Counterspell and Monsters in 2024

 Matt Colville, in one of his videos (I can't recall which one) identified the problem with spellcasting monsters.

If you've ever DM'd, and especially if you did it early in 5th Edition's time (or in previous editions, I assume,) you have probably noticed that using a spellcasting monster for your party to face is harder than it looks.

Wizards and other magic spellcasters have often served as villains in fantasy. Indeed, if you look at a lot of older fantasy and folklore, magic itself tends to be associated with evil, and the notion of heroic wizards is relatively recent (some version of the Arthur legend suggests that Merlin was only able to use magic because he was meant to be an Antichrist but was baptized, which turned him good but allowed him to retain his magical powers, which is meant to explain that exception).

So, making your villains spellcasters makes a lot of sense as a trope. And a game like D&D should support that.

But there are a couple problems.

The first is just mental bandwidth. If you look through the spellcasting stat blocks in the Monster Manual - take the Archmage, for example - the very clear main action is to cast a spell each round in combat. But given that an Archmage is an 18th level spellcaster, that means that they have a massive number of wizard spells to choose from.

Now, I've been DMing D&D for nigh on eight years now, and so if I take a look at any single one of these spells, I can generally tell you what it does. I might need to double check the damage of Cone of Cold (turns out it's 8d8, not 10d8) but I have a pretty good sense of what they do (gigantic cone AoE spell that does cold damage and has a Con save).

But when it comes to actually running an Archmage, I'll be honest and say that I doubt I could do it justice. With 99 hit points, I really just do not expect I could make it live up to being a CR 12 challenge.

And the reason for this is that spellcasting is a player-facing ability. (That's the core of Colville's argument.)

When I'm playing my Wizard (who is not level 18, or even close to that, but I think the principle holds with a lower CR creature like a Lawmage, which is the equivalent of an 8th-level wizard) I'm spending my entire time playing using the spells I've collected in my spellbook. I have a game plan, like casting Summon Undead and then falling back on cantrips unless I need more damage or can hit a lot of targets with a Fireball, and always keeping a 2nd level slot for Misty Step in case I get surrounded, keeping Mage Armor up at all times but leaving a 1st level slot up for Shield.

But unless a DM is throwing the same stat block at the party over and over, they don't have a lot of time to familiarize themselves with the spell options presented. Furthermore, it's a ton of information to track.

As a player, you really only have to track your character's resources, which only change when you level up. As a DM, I'm usually tracking information for several creatures at once.

Spell slots are not too difficult when it's just your character. There's a place on your character sheet to do just that.

But imagine this scenario: I want to have my party face a Lich, and that Lich has an Archmage lieutenant, along with three Mages who are minions, and then, say, twenty zombies - a modest undead horde for our necromantic villain to have.

Can you imagine trying to keep track of all that? How many spell slots of each level each individual spellcaster has used?

Ok, so the solution presented in the revamped stat blocks of Monsters of the Multiverse is pretty elegant.

Take the Necromancer Wizard stat block, which is an update to the Necromancer from Volo's Guide to Monsters. The old version has only two abilities outside of their spellcasting, which are Withering Touch, an attack that takes a full action but deals a pitiful 2d4 damage (this is a CR 9 creature) and Grim Harvest, which works like the player feature. Instead, the creature is meant to use their 16 spell slots and 19 prepared spells (up to 6th level).

The new version, instead, has a three-pronged multiattack called Arcane Burst, which is a melee or ranged spell attack that does 4d10+3 (25 average) necrotic damage. They also get a once-a-day ability to summon 5 skeletons or zombies to act as minions as a bonus action.

As a DM, running this stat block is far, far easier. When the fight starts, they shoot off three of these Arcane Bursts and then summon a bunch of undead minions to attack the party.

And they haven't lost too much versatility. They still have spells, so if I want, I can have them instead perform other actions that are either about movement or inflicting the party with harmful conditions, or they get a one-a-day Circle of Death if they want to do a big, scary AoE (probably a good call for the opening round).

This is a stat block I can use.

But there's a problem:

Players who pick up Counterspell are going to have a lot of trouble using it on this creature, despite the fact that this is precisely the kind of creature that Counterspell is intended to deal with.

While Arcane Burst is a spell attack, it is not a "spell" in game terms. There's no talk of verbal, somatic, or material components. Counterspell cares about a spell's level, but while even cantrips are technically 0th level spells, Arcane Burst has no level to it.

So, except for when the Necromancer Wizard casts things like Circle of Death, Dimension Door, or Bestow Curse, the player with Counterspell is going to be sitting on it, feeling annoyed that their spell is useless.

Here's the dirty secret: my reaction to this is "good."

It's not that I don't like the fantasy of having a clash of wills and spells. But on a mechanical level, Counterspell kind of sucks.

If you've played Magic the Gathering, you know how frustrating it can be to play against a Blue control deck, where the strategy that the opposing player takes is simply to counter every spell you cast and use spare mana to draw cards, waiting for your deck to run out of steam and then rolling over you after you no longer have the power to do anything about it. It's not that you mind losing, per se, it's that you don't actually get to do the cool things your deck was built to do.

If I'm running an encounter with a Lich (which I've never actually done, but let's just think of this as the ultimate spellcaster monster) I'm not generally going to have a lot of spellcasting minions, for the reasons I discussed above (though again, with the changes, I might feel more comfortable doing so with the new caster statblocks).  If my party has someone with Counterspell, it's a very good strategic play for them to park themselves within 60 feet of that Lich and just try with every reaction to counter the spells the Lich casts.

Even if the Lich is casting spells higher than 3rd level, there's a good chance that the counter-mage is going to succeed on their checks. With a +5 to your spellcasting ability modifier, you have a 50% chance to counter 6th level spells. That means even a Lich - the absolute legend of scary, monstrous spellcasters, has a grand total of three spell slots to cast things that are more likely to go through than not against a mid-level Sorcerer with 20 Charisma, and even if they cast something at 9th level, that Sorcerer still succeeds on their counter with a roll of 14 or higher, which means a 35% chance. And if they have an Artificer with 20 Intelligence, saving their own reactions to Flash of Genius these crucial rolls, that effectively allows them to succeed on rolls of 9 or higher.

And that means the Lich is doing almost nothing to the party on rounds when it's counterspelled, which the party is then incentivized to make every round. They can either use their action for Paralyzing Touch - a scary effect, but not one that does much damage - or use legendary actions to cast cantrips or Disrupt Life (ok, that's not bad for a legendary action, but it's definitely not enough damage for a full round from a CR 21 or 22 monster). The lich winds up looking like a chump (we won't get into its low HP here, as that's not really part of the discussion).

So, my inelegant solution would be to just ban Counterspell in my campaigns. And, given the direction spellcasting monsters are going, that might not even see much complaint by players.

But maybe there's a way to fix it.

I think the biggest problem with Counterspell is that the difficulty of its success is more or less independent of the creature casting the original spell.

I mean, countering the Greater Invisibility of a Mage should be easier than countering the Greater Invisibility of an Archmage, right? (Let's say for the sake of argument that we modified our Archmage to have that spell prepared.) The latter is supposed to be a great master of magic. Now, sure, they could counterspell this counterspell, but so, in theory, could the Mage. This feels inelegant and clunky.

Instead, what if we proposed a different solution?

Counterspell is meant to be the use of one's magic to quickly disrupt the casting of another's spell. We use our spellcasting ability - whatever it may be - as the ability check to see if we can disrupt a spell that's more powerful than the one we're casting in response.

Rather than having that contend with the level of the spell, why don't we have it contend with the will of its caster?

In this case, we'd say that when you attempt to counter a spell, the spellcaster makes a saving throw against this attempt to disrupt their casting. (And we would count this as a magical effect targeting the creature, so that magic resistance and even legendary resistance could come into play.)

Now, what saving throw do they make?

There are two simple proposals: first is to simply go with the standard "will save" and make it a Wisdom saving throw. But this, I think, would make Clerics and Druids (and NPCs like them) much harder to counter. Another option would be to make them Constitution saving throws, treating it almost like a concentration saving throw, to maintain focus while casting the spell.

(Of the two, I think I prefer the latter, but let's look at the final proposal, which I think I like the best.)

The third option, however, is instead that they make a saving throw against your save DC, but it's the saving throw affiliated with their spellcasting ability. So, an Archdruid would make a Wisdom saving throw, while an Archmage would use an Intelligence saving throw.

Let's look at the math now.

Say you're a 10th level Wizard with Counterspell. You've maxed out your Intelligence to 20, and you have a Proficiency bonus of 4, so your spell save DC is now 17.

You're fighting an evil Archmage, who has a number of apprentice students. One of their minions, a Mage, casts Cone of Cold at your party. You whip out a counterspell. Now, the Mage has to make an Intelligence save, and has a +6 bonus to their save. They have a 50% chance of success, meaning with the flip of a coin, you might have just saved your party from a big blast of damage.

However, on another round, things are looking rough for the evil archmage, and he's decided to peace out, teleporting away. This is your third encounter with him, and you want to take him down, so you counterspell the teleport. But the archmage's magic is complex and sophisticated. As you try to slash at the weave of his spell, he must work to engineer it so that it is resilient to your disruption - but he's well-practiced at this sort of thing. To beat your 17, with his +9 bonus to intelligence saves, he needs to roll only an 8, giving him a 65% chance of getting away - or rather, a 87.75% chance, as, because of the way that he has inured himself to the magic of those who would seek to harm him, he has advantage on the roll.

Now, to be fair, I don't love it when my reaction spells don't work. If I use the Shield spell, I expect the DM to tell me the actual roll to hit me before I expend the spell slot, so I know that it will work. And, especially with the way that Counterspell is becoming less relevant due to the spellcasting stat block redesigns, this is perhaps adding insult to injury to this spell and the players who pick it.

This is, in nearly all cases, a nerf to be sure. But I think it might actually make Counterspell a more dramatic and fun spell to use. Indeed, when based on a saving throw (especially if it uses a save that favors the defender) I'd feel a lot less guilty using Counterspell against my players.

There are other possibilities - rather than a saving throw, you could make the current version's ability check an opposed roll against the opposed spellcaster's spellcasting ability. But I think as is, the reliability of Counterspell is what makes me kind of hate it as a DM, and why I don't think I'd want to pick it up on my Wizard. (That's ok, there are tons of 3rd level spells that I'll be collecting instead).

Is 5E's Commitment to Limited Releases Doing it a Disservice?

 This year's Q4 release of Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse looks like it will be following a similar format to Spelljammer: Adventures in Space. Now, the latter is perhaps the biggest disappointment of any 5E releases - long-abandoned campaign setting that players in the current, less "fantasy-purist" era were very eager to see guide them through the potential of running spacefarng, science-fantasy adventures.

Instead, what we got was a pretty good monster book, a fairly decent adventure (at least I think it's decent - I haven't run it) and a primary sourcebook that gave very little actual content beyond six playable races (one of which needed errata to remove some unconsciously - if we give them the benefit of the doubt - racist imagery and backstory - though I'm not going to get into that discussion). A huge portion of the Astral Adventurer's Guide is given over to descriptions of ships and their layouts, but gives us very little guidance on running ship-to-ship combat (in fact, it recommends players focus on their own character abilities once the ships are in range of one another).

At 70 bucks in the U.S., the box set was twenty dollars more expensive than the standard 50 dollar books that are usually published, but gave us less bang or our buck, with a total page count (which, I believe, included the title pages, rights pages, and tables of contents in each) of 192 - making it, I believe, the second-shortest 5E book, even if it were one volume, after Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide.

The box set format and the hype building up to this long-awaited setting implied that this would be a massive event, and could shepherd in a whole new trend in D&D campaigns, but ultimately it left a lot of people feeling like WotC had totally misunderstood what players wanted out of a Spelljammer book.

The format for this sourcebook was quite different from previous ones.

I've gone on record saying that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is my favorite book published for all of 5E (perhaps making an exception of the core rulebooks, which are so foundational that you sort of can't dismiss them).

Now, I know that there are some people who point to this book as another sign of the decline of D&D as a brand and yearn for the older version of the setting.

I have to divide these critiques, because while I disagree with both, I think some are founded on sympathetic principles and some are not.

So, let's dispense with the latter first: if you think D&D has "gone woke," and that means it's ruined, then I'm just going to stop listening to you. The broad culture war going on is boring and stupid. If you have a problem with the existence of brown or black people, or the existence of queer people, or attempts to address the heavy weight of historical bigotries, you need to fix your heart. Grow up and deal with it.

But, there are other people who felt that Ravenloft as a setting had changed too much. For example, the earlier version of the setting had all the domains of dread sitting on a continent called The Core, and the misty borders of their realms were truly physical borders, such that, if the mists disappeared, you could simply plot a course through Barovia, Darkon, and Falkovnia (I don't remember if they're arranged such that this would be a direct route, mind you). As someone who is not as keyed into the older version of the setting, I'll admit that I'm much more comfortable taking a wrecking ball to that notion - I think the nightmare logic of the domains being sort of free-floating in the Mists, with no "true" land beyond them fits the idea of Ravenloft as a setting much, much more effectively.

And, where some of the domains were rewritten, well, sure, I understand the desire not to retcon your campaigns from thirty years ago to fit the new lore. Victor Mordenheim and his creation Adam have been replaced as the key figures of Lamordia, and while I think the idea behind Viktra Mordenheim and Elise is very cool, I'll concede that you might feel attached to the earlier version.

That said, I got the pdf for the original 1990 Ravenloft: Realm of Terror sourcebook, and... It kind of sucks? Like, it's kind of really boring? And, like, setting aside some of the dated cultural references (folks, the term is Romani, and they're not an inherently mystical and sinister people, they're just a long-oppressed ethnic minority) there's just not a lot going on here. One of the domains, the description more or less just says "there are hostile drow in the hills here," which feels like... how the hell does this evoke any kind of horror genre?

Now, let's talk about Planescape.

While the Ravenloft sourcebook from 2nd Edition was kind of shockingly underwhelming, given how popular I know the setting to be, the Planescape books are anything but. Sure, there's a few outdated (though as far as I recall, not quite as offensive) references in it, but broadly speaking there's just an immense amount of imagination at work there.

Really, the only tragedy for me is that I'm already running a campaign primarily set in a giant city filled with warring factions built on rigidly incompatible philosophies (Ravnica,) which means that the core part of the Planescape setting, the city of Sigil (I know that it's probably pronounced with a hard g, but as someone raised in a family that demanded precision in language, it pains me not to pronounce it with a soft g like the actual goddamned word, and I think the only reason anyone ever pronounced it with a hard g was because they didn't know how to pronounce the word sigil) is the part that I'm least interested in actually using in my adventures.

The original box set for Planescape detailed Sigil along with the broader True Neutral outer plane known as The Outlands. But in those TSR days, the general idea with D&D products was to publish each campaign setting as a product line, rather than a single book.

So, if you liked Dragonlance as a setting, you could pick up a bunch of adventures and sourcebooks that would expand upon what you got in the original publication. For Planescape, this meant in-depth sourcebooks that gave DMs (and players, though these products were mainly DM-facing - something we might bear in mind) a fairly thorough run-down of all the planes. You want a few pages describing the third layer of Acheron, and perhaps some power's (read: god's) domain within it? You can find that on page 21 of The Planes of Law: Acheron booklet, and read up on the layer known as Thuldanin, and the realm of Hammergrim, home to the duergar god of greed, Laduguer.

Each of the outer planes in three different publications - Planes of Law, Planes of Chaos, and Planes of Conflict - gets its own 34-page booklet. If you were to try to stuff those into a single Planescape setting book, you'd need 544 pages for just the Outer Planes themselves (not counting The Outlands,) and you'd still need to cover the factions, the inner planes, Sigil, and any player options like races (or species/lineages,) subclasses, spells, magic items, or unique gameplay ideas like Dark Gifts.

The box sets for Spelljammer and, presumably, Planescape evoke this idea of getting a really fleshed out new setting, but Spelljammer showed that it actually did a poorer job of that than previous releases like Eberron: Rising from the Last War, Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, or Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft (which, while it puts a lot of power into DMs' hands to create their own regions of the setting, also gives us a very solid rundown on many canonical domains of dread and even suggests unique structures for adventures in those given domains).

I did a breakdown of my ideal Planescape book, written as an attempt to cram as much into the book as possible. That's not what we're getting. Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse will have a higher page count than Spelljammer did - I believe the published adventure that comes with it and the primary sourcebook will both me 94, rather than 64 pages (with a 64-page monster supplement - which I'm honestly fine with because Boo's Astral Menagerie was the one part of Spelljammer that felt the most abundant.) Still, that gives us 252 pages - a definite improvement, but still a little behind the page count of other popular 5E sourcebooks, which tended to be around 300.

However, the whole point of this post is also to say: the single-publication model is limiting on these sorts of books.

WotC has had a policy in 5th Edition of never assuming you have anything other than the three core rulebooks when you read anything new. And I think that policy makes a ton of sense - it makes things more accessible and doesn't lock out people who aren't obsessive collectors like me.

But it also leaves a lot of ideas brought forth underdeveloped. In all of 5th Edition, we've had two Ravenloft books published - Curse of Strahd and Van Richten's Guide. We've had one Eberron book. Our only Dragonlance book is the adventure, Shadow of the Dragon Queen (which I really got to finish reading, because I was enjoying it - Lord Soth's first appearance is an absolute banger of an "oh shit" moment).

D&D has a small staff - it's probably bigger than when I first heard this statistic, but last I heard there were only 20 permanent staff members on the team. Honestly, I think Hasbro could afford to hire some more people (and maybe rather than having cultural consultants as contractors, maybe hire on more people so that the diverse perspectives can be present from the ground up rather than as an afterthought?) One potential upside of bulking up the staff would be that you could potentially get people who really know their Ravenloft or their Eberron to be able to focus on that and pump out a ton of stuff for the setting they care most about.

With D&D Beyond integration, I also think you could very easily lean into digital publication of smaller sourcebooks - something they've done a little of, such as with Domains of Delight, but if you provided a lot more content for digital prices, I think you could have a real winner.

As usual, if there is an enemy to be found in why a brand feels like it's not living up to its potential (and I'm not really a doomsayer on D&D, but I do think there are aspects of the game's direction, like this box set format, that I don't really agree with) it's capitalism.

One thing that WotC has also emphasized is trying to make products that would normally be DM-facing appeal to players as well. This has likely driven the inclusion of playable races and subclasses in adventure books, like the Lunar Sorcerer in Dragonlance. In particular, the further digitization of D&D has driven players to feel the need to buy sourcebooks that were only really there for DMs in the past - on pencil and paper, it's easy enough at character creation for you to copy down the lineage traits for your dhampir in my Ravenloft campaign, but if we're using D&D beyond, you've got to hope that I've got that on my account and am sharing the content with the premium subscription, and that I don't have too many active campaigns going, so you might feel safer slipping WotC the 30 bucks to just let you make your Dhampir College of Spirits Bard without relying on me.

By creating a single big product, rather than several smaller ones for a setting, I think WotC hopes (though I don't know how effective this technique is) that more people will pay for the total package. That's perhaps the cynical reading, but hey, capitalism, in its modern form, is basically economic cynicism.

Now, many have argued that we're free to simply read the old sourcebooks (well, not free - there's still a fee to download the pdfs) and it's certainly the case that I've done just that to illuminate myself on the Outer Planes. But while it's truly an absolute joy to scroll through the art of Tony DiTerlizzi while reading up on the Bladelings of Acheron, the thing I'd get excited about is a new and fresh take on the setting. I want to see what new ideas have emerged regarding Planescape, and how the setting could best be formed around 5th Edition's gameplay emphases. How does the Radiant Citadel interface with the planewalkers of Sigil? What do the Athar think of Exandria's Divine Gate?

The sort of open-source nature of D&D has allowed an expansion of some of these settings. Darrington Press released Tal'dorei Campaign Setting Reborn, which complements Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, using a similar structure to detail the continent to the west, which served as the main setting for Critical Role's first campaign. I imagine it's likely that we'll get another book from them detailing the continent of Marquet (the third campaign's primary setting). Likewise, Keith Baker released Exploring Eberron, which added more content for the 5th Edition iteration of his setting following the release of Eberron: Rising from the Last War.

But this, then, creates some tension with the ongoing integration of D&D Beyond. As a tool that is not just popular but now owned by WotC (and with plans to include a built-in Virtual Tabletop tool for it,) the tool's lack of support for non-1st-party books pushes us players/customers into a tighter position - left to hope that WotC publishes the things that we want them to.

Given the whole OGL debacle, I think we players are best off with a kind of decentralized ownership of the game. But at the same time, there are aspects of the official releases that I find myself kind of emotionally attached to. I think Chris Perkins might sometimes err too much on the side of referring back to D&D lore of ages past, but it comes through that that's because he has such a deep love for the game and its history, and it's the Acquisitions Incorporated games he ran that first brought me to D&D.

Still, I guess what this all comes down to is that I want Planescape to be awesome, and I'm worried it won't be.

Death Stranding Simulates Frustration Too Well

 So, I've had Death Stranding for about a week. I've made my way across the ruined, rain-soaked wasteland that is the eastern remnants of the United States (shrunken considerably down to make it fit as a game world where you're mostly crossing it by foot) and delivered packages to various islands of human civilization while tossing grenades made of my own blood at bizarre and alien marine life that rises out of a black water that appears out of nowhere.

The world of Death Stranding is intriguing - a world made into a ruin when the barrier between the realms of the living and the dead is broken, where civilization has been devastated, and where a single person's death could mean a catastrophic "void out" that can wipe out a massive chunk of the planet. People have been forced to isolate, and take extra care to ensure that if someone dies, their body is incinerated before it can cause one of these events.

There are intriguing figures, often played by recognizable actors (most centrally, the player character of Sam Porter Bridges, once Sam Strand, the son of the last American President, played by and modeled after Norman Reedus) and a strange, bizarre world that has a post-apocalyptic sci-fi feel while also being couched in Egyptian mythology. I'm particularly curious to learn more about the character played by Mads Mikkelsen, whom I know becomes an antagonistic presence later in the game (and appeared particularly sinister in one of the early teasers for it) but here seems to be the father of BB - the piece of organic human technology that Sam carries around and seems to be forming a bond with, despite his handlers' advice that he think of the BT-detecting fetus as a piece of equipment rather than a person.

But I hit a point today where I decided that I might not play it anymore.

Gameplay in Death Stranding is primarily concerned with traversing the hostile world. There are enemies to face - the creepy BTs (some of which seem to be ghostly human forms, while others are these kind of squid-whales) but also humans known as MULEs, who have gone mad and become addicted to carrying cargo around (one wonders if these are meant to be a commentary on the compulsion to perform tasks in games).

As Sam, you pile stacks upon stacks of cargo containers on your carrying harness, and the very act of walking around becomes one of the challenges - pretty easily, you'll be teetering from the weight of your inventory, and so merely walking in a straight line can be an act of balance and carefully controlling your speed.

Plotting your course across the world, then, becomes one of the challenges. There's that smooth area over there where you might even be able to drive your reverse motor-trike, but there are BTs that might assault you along the way, making you potentially prefer the rockier, cliff-strewn path that might require you to bring some ladders along (or hope that the ladders from others players' games will be there for you.)

But ultimately, your goal here is to get from point A to point B. And doing so allows you to deliver your cargo, and see about five million statistics calculated, and... rinse and repeat.

Now, there have been intriguing story elements - Troy Baker shows up as a villainous terrorist who summons a giant BT, presumably in an effort to cause a voidout that will destroy Port Knot City - a major location you're trekking to in the early game (or at least I assume it's still early).

But the real gameplay loop here is about the careful, lonely, kind of frustrating process of hauling random shit from one hard-to-reach location or another.

The breaking point for me, where I just had to shut the game off, was when I was trying to skirt around an area filled with BTs and drove my trike across what I thought was a shallow river - I thought I'd forded it on foot previously, so the vehicle, I hoped, would have to issues. However, it got too deep and the cargo I was carrying and that which was on the trike all fell off, floating down the river. Given that some of that cargo was for the "orders for Sam" missions that I believe (maybe) are sort of the core, important ones, I tried to chase them down, and a single container started to flow away from me before I could grab it. I chased that one down, only to fall in the river and have all my cargo start floating away.

And it was fucking frustrating. And I get that it's supposed to be - the world that this game depicts is one of frustrations and difficulties in doing the simplest tasks.

But I was sitting there, thinking about the fact that I'm on my couch, playing a game, hoping to get something meaningful out of all of this, or at least have some fun, and... I just wasn't.

I get plenty frustrated in my day-to-day life, and I think there are few emotions that I hate more. And games are challenging, and can be frustrating at time.

But when I play something like Elden Ring, and I die to Malenia for the thirteenth time in a row, and I get so frustrated that I feel like I need to stop playing for a little and cool down, I still come back to it, because the frustration feels worth it. I know, in that case, that when I do finally achieve victory (and I have, on I think five characters by now,) it will give me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.

But in the first several hours of Death Standing, I haven't gotten that feeling of accomplishment.

When I turn in some order that someone has made, or return some piece of cargo lost out in the world, I'm blasted with a summary page of statistics and "likes" I'm getting for the manner in which I've accomplished my task, and it all blurs together, meaninglessly.

Now, sure, maybe this is a commentary on the fact that the hard work of keeping a society together isn't actually the epic, climactic feats that most games concern themselves with, but is instead the humble, day-to-day management of logistics and elbow grease. And that's something that, as a worldview, I can respect a great deal.

But I think that even the most sophisticated works of art (and I hope by this point in the medium's life we can agree that video games are an artistic medium) still need to do something that is compelling, to keep you engaged. With Death Stranding, I'm just not sure that this game is doing that for me.

Imagining Weapon Masteries

 One of the ideas coming in D&D's 2024 Player's Handbook, and which should see testing once we get the Warriors and Mages test packet, is Weapon Mastery. Weapons will get new properties that are only unlocked by characters who have the appropriate class features to use them (I'd guess we'll also see feats for them). Part of the reason for this is to better distinguish weapon types. Currently, for example, there's no real difference (apart from weight and cost) between a Longsword and a Battleaxe when it comes to mechanics. The second reason is that they want to give more flexibility to weapon-focused characters, and particularly the Warriors who generally don't use spellcasting.

Now, as far as I know/remember, we've gotten scant details about this from the D&D Creator Summit, a gathering of D&D online community members to discuss the game, partially to address cultural and corporate aspects (and deal with the way that content creators have had to shoulder a lot of the outrage over things like the OGL debacle) but mainly to talk about the new iteration of the game.

As far as I know, we only know the following:

Daggers will have a property called "nick," whose function is unknown.

Tridents will be better than Spears thanks to a better mastery feature of some sort, to reflect that they are martial, rather than simple weapons.

Greatswords will have a mastery that allows you to deal damage even if you miss (presumably less - I believe it's just your damage modifier, almost as if you rolled a zero on your damage dice somehow).

Fighters will be particularly adept at mixing and matching masteries, possibly using two masteries on a single weapon and swapping out the masteries of one weapon for another.

...And that's about it.

Now, once we get that next UA packet, this post will probably be obsolete, or at least outdated. I wanted to look through some of the existing weapon types and consider what properties they could have. None of these, I think, can be too powerful (though the one I described for the Greatsword is actually massive - I know that the new version of Great Weapon Master is nerfed, but I'd still assume that you can't get the bonus damage from even the new version when you miss here).

Also, the current plan (one I hope remains) is to allow Pistols and Muskets as martial ranged weapons in the PHB. These weapons are not significantly more powerful than other ranged weapons, and have both a high cost (though if chosen as starting weapons, that's less of an issue) and short ranges (which is, I think, the true limiting factor on them). I'll be considering these part of the standard options for characters along with those found in the 2014PHB.

There are a lot of weapons to look at, and I don't have solid ideas for all of them. But I'll see what comes to mind.

Club: Here we might actually have a hint - the mastery is said to slow the target after you hit them, kind of giving them a dazing blow (though I think Dazed is a new condition, so perhaps this would be called something like Hobble.)

Dagger: Nick is the mastery that they named, but I don't think it was described. In all honesty, I think this makes the most sense as a "do a little damage even if you miss" mastery, and perhaps we'll actually see Nick show up on a lot of bladed weapons, specifically sword-like blades. However, if that's not what this gets, and Nick is instead something totally unique to the dagger, I think it could be something like being able to avoid breaking stealth when you hit with it (maybe not automatically doing so, but getting to do a stealth check at a severe penalty,) which would fittingly encourage Rogues to fight with daggers.

Sling: One of a number of low-damage weapons that don't really have any advantage over something like a shortbow, I could imagine Slings maybe imposing some detriment that makes it harder for the target to hit you. Call the property something like "Knock," and the target either gets disadvantage on their next attack or a penalty, perhaps based on your Dexterity or proficiency bonus.

Warhammer: While I think in fantasy we tend to thing of warhammers and mauls as being giant-headed sledgehammers, historically the heads of these weapons were fairly narrow, with the idea being that you could focus a lot of force into a small area and thus create a shock of pressure that could puncture thick armor. I think even the more fantastical, thick-headed hammers (think Mjolnir, including its interpretation in Marvel Comics) overwhelm armor by just hitting so damned hard. Given that D&D abstracts both the thickness of armor and the evasiveness of a creature into a single stat, I might not simply have these lower a target's AC, but instead perhaps have a property where creatures above a certain AC (say 15, which is the highest a naked humanoid can get with maxed out dexterity) take a penalty to their AC against attacks with a weapon that has Armor Penetration. This makes these weapons great for going after thick or heavily-armored things like golems and death knights, but is only as good as other weapons against a beast that just happens to be big and meaty. Alternatively, rather than lowering the AC, perhaps these weapons deal extra damage to heavily-armored foes. To be fair, a whole lot of weapons could have this mastery - it would make sense as well for War Picks, Morning Stars, Pikes, and, frankly, Pistols and Muskets (firearms kind of helped to end the use of plate armor, even if I think the earliest firearms predated its development).

Flail: The Flail is one of those historical weapons that I think was far less often used than it has been depicted in fiction. And to a large extent, that's because if you weren't good at using one, you'd be very likely to kill yourself rather than your foe. But, the erratic movement of the Flail, and particularly its arcing swings, makes me feel that if any weapon deserves to be able to "Cleave," and hit a second target (likely for reduced damage) it should be this one.

Blowgun: Blowguns should probably be used to administer poisons (poison in general could use a lot of reworking in D&D to make it a viable thing for players to use). Given that blowguns effectively use a d1 for damage, getting an option to put a lot more damage onto that could be great. This might be stealing too directly from Starfinder, but "Injection" could be a good mastery for this.

Whip: This is probably already cool enough as a weapon that has finesse and reach, but I think it would be a lot of fun to also give it a "Grab" property. Sure, it doesn't often make sense how someone like Indiana Jones can somehow get the whip to wrap around a tree branch or something and hold secure enough to swing from it, and then just flick his wrist and get it back, but this is a fantasy game, isn't it? Let this be the nonmagical mage hand, and maybe the pit-swinging mastery.

That's pretty much what I've got. The feedback survey for Druid & Paladin has ended, so I'm hoping our next packet is coming soon.

Fears of the Kingdom

 Getting old is a very strange experience.

The Zelda series is as old as I am. The original Legend of Zelda came out in 1986, a few months before I was born. Of Nintendo's franchises, Zelda has generally been reserved as a kind of "event." While the company liberally throws Mario into all manner of genre-bending or simply other-genre games (spawning, for instance, perhaps the most beloved video game racing series in Mario Kart) Zelda has often come around only once or, occasionally, twice in a console generation.

While there were a few Zelda games around when I was a young kid, I actually didn't get into the series until 1998's Ocarina of Time. Later, I would go back and play A Link to the Past.

Breath of the Wild, the most recent entry in the main Zelda series, is a game that is beloved by countless players. The adoration and affection people feel for this game cannot be denied. But I've been on record here on this blog that I found the game thin and empty. Or, rather, I found that it didn't seem to belong to the Zelda series that I loved.

Now, opinions vary from person to person about all things, especially in matters of taste. My own opinions are just that - my own. BotW's popularity means that it clearly struck some chord with a massive number of people, but it's a chord that I have struggled to identify.

My best guess is that the reason people love this game is the experimentation it allows with the tools and environments. The game is a sandbox game, which until recently I simply thought of as an older term for what we now refer to as an open-world game. But the sandbox here is not about the world being open and free (the classic "see that mountain in the distance? You can climb it" which Breath of the Wild does, admirably, allow better than most games that make such promises) and is instead more about giving the players tools to make their own games and toys.

The formula of Zelda games that I grew up on was to have a narrative that led you through environmental traversal and quest-like objectives interacting with NPCs and into unique, aesthetically diverse dungeons that mixed puzzles with lightly challenging foes to fight, culminating in a challenging set-piece against a final boss. And, crucially, each dungeon gave you a new tool to use that would play a heavy role in the puzzles and final boss in that particular dungeon, but also expand your arsenal for the remainder of the game.

Though not an RPG, Zelda games had a sense of progression to them.

And there was a momentum that carried you through from the beginning of the narrative to the end.

The sandbox, by contrast, seems to think of such goals as distractions or merely one activity to pursue among many.

In other words, it seemed to me that the expectations I went into Breath of the Wild with - that I would play through an epic story that took me to diverse dungeons and environments, were simply wrong. Instead, the main appeal to the game was just playing around (or, to use more adult and perhaps judgmental language, just fucking around) in the world they provided.

And I don't think that doing so appeals to me. I'm looking for that structure, and for the reward of progression to allow me to see and do new things.

Breath of the Wild begins in a plateau where you get all the tools you're really going to have over the course of the game. You get things like bombs and the time-stop and magnet abilities all at once, because the game makes no assumptions about the order in which you are going to tackle its various challenges. Whereas previous Zelda games could have a first dungeon whose puzzles only involve things you can do with the tool you find within (say, the wind boomerang from the first dungeon in Twilight Princess,) Breath of the Wild, if anything, creates systems that only work inside its major dungeons (like being able to rotate parts of the divine beasts from the map) because they cannot gate things in this manner.

Again, I think that a player who just wants to mess around (which is perhaps a happy medium between my two phrasings) in that world might - and presumably does - see that as a boon. The openness means that nothing really gets in the way of just challenging yourself to do what you want to try to do.

I cannot help but feel like an old fogey, though, in my emotional response that Breath of the Wild has done Zelda dirty - that someone has taken away the series that I loved and replaced it with what is simply a different game.

Now, there are games in that series I didn't like before as well. The previous entry, Skyward Sword, had nearly opposite problems (the restrictiveness of its motion controls and the decidedly non-open world). And I think I would not feel so upset about it if I knew that this was going to be Zelda's experiment with a different kind of structure, similarly to how Wind Waker played its game of island-hopping before returning to a more Ocarina of Time-style world in Twilight Princess (a game I consider probably the second-best entry among the 3D Zelda games - again, a somewhat unpopular opinion).

This, though, is why the approach with Tears of the Kingdom worries me. A gameplay preview showed that this is once again set in a ruined world where weapons break after you swing them a handful of times, and the exciting features being shown off were the ability to assemble a vehicle out of pieces found in the world.

If you love this sandboxy approach, I'm sure this seems amazing and good.

But to me, it shows the Zelda series drifting away from the thing I once loved, and heading instead toward a Minecraft-style game-making tool, rather than a game in and of itself (I meant here to reference an old Chainsawsuit comic, but could not find it).

It's not like simply making a game open-world will always result in this. Elden Ring, by contrast, took the Dark Souls formula and blew it out into a massive explorable world. Elden Ring does suffer from some of the necessary evils of this kind of design - mainly the need to copy-paste tile sets to create its many mini-dungeons - but the game feels like an evolution of that Dark Souls format. Its Legacy Dungeons feel distinct, and it has many unique and interesting creature designs.

Now, I suppose one takeaway here is that this is one of the rare instances of a same-generation Zelda game. Zelda has sometimes been caught in generational transitions - Twilight Princess was meant as the second (and very different) Gamecube Zelda following the polarizing Wind Waker (which I think was only really polarizing because of its cartoonish visual style) but also wound up being a launch title for the Wii. Breath of the Wild was meant as the Wii U entry in the series, but the Wii U was not generally embraced by the public, and so Breath of the Wild became more associated with the newer Switch - a massive success of a console.

But we've seen, for example, Majora's Mask, which came out two years after Ocarina of Time, but was able to accomplish such quick turnaround by replicating a lot of the UI, assets, and overall structure of Ocarina of Time.

So, as someone who does not want to see Breath of the Wild as the immutable model for Zelda games moving forward, I can perhaps take some solace in the notion that Tears of the Kingdom is an attempt to expand out the idea of Breath of the Wild by using some of the systems and assets developed for that game.

Still, despite being a big Zelda fan in my early days as a gamer, I'm finding myself wondering whether I will even get Tears of the Kingdom. And to be clear, I am in no way condemning or complaining about people who are overjoyed to have more BotW-style Zelda to play through (or around in). Frankly, I expect this to be a massive success, and a beloved game to millions of players across the world.

It just means that I've got to accept that Zelda games might no longer be for me. Getting older is weird.

Dodging BTs in Death Stranding

 I followed the announcement and slow release of information about the mind-trip of Death Stranding after it was first announced, the first major project for Hideo Kojima's own studio, after his messy break-up with longtime publisher Konami.

Having played the first three of the Metal Gear Solid games (the first on the Gamecube port "The Twin Snakes" and the latter two on the PS2) I was familiar with Kojima's madman auteur tendencies that, among other things, make his games feel almost more like strings of cutscenes with gameplay interludes rather than the other way around.

Searching for another weird game to dive into after exhausting more or less all there was of Control (and not finding the repeatable endgame content like the Jukebox excursions to be interesting enough to do much of them), I turned to this story.

The game released almost four years ago, but it's one I never really got around to (Control came out the same year). Given my obsession (and not really a recent one, though only now do I have a name to put to it) with the New Weird, I feel as if I'm finding it in all manner of artistic works. Death Stranding could potentially fit in that category, though you could argue it's either more just straight sci-fi or it's Kojima's typical anime-influenced fever dream - trading MGS' 80s action movie inspirations for something more like, honestly, The Postman.

The world of Death Stranding is bleak as all hell, and I think I'd be depressed by it if the nature of the monsters was not so compellingly odd and uncannily human. I haven't fully unpacked things, but the world has been devastated by the eponymous Death Stranding, which seems to have happened when the barrier between the world of the living and the dead was breached. Now, dead bodies that are not swiftly incinerated will "necrotyze" and bring about catastrophic "voidouts" that leave enormous, nuke-sized craters. This has forced the surviving remnants of humanity to live in isolation.

The jargon the game throws at you comes heavy and fast. Bridges is an organization that seeks to reunite America, primarily through Couriers who bring packages from one "Knot" (settlement) to the next. However, the infrastructure of the country is heavily eroded due to Timefalls - rainstorms where anything the water touches rapidly ages and expires. Indeed, one of the clever and subtle elements of the world design is that the territories one crosses (at least in my early stage of the game) all appear to be geologically aged - the hills are worn down with erosion and covered with boulders. I'm no geologist, but I believe the idea here is that the whole world looks like those places with old geological formations (for example, the Appalachian Mountains have a different look and feel from newer mountain ranges because they've stood so long).

In terms of gameplay, the challenge so far is to simply cross these expanses of open wilderness while balancing your load of cargo on a harness. Something most games give no more thought to than simply giving you a maximum carrying capacity, either by weight or by inventory slots, here becomes what I assume will be the primary management system of the game.

Three or four missions in (in an overall open-world structure) I have not yet gotten any kind of weapon, though the notice given when approaching one of the outposts where deliveries can be made indicates that outside of them, weapons can be used.

Aside from the rough terrain, it appears that there are a bandits you must evade (or presumably fight once you have some armaments) as well as "BTs," which are the supernatural creatures that seem tied to the apocalyptic transformation of the world.

The game lays on a huge number of systems in pretty rapid succession. I suspect the intent is for them to be overwhelming (I've gotten many "likes" from my deliveries, but I don't know if they have any real game impact or if they're essentially a way to keep score.) But I do get the sense that if I want to actually master the game, it will take a lot of patient experimentation.

It's an interesting choice, to make traversal the primary challenge of the game. Finding some dropped cargo bound for the starting town, I found myself wondering if there was a fast-travel system, or if that would defeat the entire point of the game.

Death Stranding also has some semi-online elements, which I believe are even less direct than FromSoft's Soulsborne games (given the popularity of Elden Ring, are we going to need to change that term?) You gain the ability to put ladders and ropes in certain places in the world, along with postbox stations that let you set cargo aside for other players to pick up and carry the rest of the way (or put in equipment you don't need that someone else might be able to use) but these things degrade and are eventually destroyed over time due to the Timefalls, keeping the world from being covered in convenient ladders and ropes and maintaining the challenge of traversal.

I have no idea if I actually like the game so far. It's slow, but simultaneously overwhelming.

Where do we draw the line between immersion and system bloat? This is a game where there's a "massage shoulders" button and a command to have the player character stop and take a piss (complete with draining bladder measured in milliliters, which then refills after a while).

See, I suspect that the complexity into which I've been thrown as a player is intentional - an artistic choice. But does it make for a good game? It's too early to say. My initial reaction is sort of offense - I think that the AAA game world has tended to load things down a little too much with superfluous systems of late (Control, for example, probably doesn't need a crafting system and could vastly simplify its loot system) but is Kojima and his team falling victim to that impulse, or taking it to its logical extremity as a way of commenting on it? (Given my history with his games, I suspect his comment would be "if only we could have thrown in more systems.")

The game's world is full of Kojima-isms, which go beyond the vast amount of jargon and include characters named "Die Hard-man" and "Dead Man" who aren't even clearly villains (I'm keeping my eyes on Die Hard-man, who always wears a skull-like high-tech mask while otherwise wearing a relatively normal business suit - Dead Man is just Guillermo del Toro with some kind of surgery scar that implies the top of his skull was opened up at some point). It's kind of interesting - the game goes to great lengths to credit the actors (and sometimes the separate voice actors - del Toro lends his likeness for Dead Man, but there's a different voice actor) and render them with great realism but throwing these bizarre character concepts that seem more at home in a comic book. Or a Mattel-sponsored cartoon from the 1980s.

What I'm trying to discover, as I think is the goal in examining a game, is where the core feeling of engagement with the game is. I never felt the need to replay any of the Metal Gear Solid games (actually, that might be a lie.) In those cases, I think playing through them was more about experiencing the story than really enjoying the moment-to-moment gameplay. The early moments of Death Stranding include times when the camera pulls out as a somber indie-pop song plays, seeming to point to this kind of quiet movement across the land as the main "idea" behind the game. It remains to be seen how engaging I'll find that.

Imagining Four Subclasses for the Warriors

 Well, here we come to the final part of my 2024PHB subclass prediction series - something that I... to be fair, have done before. But my approach here has been a somewhat new one, focusing on trying to narrow down the core archetypes within the broader tropes of the classes.

To reiterate one last time, 5th Edition's design intent is that the base classes cover every fantasy hero archetype you can think of (the Artificer being the only concept in the last 9 years that has warranted a fully new class, after failed attempts to get it to work as a Wizard subclass). The hope is that these class ideas cover as much ground as possible, and that narrower identities can be covered by subclasses. Rather than having a separate Paladin and Avenger, as they did in 4th Edition (I believe) instead the Avenger is simply an Oath of Vengeance Paladin, and the "paladin classic" is Oath of Devotion. Both on a flavor and a mechanical level, the subclasses play inside that broad class space but carve out their own identities within it.

Like the Mages, we have not yet seen the direction that they want to take the Warrior classes (Barbarians, Fighters, and Monks) in the 2024PHB, but as before, I'm going to, for the purposes of this series of posts, assume a conservative approach.

That means that, even though I've been speculating on the possibility that Fighters might all get maneuvers like the Battle Master does, I'm going to assume instead that we'll see them more or less stick to the basic form they have now.

One thing of note is that we have heard a bit about Weapon Mastery as a new feature that will be a major part of the Warrior wheelhouse. According to Comicbook.com, the masteries will grant certain weapon types additional properties, but only if you have the class feature that unlocks it. Examples include "graze," (which I believe was seen with the Greatsword,) which allows you to deal reduced damage to the target when you miss rather than none at all.

Fighters in particular appear to be getting a lot of ways to make use of Weapon Mastery, but I believe all three Warrior classes will get some version of the feature.

This is all well and good, and could potentially make for more engaging combat gameplay for weapon-focused classes, but I don't think it ultimately changes the parameters of this series of posts, which is focused more on what subclasses could make it into the 2024PHB.

And importantly, I'm not making any real assumptions built around the mechanics of those subclasses, expecting that they will be revised or even heavily redesigned to match current design philosophies.

Because the PHB is meant to present the basic options for these classes, what we want to try to narrow in on is what four subclasses give us the most classic and prevalent versions sub-archetypes within each of these class archetypes. The weird, idiosyncratic subclasses can find publication in later sourcebooks, but here we want to zero in on the most obvious, standard versions. Wild Magic Barbarian is a fun idea, but it's a pretty "off-label" version of the Barbarian.

Speaking of which, let's kick it off with our big beefy friends.

Barbarian:

The Barbarian's inspiration in fantasy is pretty obvious, with Conan the Barbarian, and particularly the 1980s Arnold Schwartzenegger incarnation of the character. The Barbarian distinguishes itself from the Fighter in a few ways (notably, though, I think that the World of Warcraft Warrior more or less gets Fighters from its Arms and Protection specializations and Barbarians from its Fury specialization). On a superficial level, the Barbarian doesn't typically wear armor (they can wear medium armor, but most don't to make full use of their bonuses from being unarmored,) and their focus on damage reduction rather than avoidance makes it easier for them to be front-line tanks without even using a shield.

On a flavor level, the Barbarian is often tied to a more primal environment, usually affiliated with natural and wild spaces, and many subclasses include a spiritual element. Spiritual or no, Barbarians are emotional warriors - their central mechanic is Rage, which I think can be easily re-skinned by players to encompass all manner of emotions (I like the idea of thinking of it as glee and revelry - just having a freaking blast, maybe pumping Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now").

Now, there's a whole post to be written about the characterization of Barbarians and their spiritual practices (while I don't think it's racialized the way that, for instance, the Monk is, given that the common points of inspiration for Barbarians are just as European and white as the inspirations for Clerics and Fighters and such, there's definitely some latent judgment - even the use of "Barbarian" - built in it that would take a much longer and different post to unpack) but we'll just leave that to the side and engage with this as a fantasy trope and give it the benefit of the doubt.

Like a surprising number of classes in the 2014PHB, Barbarians only get two subclasses, the Berserker and the Totem Warrior. The Berserker, on a flavor level, easily lives in that "standard choice" space like many other subclasses, though perhaps so much so that it can be a little hard to imagine in what way non-Berserker Barbarians aren't also, you know, Berserkers.

I have almost zero doubt that Berserkers will be reprinted and revised. This is the Barbarian Classic, who will focus on being a wrecking ball swinging into their foes - the class that takes a look at the massive monster the party is facing down and, in their mind, decides that appearances aside, they're actually bigger and stronger.

The Totem Warrior, then, plays much more into the spiritual side of things. While the Berserker could be just as home in a dense city as they are on some far-flung battlefield, the Totem Warrior has a closer tie to the natural world, given their affiliation with animal spirits. Again, I think that this is an easy slam dunk or a reprint/revision (the only problem is the massive power of the Bear Totem at level 3, making it too easy to ignore other subclasses - but this isn't a discussion about mechanics).

Where, then, do we go to explore other design space? The Barbarian's identity is built around being reckless and unstoppable. The Berserker zeros in on that emotional rage to accomplish that, while the Totem Warrior channels the spirits of various wild animals, embodying the aspects that let them fight on beyond normal human(oid) capabilities.

This actually gives us a great avenue to explore the Barbarian - what is the source of their power, the source of their rage?

And I think that this gives us a very easy option for the third subclass, because what's a force that has (in many cases in a very destructive manner) motivated people throughout history to fight and push themselves to extremes? Religious faith. And we've got a (popular and good) subclass for that: The Zealot. The Zealot is motivated to fight by their faith, but they also call upon their unwavering faith as a source of strength and power.

So, what, then, is another source of power for a Barbarian's rage? I'll confess here that the answer is not totally obvious.

See, I'm tempted to look to the Storm Herald. Storms are kind of a perfect metaphor for Rage and emotional tumult - anger and strong emotions can feel chaotic and unpredictable like a storm. This also has the benefit of tying the Barbarian into the more Primal, Druidic world, but in a way that feels distinct from the Totem Warrior (again, as a good reference point, I like to point to the distinction in World of Warcraft between Druids and Shamans - Totem Warrior is closer to the Druidic worldview, while Storm Herald is closer to Shamans - both use "nature magic," but very different flavors thereof).

The other option I'd look at is the Ancestral Guardian. Once again, this is a spiritual-based Barbarian subclass, where you draw strength from your ancestors or predecessors (in the Ravnica campaign I run, our Selesnyan Ancestral Guardian Barbarian is connected not only to direct ancestors, but to the adopted family of the Selesnya Conclave in general, and even broader, the spirits of any who hold the same values he does when he visits other planes).

I think this could also very easily be an option (it doesn't hurt that it's also probably a bit more mechanically appealing than Storm Herald,) but I might argue that it's a little close to the Totem Warrior - not enough to rule it out entirely, but I think the Storm Herald distinguishes itself more clearly. (Indeed, while writing about it, I almost feel like Ancestral Guardian would make for a good Paladin subclass.)

In the interest of showing off as broad a design space as possible, we'll stick with the Storm Herald (and assume that the new design will better balance it with other subclasses).

Barbarian subclass predictions: Berserker, Totem Warrior, Zealot, Storm Herald

Fighters:

First off, to reiterate, I'm going to write this on the assumption that we're not going to see the Battle Master expanded out to basically be all fighters. Especially given the teases about Weapon Mastery as the unifying Warrior mechanic, I think it's unlikely we'll see maneuvers made a class-wide feature, even if WotC and players find it very satisfying. In the interest of being conservative and trying to look at these classes the way I think they're most likely to play out, I'm going to assume that the Battle Master will remain unique in this way.

I know in my Expert class post I suggested that the Swashbuckler was arguably the default fantasy hero, but I think you could make another argument for Fighters. Fighters are weird, because in a lot of ways, they're the non-fantasy fantasy heroes. On a basic level, they are "the class that uses weapons and armor to fight their foes," which describes practically every person who has ever fought anyone in the real world. Unlike Barbarians and Monks, Fighters aren't even bound to focusing on melee attacks, heavy armor, and strength as a focus, as a Fighter can be just as effective with a ranged weapon and high dexterity. Indeed, I might argue that Legolas from the Lord of the Rings is more of a Fighter than a Ranger (Aragorn's 100% a Ranger, even called that in the story) despite his weapon of choice being a bow. Indeed, if you look at the Fellowship of the Ring, you could describe a lot of the characters as Fighters - Legolas, Gimli, Boromir, and possibly Sam (though the Hobbits in that are all barely noncombatants, at least until Sam carves his way through Cirith Ungol, which is likely more because he's carrying the One Ring with him and thus projecting this terrifying aura and not because he's actually suddenly a master orc-slayer - fear and charm effects are very important in the Lord of the Rings).

Now, obviously there are other martial classes in 5E (one problem I have with Starfinder is that of the seven core classes, only the Soldier gets to use heavy armor or anything other than basic melee weapons or small arms as a viable option without building for it with feats and the like). And the Fighter, frankly, is sort of defined more by what it isn't than what it is. The Paladin is the martial class with divine magic and holy conviction empowering it. The Ranger is the martial class with primal magic and wilderness expertise. The Fighter is the person who put all their training and practice and conditioning in just getting really good with their weapons.

But while that could feel limiting, in practice it might actually be freeing - the simplicity of the Fighter's overall vibe means that it actually lives in an enormous design space, and that's reflected as well, at least in its current design, by giving you the most opportunities for feats of any class.

Really, I think the only guardrails one needs to bear in mind when designing Fighter subclasses is when you start to butt up against the territory of other classes, particularly those martial or martial-adjacent ones.

However, there's another limitation that I'd place on the design that can be a little tricky to pull off. The Fighter is one of only a few classes (the Rogue and Ranger being the others) that can more or less be just as happy as a melee class as it is a ranged class. And while I think there's a slight bias toward melee, there have also been subclasses that push you into one role or the other, while there are other subclasses that are agnostic in this regard.

Among the 2014PHB subclasses, all three are capable of playing in either space, though there is a slight skew toward melee for Battle Masters, as there are some maneuvers that only work with melee attacks, and at least with the publication of Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and the printing of the cantrips Green-Flame Blade and Booming Blade, Eldritch Knights seem to have a lot of synergies if they stick to melee.

But neither subclass forces you to do so in the way that, for example, the Arcane Archer really forces you to go with a ranged Dex build. And I think that it would be good to maintain that with the 2024PHB.

The Champion Fighter is probably the default subclass for it. Now, the Champion is sort of famously (or infamously) the simplest subclass in D&D. It's not that it isn't good - the ability to crit on 19s and later 18s makes for more frequent fun moments, and a Fighter has enough opportunities for feats that they can build in a lot of other powerful functionality (it also helps that a Champion isn't going to need much more than to boost their primary stat to 20, and maybe just ensure they have decent Con, and then can spend their other feats on stuff like Great Weapon Master and the like). The Champion feels like it nails down the absolute center of the Fighter design space. Is it boring? Almost certainly. But it's also maybe the best option to help a player who is brand new to RPGs wrap their head around the basics of the game and still feel like they're a powerful and contributing member of the team.

The Battle Master, though, I think nails the idea of the Fighter as the trained soldier, its maneuvers embodying a tactical capability and thoughtfulness on the battlefield that distinguishes itself from a Barbarian's reckless rage. There is no question that this one's going to be reprinted, as it's known to be a subclass that WotC feels they got a slam dunk with, and which is very popular with players.

The third 2014PHB subclass is the Eldritch Knight. As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I could have sworn that when I was first learning about the idea of RPG character classes, that the idea of a "battlemage" was one of the standard options, and that what it entailed was a character who had the armor and heavy weapons of a knight combined with the arcane magic of a wizard. Now, that term seems to more frequently refer in media to basically "a wizard who fights in battles," but the way I had always conceived of it, it was far more like the Eldritch Knight (I might have thought of it as skewed slightly more toward the magic end of things, like being a half-caster instead of a third-caster). Indeed, the first game I ever played a Paladin in, Quest for Glory V (which was sort of a hybrid of inventory-puzzle adventure game with light RPG elements) I chose it basically because it looked like the closest thing to a Battlemage, and it took me some time to realize the more religious/divine nature of Paladins as compared to this totally-common RPG class I'd conceived of in my head.

The point is, though, that while it's a little overshadowed by the Battle Master, the Eldritch Knight is also a popular, effective subclass. And it carves out its own identity. Even if I can't seem to find a lot of fantasy media that showcases characters who fit the Eldritch Knight feel (especially if we're categorizing Jedi as more Paladins than EKs,) evidently in my mind, they represent a classic fantasy archetype nonetheless. So they're in.

That means that we only need to figure out one more subclass to add to the 2024PHB. What angle, though, do we approach this from?

Our existing subclasses give us the athletic weapon master, the thoughtful tactician, and the combat mage. Given that the Fighter is not generally a magic class, we don't have the various flavors of magic as the best axis to explore along.

Of the later Fighter subclasses to come out in 5E, I think the one I've usually seen the most excitement about is the Rune Knight. In the Wildemount campaign where I play my Triton Wizard, we have a Rune Knight who makes excellent use of his capabilities (the Cloud Rune is utterly insane - any time a creature crits one of us, it's more likely going to be hitting one of its allies instead).

Now, the only downside here is that I don't think the Rune Knight really fits the same kind of "classic archetype" as other existing subclasses. The Samurai, for instance, is iconic, and I think you could argue the same for the Cavalier.

But the Cavalier focuses on mounted combat, which is a system that I think is pretty underutilized in most D&D campaigns. The Samurai has in microcosm some of the cultural issues that the Monk also has to deal with - I certainly don't think the right thing to do is scrub out any mention of non-European traditions from the game for fear of cultural appropriation, but the truth is that the actual Samurai could probably be represented by plenty of other existing Fighter subclasses, which forces the Samurai subclass to zero in on a kind of vague impression that mostly western designers have of this Japanese tradition for its mechanical definitions.

Normally, I'd say that focusing on some specific element of lore might be too narrow for the PHB options, which I think should represent the broadest categories of class sub-tropes. But Giants are, I think, meant to be nearly as ubiquitous as dragons (which is why we're getting a giant-themed sourcebook later this year). Much like the Draconic Bloodline Sorcerer, I think we could make an exception here. Giants show up in practically every real-world mythology, and while the focus on Runes does point more specifically to the Norse variety, I think this might work as an option.

So, while I can't say I'm super confident, I think I'll put that as my fourth Fighter subclass prediction.

Fighter subclass predictions: Champion, Battle Master, Eldritch Knight, Rune Knight.

Monk:

At the D&D Creator summit this week, apparently they talked about the problems with the Monk in general - a little from the mechanical side of things, and a little on the lore side of things. Mechanically, they basically recognize that the Monk should be putting out more damage (and, I hope, getting a d10 hit die and perhaps slightly higher AC, or otherwise some form of damage mitigation).

But flavor-wise, the Monk is in a weird place as the only class whose cultural inspirations are pointedly non-Western. As a white guy, I won't claim to understand all the nuances and difficulties in addressing this. One change they mentioned is that Ki Points will be renamed Spirit Points. These mean, roughly, the same thing, but the use of an English word is, I imagine, an attempt to avoid exoticism when it comes to the class.

Monks, of course, exist in Western traditions (specifically Christian, and primarily Catholic, ones) but as far as I know, Franciscan friars are not known for being elite martial artists. Instead, the Monk is meant to evoke Martial arts traditions of East Asia, such as Kung Fu, and its association with Monks is likely tied to Buddhist traditions such as those out of the Shaolin Temple in China.

To be a Monk (or Nun, which in Christian tradition is simply the female equivalent term) means living an unusual life that is typically characterized by extreme discipline and structure. The Monk as a fantasy hero is thus generally characterized as someone who has unequaled discipline and training of both body and spirit.

Indeed, you could say that, on a philosophical level, the main distinction between a Monk and a Fighter is that the Monk requires a holistic approach to discipline and training, while a Fighter sees their practice as being more limited and focused on the physical side of things.

Furthermore, generally what makes the Monk come off as awesome in fantasy and related genres is that they contain all of their strength and power within their body, eschewing the need for armor or weapons because my harmonizing and conditioning their body, mind, and spirit, they can perform extraordinary feats.

Obviously, from a mechanical perspective, this means that they don't wear armor and generally wield either simple weapons like a quarterstaff or no weapons at all, but can (or at least should be able to) keep pace with people swinging around giant magical swords and buttoned into a walking fortress of armor.

Monks get three subclasses in the 2014PHB.

The Open Hand Monk is the clear "default" option, which really just reinforces the idea of your being a powerful hand-to-hand combatant. I don't really see a need to reconceptualize this one. I don't know what impact Weapon Mastery will have on the class (especially as a class that's typically comfortable setting aside weapons entirely,) but this seems to embody you standard martial artist.

Shadow plays up the Monk's darker side. I think you might interpret this as the "Ninja subclass," though I think Ninjas might actually fit better in the Rogue class category. Still, this subclass makes use of the Monk's focus on dexterity to create a class that uses its grace and speed to take a less direct approach. The magical aspects of the subclass also tie into the spiritual side of the Monk, which of course in a fantasy setting can manifest in actual magical effects.

Now, the Four Elements subclass has a very obvious and very specific cultural inspiration, which is Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's an excellent show (it took me a few episodes to get into it, as it's still definitely aimed at a young audience, but once you're able to put aside any feelings of embarrassment over watching a kid's show, it actually winds up being very, very good). But I guess the question remains whether it works in general for a broad subclass trope. And... you know, I think it actually does. The Four Elements Monk really only suffered from being a little underpowered - eating up your Ki points to get magical effects that aren't really powerful enough to justify themselves. But I respected the attempt to try something very different than, say, the simple "partial spellcaster" identities of the Eldritch Knight and Arcane Trickster. Perhaps all it needs is a tune-up.

So, where do we go next?

As usual, let's sum up what we've got so far. We have our master of the physical, we have our stealthy night-stalker, and we have our element-channeling magic monk.

The options here, I think, could go in a lot of different directions. First off, if we're looking for cultural touchstones, the Drunken Master Monk is tons of fun and calls out specifically to the works of Jackie Chan - as compared to Open Hand's Bruce Lee (or, really, most other martial arts stars like Jet Li, Donnie Yen, etc.) The Kensei, then, moves into a more mechanical space - Monks are masters of unarmed combat, but they don't have to only fight with their bare fists. The Kensei is based on a Japanese concept (and again, there's a bit of the old Western gaffe of conflating Chinese and Japanese traditions, which... I don't have much intelligent to say about other than to notice it) that sees someone apply this kind of mastery and discipline to the use of a weapon (I believe Kensei might translate to "sword saint," implying an almost divine mastery of their weapon). I do think that there's a little overlap here with the concept of a Fighter in general, but then again, if we allow the Valor Bard and Swashbuckler Rogue to approach the same trope space from different angles, perhaps it's fine for Kensei to sit near the border of the Fighter's design space.

Lastly, though, I think we can look to the most spiritual and heady of the Monk subclasses, the Astral Self. If the Monk is a Warrior who puts a priority on mental and spiritual discipline in addition to physical discipline, the Astral Self Monk is kind of the logical endpoint of that identity.

To be clear, the actual subclass doesn't totally work, because you can't use any subclass features without spending Ki (or soon Spirit) points, which are kind of a precious resource for Monks. But the concept - of a Monk who goes so far as to transcend their physical form to fight as their mental/spiritual body, feels really awesome on a flavor level.

And I think that the Astral Self and the Open Hand kind of work as the bookends of the physical/spiritual axis for the Monk.

Now, Kensei and Drunken Master are both options I could imagine seeing in the PHB. And don't get me wrong, I love the Mercy Monk (I haven't played it, but I suspect it could be my favorite subclass) and I think the Sun Soul's ability to basically do Hadokens makes it potentially very appealing.

But, on the other hand, what if we did see a swap-out of one of the PHB options?

I mean, people love ATLA, but I think the Four Elements Monk never really took off. I've been very conservative in these posts, and I think in every case, I've kept the 2014 subclasses. But this could be the exception.

And given that, I think we can return to an idea of balancing the representation in Monk subclasses, similarly to how we thought of Bards as going with two melee options and two back-line support casters (which is somewhat in line with the four existing Artificer subclasses, two of which are weapon-attack-based and two of which are just spell-based). And in the case of Monks, I think we've got to look at the divide as the physical versus the spiritual axis.

Open Hand of course sits on the physical side. Shadow, I think, then sits on the spiritual side. Now, I love the Drunken Master, but I think we get to push off in a new direction with the Kensei, which draws a much clearer path away from the Open Hand while still being a physical-focused subclass (though I think we'd likely see a change to its name). Then, to give us another spiritually-focused subclass, we'd go with (a hopefully heavily redesigned) Astral Self.

Monk subclass predictions: Open Hand, Shadow, "Kensei," Astral Self.

Phew, and that covers it. I've had a lot of fun going in deep on the philosophy of subclasses and trying to simultaneously distill the essence of each class while then finding the wiggle room within those class concepts to figure out four subclasses.

I suspect it will be a while before we get any confirmation about what subclasses are making the cut. And I'm not claiming to speak with any authority. I'm certain I will get at least some of this wrong, and there's also a good chance that my approach has been too conservative - I think I only accounted for two brand-new subclasses in this whole series, but if they're doing one, they're probably doing more than two.

It also remains to be seen whether WotC will share some of my attitudes and approaches. I'm very much of the opinion that mechanics in a game like this should follow the lore, and it simply behooves the designers to come up with mechanics that honor that lore while also being balanced and powerful enough that no one feels compelled to take a mechanical option that doesn't really fit with their character concept (*cough* Hexblade *cough*).

This is all speculation, and so I want to make clear that I don't want to set up any expectations. This is more for me to feel cool if it turns out I get anything right, and lets me imagine my ideal direction for the game.

The Survey for the Druid & Paladin UA ends on April 10th, so I'm hoping that we'll get the next, gigantic playtest packet relatively soon, but I also think that they announced that there was no date locked down for it at the recent Creator Summit, so I won't hold my breath.