at this conceptually:

I have a premise for a character that's kind of the first real Barbarian character I've actually felt excited to play. Loosely inspired by the Alan Wake games (particularly II,) he's a horror novelist who finds himself trapped in the Shadowfell for over a decade, desperately trying to stay alive in an ongoing nightmare. Whether it's an actual outside presence or just a persona he comes up with to help him survive (and people with D.I.D. often develop these other personae as a response to trauma,) the character manifests an alter-ego known as Mr. Teeth, who takes over when he goes into a Rage. The idea would be that at early levels, Mr. Teeth would just be a change in posture, expression, and tone of voice, but eventually he'd manifest as a kind of shadow over the character, the appearance of which I'd describe as looking like if someone had gone into the film stock and colored over him with a black marker in each frame - despite the fact that this would be in "reality" as he and the people around him knew it.

Now, if I ever play this character, I'll probably wind up just giving him weapons, because the class is clearly built for that. But I wanted to know if I could make something that at least worked decently.

Thematically, the subclass I'd wind up taking is Berserker, which, despite being kind of the "vanilla" Barbarian, has a few features that feel very appropriate. Berserkers are a more offense-focused subclass thanks to the new version of Frenzy. Mindless Rage feels particularly appropriate, as Mr. Teeth kind of manifested to help the character endure the terrors of the Shadowfell. And even the capstone, Intimidating Presence, is kind of perfect because he's become a scarier monster than the ones that terrorized him.

Why do we want unarmed strikes? Well, it's primarily an aesthetic thing. Most monsters don't really need weapons because they have claws and teeth and such. It would also mean that, when not raging, the character can look like they're just some normal guy.

I'd probably also have the character be Human. While I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for us to get the equivalent of Tasha's "customize your species" equivalent for backgrounds, being Human will allow us to grab any Origin Feat we want, which is nice.

Now, let's talk about Unarmed Strikes.

By default, we do 1 plus our Strength modifier (and also our Rage bonus) with an Unarmed Strike. This "d1" damage die is going to lower our damage by a lot - if we start off with a +3 to Strength, comparing this even with a Dagger is a difference between 6 damage when raging and 7.5. Compared with a Greatsword, we're looking at 6 versus 12, which is fully half as much damage before we even get into the fact that we're losing the Graze mastery, which is so good.

So, it's an uphill battle, and one that I doubt we're going to actually be able to win. But let's give it the old college try!

The Tavern Brawler feat is pretty good for unarmed strikes. It upgrades them to a d4 (meaning we're now at least doing as much damage as we would with a dagger, light hammer, sickle, or club) and allows us to reroll that damage die if we roll a 1. Thus, the typical 2.5 damage from a d4 becomes a 2.875. Eh, that's... better I guess? We also get proficiency with improvised weapons and can, once per turn, push a target 5 feet from us when we hit them as part of the attack action.

Ok, so this is definitely better - doing 7.875 damage on our hits rather than 6.

Still, we're pretty far behind.

Broadly speaking, Barbarians (and most melee builds) divide into what I'd call three broad categories: Sword-and-Board, Dual-wielding, and Great Weapons. The latter of these does also include polearm builds. Sword-and-Board can be very good, but sacrifices damage in the name of survivability. We're not really going for that so much, so we want instead to focus on damage output.

Now, our unarmed strikes are not going to be competitive with a great weapon's damage. But they do start to approach the damage of a dual-wielder's weapons. However, we run into the following problem: dual-wielders are built around just that - dual-wielding. Their attacks deal less damage, but they get to make more of them.

I'd love to build a "pugilist" feat that allows you to effectively dual-wield your own fists - one of the ironies of D&D's design is that someone wielding Light weapons can effectively attack faster with them than with their own empty fists.

In a lot of ways, the Monk's bonus action attack kind of corrects for this. And here, we do really need to start considering whether a dip into Monk is going to solve a ton of our problems.

Being a Monk will be a bit challenging, though, given that both Dex and Wisdom are considered their Primary Abilities, so you'll need at least a 13 in both. Going Point Buy or Standard Array will mean you're pretty spread-out, and you'll need to be somewhat lucky with rolled stats to get this. That said, talk with your DM and see if they will waive this for you.

Let's take a look at the Monk's Martial Arts feature.

We get two major benefits here: the first is that you get a d6 hit die for your Unarmed Strikes (and Monk weapons). This brings your punches (or kicks, headbutts, bites, etc.) in line with the damage of a Shortsword or Handaxe.

The next big benefit is that we get to make an Unarmed Strike as a bonus action. Because this doesn't involve the Light property, that attack gets the full benefit of our Strength and Rage.

While Monks can use Dexterity in place of Strength for unarmed strikes and monk weapons, it doesn't say you have to.

Now, I will say that if you eventually take this build all the way to level 20, you might sadly miss out on the amazing capstones for each class. But given how few campaigns actually go that far, it might not actually be that bad. The more bitter pill is that you'll be delaying Extra Attack, which is rough.

Still, just one Monk level now gives us a bonus action attack (which, to be fair, won't come up until round two, after we've Raged).

In terms of which class we start off with, I think Barbarian's probably wise, giving us Con save proficiency. Then, maybe just at level 2 we pick up our Monk level and then stick to Barbarian for the foreseeable future.

Now, as much as I enjoy the introduction of Weapon Masteries, it makes calculating damage a lot harder (depending on the mastery). Given that a dual-wielder is likely using a Handaxe or Shortsword, both of which use Vex, I kind of dread calculating it. But we could compare this with a Greatsword-wielding Graze build.

We'll take a look at this at level 4, allowing our unarmed Barbarian to become a Berserker, while our Greatsword character is going to be picking up Great Weapon Master.

Again, the assumption here is that the GWM build is going to be doing more damage. But it's a question of how far ahead they are:

Ok: Assumptions:

This is still tier 1, so the AC of our target is probably not super high - maybe a 15.

We need to account for the ramp-up time here (which to be fair would be true for a dual-wielder who has the Dual Wielder feat as well - though the Nick mastery is nicer to Barbarians than how things used to be). Thus, we'll take the damage over a course of three rounds. Again, this is going to favor our GWM build because they'll be at full speed from the get-go.

We'll assume that we started with a 17 in Strength (though given the lack of feats to really support this, we might have gone only 16 on our unarmed Barbarian, both to help us get our Dex, Wis, and Con to decent levels and because we're probably just going to be taking ASIs) and so our GWM now has a +4 while our unarmed guy only has a +3 to Strength.

So, let's try it out!

GWM:

With +4 to Strength, we're looking at a +6 to hit. Against an AC of 15, that means we're hitting on a 9 or higher, meaning we have a 60% hit chance. GWM is also going to add our PB to the damage when we hit.

Our damage on a hit is 2d6+8, or 15 on average.

With Graze, we also deal some damage on a hit, so that's 4 on those misses.

Finally, our crits, 5% of the time, give us an extra 2d6 (or 7) damage.

Thus, we have: 15x60%, or 9, plus 4x40%, or 1.6, plus 7x5%, or .35, giving us a total damage per attack (and thus per turn because this is tier 1) of 10.95 damage.

Over three turns, this becomes 32.85

Unarmed:

We only have a +3 Strength, which means our attack bonus is +5, so we're going to hit on a roll of 10 or higher, or 55% of the time.

Our hit damage is 1d6+5, or 8.5. And a crit adds 3.5 damage. Now, that said, if we took the Tavern Brawler feat, this is actually false: instead, our d6s are going to do an average of 3.917 (ish, it's actually .9166666, etc.) So, our hits are 8.917 and our crits add 3.917.

Thus: we get 8.917x55%, or 4.934 (ish) plus 3.917x5%, or .196(ish) for a total damage of 5.13.

However, after the first turn (when we're using our Bonus Action to Rage) we will get to do this twice per turn. In other words, over three rounds, when the GWM gets three such attacks, we're effectively getting 5 attacks.

Thus, over three turns, our Unarmed Build does 25.65 damage.

So, we're doing about 80% of what the GWM character is doing.

Sadly, I think that the math does not favor us as we get to higher levels - GWM scales remarkably well, and when they get Extra Attack, our solitary Unarmed Strike bonus attack is a bit deprecated in value in comparison.

A dual-wield build will likely fare better, thanks in large part to Weapon Mastery (with the Dual-Wielder Feat, we can get four attacks in per turn after the first once we have Extra Attack) though because Barbarians don't get Fighting Style feats for free, you'll be losing out on your Light weapon attack's damage as well.

Essentially, I think this build can work in the broadest sense, and I don't think people are obligated to play optimally, but I think that if I ever play this character, he's probably going to have some kind of big weapon to fight with.

Using the Doppelganger

 When I've thought about the possibility of running a campaign set in Ravenloft, I've honestly kind of struggled to come up with my own original Domains, even with the guidance given in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. The issue there is that I think my mind starts with the aesthetics of a domain, and the guidance (probably correctly) starts instead with thematic concerns. For example, I like the aesthetic of a sea-soaked harbor town out of a Lovecraft story (perhaps without the underlying racism) and think some cosmic horror elements would work really well in such a setting, but in a way, I'm sort of putting the cart before the horse. Domains of Dread are built around Darklords, and are reflections of them.

I did have some vague ideas for a domain-hopping Ravenloft campaign/adventure, which started with a particular motif: the Doppelganger.

Doppelgangers are fitting tropes for Gothic Horror, which are all about the potential for evil and monstrousness lurking within the human mind. While not monstrous in the same physical way as a vampire or werewolf, a Doppelganger raises questions about one's own identity and what other paths we might take. It can also veer into a kind of Cosmic Horror - one of the core elements of our own identities is that we are unique individuals. But if we were faced with our exact double, might we begin to question just how unique we really are?

As a trope, the Doppelganger almost certainly predates the German word we use for it, but in English parlance, rather than the specific D&D monster, a Doppelganger is just someone's double (I think the German word literally means "double-walker"). Naturally, given how many human beings there are, and the fact that we're all actually very similar genetically, it's natural that some people coincidentally happen to look like one another.

But we're also deeply keyed into distinguishing between human faces. Even, say, a pair of brothers that look very much alike will be trivial to distinguish for those who are familiar with them.

I think there's probably some kind of weird wire-crossing when we encounter someone who looks similar enough to someone else that we genuinely mistake them for the person. It's an uncanny moment, especially when we start to realize that it's not the person we thought it was, and all of the distinctions in their appearance are taken not as what they are - which is just the normal distinguishing features - and more something being just kind of wrong.

Humans are social animals, and social bonds rely on familiarity and trust. When I come home and see my roommates, their familiar appearance is a reassurance that I know who they are, and can expect that their behavior will continue to be safe and friendly to me.

And that's what makes Doppelgangers, the monsters, so potentially unsettling.

Here's the thing: D&D is a game built originally around delving into dark and dangerous dungeons, where you might find a bunch of zombies or a golem or a demon in some room.

I don't think you should ever waste Doppelgangers as dungeon fodder. Statistically, they don't really do much interesting in combat.

Instead, we need to build the use of these creatures from the ground up to make a reveal particularly interesting.

As we said before, social bonds rely on familiarity and trust. The Doppelganger monster is built to simulate that. Naturally, its most notable feature is that it's a shape-shifter, but it goes farther than that: it can also cast Detect Thoughts without any spell components (meaning that you won't know they're casting a spell unless you're reading their thoughts - or perhaps using something like Detect Magic while observing them). Even if they push deeper into your minds and you realize you're being read, the lack of spell components means that you might not know that it's actually them doing it.

The function, of course, of this Detect Thoughts ability (or Read Thoughts, which is the ability that lets them cast the spell this way) is that they can potentially fool someone even if they use common-sense techniques to foil an imposter: the old "get them to reminisce about something in the past that never happened" trick won't work if they can tell that you're thinking about the fact that it's a false story.

Now, Doppelgangers are not inherently evil, and are given the Neutral alignment in the new MM (which also serves as the "any alignment" tag). Still, it's very easy to imagine them as terrifying monsters. They are not humanoids, but monstrosities (interestingly, the "playable version," the Changeling, is now considered Fey) and while that doesn't rule them out being relatable characters (Thri-kreen, who are now consistently classified as monstrosities, are also a playable species) it also gives you, as DM, license to make them deeply strange and alien. Indeed, their natural appearance as illustrated in the 2025 Monster Manual is very much "alien," as in the sort of "Greys" trope, lacking even a nose and mouth, so that they look like they could come out of a flying saucer and pull an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of plot.

I do think that the kind of campaign you'd want to use this in would be one that involves familiarity. A lot of the campaigns I've played in have been a bit more about traversing a wide world, moving on from location to location without really returning anywhere. A campaign of this sort can still use Doppelgangers, but I think if you really want to get your bang for your buck, a campaign in which the party forms relationships with recurring NPCs who can then be replaced by them is going to probably be more effective.

Doppelgangers have proficiency in Insight and expertise in Deception, and with their Read Thoughts, they can generally pick up enough of their impersonation target's overall vibe to make a convincing double. But at only CR 3, that means those bonuses are not going to fool every player character who doesn't have expertise in Insight.

And here, I think, largely giving advice to myself, I should point out that a Doppelganger's discovery is the fun moment for these monsters. When their deceptions are found out, that's when the shit hits the fan, and we get an exciting encounter - even a combat encounter, in which the Doppelanger is likely to try to just get away and hide. If they're there specifically to kill a PC, they'll do whatever they can to avoid detection until the character can be isolated.

In terms of balancing such an encounter, I'd say you want it to feel harrowing - it should be a bit too difficult for a single character to take on a Doppelganger (otherwise why would they be the one sent to take you down?) The character would have to get back to their party to feel safe, and that's when you either have the Doppelganger slink off into the crowds and let them go - leaving them a constant paranoid threat for the party - or, if you want to fully pop off, you have a whole bunch of Doppelgangers working together to spring on the party at the same time.

I do think, though, that the entire monster is built around the dawning realization that the person you're talking to is not the person you think they are. The most flagrant way you could do this is by having a character discover the real person's dead body, but another likely scenario based on game mechanics is just if the PC succeeds on their saving throw against Detect Thoughts. Even if, as we said, there's no obvious indication that the Doppelganger cast the spell, your player is going to be on the lookout once they're asked to make a Wisdom saving throw (though remember that if the Doppelganger doesn't delve deep and only gets surface details - a distinction that isn't super-clearly defined - there's no saving throw to make).

I would say, as a DM, to couch the language about the saving throw in a way that doesn't make it to obvious - "you get this strange spike of paranoia, feeling as if someone is watching you."

It is tough, of course, to avoid metagaming when you fail a saving throw against something like this or like Scrying, so you might also want a clever Doppelganger to set themselves up in a situation where there is plausible deniability - maybe they probe someone's thoughts when the target is speaking with someone else, making the PC suspect the person they're currently talking to and not the random bar patron ten feet away.

Still, again, remember that these monsters become fun when the jig is up - and really savor that moment. You want to go through different steps - first, the general sense of offness, then describe the disguised Doppelganger's previous methods of seeming likable and trustworthy now laid bare as a malevolent artifice, the too-broad smile, the unblinking eye contact. It's that moment where now the PC knows something that the Doppelganger doesn't - which is that they know they're a Doppelganger (or at least know that they're not who they say they are.) And now, the tension becomes whether the PC can play it as if they don't yet know, and if the Doppelganger clocks that they've been made.

What will they do? Will they try to kill the PC to maintain their ruse? Will they dart and hide to take on a new identity so they can continue whatever plot they were in the middle of?

Even when the monster is defeated, the very existence of such a creature should leave players with a lingering sense of paranoia. Ideally, long after you're done using them as monsters (and with only a single CR 3 stat block, you're probably not going to be using them throughout a campaign - I'd have loved to get a CR 7 or 8 "Doppelganger Assassin" stat block) the party will feel a bit uneasy with everyone they meet.

Stats for the Darklords

 As it periodically does, my mind drifts back to Ravenloft, D&D's horror-themed setting. It's one of, if not the most unique setting for the game (the only other I can think that competes is Planescape). The setting is also built with a kind of inherent object in mind - how do you escape your current domain? While it's truly the DM's call whether you can escape the setting as a whole, as escaping one domain might just deposit you in another, there's actually a pretty solid mechanical hook here: each domain is ruled over by a Darklord, and by will alone, that individual can close off the borders of the domain, preventing anyone from escaping.

Thus, a confrontation with a domain's Darklord is the most obvious objective - if you kill them, you have a brief window to escape before they come back. Now, you need not kill them to accomplish this - Darklords are evil, but they aren't inevitably antagonistic. A Darklord might agree to open the borders of their domain if the party does something for them, and depending on the campaign or adventure, the borders might not be closed in the first place.

Darklords are, classically, powerful monsters of some sort - the most famous, of course, is Strahd von Zarovich, who is canonically the first vampire in the D&D multiverse, and also the first Darklord within the Mists. There's also Azalin the Lich, whose current status is a little mysterious (though Van Richten's has some pretty clear clues hiding in plain sight as to where he's at now).

But not all of them are such powerful beings. In fact, a fair number of them are downright weak. Van Richten's presents its Darklords as having statistics "similar to" various stat blocks in the monster manual, except in the rare cases where the monster is in Van Richten's itself (which, to my memory, might only be Harkon Lukas, who is a Loup-Garou, which is an extra-powerful werewolf - Loup-Garou is actually just the French name for werewolf).

That presents us with an interesting challenge as DMs. Some Darklords are particularly low-CR, like Ivan Dilisnya, who is a Noble - a CR 1/8 creature that would be cannon fodder even for a 1st level character.

Now, in terms of realism, this kind of makes sense, actually - these stat blocks are meant to represent real people, and as Brennan Lee Mulligan so eloquently stated in Fantasy High Sophomore Year, it turns out that for most people, if you stab them with a sword, they die. Adventurers are notable both for their ability to slay dangerous monsters and also their ability to endure the attacks of such creatures.

Now, each of these is technically a suggestion of a stat block, rather than giving you a specific one. The stat blocks for Srahd in both Curse of Strahd and Vecna: Eve of Ruin are not quite the same as the Monster Manual's Vampire stats, but Van Richten's presents this as the most obvious one to use (and given that Strahd is D&D's quintessential vampire, we can largely treat that one as a totally appropriate stat block for him - especially the 2024 one).

2024's Monster Manual also gave us many more high-level humanoid NPC stat blocks - while Ivana Boritsi, the co-Darklord of Borca with Ivan, uses a Spy stat block, we could imagine using a Spy Master (or Assassin, frankly) stat block instead.

But I do think we need to really consider how to play these characters if they are just those low-CR stat blocks.

First off, if we're expecting to largely have social rather than combat encounters with them, their HP isn't much of a concern. And while they might have poor, say, Insight or Perception bonuses, this might actually just mean the players have the ability to talk around them or more easily pickpocket them.

In other words, don't exclusively build adventures around Darklords that require them to be all that challenging. It's all right for the players to get one over on them. Because the one thing Darklords will never run out of is time - their domains always revert to the way they were, and the Darklords have time for vengeance.

Social encounters are, of course, also something that DMs have a lot of leeway to interpret and run as they will. If players choose a particular tack that isn't logical, no Persuasion or Deception or Intimidation check is going to force the Darklord to act the way that they want.

Now, what about keeping the party trapped? If you want to ensure that there is a challenge in getting out of a Domain, but the players understand that killing a Darklord allows for this, what might you do?

Well, the first is that Ravenloft works on nightmare logic - did you really kill the Darklord? And did their death actually cause the Mists to open? One of the classic tropes of horror movies (especially slashers) is when the villain seems to be dead, but isn't.

Another thing to do is just to make it hard to get to the Darklord. Viktra Mordenheim, the sort of Frankenstein equivalent, is of course famous for her creation of Flesh Golems. Yes, a CR 1 Spy is not too tough for any party, but you surround her with an army of constructs (maybe re-skinning other types of golems as Flesh golems) and now you've got a real challenge.

Finally, if you really want to build to a big boss fight, there's always the possibility of a transformation. It might be that if you slay the Darklord in their default form, like Mother Lorinda, who is a Green Hag, maybe she comes back as something far, far deadlier (the Arch-Hag from the new Monster Manual would be a profoundly terrifying jump in power). Naturally, some Darklords are already quite scary, legendary monsters in their own right - Strahd being a Vampire (I could also see him being a Vampire Umbral Lord) and Anktepot as a Mummy Lord.

One thing to seriously consider is whether the player characters actually know who the Darklord is. Meta-knowledge here can be a bit of a problem, and even just general knowledge of how Ravenloft as a setting works, so a player might be able to tell that if the people of a Domain are always seemingly talking about this one individual, there's a good chance that they're the Darklord. That said, there can be red herrings - Lamordia (which is probably my favorite domain - I guess I'm just that into the whole steampunk aesthetic, even if I don't think I could name you an actual piece of media that is within that genre that I really care that much about) has as its Darklord the aforementioned Viktra Mordenheim, but the domain's legal ruler is Baron Aubrecker, a sometime rival, sometime collaborator with Mordenheim.

Indeed, Kartakas is a domain in which the anonymity of the Darklord, Harkon Lukas, is actually central to his torment - an artist and performer who is perpetually washed up, only able to shepherd others toward fame and fortune. Lukas is kind of an ideal Darklord to seem friendly and kind at first, but the lurking wolf within eventually makes itself known.

The Shadowfell, and especially Ravenloft, is very much about stagnation, which means that merely killing a Darklord isn't going to ever end their reign of terror. They always come back, and the world and the minds of its people conspire to paint over any inconsistencies.

Notably, Barovia plays the entire setting of Curse of Strahd and the location of one of the chapters in Vecna: Eve of Ruin, but there are full-on continuity errors - or, not errors, but intentional inconsistencies. In Curse of Strahd, the default level 1-3 intro adventure in The Death House (which is sort of a domain-within-a-domain in the village of Barovia) has you meet the ghosts of children named Rose and Thorn. When you arrive at the Death House in Eve of Ruin, Rose and Thorn are living children. That's very much intentional.

One reason to not take these suggested stat blocks so literally is that the Darklords themselves are probably inconsistent. For Jacqueline Renier, the Darklord of Richemulot (a domain that goes through cycles of plague that go from people dying of illness to maddened fever-dreams - possibly inspired by Werner Herzog's 1970s remake of Nosferatu) the obvious stat block for her is a wererat, it's all really about whatever stat block feels appropriate in the moment.

There are a number of cool monsters in Van Richten's that aren't explicitly used as any Darklord, but could be a form that they take at one time or another (I love the Relentless Killers, who are meant to embody 1980s slasher villains like Jason Vorhees or Michael Myers). Like Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola's version, even the quintessential vampire could take on many different forms (they do call him "The Devil Strahd," and so maybe he takes on the form of a Pit Lord at some point!)

The Spectacular World of Smites

 The 2024 Paladin got a lot of changes, and it's the one class that I think you could argue got nerfed by the update to the PHB (the Ranger might have not been buffed as much as we wanted it to be, but I still think it's more powerful than before).

Two things, I think, could be counted as nerfs.

The first is less important - Divine Sense becoming a use of Channel Divinity, rather than its own resource, means that it will be competing with things like Oath of Enmity or Sacred Weapon (both of which got nice buffs).

But I think the change that is going to get most people to seriously hesitate on updating to the 2024 version of the class is that to Divine Smite.

No longer merely a class feature, Divine Smite is a spell that A: has components (including Verbal, so you can't cast it while silenced) and B: takes a bonus action to cast. While the bonus action still happens after you hit a target, thus ensuring that the damage is never wasted, and that you can hold off until you land a critical hit, it does cause a couple other issues: you can't cast it multiple times per turn, or if you hit a target as a reaction such as via an opportunity attack. It'll also shut down other bonus actions, such a the new Lay on Hands, and will prevent you from casting other leveled spells (though given that you probably need to use your action to attack, it was unlikely you'd be able to do that anyway). Also, Barbarian/Paladin multiclass builds are probably dead, because you can no longer Divine Smite while Raging.

That being said, I think I understand the design intent here - Paladins have, through most of 5E, treated spell slots as little more than "Smite Slots," and while that works pretty well, there's a whole world of spellcasting that Paladin players tend to ignore because of this.

However, there's another compensation we get here: all the other "Smite" spells now work the same way.

While previously, something like Thunderous Smite or Searing Smite required you to cast it as a bonus action and then hope you got a hit in before you lost concentration on it or the enemies all died, now no smite will be "wasted" because you only choose to smite after you hit.

Now, some still involve various saving throws for their additional effects, so you can still get a suboptimal result from a Smite, but the damage itself will be there.

Let's look at the various Smite Spells, of which the PHB has eight.

Divine Smite:

Our classic, we actually get one free casting of this per day, which, interestingly, also means that because we're not spending a spell slot to cast it, we can cast another spell along with it - though given that we have to attack with a weapon or unarmed strike, I don't know that there are a lot of other leveled spells we could mix with it. Divine Smite, of course, is particularly good against Undead and Fiends, but given that its sole purpose is damage, it's the baseline against which we'll compare the other smites. At 1st level, this deals 2d8 radiant damage, and then 1d8 for every spell slot beyond 1st (there's no longer any restriction on spell level, so in theory if we multiclassed as, say, a Sorcerer, we could potentially cast a 9th level Divine Smite one day (in fact, a Paladin6/Sorcerer14 would just barely hit 9th level spells at level 20). There's an extra d8 against fiends and undead, which will for sure change the math. Just so we have it for the record, against most foes, it's an average of 9 damage at 1st level, then 13.5 at 2nd, 18 at 3rd, 22.5 at 4th, and 27 at 5th level.

Searing Smite:

Searing Smite is actually also a damage-focused smite, and you might be surprised that it actually might outdo Divine Smite once you start upcasting it. At 1st level, it deals 1d6 fire damage when it hits, but then the target burns until they succeed on a Con save. They take the burning damage before they make this saving throw, so they're guaranteed to burn at least once. At 1st level, of course, this is only 7 damage. But the scaling of this spell increases both the initial damage and the burn. On average, you'll not do more damage with that initial burst than Divine Smite, but even if they succeed on their first save, they start taking more damage once you upcast the spell, and of course if they fail their save, they keep taking damage. When a foe succeeds on the first saving throw, our 1st level damage is 7, our 2nd level is 14, our 3rd level is 21, at 4th level we're at 28, and at 5th level we're looking at 35, all with the potential to do more if they fail those saves. It is fire damage, to be fair, which is resisted far more often, but it's still quite good, and the damage is coming in at the start of their turns, so while a boss might get some more legendary actions in there, for most enemies it won't matter that the damage isn't instant. The one place this becomes somewhat less advantageous is on a critical hit - the periodic damage won't be affected, so a Divine Smite might wind up doing more damage from a crit.

Thunderous Smite:

This one's a little more straightforward. It does 2d6 thunder damage when you hit with it, which is slightly less damage than Divine Smite, though Thunder is a damage type very few things resist. The target then gets a Strength save, and on a failure, they're both knocked back 10 feet and knocked prone. The ability to save against this of course reduces the effect's value, but given that you're only paying 2 average damage to have a chance at that means this is going to be worth it quite often. And there's no size restriction on this. Damage scaling here adds 1d6 for each spell level above 1st, so in terms of damage, you're going to be falling behind Divine Smite, but again, not by a ton.

Wrathful Smite:

Damage-wise, this is the weakest of the 1st level Smites, doing only 1d6 Psychic damage. The target then makes a Wisdom save or becomes frightened of you for 1 minute, though it can repeat the save at the end of its turns to end the effect. It also scales up by 1d6 for each spell level beyond 1, but this is a smite you really are using more for the fear than the damage (though psychic is also not resisted by lots of monsters). Frightened is a pretty useful debuff, especially to help protect yourself and your allies. And, like Searing Smite, there's no concentration here, so you could potentially get a lot out of this if you tag a foe early on in a fight.

Shining Smite:

A 2nd-level smite, in terms of damage we need to compare it to Divine Smite's 13.5 average damage when at 2nd level. Shining Smite is significantly less, doing only 2d6 (comparable to a 1st level Thunderous or Searing Smite). However, the smite applies a debuff to the target, causing it to glow and be unable to go invisible, and giving attacks on it disadvantage. This spell, unlike all previous ones, is a concentration spell. The advantage is the biggest reason to pack this, but if you're a Vengeance Paladin with Oath of Enmity, that might not be as appealing. Probably a niche thing - take it if you're expecting to fight sneaky or invisible enemies. The advantage is great, of course, but we can get something like that with Thunderous Smite in most cases.

Blinding Smie:

Our natively-3rd-level Smite, Blinding Smite does 3d8 when our Divine Smite is doing 4d8, scaling at the same rate. So, what do we get for our d8 of damage? Well, our target must make a Con save or become Blinded for a minute, getting to repeat the saving throw on the end of each of its turns. Blinded is a pretty fantastic condition, but a lot of foes will save out of this, as there are very few monsters that don't at least have some positive modifier to Con saves (and there are monsters with Blindsight). That said, if we do blind them, we're getting part of the effects of both Shining and Wrathful Smite, imposing disadvantage on their attacks and giving us and our friends advantage on attacks against them. Once again, this doesn't require concentration, so if you can get it off early on in a fight, with luck this can be a huge gamechanger.

Staggering Smite:

Our 4th level Smite (meaning we're well into tier 3 at this stage,) Staggering Smite's effect isn't quite as long-lasting as others, but if the target fails a Wisdom save, they are Stunned until the end of our next turn. Robbing a creature of its turn, more or less (though remember that stunned creatures can now move!) is a pretty big deal, and targeting Wisdom instead of Con (like a Monk's Stunning Strike) is going to be slightly more reliable. The damage here isn't nothing, but it's way behind our more damage-oriented options, dealing 4d6 (14 average) compared with our Divine Smite's 22.5 at this level.

Banishing Smite:

The sole 5th level smite, this one's a bit different. Dealing 5d10 Force damage, that's an average of 27.5, which means that this just flat-out out-damages Divine Smite on average, except against a Fiend or Undead. Searing Smite will do more at this level, but this is also a spell that can potentially take a major enemy out of the fight for a minute. While it can't permanently banish a creature like the Banishment spell, taking one of the big bruisers out of a fight can be very good. Now, there's a catch - the target has to be below 50 HP (after taking the damage of the attack and the smite) and also gets a Charisma saving throw to resist it. Now, luckily, a lot of creatures have crap Charisma, though most of those are big brutes with a lot of hit points. In other words, this is not a spell you start the fight off with. The trick here is that you're going to ideally hit someone for whom a weapon attack and this Banishing Smite puts them just under 50. 50 damage isn't nothing, but it's starting to be pretty marginal by the time we're talking tier 4 damage (a GWM Paladin at this level is probably hitting for 2d6+11 with each hit). However, if we consider the banishing effect to be just gravy on top of the damage, this is a pretty nasty spell to throw down, and on a crit, when it's doing 10d10 (or 55 average damage,) it's probably going to be worth doing anyway (and also more likely to put them in banishing range with that amount of damage).

    So, what's the conclusion to take here?

I suppose the proper internet way of doing things is to rank them.

Divine Smite is moot because we get this prepared automatically regardless of subclass. This is going to be our go-to option for critical strikes at least until we're level 17, and is also going to be our best damage option against Undead and Fiends until we've got 4th level spells (and even still using it when facing fire-resistant or -immune foes, which is actually most fiends and certainly incorporeal undead). Almost never bad, this gets an A.

Searing Smite should be a serious consideration for damage, especially once we hit tier 2 and half second-level spells. Against creatures that take full fire damage, and when we aren't critting, this is going to actually have our highest damage potential even if our foes cannot fail a Con save. If they do fail one (and depending on how many rounds they last,) we can get even better returns on it. It is still only damage, though. Even if the target dies before it takes its burn damage, the extra damage of a Divine Smite would have been just as wasted, so this also gets an A.

Thunderous Smite does nearly as much damage as these other two, but with an added bit of utility. Strength saves vary widely between monsters, so if you can hit a more spellcaster-style enemy with this one, it's likely to be effective. If you have a Push mastery weapon as well, you might be able to really knock an enemy far back. In an arena with hazards and high precipices, this is going to be insanely good, but even in a "flat field" battlefield, this is quite strong. Damn, I guess we get another A.

Wrathful Smite is, situationally, a spell that could save your bacon. If it frightens the target, that's awesome, and can help keep you and your allies safe. The damage, though, does fall behind significantly, and I think that makes this a more situational spell, so I'm giving it a B.

Shining Smite, again, is very situational, but I think that we're talking about a situation that is far rarer than needing to move things around the battlefield. The advantage is nice, but there are so many ways to get advantage against a target now (such as knocking them prone with Thunderous Smite or just the Topple mastery). I was going to rate this a C, though the fact that there's no save against it is actually pretty good. That said, it's also Concentration, so there is a way for them to break out of it, so yeah, we'll take this down to a C again.

Blinding Smite is pretty strong - essentially a "downcast" Divine Smite, but with the potential to put a pretty strong debuff on the target is not bad (especially good against a spellcaster with spells that require them to see their targets). What keeps this form being A-ranked is that it's a Con save to avoid being blinded, which means there's a strong chance that the foe will save against it. But the relatively low damage cost compared to Divine Smite and the high reward if it does go off brings it to a solid B, even B+.

Staggering Smite has you pay a fairly high cost in damage, and its effect is short-lived. On the other hand, more or less stealing a turn from a foe is a big deal - this is going to almost certainly force bosses to burn a legendary resistance if they fail. And targeting a Wisdom save is more reliable than targeting a Con save, though I would put that as one of the more commonly-high saving throws. It's a real gamble, as you're never going to have a ton of spell slots to cast something like this. I'll admit here that I'm doubting by own ranking ability, but I think we're looking at a B.

Banishing Smite should be your choice of smite over Divine Smite even if you're only going for damage, with the only possible exceptions of A: you're fighting undead or fiends or B: you need your concentration for some other spell. Even if you don't get the whole banishing effect here, it's just more damage than your Divine Smite, and so outside of those situations, 100% you should cast this if you crit unless you're very sure that the target is going to die to normal weapon damage anyway (or if you think a lower-level Divine or Searing Smite will be enough to take them down). The banishment can just be icing on top of the cake if you happen to get them under 50. So, that's A-tier.

One of the frustrating things about the new rulebooks is that it's just not that often I get to play new characters. I really want to rebuild my characters from campaigns past (apart from struggling to hit 20 Strength thanks to the ability scores associated with the Sage background, my Dragonborn Eldritch Knight Fighter would be downright beastly with all the changes) and I really want to try all sorts of new builds (top priority is an Elements Monk, which I never thought I'd even remotely consider given how crap the old version of that subclass was - but if I read things right, an Elements Monk can potentially grapple a target and hold them far enough away that the target can't actually strike back against them).

One of my favorite characters I played was an Aasimar Vengeance Paladin in Curse of Strahd, built around Great Weapon Master (and rocking the +2 Greatsword I got off of the leader of the revenants in the ruined castle of Argynvostholt). While that seems like a campaign that is very unlikely to ever pick up again, I still really like the idea of playing that character again (originally conceived as a man, I gender-flipped them for the campaign, but might play "Atrus" once again instead of "Atria" if I have the opportunity. Also, damn to I love Ravenloft as a setting).

Fixing Blight

 Blight is a 4th level Necromancy spell available to Druids, Sorcerers, Warlocks, and Wizards. The spell is a single-target burst of necrotic damage that plant creatures (like a Shambling Mound or Treant) automatically fail against, and which will automatically kill nonmagical plants.

It's also deceptively bad.

Spellcasters, with the exception of the Warlock, are generally built to be not as good at single-target damage-dealing than martial classes. A Fighter or Barbarian is meant to be more effective in such situations, because spellcasters can A: have a lot of utility to shape the battlefield in their favor and B: have lots of options for dealing damage to groups of enemies.

Still, there are single-target damage spells. At higher levels, Disintegrate and Finger of Death pour out boatloads of damage - those 6th and 7th level spell slots remain precious resources even at level 20, but these spells, when the saving throw is failed, do 75 and 61.5 damage, respectively (why does the 7th level spell do less than the 6th level one? Because Finger of Death still does half damage on a successful save while Disintegrate is fully wasted if they dodge it).

If we compare the damage of these spells to AoE spells of the same level, Circle of Death and Otiluke's Freezing Sphere both do roughly 35 damage (Circle of Death does 36 on average,) so Disintegrate is going to be twice as effective against a single target. We could compare Finger of Death to Firestorm, the latter of which does 38.5 average damage, or Delayed Blast Fireball, which does vary in power, but if triggered immediately does 12d6 (which to be fair is the same as a 7th level Fireball) or a max of 22d6 (though how often are you going to let it cook for a full minute?) - so minimum average is 42.

Thus, to really get our bang for our buck, these AoE spells ought to hit two or ideally three or more targets to match the power of our single-target spells.

Going back down to Blight, though, the damage is 8d8, or an average of 36 (actually it's the same as Circle of Death). That's not an insignificant chunk of damage, but it's not much more than AoE spells we can get at this level. Just Fireball is 8d6, and when upcast to 4th level, that's 9d6, or 31.5 damage, which is not that far behind but potentially hitting several targets.

Now, is that fair, given that Fireball is intentionally overpowered to maintain its iconic status? (It probably could be 6d6 and still be a perfectly good but probably more balanced spell.) I suppose we could compare this with Ice Storm, a natively 4th level spell, which does 2d10+4d6 damage (a mix of bludgeoning and cold,) coming out to an average of 25.

The question, I think, is what ratio our AoE spells should have versus our single-target spells. In the case of Disintegrate versus Circle of Death, it's a little over twice the damage - though Disintegrate's "save for none" does effectively lower its overall damage-per-casting. Finger of Death, then, might be our better model, as most leveled spells are save-for-half. In this case, then, our average damage of 61.5 is roughly 1.6 times as much damage as Firestorm (or around 1.4 or 1.5 times Delayed Blast Fireball except in extreme cases).

Our ratio for Blight is actually pretty comparable to Ice Storm (though Ice Storm also creates difficult terrain) but is only about 1.1 times the damage of a 4th-level Fireball. It also targets Constitution, a saving throw that basically no creature has a negative to, and almost all have a positive modifier for.

So, what could we do to make this a more appealing spell? What could make this a fun spell to cast on a scary boss monster?

One thing I really like about both Disintegrate and Finger of Death is the solid chunk of guaranteed damage. If you had profoundly terrible luck (and in fairness, it would be a 1-in-16,777,216 chance) you could theoretically do only 8 damage with a Blight. But a Finger of Death, on a failed save, does at least 37 damage because it's not all die rolls, instead being 7d8+30.

I like this "flattening" of the damage. You could achieve similar damage to Finger of Death by rolling something like 18d6 (which gets you to 63,) but not only is that a lot of dice to roll, it also creates a lot of swinginess. That version could do anything from 18 damage to 108. The current version does 37-86.

It seems like this could be a general model for single-target spells.

So, then, how much damage should our new Blight do?

Well, we want to make AoE spells worth it, and the way things are currently balanced, it looks like this should be optimal as soon as there's a second target. So we want Blight to be less than twice the damage of a comparable-level AoE spell.

If Ice Storm does an average of 25 damage, and a 4th-level Fireball does 31.5, I think 50 seems like a reasonable target for our ideal damage (and this for sure is a buff). Now, how do we achieve that?

We need to pick what our flat damage should be - Finger of Death adds 30, while Disintegrate adds 40. I think we could go with 10 or 20, but I'm leaning more toward the later.

So, with 20 flat damage, we then want to do somewhere around 30 (maybe skewing lower) damage with dice. Given that the spell historically has used d8s, let's continue to use those. 6d8 does an average damage of 27, so this looks pretty good to me.

Thus, to make this spell feel really good, I think rather than 8d8, it should be doing 6d8+20.

Will this be utterly nasty against Plants? You betcha. But Plants are also one of the smallest creature categories in the game.

Naturally, some playtesting is required. 47 damage is a lot to be able to put out in a single spell at level 7, but I don't think it's completely outside the realm of reason.

Nitty Gritty: When a Warrior of Elements Monk Should Use Elemental Burst

 The Warrior of Elements monk subclass is the 2024 update for the Way of Four Elements, but the folks making D&D clearly recognized that the old one was just not... good. It was bad. It effectively gave a way to spend precious Ki points on spell-like effects that were quite underpowered.

The new version... I like, but I don't know whether it's truly powerful powerful or just decent. I'm skeptical of the need to spend a focus point to go into Elemental Attunement, but unlike, say, the Astral Self monk, you still have some things you can do when you aren't in your "activated mode," and the cost is far lower (especially since Focus Points are easier to recover now).

But this is getting real narrow in focus - we're going to talk specifically about the 6th level feature for the subclass, which is Elemental Burst.

As an action, you can expend 2 Focus Points to send a fireball-sized (and with the same range, I believe) explosion of elemental damage. Creatures inside make a Dexterity saving throw, taking damage equal to three rolls of your Martial Arts die on a failure or half as much on a success.

Now, while Focus Points are a precious resource still, they're a little easier to throw around. What my question asks is this: when is it optimal to use this feature?

That is actually two questions, though. One concerns action economy, and one concerns Focus Point efficiency.

If we assume no magic items (though I hope a DM would find an opportunity to give their Monk some Wraps of Unarmed Power,) and we assume that the Monk started with a 17 in Dexterity and a 16 in Wisdom (the latter being open for debate,) and taking a feat at level 4 that bumps that Dex up to 18, we're looking at a +7 to hit and a saving throw DC of 14 at level 6.

At level 6, our Martial Arts die is a d8, so each attack assuming these stats has a +7 to hit and deals 1d8+4 damage. This feature deals 3d8 damage.

We can assume that our most efficient use of Focus Points in a single-target situation is Flurry of Blows (yes, there's Stunning Strike as well, but I'm going to set that aside for now).

We also have to make certain assumptions about enemies' ACs and their Dex saving throw modifiers. For that, I'm going to (perhaps arbitrarily) assume we're fighting things at this level with an AC of 15 and a +2 to Dex saves.

In order to determine when it's optimal to use this feature, we need to compare it to the alternative. What we want to know is how many creatures we need to be able to hit for this feature to be worth it. Thus, we find out the average damage against a single target and then the average damage of our alternative (Attack action in one case and Flurry of Blows in the other,) and see what we need to multiply the Elemental Burst damage by to make it better than its alternative.

Action Economy Efficiency:

Normally, our action will be two melee attacks. In most cases, by this level, we can just use our unarmed strikes for damage, as our hardest-hitting weapons do a d8 at most.

With a +7 to hit and attacking monsters with a 15 AC, we need to roll an 8 or higher to hit, meaning we've got a 65% hit chance. We do 8.5 average damage on a hit, and we add 4.5 damage on a crit. Thus, our damage per attack is:

8.5x65%+4.5x5%, or 5.525 + .225, which comes out to 5.75 average damage per attack.

Then, we make two attacks with our action, so this becomes 11.5 damage per Attack Action.

Our Elemental Burst does 3d8 damage, or 13.5 damage on average, but on a successful save, we only do half of that, or 6.75 damage. If our enemies have a +2 to Dex saves, they need to roll a 12 or higher to save, meaning that we're looking at a 55% chance to fail and a 45% chance to succeed. Thus, we take 13.5x55%+6.75x45%, or 7.425 + 3.0375, which comes to 10.4625 damage against a single target on average.

That's actually pretty damn close. We might have underestimated what kind of Dex saves our foes will have, but even if that damage were significantly lower, it would be optimal (in terms of action economy) to drop one of these on just two foes - and quite a bit better, in fact, than attacking a single one.

Now, what about as our martial arts die goes up?

Well, I suspect that Elemental Burst gets slightly better - by this point, without magic items, our Dex modifier will only go up once more (at least until we get our level 20 capstone). Then, essentially, as our martial arts die goes up, the dice we roll for each attack both go up (adding two average raw damage at level 11 and then again at level 17) while all three for Elemental Burst go up at the same levels (adding 3 average damage at level 11 and again at level 17).

But let's consider the other thing:

Focus Point Efficiency:

Flurry of Blows effectively adds one more attack for us to do each turn, but it's also half the cost of our Elemental Burst.

In other words, if we look at the average damage we get for a single Focus Point from Flurry of Blows, it's essentially that same 5.75 damage we calculated earlier for a single attack. If we halve the damage of the Elemental Burst to represent its "damage per Focus Point," we find that it's the same exact ratio as what we had before - Elemental Burst comes close to doing the same damage per FP, but not quite, and so as soon as we have a second thing to hit with it, it becomes more efficient.

But: what about at level 10?

At level 10, our Flurry of Blows now lets us do three unarmed strikes over the free single attack, rather than two. That means that each Focus Point is granting us two additional attacks.

If we made some assumptions about things being proportionately similar damage, we might say that you then need to be hitting four creatures. But let's look at some new assumptions:

Let's say at this point that we're fighting things with higher ACs and maybe higher Dex save modifiers.

We'll say we're fighting things with ACs of 17, and they've got +4s to Dex saves.

We'll say we took an ASI at level 8, so we're now at 20 Dex, but still at 16 Wis. Our PB has gone up to 4 now. So, we have a +9 to hit, and our saving throw DC is 15.

Now, at level 10, our martial arts die is still a d8, but only for this level. So, just for the hell of it, let's look at level 11 instead, at which point we'll have d10s.

Attacking with Flurry of Blows, our Focus Point buys us two additional attacks, each of which deals 1d10+5, or 11.5 damage on average, adding 5.5 on a crit.

With a +9 to hit and against an AC of 17, we're going to hit on a roll of 8 or higher, which is actually the same hit chance we had before (I hadn't intended that consciously, but here we are).

So, per attack, we're going to do 11.5x65% plus 5.5x5%, giving us 7.475 + .275, which comes out to 7.75 damage per attack.

However, because we're getting two of these per Focus Point spent, we're going to double it to 15.5.

Our Elemental Burst is now doing 3d10, which is an average of 16.5 damage on a failed save, and half that, or 8.25, on a success. Our monsters are now going to save on a roll of 11 or higher, meaning a 50% fail/success chance. Thus, we essentially take the average of the two, or 4.125 plus 8.25, giving us an average damage of 12.375 damage against a single target.

However, because we're spending 2 focus points for our elemental burst, we once again have to halve this damage to represent its damage "per focus point spent," meaning it's 6.1875.

Thus, simply hitting two targets with this won't be as efficient a use of your focus points as using Flurry of Blows. But if you can get a third target in there, it's actually going to wind up doing more damage overall.

    Caveats:

This is all very abstract. For one thing, we're making big assumptions about AC and dex save bonuses that might not bear out. One of the benefits of Elemental Burst is that it does guaranteed damage, whereas you could totally whiff on a Flurry of Blows or Attack Action.

The other big consideration is what requires damage here and now. The benefit of AoE damage is the way you multiply the damage across each target. But as powerful as that is, focus-fire can often be a more important consideration in a fight - the sooner you take down one monster, the less damage your party will wind up taking overall. And sometimes, you'll want to prioritize certain monsters. Maybe there's a powerful "controller"-type monster that can stun or charm or otherwise take one of your allies out of the fight. That monster probably needs to go down quickly, while the minions that make a couple melee attacks can be worried about later.

These sorts of calculations always kind of make an assumption that what's most important is the amount of damage you can put out, rather than how much damage you actually need. Consider Disintegrate versus Finger of Death. The former does more damage (75 on average versus 61.5) but if a monster dodges your Disintegrate, you get nothing for that 6th level spell, whereas a monster who saves against Finger of Death is still going to probably take about 30 damage. If your foe is sitting at 50 HP, it's probably going to die on a failed save to either spell.

At its maximum, Elemental Burst is going to do 3d12 damage, or 19.5 on average. At level 17 and higher, it's unlikely that that alone will take out even the weakest minions (unless your DM is a masochist who wants to roll attacks for the 90 zombies or skeletons that would be required to challenge just one 17th level character, according to the DMG's encounter-building guidance,) but on the other hand, you could soften up a big group that might then take the Sorcerer's Fireballs and the Paladin's Destructive Waves. If it means that the Fighter or Barbarian, or you, the Monk, only need three attacks instead of five to take down one of these minions, you're potentially speeding up the fight a lot.

But yeah, anyway, I think generally speaking you can use this on two or more monsters, and then maybe wait to be able to hit three after you get to level 10.

Why I'm Considering Going Back to XP Leveling in My D&D Campaigns

 I've been running my Ravnica game for five years now, which is honestly crazy. We had two home games before the Covid pandemic forced us to go remote, and while vaccines have allowed us to play in-person again, this game has remained primarily online just because I've got people living all over LA County (and one player in Orange County).

At this point, the party has spent over a year at level 17 - in fact, they hit 17 right at the end of 2023. Now, in terms of plot points and story, this has been justified. But it has been a minute since they powered up.

At this point, we're really only a couple sessions away from finishing the current arc and having them all hit level 18 (if it's one combat encounter per session, we're talking four-ish) but I, frankly, am feeling a bit guilty that they've been stuck at this level for so damn long.

Now, I overloaded this campaign with goals the party would need to complete. Set in Ravnica, I built it around a conspiracy by famous MTG bad guys, the Phyrexians, with a "Praetor" seeking to infect the plane of Ravnica hidden in each guild. The final one is the Praetor in House Dimir, who is a bit different, being an Elder Brain from the primary D&D multiverse who is hoping to use Phyrexian technology to further the Ilithids' "Grand Design."

Even what I have left in the campaign is pretty substantial - level 18 is going to see them traveling different Magic the Gathering planes to piece together the fragments of the Golgothian Sylex, which the ancient planeswalker Urza used to defeat his Phyrexian-corrupted brother Mishra long ago. Level 19 is going to be a delve through the nine layers of New Phyrexia (some taking longer than others - the Bleak Facade is basically going to be one combat encounter and then a big hole down to the next layer). And then, level 20 is where they get connected to the D&D multiverse and spells like Plane Shift, Astral Projection, and such finally become fair game, which will culminate in a climactic fight against Elesh Norn at the massive portal connecting Ravnica and Sigil, which will remain a canonical thing in my future campaigns (even if I'm unlikely to spend much time in the Magic multiverse in future campaigns).

This is all well and good.

The campaign has been milestone-based, which has given me a lot of control over the pacing of the campaign. It's also why a 5-year campaign allowed players to honestly hit level 10 quite early and then spend far, far longer in tier 3, and of course will spend nearly a year and a half at level 17 (my poor Storm Sorcerers are champing at the bit for their 60 foot flying speed).

My original campaign was XP-based, and I remember feeling somewhat frustrated at the slow rate of leveling in that one. But I think a big part of that was that my combat encounters were undertuned. D&D 2014, for one thing, was balanced around dungeon-crawls, where a party would have many encounters each day. And as such, a single encounter being kind of trivial, like when I had them fight a single Spectator at level 3 that died to just two turns by the Fighter and Paladin before it could act, make sense in the context of a dungeon that keeps sapping their resources, but is not as well tuned for big, climactic fights.

The new rules, notably, don't actually tell you how many encounters a party can expect in a single day - which I think is a flaw, to be clear - but it does suggest that, with the encounter building guidance, we're talking about fewer, bigger fights.

And that also means that each fight is going to award more XP.

The very first session I ran, the party (3 players at the time) fought first two Kobolds and an Octopus (the latter of whom they befriended and kept as a pet) and then a second fight against a single Thug - none of my monsters even got a turn.

Today, even if both were designed as low-difficult encounters (which they sure as hell were, and were even supposed to be) we'd be looking at 6 Kobolds in that first fight and then maybe a Tough (the new equivalent of a Thug) and two Bandits. So, we'd be going from a total between both encounters of 160 xp to 300 xp, nearly doubling it. And, I bet those would have been more interesting fights as well.

Sure, you'd need four more low-difficulty encounters to level up a party from 1 to 2, but using the old guidance, it would have taken even longer.

At the very earliest levels, it's easy to feel a bit impatient to level up. At high levels, it's not quite as urgent. One reason I don't feel as bad as I might otherwise feel for keeping my party at level 17 for over a year is that they're in tier 4 - they have their highest-level spells (unless our Artificer decides to suddenly jump ship and multiclass into Wizard for some reason) and most of their cool abilities.

But I really do feel like the amount of crazy stuff they've accomplished and the fights they've had means that they really ought to be more powerful than they are now. Just looking at the current dungeon they're in, we're talking about six low-difficult encounters and one high-difficulty encounter (along with a couple optional moderate-difficulty ones, one of which they did and another they turned into a social encounter). Per player, that's 4,500 per low-difficulty encounter and 11,700 for the high-difficulty encounter, so that's 38,700 xp per player for just the mandatory encounters in that dungeon. The xp required to go from 17 to 18 is 40,000, so just the single moderate encounter they've done in this dungeon alone would give them more than enough. And to be clear, this is the fourth major chapter of what they've actually done this level.

So: one thing I intend to do in future campaigns is to narrow the focus a lot more. Ten major villains, none of whom are even the campaign's final boss, is a little insane (Matt Mercer expressed a similar sentiment about having had five major ancient dragons for Vox Machina to fight, and I've doubled that!)

But I also think, on a certain level, leveling up should feel like the players' accomplishment. If the big bad is underpowered compared to them because they've leveled up higher than I had originally planned, that might just be the reward they reap.

Of course, one of the issues that arises with this is that it incentivizes a certain kind of play. Awarding XP from defeating monsters is very straightforward, but sessions that are much more RP-focused have a less clear reward structure. You might say that "quest rewards" can be used, but there's less explicit guidance here. If the party meets with the local King and convinces him to send troops to guard the excavation site of that ancient temple, do you get the XP value of the king and his guard? It's tough because such an accomplishment could hinge on a single good Persuasion check - and is that really as much of an accomplishment as taking down some tough monster?

Milestone leveling is certainly a way to make sure that leveling up feels like a major event. But I do think there's something kind of "honest" about XP.

I've been rebuilding the adventure that I had just started when my original campaign fell apart, and I'm going to try and see if I can get some of the players from said campaign to jump into it (along with some of my more recent players, who could join in). Of course, there's also a scheduling challenge - my Ravnica game is the one I run each week, and I've got two other campaigns that I play in. Still, it would be really cool. And it would be a good way for me to feel out the pacing going back to XP.

Monster Stats: The Little Guys

 While I'm generally a big fan of the revisions that have come with the new core rulebooks, there is maybe one omission from the new DMG that bothers me the most: the loss of the "quick monster stats" table.

In the old DMG, this section of the DM's Workshop chapter has been invaluable in aiding in the creation of brand-new monsters from scratch. The new DMG has some idea for customizing monsters, but it really seems almost to discourage actually creating new creatures wholecloth.

Let's talk about this on a philosophical level:

I've watched a lot of Matt Colville's D&D videos on YouTube, and find his insights interesting enough that I do genuinely want to try out his company's upcoming fantasy TTRPG, Draw Steel, amidst a sea of other D&D competitors coming out.

While I don't always agree with his takes on how a game like this should be played, I do think he makes a good point when talking about the way that corporations like to control their IPs. D&D is an inherently creative game - the game encourages you to come up with your own character, and for DMs to come up with their own stories in which those characters will struggle and strive.

But corporations really like to have control of a narrative. They would much rather that you play in their spaces. In video games, this is basically inherent, except when you get into the world of modding, but in TTRPGs, the analogue nature of the game means that there's not a lot of control over what the game really should be.

The designers of D&D get it, I'm sure, because you couldn't work on a game like this without loving it for its grand potential, but I think that the larger company really likes the idea that these rules are there to get you to play through their published adventures.

In particular, I think the Spelljammer and Planescape box sets didn't really give players and DMs what they really wanted out of it (and it hurts me to say this, because I think that the Planescape book did actually have some very cool stuff in it. The Spelljammer one... well... Plasmoids and Thri-kreen are cool?) Overall, though, these campaign setting products felt like they were built less around opening up a broad new world for DMs to create in than they were about setting up a single adventure for a party to play through and then move on to the next thing.

This is in stark contrast with my favorite 5E product, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which was entirely about "here's how to make this your own."

So, the absence of this "here's how to build a monster from scratch" guidance not only disappointed me, but made me worry a bit about the direction the publishers are taking the game, despite my enthusiasm for how things have been revised and updated (though I'll also say, we got a revised Bladesinger already. Maybe focus on the brand new stuff).

Which brings me to my purpose here.

The Quick Monster Stats table in the 2014 DMG has helped me create lots of fun and challenging monsters. I had been hoping that we'd get an updated version (that, if nothing else, didn't cap Armor Class at 19 - it's patently absurd to suggest that a CR 28 monster would have an AC under 20) but we got no such thing. And so... I decided to build it up myself.

The way the old one worked was this:

There were 34 rows, from CR 0 to CR 30, showing what an average monster of each CR should have when it came to Attack Bonuses, average damage (if all attacks/abilities hit), saving throw DCs, AC, and Effective HP.

The latter of these is itself somewhat complicated, as various coefficients are applied to the actual total HP if the creature has resistances or immunities, but the coefficients change depending on the creature's target CR.

You can just use these to build your monster around, but if you want a tanky creature that doesn't deal as much damage or a glass cannon, you ultimately want to calculate the Offensive CR and the Defensive CR (OCR and DCR) for each and try to get their average to hit your target. And how do you get those? Well, you average the CR of their attack bonus (or save DC if they use abilities that call for those more) with their damage output (also accounting for AoE attacks by assuming they'll hit two targets when calculating the damage output) to get their OCR, and then averaging the CR of their AC and EHP (effective HP) to get their DCR, and then averaging both.

In other words, you have some sliders here to really customize your monster. Let's say you want to build a "Spike Devil" whose role is to strike down heavily armored foes, you might lower its damage output to raise its attack bonus.

All of this gets nuanced and complicated - attacks that inflict a condition will require you to lower their overall damage to keep the same CR value.

But with the redesigns of classic monsters, what are those values?

Well, I'm going to take the new Monster Manual and see if I can find out.

For this post (and we'll see if we do more of these) I'm going to start with the creatures of CR 1/8. I'm skipping CR 0 creatures largely because they're designed to be trivial even to first-level adventurers, often only doing 1 damage on a hit and having 1 HP. Depending on how laborious such a process is, I might continue on to 1/4 and 1/2 monsters in this post, but I'm going to try to keep this manageable.

Because we're basing this off the revised rulebooks, we only have one truly, fully up-to-date source, which is the Monster Manual.

Let's talk methodology: to start off with CR 1/8 monsters, we're going to take their average damage (assuming everything hits/isn't saved against,) their average attack bonus, their average AC, and their average HP, unless they have resistances or immunities. Notably, there is a potential to skew things here if a particular CR has, for example, more glass cannons versus more tanks, but we'll go in with the potentially naive assumption that each selection of creatures at every CR (especially the low ones) has a broad enough selection to give us a healthy mix. There are also passive benefits like a Kobold's Pack Tactics that could skew things - potentially making their attack bonus effectively higher - but we're going to ignore it (perhaps at our peril).

We'll list the values here before finding averages to let you play along at home:

    Bandit:

Damage: 4.5, Attack: +3, AC 12, HP 11

    Blood Hawk

Damage: 5 (maybe skewing closer to 6, but we'll say this for now), Attack: +4, AC 12, HP 7

    Camel:

Damage: 4, Attack: +4, AC 10, HP 17

    Cultist:

Damage 4, Attack +3, AC 12, HP 9

    Flumph:

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7 (with a vulnerability)

    Flying Snake:

Damage: 6, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 5

    Giant Crab:

Damage 4 (with condition), Attack +3, AC 15, HP 13

    Giant Rat:

Damage: 5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 7

    Giant Weasel

Damage: 5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 9

    Goblin Minion

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7

    Guard

Damage: 4, Attack +3, AC 16, HP 11

    Kobold Warrior

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 7

    Manes

Damage: 5, Attack +2, AC 9, HP 9

    Mastiff

Damage: 4 (with condition), Attack +3, AC 12, HP 5

    Merfolk Skirmisher

Damage: 5 (with condition), Attack +2, AC 11, HP 11

    Modron Monodrone

Damage: 6, Attack +4, AC 15, HP 5

    Mule

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 10, HP 11

    Noble

Damage: 5, Attack +3, AC 15 (with a reaction to make it 17, technically), HP 9

    Pony

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 10, HP 11

    Slaad Tadpole

Damage: 5, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 7 (5 damage resistances)

    Stirge

Damage: 5.5, Attack +5, AC 13, HP 5

    Twig Blight

Damage: 4, Attack +4, AC 14, HP 7 (vulnerability)

    Venomous Snake

Damage: 7, Attack +4, AC 12, HP 5

    Warrior Infantry

Damage: 4, Attack +3, AC 13, HP 9

    Now, we're going to take averages on all of these (for creatures with different attacks that do different damage, I found the average for them) with the exception of damaging attacks that impose a condition (I've included a 10-foot slow as a condition,) because we want to learn what penalty we should impose if we add a condition to an attack. Honestly, we should maybe do the same for creatures with Pack Tactics. Hopefully this will get us reasonable values for what a CR 1/8 creature ought to be doing.

    Our sample size is 24 stat blocks. 3 have attacks that impose a condition.

Damage: The average damage here without conditions comes to about 4.7, which we will round up to 5. Our three CR 1/8 creatures that do impose a condition deal an average of 4.3, which we'll round down to 4. Does that mean we need to subtract 20% of the damage to justify the condition? We'll start using that for now, but because damage is so low at this CR, we might be dealing with a "pixelation" problem, where the actual penalty is not quite that amount. Still, we'll stick with 5 as our main number.

Attack: Here I got 3.7, or 4 on average. Again, this might effectively skew higher given the existence of things like Pack Tactics, but likely sticking around 4, rounded off.

AC: Here, I got 12.5, which we'll round up to 13. (I did initially get a lower number, so check my work, because the first time I think I entered fewer than 24 values when calculating the average).

HP: We're going to ignore the ones with resistances, immunities to damage types, and vulnerabilities to try to get a sense for how this might skew things, which again leaves 21 stat blocks to average. This comes to 8.7, rounded to 9. Two of these creatures have vulnerabilities, with an average HP for them of 7 (both have 7), which is, ironically, lower than the average for those without. The one with five different resistances has 7 as well. Not really enough of a sample size to see how these affect things.

However, let's say, for the sake of argument, that the average CR 1/8 creature should have the following stats:

+4 to hit, deal 5 damage on a hit, have an AC of 13, and 9 HP.

And let's compare that with some random choices. In theory, if a creature has a high AC and/or HP, they should have a lower attack bonus and damage.

Looking at the Guard, their attack bonus is +3 and their damage is only 4, both below average, if only by a little. They have I think the highest AC of all 1/8 creatures, with a 16, and 11 HP, which is a bit higher than average. So, while we don't know if this is quite balanced, it at least seems to fit with a lower OCR balanced by a higher DCR (appropriate for an NPC who is there to defend and endure).

Let's contrast this with a Goblin Minion - a stealthy skirmisher who is there to strike fast and get away. Their attack bonus is average, and their damage is actually a bit low at 4. Their AC and HP are both also lower than the average. So, what gives? Well, a Goblin Minion does have the Nimble Escape bonus action. Does this make up for being decidedly below-average on most of its primary measures?

As a last bit, let's talk about the Manes - a creature that should have zero sense of self preservation, as it's a gruesome demon who just wants to kill. I realize I messed up and forgot to account for its three typical demonic damage resistances (cold, fire, lighting) and its immunity to poison.  Despite the fact that it has all these ways to ignore or mitigate damage, it has the average HP of 9. However, its AC is significantly lower, requiring only a 9 to hit (meaning a brand-new character with a +5 to hit is going to do so 80% of the time). Its attack does average damage but only has a +2 to hit. In other words, the creature is below-average on AC and attack bonus, but can be a problem for spellcasters (a tier 1 Fire Bolt cannot take one of these down on its own, as the damage would cap out at 5, though a Monk or dual-wielder at level 1 would probably be able to take one down pretty easily if they're doing 1d6+3 on both hits, the average damage of which would be 13).

The truth of all this is that there are a lot of moving parts. A creature having a flying speed, for example, can effectively make it much harder to hit, as melee-focused characters will have a much harder time attacking it, often doing suboptimal damage because they've switched from a hefty Greataxe to a Javelin or the like. And a creature with an aura that charms people nearby is also effectively harder to hurt.

Still, even if a table like 2014's monster stats is never going to be able to handle all those nuances, surely the designers at WotC have some formulas for creating their creatures. This is something that they need to make available to customers - both for those of us who like homebrewing things (no TTRPG publisher is going to make my New Weird/Urban Fantasy stuff quite to my specifications) but also for those 3rd party publishers who create content for their game. D&D Beyond has become a marketplace for 3rd party materials, which I think is fantastic, but help out those creators to keep things in line with D&D's design philosophies!