Down into the Hole in Silent Hill

 After exiting the hospital, things remain nightmarish: we're still in the rust-covered Otherworld as we follow after Laura and... process what's happened.

Silent Hill is a psychological horror story, of course: the monsters are grotesque, but they're clearly some kind of reflection of what is going on inside of James Sunderland's head. The question I find myself really asking, though, is to what extent the version of events that we're witnessing in game is in any way objective.

So far, since the beginning of the game, we've encountered four ostensibly real people, who at least seem plausibly real compared with the inhuman monsters we've encountered (strangely, Pyramid Head is the only monster we've met that in theory could just be a normal guy under that giant helmet, though he'd have to be very strong to wear such a massive piece of metal and wield such a giant weapon).

But if we assume that they are real (and if you ask me, jury's still out on Maria at least, but that invites us to wonder about the others) I also feel like they're reacting to things in a way that might suggest that their experience of the town is not the same as James'.

I also don't freaking trust any of them.

Currently, I've made it to what I think of as the third "dungeon" in the game. We started off in the two apartment buildings, then we had the hospital, and now, well, things are getting a bit more surreal. I'm always a little ambivalent about how careful to be about spoilers for a 24-year-old game (even if the version of it I'm playing only came out last year). But just for the sake of the spoiler-conscious, I'll put in a cut:

James Sunderland Has Rocketed Up the List of "Video Game Characters I Do Not Want to Be"

 Spoilers are coming for this 24-year-old game, so, uh, be wary (I'll put a cut before we get to it).

I was thinking about the survival horror genre. I'd thought that Alan Wake II was my first foray into it (the first game is horror-themed, but really ultimately more of an action game, most notably in that you get to heal up to full whenever you find a light and you don't need to worry about ammo and batteries between chapters). But I suppose Bioshock might actually have been my first - you spend a lot of that game scrounging for ammo, eve, and money to use at vending machines.

The presence of a melee weapon in Silent Hill 2, first our "board with nails" and then our heavier big pipe (which I think does hit harder) is kind of a necessity, because I think the game mostly wants us to fight the monsters.

While the first "major level" of the game takes place in two separate apartment buildings, one in the rusty Otherworld while the other is in what passes for the real world (I may have gotten something spoiled for me, but I think it's possible that the "fog world" is actually no more our own mundane reality than the "world of rust" as I'm coming to think of it,) the second major level, the hospital, has us actually just go through the same building again, though this time there are bottomless chasms and fully different routes we have to take through it.

The rusty hospital is the first time in the game where I've truly felt out of resources. There was a good stretch there where I had literally no ammo and no healing items, and I was low enough on health that I had the little medical cross in the corner of the screen. It was rough. I only died I think once during that state, but I think it wasn't until I'd fully completed the area and gotten out that I found some healing items (ammo was a bit more abundant once I got into the basement).

The rusty version of the hospital is built around a complex puzzle box, which is truthfully three separate puzzles to find combinations and a key for its three locks. The imagery in these puzzles is unnerving: we have to simulate a lobotomy on a mannequin (including breaking one of its arms to get access to its eye) and deploy electric chocks on an upright gurney.

It's all well and good, though I think this was the one area where I started to feel like the game was playing for time slightly - I think it was very clever to have us clear Woodside Apartments first in the real world and then go to a different apartment building, Blue Creek, in the rust world, but here go through all the same rooms, so that feeling of having opened up, explored, and fully understood a place just feels kind of ripped away from you, like you have to do that level all over again, but with a more monochromatic color palette.

The Nurse enemies are a new enemy type. I actually managed to take down the first two I saw with peak efficiency - three handgun rounds to the head will put them down, though you need to be precise in your aim. I don't know if this happens with any method against them, but they always seem to rise up after falling the first time - something that hasn't been much of an issue for me because I've always half-RP'd James as beating the crap out of any monster he's killed in a panic and rage anyway, so this need to "double tap" them was already what I was doing anyway.

The nurses are scary, and I particularly like the Jacob's Ladder-style ultra-fast-head-twitch they sometimes start doing mid-fight (which also, conveniently, gives you some time to get in a cheap shot or open up some distance. In terms of actual monster design, though, I suppose I lament that they're a little more human than the body-bag foes or the mannequins. (Evidently the body-bag foes are called Lying Figures - which is a fun play on words if intentional.) These guys will do multi-strike attacks on you, so it's a little riskier to take them on in melee. A shotgun blast will take them down (minus the double-tap) but of course, James' aim is pretty wavering, and especially as they close in on you, you risk panic-firing without proper aim. At my best, I can take them down in three shots if I have time to line up my shots and enough distance that I can get the three off before they reach me, but it's tricky.

The radio, which I think I've commented on before, is kind of brilliant (and on a PS5, it plays through your controller, making it physically the closest source of sound in the game). It will let you know when monsters are near - except for Mannequins that are hiding. Sometimes, you'll shine your flashlight into a room and actually glimpse one, perfectly still and waiting to jump out at you. Attacking it will alert it, but you can get a free shot off if you're lucky. Generally, unless I'm being swarmed by lots of enemies, I will melee these down because you can start to learn their attack patterns and kind of Dark Souls them, dodging as they strike and punishing them.

Light is interesting: you can turn off your flashlight, but I don't know if there's any good reason to do so. In Alan Wake II, extinguishing your flashlight can be a way to sneak past monsters, and sometimes is the best option to avoid the drain on resources. Indeed, I tried going dark in the rust hospital only to find that I was unable to see anything in my environment. And in better-lit areas, I didn't seem to draw any less attention from monsters. So, for now, light stays on.

Ok, let's get more spoilery: (Also, spoilers for the movie Jacob's Ladder)

Draw Steel Encounter Balancing and the Multi-Dimensionality of Monsters' Difficulty Ratings

 One of the longest-running complaints about D&D is that "CR is broken." It's clear that certain monsters that might share the same CR are not actually equal challenges to a party. I do think this issue has gotten less acute with the 2024 updates to the game, both with encounter-building guidance that hands the DM a much bigger budget as well as monsters that are designed to be more serious threats (largely by increasing the damage they put out, but also by making them more intuitive to run optimally).

Still, I think there's an interesting question DMs should be asking themselves when building an encounter: is this moderate-CR monster meant to be a singular, boss-level threat to low-level parties, or is it meant to be a rank-and-file minion for some significant boss later on?

My go-to example is the Wraith. Ostensibly, a Wraith (which is CR 5) could make for a reasonable minion for a Lich or other undead (or fiendish) boss monster that a tier 3 or tier 4 party is up against. A closer reading of the stat block, though, shows that it has an ability that can make minions for itself. To me, that clearly points to the ideal use of a Wraith being a major threat to a party that's either at the tail end of tier 1 or early part of tier 2. Its AC of 13 also means that only a low-level party is going to have a significant chance to actually miss it (though to be fair, being easy to hit is an asset for a minion, if you ask me).

Nothing's saying you can't use four of these to back up a Death Knight or Vampire Umbral Lord or whatnot, but I don't think it would play very well. The Wraith itself is going to be a minor threat to a level 16 party, and boy would it be a waste of its turn to create Specters, who will be even more pathetic.

This is why I think Draw Steel's approach is fascinating. Once again, the big caveat to all my Draw Steel stuff is that I haven't actually played or run it yet, so this is all theoretical, but I think the designers recognized this ambiguity and worked very hard to build a system that ensures you're picking the right monsters.

Each monster has essentially three values to describe its difficulty from different angles, so to speak.

Monsters have levels: easy rule of thumb, you should look for monsters of your party's level to throw at them. Now, one thing I'll be examining here is how easy it is to use monsters that aren't quite of your party's level.

Next, monsters have what I think should be called "Ranks" but are simply referred to as their organization. The highest and lowest of these ranks have rules attached to them (though the higher ones have the rules written into their stat blocks). (Monsters also have group roles, but I'm not counting that as a descriptor of difficulty.)

Finally, they have EVs, or encounter values. This, as far as I can tell, is actually just derived from a formula based on their level and their rank.

Player power escalates over the course of the day, but on the Director's side, their power also grows: Directors gain greater malice for every Victory the party has, and they also get a higher budget for their encounters as the party gains Victories (essentially an extra hero's worth for every 2 Victories). I will say, I do wonder how this affects the goal of incentivizing the party to keep pushing forward, but I'll really need to see more of this in action.

At baseline, the Director gets an EV budget based on the party's size, level, and the difficulty of the encounter you're trying to build. If an encounter has some alternate goal, like taking out an individual target or some object the monsters are defending, or protecting some NPC, the difficulty might be adjusted.

Now, there's a chart on Monsters page 11 that tells you the budget per player (and helpfully if slightly redundantly does the math for you based on party size). Each level, an individual player's EV contribution goes up by 2, so from 6 at level 1 to eventually 24 at level 10.

This does do some interesting things:

A level 1 Solo monster (Solo being kind of a combination of rank and monster role, as they're truly meant to be fought on their own) has an EV of 36, meaning that a party of 6 players could face one as the very first encounter of their whole campaign, while a smaller party might want to rack up a couple of victories before they take one on. (The werewolf, which we looked at in the previous post, is one of these, and has 200 Stamina, so it'll likely be a pretty significant fight.)

What's interesting to me is the linear scaling of EV, rather than exponential scaling. A Vampire Lord is a level 7 Leader, designed to have a number of henchmen fighting alongside them against a party that is in the third echelon of play - in other words, pretty seasoned and experienced heroes. Their EV? Also 36.

Could you throw a solo Vampire Lord at a level 1 party? After all, the EV budget would be the same as the werewolf, so shouldn't that be ok?

Well, no.

A standard encounter difficulty for 6 7th-level PCs would be 108, meaning that while this particular monster is meant to be in the spotlight, you're also meant to have 72 EV-more of monsters, such as the horde controller also level 7 standard Vampire, as well as Blood-Starved Vampire minions, or whatever else you might have for your particular story (there's nothing saying that you can't mix monster types: maybe the vampire lord has a group of human cultists).

There are a couple reasons not to throw one of these at a low-level party. The first, I think, is that its attacks hit too damn hard: the least it can do with its signature ability is 13, which is enough to make a lot of 1st-level characters winded right from the get-go.

EV on its own would fail to understand this nuance, but by giving the creature its rank and level, we see what it's actually intended for: higher-level heroes who will fight this along with probably four Vampires and 16 Blood-Starved Vampires (again, or whatever monsters work for that scenario). (As a note, there's also a named vampire boss, Count Rhodar von Glauer, who was in Flee, Mortals!, and is a level 10 solo monster, meaning a reasonable campaign boss).

So: what do we do if we want to use monsters who aren't of the right level? After all, while the Monsters book has a lot of monsters in it, there are gaps: the Undead monsters are only each at the first level of their given Echelons - 1, 4, 7, and 10. If I have a level 6 party, am I SOL if I want them to still be fighting undead monsters?

This is a genuine question that I'm intending to answer by looking it up right as I write this post. On Monsters page 26, there's a section on Adjusting Monster Stats. The general advice is to simply re-skin monsters of the appropriate level: there might not be any 6th level undead monsters, but you could find some other creature and just adjust things like damage immunities and movement speeds to make it work as that kind of monster.

My suspicion is also that you can fudge levels as long as you're not going too far outside of the players' level range: those 1st level undead monsters might be fine to throw against a 2nd or 3rd level party - you just need more of them. For example, if we were building up to a confrontation with a powerful Ghost (a level 1 Leader, worth 12 EV) we might budget it out for 3rd level players - giving us 10 per player instead of 6, so, say, 40 for a party of four at baseline (though if it's a boss, probably adding a bit because it'll be a few Victories before they can get to this leader). By the math, that would leave us 28 EV left to spend on monsters.

I'm honestly impressed that the core rules' monster book has so many stat blocks (some get a little short-changed on lore description, but that's ok, because I don't super need to know the distinction between a Human Rogue (minion) and a Human Scoundrel (platoon,) as they clearly fill same roles just at different numbers.

I also think that because Stamina is the only real way that a character's "toughness" is expressed, that damage can scale more linearly. In D&D, a monster's damage output can be increased either by raising their attack bonus (or saving throw DC) or by increasing the damage of their attacks. This means that there's actually a pretty wide swing on the actual amount of damage the monster does in a turn based on what they're attacking. While PCs often have triggered abilities to reduce incoming damage, you always know that, for example, a Human Death Cultist is going to be doing 6, 9, or 12 damage with their signature ability.

I think this, coupled with the fact that abilities often do flat amounts of damage rather than rolling damage dice, means that the damage output of a monster can actually scale slower. The aforementioned Death Cultist is a level 2 platoon monster. A Shadow Elf Assassin, a level 6 platoon monster, is doing 10, 15, or 18 damage with their highest direct-damage ability, which is less than twice that lowly 2nd level monster. The Assassin has 70 Stamina, while the Death Cultist has 40, again, meaning that despite being intended for players three times higher-level, the scaling here is somewhat gradual.

Again, I still think paying attention to the level of the monster is wise, but I don't think it needs to be an incredibly precise rule: I see no problem throwing more 1st level monsters against a 2nd level party, and even potentially throwing fewer 6th level monsters against a level 5 or even 4 party.

The EV calculations become trivial, though, when using monsters of the appropriate level: 8 minions per player, 2 Horde per player, 1 Platoon per player, and 1 Elite for every two players.

Again, I'm speaking all from a purely theoretical standpoint. I'm really hoping to actually try this game out some time (I've really just got to put my foot down and make a date and invite friends to play - I'm debating on whether to start off with the pregens for the Delian Tomb, which will be a lower barrier to entry but also potentially have them less invested than they would be in characters they've made themselves).

Encounter building is more of an art than a science, because players aren't always going to know what the perfectly optimal play is, and the dice can screw you over, even in a game where your attacks can't miss. But I do appreciate the effort to add more nuance here: that yes, by EV alone, you could have 6 1st level characters face 4 vampires, but you, you know, shouldn't do that.

Looking at Draw Steel's Werewolf

 I freaking love werewolves.

I mean, I guess I've always been a dog person, but I think the werewolf always spoke to me on a deep, primal level. As a kid, while the monsters I imagined were most prevalent in my home were ghosts (I grew up in a creaky old Victorian house in a suburb of Boston) the one I always feared (even as a kid I knew this to be irrational) enough to pull the sheets over my head at night was a werewolf. Walking around my neighborhood, it was a werewolf I feared jumping out from behind a bush or hedge.

And yet, there's something also kind of compelling about the idea of "being" a werewolf. Gothic horror is all about the dark id beneath our human facades, and its monsters are representations of that id breaking out and manifesting physically, and the werewolf might be the purest distillation of that idea.

Weirdly, there's not (that I'm aware of) any real "iconic" werewolf character like there is for vampires in Dracula. Yes, Lon Chaney played the Wolf Man in the movies, but do you know that character's name without looking it up?

Anyway, I've always loved the idea of playing as a werewolf (the Worgen are among my favorite playable races in World of Warcraft) but I also recognize that they can fall into that problem of: do we want these to be just another fantasy species, or do we want them to represent something truly terrifying and monstrous?

Draw Steel splits the difference, giving us a subclass for Furies that allows you to play out your Were-wolf/bear/rat/crow fantasy, but in the lore, in makes these Stormwights distinct from werewolves.

Generally, I don't like to pump up Draw Steel by putting D&D down - I adore D&D, and frankly expect to continue playing it more often than Draw Steel (though it's very much down to how my friends like Draw Steel if and when I ever actually get them together to try it). But I will say that in this narrow category, I think Draw Steel has the edge:

5E has never* done werewolves right, in my opinion.

The asterisk there is for Ravenloft's Loup-Garou, a CR 13 legendary werewolf (loup-garou is just the French term for werewolf,) but I want to talk about the standard CR 3 version.

But I think 5E's lycanthropes get a little watered-down with all of the different kinds of were-creatures that you can find - werewolves are kind of middle-of-the-pack among them. They can infect a character with lycanthropy via their bite, and in theory you want silver weapons to fight them, but this latter thing is totally circumvented if the party has magic weapons or just has spells. A 1st level character with Fire Bolt has no problem attacking a werewolf.

The infectiousness of their curse is also a little awkward: it takes a 3rd level spell, Remove Curse, to cure someone's lycanthropy if a party member gets bitten, which... ok, sure, a 3rd level spell is not something you'll necessarily have access to in tier 1, but it kind of means that the werewolf is only scary at those lowest levels.

Now, admittedly, the Draw Steel werewolf is also designed for low-level parties. In fact, it's level 1, meaning you could start a campaign with a fight against a werewolf.

But I think it'll be memorable: it's a solo monster.

I think Draw Steel has more exciting "technology" to make boss fights. Solo and Leader monsters have Villain actions - climactic moves they can pull once each per encounter and only one per round. Solo monsters also get two (non-consecutive) turns per round, helping with the action economy issues you run into.

Because of this distinction between monster "ranks" and levels, they can afford to do some interesting things with them: you won't be throwing three werewolves against a 5th level party or anything, and so to ensure that the fight feels substantial, this level 1 monster has 200 Stamina. That means there's basically no way that a party is going to take them down in just one round.

In addition to the additional "solo turn," that they get, they also have a kind of legendary-resistance-style "End Effect," which lets them pay 5 Stamina (take 5 damage) to end an effect that normally requires a saving throw. I think it's an elegant way to honor that the party has imposed some status effect on them, while recognizing that the Director needs a way to get out of it to keep the fight from being trivialized.

Draw Steel monsters also sometimes have bespoke mechanics and conditions, and in this case, we have Accursed Rage. Werewolves' attacks impose a certain amount of rage on a target - though there's an explicit carve-out for Stormwight Furies, whose mastery of their own bestial form grants them immunity to this effect. If you start your turn with 10 Rage, you expend it all and then, before your turn, shift (moving without drawing opportunity attacks) up to your speed toward the nearest creature and make a melee free strike against them, which imposes 1 rage on them. In other words, there's a kind of spreading entropy as rage spreads from player to player.

Now, as a note, if you do have a Stormwight in your party, there's a special rule: even if Stormwights are immune to this rage, when a Fury spends Ferocity for the first time (I think in a battle) the Director gains 1d3 Malice, so it's a minor trade-off.

The werewolf's signature ability, Accursed Bite, can then actually curse someone with lycanthropy, causing them to gain 2 rage at the end of each turn in combat (the rage persisting outside of combat, though only generating when in combat) and requiring a downtime activity to Find a Cure to remove this effect. The bite is a potency effect (and requires the Director to spend malice,) but the potency increases by 1 for the creature each time they are bitten, meaning that a determined werewolf will eventually curse their target if they live long enough to keep biting the target.

Werewolves have two other main action options: Ripping Claws that can hit two targets and cause them to bleed and gain rage, and Berserker Slash, which is a burst ability that can push or slide targets and also inflict rage. They also have a maneuver where they can leap off a wall and make a melee free strike and potentially knock a target prone.

Finally, they have a triggered action that can punish foes who charge or just move at least 2 squares toward them when attacking, potentially knocking the attacker prone right before they make their power roll.

In addition to some malice-spending abilities and villain actions, there are also some general werewolf malice "start of the turn" options (even though we only get the one werewolf stat block here).

Generally speaking, the werewolf has a lot of mobility - numerous abilities allow them to shift and jump. There's also a bit of pushing and sliding - the werewolf has 0 stability at the start of a fight, but the second villain action lets them become a size 2 wolf (I might flavor this as going on all fours and expanding like something out of a nightmare, if only because I don't find the "werewolves who just turn into normal-looking wolves" trope matches my fantasy of what the monster is) and gains stability.

I think this stat block will probably give you a great encounter for classic gothic monster hunt. So, how would I build an adventure around this?

So, while it is a level 1 creature, it's got an EV of 36, meaning that if we're aiming for a standard-difficulty encounter, unless we have a big party, it'd be a little overtuned for a party of less than 6 players. Especially if the players are new to the system, it might be asking a little much to toss them into this fight from the very start.

And yet:

I actually love this as a perfect action prologue/cold-open for a gothic monster-hunting campaign. Werewolves are such perfect, elemental gothic monsters that it wouldn't feel hard to explain why our heroes are going after one.

For our battle arena, I think I want an abandoned house. Maybe it's recently abandoned. Maybe it's abandoned because the werewolf killed everyone there. Or maybe it was the werewolf's house before they allowed the rage to consume them and killed all their loved ones, and now keeps it as their den as a kind of weird self-torture.

The point is, I want this to be a house with creaking hardwood floors, maybe a big landing over a central hall and dusty rooms with relatively thin walls between them. There's some verticality with a grand stairway in that main hall (I might just be describing my own childhood home, but I'm imagining more Victorian interior decor). In its disuse, perhaps rain has soaked in through the roof and there's rot and mold in the house. We probably fight the werewolf at night, but if not, it's at least very cloudy and overcast and perhaps raining.

Hell, maybe there's a big hole in the roof that opens out into this central hall. Deviating from my own childhood home, perhaps that central hall has a marble floor. Or, perhaps we stick to the hardwood floor so that someone hitting that floor with enough force will fall down into the basement.

This werewolf is not a mere victim, not someone who happened to be unluckily bitten and infected. They called upon this power. And maybe, once the dust is settled, once the Wolf of Harrow Hill has been defeated, we might discover our first hint at what fell power unleashed the werewolf's rage.

Perhaps, if we lean into this horror, the lingering effects of the monster's bite haunt our party. They might not fully give in to the howling rage, but perhaps it continues to work its power upon them as they realize that this beast was merely the beginning of their descent into the night.

Oh Boy, and It Gets Worse: Entering the Otherworld in Silent Hill 2

 So, I suppose it's fitting with the genre, but I find myself having to use most healing items I find right when I get them. Silent Hill 2 (at least its remake, but I assume this is true of the original as well) doesn't have a traditional health bar. The screen goes red after you've been hit, and eventually a little medical cross appears when you're in dire straits. This was something you saw in this era of gaming with some of the original military shooters like Call of Duty (a series that I think has more or less been subsumed by its Modern Warfare sub-series). Here, I think it's meant to do two things: one is to reduce the UI clutter (most of the time we see nothing that isn't diagetic to the world around us) and two, to make you wonder if you really need to use that healing item or not. I do actually wonder if I'm being a little too liberal with them.

After the initial exploration of the streets and shots of the eponymous cursed burgh, you make your way into an apartment building. Once again, we have a kind of absurd puzzle-box, here not even trying to justify itself as a normal thing, where you have to find some coins with different symbols on them and fit them into slots. It's not terribly difficult once you have the coins, but that's the real trick: it prompts you to explore the building.

We get a new enemy type - these bizarre things that look like legs on both the top and bottom halves, but with its... er, arm-legs ending at flat caps just below the knee. They're actually a little easier to put down than the body-bag monsters, and don't have any projectile attacks, but they're fast, so you need to dodge around them.

Hints of other people in the town start to come here - early on, a creepy little girl bats a key out of reach behind a cage-like grate before vanishing, and toward the end of the level, we meet a panicking dude who is puking into a toilet, terrified. It's our character, James, who does his best to reassure the guy, but ultimately he leaves him behind, having to push farther.

The very fact that James isn't shitting himself with panic over what's happening here makes me wonder a lot about his personality. Through meta-knowledge, I know that he's sort of in a self-punishment phase of grief, and so I think the horrors that he witnesses are probably seen as kind of what he deserves.

After navigating the three accessible floors of the building (accessible only by solving the labyrinthine maze its locked doors make it into) we come into a room where James has his first encounter with the iconic Pyramid Head.

Strangely, this encounter ends with James trying, ineffectively, to shoot the monster, and the monster just... makes some weird gestures and leaves. There's a disturbingly sexual energy to Pyramid Head's introduction, seemingly copulating with one of the leg-monster creatures (in a manner that does not seem obviously consensual, though who the fuck knows with these things,) but also, in its interaction with James, almost this sense that its trying and failing to communicate something to him.

One thing I appreciate here is that the game is scary without being gory, at least so far. The monsters are off-putting, but in that psychologically "wrong" way rather than just disgusting. I don't mean to offend people who prefer their horror gory. In a lot of ways, I think it's just that I draw a line between the kind of horror I find entertaining and the kind I find merely upsetting. The design here is more up my alley, because it's all driving toward a mystery: what are these things? Why are these things? What is going on?

There are jump-scares when monsters appear around corners, but that feels in many ways more like a gameplay challenge than something just to spike my heart rate.

After meeting Pyramid Head, we step through a door and over a gap between the building and the next one, but as my achievements informed me, I've actually entered The Otherworld.

Somehow, despite the decay that has overtaken Silent Hill, the Otherworld pulls the level of decrepitude even farther into Fincherian filthiness. We're still in an apartment building of sorts, but rusty metal shows through the walls, and we actually knock holes in the wall to progress in some areas.

The enemies here are actually quite similar to the initial ones we encounter, though now they spew their bile in a radius when they die. We're now armed with a handgun, but it takes several shots to bring one of these down, so it's tempting to use the club to conserve ammo - just be quick with that dodge button.

(As it turns out, since starting this post, I've gotten past this "level.")

Once again, progression is tied to the completion of a puzzle: we need to find the hands for a grandfather clock and then set them each in the correct position. Certain rooms in this second apartment building will open once we've done so.

The Blue Creek Apartments have a few particularly memorable units: one appears to be perfectly clean and furnished when we first enter it - which actually sent a chill down my spine, as I anticipated some big twist to it. Shortly after we start moving around this part of the building, we return to this apartment to find it in full decay, and also with the door we came in now barred shut. Another room is a-flutter with moths - big moths provide keys to a puzzle to get through the room, but it's also just another moment of unease passing through here.

Also, while in here, we meet the young woman from the graveyard, Angela, who seems profoundly unstable and liable to hurt herself. James comes off as the most stable and sensible person compared with the various NPCs we've encountered, though the competition is light, and I really wonder what kind of storm is brewing in his own skull.

Ultimately, our journey through this otherworldly apartment building leads down to the central courtyard and our first genuine boss fight against Pyramid Head. I actually assumed he was fully invincible and tried to find a place to run initially, but then it became clear that there was no way out. Instead, we need to just put some damage on him while avoiding his quite nasty blade. Thanks to the iconic metallic helmet, you have to aim low, at his legs or lower torso (I suppose if you can get behind him, that works, though he's pretty relentless in coming toward you).

There are metal crates that you can use to gain some distance from him, and there are a couple ammo boxes with a generous nine rounds (at least on this standard difficulty). Ultimately it doesn't take that many shots to survive this fight, but you need to choose your moment to fire at him carefully. After he takes enough damage, Pyramid Head seems to get bored with you and opens up the door to exit the building. This actually lets us out into the daytime "real" world (assuming that the fog-drowned, abandoned version of Silent Hill is the real version in the first place).

Cheekily, I tried to turn back around and go back into the building, but there's only a locked alcove of what is presumably the non-Otherworld version of the building.

Moving forward, we go into a park and meet Maria, a woman who strongly resembles (I think) James' late wife. Maria's attitude feels far too blasé given the situation, but it's just on the fringe of being reasonable that I can't say I have a great read on her (though I think some pop culture osmosis has skewed by impression of her). Maria leads James a little further through the town, with a brief exploration of a motel.

It's actually here that something really interesting happens: save points in Silent Hill are these glowing red squares, usually found on walls (though in this case, on the trunk of a car). I hadn't really given them much thought, but when we're traveling with Maria, if you save the game, Maria asks James what's wrong: he kind of froze there for a second. Is saving your game diagetic to the game world? What the hell are these red squares, then, anyway?

We travel with Maria, and the fog in the town seems to get angry, sending tons of monsters into our paths (I took the hint that we should just run past them) and then Maria takes us into a strip club, where the weird femme fatale vibes get turned to eleven. Leaving the strip club, we pass into another park, and hear something about a local legend about a woman marooned on an island in the nearby lake, in a story that feels like it might be analogous to James and his wife.

Next door, at the movie theater, we hear a young girl, and as we make our way inside, we find that Eddie (the puking guy from Woodside Apartments) and the girl are there together, but Laura, the girl, runs away before we can talk to her, and Eddie... well, Eddie is weird, eating strawberry ice cream with his hands.

We go with Maria to follow the girl into the fog, and where I've now landed, we've come to a hospital, which I can only imagine is going to be our next major "level" or "dungeon" the way that the two apartment buildings were.

I find myself really curious to see how important the details of the locations and puzzles we encounter are to the underlying story. The clock puzzle, for example, gives names that start with H, M, and S, hinting at where the hour, minute, and second hand should go. But I don't know if the little rhyme that gives these hints is all that important.

More likely to be important, I think the locations we visit could be keys. We know that James and his late wife Mary had been in the town before, but I don't know if they lived there or just visited. I could imagine that perhaps they had an apartment in one of the buildings we explore (Blue Creek seems more likely, as its importance would be what pulled it into the Otherworld) and perhaps the hospital I've now gotten to is where she was being treated for her disease.

Anyway, I do love a good mystery: while the game is scary in the sense that it has monsters with really original, creepy designs, I love that the game isn't going for the obvious with excessive gore. I've always preferred the kind of horror that makes you question what the hell is going on more than the kind that makes you shriek in shock or cringe in visceral discomfort - I love The Shining, for example - and this is, much to my tastes, way more of that kind.

Let's Build a Draw Steel Encounter!

 Draw Steel is focused on monster-fighting. But those fights should, like any in an RPG, carry some narrative heft. Not every encounter needs to be against named enemies, but, considering the "Cinematic" keyword that Draw Steel was built around (along with Tactical, Heroic, and Fantasy,) I think you should treat every encounter like it's an action set-piece in a movie.

This is actually good advice for any system - always give your players an exciting "hook" that will make that encounter memorable.

First things first, let's consider what we want this encounter to be. Do we just want the party to fight a group of monsters to the death? Eh, that can be part of it, but that's a little generic. Let's start with the narrative and work out the mechanics from there.

Among the Draw Steel adventures I've had mulling in my head, one is a dark and dire one: set in my D&D homebrew world of Sarkon, but 2000 years before the modern day, we're at the tail end of the Reign of Madness: a millennium of chaos and bloodshed that has all but wiped out any memory of the futuristic, utopian civilization that came before. The acute terrors of that era have settled down into an era of mud and filth and misery. Petty fiefdoms are the only real powers in this world, and until the dragons return to the world to build their grand empires and restart global civilization, there are little more than remote pockets of civilization, most of which are ruled over by tyrants who wield some modicum of magic.

The party begins the adventure fleeing the destruction of their previous shelter, hearing rumors of a village with a large wooden wall, and where people live in relative freedom without some wicked magical tyrant. However, upon arriving, they find the place under attack by the undead: a perennial threat in these parts.

The heroes come to the village's defense, destroying the invading monsters, but it becomes clear that even though the immediate threat still looms.

The adventure will then require the party to venture out into the dangerous marshlands and go after the would-be tyrant who wishes to conquer this village.

Now, let's say that this is just the level 1 plot: even these forays out into the wilderness are to deal with this one villain. That simplifies things a bit, because the "1st echelon" undead monsters we have available to us are actually all level 1. I think we could use higher-level monsters against a 1st level party, and can also use lower-level monsters against a higher-level party, so we'll look at our encounter budget once we get our encounter put together and figure out what we can afford and how having higher-level characters would affect that.

Now, we could build the boss encounter against our villain: there's a level 1 undead leader stat block in the form of a Ghost - perhaps this is the spirit of a would-be conquerer who was defeated but cannot accept this, and now is seeking to drain the life force of the villagers to fuel a necromantic rebirth.

However, I think instead what I want to build is something in the middle - the third encounter after the initial village defense and then an ambush by undead stalkers en route to the villain's lair. We learn that the villain is drawing power from the land to fuel some cataclysmic cloud of death to wash over the village. There are numerous constructions of bones and tree-branches that stab into the earth, and the party needs to destroy them to delay this cataclysmic plan. Undead monsters guard these "Deathgnarls."

The objective here is to destroy the Deathgnarls, meaning that they can achieve victory just by destroying the objects, and don't necessarily have to kill all the monsters. This actually gives us some adjustments to our encounter balancing: this is a Destroy the Thing! style encounter, detailed on Monsters page 18.

Per the guidance given by this section, the things that need to be destroyed should have 35 stamina times the player's level. They're level 1, so that's 35. If we have multiple things, we can divide that stamina between them. Maybe we have 7 of them, and they each have 5 Stamina. Or 5 with 7 each. I think that might let them go down a little too quickly, so I think we could fudge it and have just three of them with 11 Stamina each.

The objects have full poison and psychic immunity, but perhaps we'll say that they have corruption immunity 5 (given that they're necromantic constructs) but also Fire weakness 5 (if they're made of dried wood along with the bones).

Now, if the object(s) to be destroyed are out in the open, that means that the difficulty of the encounter is reduced by a level (standard to easy, hard to standard, etc.) because the fight can end faster if they focus down the objects.

I want this to be a standard difficulty encounter, so we'll actually balance its encounter budget as a hard encounter.

While we won't be making it totally crazy to get to the objects (if they're hard to reach, that can push the difficulty even higher than its baseline) we might put some environmental effects in there that the party will need to contend with.

But let's figure out our budget: Given the relative ease of the Destroy the Thing style of encounter, we can budget this as a Hard encounter. This is also the third encounter we're expecting them to fight, so they should have two victories. Every two victories lets us add another PC's worth of EV (encounter value) to our budget.

For a hard encounter (again, because of our scenario, it'll still count as a standard encounter) we can add up to three heroes' worth of encounter budget. However, I don't really want to push this to be too hard, so we might add, say, one to one-and-a-half of the budget per hero.

We'll assume we have a four-player party of level 1 characters with no retainers. Thus, each hero brings 6 to our EV, with another 6 from having 2 victories and then 6-9 in order to bump up the difficulty. This all comes out to a total budget of 36 to 39.

Each monster has an EV value, as do dynamic terrain objects. I actually want to start with that.

The Deathgnarls themselves I don't think are going to be dangerous objects - they're just targets to be destroyed. But we want there to be some hazard on the battlefield because that makes for fun encounters (especially in a game with so much forced movement).

We'll say that each of the three Deathgnarls are in a patch of Brambles - sharp, thorny vines that impede access to them. This is actually very cheap: only 1 EV per 10x10 thicket (that's 10 squares, squared). We might only need one or two of these, placing the Deathgnarls within the large overall thicket of brambles. If we have a really big map, we could put each of them in the center (I imagine that the Deathgnarls have a size of 2, meaning a 2x2 square on the map). Brambles have only 3 stamina per square, but I think that that means you can destroy them separately. They create difficult terrain and deal 1 damage per square a creature passes through. We could upgrade them to make them cause bleeding when they deal damage (save ends). This doubles their EV cost. I think it's worth it: we'll have two patches of brambles, perhaps next to one another so that we can easily fit our three Deathgnarls within them, and thus we're spending a whopping 4 EV on the total brambles.

That leaves 32-35 EV to spend on monsters.

We're going to stick to 1st level monsters, which actually makes the math very simple: Monsters come at a clean ratio to players depending on their status as Minions, Horde, Platoon, or Elites.

To avoid making this too complicated for ourselves, I think we should limit the encounter to no more than three kinds of monster. We'll want some minions, but all the remaining 1st level Undead monsters are either Horde or Leaders (the Ghost in that latter case).

What we really need to consider is enemy type. These monsters are here to defend the Deathgnarls, so we'll want things that can get in the way of our heroes. Brutes, Defenders, and Artillery to stand at the back and try to take down foes from afar all work well in this kind of encounter.

So, do we want two kinds of minions or two kinds of horde monsters? I don't imagine these are the most organized undead. I think the image here is not of some fusillade of arrows coming from disciplined undead soldiers, but of a giant swarm of zombies. There are some skeletal bowmen, but they're going to be more like elite officers left in charge of the rabble. The rest will be Zombies and then Rotting Zombie minions.

Ratio-wise, a minion comes 8 to a player, while Horde monsters come 2 to a player, at least at the same level. So, I think we should have a similar ratio of 2:2:8, skeletons, zombies, and rotting zombies. Each horde-level monster costs 3 EV to add to our encounter, and then each group of 4 minions costs 3 as well (again, these values go up with higher-level monsters).

So, if we want equal equivalent strengths of monsters, we can divide our budget by roughly 3, giving us about 11 EV to spend on each type of monster. Naturally, that doesn't divide perfectly, but we can skew toward certain monster types if necessary.

Four "proper" zombies takes up 12 EV from our budget. Four skeletons takes 12 as well, for a total of 24. The easiest thing we can then do is have three groups of four rotting zombies, taking up a total of 9 EV. We're thus a little on the low side for our budget, but still within our target (ok, technically we were already lowballing it, so screw it, let's add a fourth group of rotting zombies).

Thus, our total monster roster is:

4 Skeletons

4 Zombies

16 Rotting Zombies.

And yeah, that feels like a real sizeable monster force.

Now, we want to divide the monsters up into squadrons for their turn placement.

Here's something I'll confess I haven't quite figured out in the rules: Minions can have captains that give them a bonus (in the case of Rotting Zombies, it's a +1 bonus to their strike damage). I don't know if they have to be in the same squadron as their non-minion captain (I don't think they do). I think their more powerful zombie brethren are likely to serve as their captains here.

So, we position the skeletons behind the briars (or even in them - maybe the skeletons are fine just not moving) to pelt our heroes with arrows, while the zombies form a wall in front of them to try to prevent the heroes from getting to the Deathgnarls.

In order to ensure the fight ends if the objects are destroyed, we'll even say that the power they're pumping out of the land is what is sustaining their animation.

With 24 monsters to fight and three targeted objects, this should be a rather target-rich environment, and I think forced movement through the brambles could also be a lot of fun - a way to shred through monsters. The Deathgnarls probably have high stability - they're anchored into the ground - but they could be damaged by hurling zombies and skeletons into them.

And there we have it: a little action set-piece for our story.

Let's Negotiate: Draw Steel's High-Stakes Social Encounter Mechanic

 As I've written many a time here, most of my friends who play D&D with me are actors, and those who aren't are still in the "theater kid" type (I myself used to act a lot in high school, but gravitated more toward writing once I went to college).

Fantasy TTRPGs in the vein of D&D tend to focus most of their mechanics on combat, and at least the way that we play D&D, that works out for the best most of the time, because when we get into the interactions with NPCs and exploring the world, we largely want to make sure the mechanics get out of the way of the roleplay.

Thus, I was a bit skeptical about Draw Steel's heralded Negotiation system. But let's take it on its own terms and decide on our opinion afterward.

Let's talk about what a Negotiation is, and then how it works.

PCs will interact with NPCs all the time in Draw Steel - the story you're telling might be filled with action set-pieces, but even a movie as action-packed as Mad Max Fury Road still does take its time to slow down on occasion and give the characters time to express themselves outside of violence and derring-do (though one thing that makes that movie so brilliant is how the characters express themselves in what they do when the blades and explosive-spears are flying). Negotiations are not there for every social encounter.

Instead, there's a particular genre trope that Negotiations are meant to simulate:

This is when the party is seeking out aid from someone who may not be inclined to give them what they want, but isn't just a straight-up antagonist.

In the Delian Tomb, the game's first starter adventure, you get a chance to negotiate with a member of a rival adventuring party, trying to get something from them that will help you get deeper into the tomb. That's all well and good, but let me tell you what I think is a much more epic example:

In Return of the King, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas go to the necropolis of Dunharrow, where Aragorn seeks to offer them a release from the curse placed upon them by Isildur if they will aid him in his defense of Gondor against Sauron's forces. The dead have largely been content to remain in their secluded, accursed home, but they are prevented from passing on to the afterlife because of the curse: they deserted from Isildur's side during the war of the Last Alliance, and thus the curse keeps them bound to the mortal plane (and as we see with the Ringwraiths, a human who doesn't die at their natural time gradually transforms into a ghostly spirit in Tolkien's world).

It's a high-stakes mission, and in the movie, at least, failure will mean the dead turn on our three heroes and extinguish them. But, ultimately, Aragorn convinces them that he is the rightful king and Isildur's heir, and that he is capable of lifting the curse. They wind up turning the tide in the battle of the Pelenor fields: a successful negotiation.

In a negotiation, the NPC (or I suppose group of NPCs) with whom the party is negotiating gets certain special stats: Interest and Patience.

Interest is something you could consider a kind of "score." The better their interest at the conclusion of the negotiation, the better the outcome. NPCs who are already inclined to listen to what the party has to say and perhaps already like them (but might still be hesitant to commit to some course of action, thus requiring a negotiation in the first place) will start with a higher interest. This score goes from 0 to 5, and if you hit either extreme, the negotiation ends with a final offer (which will be the best possible outcome at 5 and at 0 interest will see the NPC choose actually to do something harmful to the party - not necessarily fully aggressive, though it could be that - but something that will make the party regret even bringing this up).

Patience is how long an NPC is willing to continue discussing things. Like interest, this can be on a scale of 0-5, but you generally cannot increase patience: the best you can do is not decrease it. At 0 patience, the NPC will make a final offer based on the current interest level.

Now, you don't have to play out a negotiation until the NPC's patience wears out: for one, it will automatically end at 0 or 5 interest, as mentioned above, but also, the party can choose to accept a deal somewhere in the middle if they think that's ok.

Now, how do we affect the NPC's interest? Naturally, we'd love it to hit 5, but what's the best way to do that?

Well, different NPCs have different concerns, and here, we define those concerns through a number of keywords: Motivations and Pitfalls. The game provides several broad categories: Benevolence, Discovery, Freedom, Greed, Higher Authority, Justice, Legacy, Peace, Power, Protection, Revelry, and Vengeance. Each NPC has at least two motivations and one pitfall from that list. For example, the Dunharrow men could be thought to have Freedom and Peace as their motivations. But they might scoff at an offer of Protection, because what protection do the dead require? Thus, Protection might become a pitfall for them.

In a negotiation, the party makes arguments. If they appeal to one of the NPC's motivations, they test (Reason, Intuition, or Presence, depending on the appeal being made, with skills, especially interpersonal ones, often applying). If the Director considers the argument particularly well-founded, they might automatically offer a tier 3 result, but otherwise, you just roll. On a tier 1, the NPC's patience decreases by 1. On a tier 2, the patience decreases by 1 still, but you also increase their interest. On a tier 3, the interest increases while the patience remains the same. However, once a motivation has been appealed to, further hammering home on that motivation will effectively get an automatic tier 1 (again, patience running out doesn't necessarily mean you've screwed up the negotiation, but it cuts off the chance to get that perfect 5-interest result).

Hitting a pitfall, however, will automatically decrease both patience and interest by 1: you really want to avoid these if you can.

If you avoid both motivations and pitfalls (perhaps you've already used their motivations) you can try an argument outside of them. Tier 1 decreases both patience and interest by 1. Tier 2 only reduces their patience, while tier 3 will increase interest by 1 but lower patience by 1 (unless you get a natural 19 or 20, which doesn't reduce the patience).

In other words, if someone is already quite hostile toward you, it's very hard to get those high-interest results, but still technically possible if you roll really well.

Next, we account for Renown and a new stat called Impression. Status can be a valuable tool in negotiation. Aragorn has to convince the Dunharrow men that he's genuinely the rightful king of Gondor. But upon proving that, his renown is clearly far higher. If some random ranger from the north were to talk to the dead men, they'd probably not really give him the time of day.

PCs will gain renown as they level up - not strictly in line with their levels, but generally expected to gain renown every other level or so. High-status NPCs will have a higher Impression score, and the higher that is, the more renown is required to really influence their attitude toward the PC. If the PC's renown is equal to or higher than the NPC's impression score, the PC can get an edge on these argument tests, with different skills coming into play depending on whether you're famous (the NPC has a positive view of you) or infamous (the NPC has a negative view of you). (Skills like Brag, Interrogate, and Intimidate would apply to the infamous version.)

When patience runs out, or when the party decides to take the current offer, you get different things based on the NPC's interest:

5 means "yes, and," where they'll give you what you want and then offer some bonus reward on top of it. Maybe you're seeking some magical treasure, and they've decided they like you so much that they'll send a Retainer NPC to fight alongside you for a time.

4 is simple: they give the party what they asked for. To encourage players to try for a 5-interest conclusion, the NPC might ask if that was all they needed.

3 is "Yes, but," where they'll ultimately do as the party wants, but will require some additional payment or service.

2 is "No, but," where they won't do what the party ultimately wants, but they'll offer some consolation prize: maybe they don't commit their forces to some battle, but they'll offer maps and intelligence.

1 is a flat No, just not doing what the party wants.

0 is "No, and," where not only does the NPC refuse the party, but will take hostile action toward them, potentially attacking them, or perhaps undermining them in some subtler way. If the party doesn't want them as an enemy, they'll need to do something to make amends.

    Now, it would be tempting to simply use most of these mechanics "under the hood," without getting into the weeds about it with your players. However, certain class features and other bonuses will interact with this system. Negotiations are serious business, and a successful negotiation can even award Victories.

The idea here is to make these high-stakes social encounters feel as impactful as a combat encounter. But I think there are some keys: don't overuse them being one of them. I think in a given adventure, maybe one big negotiation is appropriate.

I do think it also prompts a bit of your world and adventure design. The target of a negotiation feels like it should be a kind of third party. I have the bare bones of an adventure I've been thinking up (along with a brand-new campaign setting) in which a hostile army invades a once-peaceful region. Within that region, there's a Wode Hag who has for a long time been kind of a blessing and curse, using her magic to aid those who give her payment, but also inflicting suffering and terrors upon those who displease her. At default, the Hag feels safe enough in her wode from the invaders, but the party might try to convince her that she'll be dragged into this fight one way or another, and that this is her fight as well.

In a best-case scenario, she might send her minions to attack one of the invader's footholds, and perhaps also lend some magic to the party (either in the form of treasure, or a temporary retainer: I love the idea of sending some kind of hulking wicker construct to fight along with the party - which would likely require the use of the "Custom Retainer" section in the Monsters book).

The Heroes book actually has a big section in the "For the Director" chapter of sample negotiations that you can just steal easily enough. Most are for humanoid NPCs, though it also has ones for Dragons, Liches, and even Deities. These give you an Impression score and list of Motivations and Pitfalls.

Notably, I think that discovering these motivations and pitfalls can actually be a pretty reasonable use of a Downtime Project. While you might prefer to use these on the crafting of magic treasures, doing the Discover Lore or Go Undercover projects might be a good way for you to learn more about the person you're going to talk to. That said, you might be able to discover this simply by asking them, and if they aren't forthcoming, there's a test you can make to try to determine it, with the potential to reduce their interest if you roll poorly and they don't like you trying to suss them out.

    So, what are our thoughts?

For sure, this system does put some crunch into social encounters. It creates more things for a Director to track. And I think if you made an adventure full of negotiations, it would bog things down.

But I respect the effort to create a framework at least gesturing toward the complexity of combat mechanics to make for high-stakes drama without swords drawn.

And, indeed, I think it would be relatively easy to port over some of these concepts to other RPGs.

If you don't overdo it, I actually think leaning into the mechanical workings of this could be fun: making it clear to the players that this is something with clearly-delineated parameters. You won't be able to just re-make the same argument and hope you roll better on your test than you did the last time.

I actually think that patience as a concept is something that might be the secret sauce you need underneath any social encounter - but in most cases, it can be an invisible number just held within the mind of the GM.

I would also say that it'll be important to ensure that there are multiple paths out of a failure state. In combat, weirdly enough, because the failure state is so final (though as I explored before, there are means by which an entire party can recover from a TPK,) it makes things kind of simple. Here, you need to make sure that if you build an adventure around the party successfully getting something from this NPC, you need to allow for that to come in different forms, and it might get harder if the negotiation goes poorly.