UA: Arcane Updates

 We have a new Unearthed Arcana from D&D. We've been getting these at a decent clip, though I'm a little surprised we haven't gotten any confirmed book releases. We're still waiting on the two Forgotten Realms books and the delayed Eberron one that was initially supposed to come out last month.

This one is actually just another pass at the previous "Arcane Subclasses" UA. Surprisingly, this actually has one fewer subclass, dropping the Hexblade Warlock (which did also show up twice already, having arrived in the Horror Subclasses UA, so I guess it's not that weird).

This brings us new looks at the Arcane Archer Fighter, Tattooed Warrior Monk, and the four 2014 PHB Wizard subclasses that didn't make it into the 2024 PHB.

I'll do a series of posts going over each of them, seeing how they changed from the previous UA (I don't know if I have the energy to compare them with their original versions - only the Tattooed Warrior hasn't had an official publication).

EDIT: Well, I was going to do a post looking at each of the subclasses (also, I had forgotten about the Arcana Domain Cleric, which is also not included) but the new UA appears to have been pulled from D&D Beyond.

Could it be that they did so because they were missing the subclasses? I'll check in again and hopefully have a chance to give my impressions.

Going purely from memory:

Arcane Archers got a few refinements, nothing enormous from the previous UA.

Tatooed Warrior Monks look a lot more appealing, emphasizing spells less and moving toward enhancing existing Monk abilities (they still get cantrips, but the tattoos now either give brand new effects, often without needing Focus Points, or buffing things like Patient Defense or Step of the Wind).

Enchantment and Transmutation Wizards got, in my opinion, more of a refinement than a redesign.

Conjuration Wizards got some cool buffs: giving their summons resistances to most damage types and also, at 14th level, letting you split the summons into two creatures, each with half the normal HP (but again, with the resistance, that's nearly as good as they were before), which is, possibly, insanely powerful.

Necromancers are back to getting Animate Dead automatically, but they get a few buffs to their raised minions (sadly this doesn't incorporate a bonus to hit). They also get to summon a Skeleton or Zombie with Find Familiar (which is fun) and they get a feature that lets them sacrifice undead minions, and then another that lets them blow up an undead creature when it dies (though as I read it, you can't use these at the same time because they both take a reaction). I think it's closer to the fantasy we're looking for, but I still think Necromancers should be a pet subclass.

Leaving Silent Hill

 Well, I beat Silent Hill 2 (the 2024 remake).

It actually turns out that I was far closer to the end than I had thought. But the final part of the game involves two difficult boss fights - I died once against the penultimate fight and, like, three or four times against the final fight.

I'm given to understand that various choices and activities will lead to different endings, which can even change the identity of the final boss, though I think both are similar in form and mechanics.

Again, I sometimes feel a little ambivalent about how careful I want to be with spoilers, given that this is, after all, a 24-year-old game. But just for safety:

Spoilers Ahead

Big Bads of Draw Steel

 A caveat that I hope to one day no longer need to add here: I still have yet to play/run Draw Steel in any capacity. It's all just existing in my head at the moment, needing a lull in one of my D&D groups and some buy-in from players to try it out (my transition to 2024 5E is more evolutionary than revolutionary, with two of my regular campaigns having PCs using different versions).

In theory, Draw Steel is meant to support play at max level more than D&D does - while my own Ravnica-set campaign is getting close to level 20, it's true that it becomes a little more difficult to balance things, and even with the updated rules and encounter-building guidance, it's still pretty tough to genuinely scare a party. (I did have a last-minute "go easy on them" moment, allowing them to take levels of exhaustion to quaff some experimental serums that restored HP, spell slots, and such the "Geist Engine Lich" - a reskinned and slightly altered Arch-Hag - boss had in his laboratory).

But I will say that, even if I think the Monsters book leans a little more on low-level monsters, there's still a fair amount of stuff to use at higher levels.

But what excites me is the pretty clear "final campaign boss" monsters they provide.

Generally speaking, these are 10th level Solo monsters, and while there aren't a huge number of these, the fact that they're designed to challenge a max-level party is cool.

Some - actually most, I think - are given specific character lore based in the setting of Orden, Draw Steel's central, Earth-like "manifold" (plane but also kind of planet). This is all well and good, but especially after my long-running Ravnica game, I'm for sure going to be running something in my own homebrew setting - whether that be my D&D setting, Sarkon, or a somewhat sketched-out Draw Steel setting called Andiya.

(Elevator pitch for Andiya: A world in which enormous rock spires rise up out of an unending violent storm. Civilization exists atop these spires, and airships are required to travel between them. The airships are controlled by an ostensibly politically neutral guild that holds a total monopoly on them. No one is sure what surface is hidden by the Storm Below, but the Sainted Diver, the only anonymous saint, is said to both take those who fall into his protection but also send Storm-Beasts to the World Above to strike terror into mortal hearts.)

Anyway, one of the design goals of Draw Steel was to ensure that the game worked smoothly at max level, and that there was enough content for max-level players to feel like they had something to do. Reducing the level cap to 10 naturally makes that a bit easier to achieve.

But let's talk about the level 10 Solo and Leader monsters.

    Ajax the Invincible:

Ajax is the flagship bad guy for Draw Steel, and is kind of interesting in that he's actually just a human. Ajax is the ultimate conqueror, and is said explicitly to be a Tactician, one of Draw Steel's classes, though his mechanics refer to how a Tactician works without actually making the Director play as if he were a PC.

Ajax actually has a higher EV than other level 10 solo monsters, so he's truly meant to be the "Tarrasque" of this game (while it appeared in Flee, Mortals!, Goxomoc, a more direct analogue to the Tarrasque, is likely coming in a later supplement).

As far as villains go, Ajax is a brilliant conqueror - some lore about him describes as he's played a long-term strategic game to bring elves and dwarves to heel and force them into behavior that will create enmity with humans, so that he can come in years later and offer to "save" the people his actions put in danger.

Thus, I think you can have a really deep, intrigue-laced campaign with Ajax as your big bad. Having a lot of well-meaning people fooled by his strategy could create a lot of minor antagonists who aren't truly evil or villainous.

The stat block itself is very complex, with lots of options for how to run him. One thing that's pretty exciting is that he gets a lot of abilities that call out specific class abilities: if a Shadow uses Hesitation is Weakness, he can respond with "Who's Hesitating?"

Ajax also has pretty clear monsters to use as henchmen: not only will he have armies of humans, but he's also got the infamous War Dogs, who are basically soulless but not undead Frankenstein'd-together super-soldiers. These exist at many different levels, so you should always have some War Dogs to throw at your party (I think I'd use them only as elite troops in harder encounters, to avoid giving them the Star Wars Stormtrooper effect, where the "elite terror-troops" of the evil empire wind up being your Goombas).

Notably, you can adjust Ajax to make him a leader instead - which makes sense given that his whole thing is that he's a master general. This does make him individually less of a threat, but you can increase the complexity of the encounter.

    Aurumvas:

I'll confess here: I don't really love the visual design of Aurumvas. While most demons have practically unrecognizable anatomies, Aurumvas has a very clearly snake-like head, which... compared with the level 6 Lumbering Egress, which is a towering rectangular slab of mismatched demonic flesh that serves as a living portal, it's just a bit... too recognizable.

Still, Aurumvas is a Leader, meaning that while he can be a big boss, he's going to have lots of hench-demons fighting alongside him. His "leader" abilities outside of villain actions are really just things that feed the Director malice when nearby demons die, so I think a fight against him would likely involve a lot of Minions and Horde demons.

There's not quite as complex a story to Aurumvas - he's basically just a particularly notable demon lord, so I think that the best use of him would probably be to be the power behind some more complex recurring villain.

    Meteor Dragon:

While ostensibly there are multiple meteor dragons out there, the lore on Dragons in Draw Steel is that they are created by moments of grief and calamity. Thus, I think a dragon is probably better treated as a natural disaster in flesh than some scheming villain behind the scenes.

A meteor dragon is the most calamitous of all the dragon types, and has a villain action that can permanently annihilate a target (though they have to roll poorly multiple times).

Again, I think there's something deeply impersonal about this kind of monster. This is a kind of apocalyptic beast that a mad cult might unleash, or it might be a catalyst to unbalance some power that leads to conflict the party needs to stop before dealing with the instigator.

    Count Rhodar von Glauer:

Oddly enough, the actual lore on Count Rhodar is that he's dead. However, this vampiric count, despite the fact that he would exsanguinate one of his subjects once a month, is beloved in his homeland, and has taken on an almost Arthurian role as the leader who will return in Glauer's darkest hour to save them.

There are some direct nods here to D&D's most famous vampire, with an old woman exclaiming "he is the land" when his executioners staked him.

However, the premise here really invites the Director to come up with a plot that justifies his return: Cultists, but even just Glauer patriots, might seek some necromantic ritual to bring the Count back. As described, apart from the whole vampire thing, he was a just and honorable ruler, but might his return turn his mind to vengeance?

I will say, of all the characters presented here, I think Rhodar feels like a character one could have a high-stakes Negotiation with. Especially given that his lore suggests that he might be the savior that will protect Glauer from Ajax's conquest - he could be a valuable ally to the party if they can get him on their side.

Of course, as a monster to fight, he's got some cool moves.

Furthermore, I love a gothic monster, and there's a pretty extensive collection of undead monsters to populate your campaign with (though I'd also caution that even if you want undead monsters to be the major threat of a campaign, toss in some other kinds to keep them from getting stale). Again, while Rhodar is beloved, he did also kill one of his subjects once a month in those "good days" before he was slain.

There are a few vampire stat blocks - there's a 7th level leader, horde, and minion version and level 4 horde version. In theory these aren't quite in the right level range, but I also suspect that as long as you don't go to that far a level difference, they'll still be a threat as long as you use EV to build encounters (and thus load up a bit more on them than you would if the party were level 7).

Classically, of course, vampires are great at putting on a veneer of respectability, so you could even have Rhodar appear friendly to the party at first, and do a good job of convincing them that he can be trusted only for him to turn on them when it becomes necessary.

    Lich:

Ah yeah, the classic big bad. As you'd expect, the Lich has a lot of powerful magic abilities they can use at range. While I'd normally recommend that GMs keep a Lich's soul-jar far away from them in their boss encounter so that you can use the monster again, Draw Steel's Lich has a reason you might want to let the Soulstone exist on the battlefield - because if the Lich goes down, a nearby player might find themselves to touch the stone, which will revive the Lich, potentially with full Stamina.

In a way, I feel it's almost redundant to imagine how to build a campaign around a Lich villain - it's such a classic of D&D that you can do any number of things: they might be a manipulator behind the scenes, or perhaps an undead conqueror, or an ancient evil unsealed and unleashed - so on and so forth.

There's a lot of undead monsters to use, so you can certainly have them showing up throughout the campaign. I also think War Dogs could work quite well as a Lich's minions as well (of which there are also quite a lot).

    Strategos Alkesits:

The level 10 Leader War Dog, lore-wise at least, she's clearly a lieutenant of Ajax's, and would probably work more as a preliminary "penultimate boss" in a campaign centered around him. As a Leader, rather than a Solo monster, she's going to be easier to take down if the party can focus her.

    And that's all the level 10 Leader and Solo monsters (unless I missed one). I'd really try to ensure that the campaign sufficiently foreshadows them. Given the complexity the game has at level 1, I don't think I'd be in such a rush to skip levels in a Draw Steel campaign, but because each level takes a flat 15 Victories, it doesn't seem that implausible that you could genuinely hit max level in a long-but-reasonable campaign.

I will say that most of these solo monsters have a lower EV than Ajax, even though they're of the same rank and level, so I'd be sure to give the party some meat to chew on at level 10 before they get to that final boss fight. Level 10 is a whole Echelon of Play, and there are a reasonable number of non-boss 10th level monsters for the party to encounter.

All of the level 10 Solo monsters other than Ajax have 144 EV, while he has 156. A standard encounter at level 10 has an EV budget of 24 per player, so if you have 6 10th level players, you can in theory toss them at most of these bosses right after a respite. Of course, these could become Hard encounters for smaller parties.

Remember also that you can build encounters with win conditions that aren't just "kill the monsters," which can modulate the difficulty, either making an encounter effectively easier or harder depending on the goal.

Anyway, there are lots of lower-level monsters to get through before you take on these legends, and plenty of solo monsters. And a campaign need not be just one big through-line story (though the campaigns I tend to play have a recurring threat with many branches that take us up against more minor foes).

Getting a Sense of Monster Roles in Draw Steel

 In Draw Steel, each Monster has a level, an organization (or what I like to think of as "Rank") and a group role. While the level and organization give you a sense of how dangerous a monster is, and roughly how many you should throw at a party of a given size and level, the role is a little more nuanced.

With the exception of Solo monsters, whose group role is "I am the entire fight" (though complex terrain can make such a monster more interesting,) group roles are there to give you a sense of what the monster is there to do. There are a fair number of these roles. I want to go through each of them and give a sense of what kind of abilities you find on these monsters.

Ideally, I'd like to get to a point where we can understand these well enough to start home-brewing creatures, but the asterisk here with all my Draw Steel stuff is that I still have yet to actually play the game.

Monsters of any organization level from Minion to Elite will also have one of these roles. Leader and Solo monsters are both designed to be the only monster of their type in the encounter. A Leader is meant to have several other monsters fighting alongside it, while Solo monsters are truly designed to be fought on their own.

Let's start with a list of the monster roles: Ambusher, Artillery, Brute, Controller, Defender, Harrier, Hexer, Mount, and Support.

    Ambushers:

Ambushers are meant to sneak up and strike at more vulnerable targets.

For example, the Angulotl Slink has a free maneuver that costs Malice that will allow them to leap 3 squares and hide if they land in a place of concealment.

A higher-level ambusher, the Shadow Elf Mournblade, (level 6 rather than 1) has both a signature ability that turns them invisible until the start of their next turn as well as a maneuver that lets them teleport up to 10 squares if they're concealed (such as, for example, by being invisible) into an area of darkness.

    Artillery:

Artillery is honestly fairly straightforward: these are the monsters that sit far back and try to strike from afar.

The level 5 Hobgoblin Incendiarist, for example, has a signature ability with a range of 10 that can also light a target on fire, and a 3-malice ability that can hit an area with fire damage and inflict this burning condition.

The Frost Giant Storm Hurler, a level 8 elite artillery (giants are mostly elite) also has a ranged signature ability, throwing ice javelins that can inflict bleeding and slow targets, and a 3-malice ability that launches massive icicles that land on the battlefield and explode if not destroyed before the giant's next turn.

    Brute:

Brutes are fairly simple big bags of Stamina and damage. They often have ways to push foes around or just overall be enough of a problem to draw fire.

The level 2 Gnoll Bonesplitter has a signature ability that can push or potentially grab targets.

The level 5 Troll Glutton has a signature ability that can slow the target and, with malice, heal them for the damage they do, as well as a 3-malice main action ability that lets them shift up to 6 squares and slam into foes.

    Controller:

Controllers often can move creatures around the battlefield or otherwise restrict their enemies' movement.

The level 7 undead Haunt slides targets with its signature ability, as well as using a 3-malice ability that can knock people prone in a burst area with a rider that prevents creatures from using the Stand Up maneuver.

The level 6 Voiceless Talker Invader has abilities that grab, push, and vertically slide.

    Defender:

Defenders are there to help reduce the damage that their allies take.

A level 4 Flesh Mournling (basically a Frankenstein's Monster-like creature) can prevent enemies from shifting and has an ability that can frighten targets.

The level 1 War Dog Neuronite can designate an ally with a 1-malice maneuver to either taunt all targets in a 5-foot burst around them, or they can grant the ally damage immunity 3 against any enemy in that burst.

    Harrier:

Harriers are there to chase down elusive foes.

The level 1 Radenwight Ratcrobat can hit two targets with their signature ability, and can shift between strikes and again after the second strike.

The level 3 Minotaur can shift 3 squares when it makes its signature ability (which is, itself, a charge ability, so they can even take the charge main action and still do this - and that's with a speed of 8).

    Hexer:

Hexers are all about putting status conditions on their foes.

The level 1 Lizardfolk Bloodeye can restrain targets with their signature ability, and have a 2-malice action that can reduce the target's line of effect (essentially cutting short the range of their ranged abilities).

The level 8 Rival Talent (one of several stat blocks that gives you enemy adventurers) can daze targets with a 2-malice ability, or can spend malice on their signature ability force foes to shift up to their speed where the talent wants (as long as it's not into any harmful terrain) and make free strikes against targets of the Talent's choice (each other, for example).

    Mount:

Mounts are actually kind of special: they are designed to be ridden by other creatures, who can use the "Ride" movement action to move the mount's speed.

The level 1 War Spider is one of the mounts Goblins use, and has a defensive ability to protect its riders and has a passive ability that lets riders launch themselves off of its back.

The level 1 Servitor War Walker (it does seem most mounts are level 1,) preferred by Dwarves, provides cover to the three size 1 allies riding it.

    Support:

Support creatures are there to back up and aid their allies, often by restoring stamina or granting temporary stamina.

The level 1 High Elf Palinode has a maneuver that can teleport two nearby allies to their side and grant 5 temporary stamina.

The level 9 Multivok Chief (basically big dwarven-made robots) can use a triggered action that can grant temporary stamina, as well as an aura that restores 15 stamina to nearby Servok (the other kind of Valok robot, which is less humanoid in shape) at the start of the chief's turns.

    So, there you have it: a few examples for each group role.

The idea here is that when you build an encounter, you should try to think about what the objectives of the encounter are and how the monsters might be set up to achieve their objectives. The Monsters book gives lots of guidance on different encounter scenarios. As an example, if the objective is to take out a high-value target, like an enemy commander, consider giving them a number of defenders there to keep them safe.

If the encounter is one in which the party is on the defensive, consider using more brutes and ambushers. A besieging army is probably sending brutes up on the front lines, artillery launching attacks from far away, and perhaps some ambushers or harriers trying to get behind the walls to compromise the defenses.

I also think that you could reward players' clever strategizing: say the party is there to eliminate a major villain, like a Human Bandit Chief. If the bandit chief knows that the party is coming for them, they might surround themselves with defenders, like the Human Knave. But perhaps the party has pulled something, like perhaps going behind the bandit chief's back to speak with one of their lieutenants. Perhaps in a Negotiation, they convinced that lieutenant that he should withhold his own men from protecting the boss, and maybe this lieutenant is the one who commands the gang's Knaves.

Now, the encounter's actual difficulty (as in the Encounter Value budget) might not even change, but perhaps instead of getting defenders that will make it harder to strike the bandit chief, now they've got to hire a bunch of low-level ruffians to guard them, like the Rogue minions, who are ambushers, not defenders. They might still pose a threat, but it'll make the party's goal of alpha-striking the boss far easier to achieve, and thus actually make the encounter easier.

Even if you don't want to get that complex, I do really like how this system gives you some guidance on how to make a more dynamic encounter. Putting only Brutes in your encounter will probably make for just a big slog, but if you pair Brutes with a small number of Support creatures, suddenly you give the players a strategic choice: risk another turn or two of the Brutes' damage to try to burn down the Support monsters first, or try to chew through the Brutes' stamina as quickly as you can on the logic that the Support monsters won't really be much of a threat once the brutes are gone.

Evaluating Kit Bonus Damage - When to Go for a Tier 3 Boost

 In Draw Steel, martial characters (minus the Null but including the Troubadour) pick out a Kit, which defines the kind of gear they're using, and also gives them something of a theme or vibe. Any of these classes can be a heavily-armored Mountain wielding a massive weapon, or a ranged Sniper, shooting foes from afar with their bow, or a bare-knuckle-boxing Pugilist.

I love this largely for flavor reasons: not all Shadows need to be the classic "dark leather armor with a hood" Rogue-like vibe: you can be a heavy-armor-wearing phantom knight or a wanderer fighting with a simple stick.

But I wanted to look at the mechanical benefits of these various kits, and specifically the damage bonuses.

Now, there's enough complexity here that I don't know that any kit's bonuses will always be the most optimal for a given class. You might pick different signature abilities and heroic abilities that favor one over the other.

As such, we're going to have to narrow our focus significantly to find out what bonuses are the best for us, and that means picking a class and some abilities.

The class that keeps calling out to me is the Shadow, because while I think I tend to project a kind and affable attitude toward my friends, there's always been that little edgelord lurking in the depths of my subconscious. Truth be told, what I really love is playing a "dark aesthetic but kind and heroic" character, but that's fine, because mechanically we're really focusing more on the former half of that.

Generally speaking, damage bonuses from Kits come in the following forms:

+1s to every tier result on both ranged and melee attacks

+1s to every tier result on just melee attacks (these kits tend to come with additional non-damage features).

+2s to every tier result in either ranged or melee attacks (often without any other damage bonus)

+4s to the tier 3 result of either ranged or melee attacks (there are more of these for melee, I think Sniper is the only one for ranged options).

So, what this tells us is that there's a reward for specializing: naturally, if zero in on, say, melee attacks, you'll get a bigger damage boost if you take a kit that only benefits melee. But it does mean that you'll be losing out on damage when you make ranged attacks (every class can do a ranged free strike if they don't have any ranged abilities).

Truthfully, the real thing I wanted to look at was the +4s for tier 3 results. Given that the tiers have fixed target numbers, my understanding is that as we level up, and our primary characteristics go up, we'll naturally start hitting tier 3 results more often (and tier 1 results less often). I actually believe tier 2s remain the same if we don't have an edge or bane, because the peak of our average die result always results in a tier 2 (with +2 to our stat, a natural 11 gives us a 13, and with +5 to our stat, a natural 11 gives us 16).

As such, I suspect that these broad damage bonuses will benefit us more in early levels, while the tier-3-boosters will start to pick up value when we get to higher levels.

In an earlier post, I figured out the likelihood of each roll on the d10s. There's a 10% chance to roll an 11, and each value up and down from that is 1% lower (so 10 and 12 are both 9%, and eventually 2 and 20 are both just 1%).

So, let's figure out the average damage boost that these things give us when we're adding different amounts to our power roll.

Luckily, the 2/2/2 and 1/1/1 bonuses are the same regardless of what we roll. These are always going to give us 2 or 1 extra damage.

It's the tier 3 boosters that we need to do some math to figure out:

At level 1, we're adding 2 to our power roll. That means that, without edges or banes, we get a tier 3 result on a roll of 15 or higher. The chance of rolling a 15 is 6%, and then adding the 5%, 4%, 3%, 2%, and 1% of rolling any value higher than that gives us 21%.

If we're getting +4 to our damage 21% of the time, that means that we're getting an average of .84 extra damage - clearly not as good as even a +1 across the board.

    However!

Edges and Banes are a thing. Especially when we're talking about a Shadow, who can pretty easily slip into concealment, you can often get an edge with a maneuver on your turn. By adding two to our power roll, we're effectively moving the threshold on which we get that tier 3 result down by 2, to only 13. That adds 15% to our chance to get it, putting us at a 36%. Thus, that becomes 1.44 extra damage. We're still not beating the +2 kits, but we're catching up.

If we have a double edge, things are probably going to take off considerably. Now, to get a tier 3 result, we need only roll a natural 10, because this way, every total of 12 or higher is a tier 3. Rolling a 9 or lower is a 36% chance, meaning we've got a 64% chance to get a tier 3 result. That means an average bonus of 2.56, meaning that in scenarios where we have a double edge, this kit bonus is giving us the best damage boost even at level 1.

But that is something of a best-case scenario, of course.

As you level up (I believe at the first level of each Echelon of Play) your primary characteristic(s) go(es) up. Meaning, in the case of our Shadow, our Agility - though we can also increase our Intuition, Reason, or Presence if we're going with a kit like Warrior Priest, Battlemind, or Spell Sword, whose signature abilities can't use Agility. That means we'll eventually get a +3, a +4, and at level 10, a +5 to the characteristics we're using for our abilities' power rolls.

As I said before, I suspect that this will start to favor the +4 to tier 3 bonus kits more and more as we gain levels.

At +3, our chance to roll a tier 3 result without other bonuses or penalties is now going to go up by 7%, because that's the chance we roll a natural 14. Thus, we go from a 21% chance to a 28% chance. That 4 damage bonus times that likelihood is now 1.12, meaning we're now edging out the +1 bonus kits.

At +4, we've basically already done the math, because having a +4 to our characteristic is essentially the same as having an edge with a +2. Thus, with our 36% chance, we're getting an average of 1.44.

At +5, which we only reach at level 10, we're now getting this result on a 12 or higher, adding a full 9% to our likelihood, so that's 45% of the time, meaning we're talking 1.8 extra damage. This is the same as if we were level 4-6 (with our +3 to the roll) and getting an edge.

Thus, in a vacuum, without edges or banes, we're not quite catching up with the +2 bonuses. However, again, edges and banes can make the difference here.

Jumping back to 3rd echelon, when we have a +4, an edge effectively makes that a +6, which means a tier 3 result on a roll of 11 or lower, adding a full 10% to our chance to do so. That means 55%, giving us an average damage boost of 2.2. If we can get a double edge, we're going to get a tier 3 result on a roll of 8 or higher, meaning 79% of the time, so that bonus is 3.16.

A 10th level character with an edge on their roll is also getting it now on a natural 9, which means adding another 9% to our tier 3 likelihood, or 64% total, giving us an average damage boost of 2.56. If we get a double edge, we're talking about getting a tier 3 result 85% of the time, for an average bonus damage of 3.4.

So, to sum up:

Double Edge: the +4 bonus damage is always best.

Edge: +2s remain best on average until level 7, when the +4 bonus becomes likely enough to overcome it.

No Edge: +2s are always the highest damage option.

    Now, let's reintroduce some nuance:

Depending on party composition and the way that each character plays, you might find you're getting edges all the time. If you can consistently get double edges, a +4 kit like the Mountain, Panther, Sniper, etc., will be great. Your own class might have plenty of ways to get edges as well.

Against monsters that inflict banes, naturally these +4 kits are going to suffer more than others.

Also, each of these kits come with far more than just damage boosts: you might only occasionally get that cool +4 bonus from your Panther kit, but the mobility and stability you gain from it could be well worth it.

Likewise, a kit that boosts the damage of both melee and ranged attacks might wind up being more effective overall if you want to use a lot of both kinds of abilities (many Shadow abilities can be either ranged or melee, so if you go Cloak and Dagger and fling an endless supply of throwing knives, that's cool too.)

Once again, I haven't actually had a chance to play this game yet, and so questions of how balanced it is remain to be explored, but I do get a sense that you should be able to build a character around a concept and vibe and it should be fairly effective. I think any of these kits is probably going to feel cool to use. But I also think that a real min-maxxer might consider holding off on using these +4 kits until they get to higher levels, when the bonus becomes more likely to come into play.

How Ancestries Work in Draw Steel

 Like most "create your own character" fantasy RPGs, in Draw Steel, you pick one of several ancestries. This might include conventional choices like Humans, Orcs, Dwarves, or High Elves (though I'll note that the dwarves in Draw Steel are quite different from your standard ones, being actually more akin to the Earthen from World of Warcraft) to original creations like the Memonek (silicon-based humanoids who have a vaguely metallic quality) or the Time Raiders (four-armed travelers of the Timescape who have a very 1980s cyberpunk look to them).

All in all, there are twelve ancestries to choose from in the core rules (with more coming in a supplement they've announced). These are Devils (Draw Steel's devils are from the seven cities of hell, but are ultimately humanoids with free will who aren't inherently evil - more akin to tieflings from D&D), Dragon Knights (think Dragonborn), Dwarves, Wode Elves (wood elves, but really emphasizing a more animalistic appearance), High Elves, Hakaan (towering stone giant people, very roughly equivalent to D&D's Goliaths,) Humans, Memonek, Orcs, Polders (kind of the Halfling equivalent), Revenants (yes, undead folk), and Time Raiders.

Each ancestry comes with a few signature traits: for example, the Human, being so attuned to the mundane world, has Detect the Supernatural, which allows them to use a maneuver to sense supernatural objects and creatures nearby (yes, in Draw Steel, humans are natural magic-detectors).

However, in addition to these signature traits, you also get a number of "Ancestry Points." Different ancestries have either 3 or 2 of these points (I think those with more complex signature traits tend to have fewer points to spend). There are then several options for purchasable traits that you can spend those points on.

To continue our Human example, one trait is "Cant' Take Hold," and costs just one ancestry point. This allows you to ignore difficult terrain created by magic and also reduces any forced movement by magic or psionic abilities used against you by 1 square. "Staying Power" costs two ancestry points, and increases your maximum recoveries by 2 (a fun reference to ancient humans' endurance hunting technique, where we'd just follow a herd of animals until they were too exhausted to continue running from us. Human endurance is one of our non-intelligence physical advantages).

In other words, two characters of the same ancestry might have some very different features.

Every ancestry uses this system (in early development, this was originally I think specific to Dragon Knights,) so when you build your character, you can really look at which traits will complement your character concept as well as your build.

As an example, Hakaan, the stony half-giants, are already larger than most humanoids, having a size of 1L (while they still occupy the same space on a map of just one square, 1L means they're towering at like 10 feet tall). If you build a character focused a lot on forced movement, that's already going to let you move smaller creatures an extra square (with melee weapon abilities). But you can also purchase the Forceful trait, which increases the distance of all of your forced movement by another 1.

As a note, Revenants, being undead members of other ancestries, have an option to pick Previous Life, which allows you to effectively purchase traits from the ancestry you had in life (though you can't get the signature traits). There are also some Revenant-specific ones (I like Bloodless, which gives you immunity to the bleeding condition, making it very easy to continue fighting even if you're dying.)

Things Get More Abstract and a Little Less Specific as We Descend Deeper in Silent Hill

 For the first two major "dungeons" of Silent Hill 2, we're given a sense that the town itself is where we're going to spend this game. While the journey into the Otherworld version of Blue Creek Apartments is, well, otherworldly, and when we do a second trip through the hospital, only this time in the rusty netherworld, they still seem to kind of occupy the same physical space.

As readers of this blog are surely aware, I'm a big fan of D&D. Dungeons & Dragons has, as part of its "meta-setting," a multiverse of different planes. While most settings are on the "Prime Material Plane," and are essentially just planets in a rough analogue of how we understand the world (with several asterisks,) there are also several other planes.

Among the relatively recent additions to the cosmos, debuting in 2009 with 4th Edition, were the Feywild and the Shadowfell. Both are about as close as you can get to the Prime Material Plane without being part of it, and function as mirror-worlds. For example, you might have the bustling city of Neverwinter on the Prime Material Plane, but in the Shadowfell, it's the dark and undead-filled city of Evernight.

That's largely how the first part of Silent Hill 2 works - when we step across the gap into Blue Creek Apartments, we also step into this shadowy otherworld. It's more striking, though, when we go through the hospital a second time, seeing its dark reflection, and then upon exiting, spend a fair amount of time making our way back through streets we'd already been to in the real world (though I suspect the "real" world is itself some other alternate dimension).

Things take a turn, though, after the descent into the Silent Hill Historical Society, which takes us down into the prison.

While I assume that the prison is supposed to have been real at some point, it's not clear where, spatially, it's related to the rest of the town. If anything, we seem to be below the lake. We dive down into multiple deep dark holes, making it feel (in a move I'm sure is intentional) that we're going deeper and deeper into hell. (I do wonder if the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was one of the inspirations for this story: when Eurydice dies, her husband Orpheus descends into the underworld and bargains with Hades to let her come back to the land of the living. Hades agrees, only as long as Orpheus never looks at her until they emerge. Tragically, Orpheus has a moment of doubt at the end of their journey, fearing that Hades has used illusions of his lover's voice to make a fool of him, only for him to glimpse her and thus condemn her to remain in the land of the dead).

Interestingly, we don't really get a boss to the prison like we had at the end of the apartment buildings or halfway through the hospital. But we do get a boss after a kind of mini-dungeon that follows. Here, I suspect we're kind of going through the personal torment of Angela. Her own trauma seems to be on full display here: while the game isn't explicit about what happened to her, the lurching "Abstract Daddy" boss that we have to fight several times while navigating a maze of hallways and rooms that look like a residential home surely points to, well, among the most monstrous things you can imagine a father doing to his daughter. Angela's reaction to James, assuming that his patience and attempts to calm her are merely a ploy to sexually assault her, make it pretty clear what happened to her.

Abstract Daddy has a truly disturbing design: initially I thought that it was like a painting come to life, but I think instead what it is is a vaguely humanoid form that is reaching through a door - like an abusive father breaking into a locked bedroom door. We fight it off a few times before we finally have our last confrontation with it, where the facade of the domestic house-labyrinth we've been running around collapses away to show walls of flesh, pulsing with a heartbeat. It's a potent metaphor for domestic abuse: periodically we fight it off and get it to go away, but it's waiting there - we're still stuck inside its lair.

While it's probably dead by the time she does, Angela gets a cathartic moment where she smashes it on the head with a TV set. Truly, of the people we've met here in Silent Hill, she's the one I find most sympathetic, though I really doubt we're getting any real happy endings for any of these people.

The next section is the one that I feel the most mixed on: while the previous area was already called "The Labyrinth," this label extends to the area we visit next. Here, the specificity of the environmental design gets a bit... weird.

Spoilers, I guess: