Fixing (by Replacing) Vulnerability in 5E

 Having been playing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth for the past month or so (I've logged over a hundred hours in the game - which does include when you're paused, to be fair,) it strikes me that one of the core aspects of the Final Fantasy series is elemental vulnerability. Nearly every monster has a weakness to one element or another, and while there are also plenty of physical attacks to use, many of these enemies are best dealt with by applying the appropriate damage type.

Damage types are also somewhat more limited in Final Fantasy. Damage can be either physical or magical, and then magical damage can be either "non-elemental" or of one of the elements - in VII Remake and Rebirth, at least, there are four elements, which are Fire, Ice, Lightning, and Wind. Fire is often useful against humanoid enemies, Ice often best against beasts, lightning usually best against constructs and robots (given FFVII's modern/futuristic setting, robots are pretty common) and Wind is often best against flying enemies, though there are exceptions to all of these.

In the VII Reboot series, they also implement a system of "pressuring" and then "staggering" enemies. Pressuring an enemy usually requires doing something specific, like dodging or perfect-blocking certain attacks or, most often, hitting them enough with the element they're weakest to. Pressuring, I believe, also increases the rate at which you build up their stagger meter, at which point the enemy gets stunned and takes bonus damage.

While Pressuring and Staggering are cool, I think they'd be hard to implement in a TTRPG - Final Fantasy gets away with being able to have a lot more happen in a fight than in a TTRPG because each "turn" is more like a quick decision made by a single player in a fast-paced game, and the number of actions taken over the course of a fight would take hours to resolve at a table.

Now, damage vulnerabilities are certainly a thing in D&D 5E. But they're rare. And I think the reason is that vulnerability is too strong a mechanic.

I love using Skeletons as low-level monsters. For one, I'm always a fan of spooky vibes in my broader fantasy worlds, but also I like them because they're pretty straightforward but unquestionably magical.

Skeletons are, also, one of the few types of monsters that have a vulnerability - and not just any vulnerability, but one to a very common damage type: bludgeoning. A skeleton only has 13 hit points. That means that in most cases a normal hit from a first-level character will not be able to take one down (unless you're using a d10 or higher weapon) but most skeletons won't be able to survive two hits. But if you have a maul, a warhammer, the catapult spell, or you're a Monk that is punching and kicking, you'll be literally twice as effective at fighting these things.

Here's the thing: when a monster is designed to go down in two hits, it's not actually that big of a problem if they go down in one.

Where this becomes a bigger problem is boss monsters.

The Lich is already a somewhat flawed stat block - I'm sure that very good DMs who are very good at thinking things out ahead of time can make them deadly opponents, but as a creature that's basically designed to be a campaign end-boss, its rather pitiful 135 HP is fairly underwhelming. (I've seen at least a YouTube thumbnail that suggests having a literal thousand zombies between the Lich and the party, which I think could work, possibly, but boy would it be a pain to run). But given that a Lich is often a kind of skeletal wizard, you could imagine giving it the same vulnerability to bludgeoning damage. But this could effectively halve its already low HP.

The thing is, I like rewarding players for thinking to use a damage type that should work well on the type of monster (Mummies and Mummy Lords do, in fact, have vulnerability to fire damage, but as a result, I think a Mummy Lord would be even harder to make a real threat to a party, despite clearly being meant to act as a powerful boss monster).

I sort of wish that most monsters had a vulnerability, similar to how they work in Final Fantasy.

However, I think the problem lies in the doubling of damage.

D&D is a game of rocket-tag - especially at high levels, really the only way to keep a monster up for more than a couple rounds is to ensure that there are minions that require the party's attention before they can focus-fire the boss.

So, if the party happens to have the right damage type available to them (and surely the fun of having a vulnerability is for them to have it) you run the risk of trivializing a monster that's supposed to be a threat.

What to do?

Well, though I haven't sung its praises in a while, we can look to how MCDM's Flee, Mortals! introduces something akin to vulnerability with its Vampires. The book's Vampire and Vampire spawn (though not its named "villain" vampire) have something called "Radiant Aversion." This causes them to take an additional 10 damage whenever they are dealt radiant damage.

It's pretty simple, right? But I think it solves a lot of problems. FM!'s Vampires have 204 hit points. So, you're guaranteed to knock off an extra 5% (or so) of their HP if you can get any radiant damage in there. A crit Divine Smite that lands for 10d8 (about 45) damage is going to get boosted a little bit by this to be 55 (on top of the weapon damage,) so it definitely feels like a bigger impact but it won't one-shot your monster. But if you hit it with a Sacred Flame (doing 9 damage on average at tier 2) you'll more than double that.

There's a reward there for picking the correct damage type, but you're also not going to trivialize the encounter by using it.

Of course, in a game like Final Fantasy, access to different damage types is typically not hard to come by - in VII, I'll usually try to equip every character with Materia that allows them to cast the four main elements, and in Rebirth in particular your characters can unlock free abilities that deal those damage types, meaning every character will at least be able to provide three of the four, if not all four, on-demand even without the right Materia equipped.

But in D&D, your options are more limited or at least harder to swap out. A Wizard is usually going to have only one, maybe two damage cantrips. That does provide some recourse if your main damage type is something a monster is resistant or immune to, but it makes it far harder to target a particular type to take advantage of - in other words, your damage type is more often a liability than a boon.

Still, it looks like the new Sorcerous Burst cantrip will at least give Sorcerers some huge versatility in this regard.

I think in my homebrewing of monsters, I might implement more of this style of "damage aversion" to give players a fun tool in fighting monsters.

FFVII Rebirth: Past the Point of No Return

 Well, I couldn't quite do it.

In order to fully 100% the game (as far as I know) I'd have needed to beat every minigame at the highest score in order to gain the materials to craft all the enhanced accessories, which is required to get to the highest crafting level in order to make the Genji armor pieces. Then, I'd have to beat the "Ultimate Party Animal's" high scores in all the games at the Gold Saucer (which may have gotten me the necessary materials).

I tried. I tried so damn hard. But oh well.

In fact, there are bouts at the Musclehead Coliseum at the Saucer that are designed for level 70 - my characters are level 49 at this point. This is clearly meant to be post New Game Plus in hard mode. (Indeed, some even don't unlock until you've finished the full game).

So, I'll take some consolation from the fact that I've done some very hard things - beating Gilgamesh was probably the biggest challenge the game has thrown at me (and that after the second, third, and fourth hardest). But it was time to progress the story, and that means hitting Rebirth's point of no return.

Spoilers ahead:

FFVII Rebirth's Omega Dungeon?

 Despite growing up in the 90s (born in the mid 80s), who played Secret of Mana and Mario RPG during that decade, I must confess that my first Final Fantasy game was X, and I played it in my Sophomore year of college, back in 2005 or 2006. In that game, very late in it, you gain the ability to travel back to areas that you passed through on the very linear pilgrimage that makes up the essence of that journey. But along with all those old locations, you also get access to the Omega Dungeon, which is basically the super-hard area that is tougher than the endgame dungeon for the main story. I had a different level of patience back then, so even after defeating the final boss of that area, I kept wandering around grinding monsters there until I could take them down in one or two hits, which led to the most hilarious final boss experience in which I only had to smack Yu Yevon - basically the evil being who has made himself the god of that world - in two strikes.

Level caps, of course, prevent this kind of thing in more recent games. But I'm given to understand that most Final Fantasy games have that extra-hard thing you can try late in the game to give yourself a really profound challenge.

Spoilers ahead.

FFVII Rebirth Travelogue: Seeing the End of the Road

 Gotta hand it to Square Enix: they make games that last a long time. That's not always a good thing: I never finished Final Fantasy XVI because I ran out of steam trying to complete all the sidequests in the increasingly bleak and empty world of the game. But while FFVII Rebirth's side quests vary in quality, I've really been enjoying my trek across its world from the Grasslands to the Nibel region.

However, I've hit a point where I'm pretty sure I'm near the end of the game. Of course, that doesn't mean I'm near the end of the story - there's a whole third game (I assume only a third and not a fourth) in this reboot trilogy that I suspect I'll be in my 40s before I get to play (Rebirth came out four years after Remake).

At this stage, I have a single side-quest left, but it's a doozy - trying to get a bunch of high scores at the Gold Saucer. On top of that, I also have the conclusion of the game-spanning Protorelic questline, which I think is essentially this game's version of FFX's Omega Dungeon. It appears to involve facing off against two super-powered summons at a time - I tried fighting Bahamut and Titan and found myself... well, my ass got handed to me.

Plot stuff to follow:

FFVII Rebirth Travelogue: Nibel Region and The Split-the-Party Dungeons

 It's interesting: Remake never let you pick your party composition - the story dictated who you'd have available, and so you'd always just happen to be missing Tifa or Aerith or Barret (maybe at some point Cloud?) and of course Red XIII was technically there but not controllable.

Rebirth is a far more open game than Remake was, and while it's debatable if it's truly an "open world" game (so many games are that the specificity of that descriptor has kind of faded) it makes perfect sense that the game allows you to swap out your party members (I'd actually have liked if you could sometimes have Cloud hang back - story-wise in most parts the full party is there, and you even hear combat shouts from "back line" characters in the midst of a fight).

With seven characters playable in this game (Cid and Vincent will have to wait for part 3) and three pre-set party groups, the path of least resistance is to simply have each non-Cloud party member have a partner that they share one of your pre-set parties with (you can even build out the characters' manuscripts to focus on getting Synergy abilities with Cloud and their usual partner).

However, sometimes the game will force you to change things up.

The Nibel region is either the last or second-to-last region you unlock in the game, I think (the ocean might be an additional one) and is, of course, the site of Cloud and Tifa's hometown, which we see burned down in a flashback at the start of Rebirth but find mysteriously rebuilt when we enter the area.

The town has now become basically a rehabilitation facility for people with Mako poisoning - or at least that's the official story. But the various cloaked figures who have been shambling all the way from Midgar (apparently booking passage on a cruise ship somehow?) seem to be heading here.

Naturally, anything involving Shinra is suspect, and with a little meta-knowledge, we know there's something sinister going on.

It appears that the robed figures are all SOLDIERs, and I'm assuming that the cause of their affliction is from injected Jenova cells cultured from Sephiroth. We've seen fiends fuse with some of these guys, so I'm expecting that the "Reunion" they are talking about is some kind of horrifying eldritch body-horror.

Anyway, Cloud, Tifa, and Yuffie go up to the abandoned reactor on Mt. Nibel, where we start to see how unreliable the events of that flashback at the start of the game were (Cloud forgot that Zack was even there, and again I'm more or less 100% sure that the acts he performs in the flashback were actually Zack, and the nervous Shinra grunt was actually Cloud - what's odd is that Tifa takes so long to mention that he got the details wrong, but I guess she's worried about triggering him).

Actually, one thing that I wonder about the writing of the game or possibly just the dialogue choices I've made, but the relationship between Tifa and Cloud does actually seem to me to be pretty purely platonic. Aerith clearly likes him, and is trying to bring him out of his shell (and aren't we all in love with Aerith?) but given the ways he's internalized aspects of Zack's personality, it's a little weird (personality-wise, what we see of Zack feels way more of a kind with Aerith - you can see why they'd have been a couple).

Anyway, the journey up into the old reactor sees Yuffie discovering that war between Shinra and Wutai has begun again in earnest, even if it hasn't been announced. Yuffie is... I don't know that I'd call her annoying, but they're really telegraphing that this kid has a big reality check coming for her. She says that the "Interim Government" is actually made up of a bunch of SOLDIER defectors, which sure as hell seems like a Shinra-run black op (and given that we've seen one of the Wutai leaders planning that war with Rufus Shinra, that seems to confirm this idea). Yuffie is clearly younger than the others (Cloud we get a canonical age of 21 for - it's insane that he was a soldier for Shinra at 16, but then, JRPGs really skew their characters younger. I'm assuming Aerith and Tifa are about the same age). Perhaps because I'm now 37 I relate a lot more with Barret.

Actually, as a note, back in the Corel part of the game, I was stunned by the tonal whiplash - between going to a giant amusement park to being kidnapped by a Mad Max-like desert gang to then doing what is essentially Mario Kart on Chocobos to then having Barret's very Spaghetti-Western-style confrontation with his old friend who has become a murderer and, oh yeah, is Marlene's actual father. This is a story that goes from very dark and serious (my roommate is playing through Remake, and in a meeting Hojo straight-up talks about forcibly breeding Aerith to create more specimens of Cetra genetics, which is, like, holy shit - most evil character in the game) to utterly goofy (basically Cait Sith).

Anyway, the other forced-party-selection we get while Cloud, Tifa, and Yuffie go up the mountain is the first segment where we actually control Cait Sith as the party leader, with Barret and Aerith tagging along. We go into Shinra Manor, exploring the facilities below. And this involves what might be the most frustrating puzzles in the game.

Cait Sith can summon his robotic moogle mount to toss various boxes, but the controls to do this require very precise use of the control stick, and even when the little aiming reticle says you're aimed at the right thing, it often doesn't work. I cannot tell you how many boxes I had to throw to get enough Mako into a little power generator. There are also some enemies that Cait Sith has to fight solo that are genuinely very difficult.

Each character, of course, has its own special abilities when you're directly controlling them. Cait Sith might be the one with my least favorite set up. He's a character who can do physical damage in melee or magic damage at range, but unlike Yuffie, who has two very clear modes to do so, it seems like Cait Sith switching kind of arbitrarily. And when he has to solo creatures that will start retaliating with big damage when they take one type of damage or the other, you really want to have that kind of clear, precise control.

I think I'm most comfortable with the four characters who were playable in Remake, who largely play pretty similarly (Aerith's gotten some changes) and of course we got a preview of Yuffie in Intergrade (and as far as I can tell she works similarly - I think they might have changed how the Synergy attacks work). Tifa is a character I spent most of Remake not really getting, but when I figured out how to properly use Unbridled Strength, I actually started really liking her. Red XIII I realized I have more fun with when I hold down his attack button to do his big spinning attack, and I generally like using his Vengeance meter to fuel his various "Watcher" abilities rather than actually going into Vengeance mode (for one thing, any ability that can heal a large amount without consuming MP or Items is great in my book - I've had Aerith keep Pray equipped basically the whole game, and that makes it actually a really massive party-wide heal, the only downside being that it takes two ATB charges).

One of the odd things about the Nibel region is that I've completed all the Chadley Intel stuff but have not yet gotten the Protorelic quests, so I just have those four dots not yet filled in. I suspect I need to finish up stuff in Nibelheim before that becomes available.

Anyway, while not fully in the end-game, I suspect I'm getting there. Things feel like they're building to a climactic moment. Still very unclear on what is going on with the weird alternate timeline in which Tifa and Barret are dead but Biggs and Zack are still alive.

FFVII Rebirth Travelogue - From Gongaga to Cosmo Canyon

 It's interesting to see the various environments in Final Fantasy VII. What little of the original game I had seen as a kid was all in Midgar, the massive modern/futuristic metropolis. Remake, the first entry in what I believe is intended to be a trilogy of FFVII re-visits, extends the Midgar portion of the game into an entire game in and of itself, so 2020's release more or less helped contribute to my sense of the game as being very Midgar-focused.

Of course, Rebirth starts off with the party having left Midgar, moving on to the town of Kalm, and makes a full game out of what I'm given to understand is the middle act of the story.

This has its plus sides and its minuses. The plusses include that you get to see a lot of the world. At this stage, I've gone from the Grasslands region to Junon's more coastal area, then over to the expansive Corel region, which includes a tropical coastal region and a big desert (there's also a giant mountain, but this is treated to an extent as a kind of transitional area without any of the big "world exploration" stuff). Then, there's Gongaga, a tangled jungle filled with lots of cliffs and caves (which so far has proven to be the most difficult to navigate).

Some spoilers crop up here and there:

Could You Do Dawn-Age D&D?

 One of the central assumptions in D&D, and frankly most fantasy, is that the world is old. In D&D in particular, the oldness of the world presents you with some golden opportunities - you get many generations (or strata) of bygone civilizations whose relics and even whose villains might emerge in the modern day or be discovered in dungeons.

My own homebrew setting, for example, has a fully futuristic era in the distant, 20,000 year past that ended in a catastrophe that unleashed new eldritch abominations worshipped as false deities by psychotic cults and led to a genuinely horrifying millennium of apocalyptic terror, with history as it is generally known only starting after that point.

While I love having the supernatural at play in my fantasy settings, I do tend to still prefer a world that has some resemblance to the real world, and that includes the fact that human history is just a minuscule portion of our planet's. That means accounting for billions of years of the planet's existence prior to the events of one's stories.

But, that being said, fantasy is, I think, nearly indistinguishable from myth except for the fact that it's explicitly fictional. And given the pre-scientific time that human myths' foundational texts come from, most (or at least the texts known most widely in the west) severely underestimate the world's age, placing the emergence of humanity not long after the creation of the world itself.

The era of the world's creation is invariably momentous, and the events that take place in that first era set the stage for the future dramas and conflicts to come. Consider, for example, how the kind of "first act" in Tokien's cosmos is the Music of the Ainur, and how Melkor's desire to basically improvise his own hellish jazz solo in the middle of a symphony so that he can be the star of the concert is what introduces evil to creation. Tokien's world of Arda (of which Middle-Earth is a continent) goes through multiple eras before there's even a sun and moon - first with two great lamps, and then those lamps are replaced with two great trees, and only after those are killed are the sun and moon created.

So, could you run a campaign set in a Dawn Age? One in which the world is young, and the player characters are among the first or second generation of mortals?

In some ways, this would be very difficult, but I think there's an aspect of this that is actually quite fitting:

Player characters in D&D are powerful. And the figures of legend in the distant past of fantasy settings tend to have super-human power. Frankly, at least in 5E, player characters quickly become essentially superheroes.

But let's talk challenges:

D&D loves ancient ruins and relics of lost civilizations. If humanity's (or the mortal races') history dates back only a generation, then basically nothing was around long enough to be a lost civilization. At best, if we're going for maybe a generation past the beginning of the world, you might lament some great person's downfall and the loss of their creations.

Likewise, the very nature of something like a fiend as a distinct thing from a celestial might not have taken place yet - Asmodeus, for example, in D&D's lore, is thought to have been a fallen celestial (though somewhere it was suggested that he's more akin to a Great Old One, and that "Asmodeus" is only the avatar of the great serpent Ahirman, which lingers in the Nine Hells recuperating from its fall into them... which actually could work for a celestial past too).

    This, then, raises an interesting wrinkle, and gives you some wiggle room: is this the beginning beginning, or just the beginning of the mortal races on this world? In Christian tradition, the beginning of the world happens some time after Lucifer's rebellion against God, but I don't know if there's a canonical timeline there.

Let's also talk aberrations. Technically, this creature type can mean a few different things, including the results of botched arcane experiments (essentially having a bit of overlap with hybrid-creature monstrosities like the Owlbear) but I think most people generally associate aberrations with the Lovecraftian ancient beings like Aboleths and Mind Flayers (I'll note here that Kraken, as described, feel like they could easily also count as aberrations, except perhaps because they were created by the gods rather than existing in some before-time).

    I'll probably write a post some day about how aberrations don't actually really fit in D&D if you want to run it as pure fantasy rather than partially sci-fi - there's such an overlap between them and demons (not so much devils) that you almost need to genre-bend to make them work. Luckily for me, I adore genre-bending and blending my sci fi and fantasy together, so it works great!

Still, if you want a setting in which the gods didn't just arrive on some existing world and create people to inhabit it, but truly created the world itself, it's going to be hard to work in those ancient aberrations (though the sometime-rumored notion that the Mind Flayers are actually time-travelers from a distant future does kind of solve this issue as well).

A lot of mythologies have multiple groups of divine beings. In Greek Myth, the Olympians are only the last couple generations of gods, with the Titans pre-dating them, and beings like Gaia predating them. Norse myth has the Vanir and the Aesir. I suspect that these might both be instances of syncretism - the active incorporation of multiple religious traditions to promote social cohesion between the adherents of different faiths - especially likely in the Norse case given that the Aesir and Vanir are foes who eventually become allies.

But if we're using the Greek pantheon as inspiration, this gives us another interesting question: are the gods of our Dawn Age the gods that will be prominently revered and worshipped later on in this setting?

Again, given the degree to which player characters grow in power in 5E, I'd almost be tempted to suggest that the party could actually be that second generation of gods.

And in that sense, I think the appeal here is that, while coming up with a backstory for a D&D character can often be very fun and a chance at creativity, this kind of campaign would encourage forward-thinking about legacy.

Like many others, I recently watched the second part of Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Dune. Dune, of course, has plenty of prologue history in it - it's set about 20,000 years in the future (don't let the year in the story fool you - it's 10,191, but not by the Gregorian calendar, but dating back to the formation of the Spacing Guild, itself happening about 10,000 years from now,) but what's interesting is that the first book's chapters each have an excerpt of from history books written about Paul's ascension to becoming Emperor, and given how the later books of the series go, Paul's reign itself is looked back on as a golden age of kindness and justice compared with the brutality of his son's millennia-long reign as God-Emperor (even if Paul's reign is filled with war and genocide).

Thus, the first book, so far in our future, could be described as a kind of Dawn Age myth for the civilization that follows (naturally this is, of course, a lesson for anyone thinking about their era as the only one that matters).

In a weird and very different way, in the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, the first book of the series, The Gunslinger, takes on this kind of mythic quality as well, with the title character Roland traveling through an almost dream-like experience and the boy he finds in the desert, Jake, only later able to recall those experiences from a life that isn't consistent with what actually happened to him.

I'll concede that it might be too hard to create a campaign based on a world that is brand-new. But I do think there's perhaps an opportunity, if you have a consistent table that is also invested in world-building and storytelling (which might be a big "if,") to do something really cool by imagining the grand expanse of time that might come between campaigns.

Critical Role has been a great opportunity to see a single campaign setting change and evolve and feel the impact of multiple campaigns, but it's still on a pretty human scale - I think that campaign 3 is only about 30 years after the events of campaign 1.

I'd be excited to see a legacy that extends thousands of years.