Playtest 5 Survey Results

 

Jeremy Crawford and Todd Kenreck have a new video discussing the survey results for Playtest 5 - note that this is 5, rather than the more recent 6, so there's no talk about the Monk or revisions to the Experts and Priests (also, those class groups don't seem to be much of a thing anymore.)

The video is almost half an hour long, so here are the highlights as I saw them:

Weapon Mastery is extremely popular, and is officially in for the 2024 core rulebooks. I can't say I'm surprised - while some options have had some legitimate critiques (I think Flex is both boring and also more or less gets rid of the versatile trait on those weapons - though it does deliver on being the simplest option) the overall idea of weapon mastery is popular and good and it's here to stay.

One thing I'm less excited about is that class spell lists are coming back - they're doing away with the Arcane, Primal, and Divine spell lists we've seen in the past several playtests. While this does allow them to tailor certain spells around certain classes and vice versa, the worry I have is that this is a step back from the "future-proofing" that the early playtests were doing. By creating universal class groups and spell lists, it became far easier to implement a new class like the Artificer and simply say "anything in any sourcebook that is for Experts, and any spell that is Arcane, is usable by you.") Now, by making all these things class-specific, I fear that the logistics of adding new classes to the game will be far more cumbersome, and we'll be less likely to see other new things like the Artificer.

Notably, this change will have huge implications for the most recent version of the Bard, who in playtest 6 eventually got access to all three spell lists at once, making them the most versatile spellcaster in the game. We'll have to see if Magical Secrets will be as generous in the next version.

In terms of class-specifics, we got light touches and mentions:

Barbarians: the Berserker got "most improved" in terms of satisfaction ratings, which isn't a surprise, as the new Berserker gets to do what it's meant to without the profound penalty of getting exhaustion (if we don't get the new exhaustion mechanic, I hope we'll get something akin to Van Richten's "Stress," which is a less punishing scaling condition that I think holds a lot of mechanical space.)

Fighters: The focus here was more on their use of weapon mastery. Personally, I was most excited by the new version of Indomitable, which seems like it will actually work sometimes now.

Sorcerers: Crawford acknowledged that some of the sorcerer-specific spells were not terribly popular. And I also had mixed feelings about them - while things like the Wizard's spell-manipulation stuff was very deeply tied into the class, many of the Sorcerer ones felt like they were either too similar to existing spells, or did things the sorcerer wouldn't likely want to spend spell slots on. Also, they're going to do another pass on Twinned Spell, which is probably for the best.

Warlocks: Pact Magic is coming back, and I believe Mystic Arcanum is again going to be a core class feature, rather than an invocation. Also, all Warlocks are going to use Charisma (as cool as the idea of Intelligence or Wisdom Warlocks was, I actually think this is probably the right call). Supposedly there are new ideas of how to let Warlocks cast more spells without giving them standard (and half-) spellcasting, but details are thin, though I'd expect to see them in Playtest 7, which is theoretically soon.

Wizards: I don't think they said a ton here. Evokers are still going to evoke, etc.

    So, again, I think my take on all of this is that I worry that the D&D team is playing too conservatively. While 5E is beloved, and I know they don't want to alienate anyone with sweeping changes, if you're too cautious and conservative, you start to run into the question of "hey, why would I even want these books if they're just giving me stuff that already exists?"

Granted, there are a ton of smaller tweaks here and there that I'm sure will add up, and I think that most of the ways in which things are being changed are probably good.

Indeed, while I wasn't a fan of the decision to revert subclass feature levels to their old progression, there was one winner in the Draconic Sorcerer, who once again gets their permanent wings thanks to the fact that that feature comes much later than it would with the standardized 3-6-10-14 progression. I still feel for Bards and Rogues, though in the latter case, at least they have Cunning Strikes (which I expect will get high approval ratings).

One theme Crawford mentioned was how a lot of classes were rated lower than the average on all their features, which he felt was probably a case of low-balling before going into the details. But I think one problem is the structure of these surveys - if a class is missing a thing that I think it needs, I might rate it low even if the things it does have are all fine.

Anyway, I'm assuming that playtest 7 will give us revisions of the remaining classes, which should mean the Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard. (Possibly missing the Monk, as they're a cycle behind).

I'm curious to see what other elements of the game they want to publicly test. I'd love to see if they have some Monsters from the new Monster Manual to show off, and a new encounter-building system would be great.

I think some guidance on how to build dungeon environments and social encounters would also be great - structuring an adventure that isn't purely about hacking and slashing through fiends, but maybe "how do I seed hints of how to get to this dungeon without just telling the party" and "what kind of things might I put in my environments that players can make use of - in or out of combat."

In ten days, it'll be the one year anniversary of the first of these UAs. That means we're likely over halfway through the process, so I'd only expect 3-4 more of these. Naturally, classes and subclasses are core mechanics to the game, so I can understand why they've been the focus. But I'll be curious to see what else, if anything, they want tested.

The Ideas Presented in Flee, Mortals!

 MCDM's monster book, Flee, Mortals! (an excellent title) covers a number of D&D staples, with an intention to be something of a default monster book that could fill in for your Monster Manual. While there are tons of monsters in here, I don't know that it covers every little niche I'd want out of the Monster Manual (whatever concerns I might have over WotC, I think it's about a 99% chance that I'll be picking up the new core rulebooks in 2024, though we'll see if I convert my campaigns fully to "5.5" or do some mixing and matching). Still, the ideas at play in Flee, Mortals are really exciting, intriguing, and interesting.

First off, let's talk about the encounter-building math.

The DMG's guidance on encounter-building is infamously byzantine and also tends to make for pushover encounters. As a new DM in 2015, I found that the multipliers created by adding many monsters to an encounter pushed me instead to have my party face a single CR 1 or 2 monster, which then tended to die before they could do anything when the Fighter and Paladin beat them in initiative.

The Xanathar's rules were far, far, better, and I think are still solid for most meat-and-potatoes encounters.

Flee, Mortals makes things even simpler, though, and also recognizes that most groups - at least experienced ones - will look for a greater challenge. Thus, they simply give each character level an equivalent in CR for Easy, Standard, and Hard encounters. But whereas the DMG's "deadly" difficulty becomes only barely challenging once you get into level 5, supposedly the feedback here is that hard truly means hard here.

As an example, using the Xanthar's rules (I'm ignoring the DMG ones,) and appropriate CR for a solo monster encounter for a group of 6 players at level 16 (which mine are) is 21. So, a Lich should present a challenge to a group like this (I'll admit that my group is decked out in insane magic items, so they probably count as a level or two higher).

With the Flee, Mortals! rules, each level 16 player is good for 6.5 CR in an easy encounter, 7 in a standard one, and 8 in a hard one. So, with six of them, if we wanted a boss fight that counts as "hard," we're looking at a total CR of 48. That means that after our Lich, we are going to still have 27 points of CR left over, which could mean a Death Knight lieutenant and then two Flesh Golems, or possibly three Jiangshi (from Van Richten's). Or three Necromancer Wizards. And given the power of level 16 parties, this feels much more like a reasonable challenge to present to them.

Now, let's talk about FM's take on legendary monsters.

In most segments of the book, monsters are grouped by category - you have your goblins, your orcs, your humans, your devils, etc., and various sub-categories of undead (all the undead are grouped together, but divided into segments for, like, mummies, vampires, liches, etc.) - and several of these categories have a named figure. While the generic "Lich" or "Vampire" stat blocks are presented as just powerful monsters (with their own types - we'll get to this,) there are also figures like High Mage Vairae, a lich, or Queen Bargnot, a goblin.

These "villains" are designed to be epic boss fights, and are meant to either stand on their own or command minions effectively. Each of these has multi-part actions - you can counterspell one of the lich's spells they cast during their action, but they get two more and then a bonus action and a reaction they can use, meaning the usual problem of one bad turn making your big bad seem kind of pathetic and ineffectual is probably not going to happen.

But there are two aspects of legendary creatures from main-line D&D stuff that are arguably nerfed, but in exciting ways.

First off, instead of legendary resistance, these "villain" characters have their own unique versions that impose a penalty upon them. For example, Shtriga Nonna, the named "hag" villain, has "Feline Resilience," where when she fails a saving throw, she can succeed instead but has to turn into a cat until the end of her next turn, preventing her from using some of her features while transformed. This makes using this version of legendary resistance more of a tactical decision for the DM - do your really burn it to take less damage from that fireball, or do you want to make sure you can still use Soul Steal on her next turn? For players, you're still hampering the boss in one way or another even if the specific effect you're going for is resisted.

Legendary actions are, in FM, Villain actions. These are similar to Legendary actions, but will require a little less tracking from the DM. Each villain action can only be used once per encounter, and only once per round - and are otherwise similar to legendary actions in that you use it at the end of a player's turn. The actions are put in a recommended order, with a kind of rhythm to them - usually the first involves some kind of crowd control, and then the second will somehow change the shape of the battlefield through movement abilities. The final one is typically an "ult," which does a bunch of damage and is there as a kind of "last resort" blast of damage to try to finish the party off.

For example, Lady Emer, the named Gorgon/Medusa villain, gets an AoE "Stone Gaze" action, which can potentially petrify anyone in the party. The second one gives her wings and lets her fly away without provoking opportunity attacks, and the third lets her command every creature petrified by her Stone Gaze to move and attack targets of her choice.

Now, villain characters typically have either the Solo role or the Leader role. Roles are assigned to every monster in the book, and these give you a sense of what they're supposed to do in an encounter. Brutes and Soldiers are both front-line fighters - Brutes being more of a threat on their own, while Soldiers focus on defense and locking down party members. Skirmishers have features that let them get in and strike but then get away from their foes. Artillery creatures are ranged damage-dealers (who will benefit if they have a Soldier to lock party members down.) Most of these don't have specific rules attached to them, but the idea is that when you build an encounter, you can try to cover two to three bases - maybe you have a non-legendary vampire (a skirmisher) with Human Knaves (soldiers) to lock down the party and make it easier for the vampire to flit between players, while a group of skeletons (artillery) pelt the party with arrows from afar.

    So far, I've only been able to use monsters from FM in one session, and something of a weird one at that (the party is scattered across Ravnica's 10th District, so it's been groups of 2-3 player characters). I will say that the "minions" are I think more interesting if you've got melee characters wading into them, and player characters flying can still make problems for grounded monsters, but I'm going to keep using these monsters - and this sort of monster and encounter design - and see how it feels. In theory, I adore it, but I need to get my hands dirty.

While the upcoming dungeon I'm writing for the party to go into is intentionally combat-light (I feel I've been forcing a lot of fights on them, and would like to create more opportunities for puzzles and social encounters, especially after my friend who plays a Bard expressed that he feels like he never gets to use some of his features) and should, in theory, actually require not a single fight if the party plays it that way, the follow-up to that (basically, one dungeon to resolve a crisis created by a villain, another dungeon to find said villain and fight him) will also probably be a little less combat-oriented, but should end with a big climactic clash.

A.I. "Art," Corporate Greed, and the Latest Disappointment from WotC

 Now, caveat here: officially, this was the artist using AI tools to create something for WotC, and supposedly the art director missed it until it was too late to change the art.

But it came to the public's attention that some of the artwork in Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants was AI-generated. A couple of frost giants have the classic "weird hands" and some illogical positions of various limbs.

I don't know if I've written about AI on this blog before, but my stance is basically that these tools are interesting, really amazingly impressive hacks that, in the hands of the money-obsessed capital class will be the doom of us all. Ethically, it's definitely questionable given the way it trains on others work without compensating them for it, but even if we step away from the methodology itself, the fact is that it's a system that companies will use to avoid employing artists, hoarding more wealth with the captains of industry and leaving less and less for the people who actually know how to do things and have spent their lives gaining these skills. It feels particularly perverse to do so with a profession like artist, a job people don't get into because they expect to make tons of money, but on the faint hope they can afford to put food on the table and a roof over their heads with that art, and now you're trying to remove the ability for them to survive on their skills. 

WotC's "apology" amounted to "we're very disappointed in the artist and they promised us they won't do it again, so we'll keep working with them," which is serious weaksauce.

I don't want to get into the nitty-gritty and conspiratorial thinking here, but it's interesting that in this case it was the artist who used the AI system, submitting generated art to WotC.

One could imagine that this leaves WotC blameless - that the artist deceived them. But this leaves a couple questions:

First off, why did the art director not catch this? Sure, the internet is the ultimate in "parallel processing," with thousands or millions of people looking at this stuff (there's also a lot of hive mind and mob mentality, of course). Is it possible they saw it and didn't care, or that they've got too heavy a workload and can't look at each work of art with the care and attention required?

Second, was the artist simply being lazy, or was the pressure on them to produce more art than they could reasonably be expected to produce in a certain amount of time?

See, I think the most likely scenario points to a problem endemic to our entire society - that the obsession with profit maximization is creating perverse incentives across basically all businesses.

One refreshing take I heard during Matt Colville's and James Introcaso's "Where Evil Lives" Q&A on YouTube is that Colville's company is simply owned by him, and that he doesn't care about maximizing profits. Now, sure, I'll always have to take such proclamations with a grain of skeptical salt, but the point is that some people who aren't in the upper echelons of the corporate capitalist world actually care about making good products people will like, and that they look to make a profit just so they can afford a reasonable lifestyle.

WotC, however, is owned by Hasbro, one of the biggest toy companies in the world, and as a publicly traded company, there's an enormous amount of pressure to do whatever they can possibly do to maximize profits - at the expense of all those human things like "making something people love" and "being good to your employees."

And, of course, you need to strike a balance - you need something people will buy. But I do wonder, for example, if it was really a creative decision by people like Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins to start doing these more-expensive box sets like Spelljammer and the new Planescape (more expensive but with a lower page count than earlier campaign setting books) or if someone thought this would mean having less art to pay for, fewer writers to employ, and earning more money.

Ok, that's as far as I'm going to let my tin-foil-hat mind go.

The thing that's frustrating about all of this is that, even as WotC continually disappoints as a company, the creative stuff on offer really excites me - I saw the preview for the next three years of Magic the Gathering, and while I don't give the slightest shit about the Universes Beyond stuff (which seems very much like it was dreamt up in a corporate boardroom) I'm super-excited about upcoming sets like the Wild West-themed one, the plane of tiny sapient animals, the "this whole plane is a single enormous haunted house" plane, and the yet-unnamed space opera plane.

There's a reason that these brands have power, and why really clever, creative people are drawn to work on them.

I don't know how or if we'll ever be able to wrest them from the corporate vampires who want to burn them to the ground and collect the insurance money (see: Warner Bros.) But in the meantime, I'm going to pay a lot more attention to smaller, independent companies like MCDM, who, at least as far as I can tell, seem to care about humans.

The Lich: Monster Manual vs Flee, Mortals!

 I recently downloaded the PDF for Flee, Mortals! - the MCDM (Matt Colville's company) monster book.

I have never run a Lich combat encounter before (spoilers for anyone in my campaign, but they've met one who has been disguised as a living human and using Nystul's Magic Aura to avoid the Grave Cleric's Eyes of the Grave) but when I look at the Lich stat block, I find myself extremely skeptical that, as written, it'll put up much of a fight.

The Lich is a CR 21 monster, meaning it should be able to present a significant threat to a tier 3 party on its own, in theory. But if there's one thing that really makes me doubt that, it's the Lich's pitiful 135 hit points. At level 16 (the level my party is currently at) my Wizard (obviously in a different campaign) with his admittedly high Con (+4 once we hit level 8) will have 132 HP - within a rounding error of this ultimate boss monster.

Now, before we get into comparing stat blocks, the party makeup is also somewhat important here. I have a big party, and the players who can most consistently play are a Fighter/Paladin, Grave Cleric, Artillerist Artificer, Whispers Bard, Ancestral Guardian Barbarian (with a powerful homebrewed artifact sword similar to the Sword of Zariel from Descent into Avernus,) and two Storm Sorcerers.

The Lich has pretty decent saving throw proficiencies, but with only an AC of 17, a level 16 party is going to be hitting very frequently.

(It's been a long campaign, as well, so there have been things like Tome of Understanding and +2 and +3 magic items to boost attacks.)

Take the Artillerist, for instance. They have a +6 to Intelligence, a +5 proficiency bonus, a +2 All-Purpose Tool, and an Ioun Stone of Mastery. So, we're looking at a +14 to hit.

After one round to set up their two Eldritch Cannons (using the Force Ballista option,) the artificer's standard turn is Fire Bolt followed by the cannons.

Yes, we're going to do a damage array (this is more for me than proving the point here).

Fire Bolt hit: 3d10+1d8, or 21 damage.

Fire Bolt crit: 42 damage.

Force Ballista hit: 3d8, or 13.5

Force Ballista crit: 27

Miss 1-2 (10%) Hit 3-19 (85%) Crit 20 (5%)

Fire Bolt damage per round: 17.85 + 2.1, or 19.95

Force Ballista per attack: 11.475 + 1.35, or 12.825, then x2 for two cannons and we get 25.65.

Add it up and our Artificer is doing on average 45.6 damage per round with minimal spell slot investment. That's almost precisely a third of the Lich's HP.

And with a big party, that means that if they focus fire on the Lich (did I mention that two of the melee characters have means to get fast flight speeds?) It'll go down in one round - potentially before it has a turn to take an action.

So, the HP is an issue. The AC is also a bit of an issue. But what about damage output? Liches are, after all, just undead Wizards (they also have a means of doing a bit of damage-for-healing). So, are they just glass cannons?

The Lich does most of its damage via spells. For the ones prepared in the Monster Manual version, Disintegrate is probably the most potent, though of course it's a save-for-none spell, so you really need it to land for it to do anything. Still, that's 75 damage in a single round. But that's only half of what a CR 21 monster is expected to put out. You do have some AoE spells like Fireball, which can do lots of damage if you hit a lot of targets with it, 

There are a lot of factors that bump the Lich's CR up, of course, but I think the amount of planning you need to do to make a Lich feel truly like a serious threat to your players is kind of absurd. You need to make it hard for the players to reach the Lich, because in melee, they'll be shredded pretty quickly.

Now, let's look at the Flee, Mortals! version of the Lich:

Things change very quickly:

The MCDM Lich has 270 HP - twice as much as the Monster Manual one. (It's still CR 21.) It also has an AC of 20 - not a ton higher, and high-level PCs will still hit it more often than not if they have any kind of magic enhancement. However, the Lich also has a flight speed with Hover, meaning that the party will need to figure something out if they want to have their melee characters be able to hit the thing. And that speed is 50 feet (not as useful given that my Barbarian and Fighter/Paladin have easy access to 90 and 60 foot flight respectively).

Ability scores are also bumped up a bit - this lich has +4 to Strength, though only +2 to Dex (down from +3). They also get higher Wisdom and now have proficiency in Strength saves.

Notably, they don't, however, have legendary resistance (the named Lich which is on the next page, and is a Solo monster, has the MCDM equivalent, which imposes a penalty on the monster when used, which I think is fun design). It's also fully immune to being Turned.

Now, let's look at damage.

This lich, like the newer WotC designs, uses a multiattack action, with bespoke magical effects rather than existing spells. However, these effects are still considered spells, meaning that, among other things, they can be counterspelled. The lich doesn't have spell slots to keep track of, but these unlimited-use things (and some limited use things) have levels.

The lich gets to use an ability called Glare of Undeath and then four spell attacks, using any combination of things called Biting Acid, Disruptive Thunder, or Pain of Ages.

Glare of Undeath is a crowd control ability, while the other three are damaging attacks. Each does roughly 22 damage on a hit, meaning we're still doing only about 88 damage on a turn if all our stuff hits. But each also comes with a secondary effect, giving you plenty of options when running them.

There are also some limited-use spells. Horrid Woe is similar to Finger of Death, and causes the target's spirit to rise as a Wraith under the Lich's control if it puts them to 0 HP (though interestingly doesn't kill the target). Life Absorption is the big 9th-level, 1/day ability that periodically sucks life out of the party to grant the Lich temp HP - another way to keep them alive.

As with a lot of big boss monsters in this book, the Lich also has a powerful bonus action and reaction. Necrotic Form allows them to move with a bonus action and gives them immunity to most weapon damage, making it far easier to get away if they get swarmed.

Then, they have a reaction to impose advantage or disadvantage on d20 tests - probably the least devastating of the Lich's features.

The Lich, like most new monster design, does have a number of utility spells as well (including the aforementioned Magic Aura - the SRD version of Nystul's Magic Aura).

Now, the Lich is also presented as a "Controller," meaning you can expect to have some minions around.

In the Xanathar's version of the encounter building advice (something I find much better than the DMG's,) a CR 21 legendary monster should present an appropriate challenge for 6 level 16 player characters. But I think this is balanced basically for if it's a low-stakes random encounter.

Flee, Mortals! has its own encounter calculator, and evidently online, it actually makes good on the promise of Hard encounters.

I'd love to have the eight players I've had playing regularly the last couple weeks always able to show up (along with one of my roommates, who hasn't been able to play in months, but has a Spores Druid,) but to be conservative, let's say we have six players for sure.

And we'll ignore that I've been spoiling them with insanely good magic items and say they truly count as normal level 16 characters.

The MCDM guidance says that each level 16 character is worth a certain amount of total CR, depending on the difficulty of the encounter. For easy, it's 6.5. Standard is 7, and Hard is 8.

So, with that group, I've got a total CR budget of 39 for an easy fight, 42 for a hard one, and 48 for a hard one. The Lich leaves me with 18, 21, or 27 total CR to fill out that fight.

Let's say we're going for a standard encounter (I could go hard given that I'm expecting the dungeon leading up to him to be more puzzles-and-traps focused, but I also want this to be a fun victory, especially because this is only the first time they're going to fight him). While I've been leaning toward undead as the main "force" that this lich is using, he's also part of a Phyrexian cult, which could mean using Aberrations and Construct (Oozes and even some Elementals, like a blood elemental in Flee, Mortals! could work). Fiends of various sorts could work.

Anyway, I'm rambling here:

The point is, I can see this Lich being a much bigger problem for the party, without needing to do an insane amount of prep work to make it a challenge.

We are, of course, a year away from the new Monster Manual, which will certainly have a new version of the Lich that adheres to the Monsters of the Multiverse style of spellcasting monsters. I'll be very curious to see how the old version, and this MCDM version, compare to it.

Baldur's Gate 3 Does a Remarkable Job of Translating D&D 5E to the Computer

 So, sadly I'm still playing Early Access while PC users are getting to play the full game. But the early access version of BG3 on Macs is quite good. One thing I discovered was a graphics setting that makes it run far more smoothly (though the reason I'm writing this now is that some dialogue scene crashed - it's not perfect).

I took the party into a ruined temple of Selune that had been taken over by a group of goblins (and some non-goblins) who are all worshipping something called The Absolute - likely the big bad of the campaign. While you can go in all friendly, talking with the three leaders will tend to push you toward combat unless you want to totally compromise yourself. I actually managed to get my original character captured by the "healer" goblin but was able to break out and sneak to the rest of the party, and we returned to crush her and her ogre bodyguard.

We then took out the other leaders and rescued a druid who is thought to be one of the options to cure the party (everyone has a Mind Flayer tadpole in their head - this happens in the introductory cutscene). Unfortunately, speaking with that druid, the druid froze in conversation and I had to quit, meaning I'll probably have to do the fight in the Worg pen again.

The most memorable encounter here was after we killed the leaders, all the goblins in the main temple hall were alerted to our hostility, and so we had something like ten goblins coming at us (including some warlocks and other nastier versions). However, incredibly satisfyingly, I had Lae'zel use a shoving attack (I had her become a Battle Master) to knock one of them into a pit with a pair of giant spiders, and then the spiders killed the goblin and then crawled out to attack the goblins - I took special care to avoid hitting them, and so the two spiders effectively tanked for us while my Warlock, Astarion, and Shadowheart pelted them from afar with ranged attacks.

Naturally, some of the less clearly-defined spells like Minor Illusion don't quite work how they do in the tabletop version, but a lot of spells do - my Warlock, given that this is low level, tends to use the classic Hex/Eldritch Blast combo, but I also have Shatter for when I can grab a few enemies in a group.

And, just as it tends to be in real D&D, it's very easy to run out of spell slots on your Cleric if you're liberal with tossing Healing Words at your allies.

One thing that's interesting is that Long Rests are very easy to take - as long as you have the supplies (generally food) you can stop what you're doing and have some scenes with the party in a secure camp, and then rest and get all your resources back. Party members who aren't currently with you (Gale and Wyll tend to stay at camp for me - I'm the damage spellcaster, and having Lae'zel tank, Shadowheart heal, and Astarion focus on damage and utility makes for a pretty well-balanced party.) You can do this even in the middle of a dungeon (the area you rest will also reflect your environment).

Anyway, even though I'm envious of the people playing the real version of the game, I have to say it's a lot of fun. You know, like D&D.

Baldur's Gate 3 First Impressions

 So, today marks the long-awaited full release of Baldur's Gate 3... just not for me. See, I'm a Mac user, and while I'm very happy that Larian Studios is making this game available on the Mac, the actual Mac client isn't going live for another couple months.

So, while I purchased the game today, the version I got is the Early Access build still, which I don't think is optimized to run on a Mac. I have an M1 Macbook, and while it's not a totally-souped-up gaming machine, it's still pretty good in most cases.

Baldur's Gate 3 plays on it, but there are long pauses in between lines of dialogue and the framerate isn't fantastic. I'm hoping that this all resolves itself when the fully-optimized Mac client comes out.

All that technical stuff out of the way, though:

I made myself a version of my original D&D character, the Human Great Old One Warlock, Conrad Nightfire. He's a neutral good but off-his-rocker young Noble who took on eldritch powers from a mysterious being known as The Shattering Tower of Oedom-Het. Naturally, the computer-game version can't go deep into backstory and such.

The game starts off with a hell of an opening - aboard a Mind Flayer Nautiloid ship (flying biomechanical tentacled airship) you and a number of other people are infected with Ilithid tadpoles - the first stage of Ceremorphosis, which is how Ilithids reproduce (basically, the tadpole merges and eats your brain and then takes over your body, eventually transforming the body into another Ilithid). Judging from all the dead Mind Flayers aboard the vessel, the sole survivor must be trying to rebuild a colony or something.

But while the Nautiloid attacks a city in Faerun, apparently to capture more victims to feed on or convert, a group of Githyanki riding red dragons enter through a planar portal and strike at the Nautiloid. They give chase, even as the Nautiloid plane-shifts to various other locations.

And then it winds up in the skies of Avernus, the uppermost layer of the Nine Hells. Here, you break free and can encounter Lae'zel, the Githyanki Fighter, and Shadowheart, a half-elf cleric, who join you in trying to reach the Nautiloid's helm to try to escape, all while devils (mostly imps) attack and try to take the ship.

While I've defaulted to having my original character, Conrad, being the face of the party and the one to do all the inspecting and interactions, you can actually select any of the party members to do these things, and I suspect that this will be important when, for example, you send your Charismatic characters to speak with NPCs (which Conrad is good at anyway) or sending Astarion, the Rogue, to deal with traps or locks.

Combat works very similarly to how it does in 5E, though if you're used to using a grid, it can make you feel a little unmoored having the game simply calculate distances without the need for such a thing. There are also some additional actions and such that you can perform, including special abilities with a lot of weapons, and also making the house rule of, say, drinking a healing potion be a bonus action, part of this system. Also, distances are measured in Meters, which... look, I agree that the Metric system is better, but I'm just so used to the imperial system when it comes to this game.

Also, everyone has British accents. It's fantasy! Let my pseudo-medieval/renaissance characters speak with modern American accents! (That said, I like the voice acting so far).

Still, the underlying mechanics of 5E are pretty closely hewn to, and the challenge, I suspect, will be in running several different characters at once, given all the options available. Having hit level 2, I picked up Agonizing (spelled Agonising, British-style) Blast and Repelling Blast, two of my favorite Warlock invocations. For now I'm doing the standard low-level Warlock strategy of Hex+Eldritch Blast.

All this being said, I might wait to play more of this until the official Mac release later this year. It seems like a big and cool enough game that I'll want to get the best version of it.

Flee, Mortals! Impressions

 I made something of an impulse purchase, even on the same day I pre-ordered Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants from my friendly local game store. I got the pdf for Flee, Mortals! - the MCDM-produced monster book.

It might be underselling it, though, to simply call it a new monster book. The attitude and intention here is to create monster - and specifically full monster encounters - that are more dynamic and interesting than what you might find in the basic stat blocks you get in the Monster Manual.

Indeed, the intention here is to more or less allow this to take the place of your Monster Manual as your primary monster book. Playing into that, many of the monsters here are staples of D&D-like RPGs. There are varieties of orcs, goblins, gnolls, devils, demons, undead, etc. We get, for instance, from-the-ground-up redesign of the Lich. There are also a number of "Brand X" versions of monsters that are WotC-owned IP. The "Voiceless Talkers" are clearly MCDM's take on Mind Flayers, and the "Overminds" are its Beholders.

But the book goes beyond touching up and tweaking these stat blocks. Every single one of them has something interesting going on, and there are a few ideas that MCDM introduces that I think could be a real boon if WotC were to implement something similar in 5.5E/One D&D.

First off, monsters are given broad categories telling you what role they play in a fight. Your Soldiers and Brutes are front-line fighters, with Brutes being more hard-hitting sacks of hit points while Soldiers are there to draw the attention of players much as a group's tank would attempt to do. Controllers have powers that buff, debuff, or move creatures around the battlefield.

But there are also some fun, extra-special types. Solo monsters are there to make good on the promise of legendary monsters - something you can truly have the entire party face on its own and have it still put up a good fight. The intent with these is that they have enough multi-part actions, bonus actions, reactions, and "villain actions" (which are similar to, but different from, legendary actions) that they can continually put the pressure on a party.

Then, there's basically the opposite - the Minion. These are creatures designed to be used in huge numbers, and do things like taking collective actions (five of them can attack at a time, letting you speed through the 20-30 you might have on the map) but also getting killed if they take any damage from an attack or a failed (but not successful) saving throw, and even allow "overkill" where a player can kill multiple minions even with a normally-single target attack.

The monsters are organized into categorical groups - your demons, your hobgoblins, your vampires (all the undead creatures are grouped together, but that part is divided into things like incorporeal undead, lesser corporeal undead, mummies, vampires, etc.) and each of these groups has a single named monster, which is typically either a solo or leader monster, who is there to be the big boss.

There's also new encounter-building guidelines, which I believe will make for more challenging fights, but also is built around the patterns of modern players who tend to be less into slow dungeon-crawls and more into climactic clashes at a good story beat. These I'm going to test carefully in my campaign (skewing toward the easier side of things).

Also, there are many Companions and Retainers, which can be allies for the party - so if you want some of the monsters on your side, you can with these.

There are elements of the book that I'm not 100% convinced by - while the main "monster" chapter has tons of stat blocks, there are also a lot that are buried in adventure environments and a big chapter on rival, evil adventuring parties - I wonder if, at least in the former case, these might have been put into the main monster bulk of the book.

Right now, I'm really impressed with what I've read, but I haven't actually seen these monsters in action, so I'll be working them into my ongoing campaigns and getting a feel for whether they're significantly more deadly or just more interesting.