Critical Role's Episode 3.3 and... Well, Spoilers

 Sometimes, you can weave in the sort of drama that normally doesn't work in an RPG.

Campaign 3 of Critical Role has only had its third episode, but already I feel highly invested in this new troupe of characters. Granted, as we've seen, the new troupe is not entirely new. Fully half the table is characters we've seen before - three of the members of the Crownkeepers from Exandria Unlimited arrived in Jrusar (possibly looking for Dariax, Matt Mercer's character) and Travis Willingham brought in Sir Bertrand Bell, the charming charlatan from The Search for Grog one-shot.

Um, spoilers.

New Campaign, Who Dis?

 After lengthy preparation, our Wildemount campaign has finally begun.

Having played several half- and third-casters in my lengthiest campaigns, I decided to push myself in the opposite direction and play a Wizard. Rather than picking characters for party balance, we pretty much all just rolled characters we wanted, and so our party is actually... well, there are some repeats.

My character is Vodalos Sarpadiath, a 22-year-old Triton Wizard. A recent graduate of the wizard training program at the Hall of Sagacity in Gwardan, he is now on a quest to find a number of sentient "Gate Books," having made an extremely impulsive decision to simply follow the instructions of the ancient wizard whose consciousness was bound to a book he stole from the Cobalt Soul - of which he is a novice member.

Our party also includes Sip, a high elf fighter who is a traveling anthropologist who seems to think the world is coming to an end.

Next, we have Carnelian, a dwarf paladin, who seems to have been having a really rough time and is staying with a friend in Port Zoon.

We also have Quinn, a tiefling paladin who is an old acquaintance of Carnelian's, and the two seem to have some major beef from way back. Quinn these days is a drunk doing day-labor to keep himself in booze.

And then we have Ghashi, an earth genasi wizard, who is a fisherwoman and has been way cagier than Vodalos, with whom she has been sailing in a tiny fishing boat down the Menagerie Coast.

So yeah, we've got a shield wall and then artillery in the back.

Anyway, I've been having a ton of fun in this first session, playing Vodalos as a well-meaning but very naive (and unconsciously snobby) recent college grad. One decision I made is that he's not even remotely trying to hide the fact that he's a wizard - for example, freely offering to use prestidigitation to dry people off in a tavern after many came in to take shelter from a freak storm.

So far, the party has met up and got involved in an altercation in a tavern - it actually worked out because initially I had thought Vodalos would be likely to sit out the fight, until one of the thugs (a kobold inventor) attacked Ghashi, with whom he had started to develop a friendship (and he's really excited to find out she is also a spellcaster, even if he's confused as to why she didn't say anything before.)

Thankfully, the one fight was all we had to do to get to level 2, so now I've picked up my subclass - Order of Scribes. I'm holding off on picking spells until I can coordinate with Ghashi's player so we can maximize the total spells we get and just copy one another's new spells (luckily, as a Scribe, I'll be able to do so incredibly quickly - normally a wizard takes two hours per spell level to copy a spell, but with the Scribe's Wizardly Quill, it's two minutes per spell level, a factor of 60.)

Anyway, it's very exciting to start a new campaign. I'm eager for the next session.

Class 14

 Eberron: Rising From the Last War introduced the Artificer after years of tinkering (so to speak). It's my favorite class in 5th edition, and it's the only full class to be added to the game since the editon's 2014 launch.

One of my big hopes for the 2024 "5.5" Player's Handbook is to see the Artificer added as one of the game's core classes, which would enable Wizards of the Coast to publish new content for Artificers like subclasses, new infusions, and new spells without having to republish the entire class once more (at least on the spells front, Fizban's Treasury of Dragons does have one new spell for them, which they share with a few other classes.)

But with rules-expansion books and campaign setting books and now, apparently, also monster books, new subclasses are a common feature of new publications, and letting Artificers get in on the action would be a lot of fun.

But this post isn't going to focus on Artificers.

Instead, I want to think about whether D&D is due for another full class.

Here's what makes adding new classes tricky - each one permanently adds to the complexity of the game. Now, D&D doesn't have to be as balanced as a game like World of Warcraft does. The broad "utility" of some classes might contribute to a party's power in ways that aren't really quantifiable - your Bard might never be able to pump out as much damage as your Fighter, but the Bard is so versatile that you'll still want them around to, for example, talk that Beholder into letting you use the ancient magical artifact he has stashed away in his lair.

More importantly, I think that you need to figure out a niche that can't be covered by an existing class.

Consider, for example, something like a Witcher. In the novels, games, and show (actually, I think there was a film adaptation around 2000 in Poland as well,) Geralt is a member of a highly specialized and trained group of monster-hunters. Alchemy and an anachronistically sophisticated understanding of genetics and mutation alter the boys recruited/abducted to become Witchers, and the fraction of them that survive the treatments develop heightened physical abilities and the ability to drink magical potions and elixirs that would kill a normal human to empower them further, all while being trained as peerless fighters.

Witchers are pretty specific to the story and setting, and for a class that is meant to be usable across all of D&D, you'd need to broaden things out.

But you can do that - there are plenty of stories about monster-hunters. You can look to the old Solomon Kane stories (or Abraham Van Helsing, whose movie starring Hugh Jackman is something I don't think any of us actually saw (well, ok, I didn't) but we all sort of remembered, in which they turned the older dutch professor into... Solomon Kane.

Now, some kind of gritty, monster-hunting class could be cool... but it sort of already exists. The Ranger is, arguably, designed to be this kind of thing, and you can get that spooky hunter of the supernatural vibe by taking the Monster Slayer subclass. In fact, lots of classes can fit this archetype, depending mostly just on the tone with which you play it. Paladins dedicated to a monster-hunting oath, or Rogues who specialize in stalking monsters, or even just Fighters dedicated to taking down foul beasts.

In other words, I think a class needs to be more about methodology than tone. What made the Artificer work as a new class was that there was no other class that focused on craftsmanship and creation as a means of fighting and casting magic. And while the stereotypical portrayal of an Artificer leans toward a kind of industrial/steampunk aesthetic, there are a lot of other tones and flavors you can use - I came up with an Armorer Artificer who inscribes elemental runes on stone armor, or you can be an Alchemist who plays much more of a medieval plague-doctor vibe.

So, if we're going to focus more on methods, what's new?

First off, I think we can acknowledge here that perhaps there is already some overlap with existing classes. If you have a high-strength cleric who fights with divine power granted through devotion to a god, your methods aren't really all that far off from a paladin who fights with divine power granted through devotion to a god. Here, the specifics of the mechanics are what make the clearer difference, and perhaps also a general notion that the paladin starts off with a focus on martial skill and ability that they then supplement with divine magic whereas the cleric starts off with the divine and then adds in some martial abilities.

Before the Artificer came out, one class that WotC had been experimenting with was the Mystic. Here, there was a clear difference in methodology - the Mystic used psionics as their fundamental source of power.

The Mystic was deeply flawed - it worked so completely differently from existing classes and, on top of that, frontloaded low-level characters with a plethora of abilities that made them very complex to play and also very overpowered.

Since those experiments, WotC has treated psionics more like a variation on spellcasting, and rather than building whole other classes around it, they've made a handful of subclasses that have a psionic theme.

Which does kind of close it off as an avenue for a full class.

Is there something else, though?

One class I've often thought about homebrewing would be the Shaman. I always loved the Shaman in World of Warcraft as a representative of a different kind of "nature magic" than the Druid. In WoW, Druids are focused on plants and animals and life magic. Shamans, meanwhile, are more about the primal elements, channeling fire, earth, air, and water.

But I think that the truth might just be that Shamans as seen in WoW simply fall under D&D's Druid umbrella, or perhaps even Clerics (with nature or tempest domain).

So, honestly, the conclusion I might draw here is that the Artificer is an anomaly. Rather than build out class option along the axis of total number of classes, it's far easier to let these thirteen options represent a kind of pantheon of character archetypes, and within those archetypes, there's plenty of room to expand and grow.

I know that if I play D&D for the rest of my life (and live to be very old, I hope) I'll never be able to seriously try out ever single subclass in 5th edition. Indeed, the very concept of a subclass (though it has plenty of precedent - in WoW, for example, with its specializations) was, I think, a new concept to D&D with the introduction of 5th Edition. By letting the base class remain the same, subclasses allow for flavorful and mechanically interesting twists on structures we can trust to be sound (ok, except maybe Rangers).

So maybe we don't actually need class 14. Maybe the game's better off if we stick with the existing 13 and just build them out further.

We'll see.

9.1.5 and My State of WoW

 It's been a long time since I logged into WoW.

Like a lot of players, I felt really disheartened by the stories of abuse and harassment that took place at Blizzard - not some invasive corporate culture that had snuck in, say, with the acquisition/merger with Activision, but a part of Blizzard's DNA from the beginning. I felt like I had been naive and perhaps even willfully blind to the red flags that had popped up over time.

At the same time, I've found the grind of MMOs to be somewhat less enjoyable of late. It's not so much the amount of content that's out, but the natural "keeping up with the Joneses" that comes with the genre. I've been experiencing raiding primarily through raid finder, and my experience with that has generally been that in the first few weeks that a raid wing is open, you have people bringing their A-game and characters that are decently geared, and most of all, people will be willing to sit and learn the mechanics.

And, the queue times are not terrible.

But if you try to do this later in the cycle, it's an interminable slog of players ignoring mechanics and queue times that take up most of the time you were even prepared to be logged in in the first place.

After sitting out most of the raids through Battle for Azeroth - I still haven't actually entered the Eternal Palace - I wanted to get back into it with Shadowlands, which in general was an expansion concept and story I was way more excited for.

But with the news hitting not long after Sanctum of Domination came out, I felt gross playing the game. And I've been wrestling with whether I want to come back.

Shadowlands, conceptually, is the kind of high-fantasy stuff that I get really excited for - where the genre is allowed to get deeply philosophical.

The expansion has suffered from delays caused by the Covid pandemic, like just about every industry has, and so it's been a little sad to see this very cool expansion lose out and possibly get truncated.

Meanwhile, at the same time, fans of Blizzard games are having to reckon with the fact that the company that produces said games has been a pretty terrible place for a lot of people, thanks to a culture of protection for abusers.

There have been some small steps toward progress, though I'm not well-versed enough in the effectiveness of different tactics to combat toxic work environments to know if they'll have any real impact. There's a deeper problem with our whole capitalist system where I don't think I can rationally trust any big company to actually try to be better - I find myself skeptical that any big corporation is ever doing anything to legitimately improve the lives of its workers and not just doing a performance for the sake of PR.

Still, most Blizzard employees seem to want to encourage people to keep playing the games. But I'm grappling both with a moral/ethical question as well as one for myself:

I've been playing WoW for 15 years. Could it be that, finally, I'm just getting sick of it?

Oddly, taking this break from WoW hasn't, like, made me a health-nut and given me the energy to fix all the issues in my life, but what it has done is allowed my gaming attention to spread to other things. MMO design has this issue where if they don't give you enough to work toward, it feels empty, but if they give you too much, it feels overwhelming. The problem, of course, is that I'm not sure there is a real happy medium there - the two categories might actually overlap, with no gap between them.

Again, I don't know if this is a permanent "quitting WoW" thing. Hell, I might log in tonight to check out the new half-patch. I miss my characters, and I miss that world, and I miss my guild (though it has been a little less active of late - I'm definitely a part of that, of course).

But I think at the very least, my relationship with this game is changing. And that's ok, even if there are times when I feel nostalgia for the days in 2009 or so when sometimes I'd play all day.

This blog, of course, started off pretty specifically about WoW. I still have a screenshot from leveling my Worgen Warrior through what was then the new Cataclysm world redesign as my background for the blog. And I think that elements of WoW are likely to continue to inform some of my tastes in gaming (I'm very tempted to make a 5th Edition Draenei playable race, though I've struggled to make a setting-agnostic backstory for them.)

I saw a lot of people moving on to Final Fantasy XIV. I remember spending much of the late 2000s and the 2010s seeing, over and over, other MMORPGs touted as the "WoW-killer," and so it's a bit of a shock to actually see another game overtake WoW in players.

But honestly, I'm not really interested. I don't think I ever really liked MMOs - just WoW. And maybe that's myopic because it's really the only one I played. But I guess that it's more like I put up with the issues I have with MMOs because of how much I liked inhabiting Azeroth (and Outland, Argus, the Shadowlands, etc.) I think I'm just feeling this break has been good.

Encounter Building, Challenge Rating, and the "5.5" DMG

 Challenge rating is an attempt to boil down a complex and nuanced quality (the difficulty of facing a particular creature in combat) to a single numeric value.

A lot of old-school D&D DMs will often tell you to just ignore CR, finding it useless.

But I think that might be going too far. I do think it is useful to have CR as a quick reference - you don't want to make the mistake of sending an adult dragon against a group of 3rd level adventurers. It wouldn't really be fun for these bright and exciting new characters to just get instantly roasted, maybe even dying despite succeeding on their saving throws against the breath.

There are a few changes I would make to the guidance surrounding CR, and also to the way that it's implemented.

The first change I would make is to use the Xanathar's Guide to Everything guidance on encounter building in place of the DMG's. In the DMG, there's way more complicated math, combining the XP the monsters grant and then adding multipliers as you add more monsters to the encounter. As a new DM, I often struggled with this system, in part because it seemed extraordinarily punishing to add additional monsters to an encounter. So, in my early days, I'd typically have just one or two creatures for them to fight, and with a party of heavy damage-dealers (a Fighter, Rogue, Paladin, and Wizard) it was basically up to the initiative rolls to see if the monster even got to do anything.

The Xanathar system has a simple chart for "solo monsters" (which I still think is often a little undertuned) but, far better, it has a set of tables that show, essentially, how many monsters of a given challenge rating each party member affords you. So, for example, a 5th level character affords you one CR 2 monster, or it could give you two CR 1 monsters, or 12 CR 1/8 monsters. Or, it can go the other way. A single level 5 party member can account for half of one CR 3 monster.

So, using this to build encounters, I'll think of a type of monster I want - say, I want have the party fight a band of orcs. I've got five level 5 characters. So, one of those characters can account for 4 standard issue orcs. I've got four characters' worth of monsters left to add more interesting creatures. Say I want to give them a nice boss to be the toughest foe they face in this band, so I'll see that three characters will afford me a single CR 4 monster, and I'll get a big, scary Blade of Ilneval (a creature that also happens to have an ability that relies on having allies nearby). So, now, I have one character's worth of monsters left. So far, the orc band is the same number of creatures as the party. Orcs are generally scarier in big numbers, so I'm going to go for something where I can afford more. I could just do four more standard orcs, but then I might get bogged down running 9 monsters - a bit much for me. So I'll instead see that a 5th level character can give me 2 CR 1 monsters - these could be the Blade of Ilneval's lieutenants. Turns out there aren't any CR 1 orcs, and I don't want to homebrew one, but maybe there are some Warforged Soldiers - perhaps this raider leader doesn't actually trust other orcs to strategize with, and thinks that the Warforged with their constructed nature will be less ruled by ambitions and passions.

So, that gives us our foes for the party to fight: a Blade of Ilneval, two Warforged Soldiers, and four Orcs.

Pretty simple and quick. Indeed, for a very quick fight, you can just see what CR has a 1:1 ratio with the party's level and just pick a monster with that CR and throw one of them for each party member.

But there are nuances, because not all stat blocks are built to do the same thing.

Consider these two:

An Orog is an unusually intelligent orc (this very concept might feel a bit dated given recent efforts to untie things like intelligence to humanoid races). The Orog stat block is very simple - it's got two attacks, armed with a Greataxe and some javelins, and it has the standard Aggressive trait that orcs tend to get.

The Orog does have pretty high AC (18) but overall, it will not add a ton of complexity to a fight to have multiples of these guys. Essentially, you could have it be a significant threat to a low-level party, but it would also serve very well as a minion for a higher-level foe. If the party fights a single one of these at level 2 or 3, they'll probably do just fine. And if a party fights fifteen of them at level 12, they're also, probably, going to be fine.

By contrast, a black dragon wyrmling is also CR 2. Now, I had to adjust a fight in real-time when I tried to treat these as minions. My party was around level 7, and had expanded to five players (they added a second wizard). So, I had an encounter with 5 black shadow dragon wyrmlings (they were in the Shadowfell).

Thing is, dragons are not built to be minions. Dragons have a breath weapon.

In a typical dragon fight, the breath is a horrifyingly powerful opening move, but there's only a 33% chance that the dragon will be able to use it on each subsequent turn. The damage of the breath is thus adjusted to be way more powerful than what it's supposed to be able to do in an average turn. The black wyrmling only does about 9 damage on a hit with its bite, but its breath does 22 damage on a failed save against its breath, meaning that it's doing over twice as much damage on its first turn (and any time it recharges its breath.)

So when you have five of these things, the damage is... too much. It's 20d8, which comes to 99 average damage. Even an adult black dragon does 12d8 (54) damage with its breath. So, even if the party succeeds on all its saves, it's taking nearly as much damage as if they failed against an adult black dragon, which is CR 14, and thus would be considered balanced according to Xanathar's for 11th level characters in a 5-player party.

So, what is the ultimate upshot of all of this?

D&D does have mechanics for "legendary" monsters. This typically means legendary resistance (allowing them to turn failed saves into successes) as well as legendary actions (giving them more action economy and prevent a party from feeling they are safe outside of the monster's turn) and often lair actions (which fill a similar role to legendary actions.)

A legendary monster, in theory, should be able to pose a significant challenge to a party without any other monsters. Generally, I think DMs need to do a bit of tweaking to make the fight a little scarier (I often maximize the monster's HP to make them last longer) but it's a good general rule.

But I think that there's an intermediary step that would be good to specify: a different between Premiere monsters and Minion monsters.

One of the things that makes this tough is the very low levels. A zombie, for instance, is a monster that I think is intended (and usually works) for the party to fight starting at level 1. It does low damage and has a low hit bonus, and a minuscule AC. Really, the only thing that makes it a challenge is its relatively high HP pool (22, which is a whole lot more than, say, a Goblin's 7) and its Undead Fortitude trait.

Even at level 1, I've treated zombies as "minion" monsters, and it's worked out fine. But 1d6+1, despite being a pretty low amount of damage, can still potentially take down a level 1 character... if its crits. (Or if you have a Wizard or Sorcerer with a +1 to Con or less).

Still, the reason I think that a zombie really works best as a minion is that it's just not doing all that much interesting. It's never much of a threat on its own when outnumbered. But it works pretty well as a hazard and obstacle when fighting a more exciting foe. Indeed, in Descent into Avernus, when we were fighting a demon lord at level 12 or so, I used Danse Macabre to make a staggered wall of zombies that prevented the demon lord from getting to the ranged players, and that Undead Fortitude even allowed one of them to survive one of the demon lord's attacks, keeping him on one side of the battlefield while we pelted him with spells and arrows. (Sometimes the monstrous minions can be your friends!)

You can send absurdly large numbers of "minion" style monsters against a party and they won't become an unbalanced threat.

But I do think that there is a point where you encounter opposite issues.

Last night, I was running a session of my regular campaign, but only two players could make it, so I came up with a kind of side-story that provided hints to an ongoing narrative. The players were sent over 10,000 years into the past of Ravnica, back to when the plane was not entirely covered in city and before the guilds took on their codified form. The players are level 13, but with only two of them, I couldn't go super high CR when it came to the big bad they had to face.

They wound up fighting a Priest of Osybus, who I used to represent one of the heretics who would eventually corrupt the Orzhov Church into the cynical, exploitative thing that it is in modern Ravnica.

Priests of Osybus are a cool stat block - each time they die, you roll on a table and have them revive with a new ability, but only if they don't roll on the same ability twice. They're CR 6. They aren't legendary, but they have some nasty abilities - they can summon Shadows as a recharge ability, and their dagger automatically paralyzes those it hits.

But that dagger only has a +4 to hit. Against a level 13 Artificer and an level 13 Barbarian, I didn't land a single one of those dagger hits.

Now, ultimately, especially given how pressed for time we were, the fact that the fight went so smoothly, and that the priest only revived once (becoming a flameskull that kept its revival ability and made all its fire damage deal necrotic) worked out for our purposes. But it struck me that I think that this stat block is designed to be a premiere threat, likely with minions, but for a lower-level party (granted, I just happened to have two classes that can have pretty high AC, so maybe it would have been scarier if, say, the party's Bard had been there).

I think this is one of the major challenges of CR: that there's a multidimensional value to consider. Two monsters can have the same CR, but be intended for different level players.

There's also a whole thing to get into vis a vis how different classes are better at dealing with different types of foes - like how a wizard or sorcerer can destroy a swarm of skeletons with a single spell but struggle against a hulking monstrosity that resists its crowd control spells, while a fighter will carve that monster to pieces and easily deflect its attacks but take many turns to get through the dozen skeletons that are swarming it.

Still, I think CR is a good thing to have. But perhaps it could have a couple more dimensions.

The Challenges of Expanding Systems in D&D

 I started playing D&D about six years ago and fell in love with it.

Back then, 5th Edition was new - it was seen as somewhat revelatory: a more accessible, flexible system that evoked the feeling of older editions (it reverted somewhat to the form that 3.5 had taken after 4th Edition was seen as too much of a departure) but, again, was simple enough, at least at its base level, to welcome a ton of new people into the game.

I remember arguing with a friend of a friend about D&D's strengths. He was arguing that the game did combat better than anything else, and so he felt that a D&D campaign should not get bogged down in extraneous elements - that it should really be used for combat-filled dungeon crawls and not worry too much complex characters and plots.

His reasoning was that the rules system was focused far more on combat than on these other things.

I disagreed, but it got me thinking: is the lack of rules and mechanics when it comes to "RP" a bug or a feature?

Actually, we should address the fact that it might not be so lacking as one would think. Page 244 of the DMG has a whole section on resolving interactions with NPCs. There are, in fact, level of attitude an NPC can have to the party or a PC, between friendly, indifferent, and hostile, and there's a whole table for resolving charisma checks to change the NPC's attitude - for example, a hostile creature might, by default, oppose a character's goals and even take risks to do so, but a mere DC 10 Charisma check could steer them to merely offer no help but do no harm. (Note here that a hostile character is not necessarily at the "attack on sight" stage of things, but simply dislikes the party).

I don't think I know of any DMs who have actually run things quite by the letter here, but the rules exist.

And therein, I think, lies the issue of trying to flesh new elements of the rules. There's a lot that players are comfortable with. Combat is delineated very specifically, but two elements come into play to make players more likely to take the time to familiarize themselves with the system: one is that combat is inherently exciting. Also, every character class is built with some form of combat ability in mind, everyone has abilities that they want to bust out. But it's also an area with high stakes. When combat happens, there's a chance your character could die. (I guess in theory if you were high enough level fighting low-level monsters you might find yourself in a situation where even if they succeed on their saves against fireballs that deal minimum damage you'll still win, but you get my meaning).

Some TTRPGs try to introduce as much complexity to social interaction as there is in combat. The A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, which is actually the first TTRPG I ever played (briefly,) has a thing called "Intrigues" that are structured like combat, but they're more about gaining influence and convincing or intimidating others.

But we only did like one of those in the time that I played that game, and I don't recall even really understanding what was going on.

One of the things that really got me excited looking at Starfinder was the rules for building starships. Starships are such an important trope to the space-faring sci fi adventure genre that it makes total sense that you'd have a system for it. But as cool as it seems, I'm also skeptical that my players will get really into actual starship combat - a system that works very differently from regular combat and also mostly boils down to a few specific skill checks - piloting, computers, engineering, and in the case of the captain, perhaps sometimes bluff or intimidation.

Thankfully, starships are not purely built for combat - there are other systems the players can invest their build points in in order to have, for example, specialized environmental quarters in case you have a water-breathing passenger aboard.

Ghosts of Saltmarsh introduced some cool mechanics for giving players a ship in D&D. But movement in combat, and many of the things one can do in combat with ships has a significantly different feel from normal D&D combat. I absolutely love the idea of having a party decide whether they want to get a living hull made of wood harvested from the feywild or a hull made of magical, elemental ice. But it's another system that needs to feel cool enough for the players to invest in learning it.

Because there's a ton of nuance to D&D combat that players will, I think, naturally engage with given its central role. And part of what allows for that nuance is the vast number of monsters that one can encounter in the game that are designed to be fought on-foot. I mean, the Monster Manual alone has like 450 stat blocks or something.  Within those lies a reason for a player to consider whether they'd want to have a spell that does fire damage versus another that does acid.

In a sense, these additional mechanics need to have the depth to make it worth it for the player to commit a substantial amount of their mental energy within the game to them.

And that energy is limited. Even though it's the most welcoming version of D&D that has been made, 5th Edition is still a lot to take in. I mean, I cannot tell you how long I tried to figure out how your proficiency bonus changes depending on the skills you use when I was first reading the rules - until it finally clicked for me that it was very intentionally a flat number (though things like Expertise and Jack of All Trades do blur that notion.) I remember trying to figure out if Cunning Action gave Rogues a second bonus action. I remember, in my first session as DM, not realizing that the XP for an encounter was split between the members of the party (and though I had intended to have the players hit level 2 by the end of the first session, realized I had to just kind of handwave that and give them "quest experience" in order to do so.)

So I think that any addition to the game's rules needs to be done judiciously.

The books coming in three years haven't really been defined yet as a "5.5" or "6th" edition, and I think that the popularity of 5th Edition has made WotC hesitant to do a full reset for fear of alienating their massively expanded player base.

I'm sure some things will change. We might see some very surprising changes, in fact. But I suspect that they're going to try to avoid making it more complicated than it currently is.

Why I Love Ravenloft

 Earlier this year, we got Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. This is, by a significant margin, my favorite book we've gotten in 5th Edition D&D (outside of, I guess, the core rulebooks, as the game wouldn't function without those. I might extend that to the rules-expansion books as well, but work with me here.)

5th Edition has had other campaign setting books - we've gotten two imports from the world of Magic the Gathering (of which I think Ravnica succeeds better primarily because it's a more interesting setting) but also some original-to-D&D settings like Eberron and Exandria (and I guess Forgotten Realms if you count Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide... I don't know what else you'd call SCAG) (Also, I guess if you want to get very technical Exandria is original to Pathfinder, as that's the game system Critical Role was using before they started streaming).

I've always been drawn to the oneiric side of fantasy. Fundamentally, I think fantasy is a genre that operates on a kind of irrational logic. I've often wrestled with the idea of what magic exactly is in fiction. In stories in which magic works predictably and repeatably, it seems one could just apply the scientific method to it and really just consider it a set of phenomena within the greater field of physics. In a lot of fantasy stories, that's basically what it is, lending these stories a bit more of a science fiction structure (a kind of "this is how this works, and therefore here's how human experience would change.") To my mind, fantasy fiction is, in its classical forms, less about this kind of logical thought experiment delivered through a drama than it is an attempt to recapture the wonder and scope of humanity's very first stories. In other words, I see fantasy as the creation of myths that we all accept as pure fiction. Even if ancient peoples viewed their myths largely as metaphorical, there wasn't a strong scientific tradition to explain all the ways in which the stories couldn't be true.

But given its modern authors and modern readers, fantasy fiction has tended toward a bit more rationality and obedience to certain rules we believe in about reality. And I think that most of the standard D&D settings more or less work "like the real world, but with supernatural things layered on top." Like, yes, there are provable gods at work and things like dragons and demons and wizards, but the scientific laws that we know about in our world still apply, with exceptions made for the supernatural.

But not Ravenloft.

One of the most chilling notions in Ravenloft is the idea that not everyone there has a soul.

The inhabitants who do just find themselves reincarnating over and over into the various Domains of Dread, trapped in a cycle in this bleak-at-best nightmare reality. But the majority of people one sees and interacts with are soulless.

The actual functional definition of a soul is something people, as well as religions and spiritual traditions, don't always agree on. To me, the only definition I've felt makes the term worthwhile is the idea that it represent consciousness - the soul is the part of a person that actually experiences all the sensations, emotions, and thoughts that the person has. Essentially, if your brain is a big computer, your soul is the one sitting, watching the monitor.

So, the way that I think of these soulless people in Ravenloft is that they are philosophical zombies, without any true inner life or experience.

When I was in my early 20s, zombie movies were a huge fad in pop culture. Preparing for the zombie apocalypse (or "zombacalypse," as I like to call it) was a common opportunity for people to speculate on how they'd fare and how clever they were.

I never really liked zombie stories. The idea of fighting the undead in a fantasy setting appealed to me, but I preferred big skeletal armies and not some mindless infection. I think one of the ideas that disturbed me was the glee with which friends and peers of mine imagined bludgeoning or blowing away former people. There was something kind of misanthropic about the zombie apocalypse story - like a way to get out a feeling of violent hatred toward the rest of humanity.

But a philosophical zombie isn't a brain-eating undead monster - it's someone for whom you'd have every reason to assume is a real person, but just... isn't. They could be friendly. They could even seem very strongly to have a meaningful and important bond with you - but there is nothing actually in there that looks back at you.

The soulless people of Innistrad weren't swept in by the Mists. They're products of it, along with the very land upon which you walk. And that means that they could easily be conjured when necessary.

Ravenloft operates on dream logic - more nightmare logic, but a nightmare is, of course, just a kind of dream.

Perhaps nowhere better is this demonstrated than Chateaufaux in Dementlieu. The many nobles and patricians of the city claim to have vast, luxurious estates in the countryside, when in fact the borders of the domain end not far outside the city limits. However, unlike in other domains, where the Mists simply exist as a barrier wall, here you can, in fact, wander out into the countryside.

But you never get very far. The manor houses and farms are just visible on the horizon, but you never get any closer. And if you turn back, you're never all that far from the city.

Ravenloft doesn't stick to any physical rule that doesn't suit it.

Another example - in the cosmic nightmare that is Bluetspur, there is an impossibly enormous mountain that exists always on periphery of your vision while you're above ground. It's bad enough to imagine that you can never quite look directly away from it. But if you read closer, you realize that neither can you look directly at it.

Any fiction is at least in the slightest way a break from reality. Even a well-observed literary drama with no fantastical elements whatsoever is still conjuring something that doesn't truly exist. And I think there's absolutely a place for realism. And fantasy exists along a spectrum of the more realistic and the more fantastical.

But I think that Ravenloft manages to move off into a more dream-like, more fantastical place. It's a setting where the narrative dictates the reality.

Happy Halloween!