PHB Playtest 5: Barbarians

 Barbarians appear to be getting a somewhat more subtle set of revisions, but with some quality-of-life changes, and naturally, the massive new Weapon Mastery system, which will give them a lot of new tactical choices.

For these class reviews, I'm going to go through each class feature, though I'll gloss over those which are more or less unchanged (hopefully I will not miss subtler changes).

At 1st level, Barbarians get Rage, Unarmored Defense, and Weapon Mastery.

Rage works similarly to how it previously did, granting the same bonuses and the same proscription on spellcasting or concentration.

The big change is that taking damage no longer extends your rage, but you can now extend it by forcing an enemy to make a saving throw, or simply by using your bonus action.

    This will make it far less annoying when, for example, all nearby enemies are dead and you have to dash to get to a new target. Maintaining rage is now fully in the Barbarian's hands, and should reliably last until the end of its full duration.

Oh, and that duration is now 10 minutes, which means that you can use a single rage in multiple fights, or gain the exploration benefits (such as advantage on strength checks) after combat ends.

Unarmored Defense works how it already did.

Weapon Mastery is the new system for Warriors, and is detailed in my previous post. Barbarians begin with two Masteries they can have active at a time, gaining a third at 4th level and a fourth at 10th level. These can be swapped on a long rest, so if you're really into Greataxes but then get an awesome magic Greatsword, you only need to sleep for the night and practice with the sword to be able to use its mastery property.

At 2nd level, you gain Primal Knowledge and Reckless Attack.

Reckless Attack is the same as it always was, except it must be chosen on your first attack (though as DM I'd totally let someone do it later if they chose).

Primal Knowledge gives you proficiency in another Barbarian skill. Additionally, when Raging, you can swap out a skill's normal ability modifier for Strength if that skill is Acrobatics, Intimidation, Perception, Stealth, or Survival. The idea behind this is that the primal power that your Strength represents is coursing through you and enhancing these abilities.

    While "Rage Stealthing" is a hilarious idea, I also wonder if they're de-emphasizing the ability for DMs to adjust the abilities for certain skills, such as the classic Strength (Intimidation,) or if this is merely meant as a new avenue for that kind of thing.

At 3rd level, you choose your subclass. We'll cover the sample subclass, the Berserker, after we cover the Barbarian.

At 4th, 8th, 12th, 16th, and 19th level, you get a feat, as usual.

At 5th level, you get Extra Attack, as normal.

Also at 5th, you get Fast Movement, which works the same as it does currently.

At 7th level, you get Feral Instinct, which no longer has the functionality around being surprised, but also folds in Danger Sense, giving advantage on Initiative rolls and Dexterity Saving Throws.

At level 9, you get Indomitable Might, which works the same but is now coming far, far earlier.

At level 11, you get the new Brutal Critical, which now comes as a single feature. Rather than adding dice to the damage, you now instead add damage equal to your Barbarian level.

    While this would seem to remove the one eventual benefit from the Greataxe, the new weapon mastery makes that choice far more nuanced. Now, you'll always be able to hit like a truck when you land a crit. I think this will generally amount to more damage than the old version in most cases.

At level 13, you get Persistent Rage, which works more or less the same, allowing you to keep raging regardless of what's going on as long as you aren't incapacitated or wearing heavy armor.

    Given the change to allow you to maintain rage with a bonus action, this is far less impactful than it previously was, but it's still a nice little bonus.

At 17th level, you get Rage Resurgence, which causes you to regain an expended Rage when you roll initiative.

    That's precisely when you need a Rage, and so this comes close to meaning you can't run out of them. While this is not quite the old level 20 "unlimited rage" thing from the current version, it nearly amounts to the same a few levels earlier.

At level 18, you get Primal Champion, which has been nerfed to only increasing the value and max of your Strength and Constitution by 2, rather than 4, but given the presence of the universal Epic Boon feat, you'll still be able to get one of those stats to 24 if you hit max level.

    Notably missing is Relentless Rage, which allowed you to persist through getting knocked to 0 HP with increasing Con save DCs. This feature is crazy powerful, but I think Barbarians are and will continue to be plenty resilient without it. Given the buff of weapon mastery, I think that this change, while I'm sure it will enrage some Barbarian fans, is probably warranted.

Having a Barbarian in my long-running Ravnica campaign, I can tell you that the "maintain rage with a bonus action" change is going to be absolutely world-changing. There was nothing more frustrating for that player than having wasted his rage at the beginning of a fight because all the nearby creatures were gone, and he hated any fight that took place in a large room. This will go a long way to fixing that issue.

Weapon Mastery is going to be a huge change for the game, and I think Barbarians are going to probably feel a lot more compelling when they can throw their weight around the battlefield a bit more.

Now, let's take a look at the Berserker:

At 3rd level, you get Frenzy. This has been radically redesigned. Now, while Raging, if you make a Reckless Attack, you deal extra damage to the first target you hit on your turn, rolling d6s equal to your rage bonus. So, you go from 2d6 to eventually 4d6 additional damage per turn.

    No exhaustion. Yeah, no extra attack either, but no exhaustion. There's going to be very little reason not to use this, and encourages the Berserker to fight recklessly, which is very on-brand. I think this also compares similarly with, for example, the Zealot's Divine Fury.

At 6th level you get Mindless Rage, which, as before, grants immunity to the Charmed and Frightened conditions.

    It also no longer just suppresses an existing effect, but ends it, which is great and what it should have been all along.

At 10th level, you get Retaliation, which allows you to make an attack as a reaction against any creature within 5 feet of you that deals damage with an attack against you. This has basically been moved to a lower level, and also allows you to use this with Unarmed Strikes.

    Simple and good. Not much to say.

At 14th level, you get Intimidating Presence - swapped with Retaliation from the current version. Intimidating Presence. It has also been simplified and improved. As an action, you force all creatures of your choice within 30 feet of you, or 60 feet if you're raging, to make a Wisdom saving throw with a DC based on your Strength (not Charisma, as it currently is) if they aren't behind total cover. On a failure, they're frightened for 1 minute, or until they succeed on a repeated save at the end of their turn. You can do this once per long rest, but you can expend a use of Rage to use it again.

    So, a couple things. The first nuance to point out is that, because Rage is maintained if you force a creature to make a saving throw now, this can be used mid-combat without needing to do anything else to keep your rage up. Second, this now hits potentially a lot of targets, and could have great tactical utility. It is more limited in use now - the old version can be used as many times as you want, though creatures who succeded on their saves got a 24-hour immunity, which the new version does not include. So, if you think you can afford to spend rages, you can use this multiple times per fight.

Overall, I think the Berserker is looking a lot better thanks to a bit of shuffling. Getting Retaliation at the end of tier 2 is very nice, and Frenzy is much more usable than it previously was, and less punishing.

I think the Barbarian overall feels more like a tweaked class than a fully redesigned one (meet me in a few posts to talk about the Warlock) but I think the changes here are good. The only really notable loss here is Relentless Rage, but as I said before, I think the class has gained more than it needed to make up for that loss.

Next post, we'll take a look at the Fighter!

PHB Playtest 5: Weapons and Weapon Mastery

 Weapons are getting a glow-up in the latest playtest document. The base statistics of many weapons are being adjusted to make them more appealing (tridents, for instance, are going to be a good go-to choice for a lot of people,) and the Pistol and Musket have been added to the core equipment list (DMs who want to limit the existence of firearms in their world are free to make them missing from their shops).

But of course, most importantly, each weapon now has a Mastery related to it, which is a special property that requires a feature to unlock it. Once we go through the weapons, we'll take a look at how Barbarians and Fighters use these features, but it seems similar to the riders on spells like Ray of Frost or Shocking Grasp, which give you a minor but useful and tactical bonus on your attacks.

First, let's talk about weapon revisions:

The Net is no longer considered a weapon, instead acting (appropriately, in my view) as a piece of adventuring equipment.

The Trident now has a base damage of 1d8 and a versatile damage die of 1d10. Considering it also has the thrown property, this makes it, I'd argue, one of the best options for a one-handed martial weapon (we'll have to see if it also retains its "usable underwater without disadvantage" property).

The Lance has become far more viable. It is now a two-handed and heavy weapon, and its special property has been removed, and its damage die reduced to a d10. However! The two-handed property is removed if you are mounted, so you can still use a shield and lance if you are charging on your steed. Basically, at the cost of a little potential damage, the Lance has become far more usable, removing any disadvantage from being at close range.

The War Pick now has the versatile property, giving us a piercing equivalent to the warhammer and longsword/battleaxe.

Now, let's look at revisions to the properties:

My initial reading of the change to Light Weapons left me surprised that the old bonus-action taxing form of dual-wielding had made a return. However, it appears the new "as part of the action" version is now rolled into the Nick mastery. Rangers and Paladins might thus feel a little jealous that they will need to invest a feat to gain this, but most of the best dual-wielding weapons will be able to work this way.

More welcomely, the Thrown property now makes it clear that you can draw a weapon with each attack, which will make throwing weapons far less punishing if you have the Extra Attack feature.

Moving on, let's cover Masteries:

The Masteries themselves then serve to distinguish previously similar weapons. The Longsword, for instance, has the Flex mastery, while the Battleaxe has the Topple mastery. The Glaive has the Graze property, while the Halberd has the Cleave property.

So, what do these do? Let's go down the list. Each mastery has requirements, which limit how a Fighter can shift these properties from one weapon type to another. We'll revisit this when we do the Fighter post.

Cleave: Melee Weapon, Heavy Property, found on Greataxes, Halberds. If you hit a creature with a melee attack, you can make an attack roll against another creature within 5 feet of the first creature. On a hit, you can deal damage equal to the weapon's damage die, but you don't add your ability modifier (unless the amount is negative). You can do this once per turn.

    Interestingly, while you don't add your Strength to this, you can still add Rage, or other enhancements, and a magic weapon that deals extra damage dice, or that simply has a +X bonus, should still add that. The once-a-turn qualifier is reasonable, but this feels like it could be actually kind of crazy good.

Flex: Versatile Property, found on Quarterstaffs, Spears, Longswords, War Picks, Warhammers. When you hit with a melee attack, you use the versatile damage even if you're wielding it with one hand.

    I'll honestly say I don't think this is very good. Going up one damage die means an average boost to your damage of only 1 point per hit. But if you really want to roll those d10s while using a shield, this is there for you.

Graze: Melee Weapons, Heavy Property, found on Glaives, Greatswords. If your attack roll misses a creature, you can still deal damage equal to the ability modifier yo used to make the attack roll, and the damage is the same type dealt by the weapon, and can't be increased in any way other than the ability modifier.

    This is potentially very powerful, though I might need to math it out at a later point. Being able to get some damage on the target no matter what is huge - a level 1 Fighter with a Greatsword is now basically guaranteed to at least make a Kobold bloody when they attack them. I'm almost surprised that there's not a "still nothing on a nat 1," but this now gives a martial character some of the reassurance of a caster using "save for half" spells that their turn has still done something. Even if the math doesn't make this that powerful, psychologically, it's huge.

Nick: Light Property, found on Daggers, Light Hammers, Sickles, Scimitars. When you make the extra attack of the Light property, you can make it as part of the Attack Action instead of as a bonus action, but can still only do so once a turn. 

    This limits the new, better dual-wielding to Warriors or those who invest a feat to gain the mastery, but this should be very nice for those who want to fight with two weapons.

Push: Heavy, Two-Handed, or Versatile Property, found on Greatclubs, Pikes, Heavy Crossbows. When you hit a creature with an attack roll, you can push them up to 10 feet away from you, as long as they are no more than one size larger than you. 

    This has no "once per turn" limit, so if you go ham at someone with a pike, you can slam them back with each attack if you have the movement.

Sap: This can only be put on weapons with no other properties, found on Maces, Flails, Morningstars. If you hit a creature with the weapon, they have disadvantage on their next attack roll before the start of your next turn.

    An interesting defensive mastery, you're basically getting the Vicious Mockery/Frostbite effect. I don't know if this is so powerful that it needs the "no properties" rider.

Slow: No prerequisites, found on Clubs, Javelins, Light Crossbows, Slings, Whips, Longbows, and Muskets. If you hit a creature with the weapon and deal damage, you can reduce its speed by 10 feet until the start of your next turn. Hitting the creature multiple times cannot cause this reduction to exceed 10 feet.

    Again, we get a classic cantrip effect, in this case Ray of Frost. The once-per-turn rider here is reasonable, as this could get silly on most creatures with just a second application. Notably, this shows up on a lot of ranged weapons, which makes it great for kiting enemies.

Topple: Heavy, Reach, or Versatile Property, found on Battleaxes, Lances, Tridents. If you hit a creature with this weapon, you can force them to make a Constitution saving throw with a DC equal to 8 + your proficiency bonus + the ability modifier you used to make the attack roll. On a failure, the creature has the Prone condition.

    I wonder why this is Constitution-based and not Strength or Dexterity. Notably, there's no once-a-turn rider here, so you can try it multiple times.

Vex: Ammunition, Finesse, or Light Properties, found on Handaxes, Darts, Shortbows, Rapiers, Shortswords, Blowguns, Hand Crossbows, Pistols. If you hit a creature with this weapon and deal damage to them, you have advantage on your next attack roll against that creature before the end of your next turn.

    This freaking slaps. Getting a sort of rolling advantage that sets you up for more advantage? Count me in. And with no once-a-turn rider, you can trigger it over and over. This makes me want to play a pistol-wielding gunslinger so freaking badly (obviously taking a feat to ignore the pistol's loading property).

That concludes the list of masteries, but let's now skip ahead to the Barbarian and Warrior to see how we actually use these.

The Weapon Mastery feature, which Barbarians and Fighters (and Monks, though we don't have them here to look at) gain at level 1, allows you to choose a set number of kinds of Simple or Martial weapons of your choice, such as Greataxes and Handaxes, and you benefit from those masteries when you use those kinds of weapons. When you finish a long rest, you can swap these out for different masteries, which will allow you to adjust your capabilities based on the magic weapons your DM drops.

The number of masteries you can have active at a time depends on your level and your class. Barbarians start with two and get a third at 4th level and a fourth at 10th level. Fighters start with three and get a fourth at 4th level and a fifth at 10th level. (I would presume Monks use the Barbarian's progression, as Fighters are the extra-weapon-master class).

    So, this should make the feature pretty flexible. I won't get into the nitty-gritty of how these classes interact with the feature, but it will be a core part of the Warrior toolkit.

Weapon Master is a 4th level feat that increases your Strength or Dexterity by 1, and gives you Mastery with one kind of simple or martial weapon that you're proficient with. You can swap which weapon type it is when you finish a long rest as long as the new type is also eligible.

    This will let the non-Warriors (most likely Rangers, Paladins, and Rogues, and Battle-Smith Artificers, play with these features,) but leaves them as something special that Warriors get to use for free. A Paladin using Cleave with a Greataxe could be amazing, with more chances to crit-smite.

Finally, let's take a look at the Net, which used to be classified as a weapon. The Net is now a piece of adventuring gear. You still use the Attack action to throw it on an enemy, but rather than an attack roll, they now make a Dexterity save against a DC set by your Dexterity, and the range is now fully 15 feet. Huge or larger creatures automatically succeed. On a failure, the target is restrained, and must use an action to make a Strength (Athletics) check of DC 10 to escape, or a friend within 5 feet can do the same. The net has an AC of 10 and 5 HP, with immunity to bludgeoning, poison, and psychic damage.

    Interesting though very reasonable that bludgeoning damage doesn't damage it. The Net is actually, I think, significantly better than it used to be in this form.

Whew! Ok, this is a pretty cool new system that definitely makes weapon choices a lot more interesting. There are one or two I think could be made a little more appealing, and some that might be crazy overpowered, but I like them overall.

We're going to skip the Spell section and move on to the classes, because the spells are largely concerned with the three Mages, and I think the ones introduced here are all class-specific, and will be reviewed as class features.

Player's Handbook UA 5

 The 50-page behemoth that dropped today for the One D&D playtest covers a lot of ground. This post will be a summary of the ideas presented, but we'll do other posts focusing on each of the 5 classes featured as well as the weapon mastery feature.

I'm planning on sort of reading and writing as I go.

The 49-minute interview with Jeremy Crawford gave us a few highlights, so let's take a look at them:

Warlocks are being heavily redesigned, most notably with the replacement of Pact Magic with the Spellcasting feature. While Warlocks will still be able to access higher-level spells at the normal full-caster level progression via the Eldritch Invocation that Mystic Arcanum has become, their actual spell slots now follow a half-caster progression, eventually giving you a total of 15 spell slots arrayed across different levels, which all recharge on a long rest. Eldritch Blast and Hex have now become baseline spells for the class that are also exclusive to Warlocks, with some change to their functionality (Hex appears nerfed, but I'll cover that in the Warlock post). Warlocks now get their Pact Boon at 1st level, while their subclass comes at 3. The boons are now built as free cantrips that provide the boon to you. Notably, Pact of the Blade now appears to allow you to use your spellcasting ability for your pact weapon. Warlocks also all get medium armor now, which should make Bladelocks more viable. Finally, you can now actually choose your spellcasting ability based on the boon you take. Blade and Chain Warlocks can choose between Charisma and Wisdom, while Tome Warlocks can choose between Charisma and Intelligence.

Sorcerers have gained their own class-specific cantrip, along with some other spells to reinforce their identity as being one with the force of magic.

Wizards have new spell-modifying and even spell-creating spells that they can learn, and they learn a new "Scribe Spell" spell that functions as their spell-copying feature for their spellbook. Also, to reinforce their smartypants nature, wizards now get advantage on all "Study" actions, which include most intelligence checks to recall information.

While the Weapon Mastery system seems to be a huge enhancement to all Warriors (and other classes can pick up a feat to gain the feature as well,) it appears Barbarians are mostly similar, but the biggest quality-of-life change is that you can now maintain your Rage with a bonus action if you haven't been able to attack on your turn, which is honestly a small but incredible change that should make the class much less frustrating to play. Also, Rages now last ten minutes, and can potentially continue through multiple combats because of that.

Fighters are built around being the masters of Weapon Mastery. I believe they still get their bonus feats, but the new class identity is built around being able to make use of these properties in new and special ways.

I'm going to make posts on the topics of the document in the order they appear, so we'll start the next one with those weapon masteries.

Upcoming UA Brings Everyone But the Monk and Weapon Masteries

 While we don't have it yet (evidently it's coming tomorrow), the next One D&D Unearthed Arcana playtest packet is coming, and it's set to be massive, at 50 pages.

This will be presenting the updated versions of the Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer, Fighter, and Barbarian. We'll also, as usual, get a new Rules Glossary and some feats and other things. One of the key things that will also be showing up is Weapon Masteries.

It appears that Weapon Masteries will function as a bonus property to different weapon types, the idea being to give weapon-based classes certain effects akin to the riders on some cantrips - Ray of Frost can slow a target's movement by 10 feet, and the Slow weapon mastery can do the same.

Masteries will be built onto the weapons, but only those with the Weapon Mastery feature will be able to access them. Inherently, Warriors - meaning Fighters, Barbarians, and Monks - will be able to unlock these properties, but there will also be feats for other classes to do so.

On one hand, Rangers, Paladins, and Rogues might not love having to put a feat in to get them, but these are also classes that have a lot of other tricks up their sleeves, and may help give the Warriors a bit of extra definition.

Fighters will focus on these Masteries, getting new ways to use them, and to swap out masteries on an attack-by-attack basis. We don't have the specifics here, but I think with this announcement, I'm willing to put my previous theory that all fighters would get Battle Master maneuvers to bed. That said, it also seems that some maneuvers might need reworking.

The packet does not appear to include Monks, which will make them the last of the One D&D classes to get its update (apart from the Artificer, which is not getting a new version, at least for now).

Jeremy Crawford made an interesting distinction here, which is to say that the manner in which they ensure that these revisions are compatible with old 5th Edition content is that the classes are "content" rather than "systems." Essentially, this means that a 2014Ranger and a 2024Ranger are each modular pieces that can be plugged into the 5E rules systems. Two Rangers might sit at the same table while working differently, and you might call one a "Ranger1" and another a "Ranger2" as if the two are separate classes that share a number of features and eligibilities.

Now, I might quibble a little here, as the Rules Glossary is clearly shifting some of the rules, unless you further count things like "Jump1" and "Jump2."

Still, this conservative approach is likely intended to prevent alienation and keep enfranchised 5E players comfortable in the transition, really making this all new content, rather than a new system that overwrites the old.

That said, player groups will need to have discussions about how to adjudicate what is carried over and what is replaced.

My inclination in most things, so far, is to favor the new versions. While there are adjustments that are badly needed (I like the new Wild Shape in theory, but the stat blocks need to be buffed to make it work as it's supposed to) I think that many of the problems I've had with the game are addressed and largely fixed in the new versions. I can imagine a future in which people actually want to play Rangers, which is kind of cool (though I suspect that the longstanding stigma against them might mean that it will be a while before players realize the power of the new version).

The preview interview with Jeremy Crawford that introduced this UA doesn't touch nearly at all on the Mage class group, so I'm going to assume there aren't any super huge changes to these classes. Honestly, the thing I'm most curious about is what the new Great Old One patron will look like, because that is the subclass of my first D&D character, and while I love the flavor of it, I think the mechanics just don't hold up compared to more recent subclasses. But I think we can expect the sample subclass for the Warlock to be The Fiend, so we'll likely have to wait a bit for that.

Control, Dark Souls, and Deep Lore in Games

 The games of FromSoft, particularly those in the "Souls-like" genre, which include Demon's Souls, Dark Souls I-III, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring, take an unusual but fascinating approach to storytelling.

If you want to go back a long ways, games would tend to tell their stories up-front and fairly simplistically - Super Mario games tended to let you know in the manual that Bowser has kidnapped Princess Toadstool (later called Peach in the U.S. - I actually think she always had that name in Japan) and you had to go rescue her. As the medium evolved, and technology improved, games began to have cinematic cutscenes that would play out like movies to situate you in a level or other phase of the game.

Now, there's always been some environmental storytelling as well - this could be as simple as the intro to Super Metroid, where you show up and all the scientists on Ceres Station are dead, and the glass cylinder where the baby Metroid was being kept has been shattered, which... gives you a pretty strong impression that someone broke in and violently stole it. That's confirmed in the next room when you find Ridley with the baby Metroid in hand.

But in the early days of video games, the story still tended to be simple. You can spend many hours exploring Planet Zebes in Super Metroid, but among the lore and story in the game you get, there's not a ton you can really confirm. Again, environmental storytelling gives you some intriguing hints - like, why is there a dead body in armor not entirely dissimilar to Samus' near the entrance to Kraid's boss room? And why are there weird jellyfish monsters who look a lot like Metroids in Maridia? But without going fully outside the game into supplementary materials, you won't be able to answer those things.

The Souls games (here referring to the list above, and not only Demon's Souls and Dark Souls) popularized a new approach to this. Every item and spell in these games has a description, and while some of it is fairly functional, e.g., "consume this to restore HP," they almost always come with some additional information about the world and setting, usually finding an in-world justification for the gameplay functionality of an item.

This then becomes a way to flesh out the world beyond what's revealed in cutscenes and dialogue.

Now, the Souls games take this to an extreme level. These games often give you some goal that is not exactly clear. In Bloodborne, you are told (and only by a missable note evidently written in your own hand) to "Seek Paleblood to transcend the hunt." That's not, you know, super clear. And in fact, even after you have played through the game and overcome its final challenges, you might sit back and say "hold on, did I actually find this Paleblood?"

The Souls games treat both their primary narrative and their grand narrative (I'm avoiding using the term "metanarrative" because this could be confused with a fourth-wall-breaking story about the making of the narrative) as obscure archaeological finds, hoping you will engage in what is almost a second gameplay system - the communal effort to dig up and examine the obscure lore that paints a broader picture of what is going on. Even the "main story" leaves a lot of open ambiguities. Which ending to Dark Souls is the "good" one? Or, in Elden Ring, is Marika the benevolent queen who needs our help to rescue her from the husband/persona that has come to dominate her domain, or is she the tyrant who inflicted the world with chaos for her own nebulous purposes? Indeed, I think the aim in a lot of FromSoft games is to dispense with clear good and evil options, and instead embrace the idea that any philosophy comes with negative consequences, and your choice in the end is simply to decide which direction going forward outweighs its ramifications. (To borrow D&D's alignment system, it's like there's not really any clear good or evil, so you're left to choose between lawful and chaotic.)

Now, Control, which is a game that I kinda liked, then loved, and now am sort of obsessed with, does things a little differently.

Control's primary narrative is simpler than the Souls games, and far more straightforward. Jesse shows up to find her brother (notably, having a set protagonist rather than a character-designed avatar does allow for a more directly personal story) and goes on a simultaneous journey of discovery about the outlandish Federal Bureau of Control and its otherworldly headquarters, the Oldest House, while also battling an invasion by the sinister infectious mind-controlling resonance known as The Hiss.

This conflict against The Hiss is the basis of the primary narrative in the main game as well as the two DLCs (while both involve other elements, neither conflict would have occurred in not for the Hiss invasion).

But Control's grander narrative is primarily not about the Hiss, because the Hiss invasion is a recent phenomenon when you show up. It's implied that it may have started hours or even minutes before you arrived at the Oldest House, and while we never leave the building (not counting other planes of existence or the caverns beneath the building) and thus can't get a sense of precisely how long the events of the game are supposed to take, there's very little the Hiss have done there before the events of the game. You arrive in the early moments of a massive crisis, and notably, the FBC doesn't even have a name for the invading force until Jesse coins the term (comparing it to the hiss of a broken gas pipe, subtly poisoning the air).

Control is not an item-rich game, or rather, its items are not generally accessed in a menu and equipped the way they are in a Souls game. Your single weapon has multiple forms, but that merely reflects its metamorphic nature, and there's no separate "lore" for Grip or Spin or Charge, because these are all just different forms for the weapon called The Service Weapon to take - the lore being the same for each. The closest thing to "items" you get over the course of the game are Objects of Power, which imbue you with various abilities. When you bind the Floppy Disk, you get the Launch ability, but you don't pull this disk out and wave it around when you use this ability.

But that's fine, because the deep lore media in Control simply exists as its own thing. Unlike in Souls games, most of these documents exist purely for lore reasons, and a player who doesn't care about any of this and just wants to enjoy the game for its fun combat can ignore them (though I think such a person is a little dead inside). Control gives us memos, documentation, letters, and videos, which amount to an actually quite substantial amount of material.

What these do is contextualize the world of the FBC. And through them, we get tantalizing hints of mysteries that might be uncovered.

As an example, many references are made to the "Blessed" organization, which seems to be some kind of group that is using paranatural (read supernatural) objects and phenomena to inflict death and destruction upon random people, and may in fact be targeting the FBC itself, such as when they mail a fondue pot that incinerates the producer of the radio show America Overnight, which is secretly run by the FBC to influence the public. Furthermore, there's some potential implication that the Blessed organization is actually being supported by the Board, the enigmatic entity (or entities) that supports the FBC from the Astral Plane.

While the Foundation DLC's primary narrative does explicitly raise the possibility that the Board is sinister and hostile, and not to be trusted, it does not go so far as to imply that the Board would be moving against the FBC itself, which it has had a strong influence over ever since Director Northmoor moved the bureau into the Oldest House.

At no point in Control do you come in direct conflict with the Board, and the narrative of the Foundation DLC is still primarily about fixing the problems down there that ultimately trace their cause back to the Hiss invasion. But digging deeper, new possibilities of what is really going on crop up.

In a lot of ways, I think that this form of Deep Lore scratches the same itch that fuels conspiracy theorists in the real world. Control, and the New Weird genre in general, often likes to tell stories about conspiracy theories (and explore a fictional world in which the most outlandish of them are real,) and I think that is because the conspiracy theory is the latest manifestation of a very human desire for Revelation.

But while earnestly-believed conspiracy theories can become dangerous - such as when antipathy toward a politician leads you to believe that he could not have legitimately won the election that he did and you violently try to overthrow the government in favor of your own preferred candidate - the refuge of fiction is the ability to compartmentalize and experience these feelings safely, under containment in the conceit that none of this is actually real.

Like conspiracy theories, Deep Lore in games (and other artistic media) encourages a community to spring up around it. I've spent hours on YouTube watching videos discussing the lore of Souls games, World of Warcraft, and Control, the act of collecting and analyzing this lore becomes a collaborative form of gameplay that sits outside of the PS5 controller or whatever you're using to play these games.

The desire for Revelation - to see a hidden truth - is rooted deeply and firmly in human psychology and could almost be described as drug-like. I've been reading Carl Jung's The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, and while I'm still pretty early in the book (it starts off dry, and there are some archaic assumptions made about cultures and gender roles, but it gets pretty juicy pretty quickly) one thing he identifies is the notion that, in a growingly irreligious era, people yearn to feel religious awe. That's maybe putting too strong an emphasis on it, but I think it gets at what makes this sort of storytelling so compelling: somewhere hardwired into our brain is a desire to connect new information.

And the utility of this is fairly obvious: our curiosity has allowed us to develop our intelligence, and grow the collective knowledge base of humanity. Thus, I think, the appeal of this kind of Deep Lore is a way to exercise our ability to do so and challenge ourselves to find deeper, hidden truths - the more obscure, the more we have proven our communal intellectual prowess.

This got a little more profound than I intended it (if I do say so myself,) but I wonder if the development of this kind of storytelling in games will become more widespread over time.

Battling in Out with March of the Machine's New Card Type

 March of the Machine is the climactic conclusion to this year's Phyrexian arc, which seems to have more or less brought an end (until WotC wants to pull them back out of the vault) to the second generation of Phyrexians that started with the Scars of Mirrodin block. This is an "event set" similar to War of the Spark, which itself had concluded a years-long arc about Nicol Bolas' plans to restore his pre-Mending godlike power via just a whole lot of Planeswalker murder.

This set sees really the biggest event in Magic's history, with the Phyrexians led by Elesh Norn invading more or less every plane we've heard of at once (and some of these are deep, deep cuts). And, given how big a deal that is, the folks at the Magic team decided to create a whole new card type to represent the battles of this massive, multiversal war.

This marks the first brand-new card type since Planeswalkers were introduced (as someone who stopped playing around Time Spiral during my MTG Online days in college, coming back on Arena meant getting used to these newfangled Planeswalkers,) which, previously, were I believe the only card type ever added to the game since the game premiered in 1993 (ignoring discontinued types like Mana Sources, which were things like Dark Ritual that had initially been Interrupts. I believe 6th Edition of the Core Set is when Interrupts and Mana Sources were folded into Instants).

Every Battle we get in March of the Machine also has the subtype "Siege," which might imply that the mechanics of future Battles could be different, but here's how they work:

You play a Battle, and it goes onto the Battlefield on your opponent's side of the board, though you still control it (just like, say, an aura attached to an opponent's permanent). The Battle usually (I think always in the ones we have) has an enter-the-Battlefield effect, meaning sometimes that will be the extent of your use of the card. However, each Battle has a number of Defense counters on it, set by a number in its lower right corner (similar to a Planeswalker's starting loyalty). Just like a Planeswalker, you can choose to attack a Battle, and any damage it receives will reduce its defense counters.

When the last counter is removed, the Battle gets flipped, and you can immediately cast the spell on the other side for free. Often, this will be a creature, but there are also artifacts, enchantments, and planeswalkers to be found at the successful conclusion of one of these battles.

So, what do we think?

Obviously, one thing this does is create a third potential target for your creatures to attack, and a board with an enemy planeswalker and your own battle (or multiples of each) will be a "target rich environment," with a lot of things that draw your creatures' attention away from the goal of hitting the opponent.

I will say that I don't find this to be too big of a problem, though: you're the one opting in to attack your battle, and so far there are no battles that create a pressure to attack them beyond the benefit of the creature or whatever you would get from doing so. Unlike a Planeswalker, who might be frustratingly difficult to take down while they use some deadly loyalty ability to hinder or harm you, it's fairly safe to just let a Battle sit on the board for any number of turns, and even to just make use of its initial effect and ignore it, essentially treating it like a sorcery.

The flip sides of these cards need to be pretty powerful to justify spending turns attacking it. Most have an initial defense of 4 or 5 counters, which can often mean needing to spend more than one turn (depending on your deck) going after them. So far, the ones I've played with have had pretty decent rewards, but that will be an interesting balancing act.

Defending players have only a few options to prevent battles from being won - they can block with their own creatures, of course, but beyond that I think the only other option is Proliferate, to bump up the counters on them. Of course, given that they become permanents after they flip (I think with the exception of Invasion of Alara, which becomes a Sorcery) you can also deal with them simply by using removal against the resultant reward.

Time will tell if these wind up being a one-off oddity from this particular set or if they'll become an evergreen part of the game. I'm curious to see what other design space exists for them. Does the "siege" subtype mean anything? Not yet, because every Battle is also a Siege. But what other kinds of battles might we see?

The Nuance of Mixed Ancestry and Identity in Fantasy RPGs

 At the recent Creator Summit for D&D - a gathering of D&D content creators where the team from WotC fielded questions and talked about the future of the game - they clarified the decision to remove the Half-Elf and Half-Orc from the upcoming, 2024 Player's Handbook. I don't have a direct quote, but the reason that the D&D community seems to have heard was that they said that these terms were inherently racist.

I wanted to examine that.

I am someone from a mixed ancestry, but I'll say up front that the nuances of these discussions, and particularly the way that western culture defines things like "race," puts me in a weird position. One side of my family, my mother's, would in this day and age be considered unambiguously "white." It's a mix of Irish, English, German, and other northwestern European nations, with ancestors who came in as early as the Mayflower and some who arrived later. My father's side of the family is Ashkenazi Jewish. The Ashkenazi group is basically European Jews (though a number of Sephardic Jews have roots in Spain and Portugal, given the Iberian Peninsula's ties to North Africa).

Jews, (and here I primarily mean the Ashkenazi) in America and western society in general, are often granted a "white" identity most of the time. But we have always lived under threat of the sudden and often violent rescinding of that identity when bigotry becomes a powerful political force, most devastatingly in the 1930s and 40s under fascism, but certainly not confined to that one traumatic era.

Jewishness is also further complicated because it is both an ethnicity and a religion. Jewish religious practices have a millennia-old set of traditions and beliefs, and perhaps the fact that Christianity, which began as a sect and off-shoot of Judaism, is now the dominant religion in the western world (and many of the areas that were colonized by European countries,) the religious distinctions have also created a lot of friction and complexity in how the Jewish identity is seen and acknowledged.

I, for instance, received no Jewish religious instruction when I was growing up, because by my grandparents' generation, even before they suffered the horrors of the Holocaust, they had chosen a secular, irreligious lifestyle, so my father didn't receive such instruction either and had no desire to for me or my sister to study the Torah and learn Hebrew. But my grandparents were nevertheless targeted for extermination based on the idea that their Jewishness was inherent to them on a genetic level, and I have one fewer uncle, and far fewer cousins on that side of the family than I might have otherwise had if not for the determination that Judaism was an inherited and intrinsic trait, and an undesirable one at that (to be clear, I'm not trying to say that religious persecution de-coupled from racial persecution would be acceptable, but merely point this out to demonstrate the complexity of these issues).

And, despite having really just a philosophical respect for Jewish religious belief and practice, and having a primarily cultural connection to my Jewish heritage, I hold on to it with a sense of defiance and love for the ancestors who came before me. 

But my hybrid identity is also very important to me.

I grew up in a city that had a very unusually large Jewish population, roughly one third. The city has two high schools, and the one I went to was situated in the part of town that had a denser Jewish population on top of that. So, while the actual numbers are not anything I'm totally sure of, the impression I had growing up was that perhaps a narrow majority of my classmates were Jewish. In middle school, there were many Bar and Bat Mitzvahs being thrown, and when we had a World Religions unit in 7th grade, I remember a classmate guessed Judaism when we were asked what religion had the most adherents across the globe, presumably basing this on his own narrow experience.

But given that my mother was raised Catholic in a family that to a large extent embraced my grandmother's Irish roots, it felt important for me to also carve out a space in my identity to acknowledge that side of things. With so many Jewish classmates, many of whom were going off to Hebrew school on the weekends and receiving their big winter holiday gifts before the holiday break started, given that Hanukkah usually comes before Christmas, I couldn't fully commit to a Jewish identity either (it didn't help that, kids being the sort of people who learn a rule and attempt to apply it with zero nuance immediately, many of my peers would refute any claim I had to being Jewish because my mother was not).

So, what does this have to do with D&D?

Well, I am someone who feels a very strong embrace of my identity as Half-Jewish. It's important to me that that hybrid identity is seen, acknowledged, and respected. It's important to me that one side of my identity is not ignored because it is more convenient for people to define me by my other side. There can be a loneliness in these things - when I am in a predominantly Jewish social environment, I can feel like an outsider, but when I'm in a predominantly Christian environment, I feel perhaps even more of an outsider (which I think is mostly a product of the fact that Christians in America are accustomed to everyone around them being on the same page, while Jews, as a minority, know what it is like to be around people who don't share their beliefs or lifestyle).

And so I don't necessarily agree with the idea that "Half-" identities are a purely racist notion.

That being said, I can see why one would come to this conclusion, and the argument is not without merit. In D&D, Half-Elves are presumed to have another half that is human. The same is true for Half-Orcs. The default assumption of Humans as the "normal" race echoes in many ways similar assumptions about white identity in the west - that until you are identified as "other," the presumption is that you're white and Christian (and straight and cisgender and so on). This "normativity" puts a burden on minorities to constantly have to define and defend their differences, while those who are in the dominant group can easily go about without having to think about these issues, and sometimes mistake the staking out of social or ideological territory for those who are different as an assault on their own identity because it's the only time they find themselves having to think about it.

A hybrid identity is the sort of thing that, when claimed by a person who defines themself that way, can be empowering, but when applied externally by others, it can be demeaning and - quite literally in the case of D&D - de-humanizing.

And this nuance - that it can be empowering or disempowering, depending on who is using it, is why I understand Wizards of the Coast's intention to discontinue its use. It is hard to convey nuance in a product that is ultimately just trying to give you game mechanics to use in your own games. The complexities of racial/ethnic identity are something that ultimately cannot be mediated by a distant corporate publisher, and so it behooves them to try to find the way to approach these subjects in a manner that does the best job of adhering to their most universally-acceptable manner of expression.

Furthermore, the presence of Half-Elves and Half-Orcs in D&D has always, to me, raised some odd questions. Surely, for example, Dwarves are just as common and widespread a people in these worlds as Elves, and have just as much of a history of cooperation with humans. Why should we not have Half-Dwarves along with Half-Elves? And then, if Elves and Orcs are both co-fertile with humans, what would we call the child of an Orc and Elf pairing? If my Warlock's mother is a half-elf, but his father is a full human, what, then, is he? Does a half-elf have to have precisely 50% ancestry of each playable race to count? Or would having a great-great-great-great-grandfather somewhere back there who was an elf, so far back that they don't even know his name, be enough to count?

As long as we have races, or lineages, or species (I find I prefer lineage,) as a key part of character creation that has mechanical definitions, these questions are not going to have a simple and elegant solution, except perhaps in a setting where we truly have no co-fertility between species. Such a setting might work in a science fiction setting where the existence of human-like aliens is a matter of an astounding coincidence of convergent evolution among fully independent evolutionary lineages, but fantasy has, since Tolkien at least, treated "races" as analogous to real-world ethnicities, and hybrids have been there all along - Elrond, for instance, is half-human, and Aragorn has elvish ancestry. (Actually, he's descended from Elrond's brother, so let's not think too hard about the fact that he winds up marrying his first cousin many, many, many times removed.)

So, I think that the solution they have come up with - which is to simply have people who want a character of mixed ancestry choose one or the other (or the other, if they're not the first in their ancestral line to have a hybrid identity) as the closest match, and make it clear that the actual truth within the fantasy world that exists, is that this character's identity is far more complex than a half-page set of traits in the rulebook is capable of expressing - is the best I've seen so far.