Racing Through Pragmata's Post-Game

 After you beat Pragmata, you get an option to start a new save file that basically backs you up to before the final boss fight, with all the upgrades an unlocks that you've got, and a new area appears on the map. It's not a full zone, but instead is basically another Shelter-like space that has ten simulation beds like the one you use for your Training Missions.

When I showed up, several of them were already open. I believe this is because, in the course of the main game, I had collected all the items, boxes, etc., in each zone - I suspect that these open training pods would have been closed if I had not yet completed that element of the game. Four others can be unlocked by going back and fighting upgraded versions of each of the four major bosses from the zones (prior to the central tower).

Maybe because of my thoroughness and upgrades I'd already gotten, I didn't find these bosses terribly challenging. I don't think I died to any of them (in fairness, I think the only bosses I died to in the initial run of the game were the one in the Terra Dome and the final boss). Still, it was fun to come back to them (and I hope that you can just re-fight them as much as you like, though I haven't tried to).

Each opens up another simulated mission, which are all somewhat similar to the challenges in the Training Mode from the base game, but none had time limits or bonus objectives, so while there were some tough combat challenges, it wasn't anything to break your controller over (the final challenge is a gauntlet of fights, eventually pitting you against two of those Dead Filament-corrupted kind of Ninja-like robot minibosses, the first of which you have to fend off while Diana is being repaired at the Cradle, though there's an incinerator you can lure them into, and I was able to wipe out one very quickly).

I've completed all the challenges in the hidden room, which opens up a vault containing new costumes for Hugh and Diana, a new weapon that lets you shoot Lunafilament (yes, you can turn what is essentially your XP/money into ammo,) and a Mod that I believe doesn't actually do anything for you mechanically, but notably seems to help people infected with Dead Filament survive.

UPDATE: I beat the game again - there are few enough changes that I'm just going to add to this post instead of making a whole new one.

Uh, spoilers:

Pragmata Completed

 Pragmata is a good game.

I think that's been the general critical consensus. I've now finished it, and while in true Capcom fashion, there's some bonus content I've unlocked for having beaten the story, I've got the main thing packed up. Indeed, I even 100% all of the items in each zone (though I think there were like one or two Mini-Cabins I didn't find - but the "map complete" percentages were all 100%).

I don't want to get too much into spoilers here, but it is really interesting to me that there are only really four major characters in the story, and one is dead by the time the game starts.

As charming as the game's central relationship between Hugh and Diana is (and it really is charming,) there's a certain melancholy to the story, born in part by the fact that it all takes place on a moon base where everyone's dead. Shortly after the game begins, Hugh is the only living person on the base. (There's not a lot of talk about the actual name of the base - I think it is, hubristically enough, called Babel, and run by the Delphi corporation.)

I guess we should get into spoilers now:

Building an Alucard for Ravenloft's Strahd von Zarovich

 A couple years ago, my friend ran The House of Lament, the starter adventure in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. As a joke, initially, the character I came up with for it was Alexander von Zarovich, a dhampir rogue who was the son of infamous Darklord Strahd von Zarovich. His backstory was that he had been initially born as a means for Strahd to escape the Domains of Dread (back during Strahd's collaborations with Azalin) by essentially creating a suitable vessel to transfer his soul into while leaving his soulless body behind to remain trapped as Darklord. The experiment failed, and so Strahd transformed his son into an assassin, sent to terrorize his enemies. When Alexander accidentally killed the current incarnation of Tatyana, Strahd cast him out, banishing him to the Mists. Finding himself in Lamordia, he lived as an orphan but was taken in by a kindly adult who helped rehabilitate and de-program him, allowing him to grow into a (relatively) well-adjusted adult.

While the idea of a dhampir son of Strahd was the kind of one-shot joke character, I actually realized the concept had legs (hence the extensive backstory). I haven't had an opportunity to play this character in a larger campaign, but I could see myself doing so.

Naturally, there's some precedent from the Castlevania series, with the character of Alucard, aka Adrian Tepes, the son of Dracula and his human wife Lisa. As a Dhampir, Alucard heroically opposes his monstrous father while also being a bit of an edgelord himself.

Initially, my idea for Xander would be as a Rogue - that's how I played him in the House of Lament - but while I like that conceptually, I think A: a little frustration with the Rogue as a class and B: a desire for a more effective melee fighter has led me to consider an alternative.

Initially I thought maybe a fighter, probably a Dexterity-based one using a Rapier or perhaps dual-wielding. And then it struck me:

Bladesinger.

While I tend to prefer my Battlemages heavily armored, the Bladesinger does satisfy that definition of being a character who can use both spells and weapons (I know that "Battlemage" means other things to different people - to me I think it's kind of the less IP-specific "Gish" idea, which is best embodied in D&D with the Eldritch Knight Fighter subclass).

Not only is the Bladesinger a cool and powerful subclass, but it also, I think, fits well with the aesthetic of a vampiric warrior - vampires are rarely seen wearing armor, for example. They also tend to have magic powers, and we're going to be looking at a lot of the spells I'd choose to fit in with these themes (which also happen to go together for the most part).

I've got a build here that goes to level 10.

The 5.5 Bladesinger, from Heroes of Faerun, makes them a little less dependent on having high Dexterity, because you can now use Intelligence to attack while in your Bladesong. I do think you'll still want at least decent Dex, as it still raises your AC, initiative bonus, and of course helps with Dex saves. Potentially you could go with 15s in Int, Dex, and Con, though I tend to prefer starting with a 17 in my top stat at level 1 in 5.5 so that I can put it to 18 at level 4 with a General Feat.

Naturally, we'll be grabbing War Caster at level 4, which A: is basically what every spellcaster should take at level 4, but B: also really good given that we'll be mixing it up in melee and being able to Booming Blade as an opportunity attack.

Given the desire to have some feats in tier 3 to boost Dex and/or Con, I'm going to actually say we just push Int to 20 at level 8, rather than taking another Int-based General feat. Shadow Touched would certainly be thematic here, and there are some other Int-based feats to consider, but I have an OCD thing about capping stats.

For weapon choice, there are lots of options, because you're basically going to get a d8 weapon at best - even if you fight with a longsword, you can't use its versatile property without ending Bladesong, and given that you don't get weapon masteries, it's really just a choice of damage types. Thematically, I really feel like we've got to go with the Rapier, which just feels like the elegant vampiric weapon to pick. I could see a Whip also working, which sacrifices 2 damage on average for extra reach. That reach could be very helpful as a (somewhat) squishy Wizard, but I'm going to say let's risk it.

Now, spells:

For cantrips, the must-haves are Booming Blade and Green-Flame Blade. The former is particularly good as an opportunity attack with War Caster (unless your DM is an insane stickler and says that the spell targets the weapon, rather than the target of the attack). We can start off with True Strike if we're beginning at level 1 in order to be able to attack with a weapon before we get our subclass, but we might want to just stick to the back until then. We might consider having a ranged cantrip (Mind Sliver feels on-theme and is also good) but these are going to be our bread-and-butter. Blade Ward is also a decent choice, as once we get to level 6 and get our special Extra Attack, we can pop this up to effectively increase our AC by 1d4 on each hit (though it does eat up our concentration, so this might be better if we're in a big dungeon crawl with a lot of smaller fights where we don't want to blow a high-level spell slot on something).

First level, we want to grab Shield and Mage Armor. We cannot wear armor in the Bladesong (a change from the old version) so this will be our best option for armor unless we can get something like a Robe of the Archmagi or something far later on. Remember that Bladesong doesn't change the math of how we determine our armor - it just adds our Int modifier to AC, so if we have a +2 to Dex, Mage Armor, and +3 to Int at level 3, that's a healthy 18 AC, which will be better than even heavy-armor wearers unless they have a shield or somehow snagged plate this early. I'd also take Absorb Elements, another staple. Staples like Find Familiar (feels like it should be a bat) and Identify/Detect Magic are also good - we will still be a Wizard, and people will rely on us for stuff like that. I also like Jump here, which helps with our mobility as a melee wizard and again, feels very much like a vampire thing to do.

Second level, another spell I'd take on any character, Misty Step feels particularly good for our vampire theme (doesn't Alucard have an ability in Symphony of the Night where he turns into mist to go through barred barriers?) This is such a staple spell that I have zero hesitation putting it in there. It'll also potentially help us get to foes faster. Invisibility is another good utility spell that, again, lends itself to our spooky vibes.

Third level, there are a few standard choices (I'll never not take Fireball on a Wizard,) and Fear is a really good and again, thematic choice for our big Crowd Control spell. However, we now have an interesting question: Do we take Spirit Shroud? I made a post last fall comparing this spell to Conjure Minor Elementals. The short story: Spirit Shroud is more convenient, but doesn't scale as well. Each adds damage to attacks you make if the target is within a relatively close emanation, which is really powerful when you can make lots of attacks (it pairs well with Scorching Ray,) and given that our Bladesinger can regularly make two attacks per turn starting at level 6, we can often benefit from this. Spirit Shroud is less damage, but I do think it's way more thematically on-point than CME. It also only requires a bonus action to cast it, so we can start attacking on the same turn. That said, we also need our bonus action to activate Bladesong, so we probably won't be casting it until turn 2 in combat. Now, that's not really a downside given that if we have CME, we'll probably be activating Bladesong and then casting that on turn 1 and not attacking until turn 2 anyway - with Spirit Shroud we can at least attack in a non-augmented way on turn 1. So, it really depends on A: how long your combat lasts and B: how much you can upcast your spells. While I took CME on my D&D Beyond build of the character, I might actually argue that you should go Spirit Shroud if for no other reason than it feels way more on-theme. For other 3rd level spells, I like Summon Undead - all the Summon spells are pretty good, and both add a body to the field and do pretty decent damage (Summon Undead also has great utility, as the Ghost can automatically frighten anyone they hit, and the Putrid spirit requires some set-up and for monsters that aren't immune to being poisoned, but can paralyze things).

Fourth level, Polymorph is a key one - being able to turn into a Wolf or a Bat (talk with your DM about re-skinning higher-CR beasts so you can stay on-theme) is another big vampire trope. Conjure Minor Elementals is less thematic but still great for any Wizard who makes attack rolls. Greater Invisibility can be a really strong spell for both attack and defense if you can spare the concentration.

Rounding things out at 5th level, I think we've got to take Steel Wind Strike, which is a weird sort of pseudo-AOE spell that works very well with the idea of a weapon-wielding Wizard. It plays well with Spirit Shroud/CME, and while it's limited to 5 targets, how often do you get 5 targets in a Fireball? I also grabbed Danse Macabre, which is mostly just fun but I also think not all that bad - considering that Skeletons in 5.5 now have a base attack bonus of +5, if your Int is maxed out, they'll have a +10 to hit and deal 1d6+8 damage on each attack. With five skeletons shooting bows, that's 5d6+40 damage. Against an AC of 18, that's 38.25 average damage per turn. It is dependent on how many skeletons you have access to.

In terms of gameplay, there are some arguments that even a Bladesinger should mostly play like a standard Wizard most of the time, holding back from the fray. But to that, I say: why don't you want to have fun? Truly, by level 10, we're going to be pretty resilient - with +5 to Int, Mage Armor, and still just +2 to Dex, we're going to have an AC of 20 during Bladesong that can then be bumped to 25 if we get hit thanks to the Shield spell. If we get Bracers of Defense, raise those by 2. We might even consider starting with a +3 in Dex, though I generally think a Wizard should favor Con more than Dex, as not all damage requires them to hit you with an attack, and you still only have a d6 hit die. At level 10, we can expend spell slots as a reaction to reduce incoming damage by 5 times the spell's level. I think judicious use of that feature is an important challenge for the Wizard using it - reducing the damage of a dragon's breath, for example, could make it possible for you to maintain concentration on a spell.

One of the fun things about playing this as a Dhampir is that you could, in theory, have a fight along walls and ceilings, which does feel like a fun idea for a rapier-wielding warrior. Being based in Con, and with very few ways to increase the damage, I don't think you'll be using the bite attack all that much, but that's kind of true for all dhampirs.

We will be getting an update to the Dhampir in Ravenloft: Horrors Within, though I don't know how much is likely to change (I suspect not a ton, though they seem to be presenting the Gothic Lineages as more just full-on species in their own right, so we might have some changes to Ancestral Legacy).

At level 10, we get 5 Bladesongs per long rest, so we can probably expect to have it active every fight unless we're in serious dungeon-crawl mode. If we do run out, I think we just hurl spells from afar or focus on buffing allies.

When we want to bring our A-game, we spend the first turn activating Bladesong and then going in for the attack (if we're close enough - we should have a 45-foot movement speed) with a Booming Blade on single targets or Green-Flame Blade if we can hit a secondary target. On turn two, we'll want to activate Spirit Shroud at 5th level (we always want to cast it at odd levels, given how it scales) and then attack again, now dealing 2d8 extra damage (our choice of radiant, necrotic, or cold - radiant's probably the most reliable, but thematically we might go necrotic more often than not) per hit. Again, if we are using CME instead (also at 5th level, this now adding 3d8 to our attacks - I feel like Fire damage would be the thematically appropriate one, though Cold also works. Just pick the right one for the monsters you're fighting), we'll spend our first turn setting up, getting Bladesong and CME running, and then turn two we'll use our action to either attack or if we have a target-rich environment, we can do Steel Wind Strike, hitting each foe for both the spell's 6d10 and the bonus d8s. Note that this will blow both our 5th level slots, so we should only burn both of these spells if we want to burn a lot of gas.

If we want to be a little more conservative, casting either Spirit Shroud or CME at base level is an option. Greater Invisibility is also a decent choice (assuming your foes don't have Blindsight/Truesight).

Again, we are a Wizard, so we have tons of alternatives given the situation. Fear, for example, can seriously thin the ranks if we're facing a massive horde of foes.

When facing a hard-hitting foe, we can run in, attack, and then Misty Step to avoid their strikes if we're not sure Shield will be enough to keep us safe. Also, if you want to play it extra-safe and conservative, consider Blade Ward as your concentration spell, which you can cast on turn 1 after Spirit Shrouding with your Extra Attack. This feels ideal for minor fights in a dungeon room - I'm thinking specifically the vineyard in Curse of Strahd that is overrun with Blights - each fight is trivial, but there are so many little fights there that they can chip away at your HP and resources.

Anyway, I think this could be a very fun archetype - while the Bladesinger can work in any campaign, I do think that it's a strong choice for a lithe, elegant dhampir warrior in a very gothic campaign.

Hitting Either the Midpoint Shift or Plot Point Two of Pragmata

 For those unaware, in screenwriting, the most popular and commercially viable way to structure a screenplay is the Three Act Structure. In a two-hour movie, you have the first half-hour (roughly the first 30 pages, as the general rule is that each page in a screenplay equates to a minute of screen time) as Act One, in which the characters are introduced, the premise is laid out, the plot gets going, and by the end of it, you have Plot Point One, in which your protagonist is forced to make a decision that will drive the story forward. Act Two is the meat of the story, lasting about an hour, or 60 pages, in which the protagonist encounters obstacles to their goal and either surpasses them or fails and has to find other routes to their goal. But Act Two is divided by the Midpoint Shift, which typically happens at the midpoint of both the act and the movie as a whole. The Midpoint Shift typically has some fundamental element of the story transform, either through the revelation of some new information, a change in scenery, or some event that significantly changes things. Perhaps the starkest Midpoint Shift I can think of in cinema is the one in Jaws, where the first half of the movie takes place in a Massachusetts beach resort town plagued by a man-eating shark, and the second half focuses on three men hunting said shark in a little boat out on the water.

Plot Point Two, then, marks the end of Act Two and is another major decision point for the protagonist. I've found that a Plot Point Two can often share elements with the Midpoint Shift. It's here, I think that you tend to get big revelatory twists. For instance, I think in Fight Club, the Midpoint Shift is when the Fight Club transforms into Project Mayhem, but Plot Point Two is when the narrator discovers the true nature of his relationship with Tyler Durden.

Games don't adhere to this structure in quite the same way, in part because they're meant to go longer than a feature film. And in fairness, things like major plot twists don't always come at Plot Point Two - sometimes they come right before the climax, and sometimes they're really the end of the movie, a rug-pull that the protagonist doesn't get to respond to (and might either not be aware of, or sometimes the twist is something the protagonist has always known and the rug-pull is on the audience alone).

Classically, in a video game, the climax is the final boss - the (theoretically) toughest challenge and a confrontation with the main antagonist. But outside of the tight 2-hour structure in film (something that I think Hollywood has drifted away from as they've been more comfortable making longer movies) it's sometimes not totally clear whether a major reversal is just changing the nature of the game in a Midpoint Shift kind of way, or if it's the accelerant that starts racing us to the climax like a Plot Point Two.

All that said:

In Pragmata, I've hit a major plot beat that feels like it's either the Midpoint Shift or Plot Point Two. I'm leaning toward the latter, but I don't know how much of the game I have left.

Spoilers Ahead:

Needing to Finalize an Adventure Pretty Soon!

 For level 18, my part in my Ravnica-based campaign have been assembling the shards of the Golgothian Sylex, an ancient and mysterious doomsday weapon that destroyed an entire continent on the plane of Dominaria, and is the tool they need to destroy the Phyrexians' "Cosmic Key," which Elesh Norn and company are going to try to use to redirect various portal/wormholes the Mind Flayers created linking planes of the Magic the Gathering Universe with those of D&D. Essentially, the Phyrexians want to use these passages to quickly get their forces to planes they'd normally be unable to visit because of the Post-Mending barriers to planar travel for non-planeswalkers (I'll note that I came up with this plot before any of the March of the Machine stuff happened in MtG canon).

Anyway, this has been an opportunity for the party to visit other Magic planes. So far, they've gone to Theros, Innistrad, Arcavios, Ikoria, and are now on Eldraine. The last of the six shards for them to find is on New Capenna.

And I still haven't totally finalized what that adventure will be like.

Part of the premise here has been to do something a little different on each plane. Innistrad had the party forcibly split up by the Mists (Innistrad is, in my campaign, linked to the Shadowfell and thus there's a sort of quasi-Domain of Dread there). Arcavios was a series of relatively combat encounters with unconventional win conditions for each college. Theros was a journey down into the Underworld and ended with a race out of a labyrinth within Erebos' palace. Ikoria was a hunt for the Tarrasque. In Eldraine, the party has been transformed into children and must do a series of challenges in tier 1 levels (starting at level 1 and leveling up after each, and then getting restored to 18 and adulthood when finished).

So: the premise for New Capenna is that the shard was entrusted to the Maestros, who keep it as a relic of Old Capenna (while it wasn't from there, it was instrumental in fighting the old Phyrexians, who likely still control the surface far below).

On a previous planeswalk, the party's Goblin Bard came to New Capenna and Xander, the leader of the Maestros, sought to recruit him to work as an assassin for them. I do think that there's a "speed run" cheat code here - if the party contacts Xander and entertains an offer, he'll allow the party to take the shard if the bard pledges 999 years of service and agrees to be transformed into a demon in order to carry out his duties (the Bard is already a chaotic evil member of the Cult of Rakdos and both a serial killer and cannibal, so this might not be completely outside the realm of possibility - though his greatest virtue is his loyalty to the party). This service would take place post-campaign, so there's no real gameplay cost to it. I think Xander could be negotiated down to 101 years, but if the offer is either refused or not entertained at all, I need to figure out how to do this adventure.

In theory, the Museum of Old Capenna, where the shard is on display, could be run like a somewhat conventional dungeon, though given that the party is level 18, I'd need to pull some really crazy BS to prevent the party from steamrolling it.

The alternative, and the one that I'd be really curious to try, is borrowing the structure of Blades in the Dark. Specifically, it would be up for the players to decide what kind of barriers to their goal are as they choose to use various skills and abilities.

I've put a little thought into this: First off, because skills (especially at high levels) in D&D can be enormous bonuses, we'd have a system where re-using a skill would raise the DC. You might have a +13 to Arcana (which our Aritficer does - and if they use a tool that becomes +20) but eventually, the DC for using it over and over again will become prohibitive or at least risky.

We'd have clocks that need to be filled in order to progress through the heist: I imagine there's a Casing clock, an Infiltration clock, and then a secret, third clock in which the party realizes that the Shard on display in the museum is actually a fake, and the real one is down in the museum archives.

Each of these would then be put up against a Security clock. I think the penalty for failure is to have to do a High-difficulty combat encounter (which at level 18 is quite a lot). The heist has to go off in one night (otherwise the Maestros will move the shard) so I think we can put some pressure on the party having to get through multiple really tough encounters if they fail.

I think I then just need to build a map for each of the fail-state encounters (the last would probably have a fight against Xander, who I'd give the stats of Grazz't, along with several henchmen - probably Bandit Crime Lords among others).

The rising DC remains through the entire night - probably starting off with an easy 10 but going up by 5 each time it's used, and everyone's got to do their own thing (we'd basically go in initiative, even if we're doing something that takes place over the course of hours). I might make Tools also raise the DC with repeated use (the Artificer is primarily a glazier).

There are six regular players, so I think a progress clock would be in twelve segments. Failure clocks, then, I think are going to start off lenient (maybe also 12) but go down by two each time, so that the second phase (once they're actually breaking into the museum) is 10 and then searching the archives would be 8. This way, the tension rises and failure gets more likely as things go on.

Cool, I think this can work: just need to make three maps and encounters.

We'll see how it goes!

UA: Primordial Patron Warlock (+2 Invocations)

 I believe 4th Edition really centered the cosmic story of D&D on a conflict between the Gods and the Primordials, and there's an element of that as well in the ancient history of the Exandria setting (the setting for campaigns 1-3 of Critical Role, and also the setting of the campaign where I play my Wizard).

Primordials are linked to the Inner Planes, and thus very much have an Elemental theme. While we already have the Genie Patron, Genies, while they are elementals in D&D, are still very much their own thing. Here, our Primordial patrons might be embodiments of Elemental Evil.

Like the Genie, your patron will be affiliated with one of the four classical elements, but in this case, you can also swap patrons when you gain a level, owing to the capricious nature of the elements and their shifting alliances.

Notably, each element is associated with a damage type: Thunder for Air, Acid for Earth, Fire for... Fire, and Cold for Water.

Elemental Spells:

(All Patrons):

1st: Chromatic Orb

2nd: Darkvision

3rd: Elemental Weapon

4th: Summon Elemental (always taking the Elemental type of your current patron)

5th: Commune with Nature

Air:

1st: Feather Fall

2nd: Shatter

3rd: Fly

4th: Freedom of Movement

5th: Steel Wind Strike

Earth:

1st: Entangle

2nd: Knock

3rd: Plant Growth

4th: Vitriolic Sphere

5th: Wall of Stone

Fire:

1st: Burning Hands

2nd: Heat Metal

3rd: Fireball

4th: Wall of Fire

5th: Flame Strike

Water:

1st: Ice Knife

2nd: Alter Self

3rd: Water Walk

4th: Control Water

5th: Cone of Cold

    Hoo, that's a lot to go through.

    Of these, I think Air speaks to me the most, as it's pretty much all bangers (though Feather Fall will feel pretty expensive as a Warlock when you're casting it at 5th level). Of the core spells, naturally Elemental Weapon is going to be best on a Bladelock (though you could always cast it on a friend's weapon). I think there are some solid options for all patrons, though I think I'm less impressed with Water. (Earth could maybe get Spike Growth, though that overlaps a little with the Dao Genie).

Level 3:

Elemental Node:

As a magic action, you can create a 5-foot radius sphere of elemental magic centered on a point you can see within 60 feet of yourself. The magic of that node resembles your chosen element. On a later turn, you can move it up to 30 feet as a bonus action.

When it appears, each creature in the node other than you must make a Dex save against your spell save DC, taking 1d6 damage of your chosen element's type or half as much on a success. A creature also makes this save when the node moves into its space and when it enters the space or ends its turn there. The creature only makes the save once per turn.

The node lasts for 1 minute, until you dismiss it (no action required) or until you use this to make another node. You can use this feature once per short or long rest, but you can expend a Pact Magic slot to use it again. The node's damage increases by 1d6 at levels 6 and 14.

    Ok, so the damage here is quite low, but you can potentially get more out of it if you use a lot of forced movement - while you can't fully Cheese-Grate with it, you can bang it into foes and then push them back into it to double-dip during a round. This is a feature that the subclass builds on, so we'll reserve judgment a bit until we get the full picture. But as it recharges on a short rest, I think you can expect to have this available to you most fights - if you find it good enough to spend an action to create it.

    The Node also can do friendly-fire damage, which is not great. It's a very small radius, but assuming it's centered on a corner if playing on a grid, you should be able to affect four squares with it - good for hitting enemies, bad for hitting allies.

Level 6:

Elemental Haven:

Your Elemental Node protects you in the following ways:

Elemental Protection: While within the node, you gain a bonus to your AC equal to your Charisma modifier.

    Ok! Ok! This is going to be a substantial chunk of AC for a class that often struggles to have a decent AC given their limitation to Light armor (without feats or multiclassing). If I have +2 to Dex and +3 to Charisma at level 3, in Studded Leather I could get an AC of 17, which is actually respectable. Notably, we do need to spend the action to get the Node out there on our first turn, which is a bummer, and we need to ensure that we're bonus action moving our Node with us. (Hm, maybe that's the main problem with this subclass).

Elemental Teleport: As a bonus action, you can teleport into your node or the nearest unoccupied space within 5 feet of it. You can do this Cha times per long rest.

    Our bonus action is already tied into moving the node, but while the most obvious use here is to jump across the battlefield after being separated from the node, I could see using this out of combat: say we need to get across a big chasm. We can send our Node out for 9 rounds, summoning it 60 feet away and then moving it 30 feet for rounds 2-9 (total of 8 rounds) and thus it's now 300 feet away, at which point we teleport into it. It's kind of a single-passenger Dimension Door that takes a minute (and has 75% of the range). Hm. Maybe that's not that impressive.

Level 10: Primeval Protection:

You gain the following:

Elemental Fortitude: You have resistance to your patron's elemental damage type. While within your Node, you have immunity to it.

    That's cool - but I think we're going to need to talk about some issues with the need to micromanage the node in my Overall Thoughts.

Node Improvement: Your elemental Node is now a 10-foot radius sphere.

    This is great... except that it hits your friends as well. The damage is low, and clearly not the main focus of the ability, but while this is a natural upgrade to the feature, it also potentially makes your life harder.

Level 14: Elemental Harbinger

Your node grants the following new benefits:

Elemental Vortex: When you expend a Pact Magic slot while within your Elemental Node, you can attempt to pull a creature into the node. One creature you can see within 30 feet of the node must succeed on a Strength save or be pulled up to 15 feet toward the Node's center.

    Ok, that's fun, and it's no extra action to do. Warlocks are not generally going to be expending a spell slot every turn, so it's a bit more limited than it might look at first.

Node Improvement: Your elemental Node now lasts up to 1 hour.

    This is nice, given how expensive it is to set this up.

Primordial Herald: When you're within your node's area, you can cast the Planar Ally spell without expending a spell slot, speaking the name of your Patron. Once cast this way, you can't do so again until you finish 2d4 Long Rests.

    Planar Ally is one of those more loosey-goosey spells. In this case, your patron will probably send you an Elemental of some sort. The entity summoned by the spell is under no obligation to do anything, even if you offer payment for its services, though the expectation is that they will aid you for proper payment (which could be gold or other things). So yeah, this is thematically cool but A: kind of makes sense for basically any patron and B: is extremely DM-dependent.

Overall Thoughts (though wait, there's a bit more after them):

    Thematically, having a powerful Elemental patron makes a lot of sense, and while we have the (excellent) Genie patron, Genies have always been almost their own category of creature with a more specific vibe.

    Here's my problem: Building around Elemental Node is all well and good, but I think that using it in-game would be a real pain in the ass: You have to use your whole entire action to summon it at the start of combat (and it only lasts a minute, so pre-casting it is unlikely) and then you're going to be spending your bonus action every turn to move it around. It doesn't move any faster than a typical walking adventurer, so it might not even reach where you need it to each turn.

    I'd go back to the drawing board here, and probably change it so that the Warlock becomes the elemental node - that it becomes an emanation around you rather than some object to track on the map. This would require changing some of the features related to it (like the teleportation one). I'd then also either make it a bonus action to activate or even just make it one of those "at the start of your turn" no-action activations.

    I think redesigning around that notion - the Warlock being a Node of elemental power - could make this a far better subclass.

Eldritch Invocations:

Yes, we're not done yet! There are two new Eldritch Invocations to look at.

Elemental Overflow:

(Prerequisite: Level 5+ Warlock)

Choose Acid, Cold, Fire, Lighting, or Thunder. When you cast a spell that deals the chosen damage type, you can cause elemental energy to wreathe you until your next turn. When a creature within 5 feet of you hits you with a melee attack, that creature takes 1d4 damage of the chosen damage type. (This invocation is repeatable if you choose a different damage type each time).

    The punishment damage here isn't huge, and that's really the only benefit you're getting. And as a Warlock, you really prefer not to get hit at all. Also, to activate this, you need to regularly be casting a spell that does that damage type. Ideally a cantrip, which means something other than Eldritch Blast. I just don't see myself ever picking this, even if I'm going with Green-Flame Blade as a Bladelock.

Elemental Transmutation

(Prerequisite: Level 2+ Warlock)

Choose Acid, Cold, Fire, Lightning, or Thunder. Once per turn, whenever you deal damage of any of the above types, you can deal the chosen damage type instead.

    I guess you could use this to activate Elemental Overflow. Honestly I think that this demonstrates one of the challenges of building an Elemental-themed Warlock - Warlocks already get a lot of the most reliable damage types - Force with Eldritch Blast and Radiant/Necrotic/Psychic with Pact of the Blade. How do you incentivize a Warlock to deal, say, Fire damage, which is so often resisted?

    Anyway, that wraps up a much shorter UA than last time (only 5 pages). Once again, these "villainous" options don't seem so villainous (Warlocks in particular are always making pacts with dangerous entities even if they're good guys).

    If these come out in a book, I wouldn't expect it until late next year at the earliest, as I think we're still waiting to even get announcements for things like the presumed Dark Sun book and a few others. I think that all three of this UA's options have at least the core of a good idea, but might need extensive redesign (particularly this one) for me to be satisfied with them.

UA: Warrior of Venom Monk

 I love 5E Monks, even if the theorycrafters say that even with the 5.5 update, they're still lagging behind in terms of power. Monks just get so many cool features (and I also think people are underselling how good Deflect Attacks is as a defensive feature, second probably only to Barbarians' Rage).

While the Monk as a class focuses on the East Asian martial arts of, like, the Shao Lin tradition, Monks more broadly speaking are, of course, people who dedicate their lives to spiritual practice, often eschewing traditional lifestyles in favor of one focused on the discipline of their practice. This does open the door to mysticism and potentially some really weird stuff.

Right off the bat, "Venom" as a theme implies Poison damage, which is notoriously one of the least reliable damage types in D&D, as multiple creature types are often fully immune to it (Undead, Fiends, Constructs). So, can they make a good subclass themed around it? And is that even what this is? Let's read through and find out.

Level 3:

Envenom Weapon

At the start of your turn, you can expend 1 Focus Point to apply a toxin produced from your blood to one Monk Weapon that you're holding. A creature that takes damage from the weapon is subjected to one of the following effects (you choose when you apply the toxin).

The toxin lasts 1 minute or until a creature takes damage from the Toxin.

Slowing Toxin: Until the start of your next turn, the target's speed is halved, it cannot take reactions, and it can take either an action or bonus action on its turn, not both.

    This is pretty strong - while not all monsters have an interesting bonus action, some - especially those higher-level legendary monsters - do, and given that this is a no-save effect, that's really potent.

Venom: The target takes Poison damage equal to two rolls of your Martial Arts die.

    Unfortunately we cannot crit-smite with this, as we need to do this ahead of time. Is this enough damage? A Focus Point will net us an additional attack with Flurry of Blows, which at level 3 is 1d6+3, probably, which is comparable damage. By tier 3, we're doing two extra attacks for 1d10+5 (probably,) at which point this certainly falls behind (though to be fair I haven't seen the other features). We could blow a bunch of FP to get a bunch of extra damage out, but I don't know that Venom feels powerful enough to really make it an optimal choice, even if you're fighting something you're confident takes poison damage.

    Overall, I think that allowing you to spend the FP on a hit, rather than at the start of your turn, would make this a more exciting and powerful ability - not only for Crit-Smite potential but also just to make the effect more of a fun surprise. It'll suck if you apply this and then miss on that turn.

    Also, interesting that this forces the Monk to stick with a weapon - not unprecedented (see the Kensei) but it does mean that our Monk is probably going to want both a magic weapon and Wraps of Unarmed Prowess.

Potent Arsenal:

You gain a Poisoner's Kit, and you have proficiency with it. When creating a Basic Poison, you can do the work over the course of 1 day (8 hours of work). Additionally, whenever you deal Poison damage with a Monk feature or Monk weapon, you can change that damage to Acid damage.

    Bam! There we go. That's what makes this work. As long as we're not fighting Yugoloths or Black Dragons (or I guess many oozes) we are now going to be able to make everything work pretty reliably. Fantastic. Basic Poison is worth 100g, so it would typically take I believe 50g and two full work weeks to make, so this is actually amazing for turning you into a poison factory. At low levels this could honestly be a pretty solid downtime activity to generate revenue (not that a Monk needs much in the way of money, but for the party). But the main thing here is getting to do Acid damage, which is just so much more reliable than Poison.

Level 6:

Toxic Touch:

As a magic action, you can expend 1 FP to apply a potent toxin to a creature you touch. The target makes a Con save. On a failure, they are poisoned for 1 minute. While poisoned, they are also affected by one of the following effects of your choice.

Intoxicant: The target is Charmed for the duration or until you or your allies deal damage to it.

Sedative: The creature falls asleep and has the Unconscious condition for the duration. Another creature can use an action to shake the creature awake and end the condition.

Truth Serum: The target can't knowingly communicate a lie for the duration.

    These are solid effects, assuming you can poison the target. I like that the Truth Serum effect gives the Monk a bit of cool utility in non-combat scenarios. I might like the duration to be a little longer, at least for the Truth Serum one, as I can imagine having to apply this several times during an interrogation to get all the right questions asked.

Level 11:

Toxin Refiner:

You gain immunity to Poison damage. When you are subjected to poison damage, your Envenom Weapon options each deal extra Poison damage equal to one roll of your Martial Arts die, and you can't get this benefit again until the end of your next turn. Additionally, whenever you ingest a poison, you regain a number of HP equal to a roll of your Martial Arts die.

    Thematically, I love this. Sadly, 5.5 Monks lost their poison immunity, but this gives it back. Once again, remember that we can change our Poison damage to Acid, so even if we get a big breath in the face by a Green Dragon, we can turn that poison breath into acid to strike back at them (if we're fighitng a Black dragon, well, we will stick to poison damage). Funnily enough, the "ingest poison" thing turns those Basic Poisons we're making into kind of less-powerful healing potions. I do think we need to define what it means to ingest a poison: if we're in a poisonous swamp, how much swamp water do we need to drink in order for it to count?

Toxic Blood:

Whenever a creature hits you with a melee attack roll, the attacker takes 1d6 Poison damage. I fyou are bloodied, they instead take Poison damage equal to one of your Martial Arts dice.

    Punishing attackers is actually probably good for a Monk's survival. I think they can simplify this and just have it always do your Martial Arts die. A this level that's a d10, which is only two more damage on average than a d6. If we wanted it to be more powerful when Bloodied, just make it two martial arts dice then.

Level 17:

Hallucinogenic Breath

When you take the Attack action on your turn, you can expend 2 FP and replace one of your attacks with an exhalation of hallucinogenic vapors at one creature within 30 feet of you. The creature makes a Con save, and on a failure, they take Poison (or, again, Acid) damage equal to three rolls of your Martial Arts die and become Frightened for 1 minute or until they take damage. While frightened, they take the Dash action and move away from you by the safest route on each turn unless there's nowhere to move. On a success, the take half damage only.

    Real quick, obviously the initial damage doesn't break the frightened condition there. This notably circumvents immunity to the poisoned condition. The damage here is a side-feature - the main thing is that this is a single-target crowd control for potentially the entire encounter. And, notably, you can use this on multiple creatures, as using it on a second one doesn't cancel the effect on the first.

    That said, it's a Con save, so there's a fair chance they succeed against it. Still, I really like the flavor of this. Is it powerful? Is it worth 2 FP? I'm not entirely sure, though at least FP is pretty cheap by level 17. How many foes that we face are immune to being Frightened, though, at this level?

Overall Thoughts:

    I honestly think this is a pretty solid attempt at making a subclass based around Poisoning things, and accomplishes this largely by allowing you to swap in a different damage type (though weirdly, do we all think of both Poison and Acid as "green" damage types?)

    I'd love to allow you to Envenom your own unarmed strikes, as the subclass doesn't really do anything interesting with the fact that you need to fight with a weapon. But yeah, there are some cool ideas here, and overall these "villainous options" have demonstrated a lot of originality that I'm here for.

UA: Path of Lament Barbarian

 The Path of Lament is, in a word, the Banshee subclass. You are the victim of some powerful anguish and grief, and you turn to that grief to fuel your rage, inflicting fear, psychic damage, and some other specifically Banshee-like effects at higher levels.

From the start, I'll mention that this is certainly one of the "villain" subclasses that feels less outright villainous and more just dark and associated with a kind of monster - more like the Circle of Titans than the Hell Knight. You could easily play a sympathetic, good-aligned version of this. But let's get into the mechanics!

Level 3:

Banshee's Wail:

When you activate your Rage or as a bonus action while Rage is active, you can let out a doleful wail. Each creature in a 30-foot emanation of your choice makes a Con save (DC based on your Con). On a failure, they're deafened for 1 minute and take Psychic damage equal to a number of d12s equal to your Rage bonus.

You can use this Con times per long rest, and you can expend a rage to get an additional use.

    This is conceptually cool, but given that this is everything we get at level 3, I think we need more. Initially I was going to complain that a Berserker or a Zealot can get bonus damage every turn, while this is likely going to be only 3 times a day until very high levels. However, it is an AoE, which most Barbarians don't get at all. The damage is decent for what it is (3d12 is going to be 19.5, which is actually ok for a bonus action from a non-caster). The ability to regain a use from a Rage does sort of mean we can get one back on a short rest, as long as we don't need all our rages for the day.

    Still, I'd have liked something, even a ribbon feature, at level 3, beyond this.

Level 6:

Commune with the Dead:

You can cast Speak with Dead as a ritual, using Wisdom as your spellcasting ability.

    Hey, question: for spells without an attack or a DC, does a spellcasting ability ever come into play? As a feature, this is decent and thematic, and importantly is not alone at level 6.

Horrifying Strike:

Once per turn when you hit with a Strength-based attack while raging, you can try to horrify the target. The target makes a Wisdom save (again, DC based on your Con) or be Frightened until the start of your next turn.

    I think this should swap with Banshee's Wail. This makes a lot of sense as a level 3 feature, as you'll nearly always have it. Is it too powerful at level 3? Maybe. But truly, this feels like the banner, headlining feature of "the fear Barbarian." Again, it would be nice to base the DC on your Strength, but Barbarians will be pushing Con pretty heavily, so at level 6 we're probably talking a DC 14 or so.

Level 10:

Otherworldly Anguish:

You gain the following:

Deathly Wail: If a target fails its saving throw against Banshee's Wail and has HP equal to twice your Barbarian level or lower, it drops to 0 HP instead of taking damage.

    Ok, this is probably not as insane as it appears, but it's still decent. At this level, they need to be at 20 HP or below. At level 10, that's pretty close to dead anyway, but might still take more than one hit to do so, meaning that you could clear out some weakened foes (though you're unlikely to fight anything that starts off that low at this level). Consider that at this point, your Rage bonus is 3, so we'd be doing 19.5 average damage anyway, meaning there's a good chance that you'd be killing them with the psychic damage. That said, this will scale up faster and by more than your Wail's damage (which caps out at 26 on average). Again, great to use if a big AoE spell just took a lot of foes to low HP (though the damage also works well in that situation).

Impenetrable Sorrow:

You can't be possessed.

    Man, how often does that come up? Like the Circle of Pestilence giving you immunity to magical contagions (after 5.5 got rid of the idea of "diseases" as a mechanical thing) this feels extremely situational. I know that Ghosts do this, but does any other creature in the Monster Manual possess people? We can treat this like a ribbon.

Resistance:

You have resistance to Cold and Necrotic damage while raging.

    This is pretty good, though of course situational. Still, both damage types are fairly common, especially in an Undead-heavy campaign. The lack of Poison resistance is actually sort of fitting with this very incorporeal-undead theming, though maybe they could get psychic resistance?

Level 14:

Sorrow Form:

When you activate your rage, you become empowered with undeath. You gain these benefits for 1 minute or until you drop to 0 HP, and cannot activate this again until you finish a long rest:

    First off, weird that it only lasts 1 minute but is tied to Rage. And once per long rest "modes" like this in 5.5 usually have some alternate cost to reactivate them, though what might that be, "2 Rages?"

Immunities: You become immune to the Charmed and Frightened conditions and end those conditions if you have them when this is activated. You also cannot gain exhaustion levels.

    The Charm and Fear element, of course, is something Berserkers get anyway. We'll need to see more monsters that impose Exhaustion for the second part to be relevant.

Life-Draining Strike: When a creature fails its save against your Horrifying Strike, they take 2d10 Necrotic damage and you regain HP equal to the Necrotic damage taken.

    The damage here would be underwhelming if you didn't get the healing. Given that Barbarians are (at least in theory) more about soaking damage than avoiding it, healing is very good for them.

Undead: Your creature type is undead for the duration.

    I think it's actually notable here that this does make you immune to some spells, like Hold Person. It does make you vulnerable to Turn Undead, and while you won't be Frightened, you will become Incapacitated, and the "have to move away from you" element is independent of these conditions. So, just coordinate with your party Cleric, and maybe hold off on this when fighting undead (the bonus necrotic damage won't be very useful against a lot of them).

Overall Thoughts:

    I think there's a solid thematic idea to this, and the idea of tying Grief to Rage is a really potent one for roleplay opportunities. I don't see this character as being necessarily villainous, but that's fine - honestly the villain book will probably be more popular if the character options don't necessarily force you down the villainous route.

    Mainly I think that the subclass could use some "always on" feature at earlier levels - swapping Horrifying Strike and Banshee's Wail might do that (while limited by rage, 5.5 Barbarians almost never run out of Rages, so I think we're ok).

    Of all classes, Barbarian is one that I've spent the least time playing, so I'm always a little hesitant to proclaim with any great certainty how powerful this that or the other feature is. I suspect that this one won't do quite the damage of a Berserker, but the fear effect could be really powerful as a crowd control/defensive ability. And while limited, Banshee's Wail is a pretty hefty burst of AoE damage for a class that normally doesn't get to do any AoE.

    So much of the Barbarian class is about being this thick-skinned raging maniac, and I think that there's something really compelling about leaning into the emotional aspect of the class in a way that requires some vulnerability.

UA: Villainous Options 2

 Hey, we're loading up on more bad-guy player options!

We still don't know what product the options are coming with (though I've heard, I think Todd Kenreck implied that a Book of Vile Darkness might be in the works, though I don't know if that was insider information or educated speculation).

Anyway, this will be a shorter one, giving us three subclasses: the Barbarian's Path of Lament, the Monk's Warrior of Venom, and the Warlock's Primordial Patron.

I'll break them down in separate posts!

Expedition 33, A Year Later

 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, with its typically French "subtitle for a non-sequel" title, took me and many by surprise last year. My first time hearing about it was when Jacob Geller mentioned being impressed with its turn-based combat that called to mind Sekiro (the one FromSoft souls-like I've never actually played). It was relatively cheap (I think 50 bucks) and I decided to get it on a whim, despite the fact that I was not quite done with Lies of P, which I came to a couple years after it came out (and as it turned out, just a couple months before its excellent Overture DLC).

Especially given that I had found myself frustrated by Final Fantasy XVI's complete and total abandonment of any sort of RPG gameplay (especially galling given how beautifully the FFVII remake series has come up with a fantastic blend of action combat with tactical, menu-based gameplay that I think of as being definitional to the series perhaps because I am old), it was really exciting to drop into a turn-based RPG, and one that also glowed with originality.

After beating the game, I found myself pining for a game like Expedition 33, only to lament that, well, there wasn't really anything like it. Now, I'll concede that the gameplay system is arguably not wholly original - I've never played the Persona games, but I'm given to understand that there's a lot of that that inspired Expedition 33. But the world of the game is truly unlike any other, with creature design, world design, and music that I really don't think I've seen anywhere else.

The folks at Sandfall have said that they intend to make sequels, and I can very easily see the "Clair Obscur" series going on to have other entries.

The nature of the game's story, though, makes me feel that it would best make sense to take the Final Fantasy approach and have each entry be connected by themes and motifs but not by plot - perhaps allowing only the "Writers versus Painters" narrative that is vaguely hinted at in E33 carry on.

E33 (yeah, I'm abbreviating it about as much as I can) is a gorgeous game and also one of the bleakest stories I've ever seen in video games. The prologue, which establishes the stakes and the initial premise of the game, is both horrifying and gutwrenchingly sad, but as the layers are pulled back and the truth of what is actually going on comes to light, it gets even tougher. Players are left with a binary choice at the end of the game that inspires a lot of philosophical debate, and basically, there's no way to feel 100% comfortable with what choice you make unless you refuse to engage in any philosophical nuance.

The story, the art direction, the excellent vocal and physical performances, music, etc., are all extremely praiseworthy. The gameplay is also deeply satisfying, but I do feel like I need to place an asterisk here:

This is a game that you can start to break at higher levels. There is a level cap (99, fittingly three times 33, the game's main arc number) but there is no cap on Lumina (wait, did I confuse that with a similar resource in Pragmata or do they use the same word?) The game encourages you to come up with "builds," and while I think early on, when you have very limited lumina and pictos, this is a fun bit of figuring out which bits work best for you (I focused a lot on parrying, and tended to load up on stuff that benefited that) but at the extremes, you start to hit a point where characters are doing insane one-shot combos. Meanwhile, it feels like enemies (especially in the free DLC) are built based on the assumption that that is what you're doing.

Likewise, because dodging and parrying allows you to fully avoid all damage (the only exceptions are undodgeable debuffs that lower your max HP,) late game monsters have such absurdly long attack combos and deceptive parry timing, and hit so hard, that it feels like you need to have those broken builds to beat them (ok, to be fair, this was mainly just Simon in the base game - I was able to beat Clea sort of conventionally by just figuring out the parry timing, and I think she probably counts as the second-hardest boss of the base game).

To be honest, I prefer a game where the potential for power coming from a build is sort of bounded, which then imposes reasonable restrictions on how tough a foe can be (they can still be insanely tough - I have beaten Promised Consort Radahn in Elden Ring - though only once, and after the patch that nerfed him a couple weeks after Shadow of the Erdtree came out).

Still, the experience of the main story campaign, and most of the post-game stuff, was tuned really well, I thought. (I might have made it clear that there was a post-game, as I assumed the game would just end after I finished the main story and so did all that stuff first, except maybe Simon, and was thus way over-leveled for the final boss).

I also recall early on that the tutorialization of specifically Pictos and Luminas was a little confusing. And another nitpick is that I think the weapon upgrade system was a bit flawed - the final upgrade nearly doubles the weapon's power, and given that there are a finite number of items to make that final upgrade, that felt bad. In FromSoft games, which use a similar weapon upgrade system, the final upgrade isn't much more of a jump in power than any other upgrade, and that means it's easy enough to try out a bunch of weapons at just one level below, for which upgrade items are unlimited if you get enough resources (at least in Elden Ring. I think maybe in Bloodborne Bloodstone Chunks were also finite).

I haven't gone back to play through the game a second time - I believe that you can make multiple save files (something I've always lamented you couldn't do in Control, which is a very different game but one that also captured my imagination) but I've been caught between impulses to just start fresh or do NG+. And also, I don't know if I'm ready for the game to hurt me so bad again.

I do hope to see a new Clair Obscur game, and hope it will address some of the gameplay quibbles I have (though I understand that these are more matters of taste, and the folks at Sandfall might not feel the same way). Whatever the story of the next one, I hope we get the whimsical creature design, the over-the-top Frenchness, and I also hope that Gestrals will be the Moogles/Chocobos of the series, showing up in all of them, because I adore the Gestrals.

Pragmata: Hacking and Blasting Bots on the Moon

 Having heard good things but not a whole lot else, I decided to roll the dice and get Pragmata, the latest entry in what is apparently a very good year for Capcom.

In Pragmata, you play as Hugh, one of four technicians sent to the Delphi moon base to respond to some kind of technical problem. Shortly into your arrival, signs of strangeness abound: the augmented gravity is offline, there are no people, and there are signs of chaos. And then, a moonquake hits and two of your buddies are blasted into the vacuum (though everyone's in space suits, so I'm not convinced that they are dead) and then your commander gets crushed by a falling beam.

Hugh gets knocked out, but is patched up by an android who appears like a little girl. The android, a "Pragmata" that is of a separate kind of technology than the rest of the base, teams up with you to fight the base's robotic laborers who have all gone crazy and homicidal, and eventually Hugh comes up with an alternative name to her long serial number: Diana.

Gameplay works the following way: Hugh has a number of guns to shoot robots with, but in order to damage them, Diana needs to hack them. Targeting one of these bots in classic 3rd person shooter style will pull up a grid, and you'll use the face buttons (Triangle, Circle, X, and Square on a PlayStation one) to navigate through that maze until you get the robot to open up, exposing itself to attack and thus actual significant damage.

Strangely, it recalls Alan Wake, where the monsters must be exposed to light from your flashlight (or other sources) to remove the darkness shield before you can damage them. After a while, the bots will close up their armor again, so you'll need to hack them repeatedly if they're longer-lived foes like a boss. Various wrinkles appear that make hacking more complex. At base, you have a number of nodes that can increase the damage that Diana does with a hack, and you'll also get to pick up yellow upgrade nodes that can add effects when the target is hacked (these are treated like ammo - using them will consume them, but you can sometimes find them out in the field). Other complexities arise as the game goes on, including some negative ones, like barriers your hacking path cannot go through, or some enemies who get red shields that block off parts of the hacking grid.

While made on the RE engine, this game allows you faster movement options, like a thruster-assisted dodge that can assist both in navigating various jumping puzzles and also dodging out of the way of enemy attack (the third major boss, which I just beat, I managed on my first attempt to sit at just 36 out of a few thousand HP by being very good at dodging, though I did eventually fall and have to make a second attempt).

Hugh will be able to carry weapons in four categories, but he'll always have a weapon that simply recharges instead of being limited in ammo. The more specialized weapons (which are more or less high-damage, crowd control, and defensive) will only have a few shots, but you can also find more in the world.

There's a very slight Dark Souls element here, where enemies will respawn when you go back to your Shelter, the home base for Hugh and Diana, but this lets you then farm the Lumina that is used to buy upgrades.

While Hugh is fairly fast on his feet, the pace of combat is a little closer to those Survival Horror games the engine was built for, which is good because you're going to have moments where you have to pay attention to the hacking game. Figuring out when you have an opening to do so is part of the tactical gameplay you need to learn.

The base is divided into levels, but you can always come back to places you've visited (except possibly the opening prologue area). That said, after three such areas, I've gotten only one ability that opens up previously-blocked pathways, so I don't know that it's meant to be a true Metroidvania.

Story-wise, the base is exploring some substance discovered or at least developed on the moon that is some profoundly effective medium for 3D printing. The second level centers around a bizarre facsimile of Times Square built out of the stuff. While most of the enemies are pretty classic robots, it's in this area that we come across the first genuinely unnerving robot designs, which are towering humanoids with vaguely infantile proportions. The "goomba" robots are also humanoid, but are more realistically proportioned and only a little taller than Hugh.

The antagonist is IDUS, the base's controlling AI, which seems to have determined that any living human is an intruder. While it pops up (in the form of a floating holographic logo) periodically, it hasn't really demonstrated any personality other than an intent to kill Hugh.

The emotional core of the game, of course, is the bond between Hugh and Diana. Interestingly, I don't think you ever "die" in the game - Diana drags you back to the shelter and patches you up, and if you fall to a boss, there'll even be some dialogue between you about how you might do better next time. Even as Hugh is introduced as a skeptic toward "bots," he very quickly starts to treat Diana both as a person and as a child he intends to protect. Hugh mentions being single and childless, and was adopted, so he knows a thing or two about finding family outside of your bloodline. Diana has only ever existed on the moon, and knows very little about life on Earth (despite the fancy high-tech in the game, life on Earth is depicted as pretty modern - New York taxis are still yellow. Given all the talk about taking Diana to Earth when they're done here, I'm expecting some kind of tearjerker ending.

The game encourages you to play defensively. Healing items out in the world are quite rare, and while you can load up on healing cartridges, these can only be recharged back at the Shelter. You'll discover passages back to the Shelter in each level, which function a bit like your Dark Souls III bonfires, letting you warp back to the hub to upgrade things and also restore ammo and healing.

Again, exploration is rewarded because you'll find lots of items to upgrade your duo's capabilities. Your map is maybe even less useful than it is in Control - you'll want to form a mental map instead to understand the spatial relationships between the various locations. In the first level, there's a big room where you need to find five lock nodes to hack, and the exercise in one in figuring out all the tightly-packed routes you need to take to reach each node in a relatively small but vertical space.

I feel like I've been charging through the game, but I guess it's a sign that the gameplay is fun if I spent most of my waking hours today playing it. The second major boss was a fantastic set-piece, and I look forward to other epic experiences moving forward.

Monstrous Assaults and Timing the Hunt in Deathblow

 Van Helsing and Lucy's Suitors see Dracula long before they get the killing blow. While horror often thrives by keeping the monster out of sight, its presence still needs to be known before we reach a story's climax.

In cinema, we can easily cut away from our protagonists to see the monster doing its thing, but in TTRPGs, generally speaking, the focus of the narrative tends to stay on our heroes. Again, that doesn't preclude an appearance by the monster.

Generally, as I've been conceptualizing Deathblow as a game, I've treated The Hunt as a period in which filling out your Tracking Points is crucial to finding the monster in order to fight them. But I think there's a bit of a problem in that, to begin with:

The longer you take to track down the monster, the more opportunities you have to find clues and, as we discusses in the previous post, gain Wrath to fight it with.

We need, then, to incentivize finding the monster faster. And we do this by coming up with a punishment: the monster kills again.

Again, my dream for whatever "monster book" the game comes with (conceding that this would probably all come in one volume) is that each entry has, yes, a stat block, but also an entire guide to building an adventure around them, including what sort of environment to run it in and literally how many NPCs we should be working with.

One of the reasons to have a set number of (manageable) NPCs is so that we have victims that can be killed off by the monster if the party takes too long.

Again, most of these stories take place in isolated locations, though even in an urban environment, it might be limited to a palatial townhouse or a slum in some neglected neighborhood. I'd like it if GMs could reasonably expect to know every NPC in the adventure environment, or at least give them a name and a one-sentence description ("Hob the Butcher, young man who took over after his father died, bit standoffish").

The Night Hunters are here to prevent more death at the hands of the monsters, so the threat of that "more death" has to be a thing.

Tracking time in TTRPGs can be difficult - it's one of my issues with, in D&D, effects that last an hour versus ten minutes, because functionally there's very little difference between them in gameplay. But there are games that have tried to solve this: Blades in the Dark introduces the idea of clocks, where players want to fill in clocks that represent their progress toward something, while they want to prevent bad clocks from filling up (like the guard becoming aware of their activities).

I think we can borrow something like this, but it will require that we be a little more mechanical with each of our "scenes." If we imagine that a PC going to perform some investigative task takes a certain amount of time, we can say that, success or failure, that adds a notch to our "Hunger" clock.

Indeed, this might be a way to incentivize the players to split up - if we use an initiative-like system to take turns performing Hunt tasks, the players might be able to find multiple clues before the Hunger clock gets a single tick.

This also solves another issue: penalizing failure in non-life-threatening situations. In Draw Steel, Negotiations give important NPCs a Patience score, which diminishes as the players make arguments. Successes can raise their Interest, and thus secure better outcomes from the Negotiations, but once their Interest is exhausted, the Negotiation ends. And what this does is solve a problem of players trying to get the perfect outcome by overcoming their bad rolls with insistent roleplay. I'm all for roleplay, but negative consequences for failure are important.

In this case, we could actually be more lenient with players who want to collect all the clues and might keep working at something for which they failed a check - say the Hunter failed their survival checks after discovering a set of tracks going into the woods, but they want to try to pick it up again - well, that's fine. You just fill the Hunger clock up on the same clue to try again.

What happens when the Hunger clock fills?

Well, I think that the most obvious thing is that an NPC is killed by the monster. But I also think that we have the potential for the monster to attack our Night Hunters.

There's risk here: it would be really anticlimactic for the party to fail their way into killing the monster. And I think for this reason, this kind of attack (we could call it a Monstrous Assault, maybe?) probably can only end with the monster fleeing, and not dying. I think we could maybe have the monster trigger its Escape immediately upon becoming Bloodied (at half Stamina).

The consequence here, naturally, would be the loss of Stamina, but also potentially the loss of Wrath that had been gathered previously, as the party will likely need to expend some of their Wrath to fight off the monster or heal up injured allies.

Indeed, I had talked about having lesser monsters appear on some Hunts where it makes sense (if we have some kind of Lich-like monster at high levels, they might have undead zombie minions) and while I think that these could exist as normal environmental challenges (maybe to get to the ruined shack on the island in the pond outside of town where some clues to the town history are held, you need to face off against the monsters that wait in the silt at the bottom of said pond) I also think that a Monstrous Assault might include sending minions to attack the party.

There could even be Discipline-spending abilities that help speed up one of these attacks - an Inquisitor might have a "Divine Abjuration" ability that can compel a monster of certain types (undead, demons, for example) to flee, which could just work instantly or maybe it raises the remaining Stamina at which the monster flees.

Again, the game doesn't have opportunity attacks, and uses a more narrative-based logic on how easy it is for a monster to run away from a fight because that's true to the genre. Monstrous Assaults should be harrowing encounters and not be seen as opportunities for the party to get a quick kill in - though we might still reward the party with Identify points, given how much information can be gleaned by glimpsing the monster.

Skills and the Hunt in Deathblow

 I think the most challenging aspect of design for my hypothetical Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG Deathblow is figuring out how to do The Hunt.

The intent for Deathblow is that hunting the monsters should feel as exciting and engaging as fighting the monster. While the final fight ought to feel epic and climactic, the sort of "detective work" that constitutes The Hunt needs to feel engaging as a piece of mechanically rich gameplay, but without being so heavy-handed that it crowds out roleplay opportunities.

In 5E, non-combat gameplay engages primarily in the Ability Check mechanic - a very simple mechanic in which players attempting to do various things get a success or a failure based on their total roll and the difficulty class the DM chooses. There are other systems that can be engaged: spellcasters can often have spells that function best out of combat, and using them can create an interesting tension between the desired utility of a non-combat spell with the sacrifice of that spell slot's use in combat. I think Ability Checks, though, remain the primary way that the Exploration and Social pillars of the game are executed, mechanically (though I think the 5.5 redesign tried to grant out-of-combat features to non-spellcasters that sometimes involve the same trade-off, like a Barbarian using Rage to enhance various skills and use Strength with them instead of their normal ability modifiers).

Spending resources in order to use character abilities is one of the most popular ways of making engaging gameplay - by limiting an action, and potentially other actions by expending a more universal resource, to a certain number of uses per adventure/day/whatever, the player is forced to think strategically about when to use that ability so that it has the greatest impact on their potential success.

At the same time, though, I think a good system needs some unlimited character abilities. If everything is limited, using up all of your resources means you start to also lose some of your identity as a character. If I have the Mage Hand cantrip on a Wizard in D&D, I might have blown through all my spell slots, but I can still do something that feels wizardly and magical.

Currently, the idea that I find really fascinating and would love to move forward with if it could work is that The Hunt, as I'm calling the non-combat part of an adventure in which you seek out the monster, is where you generate your resources to then use in combat.

I think it makes a certain thematic sense - the more you can learn about the monster's habits, history, and nature, the better prepared you'll be when you confront it, and this would reward a thorough hunt with greater power to bring against it.

    So, let's lay down how we imagine The Hunt working on a broad level:

An adventure begins with the Night Hunters (our PCs) called in to deal with a deadly monster. They arrive at the adventure location - which would probably most classically be some rural hamlet out in a dark wood, but could be an aristocrat's manor house, an urban slum, or some work camp like a quarry or a mine - and begin to look for signs of the monster.

The Night Hunters have a couple of goals they can work toward in their Hunt. Right now, I have it broken down into just two categories: Track and Identify.

Tracking the monster is all about finding its location. While the monster might be on the move (it is, after all, preying upon the people in the area) it ought to have a resting place somewhere in the area, like a vampire's hidden coffin in which they rest during the day (note that in this game, we're going with Dracula-style vampires, who don't burst into flame with the sun, but just lose some of their abilities - definitely easier to kill them in the day, but not so simple as ripping the curtains down).

Identify would be to figure out what kind of monster it is. The idea would be that the people being preyed upon only know that people are going missing or bodies are piling up, and there would likely be some confusion over what kind of monster it is - I like the idea of a False Vampire (I think it's a minion type for Draw Steel's summoner) that, in this game, would probably be a more Lovecraftian alien than a classic undead blood-sucker, but might leave victims exsanguinated and thus confuse those investigating.

Collecting clues of these categories (and others if I can think of them) would grant certain benefits to the party - indeed, I imagined that we could note on a stat block what information getting a certain proportion of the Identify Clues would give the party, literally spelling out that they have, say, resistance to fire damage. One of the key things Identify could help with is if the monster has special Deathblow requirements, like using a silver weapon to kill a werewolf.

Each monster would, in its stat block, show how many of each clues you're supposed to seed in a adventure, and then have a list of suggestions of what the nature of the clues might be.

The intent here is that the GM who wants to run a Deathblow adventure would pick out a monster they find interesting (and level-appropriate for the party) and from the monster entry get some suggestions on where such a monster might operate, what its lair might be like, and then that list of clues to seed. The GM then builds an adventure location that can fit all those things, and ideally this makes it pretty easy to feel like you've got the adventure sorted out.

    But let's return to a focus on the players:

The clues can't just be like objects to collect off the ground like you're in an N64-era Rareware platform game. While they have a clear and precise mechanical meaning, the clues should still feel situated in the world and as part of an unfolding narrative.

For example, if your monster is a powerful ghost (we'd probably have a variety of ghost-like monsters - we'll say a Specter is a level 1 or 2 threat. Remember that we're probably looking at a level cap of 5). Maybe the kind of ghost it is leaves ectoplasm as a residue in places where it has appeared.

If it's just some weird goo, it feels like we might be able to identify it with a quick skill check - something that in D&D would probably be an Arcana check (or Religion, as that's officially the knowledge skill related to Undead). But I think we're looking for something more compelling.

Let's imagine that there is an Ectoplasm clue to find, but in the world of our game, that stuff isn't immediately obvious - maybe instead of dripping clear jelly, it's an invisible residue, and so you need a Mechanist with a Residue Identifier ability or an Occultist with a Read the Signs ability, each of which might do somewhat different things but can both secure this clue.

I think these abilities need to be somewhat broadly designed: the joy of a TTRPG as opposed to a digital game is that you can be flexible and tailor the experience to the players. Indeed, I think that my Mechanist ability in the previous paragraph is a little too specific - you'd only use that to get precisely this clue.

Read the Signs, though, as an Occultist ability, has more potential: Let's say that the ability lets you detect the presence of supernatural activity. The ability just gives a Yes or No binary response, but the supernatural energies could be anything from ectoplasm to demonic energies to alien spatial warping.

What this would then open up is a roll-based check to determine what kind of "Signs" the ability detects. If our Occultist rolls well on their Investigation, they might find that, yes, this is specifically ectoplasm and therefore we're dealing with an incorporeal undead spirit. That, then, might give us an Identify Point.

Now, do we have multiple resources?

In Diablo III, the Demon Hunter class (which truly fits a "classic Night Hunter" aesthetic, and might be a major inspiration for our Hunter class) has two resources, Hatred and Discipline, other than the other classes that only use one. Generally, Hatred is the shorter-term resource used for damaging abilities, which comes and goes at a fast rate. Discipline, then, is more for utility abilities and I don't think there are any abilities that generate it - you just need to let it regenerate over time.

I think we could take a similar approach. While I like the idea of each class having its own resource name, we could probably get away with just giving them all the same resources. But the dual-resource system could help us figure out how to do the Hunt versus Combat.

Perhaps players begin an adventure with full Discipline (which I think is a reasonable name for the more utility-focused resource) but an empty tank for Wrath (ooh, yeah, I like that). Discipline can be spent on abilities like the Occultist's Read the Signs, and the expectation is that you're going to largely be spending it on non-combat abilities.

Each time you successfully discover a clue (so, for instance, our Occultist uses Read the Signs and then succeeds on their Investigation roll to determine that there's Ectoplasm) you gain some Wrath. Maybe it's just one, or maybe each clue counts for 3 Wrath (we'd need to figure out how many clues that we're expecting you to find before you face the monster).

Now, two things, I think, ought to be true:

First is that you should be able to discover some Clues with clever thinking or lucky rolls without spending Discipline. Let's say that the party's Warrior finds a fellow veteran in town, buys them a round of drinks, and through effective RP and some good Persuasion checks (currently I'm just using 5E skills as examples - we'll get to that) discovers that there's a rumor that the kindly old lady living at the top of the hill actually killed her abusive husband when she was younger, and that the community has just agreed not to speak of it because they all agreed she was in the right and didn't want the authorities to punish her for it. That could be a major clue to the location (Tracking) and type (Identify) of ghost we're dealing with, even if the Warrior didn't expend any resources to get it. Just a great boon for the party.

The other is that using an ability shouldn't always automatically net you that clue. The party's Hunter might have heard some stories about livestock going missing and choose to use some ability, maybe "Listen to the Wild," to figure out if some monster was snatching chickens, but then finds that it was a mundane fox and unrelated to the monstrous killings.

Now, what the rewards for these successes should be is a little up in the air: I like the idea of identifying the monster being something the whole party is rewarded for. I'm tempted to say that only the character who discovers a clue gains Wrath (maybe a player using an ability to assist them gains some Wrath as well). But horror thrives on isolation, and I think giving the party an incentive to split up is actually really good for us (even if, as GM, you'll want to be sure not to linger too long on any given scene to ensure that the players feel that they're getting an equal share of the spotlight).

I honestly think that skills might work pretty similarly to D&D. While I'd want to use modifiers rather than D&D's archaic score-versus-modifier thing, I think the fundamental idea that we have a modifier that combines something with our basic stats and try to hit a target number works. I might go for more of a 3.5 idea in which we get a certain number of skill ranks to invest in particular skills each level so that players can specialize a little more (and overcome low stats - maybe our Assassin doesn't read a lot of books, and has a low Knowledge stat, but they're very good at reading a scene, and have a lot of ranks in Investigation). (Also, thinking of changing the Assassin class name. Cuthroat? Outlaw? Nothing final yet).

A lot of creative work needs to go into figuring out what Hunt abilities each class would get. As I see it, each class should get the same number of them (and the same number of combat abilities,) and I imagine that at level 1, we're probably coming in with, like, two or three. Each would be thematic to the class fantasy - the Hunter is going to use non-magical tracking abilities, maybe they can set a trap (something that could potentially create bonus clues?). Meanwhile, the Witch or Occultist is going to have stuff that's more like magical spells, speaking to the dead or viewing things that happened in the past (the sort of thing in the latter case that might yield an opportunity for a perception check).

I think when it comes to skills, the Monster should determine target numbers for it. As I see it, clues would come in various difficulties, with each monster requiring a number of easy, moderate, and difficult clues to find, and the monster would set the difficulties for each of those types of clues.

Ideally, the monster would leave only a little work to the GMs - to come up with a setting and NPCs, and then just make sure there's room to place all the clues in their environment.

Next thing I want to talk about is the duration of the Hunt, and potential early encounters.

Solo or Boss Monster Design in Deathblow

 I learned a harsh lesson early on in my tenure as a DM for D&D. My players had had a couple of short encounters in their adventures, but I had them go to The Tomb of Sed, an ancient ruin dedicated to a no-longer-worshipped deity (the truth was that Sed was actually an angelic servant of one of the real gods who had not yet revealed herself in that era,) which was a small dungeon with basically a trap, some Shadows, and a Spectator waiting for them as the dungeon boss.

Spectators are CR 3, and the party was, I think, either level 2 or 3 at this point (they were XP leveling, and with the undertuned encounters from the 2014 DMG, leveling was a bit slow).

However, when they got to the final room, a sort of concave inverted step pyramid, with the Spectator hovering near the bottom, the Fighter and Paladin both beat it initiative and killed it before it could get a turn, with a lucky smite-crit sealing the deal.

Spectators are odd because they're a little on the complex side to be just a minion, but they're not legendary creatures like Beholders (they're also not assumed to be evil-aligned).

Gaming tradition holds a very popular trope: the Boss. I don't know exactly where the term originated, but it makes a certain amount of sense - the biggest, toughest enemy is in charge of all the little minions you've been fighting leading up to that point, even if, narratively, that's not really what's happening.

To define what a boss is in games, I guess we should narrow it down to various points:

They are a tougher enemy that requires more time, effort, and strategy than a normal enemy.

They are typically unique, or at least rare compared to other monster types (this depends a lot on genre - some games have far too many levels/areas for every boss to be totally unique, though repeating bosses are sometimes considered more mini-bosses).

They tend to come at the end of a level/dungeon, or at least after a significant stretch of non-boss enemies. (There are exceptions here when they want to subvert an idea, like Phantoon in Super Metroid, whom you fight first before all the enemies on the Wrecked Ship activate.)

They are often fought alone, or if fought among other enemies, they are by far the biggest threat. (Again, there are exceptions here, with dual-bosses like Ornstein and Smough from Dark Souls, where the biggest part of the challenge is that you have to fight two bosses at the same time.)

    Both D&D and Draw Steel - the systems that are clearly doing the most to inspire Deathblow's mechanics - have ways of doing Bosses.

In D&D, these are Legendary creatures. Legendary creatures have two explicit design elements that other monsters don't. First, and probably most impactful, is Legendary Actions. Ordinarily, a monster can only do anything when it's not their turn using a single reaction. Legendary Actions give them three opportunities to do something in between players' (or other monsters') turns. Next, they have Legendary Resistance, which allows these boss-like monsters to automatically succeed on saving throws. I think the intent here is primarily to avoid crowd-control abilities and spells that would end the fight immediately, like Banishment. A third aspect of Legendary monsters in 5.5 that doesn't get as much of an explicit call-out is that they tend to have either proficiency or, at higher levels, expertise in Initiative. This makes it far more likely that the monster gets to act first.

Draw Steel approaches things somewhat similarly, but also tends to be more explicit in how a boss is distinct from other monsters. Leaders are designed to be those fights with minions, but Solo monsters have several features that try to make them serious, epic threats.

For Deathblow, the focus on combat would be high-stakes boss fights, effectively. A bit like Shadow of the Colossus, this would be a game in which (nearly) all combat is against singular, memorable, epic monsters.

That means that every "headliner" monster, which would be the majority of those found in any monster book the game might have, would need to be cool, unique, and interesting.

Monster design is a tricky and subtle thing: I saw a sneak preview of Cthulhu's stat block coming in the upcoming Ravenloft book, and initially I was underwhelmed, as he just kind of has a grab attack and then something that can deal psychic damage to grappled creatures, along with some teleportation abilities. But then I saw that in his spellcasting trait, he can cast both Dream and Geas, and can target creatures with Geas while invading their dreams. This is... well, it's pretty Cthulhu, isn't it? And it creates some interesting opportunities for gameplay before Initiative is rolled (I'd have to probably run him to see how he feels to play actually in combat).

Still, broadly speaking, boss monsters need to overcome the problems with the action economy. If your boss monster is outnumbered by the party (which should be the case every time) they run into this problem where the party just has more opportunities to do things than they do. The party can respond with many different things to each act that the monster performs.

Notably, I think that something like Multiattack among D&D monsters doesn't really solve this - Multiattack tends to commit you to doing one major "verb," as in "attacking," and while they might split their attacks between targets, chances are that they're all coming toward a single PC, so it's actually not all that different from just one big attack.

Legendary actions, thus, are a big part of fixing this. But Legendary Actions are also often limited. In 5.5, typically you get two or three Legendary Action options, one of which is a standard attack while the other one or two are going to be more flashy things that might involve movement or imposing conditions on PCs, but can only be used once per round.

Draw Steel has rough equivalences to a lot of 5E tech: Legendary Resistance is replaced with a feature that lets the boss pay health to end conditions on it - another way of eliminating the "null result" and giving players a consolation prize for imposing conditions. Villain Actions are like Legendary Actions, but each only gets used once per encounter, and they tend to be bigger and flashier because of this.

But I think the really fascinating bit of tech in Draw Steel's solo monsters is that they get multiple turns per round. In Draw Steel, there's no set turn order determined by individual initiative rolls - instead, the party and the monsters alternate turns (with weaker monsters getting to act in squads on the same turn). Solo Monsters get to take two turns a round, and just need to let at least one PC go between their turns.

This, naturally, lets the monster do a lot more in a fight because they're literally getting twice as many turns (unless they get killed before they take their second turn of a round).

However, I wonder if we could take this further.

In Daggerheart - a system I am admittedly far less familiar with - there is no established initiative whatsoever. Instead, players can take turns until something causes the "spotlight" to revert to the GM. I know that this happens when someone rolls with Fear (which happens roughly though a little less than 50% of the time - now I want to figure that out mathematically,) but the GM can also spend Fear to take the spotlight. I also think that in Age of Umbra they might also get it when an attack misses, though I might have misunderstood that.

The point is, in that game, the monsters can potentially act far more often, and I get the sense/vibes that the game was designed to make individual monsters far more threatening because of this.

So, what if we did the following:

What if the monster gets a turn after every PC's turn?

The consequence here, which could be good or bad, is that the monster scales significantly with the number of players at the table. If you have a tight band of three Night Hunters, the monster gets three turns per round. If you have a hefty squad of 6 players, the monster gets six turns.

The good thing here is that the monster naturally has scaling action economy. I don't think we need anything like Legendary Actions or Villain Actions when the monster is constantly on the move. The party is never going to be able to overwhelm the monster with sheer numbers, because the more they bring, the more the monster can fight back.

The bad thing is where that throws all the other elements of scaling. Having a large party will still let you kill the monster in a shorter number of rounds (assuming the Stamina doesn't scale up as well with the party size) but if the monster is getting more turns, that means that damage-per-round on both sides is scaling up by a fair amount, and thus, the target of the monster's attacks is going to take more damage between each of their turns.

To illustrate: a party with a Witch, Warrior, and Assassin is confronting a Banshee. The Banshee has some kind of Death Wail attack that deals, say, an average of 10 psychic damage. The Warrior, whose abilities are probably focused on holding a monster's attention and protecting allies (basically tanking) is getting her full ire. So, on a round, the Warrior is taking all the Banshee's attacks and so can expect to take 30 damage per round if we're using the "monsters act after every turn" approach.

But if the party now consists of the Warrior, Witch, Assassin, and also a Hunter, Inquisitor, and Occultist. The party is putting (on average) twice as much damage out, but the Banshee is now getting twice as many turns, meaning that the Warrior is now taking 60 damage per round, rather than 30.

Is that ok? Are we ok with that?

Because there's a world in which that might be all right - maybe the challenge of playing in a large group of Night Hunters is that you need to be more specialized and coordinated. Not only does the Warrior focus on keeping the Banshee from attacking their allies, but the other players need to use abilities that help keep the Warrior up - the Witch might need to use more healing abilities, and the Hunter might need to use abilities that reduce a monster's damage output or perhaps draw them away (physically) from their target. And perhaps, in a larger group, Warriors (or anyone who takes on the task of tanking the boss, which I could see being something that Inquisitors and maybe Mechanists would be decent at - maybe Assassins could as well, but in more of a "focus on me as I run away" manner) would need to focus more on defensive abilities while in smaller groups they can contribute more to damage.

One of the things I really like about Draw Steel's solo monsters is that they have way more Stamina than lesser monsters of the same level. A Werewolf (one of the two level 1 solo monsters) has 200 Stamina, compared with 26 for a level 1 Platoon creature (platoon being the organization level where you can have roughly one monster per player in the encounter if they're the same level). In other words, if I had four level 1 players in Draw Steel, I could have them fighting four Dwarf Gunners, who would have a total of 104 Stamina, or a Werewolf with a total of 200 Stamina.

While that might seem inappropriately spongey, I actually think it's smart - even with the various action-economy enhancements like the second turn and Villain Actions, it's still not quite matching what four less powerful monsters could do. Having the beefy stamina means that the monster is going to be able to stick around long enough to actually get to do their cool stuff.

If we really want to scale the monsters to the party size, what if they had Stamina based on the size of the party as well?

Again, if we've got this Banshee, maybe she has 50 Stamina per party member, so in that group of 3, she's got 150 Stamina and if it's the larger party, she's got 300.

Now, are we worried about double-dipping? The monster is already doing twice as much damage to the party if we're letting it act after every PC's turn. Now, we're making it last twice as long. Thus, doubling the party effectively quadruples the monster's total damage output, because we can assume it's going to get twice as many turns before it's taken down.

Assuming an average damage output among players - say 15 per turn - we can then assume that regardless of the number of players, the monster should last a certain number of rounds. 3 players doing 15 damage per round each would mean 45 damage per round and thus could put out 150 damage some time in the middle of round 4. 6 players doing 15 damage per round would do 90 damage per round in total, and thus would have hit 300 damage again some time during round 4 on average.

    But there are other ways to scale monster damage with a party.

The biggest, most obvious one, is just multi-target damage. If that Death Wail doesn't just hit one Night Hunter, but damages everyone within 60 feet or something, that is probably going to hit the majority of the party, if not everyone. And in that case, the monster is literally dealing more damage the more players there are.

One of the goals I'd have with combat design (which is likely to take a lot of cues from Draw Steel, though I'm going to stick with real-world measurements like feet, even if under the hood it'll really be units of 5 feet that act like "squares" in Draw Steel) is to make sure that creatures don't get locked down in place. In cinematic fights, movement is a huge thing - you almost never see two combatants just standing in the same place (the lightsaber duel in the original Star Wars is notable in how kind of dull it is, which got corrected in Empire Strikes Back with the deadly cat-and-mouse game between Luke and Vader).

Deathblow would eliminate Opportunity Attacks in order to encourage constant re-positioning and use of terrain.

But to get to the point regarding boss design, I think that bosses are probably going to also jump from target to target a lot - indeed, I'm not sure that I'd really design tank-y abilities, or at least taunt-like abilities. Tanks would be built to endure attacks, but I think they won't be able to compel monsters to strike them instead of their allies except by doing things like grappling or otherwise reducing the monsters' movement abilities.

This could, in a weird way, actually benefit the players because if the monster is not going to focus down a single player, the size of the party effectively raises the total Stamina of the party.

That being said, we don't want monster design to rely on GMs playing suboptimally. If the monster is going to be jump from target to target, they'd want an incentive to do so.

And surely, different monsters might act differently. I could imagine a Banshee being evasive and using ranged screams that damage multiple PCs, so the challenge is reaching her and getting your strikes in. A Hexen (again, my vaguely Hag-like equivalent) would probably want to place curses on each of the party members, which might require them to get up close to them sneakily. Maybe the curses scale up in damage as the monster puts more of them on the target. A vampire, on the other hand, probably tries to isolate and exsanguinate individual targets.

Multi-target attacks plus action scaling per player once again double-dips.

So, while it might be the most boring way of doing this, I think that maybe the right call for monster scaling here is to simply have the Stamina scale up with the number of party members. I do think that this should, all in all, actually favor the players because a larger party is covering more bases, and can specialize in ways to tip them over the top - say the Occultist has various ways of boosting the damage of other players through eldritch rites while the Hunter can make the monster more vulnerable with certain attacks, opening up the Assassin to land some insanely high-damage blow that is more than what they would get if they were just each individually trying for their best damage abilities (like a Grave Cleric doing Path to the Grave before a Paladin hits with a Divine Smite in 5E).

Still, we'll want to at least boost the action economy of a monster. I really like Draw Steel's "two turns per round" approach, which is a flat boost rather than a scaling one, but does simplify the math and also allows the monster to mostly adhere to the same action economy rules as the player while still letting them do more things.

If we're really worried about scaling Stamina double-dipping with AoE effects, we could target-cap AoE abilities. I think melee-focused monsters like a werewolf might not be much of an issue - if their "Sweeping Rake" (a hypothetical ability) does slashing damage and maybe puts a bleed on every target within 5 feet of them, that's naturally going to limit it to those characters who are grouped up with them in melee. But our Banshee's Death Wail is going to be a huge radius, and so we might say that it deals its damage to only three targets, so there's a cap on the total damage it can do.

Another idea, if we were to have turns scaling based on the party, is to limit monster resource generation to rounds - the resource (I'm thinking Darkness, though it's really not too different from Malice in Draw Steel) would need to be spent to use a monster's more powerful abilities, and thus those "extra turns" that it gets might feel a bit more like legendary actions, which tend not to give a monster their full multiattack in 5E. The GM could choose to spread out their expense of Darkness over the round to do cheaper abilities, or they could blow it all on one big ability and then spend the other turns doing the monster's basic, weakest attacks.

Resource generation is something we really need to figure out for the game - both how it will work for PCs and how it will work for monsters.

To be fair, I'm getting very theoretical and some of these might need to be ironed out via playtesting.

But I think we need a core concept here that we can apply to our monsters. Monsters in Deathblow need to all feel like big, epic fights, because the whole point is that the adventure is building toward the confrontation.

I think that means we need to A: give them a lot of "action economy slots" to do iconic things. A Vampire ought to be able to grab a creature, drag them off somewhere, and bite them all in one turn, but we also need some opportunities for shapeshifting and disappearing in shadows. And B: we need to give them flashy, memorable, and unique mechanics to distinguish them from the rest.

Players should remember each headlining monster they've fought. Special Deathblow mechanics are certainly one way to make them memorable, but I think building bespoke mechanics for each kind of monster is also really a good idea. Again, looking at Draw Steel's Werewolf, there's a unique "condition" that the Werewolf imposes called Accursed Rage - the longer you fight it, the more likely you are to succumb to a berserker rage and strike your friends (wonderfully, if you're the lycanthrope-adjacent Stormwight subclass for the Fury class, you're immune to this because you're kind of already a were-creature anyway).

To be frank, if this game were to be finished and published, I imagine the monster book would actually be a fair degree thinner than it is for its main inspirations. But I also imagine that a monster stat block would be a lot more complex.