Getting Down With Disco Elysium

 So, I started playing Disco Elysium.

The game's four years old, and I've heard amazing things about it, but I was, and frankly am still, a little wary of its format. I've bounced off of Baldur's Gate and Planescape Torment because I just didn't jive with their gameplay style, even if (especially in the latter case) I'm very curious about the story.

Disco Elysium clearly builds off of that gameplay format. For example, a big part of the game appears to be dialogue streams where you have numbered potential responses. Honestly, it's not actually all that different from the conversation wheels in Mass Effect.

But Disco Elysium might be closer to an adventure game - I haven't had any "combat" yet, and I don't really expect to.

You play as an amnesiac police officer who went on a multi-day bender of drugs and booze and remembers literally nothing, but soon discovers that you're actually there to investigate the apparent murder of a man hanging from a tree behind the hostel in which you woke up.

The world is not ours - I'm scratching the surface of it, but it appears we're in a place called Ravechol, and within that, in a neighborhood or city called Martinaise.

Things are run-down and bleak, just like our character, whose face is frozen through some kind of nerve damage or something into "The Expression," which was apparently something some rock star had as a signature decades earlier when Disco became very popular.

The bleak 1970s-ish setting is one of the signature aspects of the game, but probably the most distinctive is that our character has internal conversations with different instincts and mental processes in his brain, which have idiosyncratic names and distinctive voices.

These elements of our mind are also our main stats - I haven't actually leveled up yet, but you can pick various character builds (I chose "Sensitive," one of the three default ones) that emphasize the influence of certain traits, and these can be leveled up.

And, in various situations, these traits will pop up to give you advice and options on how to proceed.

I have no idea if I'm playing "well" or even if that's a thing one can do.

Back when I was a kid, I used to play the Space Quest games with my best friend, along with some King's Quest and Quest for Glory. The latter incorporated RPG elements and combat, but the former two were pretty strictly adventure games - you explored an environment, maybe collected items for your inventory, and then used those items to overcome the environmental puzzles (often in really non-obvious ways that made using a guide very appealing, even if that sort of defeated any challenge in the game).

And I sort of get that vibe from this - so far at least, it seems to be mostly about uncovering this mystery, and trying to talk to people in a way that helps you progress your case.

But I'm also barely into the game - I've gotten out of the first building, looked at the corpse (and threw up) and talked to the punk kids hurling rocks at it, and then talked to a girl outside a bookstore. Oh, and I might have talked to a ghost over a PA system?

Early on, you meet your partner - actually another cop sent from another precinct who might actually be there to solve the case before you do, but he seems to be working with you for now at least. The fact that you can tell him you have total retrograde amnesia and his response is more or less "hm, that sucks, and you should probably do something about that, but let's take care of this case first" says a lot.

This does not seem to be a great world to live in.

Anyway, I'm going to try to keep plugging away at the game. There's potential here.

Spellcasters of the Monster Manual

 One of the most notable redesigns we got in Mordenkainen Presents Monsters of the Multiverse was the transformation of spellcasting statblocks. The Evoker from Volo's Guide to Monsters, for example, has the Sculpt Spells feature of the playable subclass, and then just has the ordinary spell slot loadout of a 12th level wizard, with a bunch of prepared spells. Their only "action" is to whack with a quarterstaff - something you'll probably never do as a DM, as it causes this CR 9 creature to deal 3 damage a round.

The Evoker Wizard, the MotM replacement, does have spells, and some even that do damage (like Lightning Bolt,) but they don't use spell slots and their primary meat-and-potatoes attack action is a multiattack that allows them to shoot three Arcane Bursts - spell attacks that deal 25 damage on a hit.

The point here is that a creature like this is way easier to run. They can absolutely shoot off a lightning bolt or two, but when in doubt, the DM can just have them shoot these Arcane Bursts and the damage output should be appropriate or the CR (skewing a little more toward damage output given having less survivability - fitting as a wizard).

I really prefer this sort of stat block. Spells and spell slots work very well as a player-facing mechanic, but if you want a conclave of evil wizards for your party to fight as a DM, you don't want to have seven different wizards, each with their own spell slots to track, and with a dozen different spells to pick from on each of them.

This, presumably, is the model moving forward for D&D spellcasters. And we're likely to see all the spellcasters in the Monster Manual transformed in a similar way.

Lots of creatures that cast spells have things like innate spellcasting, but that's clearly not being gotten rid of. Instead, it's the player-facing spell slot system that looks like it will be changing.

This post isn't really meant to go deep on the philosophy or design - I kind of just want a place to list all of these creatures to refer back to. So let's take a look, in alphabetical order, at all the creatures in the Monster Manual who use spell slots to cast spells.

Acolyte

Androsphinx

Arcanoloth

Archmage

Bone Naga

Cult Fanatic

Death Knight

Drow Mage

Drow Priestess of Lolth

Druid

Flameskull

Guardian Naga

Gynosphinx

Hag Covens (special)

Kuo-toa Archpriest

Kuo-toa Whip

Lich

Lizardfolk Shaman

Mage

Mind Flayer Arcanist (a variant option)

Mummy Lord

Orc Eye of Gruumsh

Priest

Sahuagin Priestess

Spirit Naga

Vampire Spellcaster (a variant option)

And there you have it. Of the 450 monsters (give or take) in the Monster Manual, these 25 (again, ish - Covens covers three types are the ones that would warrant a redesign.

Tons of other monsters can cast spells, but they do this via Innate Spellcasting, which in most cases presents such options as supplementary to either weapon attacks or bespoke abilities.

Violence, Morality, Deathloop, and Dishonored

 Dishonored came out eleven years ago. There was a stylish trailer with an off-beat version of "Drunken Sailor," though changed to "Drunken Whaler," given the way that the steampunk world of Dishonored ran on oil harvested by eldritch, supernatural whales. The look of the game was super cool, even if a bit more graphically violent than I tend to prefer.

It was made by Bethesda, and I'd found I really liked playing Stealth-oriented characters in their Elder Scrolls games, so it seemed like a great fit.

And I started it. The story was interesting - I was particularly compelled by The Outsider, this strange being that takes the form of a young man with black eyes who could honestly fill the role of any of D&D's three warlock patron options from its Player's Handbook - the Archfey, Fiend, or Great Old One.

The game is about seeking to dismantle the conspirators who murdered the Empress, who also happened to be the player character's lover, and to rescue your daughter with her, after you're framed for the assassination (you are, after all, in addition to being the Empress' consort, also her weapon).

Dishonored has an interesting mechanic, called Chaos. The bad guys are everywhere looking for you, which means you have to be sneaky - the game is also balanced in such a way that unless you're incredibly skilled, you'll quickly get overwhelmed and killed if you're detected and don't run for cover. But, also fitting that "sneak past them" emphasis on the gameplay, this is also reinforced thematically and mechanically by Chaos. The more people you kill, the more hostile the world gets. There are larger patrols, sure, as you'd expect the guards would want to shore up their defenses in response to such killings. But also, the world itself becomes more hostile - plague rats, for instance, grow in number. I don't think this is meant to simply reflect the greater number of bodies to spread disease, but rather a kind of supernatural judgment of the world you're creating with your actions.

Each "assassination target" that is the objective of your missions can be dealt with in a non-lethal way. These aren't necessarily nice - there's one mission where you can have a slaver sold to work in his own mine. But it means not murdering.

In life, I'm nearly a total pacifist. I get angry, and I definitely got in physical fights as a kid (though not generally past, say, age 11) and I definitely get the normal violent urges to lash out with a fist when I'm angry. But I don't. And the thought of committing truly dangerous, lethal violence, is abhorrent to me. (Also, something you begin to realize as an adult is that hitting someone can become that level of lethal in the right - or perhaps better to say wrong - circumstances. I think that most of the violence we condone culturally is only out of a chicken-and-egg vicious circle out of fear of violence. People wage wars because they expect others to attack them. And I think that even the most violent criminals deserve at the very worst a life sentence (and generally that we need to put fewer people in prison,) and that capital punishment is a barbarous relic of a dark age we should strive to move past.

And so, philosophically, I like this idea - that to get the "good" story and ending in these games, you need to commit to, if not total non-violence, then at least a serious effort to be better.

It's not easy. Sneaking past a guard is a lot easier when they're dead on the ground.

Now, until I get into my deep, Philosophy 101 navel-gazing, I don't think that the characters in a video game have any sentience - any inner life or experience, capacity to feel pain or loss. When a sniper bullet in Fallout 3 shatters a raider's skull, sending brains and eyeballs flying in different directions, I don't feel the shock, revulsion, and regret that I would feel if I saw that happen to someone in real life (maybe a little of the revulsion). What happens in these games, or indeed what happens in any work of fiction, has a crucial and important distinction from reality: it didn't actually happen.

Technically, Dishonored lets you play as a violent killer, slaughtering everyone in your way. But not only does it then raise barriers of difficulty in response, but it also makes the story play out differently.

Violence is common in video games. Even in the most all-ages games. Mario's basically the Micky Mouse of video games, and Mario games are basically designed to be any kid's first video game. But even in Mario games, you stomp on enemies' heads or drop the bad-guy turtle-dragon dudes into lava. Zelda games, which are also generally appropriate for young audiences, still have you playing the role of sword-slashing hero slaying monsters.

I mean, human stories have tended toward violence as a marker of heroism. The traditional masculine roles of hunter and protector are both about using violence to help their community.

Ok, I might be getting in the weeds here.

The point is, I started both Dishonored and more recently Dishonored 2. And I liked them. And then I gave up, just sort of walking away from them.

But I played the shit out of Deathloop.

Deathloop is made by the same studio, and actually takes place in the same world as Dishonored, though a hundred years later (and unlike many fictional worlds, they allowed this one to change significantly in that time - the world is updated from a Victorian Steampunk to Mod-1960s chic).

And Deathloop does not in any way penalize you for killing. Indeed, the only way to beat the game is to figure out a way how to kill a bunch of different people (which will probably require killing a lot of other people) all in one day - an elaborate checklist that is broken down as various missions to complete.

The thing is, the whole conceit of Deathloop is that you're in a world without consequences. There is no Chaos that rises with more death, because everything resets when the day ends. This is the world that the hedonistic "Eternalists" have decided they want to live in. The goal, essentially, is actually to restore consequences.

And, in a weird way, the murder spree you go on in Deathloop is actually an act of mercy. The Eternalists, I think, assumed they would all be able to remember the previous loops even if their physical bodies reset. So, yeah, you get decapitated to splatter after jumping off a cliff, and then the next thing you know you're waking up that morning. But at the point you're at, no one except you and someone named Juliana is actually aware that this isn't, in fact, the first day of the loop. Or... it is, but that there have been previous first days.

Mechanically, this allows you to, Majora's Mask-style, know where characters will be each time through the loop, and is how you're able to orchestrate the one-day massacre of the people whose lives are tied to the loop.

Success causes one last reset - everyone you had killed (and many of them several times over) is alive again, but with no reason for Juliana to sic them all on you, they don't even remember that you're supposed to be enemies.

Jacob Geller, with whose video essays on games I've become a completionist, suggests that there's something a little disconcerting about this. In time loop stories like Groundhog Day, the protagonist often start performing acts of self-destruction in either an attempt to escape the loop or just out of boredom. Groundhog Day disturbed me a lot as a kid thanks to the sequence in which he starts killing himself over and over in various ways. When I came back to the movie as an adult, I recognized it as a work of genius, not that my childhood dislike of it was invalid.

But in most of these stories, Geller points out, this violence is self-inflicted. The victim is a knowing and consenting participant in this experiment in chronologically-undone destruction. In Deathloop, we're the one aware of the loop, and we're the one blasting peoples' heads off with guns or running them through with a machete.

The people in Deathloop are not aware of the loop, but they sort of are. One of the earlier (at least when I played it) targets is at the top of what is a kind of space-themed paintball/laser tag arena, only because everyone will pop back to life the next day, they play this game with actual guns. Real violence is no more real to them than simulated violence.

The island in Deathloop is a place of consensual brutal violence (among other, I'd say less disturbing, indulgences - though there's also a party where guests who are not seen as sufficiently brutal are ground into meat for the others to eat, which is probably the most fucked up thing in the game). The reason they brought so many guns there wasn't out of fear that they needed it for security. It's that they thought it'd be great fun to kill each other over and over again.

And as players, we have lots of fun killing them over and over again.

I don't know that the commentary goes much deeper than that. Is the loop a metaphor for our own rationalization? These people don't mind doing fucked up shit to one another because, hey, it's not real! We just reset afterwards!

And we don't have any issue with killing people in the game because hey, they aren't real people! It's a game!

Juliana effectively serves as the main antagonist of the game, given that she's the only one who understands that the loop is already in effect. But when we learn more about the relationship between Colt (the player character) and Juliana, the fact that each has killed the other countless times, over and over, becomes even more nightmarish.

I think you could even argue that the whole premise of the game - you need to kill these people to save them - is problematic. In the final moments where I beat the game, I put a bullet through Juliana's forehead - and unlike normal, when a killed character either bursts into "time energy" or their time-frozen corpse kind of shimmers with that energy, she was instead slumped in a chair with a kind of realistic bullet hole in her head.

And I did this to save her, too. Maybe most of all.

Redemption through violence is a kind of horrific pillar to worldviews I find utterly destructive. Mad Max Fury Road explored this excellently - the War Boys are told that their only value is in how gloriously they can die in Immortan Joe's service. Interestingly, that movie ends with an act of sacrificial, suicidal violence that does manage to kill a whole bunch of people, but feels totally different because the end goal of that violence is to save lives. The deaths are a side-effect.

So, is Deathloop less deep because of its forgiveness of violence?

That's reductive, of course.

The premise of the time loop is, of course, fantastical. People don't exist in these loops in a literal way - though there are ways you could treat it as a metaphor - either for the stagnation of routine or even on a spiritual level, the cycle of reincarnation that is central to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs (the former viewing that cycle as something you want to eventually escape from, even).

But as science fiction in particular is effective at doing, the hypothetical of the time loop is one that opens up opportunities to talk about heady concepts. Things like transporter clones in Star Trek (or my favorite Christopher Nolan movie) introduce new ways to think about identity, and what it means to be an individual person. 

I think Deathloop also invites a kind of meta-examination of how video games work.

The first time I really remember being confronted with this in games was in Bioshock. You spend the first half (maybe more like two thirds) of the game following the guidance of a character named Atlas, who speaks in a lilting Irish accent and, seemingly as a dialect-specific idiosyncrasy, prefaces every direction with the phrase "Would you kindly...?"

The truth of what that phrase means is, of course, gaming history. But even though the player is not psychologically condition to do anything someone tells them to if that phrase comes before the request, you still wind up doing it anyway. After all, the game wouldn't go anywhere if you didn't. Maybe we are psychologically conditioned to do what we're told? After all, we want to progress through the game.

Playing Deathloop, you'll notice after your first couple loops, that the experience of being in a loop, seeing the same video game enemies walking in the same patrol patterns, having the same canned dialogue, acting with clockwork consistency each time until you interfere with their loops is... familiar.

This is, in fact, how pretty much all video games work. That Goomba at the start of World 1-1 will always appear there, moving toward you and encouraging you to jump at a point where you'll get the first Super Mushroom.

Super Mario Bros came out a year before I was even born, and yet, 38 years later, we all pretty much know the patterns and landscape of that level (well, at least the beginning of it).

In fact, nearly all of our video games are deathloops.

And you know what? Juliana's not even wrong - a lot of people enjoy slaughtering their friends time after time. It's fitting, actually, that the "single player mode" or Deathloop is about someone trying to get through the story and close the loops. The multiplayer mode, where you play as Juliana and invade others' main games, had no defined end. Just like PvP systems tend not to. After all, no single person can "beat" a competitive multiplayer game. You can win the round or even make the top rank of the season, but the appeal in competitive games is to jump in, play, and always have other players to test your skill against. The single player game can have some of that replayability - even if you break the loop, and the story says that the loop has ended, you can still keep playing Deathloop with all of your acquired skills and weapons, saved with the loop-resistant magical substance known as Residuum.

But Colt is trying to win. Juliana's trying to keep the game going.

Most video games are about violence, or at least place violence as your primary means of interacting with the world. That's not new. I mean, the ancient board game, Chess, represents clashing nations at war. The Eternalists in Deathloop have turned their lives into a video game.

We commit a massive amount of violence to break them out of this loop. We end their game. The ending does leave some ambiguity, though: did we actually do them a favor? Certainly, Colt wanted the hell off that island, and he had every right to leave it. But the world that is now visible following it seems to have undergone some world-altering catastrophe.

I'm not well-read on world religions. But generally, my sense is that Western religion is afraid of death as a cessation to existence. Our religions (and while not "Western," I think Egyptian myth also has an influence on this view) generally promise eternal life, unending existence, as a reward for moral behavior and adherence to divine law. Judaism is vague about whatever comes next, but Christianity places an enormous emphasis on heavenly eternity - that the main thing Jesus did through his resurrection was to open up the possibility of eternal life.

And while I'm not a Christian, that idea does appeal to me. I'd like to feel that I'm not just going to blink out of existence, every memory and thought I've ever had, and the continual stream of consciousness that I've been since it first awoke, simply lost to oblivion, when this body stops functioning.

But with Buddhism, at least, my understanding (and again, I apologize if I'm misinterpreting this) is that the eternal existence is assumed - that you'll keep reincarnating into different bodies and identities, but that your soul/consciousness will persist over and over. And that then, the goal of Buddhism, is to stop existing - to end that cycle of life and exit the whole suffering wheel of existence.

Now, sure, what that looks like could vary. Nirvana could mean something more akin to Christian heaven - a new kind of existence in which you've left behind all suffering and instead existence in a painless, rich, enlightened state. Or, Nirvana could be the very thing I fear the most - utter annihilation.

Is the loop something to be desired or to be feared? Something to be sought, or something to flee from?

And are we already stuck in it, yearning to break out, or are we trapped outside, wishing we could get in?

In some Christian thought, the idea of being in heaven is an existence without sin. But what is sin, after this mortal world is left behind? Is sex a sin? (I don't think it is as long as it's between consenting adults, but the moral view of a lot of traditional religious worldviews forbids many expressions of sexuality, sometimes treating it as a necessary evil whose only purpose is to create babies.) If heaven exists, do people have sex there?

What about violence?

I mean, in the mortal world, the obvious reason violence is bad is because it causes pain, loss, and death. But if you're in a world without death, where nothing can be permanently lost... is there no problem with violence?

The Eternalists seem fine with a world where they can happily play William Tell and, if they get shot in the head, no worries - they just wake up the next loop without even a headache.

Are they in heaven or hell?

Hold Up: Is Turn of Fate's Wheel Just Planescape: Torment?

 The 96-page adventure module coming with Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse, is summarized on this blog post thusly: "In the 96-page adventure Turn of Fortune’s Wheel, your character returns to life in Sigil. There, you’ll explore this curious city at the center of the multiverse as you aim to rediscover who you are."

If you are at all familiar with the 1998 computer game, Planescape Torment, this ought to sound... also familiar.

Torment sees you playing as the Nameless One, who wakes up in a morgue in the city of Sigil - you're totally covered with scars and have dead, grey skin, but no idea who you are. The game (which, I'll confess, I've only played the first couple minutes of because I just cannot get my head around that Baldur's Gate style of gameplay - hoping that BG3's turn to more D&D-like turn-based combat will be easier on me) follows the Nameless One as he uncovers the secrets of his past and starts walking a path toward redemption.

Spoilers to follow:

Anticipating Playtest Packet 7

 The survey for One D&D's Playtest 6 is out, and I filled it out yesterday, with a lot of feedback that you could glean from reading this blog - in short, I think the Monk needs more substantial buffs (even if it means killing Stunning Strike) and that the nerf to Divine Smite is bigger than you might realize. But, as usual, my actual overall impression of the playtest as a whole has been largely positive.

Much of what is happening here is an attempt to clean up the messy parts that we had in 2014 but preserve the overall feel of the game. And I guarantee you that the overall feel of D&D will not change with these new rules.

We got a look at seven classes, each with four subclasses apiece (though some, at least for now, simply used subclasses as they exist already in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything).

Thus, I think it's pretty likely that we'll see the other five classes looked at in this next playtest packet - namely, the Barbarian, Fighter, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard.

I think it's likely we'll see a similar format, with each class being presented with four subclasses. I looked earlier at how my subclass predictions had gone, getting about 75% of them right (which is honestly not great, as it was a gimme that all the 2014 PHB subclasses were going to be reprinted, which accounted for 40 of the 48 subclasses in the new PHB, so honestly it was more of a coin flip on whether I got anything right.

One thing I noted is that I think popularity had a greater effect on a subclass' inclusion than thematic iconic-ness.

Classes, of course, also got changes.

I think we're still in a class-focused stage of the playtest - I hope we'll see some monster designs and other systems to test, but I think the developers know that the game mostly lives or dies by its class design, so it makes sense that this is what they'd focus on.

So, let's go class-by-class and see what we think will change.

Barbarians:

The Barbarian in the earlier playtest was actually very solid, getting some nice quality-of-life buffs (like being able to maintain Rage with a bonus action if you weren't able to attack,) so I don't see a ton of changes.

I suspect Weapon Mastery might be brought closer in line with what we see with the Monk - having only two at a time that can be swapped on a long rest. I suspect "class groups" as a thing are being swept under the rug, so Barbarians get no special claim to Weapon Mastery - though this could also mean their losing Fighting Styles, which I think would be a shame.

The Berserker and Totem Warrior are, I think, a lock for inclusion. Now what remains to be seen is what the other two subclasses will be. In terms of popularity, I'd guess Zealot and Ancestral Guardian are the most likely inclusions, even if, on a thematic level, I'd like to see the Storm Herald included (though with some buff to it - and perhaps the option to swap storm types on a long rest).

I'll also be curious to see if the Bear option for the 3rd level Totem Warrior gets nerfed - it's one of those really amazing features that leaves a lot of people wondering why you'd pick any other subclass, and thus probably needs to be nerfed or moved to a higher level.

The new Brutal Critical is probably better, but it does have the odd consequence that even Barbarians will prefer a Maul or Greatsword over a Greataxe (though weapon mastery then complicates that again, which might mean this is fine.)

Fighters:

Honestly, I loved the previous playtest Fighter and don't really see anything to change about it. Indomitable is finally useful for saves you're likely to fail, and the way that Fighters play around with Weapon Masteries is really cool.

The Champion, Battle Master, and Eldritch Knight are locks for inclusion. I expect we'll see loosening of spell school restrictions for the EK like the Arcane Trickster got, though I really hope they get the Valor Bard's feature to let them use a weapon as a spell focus.

In terms of popularity, the Rune Knight is my guess for the fourth subclass, largely because it doesn't have much competition. The Wildemount subclasses haven't seen much reprinting (the Echo Knight is actually really cool and good) and beyond those, I basically never see anyone playing Samurai, Arcane Archers, Cavaliers, Psi Warriors (this one being actually kind of cool, if not really as good, in my opinion, as the EK) or the... Purple Dragon Knight (which is maybe my least favorite subclass in the whole game).

I do think we're likely to see some revision to the Battle Master's maneuvers, given that a lot of Weapon Masteries will have similar effects. Stuff like knocking foes back or tripping them is covered by masteries, so we'll perhaps see these cut down - or we might see some maneuvers that play with masteries, like letting you swap out a mastery for a single attack.

Sorcerers:

I think we'll probably see some revision to the Sorcerer-exclusive spells, many of which were a little underwhelming, at least in a vacuum.

I also think, given the uproar over Twinned Spell, we might see another crack at it.

Subclass-wise, again, Draconic and Wild Magic are a lock. Storm Sorcery is one that I could see being added here, and I wonder if they might change it to involve some access to the Primal spell list. If we were getting the Tempest Cleric and Storm Herald Barbarian, I'd put the chances lower here, but without the former and probably without the latter, the only other "storm" subclass is the Druid Circle of the Sea. This could make it in.

The next is kind of anyone's guess. Shadow Sorcery is less likely if we get the Undead Warlock and/or Necromancer Wizard. Given the popularity of the Tasha's subclasses, I would not be shocked to get one of those.

We'll have to see how the Sorcerer-exclusive spells shake out to predict how tied-in the subclass features will be to them.

Warlock:

I imagine we'll see another take on Warlock spellcasting. Personally, there's maybe no change that upset me more than the idea of having Warlocks as half-casters, so I'm really hoping we see some new take on Pact Magic.

I'd hope, though, that we could keep the new design for the Pact Boons, which I think is generally very good.

It remains to be seen how central they expect Hex to play a role in the class design - as long as it remains a concentration spell, I don't want to be forced to use it to get access to class features.

While I hope for a big redesign of the Great Old One subclass, I'm not counting on it - the only subclass to be totally rebuilt was the Four Elements Monk, which was I think the most poorly-rated subclass in the 2014 PHB. GOO is a little lacking in power, but still sees play. I just want some of its features to be tossed in favor of something more thematic (Entropic Ward, primarily).

And I still think Undead makes the most sense as the fourth subclass option. Hexblade is popular, to be sure, but really only for its mechanics, and a lot of those mechanics have been made either baseline or part of Pact of the Blade. I could see Genie here, and I love the Genie. If they want to give more options for a less "Dark" Warlock, it would be a better option than Undead. But for classic Warlock flavor, Undead makes a lot of sense.

Wizard:

So, some of the issues with the Wizard-exclusive spells could do with some tweaking and clean-up, but I think the class overall is fairly solid.

And I think I predicted Evokers, Diviners, Necromancers, and Conjurers (though admittedly, Necromancers and Conjurers tread similar territory - both summoning minions - so one of these might be dropped).

I don't know when we're likely to see the packet. Generally, we've been getting packets roughly every two months, so packet 7 is probably not coming for about a month - late August.

The Augmentation Evoker Needs Some UI Love

 In an unprecedented move, 10.1.5 introduced a new specialization for a class in the middle of an expansion. The only time we've ever seen a class gain a new specialization before was in Mists of Pandaria, when the new (now-defunct) talent system required Feral Druids to be split into two specs (for those who started playing afterward, Druid Tanks used to also be Feral, but would choose different talents to ensure that they had the survival in Bear form to effectively tank).

The Evoker - itself only introduced this expansion - began similarly to the Demon Hunter, having a single DPS spec and a single non-DPS spec. The Demon Hunter had been introduced in 2016 with only two specs out of a desire to concentrate all the iconic Demon Hunter abilities into the specs people would play - they said that they didn't want to do a ranged DPS spec for them because they felt that Havoc would have to lose Eye Beam to give it to the ranged spec.

But given how long development on these things take, there's no way that Augmentation wasn't in the works from the start. My theory was that they were still ironing out the kinks in it by the time they had to have things ready for launch, and rather than have another Azerite Armor situation on their hands (a feature that didn't make it to the Beta until mere weeks before Battle For Azeroth launched, and proved to be a headache for the rest of the expansion - arguably one of the worst mechanics in WoW history, which is why you don't even get it anymore when you level up through BFA content) they instead chose to tinker at it until they felt it was presentable, which wound up happening after Dragonflight's second raid tier had already come out.

On top of that, and probably the reason why it took them so long to figure it out, Augmentation is weird.

Now, in the past, a lot of classes/specs were built around buffing allies. DPS Shamans used to get a lot of their utility out of totems that buffed their parties (back in BC, Bloodlust/Heroism only affected those in your party, so high-end raiders wanted to have a shaman in each group within the raid - and Time Warp and other variants wouldn't come in until later). Paladins also used to have to distribute Blessings across all the different classes (I don't recall when Greater Blessings came about - these would put the buff, either to attack power or mana regeneration, or if you were specced for it, some other blessings, on everyone in the raid of the same class, and last a whopping 30 minutes, but consumed a reagent, so when I was raiding in Wrath of the Lich King, I'd always restock up to 200 Symbols of Kings before heading out to ICC so I wouldn't run out of them).

But even then, there was still a sense that the main power of DPS specs like Enhancement was meant to be their own damage output.

Augmentation is different.

Secondhand, I've heard stories about Augmentation Evokers being kicked from groups because of their low DPS. And yes, the damage Augmentation does itself is definitely lower than Devastation, the Evoker's more conventional DPS spec. On the raiding target dummy in Valdrakken, my Evoker can put out something like 57k dps with an item level of 409 or something (with full tier set bonus.) That puts it ahead of a lot of dps specs at that item level (my poor Demonology Warlock, at about the same gear level, is like mid-40ks). But my Augmentation Evoker has to push really hard and nail the rotation to get to like 30k dps.

But, of course, that's not their point.

Through buffs like Ebon Might (that one most of all,) Augmentation significantly boosts the damage of their allies. By how much? That's hard to tell. And that's part of the issue.

Damage meters - the addons like Recount that allow you to determine how much damage you're pouring out - don't know how to handle the contribution that Augmentation Evokers are providing. What we see instead is that the allies who are benefiting from the Evoker are doing significantly higher dps.

Other systems, like Warcraft Logs, have managed to find a way to show their contribution, and it turns out that, if you count the extra damage that the Evoker is providing to its allies as its own rather than the allies', it actually looks like Augmentation might be the best DPS spec in the game currently.

I'd even consider that Blizzard might aim to keep them that way - certainly some players will enjoy the novelty and just the rotation of the spec, but I think if Augmentation was only on-par with other DPS specs, players might be turned off from it.

Balancing specs has always been a huge challenge, but I think Blizzard has made the challenge even greater with Augmentation. Granted, I really respect a big swing.

Aesthetically, also, I actually love Augmentation. My favorite of the five main dragonflights is the Bronze one (I've always been obsessed with time travel) and I was bummed that Devastation really focused more on the Red and Blue ones, leaving Green and Bronze to the healers (every now and then I tell myself I'm going to try playing a healer, and then I get stressed out just thinking about it and remind myself that I play lots of tanks, so I'm still making queues shorter for people that way). Augmentation focuses on Black and Bronze (though admittedly more Black,) and I really dig the erupting earth and sands of time aesthetics to it.

What I'm hoping - and I have very little sense of what this would entail - is that Blizzard can find a way to make it easier for add-on makers to track the contributions that Augmentation is making. We do see in the in-game UI little orange numbers that I assume are meant to represent the greater damage our allies are doing because of our Ebon Might, but I don't know if damage meters are able to parse that.

The spec is very new, of course, so I'm hopeful that such changes will make it in.

Until then, I'll have to kind of remain faithful that when I play my Evoker in Augmentation spec, I'm making a good contribution to the group.

Hopes and Fears for Planescape

 Last year, I wrote a post about what I'd want out of a Planescape sourcebook for 5th Edition. I know that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft has its detractors, but it's my favorite 5E book published by WotC. People might have disliked the changes to some of the Domains of Dread, or the pages dedicated to talking about genre, or the notion that the Domains are now afloat in the Mists rather than countries bordering one another on a massive landmass.

Of course, those people are wrong.

The point, though, is that I felt the book was a great model for how to do campaign setting books in the future. Sadly, though, when Spelljammer: Adventures in Space came out, we saw that that model was abandoned. Spelljammer is probably the most disappointing product to come out of 5E - a setting that was very hyped, had been missing for 30 years, and promised to provide a really new and fun twist on the game and... we got some new playable races (one of which unfortunately, and I think unintentionally, though with a naivete that an established company like WotC should have known better about, replicated a few problematic racial tropes) and an actually pretty good bestiary, but practically no "setting" for the setting.

My Planescape proposal was very much based on using Van Richten's and to an extent Guldmaster's Guide to Ravnica as a way to cover the enormous amount of ground you'd want to with Planescape - covering the Factions of Sigil and the city itself, all 17 Outer Planes, the four Elemental Planes, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell, with monsters and playable races and subclasses.

But then, the actual title: Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse was announced, and that it would once again be a box set of three slim volumes (with more overall pages than Spelljammer, but still less than Van Richten's had,) I got worried. And those worries will remain until we actually get our hands on the product.

However, I've started to see it advertised on Facebook (I guess Glory of the Giants is close enough to release that they want to get it hyped up,) and the biggest draw the ad presents is new backgrounds and feats.

Let me be frank: that's not exciting.

Spelljammer foregrounded its playable races because, ultimately, those wound up being the most exciting part of the product (though again, Boo's Astral Menagerie does have substantial content). If mere feats and backgrounds (the latter of which is basically being eliminated in the One D&D playtest, with "background" really being just some free choices of feats, skills, and ability score bonuses when you create your character) is the best thing they're putting forward...

I mean, look, I'm probably getting it. While I'm not at 100% collection (I doubt I'll ever pick up Strixhaven and I don't have Call of the Netherdeep, though my roommate has both) I have gotten most 5E books, and Planescape is the setting I'm most excited to run something in (or play in, if I can find someone who wants to run it).

But I also think that the stakes get so much higher due to 5E's general approach to campaign settings - they don't really tend to revisit them. 5E has gotten a grand total of one Eberron book (at least from among WotC's products - Keith Baker wrote another one expanding on Rising From the Last War,) for instance. As such, you really hope that when they do a setting, you get something really substantial and good.

I worry about Planescape because the setting is so profoundly enormous - Sigil is obviously the centerpiece of it, but the setting also comprises all the otherworldly realms in the multiverse, and each of these is a universe unto itself. A place like The Beastlands is itself three layers (one always day, one always at sunset/sunrise, and one always at night) with realms and towns and characters and organizations.

There's a massive amount of ground to cover.

    And, indeed, in the midst of writing this, I found an article from May of this year that breaks things down:

The three books will be Sigil and the Outlands, at 96 pages, Morte's Planar Parade, at 64 pages, and Turn of Fortune's Wheel, at 96 pages.

So, taking a step back and a deep breath: it looks like the "setting" part of the book will be laser-focused on... Sigil and the Outlands. To be fair, in the original Planescape campaign setting book, this was also the focus. The other planes were in later supplements like Planes of Law and Planes of Chaos. 96 pages is also... more than Spelljammer's 64 in the Astral Adventurer's Guide.

It's not huge, though.

However, another reason to have a little bit of hope is that one of the biggest problems with the Astral Adventurer's Guide was that an enormous chunk of those scant 64 pages were dedicated to two-page spreads for each type of Spelljamming ship, giving us deck plans and... yeah, just really deck plans.

I expect that, instead, we'll have the 96 pages of Sigil and the Outlands first giving us the player options (those feats and backgrounds,) which will probably take fewer than 10 pages, leaving us with 86 (well, subtract a couple for the table of contents and introduction, so conservatively say 80). We'll need to cover each of Sigil's factions, of which there are (or were before the Faction War,) 15. Giving each of these two pages would mean 30 pages total (or 45 if we're at 3 pages) leaving us with, say, 50 (or 45, but I think the feats and backgrounds won't take too much, so I'll err on 50).

Then, maybe we get a few magic items and/or spells, but probably not taking more than three or four pages.

So we're down to 46ish.

And then, well, if we're ignoring all the other planes, we can divide that between Sigil and the Outlands. Say 26 to the Outlands and 20 for Sigil.

And... I think that actually works out decently. Ravnica dedicated 22 pages to fleshing out the Tenth District, and Eberron took 32 to talk about Sharn, so if we maybe skew things a little differently (maybe giving Sigil 23 pages and the Outlands 23) we're in a similar ballpark.

I think I'd err on doing more with the Outlands, given all the locations out there - the Gate Towns in particular would give us a bit of a peak at the other Outer Planes, given that it doesn't look like we'll be covering them directly.

Now, if we compare this with the original 2nd Edition book, the "Sigil without a Guide" chapter is 21 pages. If we include the "Doorway to Sigil," which includes the fifteen factions, it's a lot more substantial, at a total of 53 pages, but we're also up at that number if we put in our 30 pages of Faction stuff.

Indeed, "Sigil & Beyond" is, in fact, 95 pages, which is shockingly close to our 96 here.

At least my PDF of the full original Planescape Campaign Setting box set from 2nd Edition is 236 pages - 20 pages short of Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse.

Now, of course, that one doesn't have over a third of it dedicated to an adventure, so it's not a perfect comparison.

The thing is, I think there's a high enough page count here that we could get something with actual substance here (and, again, if we don't have 35 fucking pages of nearly-identical deck plans).

However, it's the broader pattern that saddens me: Planescape was supported with tons of additional, massive products detailing all the planes, with adventures and monsters and stuff. Unless WotC leans heavily into Planescape moving forward, this might be the only Planescape thing we get for a decade or more.

So, I want to get the new Planescape stuff, but I'm really hoping that, at some point, we'll get a Manual of the Planes or other guide to the heightened fantasy of Planescape.