Poet's Theatre

 The final level for Alan's side of Alan Wake II is Poet's Theatre, for the chapter called Zane's Film. Like Caldera Street Station and the Oceanview Hotel, we enter this dilapidated space and follow the echoes of Alex Casey's investigation of a murder, but there are a few things that are a little different about this one.

In the previous levels, the echo/flashback stuff seems to be telling the story of how the Cult of the Word managed to kill people who are essentially the "Elite Taken" that Saga encounters in the game - Robert Nightingale in her first chapter and Cynthia Weaver in her third (I still don't have anything to really say about the fact that these chapters don't happen in the same order). There's a story in the theatre that connects to the Thornton and Mulligan, the dirty cops who, in the Cult of the Word version of the story, have sought to join the cult for some kind of personal gain, and are dumping the bodies of the cult's victims into a vent of some sort in an alley out back of the theater, all in the hopes of this act earning them a spot in the cult.

But the echo story gets... weird. And perhaps that's perfect: rule of three says that this third level should bring a change to the formula, and wouldn't you know it: the character being ensnared by the cult winds up being Casey himself.

While we do ultimately find Thornton and Mulligan's corpses in the projection room with the deer mask, arranged like the figures on the float commemorating the Huotari murders in Watery (the vent they dump bodies down feels connected to the Huotari Well - also, do we think that "Watery" is just a bastardization of the name "Huotari?") Casey seems to become the target.

And when we get to the final part of the level, something else strange happens: Alan winds up in an Overlap.

Now, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is true of all the levels - when we get to the big concrete chamber in Caldera Street Station with Nightingale's corpse we see flashes of Cauldron Lake, and when we enter Room 108 to find Cynthia Weaver's body, we see flashes of the bunker beneath Valhalla Nursing Home. But beyond merely getting flashes of the Huotari Well and Coffee World, Alan is forced to go through the same kind of looping landscape that Saga does when she enters her Overlaps - she goes through the woods near the Witch's Ladle when chasing down Nightingale, through a ravine and past the Watery Sauna and past the Huotari Well when chasing Thornton and Mulligan, and through the bunker while chasing Cynthia.

But Alan doesn't have to do these loops in the train station or the hotel - once he gets access to their area, he just walks right in.

Why, though?

Ok, we're not done talking about all the weird stuff, though:

We hear Casey chasing after the cult's "Grandmaster," but he seems to encounter a new version of himself in each iteration of the loop - like each loop is layering on top of itself, so that he's hearing echoes of himself but mistaking them for the grandmaster.

And then, in perhaps the most baffling part of the level, we find not Alex Casey, but Sam Lake (the performer, or the real-world Creative Director of Remedy Entertainment and primary author of these games?) tied to a chair and strongly hinting to us that we should stab him in the heart, but fleeing as soon as we get the knife to do it.

Finally, when we investigate the last echo here, the masked Grandmaster (who I believe is Tom Zane) addresses us directly, pushing aside the idea of Alex Casey to instead focus on Alan.

From there, we find the bodies of the dirty cops and can then descend into the theater to view Yöton Yö (Nightless Night) in... its entirety?

It feels as if there's something significant about this one's placement as the final chapter for Alan to play through before the game's ending. Tom Zane describes his film as the "companion piece" to Return, and thus perhaps it makes sense that this is the most directly personal to Alan of all his levels.

The film itself (which I've delved into pretty deeply) implies that there's some attempt to more or less have Alex Casey take his place in the Dark Place - Tom is playing Alan Wake in the movie (or the Finnish version of him). It's interesting, then, that in the game's ending, the Dark Presence takes over the real Alex Casey when it leaves Alan, but Alan decides to follow him and not simply run after escaping the Dark Place for the first time in 13 years.

Still, let's put forth a crazy hypothesis:

Why does Alan have to go through a looping Overlap?

What if he's connecting to some third place? What if, just as Saga is connecting to the Dark Place by going through her looping landscapes, Alan is touching on some place beyond? He goes through a massive cinema attic filled with film reels, and given the Grandmaster's likely identity, he seems to be connecting with Tom Zane.

Tom Zane remains, as always, an enigma. I've suggested in previous posts that he might be, in some way, a co-creator of Alan Wake. But let's throw out another, crazier possibility:

In Yöton Yö, Tom, playing Alan, has Alex Casey sacrificed to take his place in the Writer's Room. Alan has "taken the role of the detective" by picking up Casey's gun and flashlight. So, in an ironic sense, the "Alén Veikko" of the film is not really Alan, and instead Alex Casey is the character that Alan is tied to, with Tom usurping Alan's means of escape (there's a less sinister interpretation where Tom intends to "play" Wake in order to piggyback onto Alan's own escape, but this still likely involves the sacrifice of Alex Casey, which nearly happens in the end of the game).

Is it possible that Tom's similarity in appearance to Alan is not because of some previous connection between the two, but a method that "Tom" is trying to use to better align with Alan?

See, when we encounter Thomas Zane in the first game, he doesn't sound anything like Alan and, well, we never see his face. But "Thomas Zane" has been cosmically retconned into being a "character" that Tom played in his "most famous film," Tom the Poet. I'm inclined to believe that the filmmaker is not, actually, the "real" Zane, and that the poet was the real one before he wrote himself out of existence.

But if Thomas has become just a character in one of filmmaker Zane's films...

Isn't that exactly what Tom is doing to Alan by making Yöton Yö?

In other words, is "Tom" actually some entity that is leapfrogging from artist to artist, stealing their identities?

Now, if you'll forgive me, there's one last batshit idea I have to throw at the wall like so much spaghetti:

We know from emails from Barry Wheeler to Alice Wake that Barry has moved out to Hollywood to manage the Alex Casey film series - acting as an executive producer to advocate for the studio not to butcher his best friend's and client's novels.

It's in Hollywood that Barry encounters Chester Bless, whom we know from Control to be somehow associated with (likely the kingpin of) the Blessed Organization, an enigmatic paracriminal group that has killed FBC members and seems to be unleashing altered items upon the world (including, it should be noted, a film camera).

So, this is a real Hail Mary of a hypothesis, but:

What if "Tom Zane" is actually Chester Bless?

I'll walk this back a bit immediately, of course: the connections are tenuous. Bless seems based in Los Angeles, but I don't know if there's any strong evidence that he has ties to the film industry. Instead, I suspect that things like the Blessed Wellness Center are likely meant to evoke Scientology, the high-profile cult that worked very hard to ensconce itself in Hollywood. For those of you who don't live here, you might be surprised at the massive properties the cult has, like the "Celebrity Center" across the street from Upright Citizen's Brigade (I have friends who do improv and sketch comedy, so I've been there a few times). While often seen as something of a punchline about how weird Hollywood is, historically the Scientologists were nevertheless responsible for one of the largest infiltration of US Government agencies in something called "Operation Snow White" in the 1970s - with 5000 agents of the church infiltrating and stealing from various offices and agencies.

In the current version of history in which Zane (the filmmaker) had the house that is now Valhalla Nursing Home built, he's described as being something of a cult leader, with the house serving as the kind of cult headquarters. In the Dark Place NYC, Poet's Theatre is the headquarters of the Cult of the Word. Now, its connection to the Huotari Well could simply mean that it's really more connected to the Cult of the Tree's headquarters in the Kalevala Knights workshop, but I think Zane's influence and impact on all of this cannot be discounted.

So - a tenuous connection with Chester Bless to be sure, and I'll happily drop this theory if new evidence arises to separate the two figures.

Still, something about the Poet's Theatre feels special.

The Oceanview

 In Control, I believe our first encounter with the Oceanview Motel and Casino is when we need to cross the gap in the Executive Sector to reach The Hotline. The Oceanview is one of the FBC's most consistent known Places of Power, and has been used by agents even just to rest for a while in a comfortable bed.

Practically speaking, the Motel is a transitory place - which makes sense, as it takes the form of a classic American roadside motel.

When I was a kid, we did a number of cross-country road trips from Massachusetts to California, and we stayed in many of these generic motels en route. These are places you visit and stay for the night but forget about shortly after you leave them. The Oceanview seems to be a kind of archetype of those sorts of motels.

The Motel is reached by pulling three times on a light switch cord, found initially while the FBC was investigating an AWE in Butte, Montana in 1992. But the cord started appearing in the Oldest House. Pulling the cord three times causes you to appear at one end of the motel, where a bunch of doors that have strange symbols on them flank you. There's a small lobby, and then another hall with conventionally numbered doors.

In the game, the numbered doors are typically part of a puzzle - you ding the bell at the counter and one of those doors will open - each door opening and closing in sequence. Solving the puzzle grants you the key that opens the door with the inverted black pyramid on it, and another cord will take you back to the Oldest House - either to the same spot but with a change (such as a bridge appearing) or to the place you were trying to go.

This is a strange and eldritch place. The FBC doesn't know where the Oceanview Motel is located, if it even has a location, though one time we visit it, we can hear voices from outside knocking at the door and deciding it must be closed (we cannot see the people out the windows). Another time, blood seeps from under one of the doors on the numbered side. When Jesse is nearly taken over by the Hiss following the destruction of Hedron, it is into the Oceanview Motel that she escapes the Hiss-induced nightmare and where she is able to find/reignite Polaris within her. And finally, we visit it one time during the AWE expansion, and find a darkened Oceanview, seemingly affected by the Dark Presence.

Now, flash forward four years to Alan Wake II.

Alan is trapped in a nightmarish, grimey version of New York City. But in his second main chapter, Room 665, he is directed to explore the Oceanview Hotel.

Superficially, this Oceanview is utterly different. Where the Motel and Casino was the kind of place you'd find out on a remote highway in the Western United States, the Oceanview Hotel is a water-damaged ruin of a fancy old New York hotel. The place holds a kind of faded glory - once a luxury hotel, the wallpaper is now peeling off the walls, and the signs of a terrible murder mark the place.

But there are ample hints that these two places are connected, and indeed might actually be the same place in a metaphysical sense.

The first is that the address to the hotel is 3 Cord St. The second, and perhaps more compelling hint is that the very same symbols appear on the doors of the hotel - including the inverted Black Pyramid and the Spiral (which we do actually see elsewhere in Alan Wake II). And, of course, there's the name.

I think another element of note is the presence of Tom Zane - as we talked about in a recent post, Tom Zane should perhaps be thought of as separate from Thomas Zane, the poet and "Light Presence" from the first game. Tom Zane's nature is a huge enigma, but in Alan Wake II, he sort of inhabits the Oceanview Hotel.

Or does he?

Alan gets phone calls from Tom Zane, but never do we see Tom in the world of the game - instead, he appears in live-action filmed segments (performed by Ilkka Villi, who also provides the motion capture and live-action visual performance for Alan, though Tom is Villi in both appearance and voice). He "inhabits" Room 665 (the neighbor of the beast, and running gag throughout Remedy games - honestly, it shows up like 19 does in Stephen King's Dark Tower series) but it's a little weird: When Alan makes it into the Oceanview and goes to meet with Tom, Room 665 is only an empty square room, but within that room is a film projector. Turning it on starts a scene that we can enter similarly to how we enter the televisions at Mr. Door's talk show. But in that film, Alan goes into a different Room 665 and meets his Finnish doppelganger, who welcomes him to "The House of Zane."

And that Room 665 is more of a luxury hotel suite, with a little couch area with a TV and a big bed.

One of the key features of The House of Zane is that there's a big painting of a black-and-white spiral above the TV.

Back in Control's AWE expansion, when Jesse gets a glimpse through the spiral door at the Oceanview Motel and Casino, she spies on Alan speaking with Tom (though in this case both are rendered in video game graphics, and look identical to one another, including facial hair and clothing) in a lodge room with that same painting.

The fact that Jesse is peeking in while Alan and Tom speak does allow an interpretation that Alan's first encounter with Tom in Room 665 is, in fact, another "draft" of the conversation from AWE - with Jesse's face appearing on the television as an interpretation of her peeking in through the door.

But we don't know.

Still, it does lend some credibility to the notion that the Oceanview Motel and Casino and the Oceanview Hotel are just two forms of the same thing - that perhaps it looks different depending on who is looking at it and in what context.

Now, let's consider the symbols.

The Spiral certainly seems associated with the Dark Place, and specifically with Alan's Writer's Room there. The inverted pyramid seems very likely to refer to the pyramid from which the Board contacts the Director of the FBC. Supposedly, the other symbols are affiliated with other Remedy projects, like Vanguard.

It would stand to reason, then, that the Oceanview connects with all of these different planes of reality, and might be a transitory space that one passes through to get from one to another.

But that leaves some questions:

First, the Oceanview is one of the three major locations for Alan's part of the game. It's a murder site, where the catastrophic performance of The Cult takes place. Now, already, the reality of these murders is a big question: Did the real Alex Casey investigate real Cult of the Word cases in New York, or are these just symbolic versions of the cases surrounding the "Elite Taken" in the Bright Falls area?

In other words, on a certain level, the Oceanview Hotel is just another "level" like Caldera Street Station and the Poet's Theatre.

The other oddity is that there's a third Oceanview.

Near Bright Falls, during World War II, a bunker was built to defend against a potential attack on the west coast by the Japanese. This, of course, never got used, and was abandoned after the war. Later, Thomas Zane (not Tom? I think?) had a house built over it, and after his disappearance, the house eventually was purchased to become the Valhalla Nursing Home. But teenagers would sneak down into the bunker to drink and get high and have sex. And the teens called it, as an inside joke, the Oceanview Hotel.

Now, our in-game experience of this bunker is weird.

We're told the bunker is beneath Valhalla, but we only descend into it via an Overlap, going down into the little pond between the main house and the medical center - so we never actually find a hatch or door or stairway into it. Instead, we only see it as a looping Overlap through which Saga is chasing the now-Taken Cynthia Weaver and trying to rescue her grandfather.

The connection with the Oceanview Hotel in the Dark Place is mostly apparent - we find Cynthia's body in room 108 of the hotel, evidently as the target of "The Devil" in the performance of The Cult, and we are able to send the record of "Anger's Remorse" to the real world for Saga to use and open the Overlap.

But this Oceanview, even if it's a surreal, looping Overlap, doesn't share the distinguishing features of the Control version or the Dark Place version. To my knowledge, the symbol doors are not there and there's no front desk.

The one possible exception is if we include the upper floor of the house, where there is a single door with the Spiral shape - which is key to the very end of the game (and seemingly guarded by Ahti, whose room at the home is next to this door).

Ultimately, I suspect that the true nature of the Oceanview is going to remain a mystery. I'm inclined to think that the "real world" version - the Bunker - is, while not quite "coincidental" in its naming, likely not possessed of the true "Place of Power" nature as the versions found via the Light Cord and within the Dark Place.

The Component Pieces of the Man, Alan Wake?

 Now that I'm back after my winter holiday and have had a couple days of downtime to get back into my playthrough of Alan Wake II's New Game Plus mode, The Final Draft, I've been theorizing. I just finished Zane's Film, which means that I've basically just got the final battle at Cauldron Lake - though I'm still vainly hoping that I can wait for a patch or fix to let Saga collect all of the Cult Stashes and the second inventory upgrade (interestingly, I was able to get the third one in Bright Falls after some update/reset).

The Final Draft has definitely made some additions and changes, even if, for the vast majority of the game, it plays the same. But I wanted to talk about a particular pair of videos that appear in it whose descriptions themselves are somewhat spoilery (though they are teased in the Final Draft trailer).

But let's put this behind a spoiler cut anyway. Spoilers for Alan Wakes 1 & 2 and Control

Stillfleet Overview: Premise and Basics

 Stillfleet is a relatively new TTRPG, the core rulebook of which I received for Christmas. Full disclosure, the game's chief editor is a friend of mine.

Stillfleet is a far-future, sci-fi, class-based RPG, but one that downplays fighting monsters (though you can do plenty of that) in favor of having a wide array of abilities that can help with traversal, social encounters, and other such things.

Set hundreds of millions of years in the future, Stillfleet is a post-human world. There are "humans" that you can play as, but these are more accurately the descendants of modern humanity in most cases. There are also various strange life forms, including some synthetic kinds and some that are extra-dimensional - one rare option is a being whose three-dimensional "shadow" that we would see is like three elephant legs and a sphere.

The game is meant to be weird, and readers of this blog and my other ones will recognize that I am someone who has become very interested in the New Weird literary movement.

The main setting for the game is upon a space station known as the Spindle, which is an utterly vast structure that has within it various tunnels that act as teleportation portals. Decades ago, the Spindle was a hub for a vast empire across known space, but after the portals stopped working, contact with the rest of the cosmos was cut off, and their recent reactivation has led to a wide-scale effort to re-establish ties and lay the groundwork for a re-establishment of this imperial control.

Players work for the Worshipful Company of Stillfleeters, also known as "The Co.," which is explicitly an evil, proto-colonialist entity comparable to a far-future version of the Dutch East India Company. The degree to which the Co. exploits those on the various planets and ships you explore, as well as your characters - the "Voidminers," becomes a big part of any story in the game.

In terms of gameplay, you'll pick a race and class, much like other RPGs. These include the Banshee, who specializes in operating archaic technology (known as "arcahetech,") and are needed to activate the "Malkovich Tunnels" that allow you to travel to other worlds, or the Witness, a kind of anthropologist who specializes in connecting and understanding the alien cultures you encounter, to the Stillrijder, which is the arms specialist whose job it is to defend the rest of the party.

Like other RPGs, you have various broad attributes, but rather than getting a modifier to a d20 roll, you'll assign different dice to these various attributes instead (you can also sometimes get little bonuses to these rolls, but the main thing is figuring out which thing you have a d12 in versus which you have a d6 in).

Classes begin at level 1 with various signature abilities, but as you level up, rather than getting a steady progression of new features, you choose from various lists that your class enables you to pick from. In other words, you'll get a little harder to kill as you gain HP, but every feature can be picked at level 1, so you don't have to wait very long to get your super cool stuff.

While this is a science-fiction game, there is a vague equivalent to spellcasting, which is known as "The Hell Sciences." These are areas of study where empiricism has kind of taken a back seat to superstition, and is themed around cosmic horror entities, like the King in Yellow.

One of the core mechanics of the game is "Grit." As you level up, you'll have a Pool of both Health and Grit. The former works as you'd expect it to, but Grit is essentially the fuel you use for your abilities. Your abilities cost different amounts of Grit, and often a somewhat randomized amount of it (an ability might cost, say, 10-dMov, which means you'd roll your Movement die and subtract the result from the cost of the ability). Grit is also what keeps you alive if you are reduced to zero hit points, so it becomes a bit of a gamble when you use different grit-spending features.

    I'm still only around halfway through the core rulebook, but I think that the overall intent of the game is to be one where you're making strategic decisions about your character build, but which doesn't force combat to be the be-all and end-all of what your Ventures entail.

As I go through the rules, I'll post more about how different systems work, such as technology levels and complexity and the structure of the Co.

The Potential and Possibilities of MCDM's Combat System

 So, I am not on MCDM's Patreon, so I don't have access to the playtest rules for their new, still-unnamed RPG. I pledged some money on Backerkit to get the rules PDFs when they come out, but unless I throw some more money their way to become a Patron, I'll be getting their playtest stuff second-hand (unless they throw the test open to the general public, which could happen but will probably only come later in the process - for a game that isn't due to come out until 2025).

In a previous post, I talked about the impressions I got from the video of James Introcaso (MCDM's lead designer, and kind of second face of the company after founder Matt Colville) running an encounter for two guys from The Character Sheet.

There are many videos talking about how this game might be particularly appealing to people who have only played 5th Edition, and while that's technically not true for me, it is close to the truth, as my experience with other TTRPGs is limited.

(Incidentally, I'll likely be digging deeper into Stillfleet in the coming year, but need to finish reading the core rulebook.)

Still, what others have identified is that MCDM's game seems aimed at doing a better job than 5E does at being the sort of game that 5E players want to play - in other words, to shed the vestiges of older D&D editions that Colville believes are only there for the sake of nostalgia, and instead embrace the style of story-forward, heroic adventure that today's D&D players are into.

As a contrast, Colville argues that D&D began its life as something more akin to survival horror - a dungeon was a dark and terrifying place where death lurked at every corner, and where having ten-foot poles to trigger traps before you stepped into that particular hallway was crucial, and where tracking rations and torches was part of the challenge of surviving the dungeon's challenges.

Players these days, though, are looking for a chance to fight monsters in epic encounters and as part of a cinematic narrative, and he feels that there are several ways in which 5E, and indeed most D&D-derived RPGs, fall short of this.

In my mind, there are two key things that distinguish the game from 5E - they aren't the only differences, but they're what I think are the real cores of how this game should feel different.

The first is the removal of attack rolls, which has a few cascading effects:

The good thing is that, no matter how your turn goes, you'll at least accomplish something. That said, there are exceptions: for example, Banes, which are kind of the equivalent of disadvantage, require you to reduce your rolls (including damage rolls) by a number of d4s equal to the banes (you might get one from being webbed up and another from being poisoned, or something). Thus, if you have a very unlucky roll, you could wind up subtracting so much from your damage to reduce it to zero - say, if your attack usually hits for 2d6+3, and you roll snake eyes, but then also have two banes and get a 2 and a 3, that means zero damage. But that's pretty rare (people who have tested the game say that at this stage it's rare to get a net boon or bane that's more than 2d4 - any boons you get cancel out a bane, and vice versa).

The idea here is to remove the frustration of waiting fifteen minutes to come around to your turn and then missing with your attacks. And that appears to be working.

But there are a couple things this also requires you to re-think.

Monsters also don't have to roll to hit - which means player health will be dropping constantly. Now, classes each have their own Triggered Action, and some of these can help you avoid damage. A Tactician, for example, can halve the damage they take from an attack, or the damage a nearby ally takes. They can also spend 1 Focus (and we'll get into these resources in a bit) to further reduce that damage with a roll (I believe it was something like 1d6+3, which might be based on their Might score - bumping it to 4 could mean some more damage reduction). In other words, it's possible to reduce that damage to zero with lucky rolls. But, like a reaction, you only get one such triggered action per round, so it becomes a tactical choice on when you want to use it - probably best to save it for if the big scary boss monster hits you.

The other implication of this is that, with no more concept of Armor Class, armor doesn't actually make you harder to hit anymore. Instead, it becomes a flat increase to your Hit Points.

Mathematically, of course, AC is basically going to put a (below-1) coefficient on the damage you take on average - if your AC is 18 and the monster has a +7 to hit, that means that more or less you'll be taking 50% as much damage. You could just give yourself twice as much health and would take, on average, the same amount of time for the monster to knock you to zero HP.

If attack rolls were the only way to take damage, that is.

See, I think there's room here for mechanics that can make up for this, but in 5E, you can have a character who is better-equipped to handle different kinds of attacks. In my long-running game where I played an Eldritch Knight, he was extremely well-equipped to face off against foes that made attacks, as I could boost his AC to 27 with the Shield spell - a creature with a +9 to hit would only be hitting me on a roll of 18 or higher. But his Dexterity was 10, so something like a Fireball or a Red Dragon's Breath would usually do full damage against me (this is why I also had Absorb Elements, but that would be less useful against something that did, say, Necrotic damage). But my friend's Monk, of course, had a lower AC (even with Bracers of Defense he probably only had an AC of 18 or 19) but when that Fireball came, he'd be extremely well-equipped to handle it, with a high chance to succeed on the save and, thanks to Evasion, taking zero damage when he did.

In other words, there's some nuance that is lost here.

But I think there are ways to add this back in.

For example, the Tactician's Parry Triggered Maneuver/Action/whatever is, I believe, based on weapon attacks - I don't think you can parry a spell. I could imagine the Elementalist (who seems to be a kind of Wizard/Sorcerer analogue with a focus on stuff like fireballs and lightning bolts) has a Triggered Action that deflects or otherwise reduces incoming magical damage, you might find different heroes shining in different scenarios - which is good for a game with classes.

It should also be noted that not all Triggered Actions are defensive - the Fury (MCDM's Barbarian analogue) instead gets to attack back against the foe that hit them - which should account for significantly more damage dealt. And, of course, killing the enemies faster is a tried-and-true way to reduce the overall damage you take.

Also notable is that your Recoveries, which are the main way you regain hit points and seem to be the one major limiting factor on how long you can go on adventuring without resting, will heal you for a flat 1/3 of your maximum HP. And when you consider that, raising your HP is, in fact, more or less identical to reducing the damage you take, because we can kind of think of damage purely in terms of the fraction of your health that is reduced. (This is not the case in D&D, where healing is stuck at relatively flat rates - a standard Healing Potion is always going to heal you for 2d4+2, which is about 7, regardless of whether you're a level 1 Wizard with 8 HP or a level 10 Barbarian with 105, meaning that the relative value of damage reduction - such as via Rage - will vary greatly depending on your healing-to-HP ratio).

What we have yet to discover is how AoE damage will affect this, and also how things will look at higher levels.

2d6 takes the place of the d20 when it comes to resolving checks and such in this game, but it's also the standard damage of attacks, whether with a longsword or a dagger. In the Backerkit sample Tactician, we see that their Basic Attack, called "Precise Attack," deals 2d6+Reason damage (Reason is essentially Intelligence, and Tacticians automatically start with 3s in Might and Reason, and can choose two 2s and two 1s to put into the other four stats.) If you pick "Cleave" as a Stratagem (a menu of options for special attacks that Tacticians get at level 1) you'll deal 2d6+MGT (Might) damage, which, we'll note, is the same damage as our Precise Attack given that we have 3s in both stats (though Cleave will also hit a an additional nearby enemy for damage equal to our Might, and it also generates 1 focus - which makes it seem strictly better than Precise Attack unless I'm missing something).

Now, it appears that the Shadow (Rogue equivalent) is also doing 2d6 plus some modifier - and these modifiers can be altered by Kits, which come with their own special abilities (though these can only be used once per encounter).

As of yet, the only testing that has been available to the public is at level 1. And, frankly, this level 1 stuff looks quite exciting and interesting. But I don't really have a great sense of how things will scale. In addition to Boons and Banes, we'll also be seeing Impact Dice, which are d8s - meaning that with two impact dice, they're now contributing more on average to your damage than your base 2d6. The system so far appears to only use d4s, d6s, and d8s (meaning I really need to invest in some of those pill-shaped d4s). But I don't know how damage is going to scale up at higher levels - I'm not sure the designers have even cracked that yet.

Moving on, though:

The other big signature mechanic for this game will be the different resources used by each class. We saw Tacticians use Focus, Shadows use Insight, and Furies use Rage. We can also pretty confidently guess that Talents will use Strain, but likely it will work differently than it does in their 5E version of the class.

In I believe all three of the testable classes, these resources go away when combat ends - meaning that they only play a role in combat. Then again, this is a combat-heavy system. What I've seen praised about this is that it does make for interesting choices in a fight. In D&D's attrition-based resource system, the first round of combat is usually the one in which the most exciting stuff is happening. The "Nova" is a popular strategy that takes my aforementioned "killing enemies faster is a great way to reduce incoming damage" to its logical endpoint, ideally burning through resources quickly to wipe out half the foes in a fight and make the rest of it go much easier.

Heroic Resources are designed to make this kind of play less likely. Insight, for the Shadow (the Rogue equivalent,) is generated, I believe, by using certain Insight-generating attacks. Assassinate, one of the core Insight-spenders, costs 5 Insight, meaning that you'll need to take some time building up to it before you can let loose with this big attack, which I think adds two impact dice to your damage (so 2d6+2d8+some modifier).

So, already this requires some ramping up, meaning that the fight gets more exciting in the later rounds. I also think that by using resources that go away when combat ends, you're incentivized to unleash your big moves to finish the fight off - if all your Insight is going away at the end of combat, you'll want to blow your big Assassinate ability even if it's just on that last surviving Kobold. And that means that you're not conserving and doing minimal damage just because you want to save your big stuff and figure one monster isn't going to be dealing much damage to you.

By letting resources drain at the end of combat, as well, it doesn't incentivize keeping a monster alive to torment long enough to build up resources for the next fight.

Instead, accruing Victories empowers you for future fights. Each time you complete a combat encounter, or do other various victorious things like solving a tough puzzle or navigating a deadly trap, you get a Victory. These will then let you start off future fights with some resources (likely for most classes, an amount of your resource equal to your Victories, though with the Talent probably reducing your Strain by that amount), and have some passive benefits as well. In other words, your Shadow might have to wait a long time to use their Assassinate ability during the first fights of an adventure, but once they're deep into it, they might be able to pull one off in the first round.

This will incentivize seeking out more monsters to fight. But I don't think that's entirely a bad thing: This game is not about dungeon-crawling. You might have a dungeon to explore, but the combat encounters are more likely to be set-pieces than random encounters meant to drain your resources.

The tension, thus, becomes between going into battles with a bunch of victories, or retreating in order to rest and regain Recoveries.

Now, another note that was mentioned in a roundtable by the Knights of the Last Call is that these resources also sometimes come with passive effects. One of them, who played a Fury, noted that Rage gave a passive damage reduction for each point of Rage they had - which created a tactical judgment for them to make - they had an ability called Whirlwind, which cost a bunch of Rage and deal damage to multiple enemies. But was it worth losing the damage reduction they had from the Rage?

And I think this is the sort of decision that's interesting to make - risk versus reward.

Where I think this does remove some tension, though, is in combat-versus-noncombat uses of resources. As an example:

In D&D, if I'm playing my Wizard, and I have the Fly spell, it might be a good idea for me to use it (or something like Levitate) to fly up a shaft and tie a rope off at the top that will allow my party to ascend the shaft. I spend a spell slot to do so - one of my precious resources - that could otherwise have been, say, a Fireball. But I've made the strategic choice to expend one of those slots. Perhaps if I hadn't, my allies would have risked failed Athletics checks to climb the shaft and taken fall damage - even if the slot meant I didn't have the Fireball to kill all those Mud Mephits we encounter later on, it might wind up being better overall for the party.

With all resources (or at least the ones we've seen so far) so combat-focused, I wonder if we'll lose some of the tension in out-of-combat situations.

We also don't really know how magic classes are going to work. I suspect they will use similar Heroic Resource systems. Will we see a giant selection of spells, or will each class get its own bespoke magical abilities that are no greater in variety than the Stratagems of a Tactician.

I honestly don't think the latter scenario would be so bad - one of the problems with D&D, in my opinion, is the vast versatility that any spellcaster gets over any non-spellcaster. Indeed, the way that 5E does spells also creates a lot of overlap in class capabilities. Oh, you can Detect Magic? Cool, so can nearly any other spellcaster.

    It's early days on the MCDM RPG. And I do think that my overall impression has been positive. I could very much imagine running this game for my D&D players, and so far at least, I think that (at least at level 1) the game system doesn't seem too overwhelmingly complex. It looks like you'll have some real decisions to make, but with a curated list of options to make making those decisions fairly well-informed. Again, we'll have to see how higher levels look, and perhaps if things are this complex at level 1, we might need to be worried about how much an additional nine levels will pile on complexity.

Still, I think a great deal of effort is being put into the feel of the game, and I suspect it will be very satisfying.

Getting a Look at MCDM's Combat

 Well, I finally watched a video of MCDM's new RPG's combat in action. Lead Designer James Introcaso ran a two-player combat encounter for the folks over at the Character Sheet and I got a sense of how the mechanics of this game function.

The players were a Shadow and a Tactician. These are the analogues for the Rogue and Fighter, but with the Shadow pushing for a more mystical angle that includes teleportation and the Tactician leaning into the battlefield-commander idea that in D&D is similar in flavor to the Battle Master.

The game works differently from D&D in several ways, but still looks familiar in terms of what a battle map looks like and the overall vibe and goals.

First, let's talk dice:

The game is a 2d6 system rather than a d20 system, and so the vast majority of rolls you'll be making will be 2d6 plus some modifier. In addition to these, there are d4s an d8s that can get thrown into the mix. D4s represent "boons and banes," which fill the roll of Advantage or Disadvantage - if you're, say, webbed up by a giant spider, your attacks will have a bane on them, requiring you to subtract the result of a d4 from your attacks, but if you have, say, a skill, you can add a boon of a d4 on top of the base ability you're using, such as combining the Athletics skill with a Might test (the equivalent of a Strength check).

Famously, the game does not use attack rolls - if you attack a foe, they will take damage, and it's just a question of how much damage. Regardless of what kind of weapon you're using, you'll be rolling 2d6 and adding a modifier. Enemies will also attack in this way, but in this example, the Shadow and Tactician each had a Triggered Action (akin to a reaction) that they could use to reduce the damage they took - the Tactician could be hit for as much as 22 damage and, with their class-specific defensive ability, reduce that to as little as 3 and even on occasion to zero - but you need to choose which attack to reduce, because you only get one of these per round.

Gear is handled in broad terms with "kits." A Tactician might pick up a kit that gives them heavy armor, which simply increases their max HP, and provides a few other scattered bonuses. But other than magic items, it doesn't look like you'll be tracking a whole lot of things like individual weapons, shields, helmets, etc. Example kits we've seen have also added new abilities.

The Shadow and the Tactician each have unique resources, and at least from the perspective of the video, these seemed to build up in similar ways. Shadows gain Insight, which they get when they use their basic attacks, and gain additional Insight when they have a boon on their attack (remember, that d4 bonus). Tacticians have Focus, which seems to build at the beginning of each round and might be generated faster by certain abilities. These resources can be spent to perform more powerful attacks. For example, the Shadow can spend 5 Insight to perform "Assassinate," which adds a d8 (maybe 2d8?) to their normal 2d6 and modifiers. The Tactician used 5 Focus to perform "Hammer and Anvil," which let them make an attack and then also let the Shadow make a free basic attack on the Tactician's turn.

Initiative is looser - the party rolls a d6 against the monsters, so it's "side initiative," but with alternating turns. When the fight began, the party was two adventurers versus five goblins, so they started with one of the players, then one of the goblins, then the other player, and then the remaining goblins. The party and the Director (GM) choose who on their side goes in what order, which is intended to encourage players to think tactically about what order they want to take their turns - you might have some cool attack that deals damage to enemies in a line, so you wait for your Tactician buddy to go first and try to push one of the monsters into a line between two others.

    So, what do I think?

I love this a lot conceptually, but I do see some challenges that might present themselves:

First, players will need to be paying close attention - you can't really just look at your phone when it isn't your turn. Furthermore, there's definitely more bookkeeping - with resources that are generated in combat, you'll need to be tracking their generation as well as their spending, which means I can imagine some players forgetting to do so when a round starts and getting confused as to how much of a resource they have. Likewise, I can imagine that, especially in big encounters, a Director might have a hard time remembering which of their monsters have gone in a given round.

Something I like, though, is that because every attack is a guaranteed hit, you don't really need something like Extra Attack, whose primary utility (other than just doing more damage) is smoothing out your chance to hit - it sucks to miss, but if you have a 50% hit chance, getting Extra Attack reduces your chance to miss overall to 25%. Now, it's fine to just pile on the damage as you get more powerful.

It's also clear that, from level 1, you're going to have cool things to do, but unlike some systems I've found a little overwhelming, it doesn't seem like you'll be bogged down too much in complexity. In other words, I suspect that building a character will be relatively quick - perhaps even quicker than 5E, but that you'll have interesting choices from the get-go. I often try to start my 5E campaigns at a higher level these days because of how limited it feels at levels 1 and 2 (and honestly, I like to get to tier 2 as soon as possible).

I think they're only now starting to get the higher levels figured out, but the core playtesting has been to ensure that level 1 is fun, and I suspect that it will be.

At the same time, this game is very clearly aiming to be the kind of game that D&D is as most people playing it these days play it. That creates a big hurdle for them to clear - can they convince players that they should learn a new system to run the same kind of game they've been running already?

So far, the rules appear simple enough that you can learn it without too much difficulty, but I'll be curious to see how complex things get at higher levels. Part of this will also just involve resetting our numbers values, like how 20 degrees Celsius is comfortable but is frigid in Fahrenheit. So, for example, the Tactician in this video, at level 1, had 60 hit points - which most 5E Fighters wouldn't get until level 6 or 7. Likewise, in D&D, getting a 10 on an ability check is only rarely a success, whereas here it's a pretty reasonable "moderate difficulty" target. Oh, and DCs are now TNs (Difficulty Class versus Target Number - which is actually a clearer term, not requiring any adage like "meets it beats it").

Going back to the Kit idea, one thing I liked was how the Shadow fought with daggers. There aren't different damage dice for different weapons, so unlike in D&D where you'd be better off with, say, shortswords or a shortbow in most situations, these daggers could be used in a fully effective way. I believe that a kit that includes daggers might include a special attack that is flavorfully linked to them, but it looks like you're going to be able to have a lot of flexibility in the overall vibe you're going for.

The benefit of this all being heroic fantasy is that it should take very little effort to play this game in a setting you've already created for D&D - or even to play in an established D&D setting, if you've been wanting to play, say, a Ravenloft campaign.

I also think that it's possible it'll be easy to homebrew kits that can let you step outside the genre a little - a "Tactician" could, I imagine, easily work with a kit that includes modern body armor and an assault rifle, or a Shadow might work with a kit that includes cybernetics and laser swords. Currently, the plan is to have three linked official settings, which include a standard fantasy setting, an urban intrigue and politics setting, and a space-fantasy setting called the Timescape. I'm eager to see how they'll handle these, and ideally, if the rules will be robust and flexible enough to let us play around in genre.

The proof in the pudding will be to see how complex the game gets as you ascend through the levels. There are only ten levels, but the folks at MCDM claim that a level 10 character in their game should be comparable to a level 20 character in D&D - only that you should actually be able to hit level 10 in most campaigns.

Looking Back and Looking Forward: Games of 2023 and 2024

 It's a new year, and of course, as it always seems, we're in a year that previously felt like the realm of science fiction. 2024 is now just reality.

But, even though it's sort of arbitrary that January happens to be the first month of the year, we're at a place where we can think about what the coming year will bring and what we might want to do with it.

2023 was a great year for games, some of which I haven't even played yet (I have Tears of the Kingdom downloaded to my Switch but am waiting until I get back to Los Angeles so I can play it on my TV). Armored Core VI, Baldur's Gate 3, Mario Wonder (which I also just got and have actually played a bit of,) and probably my favorite game of the year, Alan Wake II.

On that last note, 2023 was also when I played Control and then Alan Wake (I), and became fascinated with the Remedyverse (sufficient to get me very excited about Alan Wake II).

In the Tabletop realm, I continued to play lots of D&D, with probably the most notable thing being that I just got my players to tier 4.

So, what am I excited about in 2024?

    Trying New TTRPGS:

For Christmas, I got a copy of the core rulebook for Stillfleet, a game on which my brother-in-law serves as Editor. The system looks like it has the benefit of being simple but deep, and is built to run very off-beat, weird stories, but still allows for the kind of tactical choices that purely narrative RPGs sometimes skimp on.

But there are also other things coming out that I'm excited about - I don't know if we'll be getting any early preview of the MCDM RPG - though there are existing playtests for Patreon patrons - but it's something I'll be following closely. I also don't know many details about Darrington Press' Daggerheart, but I'm curious to see how that works.

    D&D's 50th Anniversary 5E Revamp:

This blog has, of course, featured a lot of posts dissecting in minute detail the various playtest versions of D&D's class revisions and other revamps 5E. For every detail I'm grumbled about or criticized, my overall impression of these revisions has been extremely positive, and I think that the game is going to get a real shot in the arm, with classes like the Monk and possibly the Ranger (though we'll have to see how close it hews to the earlier playtest versus the more recent one) becoming genuinely very appealing while it looks like already-popular classes should feel just as cool as they were and even get their own quality-of-life improvements.

I'll likely be opening the doors to my players to allow them to convert their existing characters to the new versions of their classes, and I actually don't anticipate there being much friction in doing so (though we'll maybe have to put a pin in whether I'll let them undo old Ability Score Improvements to take on the new versions of feats).

    Final Fantasy VII Rebirth:

Final Fantasy VII Remake took I believe a full ten years to actually arrive after its initial announcement, but when it did it managed to be incredible - an update that introduced more action-oriented gameplay but nevertheless retained all the tactical strategies of the old menu-based combat system of old school Final Fantasy games.

Indeed, as the series pivoted fully to action with FFXVI, I think that this thing, technically a side project, managed to feel like a better successor to the series than its latest official entry.

    Alan Wake II's DLCs:

I have not yet finished my "Final Draft" playthrough of Alan Wake II, sitting at about 2/3rds completion (I have nearly nothing left to do as Saga except for a couple things that seem bugged, but still have two more major chapters on Alan's side) but as cool as it is to see things change, it's still a New Game Plus - meaning the game is still mostly the same experience.

With only the titles and in-game context to guide us, AWII's upcoming DLCs, The Lakehouse and Night Springs, radiate fascinating implications. Night Springs is the in-universe Twilight Zone-like show that seems to be connected to Mr. Door and the FBC, and so we might figure out what the meaning of the oblique references to the show in the main game ultimately mean. The Lakehouse is the name of an FBC facility that was built on the shores of Cauldron Lake and seems to have gone dark.

    Shadow of the Erdtree:

Speaking of DLC, Elden Ring is my favorite of FromSoft's Soulslike games they've ever made, and rumor has it that, in this DLC expansion (something FromSoft has a very good reputation for making amazing, such as Bloodborne's The Old Hunters) is going to be an utterly massive area with, I'm sure, tons of new weapons, spells, armor, enemies, dungeons, and brutal bosses. It should also give us tons of new lore to dissect and speculate about, seemingly involving Miquella, who at least so far seems like the most benevolent and admirable of the demigods (or at least the one with the best P.R.)

Elden Ring has been out for a good long while now, making this a longer wait than usual for DLC content, but given FromSoft's consistent quality, I think it will probably be worth it.

    Obviously, these are the things that I'm excited about. But this time last year I think I was only barely aware of Control and had no idea that it was connected in any way to Alan Wake or Max Payne. So perhaps the thing I'm most excited for the coming year will be what new discoveries, new passions I'll find in that time.