The Games that Stuck with Me in 2023

 With 2024 just around the corner, I thought I'd do a little retrospective on the past year, which by most peoples' measure, was a fantastic year for gaming, even if we saw some real nastiness on the industry side of things.

Addressing that, I think as I've gotten older and perhaps even a bit wiser, is that we continually see how the shortsighted, everything-to-raise-stock-price late capitalist world is making things really rough for talented and creative people who want to make beautiful things. The shift required to take us out of this downward spiral is a lot bigger than just the games industry, so the best we can do as fans of games is to reward creativity and cleverness and support a ground-up movement for the people making these games to demand and receive the respect and security that they so richly deserve.

But, being outside that industry, and just being one dude with a blog, right now I'm going to focus on my own personal experience and talk about the games that have meant a lot to me this year.

Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon:

    I'm a newbie to the Armored Core franchise. Like a lot of people who got on board the FromSoft love train with the Soulsborne games (ironically, I've generally liked the non-Dark Souls games of theirs I've played better) but in a weird way, ACVI was a throwback to an older style of game that I didn't realize I was nostalgic for.

    Remember levels? See, for those of you Zoomers or even Gen Alpha folks who were born after 2000, video games used to nearly all be divided into discrete mission environments we called levels. A level would start, and you'd play through it, and once you had beaten it, things would kind of reset to a status quo.

    These days, "open world" games have become far more ubiquitous, which emphasize a kind of continuity between areas of the world. Designers have gotten good at nevertheless making paths through those worlds that can set up elaborately-staged setpieces, but there is a certain lack of punctuation. Often, victory in some big event will spur you on to the next big event.

    Levels, however, create natural moments in a game's pacing to pause and even potentially take a break.

    Armored Core VI has, of course, a lot more to recommend it beyond levels, but as someone who was playing Gamecube and PS2 games in high school and college, ACVI hits a note of nostalgia. The PS2 had a crapton of games, and a lot of them were forgettable, but it was also an era in which I felt I could be more free to try something unlike what I had played before and still enjoy myself. ACVI recaptured that feeling and was, on top of it, made for really satisfying gameplay. Even as someone who usually leaves it to online sources to optimize builds, ACVI feels built to reward understanding all those weird statistics on each of your parts and to really get into specializing a build for the challenge ahead.

    It's also the most audacious use of New Game Plus modes I've ever seen - not only are there two different endings to go for that you can play through one after the other, but an entirely new ending and mission line emerges after you've already beaten the game twice.

    And somehow, even though it's not going to take you all that much time to beat the game the second time, it never feels like the reason it's so fast is that the game doesn't have enough content.

    Also, I had been somewhat turned off by its announcement trailer, which portrayed, with its muted colors and synth score, a depressingly bleak world for a game. It's not that that portrayal is wrong, but somehow, despite its characters appearing purely as emblems and voice over, there are some real personalities and dramatic arcs - I mean, who didn't fall in love with V.IV. Rusty? (I maintain the third ending is the canonical best one if only because Rusty might survive it).

Baldur's Gate 3:

    I'll throw a caveat in here: I never beat Baldur's Gate 3. I got to the cusp of the city and found that my drive to finish the game had kind of dried up. There's something a bit overwhelming and intimidating to the sheer volume of possibilities that can happen in that game.

    But this is something I feel is more my issue than the game's. The fact is that this thing is an utterly mindblowing achievement. BG3 takes the framework of D&D's 5th edition rules and adapts them very faithfully to a digital medium, while arguably making a lot of improvements that the TTRPG should consider implementing as well.

    BG3 is filled with a cast of well-written party members and side characters, with some real dramatic stakes and interesting fantasy ideas.

    This might be more of a song of praise to my computer, but I was also overjoyed that an enormous game like this was running smoothly on my not-particulalry-a-gaming-computer M1 Macbook Air.

Control:

    So, this is a bit funny: Control came out in 2019, but I didn't check it out until this year. However, upon getting into the game, I have become a zealous convert to the cult of Remedy Entertainment. This was a game that helped me find a term to identify the style/genre of writing I've been doing since I was 17, and juiced a lot of my own creative impulses, which spurred a huge spurt of my own writing earlier this year.

    Control left such a huge impact on me that, in writing this, I could have sworn I played the game last year - the idea that I've only been familiar with it for about 9 months seems far too short.

    The game's action combat is extremely fun and satisfying - after finishing the game I spent a good amount of time wandering around the Oldest House looking for Hiss to fight just for the fun of it - but far more is its incredible world-building and mixed approach to storytelling. It's fascinating to me that my favorite character in the game is one who only ever appears as a live-action actor in various film strips.

Alan Wake II:

    So, it should come as no surprise that, upon discovering Remedy's games in the first of their releases to push for this idea of a connected universe, I decided to finally go back and check out Alan Wake, which has sounded intriguing back in 2010 but which I never got around to.

    I liked Alan Wake a lot, but it definitely also showed its age, even in its Remastered Edition. Still, it was enough to pump me up for October's release of the long, long anticipated Alan Wake II.

    And by God is that an incredible game.

    I will say that purely in terms of personal tastes, I think I like Control better overall, but in terms of stunning achievement, Alan Wake II sets a new bar for artistic ambition within the medium of games.

    I mean, holy crap. Holy crap, guys. This game feels like you're playing through a top-shelf season of prestige television while also reading a mind-bending novel. The game is so rich in thematic meaning as well as engrossing mystery. It's funny. It's beautiful. It's terrifying (but never in a cheap way, unless you count the occasional jump scare). It's fascinating. It's exciting. It's just... dear lord.

    This movie has a fifteen-minute avant-garde art film that you might even miss if you don't stick around to let it play!

    I'll confess that the survival-horror gameplay, as someone who has never played such a game before, took me some time to adjust to - my initial fight against Robert Nightingale (which I realized on my second playthrough is literally the fourth enemy you'll face) was brutal because I had to spend most of it scrounging for two more bullets to fire at the guy, and I think the genre evokes more of a frustrated grumble than a shriek of fear, but on a second playthrough I found myself much better-adjusted to the rhythms and cadences of the gameplay.

    Still, this is the sort of game where whatever flaws or points where my taste varies from their choice of direction is kind of moot because of what a profound achievement it is.

Questions about MCDM's RPG System

 MCDM, the beloved indie TTRPG developer, is working on their own RPG system that aims to bring more exciting tactical, cinematic, heroic fantasy monster-fighting than the mainstream options like D&D.

Nearly everything I've heard about the system makes me excited - I think the point of inertia is that, with almost a decade of 5E D&D under my belt and maybe a thousand dollars' worth of books for the game, along with a subscription to D&D Beyond and all the built-in infrastructure to make running and playing this game convenient, the big challenge is whether the new game will be so much better that not only I, but also my friends, will feel inclined to try out a new system.

Optimistically, I'd like to say it would be easy enough to simply continue running 5E games and also run games in this new system - indeed, that's what I hope I'll be able to do. But running a TTRPG is a big commitment.

Adults, infamously, have busy schedules, and RPGs are never the top priority (even if, as someone who is a bit of a homebody bum, it's high on my priority list). I'd also say that my friends are not necessarily all big gaming nerds - a lot of them enjoy video games, but tabletop games require a certain rules familiarity and mastery because things cannot be automated the way they are in a video game. Playing Baldur's Gate 3 is, on a mechanical level, very similar to playing a game of 5E D&D, but the barrier to entry is way lower because most of the rules are automated by the game, and on top of that you can easily play it solo.

In my mind, a game like Pathfinder needs to struggle to justify itself. At its heyday, during 4th Edition, I suspect the reason that Pathfinder was so popular was because it was a closer continuation of the 3rd Edition (or 3.5) system - it had the familiarity advantage in a way that 4E did not.

MCDM is, admirably, I'll add, boldly slaughtering sacred cows in the interest of shaking off the rust of nearly 50 years of game design. The thing most people are talking about is the fact that you won't be rolling to hit with attacks.

And that raises the first of my questions: How likely is it in a round of combat for your character to emerge unscathed?

    The preview page for the Tactician (the Fighter analogue with a Battle Master emphasis) shows that a first-level Tactician will likely start with something like 40ish hit points (maybe more, as a "Kit" can add a lot). That's almost four times as much as a 5E Fighter would start out with at the same level. Now, we know that there's no attack roll, but characters can still have armor and defenses.

I think to some extent this will just contribute to piling on more HP.

After all, if you don't account for healing capabilties, having a higher max HP is basically equivalent to taking less damage. If your HP and your healing received go up, then it's truly equivalent to taking less damage.

Still, I'm thinking about my Eldritch Knight, whose modest build strategy was to severely reduce the chance he had to get hit by an attack - with a +1 Shield, the Defensive Fighting Style, plate armor and the Shield spell, he effectively had an AC of 27 as long as he had a reaction and a spell slot. So, unless there were save-for-half offensive abilities, he'd only rarely get hit (he did tend to receive a lot of critical hits, though I wonder to what extent I was just more aware of them because they made up a higher percentage of the hits he took).

Therefore: I wonder if I could build a character who, similarly, takes very little damage.

I know that in earlier designs, there would be some kind of roll for defense - you could reduce damage by rolling some dice, and even that if you reduced it to zero, you got to make a counterattack.

I believe this idea has been scrapped because it required too much rolling not on your turn, but I wonder if there will be some statistic governing the ability to reduce incoming damage.

The math gets tricky, of course: if you have a subtractive system - say, with your heavy armor you get to subtract 5 damage from each attack - that becomes really powerful when your foes are rolling, say, 2d6 (nearly half the time you're reducing the damage to zero) but becomes pretty pathetic when you're getting hit for a roll of 4d12+7 by some gargantuan titan.

A fractional system is more balanced - a Raging Barbarian taking half damage from six weak attacks by a group of skeletons and also taking half damage from the claw attack of an ancient dracolich is getting consistent value out of that feature - but if you go into more complex fractions than simply halving, the math gets a little more difficult. How scalable is this?

See, it could be cool if as you get better armor, the damage reduction gets more powerful, but while this is a common feature in digital RPGs - like how Armor works in World of Warcraft - it's potentially a lot of math at a tabletop - do you really want to have to figure out what the damage of that attacks was when you have a five-eighths damage reduction?

So, my suspicion is that we'll likely just see much larger health pools, but will not, by contrast, see monster damage scale up proportionately. In other words, players will need to adjust a bit in terms of what they consider a big scary hit - a monster hitting you for 5% of your maximum health in 5E is basically negligible - just a scratch. But because that's going to be a consistent drain rather than on occasional event, taking the 20 hits of that size necessary to be taken down is going to happen a lot quicker.

    Really No Attrition?

To be fair, I think James Introcaso has already acknowledged this, but while the primary class resources are meant to build up over the course of a fight or even an adventure, it seems there will be some things that are dwindling resources. They've talked about creating a tension between Victories and Recoveries: Victories are earned when you win fights or accomplish other serious goals over the course of an adventure, and each class will have some way to capitalize on Victories. The Victories go away (and are converted to XP) when you Rest, which is meant to signal the end of an adventure in most cases, which is meant to encourage players to push on and forward.

Recoveries, however, will be another resource that you start with a lot of, and which you'll spend over the course of an adventure to regain HP and possibly some other things. These, however, do dwindle, and the idea is that if you run out of recoveries, you'll start to really have to seriously think about resting.

Now, I like that these two are in tension - it creates a dramatic and strategic choice and could solve an issue in 5E, which is that if you can afford to do so, it's usually best to rest as much as possible, usually with only narrative tension serving to keep players from resting at every opportunity (or a threat that DMs will add more monsters if the party does rest - which I, for one, am usually too lazy to do - probably should learn to rebalance encounters and have an "if they rested" version of fights, but oh well).

Heroic Resources, though, of which each class has a unique one, are said to not be built on an attrition model.

Now, we don't know what this version of the Talent will look like, but certainly the 5E talent, while not using spell slots, does for sure have an attrition-based resource system. Talents accumulate Strain, and Strain eventually puts them in a position where they have to tap the brakes on their powers or risk just straight-up dying (and on top of that they're also building up other negative effects).

But if we assume Strain is going to work similarly to how it does in its 5E version, that puts it in contrast with other heroic resources, such as the Tactician's Focus, which seems to easily build up in combat and, far from running out, the Tactician is going to get more to play with the longer they adventure and fight.

Now, this could certainly create more tension at the table - our Talent is starting to look really ragged, but our Frenzy is itching to push forward and get more Rage - but I'd really like to see how the balance is going to be struck. Will Talents feel unfairly like the wet blanket holding the rest of the party back because they need to rest and release some that strain? Or are only half the classes going to really get this feeling of having the heroic will to push on regardless of how long the adventure has gone?

    The Martial/Caster Divide:

One of the deep... I hesitate to say flaws, but one of the deep issues in 5E and I think most of D&D design, is that you have this giant catalogue of spells, which are sort of the ultimate customization options for a lot of classes, and which are utterly meaningless to other classes.

Essentially, the spell list in the back of the PHB (and in rules supplements like Xanathar's and Tasha's) are a giant grab-bag of ways that your character can do unique and interesting things. Sure, some spells are favored a lot more than others, but the point is that, beyond combat, there's a core system for "various cool things you can do" that half the classes usually don't have access to.

The 5E Talent, interestingly, does not use any of 5E's existing spells, getting its own class-specific bespoke catalogue of Psionic Powers. Many of these powers look very similar to spells - with casting (manifestation) times, levels (orders,) and even schools. This allows the Talent to be nearly as customizable as all the 5E spellcasters (and potentially just as much if they released more psionic powers).

But I think that one area where D&D suffers is that the utility options of all those spells can just never be replicated for non-caster classes. A Rogue, in addition to being the stealthy, underhanded combatant, is supposed to be "the guy who can do it for you," and while things like Expertise and Reliable Talent make them really good at succeeding on skill checks, there's no real Rogue ability that lets you, say, automatically find an object nearby - even if that's flavorfully something that  Rogue should be very good at. Thus, a Wizard with Locate Object can often be more effective at searching for something than a Rogue who's got expertise in Investigation.

I'd love to see a system in which classes that aren't necessarily casting magical spells still have the versatility of a spellcaster.

    How is non-combat stuff going to feel?

We don't have a super strong idea of how skills and such are going to work in MCDM's RPG. I suspect that it will look pretty familiar - the Tactician, for example, is given a number of skills they can learn, and I'd guess we're looking at a similar system.

But I don't think it's something they've talked about in their design diaries.

And I think this ultimately comes down to the following question:

Can I run the same sort of adventures I run in D&D using this system?

The goal, I think, of the MCDM RPG is to do what current 5E players like to do, but better.

And to be fair, a lot of the roleplay and storytelling that has made D&D a compelling entertainment medium in the form of Actual Play shows has been pretty independent of the gameplay systems. I like tactical combat, and in a way I think that's the thing I'm least worried that this game will screw up.

Perhaps, therefore, it's silly to worry how well it will handle such things, because in theory any system that doesn't get in the way of RP will be fine.

So, then, here's my last question:

    How easy will it be to customize and homebrew stuff for it?

In a Q&A, Matt Colville gave a somewhat flippant answer to whether there will be guidance on homebrewing monsters in the rules, saying that the way to build monsters is to playtest them, and that should be obvious.

But I think maybe he was thinking about that from the perspective of a professional game designer: obviously, the monsters of Flee, Mortals were tested and tweaked by lots of professionals, and the result was a beautifully polished product.

The thing is, sometimes for the story you're telling, you don't always have quite the pieces that you need. And I have made regular and ample use of the "Quick Monster Stats" in the 5E DMG to build monsters of my own design.

What we need, basically, is a similar table that can show you roughly how much HP a monster of a certain level should have, and how much damage it should typically do. This isn't a precise science, of course, but it's incredibly useful for putting together something that will challenge your players without overwhelming them.

So, I'm hoping that there is a similar chart here. I'm someone who likes genre-mixing a lot, and so if I want to make a monster that is a vending machine animated by the strange radiation of a glowing meteorite, with an attack that lets it launch a volley of soda cans at its foes, it would be nice to know if, for a second-level party, I should make it launch three cans for 2d6 each, dealing a total of 21 damage on average, or if I should decrease that damage given that I also want it to have a lot of HP.

I don't know when we'll start getting sample pages or a basic rules release, and I'm sure that this coming year I'll be focusing more on the 2024 D&D core rulebooks (and seeing if it's going to be easy enough to let players in existing campaigns convert).

But I am excited about this game, far more than I have been about things like Pathfinder 2E Revised or Tales of the Valiant.

Cleaning Up Cult Stashes, Nursery Rhymes, and Lunchboxes

 With my intention to be as much of a completionist as I can, with boltcutters in hand I am collecting all of the various odds and ends.

I just got the penultimate Nursery Rhyme and received a package from the FBC with a new doll - the Father doll (which... looks a little familiar) - and a suggestion that a new site has opened up at Cauldron Lake.

One of the issues I'm running into, though, is that I'm completely out of healing items, so I'm finding it generally wise to turn off my flashlight and give any Taken I come across a wide berth (it turns out there is a reason to turn off the flashlight - the Taken are less likely to see you if you do).

I realize I'm actually not right up to the point of no return, as I think the first confrontation with Mr. Scratch happens before that point, and of course with most of Alan's story left to play through I'll be swapping over to him for a good long while.

Alan, of course, has fewer obvious collectables - basically just his many Words of Power, and thankfully I think I've met Tim Breaker in each of the levels, so I believe I already have them all marked on the map.

One thing that has been helpful here is that if you find all of the Setter for Mayor posters, you'll get a sign announcing that he's meeting people at Suomi Hall in Watery, and if you meet the very good boy of a mayor, you'll get a charm that will show any collectables near you on the map.

I think I have only two lunchboxes left to find - somewhere in the Bunker Woods west of Bright Falls, I believe, and the only Cult Stash I have "yet to find" is the one that's automatically open on NG+ because it contains the crossbow - I think we'll need a patch or something to let it count for the case board.

I've been thinking about which half of the game I think is "better."

Naturally, Alan's "Noir York City" is the more mind-bending part of the game. It's interesting that Alan doesn't really have any boss fights in the same way that Saga does - with her three Overlap Guardians and her two fights with Mr. Scratch. Alan's Plot Board is simpler in some ways than Saga's Case Board, but it's also a little trickier.

The Restless Shadows as enemies are interesting - Alan is constantly surrounded by potential threats, but only one in ten winds up being an actual enemy. It definitely creates an uneasy sense, where you're either paranoid and potentially wasting batteries on harmless shadows, or you grow to underestimate something and wind up getting a big chunk of health knocked out when that shadow turns out to be a real foe.

I have noticed on this playthrough, though, that if a Shadow is holding a non-shadowy weapon, it's a sure sign it's the real deal.

Noir York City, as I'm calling it, doesn't have any of the fun cutesiness of Bright Falls - even if Bright Falls and Watery are under siege from a terrifying supernatural menace, a big part of the fun of the setting is all the idiosyncrasies of the small-town culture there. There's a real charm to these places even if it sometimes gets creepy. Alan's nightmare reality is basically free of anything remotely charming - it's the grittiest, grimiest version of New York you could imagine.

Also, one of the reasons a big city like New York tends not to feel so creepy is that there are, you know, people there. When I was in college in NYC, sure, there was a kind of anonymity to the city (also, given that I started college three years after 9/11, there was a dark shadow hanging over the whole place,) but it was rare I didn't feel safe there. Walking around at night, there were always tons of other people out on the streets and bright lights shining everywhere. Cities, after all, were built by humans to be a safe place compared to the wild woods filled with hungry wolves (holy crap are the wolves in this game scary).

So, Alan's nightmare NYC is all the fears and imagined terrors of the city with none of the counterbalancing reality.

I actually think it's kind of a brilliant juxtaposition. I remember a Cracked After Hours episode that was talking about how American horror stories almost all take place in rural areas, compared with British stories that take place in cities.

Now, the argument (which is made by a fictionalized version of the person in the episode) is a little more cut-and-dry than reality. Candyman, for example, is a definitely urban horror story that was very popular (though also written with a different perspective than the typical white suburban one that most horror stories of its era had).

But we kind of get both styles of alienation - for Saga, being from a more cosmopolitan home (I believe she's meant to be from D.C.) going into this remote, rural place (I suspect Sam Lake opted to avoid going too deep into the racial politics aspect of the urban/rural divide, given that he's not an American, but it's got to add a whole other layer of unease to be a woman of color out in a rural area - though there's some interesting questions of interpretation about the origins of Tor and Odin's conflict with Saga's father, and whether race played a role, much as I'd hope that the old rockers wouldn't care about that). Alan, on the other hand, is basically in the NYC from his Noir-inspired detective novels, and Noir is all about that isolating urban alienation. Particularly in the 70s and 80s, which is when Alan would have been growing up, there was a strong cultural association of cities with crime and danger - one point of inspiration for The Dark Place's NYC is the movie Taxi Driver, which has a protagonist who cannot see anything in the city but the sleaze and corruption.

If the rural horror is being too far away from anyone else to get any help, urban horror is the idea that your problems are minor and personal enough that the vast majority of the city's populace doesn't care to help you solve them. In that sense, the fact that the Dark Place is, in fact, densely populated, just with shadows that are indifferent to you, kind of nails that feeling.

Anyway, with only one full day before I fly off for the holidays, I'm skeptical I'll be able to make much progress - I might be able to clean up Saga's side of things, but then I think I'll maybe be able to scratch the surface of Alan's next chapters (if memory serves as well, The Oceanview Hotel was the longest "level" of his side of the game.)

So, in that case, it's unlikely I'll be finding out how the Final Draft ends (though I'm stumbled across some spoilers).

I don't know if we have a timetable for the Night Springs and Lake House DLCs, but I'm not holding my breath. I am, of course, looking forward to other DLCs from other games, like Shadow of the Erdtree (I believe the recently-released Valhalla expansion for God of War Ragnarok is free, but while that game was pretty good, it's not as high on my priority list of exciting stuff.)

I'm sure it won't be for a few years, but damn am I excited for Control 2. I'm hoping we don't need to wait thirteen years for it - I'd like to play it before I'm 50! Alan Wake II has so much polish on it compared to the first game, and even if I'm freaking out a little about healing items, I think I'm getting the hang of the combat (getting those lunchboxes has helped). But with Control, I came back to the game after beating basically everything just to run around and fight random Hiss spawns for fun - the combat is that satisfying.

If we could have a Control 2 with the production value of Alan Wake II (not to say the original was lacking) I'd be freaking overjoyed.

Echoes of the Past and Alan Wake

 I followed through on my threat to do both Local Girl and Old Gods one after the other, meaning I've left a lot of Alan's half of the story to go after I've finished up Saga's.

One thing that I had forgotten is that you don't actually get the Bolt Cutters until you're fully in the Overlap after going to the Valhalla Nursing Home, so you really can't access all of the game's areas until you're really near Saga's endgame.

I don't know how many of the manuscript pages I've found are truly new or just that I missed them the first time - or even that I just forgot them.

But we do see a little more about the sequence of events:

Local Girl and a Crossroads: Progressing through The Final Draft of Alan Wake II

 So, as it turns out, you have to do Alan's first (full) chapter, "Casey," before you can switch between characters at will in Alan Wake II.

I think I'm going to try to do all of Saga's stuff before going into the rest of Alan's stuff this playthrough, if only to mix things up compared to my first playthrough - and I'll be honest, part of this is delayed gratification to save "We Sing" for as late as possible. (I think my first go around I did We Sing before Local Girl, but then did Local Girl before Room 665.)

I don't think I had realized you can find a map of all the Cult of the Tree stashes in the hideout toward the end of Local Girl, but it marks all of them on your map, making the collection a bit easier. There are lists of where the Nursery Rhymes are, but it's less explicit, and the lunchboxes are... I don't know if there's any clue to them other than "keep an eye out for colorful yarn thingies."

Another thing that I think has really helped me is that I actually got the Dark Place map as soon as I got out of the studio - which in the first playthrough I didn't until pretty late in the game. I don't think I ever got the map for the health center at Valhalla Nursing Home, so I'll try to get that too.

Anyway, I think I have everything out of Watery I can get so far - I don't have the Bolt Cutters yet, so there are a couple things beyond my reach. More frustratingly, the stash near the little hut across the river from Coffee World was already open, despite being marked on my map. I don't know if this is a very weird Final Draft thing or if it's just bugged - I've been opening other stashes I had previously found in the original playthrough, so there's nothing about this one that suggests it should be different.

With the Screwdriver, I can open a few of those park service supply boxes at Cauldron Lake, but I don't know if there are any other "major collectables" that I can come across there.

On Alan, I think I got absolutely everything out of Caldera Street Station, including all the Words of Power.

As it turns out, I suspect that these upgrades might be making the game more manageably easy, which is nice. I took a few shots form Thornton and Mulligan, but knowing how to beat them of course makes the fight relatively simple.

Once again, though, I have a couple clues in "The Story" that say "for later," which in my first playthrough I never wound up being able to put on the case board. I'm hoping that by being really insanely thorough I'll get every case buttoned up.

I'll be curious to see how Night Springs and The Lake House fit into the game - if they'll be standalone chapters like the ones from the first Alan Wake, or if you'll access them in-game. I honestly think the former might be better, given that I think the last "autosave" spot you get is well past a point of no return.

This game is, of course, more of an open world like they conceived for the original Alan Wake, but it's really primarily a narrative-focused game, and so the openness is really more to reward backtracking.

I'm going to be looking up lists of all the manuscript pages and other collectables to make sure I don't miss anything.

So far, the Final Draft has not seemed all too terribly different. I imagine the "real world" stuff would go roughly the same, though. We're not looking at a whole other game here, after all. I'll be keeping an eye out for a different ending, of course.

That being said: Alan Wake II is already a complete game, and much as I'd love to have more, more, and more of it, I'm going to get ready for the DLCs and the other Remedy projects in the works - even if they're going to be probably years off (will I play Control 2 while I'm still in my 30s? We've got about two and a half years!)

Wrapping My Head Around What We Know of the MCDM RPG

 The recent infuriating news about Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, which comes at what I imagine is the worst possible time from a strategic standpoint (unless some Hasbro folks assumed that the work on the 2024 books was basically done and they could thus afford to fire a bunch of people who had just done said work) has had me taking more seriously the idea of a broader TTRPG space.

Don't get me wrong: I love D&D, and I think it's important that the infamously nuance-blind online community realizes that there's a distinction between the passionate game designers and artists who make D&D and the corporate parasites that pull shit like the OGL fiasco and lay off people to improve their own year-end bonuses. The public faces of D&D, which these days is primarily Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford, are not the enemy here.

The enemy, as usual, is basically capitalism (or whatever horrifying mutant "increase share value at the expense of all else" version of capitalism that exists today is).

Anyway, I love D&D, but I've also been playing it long enough to start to question some of its underlying assumptions. The game is nearly 50 years old, and while 5th Edition is very different than 1st Edition was (not even getting into the complexities of what "1st Edition" even means) there's clearly a strong effort to preserve elements of the game for the sake of nostalgia.

And thus there's a place for a game that's willing to upend the table.

I think that's the core premise of MCDM's as-yet-untitled TTRPG. (As a note, I'm not labeling these posts until we have a name to talk about this game.)

This game is still in development, and likely won't be released until 2025 (fitting, perhaps, that I'll get it ten years after I started playing D&D) so all of this is somewhat speculative, but I figured I'd go through what we know:

    2d6 Rather than 1d20:

D&D's most iconic die is the d20, which is notably the largest die (sort of - you could argue percentile dice simulates a 100-sided die) used in the game, but it's also the one most commonly used. This means that for most rolls you make, there's the widest swing. And, as a single die, there's no greater chance for it to roll near its average than at its extremes.

The MCDM RPG uses 2d6 for most of its rolls, and will evidently be using d4s and d8s for other systems, but probably not any higher-value dice.

This means that you're more likely to roll average, and the absolute lowest you can roll is only ten lower than the absolute highest you can roll.

Now, it seems that this will be used both for combat and for skill checks, so we'll need to adjust our expectations. In 5E, as a DM I tend to set a DC of 15 as my standard "moderate difficulty" for a skill check. At early levels, a player who's perfectly set up for that kind of thing is going to succeed about half the time, but for other players you'll need a little luck, but it's still very doable.

We don't know how "characteristics" (their name for abilities) will scale with level, but it appears that the Tactician starts with 3 Might (the values here are your modifier - there's no weird raw score that is rarely ever referenced) so it would seem that a good base TN (Target Number, rather than using "Difficulty Class") might be 10 (though we don't know what kind of value that Skills might add, so it could be more like 12).

We don't know how critting will work. Supposedly it'll be more frequent than in 5E, which to me suggests it could happen any time you roll a 6 on either die, which would be about 31% of the time.

    Classes, Subclasses, and Ancestries:

One thing that will be familiar is that there are a number of classes, each with its own subclasses, and that you'll be able to play various ancestries like humans, elves, dwarves, and presumably some weirder original creatures.

The classes that have been previewed look like they largely fit into familiar fantasy archetypes, but use unconventional names. Some will have obvious analogues: the Fury is the Barbarian, the Shadow is the Rogue, the Tactician is the Fighter, the Null is the Monk, the Conduit is the Cleric, the Censor is the Paladin. But we'll also see a little bit of unusual flair with some ideas like the Summoner as a kind of Necromancer/Conjurer and the Elementalist as a classic blasty mage. The Talent, of course, we've seen in 5E now, and while you could argue for it being vaguely similar to the Sorcerer, it's kind of its own thing.

    Roll for Damage, No Roll to Hit:

One of the exciting and curious things about the game is that there's no roll to hit a target. Instead, it looks like damage will simply happen, but monsters and player characters will have ways to reduce incoming damage.

That said, it also just seems that we should expect higher damage numbers. In the Backerkit preview pages, we see that the Tactician begins at 1st level with 38 HP plus their Endurance score (Endurance being basically Constitution) and gets an additional 8+END with each level.

Compare this with a 5E Fighter, who's going to have 10+Con at 1st level, so likely only 12 or 13. There's a good chance you're going to have more than three times as much HP - but perhaps that's necessary given that you'll likely be taking more damage.

    10 Levels:

The range from beginning adventurer to demigod-like hero is shortened here. The intention, according to Matt Colville, is that players should level up after an "adventure," which he suggests is something like a 32-to-64-page published adventure. The hope is that most campaigns will see players hit max level, and that all that exciting max-level content will not be a hazy dream the way it typically is in D&D.

    Kits:

Equipment is handled very differently. The game's emphasis is on the tactical fighting of monsters, and so the nitty-gritty about every piece of equipment you're carrying (and how much it all weighs) is left abstracted into something called Kits.

We're given some examples of Kits, and different classes will be able to use different kits. For example, one of the kits a Tactician (and presumably a Censor) could take is "Shining Armor," which is described as being heavy armor, a shield, a medium weapon, and a thrown weapon, and grants bonuses like adding 20 HP, 1 Speed (speed is measured in squares on a grid, so this is the equivalent of 5 feet,) +1 damage with weapon attacks and +5 range with weapon attacks (I'd assume this applies to thrown weapons). It then grants a once-per-encounter ability called "Lead the Charge," which lets you and all your allies within 10 squares of you to move up to your speed.

Kits thus feel like a sort of mix of equipment and "vibe."

    Initiative:

There's no initiative roll - instead, the players and the monsters take turns, and the party can discuss which order they want to take their turns in. The intention here is to encourage cooperative tactics - maybe the Fury has an ability that will knock those two kobolds closer to their allies and then the Elementalist can bring a Fireball down on them.

I'll be curious to see how this works when the party outnumbers the monsters (such as if you're fighting a deadly giant) and, by contrast, what happens if the monsters outnumber the party (such as a horde of zombies). Minions, like from Flee, Mortals! will likely be part of the game (the idea right now is that most of the monsters from Flee, Mortals! will probably also be in the base monster book) and will presumably attack as a unit, but we'll have to see how it works when you've got a party of five players facing off against, say, three hags.

    Default Setting:

MCDM is working on three settings, all of which take place in the same cosmos, but which serve different fantasy subgenres. Vasloria is their classic heroic fantasy setting of roving monsters, ruins to explore, and small villages in need of defenders. Capital is their grand city of intrigue, where politics and social maneuvering are central. The Timescape is their science-fantasy setting, which Colville pitches as having a 1970s Used Future aesthetic, though is certainly more on the fantastical side of things than having any really hard science-fiction (if they hit the Star Wars balance I'll be pretty happy with it).

However, the assumption that Colville suggests is that most people will play in their own homebrew settings. I know that, despite my longest-running campaign taking place in Ravnica, I generally prefer to use my own lore and setting.

What I hope we'll see is some guidance on creating customized stat blocks, akin to the chapter in 5E's Dungeon Master's Guide, which I've used extensively to create my own monsters, and which has generally been pretty effective at making cool and appropriately-challenging monsters in my experience.

    My Hopes for the System:

So far, the impression I've gotten of the game is that its core mechanics are relatively straightforward. The huge hurdle I think any new RPG system has to jump over is to tell us why we should play this instead of the system that we're already familiar with.

I think that, even if this game is everything I could hope it would be, there will still be an uphill battle convincing my players to try it.

Among my gaming friends, we're not the type that jumps around to a lot of systems, or even campaigns, very much. I have lots of friends who would rather not play than roll up a new character for a one-shot, and so the promise of a short, one-to-three-session adventure trying out this game will take a lot of convincing.

Furthermore, this game is promising to focus on a particular aspect of TTRPGs - the tactical combat side - which is, I'd guess, the thing most people think D&D does best. While I don't think there's any intention to be the "D&D Killer," in the sense that it would take all of the audience from D&D (which I just don't think is going to be possible in the short term when D&D's brand is at its most popular - terrible corporate decisions notwithstanding) it's clear that the intention here is to be the RPG that does what D&D does best, but better.

Given that I freaking love playing D&D, and think its combat system is super fun, I'd be overjoyed if it succeeds, because that'd both mean an even more fun game and create a pressure on D&D proper to improve.

But it remains to be seen if this will ever grow big enough to rival D&D, the way Pathfinder managed for a time during 4th Edition.

For my own personal predilections, I'll be curious to see how well this does the weirder aspects of fantasy. Colville's stated tastes strike me as erring toward tradition, with perhaps a generational preference for a kind of genre purity. But that's just based on what he says in his videos. By contrast, the actual design coming out of MCDM has proven to be a little more diverse - The Talent is by no means a traditional fantasy class, borrowing more from science fiction and horror (not that it's a "dark" horror-themed class, but that psychic powers often come along with paranormal stuff associated with horror) and if they come out with the Operator, we've got a very sci-fi-style class that could wind up fulfilling the promise of the Artificer better than 5E's version does (albeit with a narrower focus).

I've already pledged by own bucks toward the project (I'm considering shelling out for physical books, but it would more than double the amount of money I'd have to put in) and so I'm hoping to get some updates as the game takes shape.

I don't want to give the impression, though, that my interest in this game means I'm any less excited for the 2024 revamp of D&D 5E. I'm for sure getting the new core rulebooks when they come out, and will likely talk to my players about allowing them to convert to the new versions of their classes for my ongoing campaigns (and check in with my DM about converting to the new Wizard in our Wildemount game).

But I'm hoping that, moving forward, I'll have the chance to bring this game to the table as well and at least give it a good try.

Further into the Final Draft

 One of the challenges in comparing the Final Draft New Game Plus version of Alan Wake II with the original playthrough is that when I played the game the first time, I was not being much of a completionist. So there might be things I'm discovering this go-around that were actually there in the first version of the game.

I've finished The Heart chapter, which concludes with the boss fight against Nightingale. I can definitely tell you this: going into that fight with something like 16 shotgun shells and the pump-action shotgun from that you normally don't get until late in the game makes that fight way, way easier.

My first playthrough I was very low on ammo and battery charges (though I'm finding that not everything requires the flashlight) and so I'd basically get two shots into the undead ex-FBI psycho before having to run and scrounge for more ammo. This time, I did get grabbed a couple times, but it didn't seem to drain my health as much and I was mostly able to stagger him and fend him off, shooting him enough that he'd vanish and I'd have time to reload and heal up before my next confrontation.

At this point, I'm planning to do a thorough exploration of the Cauldron Lake area before heading back to Bright Falls, which has led to a couple encounters with the Taken Wolves, who take three full shotgun blasts to the face before they go down, but I have a better sense of how to deal with them - carefully track them as they circle around you and don't shoot until they're facing you, prowling forward.

It's actually kind of surprising how few enemies there are to fight before the first boss fight - really it's just the single Taken Cult of the Tree member in the convenience store and the two guys who come out of the water right before you get to the place where you need to put the heart into the hole in the witch sign.

While this game certainly doesn't have the insane endless waves of enemies that the first did, later parts of the game, as I recall, definitely had enough foes to really drain your resources. Maybe I've gotten better at pulling off headshots (I have the perk that staggers them if you land two headshots with the pistol in short succession) but this go around has felt a lot smoother so far. Still, we're very early in the game.

I've been keeping an eye out for differences - I'm finding, I think, more manuscript pages, but I don't know if that's because these are new or just that I didn't catch them the first time I played.

Oh, and I also noticed in my exploration of Cauldron Lake that there's a gate leading to the Lake House, which we know will be one of the two DLCs for the game, the Lake House being an FBC laboratory set up to study the lake.

I haven't decided if I want to change the order in which I play the game. Last time I basically alternated Saga and Alan chapters, so I did the Heart, then Casey, then Lost Girl, then Room 665, then... the one that takes place at the Nursing Home, and then Zane's Film. I've been toying with the idea of just playing through Saga's story in its entirety and then doing Alan's stuff, but we'll see how the mood takes me. My general recollection is that Saga's "levels" are easier but she has the bosses that are hard, and then Alan's levels are a little harder but of course don't have bosses.

Presuming that's still the case, of course.

Anyway, the game's gorgeous and I'm happy to jump into it, and happy to be doing so at a more relaxed pace (not sure if I'll finish it before I fly off for the holidays, so we might not roll credits on New Game Plus until next year.)