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.

Null Results and Gothic Monster-Hunting

 This blog started as an exclusively World of Warcraft-specific blog. The game, which will hit its 22nd anniversary this year (and in September I'll have played it for 20) has gone through a lot of system changes, with biannual expansions giving them the biggest opportunities to overhaul things.

Back in the day, you had to have Hit Rating on your gear (or Spell Hit Rating when they made those things separate - Light help you if you were a magic/melee hybrid like an Enhancement Shaman) spells/abilities and auto-attacks had a chance to just miss the target. You could also find pieces of gear that raised your skill with a weapon type, which was later turned into Expertise (which worked for all weapons) and thus reduce the chance that a creature could dodge, block, or parry your attacks (because monsters could only dodge attacks from behind them, damage-dealing melee characters could be satisfied with enough expertise to eliminate dodging, while tanks were expected to get enough to prevent any parrying as well).

At some point (I want to say Warlords of Draenor,) they ripped this out of the game - from then to today, if you are fighting level-appropriate foes (and given the scaling world of the game, that's more or less any you'll come across) your spells and abilities (things with a name you push a button for) will always connect, and the only thing that has a chance to miss is your auto-attacks if you are dual-wielding weapons (auto-attacks, which used to be a huge portion of player damage, have also been de-emphasized as a source of damage compared to active abilities).

The only thing that was lost was a weird sort of stat-juggling where you wanted to have just enough Hit and Expertise ratings to meet your threshold but not have much more than that, as it would be redundant. Gameplay-wise, though, that meant that, properly geared, missing wasn't really a thing.

It is, kind of, a distinction between D&D and games that don't bother with attack rolls like Draw Steel (I know they're not the first to try this, but it was a big part of their pitch to the audience).

Missing in D&D is not really fun. It's especially not fun in early levels where your entire turn might have no effect because you only have one attack. Extra Attack or the unique scaling of the Eldritch Blast cantrip can smooth this out - if you have a 75% chance to hit, getting another chance to hit means that the chance of not getting a single hit during your turn goes from 25% to 6.25%.

Essentially, the more attacks you're making, the more your actual damage output is going to resemble what your average damage output ought to be, because there's a larger sample size and each outlier has a diluted influence.

Still, even if the chance that you get nothing for your turn's efforts drops as you get some of these mid-to-late-game enhancements, it doesn't eliminate the problem completely. You could have a 95% chance to hit (the most you can get without advantage because a Nat 1 always misses) and even with four attacks, technically you could just get really unlucky (though that would be vanishingly rare).

And furthermore, the game slows down as you get to higher levels because there are more actions taking place. Extra Attack doubles the time it takes for a character to describe their action. Now, sure, it's still going to probably take way less time than someone casting nearly any spell.

But let's talk about it in terms of fantasy:

Draw Steel eliminates attack rolls in part because the point of the game is for the player characters (and the monsters) to feel awesome. The game pumps everyone up to be these epic heroes (with a little superheroics at work) and an epic hero totally whiffing doesn't really feel like it's true to the tone they're seeking out.

Deathblow, the kernel of a game system that I'm rolling around in my head (other than DMing a lot of D&D, I should note that my game design experience is largely limited to homebrew monsters and obviously a lot of homebrew adventures - I'd love for this all to turn into something real, but I make zero promises,) is not quite that in tone.

The Night Hunters in Deathblow are not epic heroes, and they're not the kind of people who are going to save an entire city from a rampaging Kaiju (unless I really figure out the game system and find it can scale up beyond where I've conceived it). While Night Hunters are meant to be more capable and prepared to fight gothic monsters than the villagers they come to protect, they're still very much mere mortals for whom victory is no guarantee.

So, does that mean they should have a chance to miss?

Here's the thing: missing as a player in D&D feels bad. Getting missed by a monster in D&D feels awesome. My long-running Eldritch Knight Fighter was built around having an absurd AC - between a +1 Shield, the Defense Fighting Style, and the Shield Spell, once I got plate armor I effectively had an AC of 27 as long as I had any spell slots left. While I've found in the past that AC isn't really as good at reducing average damage taken as things like Rage or even Deflect Attacks, that might start to change when you start pushing the AC to those absurd limits.

But more than that, on a feeling level, it felt really good to be so untouchable. In a recent episode of Critical Role, Luis Carazo's character Azune is a Sorcerer/Paladin multiclass, and so could combine the high AC of a Paladin with the Shield spell, so that when pitted against a group of what I assume were Bandits, each needed to roll a natural 20 to hit him, and none did (evidently DM Brennan Lee Mulligan rolled several 19s, but to no avail).

In early design for Draw Steel (then just "The MCDM RPG") they gave some classes triggered actions that could fully negate a foe's damage to them, but the final design at best let damage be reduced, but never eliminated. For both players and the Director, the intent is for every turn to move things forward.

Again, though, I think that there's an efficiency to removing attack rolls - while Extra Attack doubles a martial character's damage at level 5 (not to mention the higher hit chance due to a bump in proficiency bonus,) I actually think the "feels-good" part of getting it is more about that statistical smoothing effect. Even if you miss on one attack, getting one in will at least make you feel like you did something. In a system without attack rolls, though, you could double damage simply by... doubling damage. Sure, there are cases where you might prefer the split damage (like if you can kill a monster with one attack and then move on to the other with the second attack) but especially in a game where I'm imagining most monsters should be fought solo, pouring it all into one bit of damage is probably ideal (especially given Deathblow mechanics, where you need to hit their threshold with a single attack to get the kill).

I think the only thing, then, to really consider is how this impacts things like equipment.

In Draw Steel, armor is very abstractly represented via Kits as just higher Stamina. The argument for this was that if heavier armor reduced the damage you took by 20% on average because of the higher chance for monsters to miss you, you could achieve the same effect by increasing your Stamina and healing received by 25%  (given that healing in Draw Steel is almost always proportionate to your max Stamina). (I think I have that math right - 100 is 80% of 125, just as 80 is 80% of 100).

I'd be tempted to use armor as damage reduction, but damage reduction always runs into two problems: first, if it's a percentage reduction, that might require everyone bust out calculators (something you generally want to avoid in TTRPG design) unless it's always something flat and easily done in one's head, like the 50% reduction from resistances in 5E. But if you want different kinds of armor reducing damage by different percentages, it gets messy. Alternatively, if you have subtractive damage reduction, it becomes insanely powerful against a lot of little hits and proportionately weaker against individual, massive blows.

So, yeah, without a hit chance to consider, I guess I'll hand this to the MCDM folks - just raising Stamina is probably the most elegant solution.

That being said:

The subtractive damage reduction issues might not be as big of a deal when we're dealing with a game that focuses on individual, powerful monsters. Minion fights against, say, zombies or wicker blights (the latter being the kind of minions I think a Hexen would have, which are sort of this game's version of hags) might really favor Night Hunters with heavy armor, because they might be able to shrug off the minions' blows unless they can roll particularly high on their damage, but then when facing off against the starring monster, that reduction is less proportionately powerful because every attack is going to do at least a bit of damage.

On the other (are we on third or fourth now?) hand, subtractive damage reduction might be too powerful if PCs are also only killed on a Deathblow.

Eh, yeah, for now, I think sticking to the Draw Steel style of armor is probably the best course.

Actually, How Should Class Resources Work in a Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG?

 Like many who got their start in digital RPGs, I was surprised to discover the Spell Slot system in D&D when I first started playing. It is a pretty weird one, even if you figure it out pretty quickly.

I believe in early editions, "preparing" spells meant that you literally chose how many of each of your known spells you would have ready for the day - having three (numbers chosen arbitrarily) Fireballs ready might mean that you couldn't cast Fear (also not sure those spells were around then, though both feel likely to be very long-established ones).

Anyway, the gradual attrition in D&D is great for a survival-horror challenge like an old-school dungeon, but as the folks at MCDM (mainly Matt Colville, though I think he was acting as mouthpiece for his company) pointed out, the more heroic fantasy that D&D tends to lean toward in this day and age favors a build to a big climax.

Draw Steel's resource system is built both to make individual fights ramp up in intensity (as players start off with little of their heroic resources and need to work up to their more epic moves, as well as how the Director gains Malice to build up to their monsters' own big moves) and also encourages the players to push forward because of the way that Victories give them a head-start in resource generation so that fights toward the end of an adventure go to 11 earlier (Directors also get a head-start on Malice the more victories a party has, so it's mirrored).

But I was thinking about how resources in Deathblow, my concept for this Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG, ought to work.

Elements of both D&D and Draw Steel work their way in - I like the "every attack hits" aspect of Draw Steel, but I also think it really plays into the major distinction between losing stamina and actually getting slain by a Deathblow. Because the monsters are all very deadly, I think the narrative of "taking damage" is really more like "avoiding a lethal blow at the cost of some of your energy to continue the fight."

I certainly have some ideas about how surviving a Deathblow might still have certain impacts (like lasting injuries). But that's not the current think I'm considering:

Thematically, does a game about monster-hunting - an element of classic fantasy RPGs to be sure, but we're really zeroing in on the idea of building to a big climactic fight at the end of a hunt - feel more attrition-focused or something where resources build up to be spent?

I think the problem with traditional attrition is that, ideally, an adventure in Deathblow only has one big encounter, and zero to like, three at the most encounters against less powerful monsters (here, we want an opportunity for monsters that are more threatening in numbers, like zombies. While I'm imagining a Ghoul as a truly deadly threat on its own, zombies provide us with the more minor challenge, though the difficulty vibe I'd go for is more like RE2 Remake's spongey, serious threat zombies and not something to be mowed down in the dozens).

Anyway, given that I want this to be a game where it's perfectly reasonable (and fun) to have a multi-session adventure that has just a single combat encounter, the attrition one tends to endure over the course of many fights in a game like D&D doesn't really make sense.

I'm tempted, then, to go for something more like Draw Steel's system of heroic resources. But this also might not be the right fit: after all, Draw Steel is about charging forward from action set-piece to action set-piece, where recovering Stamina is just a matter of catching your breath and taking a moment (unless you've exhausted all your recoveries and really need to retreat to a safe location and take some serious time off). Deathblow isn't about racking up several small victories over the course of an adventure - it's about getting that one definitive victory at the end.

In writing this, I have come up with one possible option:

Tracking and identifying the monster in Deathblow will probably (everything I say about the game is tentative, and I'm not making any promises about whether this game ever gets finished, much less distributed to the public) be a core mechanical element of the game. While an adventure like this in D&D might involve some loosely-structured Survival, Investigation, maybe a knowledge skill check or two to discover what monster is threatening things, based largely on narrative, I would want to have this phase of the adventure, The Hunt, to be a really core and important part of the game, in which every class has relevant abilities to bring into play (and here, I'm using the Draw Steel meaning of Abilities, as in specific, mechanically-defined actions that your character can take, sort of like spells in D&D).

The point of The Hunt in a monster-hunting narrative is to prepare yourself for the eventual encounter with the monster. In Dracula (and surely that's a classic Gothic monster-hunting story,) Van Helsing and the other vampire-hunters spend the entire book trying to figure out just what exactly Dracula is (it's actually a bit awkward because Van Helsing seems to know but kind of draws it out to the extent that he even fails to prevent Lucy Westenra from getting turned by the Count) and the final confrontation, as Dracula flees England and tries to return to his castle, is a mad rush in the snow to take him out before the sun sets. (The Texan cowboy - and yes, there's a Texan cowboy in Dracula - doesn't make it).

Anyway, I had this idea: if the whole point of The Hunt is to prepare the party for their eventual confrontation with the monster... what if that's how they generate the resources that they use in the fight against the monster?

Let's say that you're a Mechanist, and you have a resource called Ingenuity. You spend Ingenuity on your powerful abilities (in the Mechanist's case, probably individual devices and contraptions you've created).

We'll say you're hunting, oh, a Hexen (kind of this game's equivalent of a Hag, but with a more tree-like appearance, blurring the line between hideous nightmarish humanoid and plant-life) and you use one of your Hunt abilities - let's say Residue Analysis (or maybe Residue Detector). If you do find some Bloodmoss in the washbasin of the ailing town priest, you move toward being able to identify the monster, maybe toward tracking it, and maybe you gain an Ingenuity.

Now, two things to keep in mind:

First, I think that there needs to be a fail state here. If you don't get the clue, you don't get the point of Ingenuity. Players should try to really focus on efficiently and effectively Hunting the monster, and reap the reward of more resources if they do (or, from another perspective, pay the price if they don't).

Second, there's the question of player overlap. If the Mechanist uses their Residue Detector while the Witch wants to use, oh, say, "Ken of Thorn and Blood," a spell that might animate trace amounts of poisons to bring attention to themselves, who gets the resource? Maybe the entire party gets a point of their resource for each clue they uncover - this is probably the most elegant solution.

Alternatively, different kinds of clues might empower classes differently. Maybe the Mechanist actually doesn't benefit from this particular piece of information, but by discovering it for the party as a whole, the group's Witch and Assassin both gain a point in their resource.

Here, perhaps, stat blocks could help build adventures (something I generally think is wise). We might say that different monsters will have a quota of different kinds of clues that you'll need to seed into the adventure's setting.

Let's imagine some clue categories: maybe witness accounts (including repressed memories that might need to be brought out with various abilities,) victim remains (which could be literal physical remains or maybe evidence of strange behavior) and then Signs of the Beast (which would be things like tracks, claws, teeth, other things that the monster has left behind). I really like Signs of the Beast, and I think we should come up with interesting names for the other two.

So, if you have a Vampire, say (probably a high-level monster - though I love the idea of a False Vampire that is actually some kind of Lovecraftian monstrosity that is commonly mistaken for a vampire but also actually a bit lower-level) they'll have some quota of clues for you to leave for your players. And then, each class probably generates resources on two but not all three of the clue categories.

I'm tempted to thus say that, to keep the pressure on, the party basically has limited attempts at finding these clues before they are attacked, and thus might not have all the resources they want. That said, being ambushed by the monster feels... slightly counter to the whole premise of the game. At the very least, I don't think every monster should ambush the party.

But I think if there's a failure state on investigating clues, that creates pressure to figure them all out correctly and thus have all the resources you can get for the eventual fight.

The Escape mechanic, where a failed Deathblow allows the monster to escape, adds additional tracking time. In my initial conceptualization, the price paid here is the need to keep Hunting the prey, and maybe doing so with diminished resources (the Monster is also diminished). But I think if we used something like this, it would also create this new scenario where the party has an opportunity to recoup some of the resources they expended in the failed attempt to slay the monster.

Truly, I do really like the idea of generating resources over the course of The Hunt to then use in the big fight. But it's a system that has some kinks to work out.

(Also, what do we think of Deathblow? It's a core mechanic of the game, but is it not Gothic enough? I could potentially imagine that if the system is fun enough, maybe tweaks to it could make it work in other speculative fiction genres, at the very least other kinds of monster-hunting. Maybe they're all Deathblow, but this would be "Deathblow: Night Hunters" and other versions could have a different subtitle. Anyway, I think Deathblow is the working title unless something more fitting comes about.)

Ideas for a Gothic Monster-Hunting RPG

 This is extremely tentative - I literally just had the idea in the last hour while having lunch.

The first thought that came to me was how Curses in D&D are kind of disappointing. They are mechanically distinct from other magical effects, but only in that there are other spells (Remove Curse, mainly) that can dispel them. If anything, this means a Curse is actually less of a problem than other kinds of magical afflictions, which feels utterly wrong.

I was thinking about how in Dark Souls, getting cursed required you to go through a pretty involved process to cleanse it, and the notion was that a Curse could never just be eradicated, only transferred to someone else. Even the items you could get to cleanse them were technically a person's spirit who was just taking on that curse. True to the game's themes of entropy, on a long enough timeline, everyone would be afflicted with this curse, which feels very, you know, curse-like.

But that got me thinking about how it would be cool to have a D&D-like system that could handle curses in this way.

I've long been drawn (as documented in this blog) to the idea of Monster-Hunters in a world of Gothic Horror. In my homebrew setting, there is a group called the Nachtjagers (and then I expanded this to an older branch in another kingdom called the Night Hunters - same term, just in English) who play that role of secret monster-hunters who go village-to-village fighting monsters. It's actually not too dissimilar to The Witcher in concept - this is an archetype that goes way back. And while Van Helsing from Dracula is not precisely this archetype in the novel, he's been portrayed that way in reimaginings (like the Hugh Jackman movie from the late 2000s where he looks like Solomon Kane, although to be fair, Van Helsing is Dutch and Kane's a puritan who might have adopted Dutch fashion while there in exile from England - I don't know actually when Kane's books take place).

Anyway, it's just scattered thoughts for the moment, but I think this would be a bit more than just a 5E hack. Here are some concepts I'd want to build around:

1. Borrowing Draw Steel's "Everything Hits"

I really like the idea that there's no Null Result in Draw Steel's combat, but I also think that the Power Roll is not the only way to implement this. In D&D, after all, we have damage rolls, and I think you could play around with those rather than standardizing to just three potential results.

2. A Focus on Fighting Individual Monsters

Monster-hunting as a subset of the dark fantasy genre does really tend to focus on a single, interesting monster. It should be a shocking reveal when there's more than one of them. There can be exceptions, of course.

But not only are they usually only fighting one monster at a time, I think that a monster fight needs to be a really climactic effect. If you figure that a monster hunt should be the rough equivalent of an adventure, that means you'll want to potentially allow the party to spend multiple sessions going after an individual monster. This, then, inspires two other pillars:

3. A Focus on Hunting, not Just Fighting

Every character must have some skills that contribute to tracking down the target, with different classes having different methods of doing so. There needs to be interesting gameplay related to finding the target, and we might actually have to reinforce that mechanically, like you need to earn a certain number of "tracking points" to actually find where you can fight the monster.

4. Deathblows

This, I think, would be the radical change compared to most RPG combat systems. I think we'd use Stamina in place of HP like Draw Steel does, but we are really going to reinforce the notion that Stamina is merely your ability to keep fighting. If you are knocked down, you're basically out of the fight but kind of just have the wind knocked out of you.

I think that actually killing a creature (whether a monster, NPC, or PC) would require separately taking a moment to get the killing blow. And this moment would require dice to be rolled to determine if you successfully kill it.

A failed Deathblow would probably net the monster some Stamina, but just enough to give them the opportunity to flee. Certain class abilities might give you a better chance at successfully executing a Deathblow, and maybe other class abilities could mean that a Monster that survived a Deathblow is easier to track and maybe is less likely to survive the next. Monsters probably wouldn't have abilities that make it harder for PCs to survive Deathblows (especially because, given the genre, we probably aren't going to have any kind of resurrection mechanics).

Deathblows could also help give iconic monsters some of their iconic features - you can't Deathblow a vampire unless you have a wooden stake to drive into their heart, for example. Likewise, you might not be able to Deathblow a werewolf without a silver weapon.

The actual mechanics of the Deathblow are something I don't quite know how I'd handle - I think potentially it's that you need to do some minimum amount of damage in a single attack (or turn - we could count someone stabbing a monster a dozen times in quick succession as one collective attack). Each monster could have a Deathblow threshold that needs to be met, and certain player abilities might add to the damage of their Deathblows, or perhaps make certain types of damage count as higher when used for a Deathblow.

5. Thematic Classes

Part of why we'd want to build a new system is to ensure that we don't fall into the same genre conventions as D&D. I think like Draw Steel, we'd also want class design that gives just as much versatility and options to martial characters as it does to spellcasters.

I have three spellcaster concepts in mind:

A Witch who deals in natural magic, with a very mud, blood, and thorns aesthetic.

An Esotericist (that might be a mouthful, Mystic could work better. Alchemist could also work, but we're leaning more toward the esoteric traditions than the "beakers and bottles" aesthetic). Oh, Occultist is probably the best: this is the archetype of the person who employs deep and forbidden magic, with hellfire, rune circles, and dark tomes as their aesthetic.

Inquisitor would be the "divine" spellcaster, with a really harsh fire-and-brimstone aesthetic using searing light and white-hot silver.

For "martial" archetypes, truthfully we're probably talking roughly the Fighter, Ranger, and Rogue in broad terms. But I think we'd have some different terms:

Warrior is probably our only heavily-armored (remember that everything hits, so this would mean lots of Stamina) class fighting with big medieval weaponry, and I think their tracking capabilities are more about keeping morale up on the move.

Hunters (a name that might need to change if the game were just called Night Hunters - I'm between that and Deathblow) are all about special techniques and knowledge about monsters, and likely would have some mechanic where they can prepare special poisons for their weapons, or if that doesn't work mechanically, they might have a lot of abilities that impair the monster (slowing it, reducing its damage, etc.)

Assassins are your quick, nimble, and sneaky monster hunters who likely fight with daggers or other small weapons, and probably have very high mobility.

6. Thematic Stats

I like the flavor of using alternative stat names - while I think Draw Steel kind of goes contrarian in its insistence on calling everything something else (Strength is fine - though as someone whose first class-based RPG was WoW, Agility does actually feel kind of better than Dexterity) here we're narrowing the tonal focus of the game and would want the stats to reflect that.

For example, Brutality would be the stat for raw physical power - Warriors would likely want to focus on this, but I'd also want the stats to be appealing to more than one class. Cunning would probably be the spellcasting ability for our Occultist, reflecting, yes, cleverness and forward-planning but with a somewhat sinister vibe. Will might be what an Inquisitor uses - a raw channeling of one's power and conviction upon the world.

We don't have to have 1:1s for all the classic D&D stats, and I'd even be kind of curious to play in a space where some classes might want to split their stats a bit, like how in Soulsborne games you sometimes would rather have 40 Dex and 40 Int instead of 80 Dex.

Maybe we can design class abilities that scale with two stats, but in a limited manner - if you're going for more of a melee Inquisitor build, you might want to have 3 Brutality and 3 Will, while if you're going for a pure spellcasting build, you'll want to have a full 6 Will (the numbers are made up here, but I imagine we'd want to just make the scores whatever you add to your rolls).

Like, say we've got an ability called Purge the Wicked, which deals holy/radiant/whatever we wind up calling it damage. Say it does 3d6+Will. Then, we have another Inquisitor ability they can pick called Searing Brand, which does 1d10+Brutality (max 3) physical damage and 1d10+Will (max 3) fire damage. If you have 6 Will and nothing to Brutality, you'll be doing 16.5 on average with Purge the Wicked and only 14 with Searing Brand, but if you're split between the two, you could potentially do an average of 17 with Searing Brand.

7. Relatively Flat Levels

I think it was wise for both Daggerheart and Draw Steel to compress to just 10 levels. The legacy of 20 levels in D&D has left a lot of campaigns ending well before the level cap.

I think this game has an even lower level cap. Like, probably 5.

The reason is that, while we do want our players to be fighting scarier monsters as they get more experience, the core tone of the game is for them to be these rough-and-tumble killers for hire, not superheroes. If any of the characters gain the ability to fly, it's going to be very limited, and probably just one person (the Witch, most likely).

I wouldn't want the power escalation to get to the point where the party can just teleport across the globe or phase through walls. A monster that is extremely dangerous at level 1 should still remain a threat, even if it's a more manageable one, at the cap. At no point should a vampire be a trivial encounter (to be fair, that's the kind of monster I imagine being beyond the players' capabilities until the later levels, like 3 at the absolute earliest.

8. Extensive non-combat mechanics

I always get a little wary of complicating non-combat situations with a bunch of mechanics. At least with my players, naturalistic roleplay tends to be what we want to focus on when we're not looking at minis on a battle grid.

I was, thus, pretty skeptical of Negotiations in Draw Steel. I have yet to actually run one (or even see it in play) but I will concede that its solves some issues, like preventing players from just brute-forcing social encounters after failing a ton of charisma checks.

Actually, I think I wouldn't have a "Charisma" equivalent stat (beyond Will, being only roughly equivalent) in order to make it feel like players don't feel they need to be a certain class to be the party face and interact with NPCs.

What I think would really need to be robust would be a system for detective work.

I'm tempted to adopt something like the Time Clocks in Blades in the Dark - while we'd mostly want to situate the monster hunt as a narrative thing, we'd also have an underlying numerical system to track how close the party is to finding the monster.

9. Resource System

I definitely like the Draw Steel Heroic Resource system, but that really truly only functions fully while in a fight. Out of initiative, the use of Heroic abilities is kind of kludgy. I'm tempted, then, to borrow ideas from Daggerheart, where combat and non-combat situations operate along similar lines.

But that might be a later consideration.

    Ideas are Cheap. I'll be honest, I'm kind of getting excited about this concept, but I also know it would be very difficult to put it all together. If I could figure out at least an initial core dice mechanic system (I actually don't hate ability modifiers and proficiency bonuses with a d20 - just that it wouldn't be so common to roll d20s in combat) and put together a rough level 1 for some classes and a monster, we might see if we get any traction.

Ability Score and Characteristic Flexibility

 I haven't posted about Draw Steel in a while, because, well, I have still not had a chance to play it. I need to be the one pushing my friends to try it out, and between the D&D game I play in and the one I run (and hoping we can one day return to the Sunday game I play in that hasn't played in like 7 months) and everyone having packed adult schedules, I've been struggling to find the oomph to actually set a date and get it running.

Still, while my admiration for the game is still theoretical at this point, I wanted to point out one other thing that I really appreciate about the game:

Naturally, this is going to be in comparison to D&D - the 800-pound Gorilla of the TTRPG space, to which Draw Steel was designed largely in response to.

If you are playing a Bard in D&D, you will most likely have Charisma as your top stat, potentially even if you're going for a melee build like Dance or Valor. While I think they only get simple weapons now, back in 2014, they got proficiency in Longswords as one of the specific martial options they were granted. A Longsword is not a finesse weapon, so barring something like True Strike or Pact of the Blade, you'll need to attack using Strength with it.

Now, I like the idea of a strong Bard. But because Bards are limited to Light Armor, if you don't invest pretty heavily in Dexterity (or somehow upgrade your armor type through multiclassing or a feat) you'll have a pitiful AC, which is a real liability (though I do think monster attack bonuses outpace AC growth unless you get lots of magic armor).

We do, in theory, have a lot of options for how we want to express our characters with different stats, but it's quite difficult to make it impactful without hindering our characters. Basically every character wants at least a decent Constitution score, and to have decent armor, you need at least a 14 in Dex unless you can wear heavy armor, in which case you will want at least a 15 in Strength. (Armor Artificers are a rare exception, who truly don't need a good stat for AC, but given that the armor you wear still contributes to the weight you're carrying, if your table uses any kind of encumbrance rules, you might still consider investing a bit in Strength).

Different classes have different degrees of flexibility here - a Rogue really only needs high Dexterity and probably decent Constitution, though certain subclasses will then want to invest in Intelligence as well, and possibly Wisdom to aid in important perception checks and the like. A Paladin, though, who really wants to maximize their Strength, Charisma, and ideally Con as well, has very little flexibility on getting decent Dex, Int, or Wis - in fact, the "optimal" build using Point Buy is to take 15s in Str, Cha, and Con and 8s in the rest.

There are two ways in which Draw Steel, to me, really fixes the friction here:

First, there's the way that Stamina (the equivalent of HP) is calculated - there's no Constitution stat, and so your Stamina is determined by your class, level, and potentially your Kit, all of which are basically divorced from your stats. There is also no concept of an Armor Class - all attacks will do something, it's just a question of how much of an impact they have (think of it as damage rolls without attack rolls). Again, there is no stat minimum for your Shining Armor or Cloak and Dagger kits.

The second element is that your class guarantees that the most important stats for you go up, hitting the maximum for any stat you could have at each level it could reach that (basically each echelon of play - their version of tiers of play).

The Censor, which is the rough equivalent of the Paladin, for example, always has Might and Presence both at the highest amount you could get at any level (the equivalents of Strength and Charisma).

Now, for the other stats, the player has a choice - they can either have a relatively flat spread between the other three stats (Agility, Reason, and Intuition - the equivalents of Dexterity, Intelligence, and Wisdom) or they can actually take a low score in at least one of them to keep another at or near the level of their primary stats.

I realized this when I was building a Talent - the psionic class that doesn't really have a 5E equivalent until they come out with the Psion, presumably in some upcoming Dark Sun book. Talents earn more of their heroic resource when a creature is force-moved near them, and while that would most classically take the form of some kind of telekinetic movement, it actually works just fine if you shove someone.

A Talent is among the "squishiest" classes (meaning purely that it has lower Stamina) and so you wouldn't think it would be a class that lends itself to having a high Might. But there's actually nothing really stopping you from doing that. Thus, I built a Hakaan (think sort of Goliaths but made of stone and literally one size category larger than most characters, though they still fit on one grid square) Talent whose Might was just one point lower than his Reason and Presence (the core stats for Talents). Because you can shove creatures as a maneuver (think bonus action) I figured he could start off a turn if someone was up in his face by shoving them away, thus immediately gaining some extra Clarity, and then drop some nasty psionics on them.

By contrast, it's very unlikely that a Sorcerer in D&D would be able to afford having a high Strength when they need to have a high Charisma, decent Con and decent Dexterity.

It does honestly make me wonder if D&D would be better off if armor was less stat-dependent, and if we could make room for weirder stat arrays.

Raven Beak in 3

 Well, 5 years later my re-play of Metroid Dread saw me take down Raven Beak in three attempts. While I love this game as a fitting follow-up to the series, my biggest complaint as someone getting a bit older is that it's tough on the hands - when you get either the Plasma or Wave Beam, you can start damaging bosses with your uncharged beam weapons, which is theoretically a good thing but given that Dread's beam weapon more or less shoots as fast as you can hit the Y button, I just found my thumb getting extremely tired doing it, and so I wonder if I actually would have taken him down faster if I had stuck to missiles with a slower fire rate but I assume still higher damage-per-hit. When I got the parry-cutscene damage opportunities, I just shifted so that I could tap the Y button with my pointer, which was was better-rested and made it easier to really rapidly blast the guy.

My first go I got absolutely trounced, but I got better at reading his tells, and in both attempts 2 and 3 I barely took any damage on his flying phase. I also remember hitting his void-bombs with Storm Missiles 5 years ago, but this time I had trouble getting the lock-on and launch in time, and found it easier to just aim Ice Missiles at it.

Despite having very little screentime, Raven Beak is a really memorable and compelling villain. For one thing, we've generally seen the Chozo as benevolent figures. For all the cosmic horror we encounter in Dread, the fact that the final boss and main villain is just a philosophically evil conqueror and tyrant is an interesting twist. Given his end, though, it seems very unlikely that we'll ever see him again.

Kraid and Ridley have died multiple times and come back via cloning or whatever - it's not super clear how the Mawkin captured Kraid (to be fair, Kraid just kind of sinks into the ground when we beat him in Super Metroid, the last time we canonically saw him, so maybe he got off Zebes before it blew up. Or, again, could be a clone). But given that Kraid appears as part of an X-Parasite (the same that infects Raven Beak and creates the truly horrific Kraid/Raven Beak Hybrid. Kraven Beak?) does that mean he's perma-dead?

If memory serves, there's a Ridley clone in Metroid Fusion (oh, and it turns out I can't play it on my Switch because they have a tiered subscription) but even though Ridley shows up more than any other Metroid villain, I believe his canonical death happens in Super Metroid (he literally blows apart).

My total play time was 8 and a half hours, though there's also a counter for when you're on the map screen, which bumped mine up to 11.5. I cannot imagine I spent a full 3 hours looking at maps in this playthrough, but I assume I left the game paused for a long time while doing something else. I saw that a previous speed-run of it I'd taken only 3 hours and maybe 40 minutes, but only had like 37% of the items. I believe you get art rewards for getting under 4 hours, and I just never got that on Hard Mode (doubt I ever attempted it).

100% But for Raven Beak in my Revisit to ZDR, and Thoughts on Super Metroid

 I seriously doubt that I'm getting any reasonable completion time, but I've gotten 100% of all items in my 5-years-later play of Metroid Dread.

I was shocked that I managed to pull off the difficult shinespark puzzles in Burenia and Cataris in only a couple attempts. I also realized that the one I recalled struggling with in Ferenia actually doesn't require you to use the shinespark until the very end, rather than having to preserve it on slopes, which might explain why I had so much trouble with it back in the day as well. This is the one in the lower left part of Ferenia, through a hidden passage next to the lift that goes down to Dairon. You have plenty of space to get the speed boost up, and then you just slide under a small gap, run up a slope, wall-jump to another slope, and then get your shinespark activated right at the top of that slope and shoot straight up.

Similarly, the one in Artaria (upper left) that I thought required you to get the shinespark, bomb through a wall, and then flash-shift through one of those barriers that will close if you step on the ground near them... could also be done much more simply, as you actually have just enough space to get the shinespark on the other side of the bomb-block barrier, making it actually pretty trivially easy (you can just space jump over the barrier with plenty of time to get in position to spark up through the speed blocks).

I really love Metroid Dread. I still think that I like Super Metroid's world design better - particularly, I find that Dread locks too many doors behind you, so that frequently the zones feel less like an expanding world than levels that you have to commit to completing before you can go back where you came from. I appreciate that you can use the teleporters to go to any other teleporter after getting to Itorash - it was convenient for my item hunt - but I also kind of prefer the way that Super Metroid only rarely traps you where you are - you can usually return to the ship if you want (the exception being I think when you go down into Lower Brinstar and I think you really need the Ice Beam to climb back up).

Also, Super Metroid's soundtrack is among the greatest of all time, and I don't know that any of Dread's music achieves the same iconic memorability. Indeed, Dread re-uses some music from Super Metroid - its theme now sort of functions as Samus' theme (which is funny because she has a theme, which plays near her ship in Super Metroid) and they use the Red Brinstar theme when Quiet Robe gives you the mid-game lore dump. (I remember when I first played the series after discovering Samus in Super Smash Bros., I was surprised that I didn't hear the Brinstar theme in Super Metroid. This, of course, had been the Brinstar theme for the original game, which has a far more heroic space-adventure vibe compared to the brooding and dark stuff from Super Metroid (even if the Green Brinstar theme is kind of a banger, there's still a bit of a "what a weird and mysterious world we've found" tone to it).

Actually, fun fact, when I first played Super Metroid, I was a Middle Schooler in, like, 2000, and at the time I had very strong and strict opinions on what kind of music was cool, and objected to the kind of dance-y, synth-y vibes of that Green Brinstar theme. Naturally, I'm a much more mature person now and understand that it's one of the game's best tracks (with solid competition).

I think that the issue I have with Dread's music is that it feels like it pulls back on its bombast a little, as if it's afraid of being distracting. But given that the gameplay cues in Metroid Dread are largely visual, I don't think it would be a problem for them to go bigger and really claim their space the way that the Super Metroid tracks do. Lower Norfair has always been a favorite of mine because it truly makes Ridley out to be demonic, these fire-and-acid-filled ruins feel like hell, and the music evokes some kind of Latin choir. Upper Norfair is much more subtle, and arguably is one of the more forgettable tracks from Super Metroid, but it's kind of a prelude to the insane bombast you get when you go after Ridley.

Also, coming back to Green Brinstar's theme, I love how it's especially designed for when you first arrive in the zone. You've only been to Crateria at this point (as well as a somewhat ironically rearranged, I think, version of both the first room from the first game and the original Mother Brain boss room and escape shaft - though I think that neither is counted as being in Brinstar or Tourian, the zones each were respectively in in the first game). But Crateria is mostly lifeless, just bluish rocks (which honestly sounds a bit more like the NES version of Brinstar). As the music changes when you go down into Brinstar the first time, you hear the little rhythmic intro while Samus is in the elevator shaft, and right as the main melody kicks in, you see the area covered in thriving plant life, green moss and different, maybe healthier-looking creatures.

Actually, while ZDR's destruction kind of becomes a necessity after the X Parasite infection rabidly spreads (damn, how the hell did Raven Beak manage to quarantine them in Elun in the first place? Like, minutes after it's opened up, the entire world is basically dead,) it honestly feels a bit of a shame 32 years later that Zebes was destroyed at the end of Super Metroid. I think it's the only world that the Metroid games have ever revisited (at least among the ones I've played).

In some ways, even though it is explicitly a sequel, Super Metroid is also kind of a remake of the original game. Released only 8 year later, the game's a showcase for both the evolution of the design and the big jump in power from the NES to the SNES. But it's filled with callbacks that flew over my head the first time I played the game - not only the rooms from the beginning and end of the original game that you find very early on, but also the kind of creepy faces in green and purple metal right before facing Kraid and Ridley, respectively. The weird bubble area of Norfair, and some of what I thought were odd choices for terrain design.

While I'd prefer that they keep moving the series forward, I've found myself wanting a remake of Super Metroid using the engine, controls, and perhaps some mechanics from Metroid Dread. Dread isn't easy - I think that the greater precision of control you have in it allows them to be far more punishing with their bosses (does any boss have an attack that doesn't do a full energy tank's worth of damage?) Certainly some challenges in Super Metroid would be trivialized by things like Samus' ability to slide. But if you could rebuild Super Metroid to control like Metroid Dread, I'd be really eager to try it.

Anyway, with literally nothing left to do but fight Raven Beak, I suspect that this trip back into the heady days of 2021 is drawing to a close. Bake a loaf of sourdough in a saucepan and cut your own hair if you feel nostalgic.

On to Cleaning Mode on ZDR!

 Metroid games have a very satisfying gameplay loop - you push forward, discover some new area, challenge, or boss, defeat it, and are rewarded with a new ability that allows you to push forward some more.

Metroid Dread is truly old-school in its approach, and so the game itself isn't that long. I'm already ready to go up to the Itorash and confront Raven Beak. But, naturally, I'm not doing so yet.

There are items to collect!

I can't recall how many playthroughs this is - whether it's my 3rd or possibly more. Back in 2021 I cleared it and then did it on Hard Mode... and I think maybe did another Hard Mode clear with 100% of items. Anyway, I think like my last 100% run, this time I surprised myself by doing what I generally think of as the hardest Shinespark puzzle in only two or three attempts. This one requires you to get up to speed on a platform that is basically as short as will allow you to build up the requisite speed (with a door in the middle, so you need to shoot it before you start running - not a major challenge, but psychologically tricky). Then, you have to slip through a gap, as you're falling shoot down through some beam blocks, activate the shinespark mid-air to go left and hit a slanted platform (and thus preserve the spark,) leap down, do so again going right, and then leap down into a pit where you have some blocks to hit on the right. I think you only get a normal Missile tank, but if you want everything, that's how you get it. It also lets you skip the ordinary path to the Gravity Suit.

I had heard that at some point the various teleporters become a fast-travel system, but after beating the Gold Chozo right before Itorash, I still can't use them that way. According to Reddit, you have to actually go to Itorash first and then come back. I need to test this (the TV is in use. Yes, it's a Switch game, but... shut up).

Anyway, there's a certain melancholy when you get toward the end of a game like this - the world opens up, yes, but there's also no new capability to discover. We're at full power.

Going back, the Wave Beam EMMI gives us our final challenge, where you need to speed through tight corridors with various barriers to deal with and find the tiny straightaway that gives you enough time to Omega Stream their faceplate off. While I had to abort my initial go (I think I actually parried out of a grab) the second time I got a nice clean stream-then-beam.

I both hate and love the EMMIs - I hate them in the moment, especially the latter couple where you have to flee them underwater before you get the Gravity suit. But they do exactly what they're there to do - instill a sense of dread (you know, like the title!) The nature of the Omega Stream also forces this very tense moment with each of them, where you need to make yourself vulnerable as they approach and hope you have the precision and the distance to melt their face shield. Getting off the beam shot right afterward takes practice - my first playthrough I think I always ran again after getting the faceplate off and had to set up again for the killing blow, but once you figure out that they start to stand up once you've done enough damage to the plate, you can switch to charging your beam and get off that final blow immediately.

I think for the first time I managed to get a Shinespark on Escue, which made that fight go very quickly. A few of the bosses gave me a fair amount of trouble - Experiment Z57 killed me several times, even though I thought I knew what I was doing (I managed to flub the parry the first few times and I also somehow missed one of the tentacles with my Storm Missiles once).

Anyway, I'll have to see if that teleporter thing works. I know there are a few really tough Shinespark puzzles, and even if I got the one in Burenia, I'm fearfully anticipating a few I remember (there's one in Hanubia where you have to stop, drop a bomb, and then shinespark down, and I genuinely cannot remember how you are supposed to get up to speed for it). I remember one in Artaria where you have to roll into a ball while you have the Shinespark to get through a narrow passage, one in Ferenia where you have to do a lot of slope-preservations, and another very elaborate one in Cataris with the same thing.

Returning to ZDR and Dread

 Crazy to think it's almost been five years since Metroid Dread came out.

While the long-awaited (and supposedly disappointing - I haven't played it yet because I don't yet have a Switch 2) Metroid Prime 4: Beyond has come out since, this is still the most recent classic 2D Metroid game.

Having gotten to the final boss of RE4 Remake on my second playthrough, I felt I had more or less done what I wanted (other than a single missing treasure in the Castle and the Island each before points-of-no-return) and was trying to find a game that would scratch whatever itch it is that I have, and I've found myself thinking about the Metroid series a lot lately.

In large part, this is in reaction to RE2 Remake. After a brief prologue, you enter the RPD headquarters, and until the game's final act, you gradually open up more and more of the building and the sewers below.

It's not technically a Metroidvania - while characters get new weapons over the course of a Resident Evil game, their fundamental capabilities don't really change all that much. In Metroid games, something like the Ice Beam both allows you to freeze enemies in place to make combat a little easier but also allows you to use frozen foes as platforms to reach previously-inaccessible areas - whereas the Club Key, valuable though it is, is there to let you open a certain number of doors and is then discarded when all such doors are opened.

Metroid Dread was a long time coming. Metroid Fusion, 19 years prior, was the previous entry in the main Metroid series (a series that, interestingly enough, has split its time between home consoles and handheld ones, from the NES to the Gameboy to the SNES to the Gameboy Advance, and then hitting Nintendo's home/handheld hybrid on the Switch).

Anyway, what's interesting to me is the parallels that Dread has with RE2. Not only is there an ever-widening environment for you to explore, but there are also unkillable stalkers that you have to spend a significant portion of your game fleeing. RE2 has Mr. X, the hulking tyrant-zombie in a fashionable trenchcoat and fedora (this was 1998, so the fedora was just a throwback to men's fashion in the 1940s, not some Incel-coded red flag). Dread has the EMMIs, robots that are nigh-indestructible who can potentially one-shot Samus if they catch you and you can't pull off the (very tight, difficult) counters (I guess technically two-shot, as you have two chances to counter).

The EMMIs are limited to EMMI zones, unlike Mr. X, who can enter almost every room in the RPD (though I think he stops wandering the police station after you go down into the sewers - he chases you there, though on my second run I don't know if I even bumped into him there). While you might expect that once you enter an EMMI zone, you can complete it and bring the robot down with the special beam weapon you get, the truth is that you'll often need to traverse them multiple times before you can actually deal with the Pursuer. Their appearance will throw you off - you might be heading for a particular exit, but especially if they're in an active pursuit (which seals the exits,) you need to prioritize fleeing them, which might send you in some crazy direction you didn't intend - which is honestly quite a lot like Mr. X - I think that I always seemed to be getting chased by him when I finally got the lever that lets you move the bookshelves in the library and had to circle back to that room multiple times to get the opportunity to use it. (Evidently that very lever is a key item in the visit to the ruined RPD in RE9, and it's right where Leon and/or Claire left it.)

Once again, playing Metroid Dread is really exciting because of how fast and fluid Samus is. My only significant experience with the rest of the mainline series (I played the original Metroid Prime trilogy as well) was Super Metroid, and Samus is pretty slow, her weapon's fire rate especially.

Actually, as someone who is turning 40 in about two months, I have to say that the rate at which Samus can blast things is maybe more of a hinderance than a help, as my thumb gets sore from mashing Y over and over. (Funnily enough, I remember that the Super Metroid default control scheme didn't really work for me, but you could customize it. Dread effectively canonizes my preferred scheme, with Y for shoot, B for jump. A isn't for dash, but it is used for your Flash Step, which functions similarly (it's actually sort of the classic spot for a dodge button, like in a Souls-like, and that is one major use of the Flash Step). The sore-hand issue was also true when the game came out and I was five years younger (I think I may have freaked out more over being halfway through my 30s more than being at the end of them, but then, I also started seeing a therapist that year).

Samus' agility is fitting for her role as an action hero, and I wonder if her relative sluggishness in previous games was intentional or just a limitation on what they could pull off. One of the really weird things to get used to initially is that she'll angle her shots as you move forward, so you have to learn to really point the stick truly right if you want to ensure she hits things in her direct path. Aiming is far freer than it was in Super Metroid, where you could only angle up or down at 45 degrees (though crouching to shoot low enemies or other targets is still a thing).

One thing I remember about Dread is that there are a fair number of one-way paths. Most of these become two-way once you get a relevant upgrade, and by the end of the game you have free reign on ZDR to go everywhere. I suspect that the creators wanted to help you from getting lost. By cutting off the path behind you, your options narrow and thus it becomes easier to know what you need to do next. This can, however, leave you a bit frustrated when you really don't know when you'll be able to go back to a previous area. Metroid games often tease you with optional upgrades just outside your reach, and a promise that you can get it later. But these are mixed in with environmental puzzles that can be solved immediately, so there's a tension on whether you want to stick around and figure it out or move ahead.

Given that those upgrades help you survive, that's a big deal. I think I died maybe twice to Kraid, until I made a change in strategy on the last phase (charging up to hit the little balls he launches out of his belly rather than trying to take them out with normal beam fire - the rate at which they come is actually just about perfect for this). But while I find I'm a little more comfortable being cavalier with Missiles, for example, given how many enemies drop them on death, it's certainly nice to have a large reserve.

There's a saving grace to these one-way doors, though, which is that you truly can return everywhere (at least everywhere with an upgrade) at the end of the game. There's no point of no return where if you saved the game after going through some barrier, you lost that upgrade forever. This was the huge frustration I had in my second, completionist run of RE4. I was able to do all of the Merchant Requests (I had like two blue medallions left on my first run,) but infuriatingly, I had literally just one treasure left behind on both the Island and in the Castle - evidently I already mentioned that in an earlier paragraph, but that should tell you how frustrating it was). RE4 pushes you through the story and its settings - it's not a totally linear path, as there is both opportunity and necessity to revisiting various places you've been to (for all the complaints about escorting Ashley, she actually functions as a Metroidvania-like tool for all the places you can send her up to go through a high gap in a wall and unlock a door or kick down a ladder).

While it doesn't come until right at the end, the fact that Metroid Dread does allow you to eventually sweep ZDR for upgrades before your final confrontation with Raven Beak is very appreciated - he's a very tough fight and you want everything you can get for him. Power Bomb capacity upgrades are arguably only for one specific move of his. Unlike in Super Metroid, where they're a sort of mid-game tool, Dread makes Power Bombs the endgame nuke.

I'm really curious to see how the Metroid franchise is doing - naturally, Prime 4: Beyond was the most recent release, and while I haven't played it, I know it's gotten a lot of flak online. I'm always a little cautious about taking online buzz too seriously especially in the space of gaming, where not only are "hot takes" prioritized by social media algorithms, but there's also a powerful far-right agenda to shift conversations and culture and get people mad about stuff that we used to consider either neutral or just good.

But that being said, there's plenty of legitimate criticism to be had about any medium of art, and the "just let people enjoy things" attitude sometimes veers into "just always like what you're given."

It's neither here nor there, of course, because I haven't played the game and so don't know how I'd feel about it (best guess - I'll probably have mixed feelings about it, enjoying some aspects and disliking certain choices the makers made. Remember that you can like things and still find faults in them, and you can dislike things and still find virtues in them).

Dread felt like a really cool update to a classic franchise, and after nearly 20 years of waiting for it, I really hope that I'm not going to be pushing 60 by the time that we get Metroid 6.

Elvish Unity and Sunwell No More

 With Story Mode available for the final (of two) fights in the March on Quel'danas raid, it's now very easy to finish the campaign quests for the first patch of Midnight. We're going to talk about what happens here, what it implies, and where we think we're going next.

In other words, spoilers abound.

I'm undeniably old-school when it comes to WoW. I started playing at the tail end of Vanilla, and so I've been there for every expansion. In September, I'll have been playing for 20 years.

In those early expansions, the endgame was clear from the start. Shadowmoon Valley was a fel-scorched wasteland with the Black Temple looming (as much as any structure could loom in the days of pretty short draw-distances) and our confrontation with Illidan as the clear endpoint. It was Blizzard's first WoW expansion, and they had ambitiously wanted to get as much of it out as quickly as possible, meaning that its first and second raid tiers both came out at launch, and what was meant to be the final raid came out in 2.1. The expectation, of course, was that players would still have to spend months and months making their way through the content (not only did they need to gear up, but there were lengthy quest chains that required completing dungeons and raids before you could go to the next raid).

Still, having the final raid in the first major patch turned out to be a misstep, and so, maybe a year or so after launch, they created a sort of epilogue with the Sunwell Plateau raid, which gave us the Isle of Quel'danas and our first fight against Kil'jaeden. I think only like 3% of all players even set foot in Sunwell Plateau - raiding was considered an activity for hardcore players, like how Mythic Raiding is today.

Wrath of the Lich King, though, delivered on building to a final climax, and saved Icecrown Citadel, which had always loomed imposingly over Dalaran and all of Northrend (again, looming), with a promise that this would all end with us battling Arthas at the Frozen Throne, which we indeed did. (Yes, the Ruby Sanctum was technically the last raid in Wrath, but that was more of a prologue for Cataclysm).

But in Cataclysm, things changed.

In the leveling campaign for Cataclysm (which was nearly the entirety of the quests we did in that expansion) the final zone was Twilight Highlands, in which we built up to a fight against Twilight's Hammer in the Bastion of Twilight raid. But that plot was resolved in that first patch - we defeated Cho'gall (and Sinestra in heroic mode, which was the highest raid difficulty at the time. Mythic Raids came in I believe the Siege of Orgrimmar).

We knew very well that Deathwing would be the final boss of Cataclysm, but it was totally unclear where we would actually fight him. And that's kind of been the way that things have worked out since then: Blizzard tends not to really clue us in to what we're building to in an expansion. Mists was something of an exception: Blizzard announced in Blizzcon 2012 (if memory serves,) shortly before or maybe after Mists launched, that the final raid would be the Siege of Orgrimmar, with Garrosh as our final boss. But Warlords... was kind of a mess, and we thought Grommash would be the final boss in Hellfire Citadel - Hellfire Citadel was the final raid, but we also got one fewer raid tier than expected in that expansion and the whole Burning Legion angle was a bit of a surprise (in large part because that was kind of what the Iron Horde used to define its superiority over our Horde, that it was never corrupted by demons. Oops). Legion arguably did set up the Tomb of Sargeras from the start, but most of us assumed that Argus would be a full expansion, and Antorus had never been mentioned before. We also hadn't known that Argus was a Titan (/worldsoul? The lore established in Legion was that worldsouls were Titans, and in fairness, I think that that had probably always been intended given that Yogg-Saron refers to Azeroth as a "little seedling," but starting in Dragonflight, the notion that Azeroth is destined to be a Titan specifically has been called into question). BFA seemed to be setting up Sylvanas as our final boss, but the whole N'zoth angle snuck up on us, and again, I'd assumed Ny'alotha would have been a zone, rather than just a raid. Shadowlands made it pretty clear we were fighting the Jailer by the end, but we did Torghast early, and Zereth Mortis was a very new thing when it came out.

Basically, modern WoW, and honestly at this point most of WoW, plays a bit coy with us.

Midnight's leveling campaign built up Quel'danas as the real fundamental point of crisis for the expansion. But now, it's been resolved.

Let's recap (spoilers ahead):

A Second Run Through RE4

 While I had done Ada Wong's "Separate Ways" campaign, it wasn't really like the "second run" you get in RE2. That's arguably to its benefit: RE2's second run, giving you the opportunity to play as the other character, is nearly a full second playthrough (I don't remember exactly how it changes outside of the ordinary Leon/Claire differences, but Mr. X at least shows up earlier - which does make his perfect helicopter-hauling entrance sort of redundant). Really, though, I was curious to see if I could get every last treasure I had missed in my first playthrough of RE4, and also see how it felt to go in with fully-upgraded weapons (in fairness, I think I only had the Blacktail truly fully upgraded, but your handgun is generally your default weapon in these games, and especially when you are hitting pretty hard with it, it will serve you quite well).

I have just defeated Ramon Salazar. While the first time against him took me many, many attempts, this one only took me two - the one death came from his insta-kill attack when I lost sight on him and didn't realize how close he was.

Ramon is a great villain and a terrible boss fight, which is a shame. It's a fight that feels designed to frustrate, giving you tiny windows in which to actually damage him, some attacks that feel undodgeable (when he does the horizontal black-bile spray). To be honest, I'm not really enamored with any of the bosses in... well, most survival horror games. (I think the ones in Silent Hill 2 were more interesting than frustrating - I struggled a lot on Eddie, but appreciated it).

Castle Salazar is generally agreed upon as the best part of the game, and I agree. The Gothic Castle (thinking of an Arrested Development joke - if you know, you know) has a grandeur to it, has cool new enemies, and really amps up the feeling of being displaced in time.

Basically, if we are to rank the three main acts of RE4, I think there's a consensus that the Castle is a firm #1, the Village is a respectable #2, and the final act on the Island is a distant #3 - which I, again, agree with.

But playing through again, I can't help but notice the linear design of the castle. There are kind of segments of it that we need to do in a strict sequence, and rather than a comprehensive and cohesive space, it feels a bit like a series of set-pieces that stand mostly in a line from west to east.

One of the detours from this eastward movement is Leon's trip along the castle walls. It's a thrilling sequence in which we need to dodge hurled explosives by a Gigante that has armor like that sapper Uruk-hai from the Two Towers (the one that ignites the bombs under the big wall).

It's a memorable part of the castle, but it's also weird, because the walls project out from about a third of the way into the castle and reconnect before they can protect other parts of the castle.

RE4's combat is more satisfying than that of RE2 (again, talking about the remakes of both) but the level design is less impressive. It's kind of mad that the RPD and the sewers below all fit together like a big jigsaw puzzle.

Survival Horror rewards (and sometimes in the same breath punishes) exploration. RE4 has a whole mechanic for this, giving you treasures that make up a big bulk of the Pesetas you need to make your weapons more effective. More effective weapons mean enemies that are dead faster, and enemies that die faster mean you're both less likely to take damage from them and also you use up less ammo on them. So there's a really strong incentive to explore the map.

But there are a lot of points-of-no-return in RE4 - I realized only after the knife fight with Krauser in the mines that there was one treasure back in the Hive area that evidently would have required me to blow open a wall, but because I had fallen down the ledge into the arena where we fight Krauser, and I had saved in the Chapter End screen (something that is usually unnecessary because we tend to immediately find a new Typewriter at the start of each chapter) I was SOL, and finished the castle with 40/41 treasures collected.

It's interesting, because I remember playing a lot of games in the mid-2000s that embraced linearity in the name of storytelling. I didn't play RE4 until a couple months ago, but I remember playing the Prince of Persia games of the same generation, and I remember having a frustrating moment where I realized in Warrior Within that I had missed just one of the shrines where you can increase your health and earn the Water Sword, which in turn gives you the true final boss of that game.

Earlier games, in the 90s, often had discrete levels that could be re-played, even if there wasn't anything you needed to unlock in them. But I think as games were starting to be treated more as a legitimate storytelling medium, particularly in this PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era, there was a greater drive to move forward with the story by continually pushing the player through the game.

What's kind of fascinating is the way that the next big move in video games was the Open World genre, which went the opposite direction. Obviously, titles that pre-dated RE4, like Grand Theft Auto 3, which kind of invented the modern open-world game, existed. But I wonder if the popularity of games like Assassin's Creed were born in part out of the idea that, because the missions didn't take you to some unique location, meant you could always revisit places and continue your treasure hunts.

But to turn back to RE4, the forward momentum means that there's less of an intricate puzzle box approach to the level design. Castle Salazar implies a lot of unvisited rooms, or is the most inefficiently-designed castle in the world. (I think the implication is the former because there's no bedrooms or kitchens or other pretty necessary parts of a castle).

In contrast, the RPD is madly designed, but there's something more believable about the fact that all of its chambers fit into a rectangular footprint.

But I think that this linear design in an exploration-focused game creates a major problem: it punishes exploration. If you take a wrong turn, and you haven't solved this one puzzle, you're screwed. In my first playthrough, I think I had the third tile for that one puzzle in the lakeside village where you have to swap hexagonal tiles around to make an image, but because I had gone far enough that the game wanted to funnel me toward the eventual Father Mendez fight, I couldn't actually get back to the place to plug the third piece in and collect the idol treasure (on my second run, I did finish this puzzle, and the idol was kind of underwhelmingly low-value, but I had to remind myself that in the first act of the game, when you're just barely able to afford the first couple upgrades on your weapons, that treasure is probably worth more, relatively speaking).

I'm thinking about, like, the locker room in RE2, and how I could totally imagine forgetting to go and plug in the second spare button, thus being unable to claim the super-valuable hip-pack there. But until you go to the Nest, there's nothing stopping you from returning there, and by that point, you've probably got a fairly fast route to return to the RPD from the sewers.

Anyway, having finished the Castle, I'm trying to decide if I want to finish the final part of the game. I died something like fourteen times in the real Krauser fight, but maybe I'd do better this time. I kind of dread the part where you need to deal with both an Iron Maiden and four Ganados trying to grab Ashley from behind a bunch of metal bars, but maybe with my fully upgraded LE5 or Stingray, I might be able to down the Iron Maiden quickly and be able to deal with the Ganados at a leisurely pace (when I finally beat that encounter, I didn't kill the Iron Maiden, instead just dropping it into the chasm and forfeiting any treasure I might have gotten. Like fleeing Verdugo the first time, this time I killed it, so we could see).

Really, I'm mostly contemplating what I want to play next. Truly, there is something very satisfying to the combat in RE4, so there's a hook there.

Metroidvania and D&D

 The first time I played Super Metroid was either in 1999 or 2000. While I had gotten an SNES in 1996 (after the N64 had already come out) I got my N64 just the next year, so those two console generations - which represented a pretty big jump - kind of overlapped for me. I was familiar with Mario and Zelda, but it was 1999's Super Smash Bros. that introduced me to Samus. After she became my favorite fighter in Smash, I decided to check out one of her titles, and the only one that was on a console I owned was Super Metroid. I got a used cartridge for 5 bucks. Probably the best 5 bucks I ever spent.

Nowadays, Super Metroid is remembered as an absolute classic. It's the Metroid game that most ROM hacks use as their foundation. It has a killer soundtrack and a fantastic world design. While the first title probably invented the Metroidvania genre (the other half, Castlevania, wouldn't actually work like one until the PS1 era's Symphony of the Night, which I've never actually played) Super Metroid is maybe the most quintessential example.

What is a Metroidvania?

Well, for context, in the SNES era, most games were divided into discrete levels. Even a relatively open-world game like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past still put you into dungeons that were kind of separate from the rest of the world - you could be confident that once you got inside a dungeon, you would find all the tools you needed to beat it within.

Metroidvanias place the character in a large and complex environment, but only give you access to a small part of it initially. The player must search that territory for items and upgrades that enhance their abilities and open up new paths. In Metroid games (the recent Dread actually being an exception,) the first upgrade you tend to get is the Morph Ball, which allows our badass armored space bounty hunter to roll into a sphere and quickly travel through narrow crevasses (this series staple was actually because they were struggling to give Samus a crawling animation in the NES original). So, your experience with these games begins by funneling you to that first item, with various barricades and obstacles that cannot be overcome until you get the next item in the sequence. (That said, the designers often put in extra-challenging ways for knowledgeable players to break that sequence, which is how you get people who do "backwards" runs of Super Metroid where they beat the four major area bosses in the opposite order of how the game expect you to do it).

Having beaten Resident Evil 2's remake recently (Leon's first run and Claire's second) I was trying to decide if it counted as a Metroidvania. The answer is kinda-sorta. With the exception of the Nest lab at the end, the whole game is one interconnected map, with the baroque police department headquarters up on the surface level and a vast sewer complex below. These connect in unexpected ways, and until you get on the tram that takes you to the Nest, you can always return to the RPD's main lobby that acts as the real start of the game for Leon (other than a prologue that takes place in locations you cannot revisit - just as Samus cannot return to the destroyed Ceres Station in Super Metroid).

The distinction I might make here, though, is that the key items and opened passages in RE2 are not based on abilities you gain that aid you in other ways (with rare exceptions like how getting a combat knife allows you to cut through some tape over a control panel). There's no use for the various card-suit keys other than opening the doors with those locks on them, and RE2 lets you know when a key item is safe to discard, meaning that these don't enhance your abilities over time - they are only useful in the finite instances for which they are intended. Not only do you no longer need a pair of bolt cutters after you cut the three or four chains holding doors closed, but the bolt cutters cannot be used for any other purpose, and just jam up your inventory space, incentivizing you to toss them (and unlike a Skyrim-like game, the item vanishes from the world when it's discarded).

Still, the structure of these games are both about exploring a space in a kind of sequence that gradually opens that space up. Part of the challenge of the game is that you don't know what that sequence is initially, and so when you get a new tool, you need to consider all the locations where you saw barriers that that new tool can overcome (newer games in these genres often mark such places on a map).

This structure isn't limited to Metroidvanias - Silent Hill 2's remake (yes, I've spent a lot of the last year or so familiarizing myself with the classics of the Survival Horror genre through their recent remakes) puts you in "dungeon" like environments that need to kind of be solved like a big puzzle, but once you depart, you don't come back to them - the overall structure is linear even if individual chapters require backtracking.

Anyway, I think part of what I love about DMing D&D is the opportunity to be an amateur game designer. I know nothing about the digital tools required to build video games, but I like to think I've absorbed a lot of game design philosophy over my very soon to be four decades.

D&D began in the 1970s, and while there were rudimentary computer games at the time, the revolutionary development of the medium in the 1980s had not yet taken place. Still, I think that those dungeons that people built back then were in many ways the blueprint for a lot of these exploration-heavy video games.

But I also don't think that it totally works, because of the generalities built into D&D that might clash with dungeon challenges:

Consider keys:

In RE2, finding keys is a huge part of the game. Leon and Claire each find three of the four card-suit keys (there's one exclusive to each of them, Clubs for Leon and Hearts for Claire) and there are plenty of other keys to find, as well as lots of items that might not be literal keys, but are effectively (like the aforementioned bolt cutters).

In D&D, picking locks is a valuable skill that Rogues in particular tend to be good at. Rogues and Artificers (as well as PCs from some backgrounds) start with a set of Thieves' Tools, and the expectation for those characters is that they're going to be able to use those tools to get around the need for a key. Wizards (and maybe other classes?) can get the Knock spell. And any character could try to use an Athletics check to just knock a door down, ignoring the challenge of the lock.

D&D is built to allow imaginative and creative solutions to problems. Metroidvania design is about discovering the intended path that is obscured by its expansive world. Straying from that path might reward you by finding optional collectables - the missile expansions or energy tanks that give you more longterm combat power, for instance.

As a DM, it's kind of an unspoken covenant with your players that if the course of action they describe makes sense with the logic of the world, you must at the very least allow them to attempt to take that course of action. It might be mitigated by a roll, and extreme actions (like battering down a reinforced door) might be met with extreme difficulty, but generally not impossibility. You might say that one important door is impossible to knock down, but your players will start to get impatient with you if say that every door is impossible to knock down, especially because there are in-game tools that they might have acquired to do just that (like a battering ram, a real item that has a gold cost and everything).

I had a moment like this - frustration at having all my character abilities shut down but also appreciation for what the DM was looking for me to do:

My Triton Wizard, in his backstory, was informed of a hidden Age of Arcanum facility called the Cryptorium. The sentient book that sent him on his adventure (and trained him in the Order of Scribes and acts as his Manifest Mind,) and who was originally a living human wizard from long ago, thought that the other members of his ancient order (also turned into books) could be found there. It was the dungeon that I had basically written into my backstory, and truly, my DM (who is also my best friend) did an amazing job with the conceptualization of it (I had given only the name, but the place was built into the lakebed of the Erdeloch in the Dwendalian Empire, and was a sort of magically-high-tech underwater facility, which also gave my Triton some time to feel cool swimming around).

The central challenge of the dungeon was to gradually go up through its levels (it was basically an underground tower carved into a solid piece of rock, entered at the bottom through a submarine docking bay). When we noticed a hole in the ceiling of the central chamber where a hovering disc elevator ought to go, naturally my first instinct was just to cast Fly on myself and secure a rope at the top.

But that would mean skipping the intended solution, which was more fun. So, in a manner I suspect was sort of improvised, the central chamber of the Cryptorium now had an antimagic field. I pointed out that we had fought a monster in that base level of the central chamber, during which I had cast a cantrip, so the field was revised to allow cantrips, just not higher-level spells.

It was, you know, railroading.

However, as we explored that level, we came to one room in which a great glass window looked out into the murky water of the lake. And a lightbulb went off in my head:

If we broke the glass, the water would flood in, and we could swim up through the hole.

This, it turned out, was the intended solution. And even if it was kind of forced upon us in an awkward way, I freaking loved it. Once again, this was tailor-made for my character, who both has a swim speed and can breathe underwater. The rest of the party had to work a little harder - while I had Water Breathing running on everyone as a matter of course given our location, the rush of water was a hazard, and we also needed to ensure that we had collected and protected any valuables we could find that might be harmed by the water.

Now, this isn't really a Metroidvania-style solution. While we would quickly recognize that flooding a floor gave us access to the next floor (something we repeated once or twice to get to the top of the facility) and so could more easily get past the rest of the dungeon, it wasn't some tool that we could use more universally.

And I think that's because D&D's design is not really built for that.

In 5E, player power comes predominantly from our class, and our overall build. Magic items usually enhance those things: a Vicious Weapon still plugs into a Fighter's overall strategy of "hit things with weapon" and rather than transforming how they do what they do or when they can use it, it just amplifies the effect.

I could imagine a campaign in which you introduce monsters that can only be defeated with some special kind of, say, poison, but because the game design has to be modular and generalized, you're never going to get a big monster book with that built in.

To take another RE2 example: in the final stretch of the game, you encounter Plant Zombies. These things will not die unless they burn to a charred crisp (I think - I read somewhere that if you destroy all of their bulbs they won't come back, but I always burned them). With fire as the only means to permanently destroy them, you're incentivized to conserve either the fuel for Leon's flamethrower or the Incendiary Rounds in Claire's chemical launcher.

A rough equivalent in D&D is a Troll's regeneration ability. Trolls cannot die as long as they can continue to regenerate HP. But to turn that off, you can hit them with Fire or Acid damage, both of which are damage types that a spellcaster can get in cantrip form. If you have that available, there's no need to use up any limited resource to ensure you're free of their threat.

Once again, the broad capabilities of D&D characters means that the DM has limited control over what solutions they can force the player into finding.

There are rare exceptions: Flameskulls come back to life after just 1 hour unless they are sprinkled with Holy Water or the Dispel Evil and Good spell is cast on them. While the latter is something that a player might happen to have on them and thus not be limited to some specific resource, it's a 5th level spell, and thus a pretty significant sacrifice of future power.

But cantrips and tools have the potential to disrupt this kind of puzzle-box dungeon.

I don't think it's impossible, but you might have to really go outside the box on what kind of obstacles you set up. Magic is a good start, but even that can be countered by things like Dispel Magic. Even impenetrable physical barriers can potentially be bypassed with things like Stone Shape, Dimension Door, or Passwall.

Certainly, these spells consume spell slots as important resources, but those are also resources that might come back if the players find a way to take a rest inside of a dungeon (like with a Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion spell).

I think my conclusion here is that while you can take a lot of inspiration from the puzzle-box dungeons found in Metroidvania and similar games, on a basic level, D&D is not really built for that kind of experience. A more stripped-down game might make it work. But D&D is very much built to allow players to improvise and color outside of the lines. That's very fun in its own way - as a DM, I'm always excited when my players come up with a solution I never thought of - but it does mean that the experience is going to feel different.