After being away for over two months, I was finally able to do some significant work on the Broken Shore and its new content.
So far I've gotten new followers, upgraded artifacts, and the ability to research new AK levels on my Paladin, Death Knight, and Demon Hunter, who are my "top three" guys (Shaman and Rogue will go next.)
There's a lot of stuff to handle - a new dungeon (which I've run once on the tankadin) and new followers along with a much higher follower item level cap (and thus quests requiring much more.)
So far I'm finding the Broken Shore decent, though I think that while a new zone for world quests is never a terrible idea, I'd have tried to work in some of the unstructured content we had in places like the Timeless Isle.
Plotwise, I've gotten Anduin through his grieving process (not sure if the Horde has an equivalent quest chain, though I'm given to understand they don't,) but we're still definitely in a holding pattern when it comes to the raid.
I'm somewhat encouraged that I'm already maybe a quarter or even a third of the way to revered with Armies of the Legionfall, which is the only thing I need for the flying achievement (not sure if the class mount quest follows from that or if it's something they're still holding back.)
And I have not even made an attempt at the artifact challenge, as I'm given to understand that it - and particularly the tanking challenge - is very difficult and might be better attempted once I get a little of that Tomb of Sargeras stuff.
I spent some Marks of Honor on the previous PvP season's DK look, which is pretty great, but I'm thinking I might save the other twelve I have for 7.3, as the Paladin Lightbringer lookalike PvP set (Alliance blue) is directly up my alley (while I tend to go for Tier 8 Aegis as my go-to transmog, tier 6 and I guess also 20 now is what I think of as the absolute most quintessential paladin armor set. There is no doubt that you're looking at a heroic good guy in heavy armor.)
Of course, I have nine more characters to take to the Broken Shore, but as long as these three are up and active and getting their sweet sweet artifact knowledge research, I'm ok.
Thursday, May 25, 2017
Monday, May 22, 2017
Linearity Versus Open World in D&D
My primary exposure to D&D prior to playing the game has been watching Penny Arcade's annual or semiannual Acquisitions Incorporated games. While these are very fun (largely due to fun characters and Chris Perkins' ever-game DM'ing,) they are generally on rails. There's very little real "dungeon crawling" and mostly involves single-sitting adventures that typically only involve one large fight rather than multiple smaller ones.
It makes things very entertaining and works to give each two-and-a-half-hour session a clear arc. But as someone who doesn't need to entertain a crowd, I've been exploring a more open-ended adventure.
I spent almost a month putting together an adventure that takes my players to a location they have never heard of (though they've encountered some of its inhabitants.) I'm going to be slightly cagey about this on the off chance that any of them follow this blog, but I'll talk a bit about structure.
The idea behind this is that there is a bordered region that's going to really be where they do their adventure - if the players attempt to leave this area, I might have them encounter extra-tough enemies or simply improvise some new settings for them to visit. But generally, I'll try to steer them back into the adventure region.
However, while they will be somewhat limited to this area for what I imagine will be many sessions, while they're in there, I'm going to try to be pretty open to what they want to do and where they want to go.
My strategy for preparing this adventure was to first come up with a general sense of the "overworld" area. This is a large region that will require days of travel and special threats that they'll deal with the entire time.
My expectation is that the players will level up at least two times (probably more) by the end of the adventure. The overworld region won't level up with them, so threats that seemed pretty scary when they first got there will, hopefully, seem like something they can overcome with ease.
One way to help dull the difficulty when they first arrive is that they'll get a couple NPC party members. Eventually, they'll be able to get three followers who will always be two levels below them. These guys will dilute the XP they earn (I don't want them getting super-powered before they escape) but also make combat encounters less likely to wipe them out.
From the Overworld, which is totally set up to cater to their current level, they'll go to various important locations, which is where most of the plot of the adventure takes place. These areas are "tuned" for higher levels, with more challenging beings that rule over them. My thought is that each of these regions will take maybe one to three sessions, and while one of them is the "final dungeon," they're designed to be relatively self-contained, so that the players can do them in any order.
My thought is that, especially with noncombat alternatives to some of the key conflicts, it won't be a problem if the players outlevel a region. The environments and characters are, I hope, enough to make easy combat still entertaining. On the other hand, I'll be curious to see if there will be situations where the players feel compelled to retreat from combat.
It's a big experiment, but I'm really excited to see how it works out, as this kind of open-world design could be a model going forward. (It also means that I probably won't have to prepare any new content for months.)
It makes things very entertaining and works to give each two-and-a-half-hour session a clear arc. But as someone who doesn't need to entertain a crowd, I've been exploring a more open-ended adventure.
I spent almost a month putting together an adventure that takes my players to a location they have never heard of (though they've encountered some of its inhabitants.) I'm going to be slightly cagey about this on the off chance that any of them follow this blog, but I'll talk a bit about structure.
The idea behind this is that there is a bordered region that's going to really be where they do their adventure - if the players attempt to leave this area, I might have them encounter extra-tough enemies or simply improvise some new settings for them to visit. But generally, I'll try to steer them back into the adventure region.
However, while they will be somewhat limited to this area for what I imagine will be many sessions, while they're in there, I'm going to try to be pretty open to what they want to do and where they want to go.
My strategy for preparing this adventure was to first come up with a general sense of the "overworld" area. This is a large region that will require days of travel and special threats that they'll deal with the entire time.
My expectation is that the players will level up at least two times (probably more) by the end of the adventure. The overworld region won't level up with them, so threats that seemed pretty scary when they first got there will, hopefully, seem like something they can overcome with ease.
One way to help dull the difficulty when they first arrive is that they'll get a couple NPC party members. Eventually, they'll be able to get three followers who will always be two levels below them. These guys will dilute the XP they earn (I don't want them getting super-powered before they escape) but also make combat encounters less likely to wipe them out.
From the Overworld, which is totally set up to cater to their current level, they'll go to various important locations, which is where most of the plot of the adventure takes place. These areas are "tuned" for higher levels, with more challenging beings that rule over them. My thought is that each of these regions will take maybe one to three sessions, and while one of them is the "final dungeon," they're designed to be relatively self-contained, so that the players can do them in any order.
My thought is that, especially with noncombat alternatives to some of the key conflicts, it won't be a problem if the players outlevel a region. The environments and characters are, I hope, enough to make easy combat still entertaining. On the other hand, I'll be curious to see if there will be situations where the players feel compelled to retreat from combat.
It's a big experiment, but I'm really excited to see how it works out, as this kind of open-world design could be a model going forward. (It also means that I probably won't have to prepare any new content for months.)
Chrono Trigger: A Benchmark in Time-Travel Video Games
Squaresoft had a golden era in the 1990s. As someone who is just starting to realize that he's not exactly "young people" anymore, I sometimes forget that there are people who are legitimately adults who don't really remember the 90s.
The SNES era saw the release of Final Fantasy VI (released as III in the US as there had only been two of the five games released here at that point. For VII they just synched up the series with Japan,) Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG, and Chrono Trigger. Of these, I really played a lot more Mario RPG and Secret of Mana when I was a kid, but in college, I got the PS1 port of Chrono Trigger (played on my PS2, so it was kind of doubly removed from its original form) and I realized it's one of the greatest games of all time.
And one of the reasons that it was so good is that they managed to create a solid time-travel narrative that was not impossible to follow.
Time Travel is, hypothetically, one of the coolest subjects in fiction, but writing it is very, very hard. For one thing, because it's a totally hypothetical thing that may be not just physically impossible, but actually metaphysically impossible if fully considered, the logic surrounding it has to be worked out by the writer. And it's easy to slip up and be inconsistent.
Now, to be fair, Chrono Trigger is not always perfectly consistent - generally, the party members are immune to changes in the fabric of history, allowing them to remember other versions of events before they changed them. However, there's also a part where party member Marle disappears from existence because her ancestor was kidnapped and presumably would be killed without further intervention.
Still, as interesting as it is to talk about the logical paradoxes that can arise from being able to manipulate the events of history, one of the other really great opportunities in a time-travel narrative is to see how familiar things change.
For example, the game starts in the modern era in 1000 AD (the years are a little misleading, as 1000 seems more like 1990, and 1999 looks like some kind of futuristic civilization even though the game was made only a couple years before that in the real world.) In 1000, there is a town full of beings that look monstrous, but they're perfectly friendly. However, when traveling back to 600 AD, there is a war between the human kingdom of Guardia and the Mystics - those very same monsters that will be friendly in the present. In fact, when the game begins, the leader of the Mystics, known as Magus, looks like he's going to be the main bad guy of the story.
One also gets to play some fun games with long periods of time. One of the party members is a robot from the future, and there is a side-quest toward the end of the game in which you can have Robo (ok, the character names are not the most creative) start working on irrigating and planting trees in a desert and then quickly traveling several hundred years into the future and picking him up when the job is done.
I don't think I've seen any other games pull off time travel as well as Chrono Trigger. Time Splitters: Future Perfect did have some fun with it, but not nearly to the same degree.
Chrono Trigger had one sequel, Chrono Cross, which I never played, but it never grew into a large franchise like Final Fantasy (or Secret of Mana, which I actually think went on to have several games, even though I'm almost utterly unfamiliar with anything but that one.)
The SNES era saw the release of Final Fantasy VI (released as III in the US as there had only been two of the five games released here at that point. For VII they just synched up the series with Japan,) Secret of Mana, Super Mario RPG, and Chrono Trigger. Of these, I really played a lot more Mario RPG and Secret of Mana when I was a kid, but in college, I got the PS1 port of Chrono Trigger (played on my PS2, so it was kind of doubly removed from its original form) and I realized it's one of the greatest games of all time.
And one of the reasons that it was so good is that they managed to create a solid time-travel narrative that was not impossible to follow.
Time Travel is, hypothetically, one of the coolest subjects in fiction, but writing it is very, very hard. For one thing, because it's a totally hypothetical thing that may be not just physically impossible, but actually metaphysically impossible if fully considered, the logic surrounding it has to be worked out by the writer. And it's easy to slip up and be inconsistent.
Now, to be fair, Chrono Trigger is not always perfectly consistent - generally, the party members are immune to changes in the fabric of history, allowing them to remember other versions of events before they changed them. However, there's also a part where party member Marle disappears from existence because her ancestor was kidnapped and presumably would be killed without further intervention.
Still, as interesting as it is to talk about the logical paradoxes that can arise from being able to manipulate the events of history, one of the other really great opportunities in a time-travel narrative is to see how familiar things change.
For example, the game starts in the modern era in 1000 AD (the years are a little misleading, as 1000 seems more like 1990, and 1999 looks like some kind of futuristic civilization even though the game was made only a couple years before that in the real world.) In 1000, there is a town full of beings that look monstrous, but they're perfectly friendly. However, when traveling back to 600 AD, there is a war between the human kingdom of Guardia and the Mystics - those very same monsters that will be friendly in the present. In fact, when the game begins, the leader of the Mystics, known as Magus, looks like he's going to be the main bad guy of the story.
One also gets to play some fun games with long periods of time. One of the party members is a robot from the future, and there is a side-quest toward the end of the game in which you can have Robo (ok, the character names are not the most creative) start working on irrigating and planting trees in a desert and then quickly traveling several hundred years into the future and picking him up when the job is done.
I don't think I've seen any other games pull off time travel as well as Chrono Trigger. Time Splitters: Future Perfect did have some fun with it, but not nearly to the same degree.
Chrono Trigger had one sequel, Chrono Cross, which I never played, but it never grew into a large franchise like Final Fantasy (or Secret of Mana, which I actually think went on to have several games, even though I'm almost utterly unfamiliar with anything but that one.)
Friday, May 19, 2017
Making the Monsters Matter
As I've said before, I came to the D&D table pretty late, only a year/year and a half ago (I'm still getting used to the idea of being 30 and it's dawning on me that 31 is coming in less than a month,) but a combination of the fact that it's way easier to get people to play a game like this if you volunteer to do the hardest part and the fact that it means I get to come up with a whole new world and history really compelled me to jump into the deep end as a DM.
Now, my RPG experience has been primarily through video games (this blog started as a pure World of Warcraft blog, and I'd say that's still its main focus) and one thing that video games have to contend with is that everything needs to be pre-programmed. As well-written as the characters in Mass Effect are (can't speak to Andromeda, which I have not played,) your interactions ultimately wind up being multiple-choice, and the game's not going to let you do anything the developers didn't anticipate.
My impulse in my campaign has been to push combat encounters with little fanfare - my general sense has been that if I send a monster at my party, there's going to be a fight. But I think that is a bit of a habit from video games.
Just because, for example, a goblin in D&D is chaotic evil, doesn't mean that it is necessarily going to kill everything it looks at.
So even though this is May, I'm going to make a kind of new year's resolution to open things up and encourage my party to deal with monsters in either non-combat ways, or at least more strategic ways.
I think one of the keys is allowing players to encounter monsters in contexts that don't necessitate immediate combat.
One idea (and I'm banking on the assumption that none of the players read this blog) is that I have a subregion of an area within my setting's equivalent of the Shadowfell (think more like the Dark World from Zelda: A Link to the Past) where there is a coven of Night Hags who control a town that used to belong to their mother, from whom they usurped the town.
My initial impulse would be to give the players a simple "kill their mother to get their help or kill them" choice, but I think the resolution here is to try to let the party surprise me. Anything from a Yojimbo-style playing-both-sides-against-each-other thing to providing family counseling to heal the rift between these evil fiends.
Only one of my players has played the game prior to this campaign, so I think I'll need to actively encourage them to try alternative approaches - not that going in guns-a-blazing isn't an option. I suppose that I could encourage this by A: having monsters that are not immediately hostile and B: sending them up against monsters that can wipe the floor with them, requiring them to try some other tack.
Monday, May 8, 2017
What I Learned Rolling Five D&D Characters in a Row
Because I'm bored and far away from my D&D party, I've been entertaining myself by watching Web DM (a Youtube channel with lots of in-depth tips for players and DMs,) as well as the Acquisitions Incorporated spin-off The C Team (which has gotten really good in the past few episodes,) planning an elaborate adventure for my party for when I get back to LA, and today, coming up with several potential player characters (that I'd want to play, though I suppose if we have some players who want to pop in I could let them take these for a spin.)
When you're new to D&D, as I was when I first started DM'ing, there's a hell of a lot of information to take in (thankfully the Monster Manual is almost pure reference.) So while I've got a pretty solid understanding of how to run combat, build dungeons (sort of... I never have anything as elaborate as what you find in the published adventures, focusing more on outdoor stuff,) and do general RP/character interactions and such, I mostly rely on the honesty of my players to get the details about their capabilities right.
Rolling a bunch of characters has really given me a much better sense of what these classes can do. So I'll go character-by-character and say what I learned about the classes. All these guys are at level three, which I figure is a relatively standard place for most campaigns to start (I started my guys at level one, but given that only one of us had played the game before, it wasn't a terrible idea.)
Generally speaking, I think that the traits, ideal, bond, and flaw things are all stuff that one might be tempted to skip over when creating a character, but they're actually really good to help you get a feel for how to role-play. If you take the time to figure these things out - even if you are just copying them down from the suggested characteristics in the book - you'll start to get a real sense of the character, which will inspire you to come up with more ideas to lend the character specificity.
Alfred Nightfire - Human Warlock, Great Old One, Tome Pact, Noble, Chaotic Neutral
Alfred's the character I came up with a long time ago, and he's actually shown up in my campaign as a temporary party member when we only had three people in the group other than myself. I re-rolled him today as an exercise.
I think Warlocks have fantastic storytelling potential, as you kind of have a Bond automatically. Mechanically, they are a bit limited in that they rely a lot on their spell casting, but have a tiny number of spell slots. Thankfully, you can get those slots back on a short rest, but you'll have to ask your party to break for lunch about as often as the Hobbits do. The eldritch invocations focus a lot on the Eldritch Blast cantrip, which certainly seems like the ideal cantrip, but it'd be nice to make it non-mandatory. I love the idea of playing an escaped mental patient with a direct line to some sort of eldritch abomination, though, so he's still top of my list to play if I get someone else to DM.
Zarlak Azoral - Blue Dragonborn Fighter, Eldritch Knight, Sage, Lawful Neutral
I don't know why, but for some reason I've always been a little repelled by the "straight fighter" classes in RPGs. It always seems to me that if you're going to play in a world with magic, you're kind of nuts not to play a class that has magic.
The Eldritch Knight archetype solves this big time, and it also realizes a class archetype I could have sworn was a real thing, but can never find in actual RPGs: the Battlemage. An Eldritch Knight is pretty much exactly what you need for a Battlemage. I feel like Eldritch is too firmly associated with Lovecraftian horror in my mind, but this is totally a Battlemage, and I imagine it's a lot of fun to play.
Kex Kariko - Wood Elf Monk, Way of Shadow, Acolyte, Chaotic Good
I've also never been drawn that much to martial arts classes in the past. I don't know why. Maybe it's my subconscious occident-centrism tendencies or a draw toward heavy armor and heavy weapons, but for some reason it doesn't usually click with me. Reading through the Monk entry in the player's handbook, however, is doing a lot to change my mind.
If you go Way of Shadow, you get a straight-up ninja, with the ability to cast stealth-enhancing spells to go with your martial arts moves. And actually, on top of that, there's some really cool flavor to Monks in general, what with the ability to catch arrows and thrown weapons and toss them back at your enemies, as well as the ability to, very early on, smack your target with up to three attacks. Monks get a lot of toys.
Jadro Coppledart - Lightfoot Halfling Rogue, Arcane Trickster, Enforcer (custom background,) Lawful Good
First off: there's really no good "cop" background. The Soldier background is too focused on army camaraderie and the Spy variant of Criminal doesn't really change how the benefits work for the background. So what I suggest is something I partially cribbed from suggestions online: Give Insight and Investigation proficiencies, one extra language, proficiency with thieves' tools, a badge of office, a crowbar, common clothes, and a coin purse of seized assets worth 15gp. This works, pretty decently I think, for a detective character (Investigation to search for clues, Insight for questioning witnesses and suspects.)
Rogues I actually have some experience with, as one of the members of my party is a Rogue. That sneak attack damage can really make them hit for huge amounts, and it's not terribly hard to get the bonus if there's melee characters in your party.
Palthan Arbrecht - Human Wizard, School of Necromancy, Charlatan, Neutral Evil
There's also a Wizard in my party, and I have to say that as a class, it's really defined by the spells you choose. Most of the class features just focus on getting more spells, recovering spells slots, and making it quicker and cheaper to add spells to your spell book.
At least at early levels, your school doesn't change the way the class plays a whole lot. However, because you can effectively know unlimited spells, it means that it's very easy to customize your capabilities. The only downside is that you're really going to have to either invest in a set of spell cards or print out a list of all the details of your spells (or just flip through the Player's Handbook constantly.)
Also, as a character note, I'm really happy with the idea of a snake-oil-selling necromancer, complete with his false identity he uses on the road, Doctor Lukvard von Toffel.
Other Characters:
I imagine I might do a bit more of this. I rolled a Barbarian, Druid, and Bard to serve as allied NPCs in the upcoming adventure. I'd like to start looking into alternative races, backgrounds, and class features that have popped up in other books. (Actually, the Barbarian I rolled was a Goliath.) Still got room for a Cleric, Ranger, Paladin, and Sorcerer.
When you're new to D&D, as I was when I first started DM'ing, there's a hell of a lot of information to take in (thankfully the Monster Manual is almost pure reference.) So while I've got a pretty solid understanding of how to run combat, build dungeons (sort of... I never have anything as elaborate as what you find in the published adventures, focusing more on outdoor stuff,) and do general RP/character interactions and such, I mostly rely on the honesty of my players to get the details about their capabilities right.
Rolling a bunch of characters has really given me a much better sense of what these classes can do. So I'll go character-by-character and say what I learned about the classes. All these guys are at level three, which I figure is a relatively standard place for most campaigns to start (I started my guys at level one, but given that only one of us had played the game before, it wasn't a terrible idea.)
Generally speaking, I think that the traits, ideal, bond, and flaw things are all stuff that one might be tempted to skip over when creating a character, but they're actually really good to help you get a feel for how to role-play. If you take the time to figure these things out - even if you are just copying them down from the suggested characteristics in the book - you'll start to get a real sense of the character, which will inspire you to come up with more ideas to lend the character specificity.
Alfred Nightfire - Human Warlock, Great Old One, Tome Pact, Noble, Chaotic Neutral
Alfred's the character I came up with a long time ago, and he's actually shown up in my campaign as a temporary party member when we only had three people in the group other than myself. I re-rolled him today as an exercise.
I think Warlocks have fantastic storytelling potential, as you kind of have a Bond automatically. Mechanically, they are a bit limited in that they rely a lot on their spell casting, but have a tiny number of spell slots. Thankfully, you can get those slots back on a short rest, but you'll have to ask your party to break for lunch about as often as the Hobbits do. The eldritch invocations focus a lot on the Eldritch Blast cantrip, which certainly seems like the ideal cantrip, but it'd be nice to make it non-mandatory. I love the idea of playing an escaped mental patient with a direct line to some sort of eldritch abomination, though, so he's still top of my list to play if I get someone else to DM.
Zarlak Azoral - Blue Dragonborn Fighter, Eldritch Knight, Sage, Lawful Neutral
I don't know why, but for some reason I've always been a little repelled by the "straight fighter" classes in RPGs. It always seems to me that if you're going to play in a world with magic, you're kind of nuts not to play a class that has magic.
The Eldritch Knight archetype solves this big time, and it also realizes a class archetype I could have sworn was a real thing, but can never find in actual RPGs: the Battlemage. An Eldritch Knight is pretty much exactly what you need for a Battlemage. I feel like Eldritch is too firmly associated with Lovecraftian horror in my mind, but this is totally a Battlemage, and I imagine it's a lot of fun to play.
Kex Kariko - Wood Elf Monk, Way of Shadow, Acolyte, Chaotic Good
I've also never been drawn that much to martial arts classes in the past. I don't know why. Maybe it's my subconscious occident-centrism tendencies or a draw toward heavy armor and heavy weapons, but for some reason it doesn't usually click with me. Reading through the Monk entry in the player's handbook, however, is doing a lot to change my mind.
If you go Way of Shadow, you get a straight-up ninja, with the ability to cast stealth-enhancing spells to go with your martial arts moves. And actually, on top of that, there's some really cool flavor to Monks in general, what with the ability to catch arrows and thrown weapons and toss them back at your enemies, as well as the ability to, very early on, smack your target with up to three attacks. Monks get a lot of toys.
Jadro Coppledart - Lightfoot Halfling Rogue, Arcane Trickster, Enforcer (custom background,) Lawful Good
First off: there's really no good "cop" background. The Soldier background is too focused on army camaraderie and the Spy variant of Criminal doesn't really change how the benefits work for the background. So what I suggest is something I partially cribbed from suggestions online: Give Insight and Investigation proficiencies, one extra language, proficiency with thieves' tools, a badge of office, a crowbar, common clothes, and a coin purse of seized assets worth 15gp. This works, pretty decently I think, for a detective character (Investigation to search for clues, Insight for questioning witnesses and suspects.)
Rogues I actually have some experience with, as one of the members of my party is a Rogue. That sneak attack damage can really make them hit for huge amounts, and it's not terribly hard to get the bonus if there's melee characters in your party.
Palthan Arbrecht - Human Wizard, School of Necromancy, Charlatan, Neutral Evil
There's also a Wizard in my party, and I have to say that as a class, it's really defined by the spells you choose. Most of the class features just focus on getting more spells, recovering spells slots, and making it quicker and cheaper to add spells to your spell book.
At least at early levels, your school doesn't change the way the class plays a whole lot. However, because you can effectively know unlimited spells, it means that it's very easy to customize your capabilities. The only downside is that you're really going to have to either invest in a set of spell cards or print out a list of all the details of your spells (or just flip through the Player's Handbook constantly.)
Also, as a character note, I'm really happy with the idea of a snake-oil-selling necromancer, complete with his false identity he uses on the road, Doctor Lukvard von Toffel.
Other Characters:
I imagine I might do a bit more of this. I rolled a Barbarian, Druid, and Bard to serve as allied NPCs in the upcoming adventure. I'd like to start looking into alternative races, backgrounds, and class features that have popped up in other books. (Actually, the Barbarian I rolled was a Goliath.) Still got room for a Cleric, Ranger, Paladin, and Sorcerer.
Saturday, April 29, 2017
Trying out Diablo III's Necromancer
While, given the cooperative nature of WoW, I haven't really been playing it much on my ancient laptop while I'm out of town, I did find in my email an invite to the Diablo III Necromancer beta test.
Diablo III's in a weird place where content is coming in entirely patches. The Necromancer will be paid DLC, but it's not a full expansion.
The Necromancer was, of course, a popular class from Diablo II (and Xul, the character who represents the class in Heroes of the Storm, is my favorite character in that game,) so it's exciting to get to play it in Diablo III, even if some of us (me) don't really feel incentivized to keep playing much given the lack of a new campaign act (and I long-since got multiple full gear sets for each class.)
Still, I dig the necromancer aesthetic (I was never a goth, but Halloween was my favorite holiday as a kid) and wanted to give it a go.
Now obviously, the first thing that comes to mind playing the necromancer is its similarities with the Witch Doctor. The Witch Doctor is also an intelligence-based caster who tends to command undead legions. Indeed, I think the Witch Doctor was heavily based on the Necromancer, but given a decidedly different aesthetic. So what does this new version of the Necromancer bring?
Well, one thing is that, mechanically, when you kill enemies, you get corpses on the ground. Certain abilities (the first one you get and probably the most iconic being Corpse Explosion) use these corpses as a kind of alternate resource. You can explode corpses without any cost as long as there are some on the ground, but positioning enemies to be near corpses will require a degree of skill.
Necromancers use Essence as their resource, which seems to build and spend at roughly the same rate, though in my mere 14 levels of experience, I've tended to just let my skeletons and by builder ability drop a couple of monsters and then wipe up the rest with corpse explosions (sometimes I use Bone Spear, a spender, to get the ball rolling.)
A bit like the Scourge in Warcraft III, the Necromancer seems to be pretty powerful if you can build up momentum, and if there's a large swarm of enemies, you can devastate them with amazing speed (though to be fair, this tends to be the case with most Diablo III classes after you get a decent complement of abilities.)
I don't know off the top of my head how much the DLC will cost, but right now I think I'd be willing to pay something under twenty (preferably under fifteen) dollars for it. I'm curious to see what the set bonuses do.
Diablo III's in a weird place where content is coming in entirely patches. The Necromancer will be paid DLC, but it's not a full expansion.
The Necromancer was, of course, a popular class from Diablo II (and Xul, the character who represents the class in Heroes of the Storm, is my favorite character in that game,) so it's exciting to get to play it in Diablo III, even if some of us (me) don't really feel incentivized to keep playing much given the lack of a new campaign act (and I long-since got multiple full gear sets for each class.)
Still, I dig the necromancer aesthetic (I was never a goth, but Halloween was my favorite holiday as a kid) and wanted to give it a go.
Now obviously, the first thing that comes to mind playing the necromancer is its similarities with the Witch Doctor. The Witch Doctor is also an intelligence-based caster who tends to command undead legions. Indeed, I think the Witch Doctor was heavily based on the Necromancer, but given a decidedly different aesthetic. So what does this new version of the Necromancer bring?
Well, one thing is that, mechanically, when you kill enemies, you get corpses on the ground. Certain abilities (the first one you get and probably the most iconic being Corpse Explosion) use these corpses as a kind of alternate resource. You can explode corpses without any cost as long as there are some on the ground, but positioning enemies to be near corpses will require a degree of skill.
Necromancers use Essence as their resource, which seems to build and spend at roughly the same rate, though in my mere 14 levels of experience, I've tended to just let my skeletons and by builder ability drop a couple of monsters and then wipe up the rest with corpse explosions (sometimes I use Bone Spear, a spender, to get the ball rolling.)
A bit like the Scourge in Warcraft III, the Necromancer seems to be pretty powerful if you can build up momentum, and if there's a large swarm of enemies, you can devastate them with amazing speed (though to be fair, this tends to be the case with most Diablo III classes after you get a decent complement of abilities.)
I don't know off the top of my head how much the DLC will cost, but right now I think I'd be willing to pay something under twenty (preferably under fifteen) dollars for it. I'm curious to see what the set bonuses do.
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
The Apotheosis of Nerdery - Imagining a Warcraft D&D Module
While I'm back east, I've been more or less WoW-less (my laptop was new during Wrath of the Lich King, and makes Legion content kind of slow - and I'm definitely feeling that MMO FOMO effect, and thus limiting my visits to Blizzard Watch and MMO-Champion.) But it has given me a lot of time to work on my D&D campaign (one of our party members is also out of town for an extended period, so this would be downtime anyway.)
My D&D setting is wholly original (to the extent that anything is truly original) because making up fantasy worlds is basically my life's calling, but I couldn't deny the influence that Blizzard's flagship universe has had on my own tastes, and while it might have begun its life as a Warhammer clone, the amount of work that the creative folks at Blizzard have put in to making Azeroth (and the larger Warcraft universe) dense and interesting has made for one of my favorite fictional settings.
D&D, largely due to its pencil-and-paper system and a human dungeon master, is a game that is pretty easily modifiable. They do have their own standard setting in the Forgotten Realms (as well as some other settings like Greyhawk, Ebberon, and Dark Sun,) but the Dungeon Master's Guide has a pretty sizable portion of its text dedicated to ensuring that those who want to build their own setting have plenty of tools to do so.
Apparently, long before I started playing D&D (which was only like... a year and a half ago or something?) and possibly before I started playing WoW (which was ten and a half years ago,) there was actually an officially supported Warcraft D&D module. I believe it spun off to become its own RPG, but then was canceled and even declared officially "non-canon unless we say otherwise" much like the Star Wars Expanded Universe (goodbye, Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo! Though Grand Admiral Thrawn has apparently been salvaged.)
Anyway, whenever that RPG ended, I think we've seen a lot of things in WoW change. The Chronicle books have gone to huge lengths to put together a comprehensive canon in a way that never really existed before.
So, I love the Warcraft setting, and would find it a lot of fun to play a D&D game set in it (though probably not as DM, as I think any games I DM would probably be in my own setting(s.) How would we go about translating the game?
And to be clear, this is basing all of this off of 5th Edition rules, which is the only version of D&D I'm familiar with.
Races:
A lot of races would translate easily. D&D does a lot of sub-races, and so while in WoW, Night Elves and Blood Elves might as well be entirely different from a gameplay perspective, you could easily make them into sub races of the broader Elves in a D&D setting (and this would make it simpler to add High Elves, Nightborne or Highborne as additional sub races.) Likewise, you could use this to distinguish out the three major dwarf clans (even adding the Frostborn - remember them?)
WoW races tend to go a little broader, especially as you get the added ones and the Horde ones (though Volo's Guide to Monsters adds some more outside-the-box races.) There could be some questions about what exactly constitutes a sub-race. For instance, Trolls are pretty diverse on Azeroth, and so you could imagine making sub-races for Drakkari, Farraki, Gurubashi, and Amani trolls (Darkspear count, I believe, as Gurubashi, as their original homeland was Stranglethorn Vale.) But when it comes to Orcs or Tauren, it's not totally clear to me whether the different clans and tribes would count as totally different sub-races or just kind of cultural differences that wouldn't really count except for RP purposes. (And that's also setting aside the issue that I think the canon is that most Orcs basically stopped caring which clan they were from when the Horde joined - and there's probably a lot of mixed-heritage Orcs these days.)
A fair number of races would probably have to be made whole-cloth unless you really wanted to stretch things. Would Draenei simply use the stats of the Aasimar? They're both very light-based, even if their backstories and looks are pretty different. Another interesting issue is that of Worgen and Undead. In both of these cases, the "race" is really just human, and so you'd have to figure out how the other effects interact. In WoW, they decided to make Undead count as humanoid and not speak Common for balance and gameplay purposes, but in D&D, having everything tightly balanced is not really as important as making for a good story. So giving Forsaken characters the "undead nature" effect that many monsters have would make lots of sense. You'd also have to see if the effect of Lycanthropes in D&D would have to have some other effect given that the Worgen curse is a little more specific and harder for other people to catch than standard werewolfism.
One of the benefits of doing Warcraft as a tabletop is that you could more easily add in other playable races. Having Ogre, Vrykul, Furbolgs (which are pretty different than D&D Firbolgs) and Naga are easier to fit in when you don't need to worry about the knife-edge balancing we expect for the computer game (and you don't always need to worry about making an equal number of Horde and Alliance races - hell, you could even do buddy-cop stories where the party is of mixed Alliance/Horde make-up.)
Classes:
Like races, there are a lot of direct-translations between the classes in WoW and those of D&D. Paladins are Paladins, Druids are Druids, Rogues are Rogues, Warlocks are Warlocks. Monks are Monks. Rangers, Fighters, and Wizards work out as pretty clear analogues of Hunters, Warriors, and Mages. On the other hand, D&D has a few classes that would probably fall under another class's domain in WoW, like Sorcerers (which is like a Mage who got power from raw talent rather than years of study) and Barbarians (where are like Warriors who are more primal and spiritual.)
WoW, on the other hand, has a couple classes that are pretty unlike anything you find elsewhere. Death Knights could maybe-kinda use the Blackguard (which is only found in D&D's Unearthed Arcana blog) or Oathbreaker Paladin oaths, but one sort of feels like it should be its own thing. And if Death Knights do sort of have precedence in other fantasy stories (like the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings. I'd call those guys Death Knights) Demon Hunters really feel pretty unlike anything I've seen anywhere else, and you'd probably want to just create a whole new class for that.
Then you'd also have to ask if you wanted to kind of orient classes more around their WoW specializations or keep the D&D variants. For example, Warlocks in D&D can have different sources of magical power - from the standard Demonic/Devilish (in D&D there's a distinction) Fiend, to the Archfey (anything from a Faerie being that would probably be someone like Cenarius or Goldrinn in WoW) to a Great Old One (which in WoW would basically have to be an Old God or at least some high-level C'thraaxi or N'raqi.)
Though to be honest, D&D generally gives players more options to vary their classes. Priests can choose from a wide variety of domains (based on the god or principle they worship) and Wizards can specialize in several different schools of magic (but are not typically stuck to one element or the other.) For a lot of WoW classes, the specializations don't have all that much to do with flavor as much as they do with mechanics, but some are a big deal (like Holy versus Shadow Priest.)
Either way, D&D classes don't really have anything like tanking, and everyone has to be a little more self-sufficient given that you can't really play a class as "the one who never gets hit by anything" which is like, most WoW characters.
Monsters and Dungeons:
Dungeons are, in a way, the easy part. WoW has a huge number of dungeons that you could use as inspiration, or you could turn any number of memorable questing zones into dungeons, or just make stuff up.
Of course, it wouldn't really be a 1 to 1 translation, as a computer game can generally handle combat very easily and quickly and handle character interactions less easily. But imagine a version of Deadmines where you sneak into the place disguised as bandits, maybe try to convince one of the bosses to let you get through to the ship, and then have a climactic fight with Vanessa at the end. D&D certainly lets you have exciting combat encounters, but it provides a whole lot more freedom to either avoid combat or seek other outcomes (actually, forget that climactic fight with Vanessa. Imagine instead convincing her to denounce violence and reform the Defias into a political advocacy organization.)
Like a lot of D&D modules (there have been a number of ones based on Magic: The Gathering settings, which is my first deeply nerdy love,) you could simply use "close enough" creatures from the Monster Manual to remake iconic Warcraft creatures. Kua-Toa are almost exactly Murlocs, but you could also translate something like Modrons into various Titan creations like Mechagnomes.
Campaigns:
Of course you could easily come up with new threats for players to deal with. There's plenty of stuff to choose from. Alternatively, you could kind of remake some of the WoW expansions as campaigns.
Of course, WoW's level cap keeps going up and D&D is set up to go from 1-20, which makes each level a lot more significant. But for a long time now, level in WoW has been a purely mechanical thing. I don't think anyone would argue that Blackhand, even with all his Iron Horde tech, was truly more powerful than the Lich King. So it wouldn't be hard to simply start new campaigns as "new adventurers coming off the boat in Northrend."
But the freedom of D&D would also let you do stuff that WoW is unlikely to ever do - like having players fight their way through a post-Arthas Northrend.
D&D&WC:
Ultimately, D&D and its variants can be used to play through most fantasy settings. And given that WoW is one of the most popular RPGs that owes a big debt to the quintessential one, it might be a fun project for anyone involved to create a campaign that has you adventure across Azeroth.
And it's probably the only way you're ever going to play that Tauren Bard you always wanted to play.
My D&D setting is wholly original (to the extent that anything is truly original) because making up fantasy worlds is basically my life's calling, but I couldn't deny the influence that Blizzard's flagship universe has had on my own tastes, and while it might have begun its life as a Warhammer clone, the amount of work that the creative folks at Blizzard have put in to making Azeroth (and the larger Warcraft universe) dense and interesting has made for one of my favorite fictional settings.
D&D, largely due to its pencil-and-paper system and a human dungeon master, is a game that is pretty easily modifiable. They do have their own standard setting in the Forgotten Realms (as well as some other settings like Greyhawk, Ebberon, and Dark Sun,) but the Dungeon Master's Guide has a pretty sizable portion of its text dedicated to ensuring that those who want to build their own setting have plenty of tools to do so.
Apparently, long before I started playing D&D (which was only like... a year and a half ago or something?) and possibly before I started playing WoW (which was ten and a half years ago,) there was actually an officially supported Warcraft D&D module. I believe it spun off to become its own RPG, but then was canceled and even declared officially "non-canon unless we say otherwise" much like the Star Wars Expanded Universe (goodbye, Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo! Though Grand Admiral Thrawn has apparently been salvaged.)
Anyway, whenever that RPG ended, I think we've seen a lot of things in WoW change. The Chronicle books have gone to huge lengths to put together a comprehensive canon in a way that never really existed before.
So, I love the Warcraft setting, and would find it a lot of fun to play a D&D game set in it (though probably not as DM, as I think any games I DM would probably be in my own setting(s.) How would we go about translating the game?
And to be clear, this is basing all of this off of 5th Edition rules, which is the only version of D&D I'm familiar with.
Races:
A lot of races would translate easily. D&D does a lot of sub-races, and so while in WoW, Night Elves and Blood Elves might as well be entirely different from a gameplay perspective, you could easily make them into sub races of the broader Elves in a D&D setting (and this would make it simpler to add High Elves, Nightborne or Highborne as additional sub races.) Likewise, you could use this to distinguish out the three major dwarf clans (even adding the Frostborn - remember them?)
WoW races tend to go a little broader, especially as you get the added ones and the Horde ones (though Volo's Guide to Monsters adds some more outside-the-box races.) There could be some questions about what exactly constitutes a sub-race. For instance, Trolls are pretty diverse on Azeroth, and so you could imagine making sub-races for Drakkari, Farraki, Gurubashi, and Amani trolls (Darkspear count, I believe, as Gurubashi, as their original homeland was Stranglethorn Vale.) But when it comes to Orcs or Tauren, it's not totally clear to me whether the different clans and tribes would count as totally different sub-races or just kind of cultural differences that wouldn't really count except for RP purposes. (And that's also setting aside the issue that I think the canon is that most Orcs basically stopped caring which clan they were from when the Horde joined - and there's probably a lot of mixed-heritage Orcs these days.)
A fair number of races would probably have to be made whole-cloth unless you really wanted to stretch things. Would Draenei simply use the stats of the Aasimar? They're both very light-based, even if their backstories and looks are pretty different. Another interesting issue is that of Worgen and Undead. In both of these cases, the "race" is really just human, and so you'd have to figure out how the other effects interact. In WoW, they decided to make Undead count as humanoid and not speak Common for balance and gameplay purposes, but in D&D, having everything tightly balanced is not really as important as making for a good story. So giving Forsaken characters the "undead nature" effect that many monsters have would make lots of sense. You'd also have to see if the effect of Lycanthropes in D&D would have to have some other effect given that the Worgen curse is a little more specific and harder for other people to catch than standard werewolfism.
One of the benefits of doing Warcraft as a tabletop is that you could more easily add in other playable races. Having Ogre, Vrykul, Furbolgs (which are pretty different than D&D Firbolgs) and Naga are easier to fit in when you don't need to worry about the knife-edge balancing we expect for the computer game (and you don't always need to worry about making an equal number of Horde and Alliance races - hell, you could even do buddy-cop stories where the party is of mixed Alliance/Horde make-up.)
Classes:
Like races, there are a lot of direct-translations between the classes in WoW and those of D&D. Paladins are Paladins, Druids are Druids, Rogues are Rogues, Warlocks are Warlocks. Monks are Monks. Rangers, Fighters, and Wizards work out as pretty clear analogues of Hunters, Warriors, and Mages. On the other hand, D&D has a few classes that would probably fall under another class's domain in WoW, like Sorcerers (which is like a Mage who got power from raw talent rather than years of study) and Barbarians (where are like Warriors who are more primal and spiritual.)
WoW, on the other hand, has a couple classes that are pretty unlike anything you find elsewhere. Death Knights could maybe-kinda use the Blackguard (which is only found in D&D's Unearthed Arcana blog) or Oathbreaker Paladin oaths, but one sort of feels like it should be its own thing. And if Death Knights do sort of have precedence in other fantasy stories (like the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings. I'd call those guys Death Knights) Demon Hunters really feel pretty unlike anything I've seen anywhere else, and you'd probably want to just create a whole new class for that.
Then you'd also have to ask if you wanted to kind of orient classes more around their WoW specializations or keep the D&D variants. For example, Warlocks in D&D can have different sources of magical power - from the standard Demonic/Devilish (in D&D there's a distinction) Fiend, to the Archfey (anything from a Faerie being that would probably be someone like Cenarius or Goldrinn in WoW) to a Great Old One (which in WoW would basically have to be an Old God or at least some high-level C'thraaxi or N'raqi.)
Though to be honest, D&D generally gives players more options to vary their classes. Priests can choose from a wide variety of domains (based on the god or principle they worship) and Wizards can specialize in several different schools of magic (but are not typically stuck to one element or the other.) For a lot of WoW classes, the specializations don't have all that much to do with flavor as much as they do with mechanics, but some are a big deal (like Holy versus Shadow Priest.)
Either way, D&D classes don't really have anything like tanking, and everyone has to be a little more self-sufficient given that you can't really play a class as "the one who never gets hit by anything" which is like, most WoW characters.
Monsters and Dungeons:
Dungeons are, in a way, the easy part. WoW has a huge number of dungeons that you could use as inspiration, or you could turn any number of memorable questing zones into dungeons, or just make stuff up.
Of course, it wouldn't really be a 1 to 1 translation, as a computer game can generally handle combat very easily and quickly and handle character interactions less easily. But imagine a version of Deadmines where you sneak into the place disguised as bandits, maybe try to convince one of the bosses to let you get through to the ship, and then have a climactic fight with Vanessa at the end. D&D certainly lets you have exciting combat encounters, but it provides a whole lot more freedom to either avoid combat or seek other outcomes (actually, forget that climactic fight with Vanessa. Imagine instead convincing her to denounce violence and reform the Defias into a political advocacy organization.)
Like a lot of D&D modules (there have been a number of ones based on Magic: The Gathering settings, which is my first deeply nerdy love,) you could simply use "close enough" creatures from the Monster Manual to remake iconic Warcraft creatures. Kua-Toa are almost exactly Murlocs, but you could also translate something like Modrons into various Titan creations like Mechagnomes.
Campaigns:
Of course you could easily come up with new threats for players to deal with. There's plenty of stuff to choose from. Alternatively, you could kind of remake some of the WoW expansions as campaigns.
Of course, WoW's level cap keeps going up and D&D is set up to go from 1-20, which makes each level a lot more significant. But for a long time now, level in WoW has been a purely mechanical thing. I don't think anyone would argue that Blackhand, even with all his Iron Horde tech, was truly more powerful than the Lich King. So it wouldn't be hard to simply start new campaigns as "new adventurers coming off the boat in Northrend."
But the freedom of D&D would also let you do stuff that WoW is unlikely to ever do - like having players fight their way through a post-Arthas Northrend.
D&D&WC:
Ultimately, D&D and its variants can be used to play through most fantasy settings. And given that WoW is one of the most popular RPGs that owes a big debt to the quintessential one, it might be a fun project for anyone involved to create a campaign that has you adventure across Azeroth.
And it's probably the only way you're ever going to play that Tauren Bard you always wanted to play.
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