Gold, Credits, and Player Motivation

 So, while I'm not really anywhere close to running it, I have at least gotten one friend to build a Starfinder character (a Brennari Xenodruid Mystic) and hope that some time this year I'll actually be able to run something.

One of the issues I find myself having running D&D is that after a certain point, most characters don't really have a need for gold anymore. The most expensive piece of personal gear you can buy that has a standardized price is plate armor, which is 1500 gold. That's enough that Paladins, Strength-Fighters, some Clerics and Armorer Artificers will need to save up for a good long while and probably not get a set until they're about halfway through tier 2 (historically I think around level 7 to 9). Once that purchase is made, though, gold as a reward starts to drop off in urgency.

There are, of course, spell reagents that cost gold - in particular the diamonds required for resurrection spells, though also components for powerful buff spells like Heroes' Feast - but I think that the kind of exponential growth of gold acquisition if one is giving it out as loot starts to make a lot of character builds stop caring. Your Rogue, for instance, can get kitted out with Studded Leather Armor for only 45 gold - something they can probably afford at level 2 or 3. From there on out, other than maybe buying replacement arrows (which are trivially cheap for anyone who's not a 1st level adventurer) there's not much you can explicitly buy that will be necessary to succeed at your role in the group.

So, what about magic items?

Here's the thing: while the books claim that you can run a whole D&D campaign without any magic items, I quibble with that when you start to look at a lot of high-level, epic monsters. A lot of legendary creatures in the higher CR range become immune to most weapon attacks unless the weapons are magical. Now, yes, a character can cast Magic Weapon, but I think the assumption is, instead, that the characters will have gotten each of their weapon-wielding characters at least your basic +1 weapon (Adventurer's League characters, at least the last time I played in AL, could pick up any +1 weapon of their choice upon hitting tier 2).

Furthermore, the primary expected means of acquiring magic items is through loot - you find a Defender Longsword in the dragon's hoard. This does introduce a great convenience to the DM, which is that they can control how and when the party gets access to the magic items that they select.

Now, comparing this with Starfinder, things are very, very different.

In Starfinder, literally every item in the game has a value in Credits (the sci-fi equivalent of gold). This ranged from weapons to armor to cybernetic implants to magical jewelry to holographic strategy games (the latter very clearly meant to be the game on the Millennium Falcon). The only "item" that doesn't is your spaceship and its components, which instead "levels up" with your party.

But this also translates to character progression. In D&D, every Greatsword, from a common, nonmagical one to a crazy Holy Avenger, does 2d6 slashing damage, to which you add your Strength modifier. The bells and whistles on your magical weapon can potentially increase that damage by a lot, but nothing that's being mass-produced is going to have anything particularly fancy - depending on how prevalent magic is on your world and how well understood it is, even a +1 weapon could potentially be made with the lost art of a bygone age, and cannot currently be reproduced, making such weapons jealously sought after.

In Starfinder, though, mundane weapons can get insane as they become more expensive. Your standard laser pistol does 1d4 fire damage (there is no "radiant" damage in Starfinder) but by the time you hit high level and can drop a lot more credits, you can get a laser pistol that does 8d4. And that's not some "laser pistol of incredible magic power" or anything. It's a fully mundane and nonmagical piece of technology that, at most, is maybe some bleeding edge new tech, or a weapon that is strictly regulated and only permitted to be used by especially elite soldiers or operatives (...crap, those are both class names in Starfinder. I meant the terms more generically).

But even if the mundane weapons and armor come in a broader variety, on top of that even magic things have a price.

Now, what's the upshot of all of this?

In the early days, D&D was, I think, conceived as a more morally neutral affair - it was all about delving into treasure-rich dungeons and plundering them. Indeed, when you look at the alignment system, the idea of a lot of morally ambiguous people working together makes a lot of sense. Your lawful good character might want that gold to help the innocent and bring order to the wilderness, and your neutral evil character might instead want to use it to establish themselves as the king of the criminal underworld. But everyone can make use of money, so you band together to get it.

I think most players of my generation tend to instead prefer more of a narrative basis for their campaigns. Gold becomes a secondary or tertiary objective - what you really want to do is instead slay the evil monster that is threatening to destroy the world.

Indeed, I think a lot of modern campaigns are built around responding to a crisis rather than going out to explore and acquire. Compare, for example, Tomb of Horrors with Tomb of Annihilation, the latter of course being a kind of modern update to the former. The original Tomb of Horrors was a death trap, and the only reason to go in was to get the treasures found within - indeed, the "twist," if one can call it that, is that the dungeon itself is basically a big honeypot to try to lure adventurers there and feed their souls to Acererak's phylactery. In Tomb of Annihilation, on the the other hand, there's a massive crisis where resurrection magic is failing, and anyone who had been resurrected previously is wasting away. The dungeon there is an obstacle not to the glorious treasures hidden within, but the resolution of a crisis that threatens the whole world.

And I think that this change in story structure reflects 5E's ambivalence toward gold as a reward. Yes, you're never going to be upset that you have more gold, but if you were to tell a group of level 13 adventurers that a sum of 10,000 gold was sitting in a dungeon somewhere, but that it had nothing to do with whatever the main story of the campaign was, they'd probably be reluctant to go. After all, if you're a heroic adventurer in a world where there's some crisis like an ancient lich coming back to send an unstoppable army of the dead across the world, you might say that a several-day detour to delve into the lost mines of some dwarven clan aren't going to be worth it (except perhaps through the players' meta-knowledge that the DM worked hard on that dungeon and that they'll probably have worked in some narratively convenient clue that can only be found within).

By tying money directly to player power in a way that 5E does not, though, I think Starfinder might potentially work better to motivate a more mercenary group of adventurers.

Here's the thing: I think that you build the system that rewards player power along the lines of the experience you think people will gravitate toward.

And you might notice that most people who play 5th Edition these days don't really bother with experience points as a path to player power. Milestone leveling is, anecdotally at least, a much more popular form of play. And what does milestone leveling encourage?

Story. Plot.

As an example, in the Wildemount game I'm playing, the milestone moments where we've gotten to level up typically happen when one of the "prophecies" in the "heroic chronicle" system are reached. (This is a pretty thorough character-building system in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount that gives you step-by-step instructions on how to build a character tied into the setting and with goals and personal stakes).

As such, if we want our characters to get more powerful, we need to work our way through their plots - which leads to a very narrative-driven system.

Experience Points for killing monsters, though, naturally pushes players to want to fight monsters as much as possible.

And when money becomes a progression system because everything has a price you can buy it with, you're going to have a game where people want to make lots of money.

Now, I'm someone who likes narrative. I am a writer, after all, and I love telling a story with my D&D games. So, milestones work very well for me.

But I think it'll be interesting to run a system like Starfinder, where at least in one aspect, there will be other incentives in play.

Naturally, as a GM for Starfinder, I think you could basically play it like a D&D game - maybe only lower item-level items are available for purchase, and you might reserve the right to only allow people to get super-fancy weapons and armor or magic items by finding them in the world.

By contrast, you could also set prices for magic items in a D&D game to make gold more of a constant motivation (there's some guidance on these things, but if you want to do this, I recommend sitting down and really figuring out how much each thing you want to make available should cost).

This is all kind of theoretical at this point for me, and while I want to run some Starfinder before the end of the year, I also think that any extended campaign is unlikely to happen until one of my two current games I'm DMing reaches a conclusion.

Phyrexia: All Will Be One: Getting a Compleat Picture

 So, given that I'm running a Ravnica-set D&D campaign with the Phyrexians as the big bads, the focus on them in MTG's canon story has been useful to me for inspiration (I picked them just because I'm an old school MTG fan who started playing first during Fallen Empires and not long after our campaign started, Vorinclex showed up on Kaldheim).

The newest set is Phyrexia: All Will Be One, which puts these fantasy-genre cybernetic body horror monsters front and center (there's a card, I can't remember the name, that shows a bunch of humanoid Phyrexians who could very easily just be the Borg from Star Trek).

Now, I'll confess that I'm not the most adventurous deck builder. Arena's system where anyone can get any card pretty easily is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you can get all the coolest cards. On the other hand, there's less incentive to try to scrape together a functional deck with just the stuff you have. Most players it seems are working with the carefully-crafted deck archetypes that the pros use.

That makes these early days of a new set kind of exciting. You don't really know what the good deck types and good cards are, so you scrape together what works. The downside is that you still encounter a lot of the really strong decks from the past set's era, which usually blows you out of the water with your weird new one. But occasionally, you wind up playing something that's just out of left field enough to work pretty well against people expecting you to play a certain way.

There are two decks I've found pretty satisfying to play - even if they're still not tuned up fully yet.

The first is a mono-black deck that uses a cool new threat called Archfiend of the Dross. This is a 6/6 flyer for 2BB - yes, it's cheap and huge. It also causes your opponent to lose 2 life any time a creature they control dies. The big and scary-sounding downside is that it starts with 4 oil counters, and each upkeep, you remove one of those counters. Once it's out of oil, you lose the game.

That sounds scary, and is clearly the downside that justifies its absurdly low cost for its size. The thing is: this gives you four turns to attack your opponent with a 6/6 flying creature. That means there's a good chance that you're going to swing in for the kill before you run out of oil - 24 total damage is more than enough to win. But then, also consider that you'll likely be removing more life from the opponent. One creature down and now the archfiend can finish the game in three attacks.

A creature surviving four turns is pretty rare in Magic anyway - you might swing in once and it dies to some removal, and now the downside has disappeared.

The other terrifying threat in this deck is Phyrexian Obliterator (a creature I've homebrewed stats for in the aforementioned D&D game - though it's not quite as nasty, if I'm honest). This is a reprint of a card that basically took its inspiration (the Negator - which I've also homebrewed) and turned the punishing drawback into a horrifying bonus. Again for just 4 mana (though it's BBBB, so good luck using that in a multicolor deck) you get a 5/5 trampler, and when it takes damage the opponent needs to sacrifice permanents equal to the damage dealt. Note that nowhere does it say "nonland permanents."

My experience with the Obliterator is that most opponents know that it's way more punishing to kill one of these things with damage than to just let it swing through and hit them - though any sort of kill, bounce, exile, or otherwise nondamaging removal spell works just fine. Still, I did play against an Izzet Prowess deck and the opponent must have either been desperate or not understood the text, because they buffed up a creature to kill my Obliterator and they wound up having to sacrifice literally everything they had on the board to start from scratch (or, they would have if they hadn't just conceded there - I can't blame them).

The deck uses a few black staples like Graveyard Tresspasser, Liliana of the Veil (a card I always feel a little skeptical about) and lots of removal. Gix's Command combos very well with the Archfiend especially against go-wide Soldier decks.

The other thing I've been trying to do is build a solid Toxic deck. Toxic is the new Infect/Poisonous ability that decouples the number of poison counters from the power of the creature (I actually wonder if this could become a retroactive keyword on old cards like Surveil did - does my Marsh Viper from The Dark now just say "Toxic 2?")

Initially I wanted to try using the new Phyrexian Mite tokens as a go-wide strategy with Toxic, but I'm not convinced it really works that well. I've had more luck with a Golgari deck of my own clumsy design that gets a bunch of cheap creatures (that are probably too simple to be considered by really competitive constructed players) with flight or deathtouch to make blocking them either more difficult or more costly. Venerated Rotpriest is a 1/2 for G that has Toxic 1 and also causes your opponent to get a poison counter whenever they target any of your creatures. Given how cheap my creatures are, this creates a bit of tension when it comes to removal spells where it might be worse to remove them than to just let them hit you (especially if I can get multiple Rotpriests out). Another insane green card here is Bloated Contaminator, a 4/4 with trample for just 2G (man, power creep is real) that has Toxic 1 but also lets you Proliferate when you hit the opponent with it. 4 power and trample along with Toxic is pretty nasty.

I can't say that this Golgari Deck is quite off the ground yet, but I've definitely racked up a few wins with it.

I will say, I now it's been a few years since they stopped doing "blocks," but I kind of miss it. I know that they've been able to introduce a lot of new ideas this way, but I also think that it often means that the really distinctive mechanics of any given setting or set wind up usually falling behind more general and kind of perpetual deck archetypes.

Also, while I don't really follow the Magic story very closely, I am struck by how this set really feels like it represents the darkest hour. While originally introduced in Antiquities, I think the original Phyrexian saga could be said to have run from Tempest Block through Invasion Block, so about four years. This one, has, I guess, gotten three years (certainly coming about after the War of the Spark). I do wonder if the relatively low bodycount from the War of the Spark and the complaints about it encouraged the folks at WotC to kill off a lot more established characters (to be fair, Jaya Ballard's the only one who has really died-died, but of course a lot of these folks have gotten a fate worse than death).

The Phyrexian plot here does suggest to me that they might pull back on the restrictions on planar travel that happened after Time Spiral. This allowed them to make Planeswalker cards in the first place, but I almost feel like, as cool as that is, Planeswalkers have kind of taken the place of Legendary Creatures, and now it's like anyone who isn't a planeswalker is an NPC in the planeswalkers' stories.

Anyway, the new set is gross and so far I'm having fun with it.

Getting Prematurely Invested in Starfinder

 So, I have not yet run a single game of Starfinder. But two days ago I ordered two supplementary books beyond the Core Rulebook and the first Alien Archive.

I have never played Pathfinder, largely because the genre in which it exists seems to be handled sufficiently by D&D 5th Edition. Pathfinder was, of course, released something as a response to 4th Edition and an attempt to build a kind of new edition that was more of a continuation of 3.5th Edition.

The point is, Pathfinder was built, pretty explicitly, to just be something you could play D&D-like games in.

Now, the nitty-gritty of it is something that players might have strong opinions about - Pathfinder's relative open customization versus 5E's more streamlined and narrow approach to character builds (not to say that complex multiclass builds don't exist in 5E). But the point is that just about any story you could play through and most character concepts you could come up with in 5E would have some analogue in Pathfinder, and vice versa.

I think the reason I've become so interested in Starfinder is its farther lean into true Science Fiction tropes. Spelljammer in D&D makes no attempt to change game systems - indeed, it does even less than what I think we expected it to do, which was to create ship-to-ship combat systems (there are such systems in Ghosts of Saltmarsh, but I haven't heard a lot of people using them).

This got me thinking, though, about the utility of new game systems.

In the midst of the OGL controversy, a number of companies announced plans to build their own new RPG systems. I believe Kobold Press, Paizo, and MCDM (and likely others) have all been talking about doing that.

On one hand, I think that a more diverse marketplace would be great for the TTRPG world - competition can drive innovation. But it's also true that these games tend to be difficult to learn - there are tons of nuances and tricks to them that can be daunting for a new player.

Those same nuances and tricks are, of course, also part of the appeal. It's exactly these sorts of things that allow clever players to come up with clever builds and strategies, and which get online communities playing around optimization or even just building ridiculous concepts that focus on narrow strengths (I played a one-shot with a Fighter who had specialized into grappling, and literally held an archdevil underwater while we pummeled it to death).

The point is, purely from a player perspective, if there's a system that does what I need it to do, I'm probably going to be very hesitant to try out systems that do the same thing. Starfinder looks like it can scratch an itch that D&D doesn't quite reach (though it comes close).

There are, of course, simpler RPG systems. I briefly played a bit of Kids on Bikes, and while I think that's almost absurdly easier to pick up, it's a system that is sort of there to be unobtrusive and avoid getting in the way of the improvised storytelling. I don't think there's such a thing as a really effective "build" in Kids on Bikes. And that's fine given that its focus is more about telling a story than being about overcoming challenges (the story might be one of people overcoming challenges, of course).

One thing I do wonder about is whether Starfinder could be used to tell more Star Trek-like stories - the ones that are less about the big phaser fights and starship battles, but are more conceptually complex. I think D&D and Starfinder kind of default to just making a bunch of ability checks or skill checks to resolve things like that, though on the other hand, it seems that most systems do that anyway.

I don't know if I have a huge point here, other than that I really hope I can run (and maybe, maybe, play in) some Starfinder one of these days.

WotC Announces OGL 1.0a and SRD Going to Creative Commons

 So, once again, I am no legal expert and certainly not one in this field. Those who are wary of celebrating any grand victory when corporate forces are in charge are right to be skeptical. However, it looks like Wizards of the Coast has reversed course.

Again, I want to seriously preface this with saying I am no more an expert in this stuff than you are. My legal background is that my mom was a lawyer who stopped practicing around the time I was born in the mid 80s - so in other words, everything I'm saying is just what I believe this all means.

The OGL, or Open Game License, is a document that WotC created detailing how other people can use the system they developed (originally 3rd Edition, but this was extended to 3.5 and 5th edition - though not, I believe, 4th). It promises, in what I believe is a legally binding way, that anyone who wants to can make products relating to their game as long as long as there is attribution, and that one does not need permission or to pay royalties. To define what "their game" means, the OGL refers to the System Reference Document, or the SRD.

The SRD is basically a giant block of text that details the rules of the game. It includes the core mechanics as well as stat blocks, spell and item descriptions - basically anything you need to run the game. There are, however, some notable absences here, which allow WotC to preserve their copyright on certain things. Creatures that are original to D&D, including Mind Flayers and Beholders, are not in the SRD, nor are named NPCs like Mordenkainen or Lord Soth (indeed, the rights to Lord Soth and Dragonlance were the source of some legal complexities due to the fact that the setting belongs to its creators, the Hickmans. I don't know if WotC fully bought them out or just got a license to make the recent adventure).

Now, as I understand it, the original plan was to put the OGL under Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that basically holds onto licenses and other documents to protect them from being altered or rescinded by capricious corporate interests... you know, like Hasbro.

The seeming change with this announcement is that not only will the OGL be put under Creative Commons (unchanged from its 1.0a iteration, which is the one people were afraid of losing,) but the SRD will as well.

Now, I don't know to what extent it would profit WotC to retain the SRD. I suppose you could say that in theory, having the OGL unchanged but being able to change the SRD would make the OGL useless. After all, a spiteful WotC could theoretically edit the SRD to say "nothing, you suckers," and make the OGL's license to use it worthless, though that seems unlikely.

This move, though, once they go through with it (and here I understand some fear they'll pull the rug out just because, well, late capitalism is full of such bullshit, though I think they've already been bleeding from one self-inflicted wound in the foot and this would be a coup de grace) would mean that the SRD itself belongs to the public, and would thus mean that, perpetually, 5th Edition D&D remains open and accessible to anyone who wants to make stuff for it.

Now, the big question I have is whether any of this applies to One D&D.

In theory (again, remember that I'm just some dude at his computer who knows as much about this as you do) I believe the SRD as it stands is just the rules for 5th Edition (though there's also got to be rules for 3rd and 3.5). Nothing in this announcement has confirmed that the SRD for One D&D - which they claim is not going to be called 6th Edition but... sort of is, isn't it? - will also be put under Creative Commons. There's a possibility that the reason they acquiesced to the community's demands is that they only have a year or two left of 5th Edition to make stuff for before they move on, and so there's not much to win by holding it under such restrictions.

However, looking at the history of the OGL, I think it would be smarter of them to do this for One D&D as well. Yes, Pathfinder emerged as a big competitor to D&D, built as it was on 3.5 as a system, and it ate 4th Edition's lunch. But that pressure also caused them to make a much more popular system in 5th Edition, and D&D's popularity exploded to heights it had never seen before. Indeed, Paizo, which makes Pathfinder, has even started making content for 5th Edition, given the degree to which WotC has roared back into dominating the hobby.

Now, you could argue that this was really just a matter of making a better game system. But to me, it looks like the way that this sort of game thrives, you want to have a lot of people working on and designing things. If MCDM comes out with a monster book and someone got interested in Matt Colville because of his videos about 2001 a Space Odyssey, they might be interested in picking up D&D. If people watching the Legend of Vox Machina hear that Critical Role put out a book about Tal'dorei, and then realize that they could play an RPG in this setting if they get the D&D rulebooks, that's pretty great for WotC.

And, again, I think Pathfinder is one of the big reasons we got 5th Edition in the first place.

One of the core premises of capitalism is that competition breeds innovation. But over my lifetime, I've mostly seen big corporations do everything in their power to prevent anyone from competing, and to force customers down a single path, where they have no choice but to buy one company's products at the price they set.

In the short term, this strategy is, I'm sure, great for the executive class. But what it does is it erodes out the base of the business they are running, mining out the core purpose the business should be there to serve, and leaves everyone except for some CEO or Board member poorer for having lost a great product or service.

This problem of course applies to much more than just TTRPGs. But at least in this circumstance, the community has enough leverage to - I hope - hold back the tide of self-cannibalizing capitalism... on this one, small front.

Power and NPCs

 There's this inherent issue in the way that D&D (and, I think, a lot of similar TTRPGs) treat expertise and power. Generally speaking, the world is built for adventurers. As our player characters risk their lives in adventures, they gain more power. When it comes to martial classes, there's a certain logic to it - veterans perfect their martial techniques, and even just getting lots of exercise makes one stronger.

And to a certain extent, this makes sense for spellcasters as well - magic-users will get better at casting more complex magical spells in the heat of combat as they gain experience doing so.

But the odd result here is that know-how gets linked inextricably to one's experience fighting monsters. In D&D worlds, often the most powerful people are retired adventurers.

I had the following issue in the Spelljammer campaign I run on Sunday nights.

The party began at level 3, crash-landing on a colony world. Most of the monsters one faces in Wildspace are kind of geared for a tier-2 party or higher, so I decided to take a moment to introduce the characters and their dynamics via some classic grounded D&D (the players also wanted something of a space-western, and while I've leaned far more into the "X-Files/Roswell" vibe of the American Southwest, I figured we could do at least a bit of classic tier 1 "quests around a small town" thing.

To justify why they couldn't yet leave, I had their Spelljamming helm destroyed in the crash, and while they have a Living Ship (something I might already regret letting them start with - less for its ability to repair itself and more for having a treant in the hull that can defend the ship) the Helm needed to be replaced.

Now, they have an Artificer, but she'll only be able to cast the "Create Spelljamming Helm" when she hits level 17 - in other words, not for a very long time. This spell can also be cast by a Wizard, but even they would need to be level 9, as it's a 5th level spell.

So, I decided they would need to have an NPC come and cast the spell for them. But I also wanted to imperil said NPC (you know, for drama and to give them a reason to delve into the military base where one faction of Men in Black were being hunted by another faction of MIBs - the former being the classic "government agents trying to cover up the existence of aliens" vibe and the latter being "something deeply offputting that might be some kind of Cosmic Horror monstrosity in an unconvincing human-like disguise"). How, then, do you imperil a 9th level wizard or a 17th level artificer when the party is level 4?

The answer: maybe you don't need to be an adventurer to cast high-level spells.

See, the lens through which we see the worlds of D&D is very much built around the player characters, and the universal trait of all D&D characters, and the basis for their classes, is that they are adventurers. These are the people who delve into dungeons, fight monsters, and gain power and renown for their deeds. They're superheroes.

In the real world, you don't need to be a veteran soldier to design sophisticated computers.

So, I created an NPC, a dwarf named Erman Steelvar, who is an engineer that the government contracts with, and whom a friendly NPC had brought in to help fix the ship. Steelvar is a renowned engineer, but he's not a fighter. He's got the Commoner stat block, but has an Intelligence of 18 and can prepare and cast any Artificer spells that don't deal damage or restore hit points. And, if those spells have a casting time of less than one minute, they take at least one minute to cast.

The point is: this is a guy who understands the magic of artifice on a deep and profound level, thanks to a lifetime of study. But he's not a combatant. He's useless in a fight. Indeed, when the party found him, he had been stuffed in a closet to keep him safe during the incursion by a deadly "Division 10" agent, and when they took him out of the closet, he immediately had a heart attack, requiring the party to act quickly to save his life (here, magical healing was very useful).

I recommend looking at the possibility of expanding the world of civilians in your D&D settings. Adventurers are built to be very self-sufficient, but in most of these worlds, they're also very rare. I mean, few people would choose such a lifestyle if they had other options.

A Review of Fighting Styles in 5E

 So, while there's a lot of drama at the corporate level, I think most of us have very affectionate feelings toward 5th Edition as a mechanical gameplay system. Yes, there are some who will say that other systems are better (I think in matters of taste there is rarely anything that is strictly "better" than others) but I don't feel any qualms getting into the crunchy nitty-gritty.

Fighting Styles are options that Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers automatically get at either level 1 (Fighters) or level 2 (Paladins and Rangers). College of Swords Bards also get some of these options, and in One D&D, it looks like all three Warrior classes (Fighters, Monks, and Barbarians) will get access to them. In the latter case, we don't have a full picture of all the Fighting Styles, though the ones we've seen look pretty similar to what exists in 5E.

What I wanted to take a look at was the relative values of all these styles. I suspect that the potency can be surprising.

We'll start with those available to the Fighter, which covers most of them, and then take a look at the ones that only the Paladin or Ranger can get (which I think might be just one each).

Archery:

This is one of the most straightforward ones. You get a +2 bonus to your attacks with ranged weapons. So, how do we evaluate the power of this fighting style?

Ultimately, what it means is that whatever your percentage chance to hit with your ranged attacks increases by 10%. Let's say you have a +3 to Dexterity and a +2 Proficiency Bonus. That means that hitting a target with an AC of 16 will happen 50% of the time (11-20 on the d20). This fighting style increases that chance to 60% of the time.

I don't know that I want to go through the total math of the implications for that overall on your damage output, but overall just being able to hit with your attacks more often is going to be very good for you. So, while simple, I think this is a very strong choice if you're going to be a strongly ranged-focused character.

Let's imagine, just as a scenario, that you're a level 5 Dex Fighter with a nonmagical longbow. At this level you have 18 Dexterity (+4) and you're trying to fight a target with an AC of 18.

Without this fighting style, you will hit the target on an 11 or higher for 1d8+4 (8.5 damage on average) and crit on a 20 for 2d8+4 (13). That means 45% of the time you're dealing 8.5 damage and 5% you're doing 13, and 50% of the time you're doing 0. So, we get an average damage per attack of 4.475, doubled by your two attacks to 8.95 per turn.

With the fighting style, you're now hitting on a roll of 9 or higher, meaning you get a 55% chance to get your standard damage. That gives you an average damage per attack of 5.325, doubled to 10.65, meaning we've increased our damage per turn by 1.7.

That's honestly a little underwhelming, to be honest, though I think you could argue that any feature that lets you tack on things after you hit (such as a battle master's maneuvers) could bump this up significantly. There's also potentially a larger difference in the case of very high AC monsters and very low.

Blind Fighting:

This one's hard to evaluate on its own. The key, I think, is that characters could work synergistically to make this very potent. If you have a Warlock (with Devil's Sight) drop Darkness on the battlefield, and you have Blind Fighting, you could really wreck house together against a bunch of blinded enemies.

Indeed, this could serve well in non-combat situations as well.

Ultimately, this is situational, but in a common enough situation that I think it's a great choice (though probably for only for melee builds given its short range - 10 feet of blindsight is not going to be great for an archer.)

Defense:

This adds one point of AC if you're wearing armor. Like Archery, this is going to have a varying impact based on your own base AC and the hit bonuses of the things you're fighting. My Eldritch Knight took this as part of his quest to get an insanely high AC (this, a +1 shield, and plate put him at 22 and then he had the Shield spell to bump it to 27).

The value of this is also going to depend heavily on how many attacks you take in a round - if you're positioned to be the true tank and are getting attacked by multiple enemies, the benefit here has a real multiplier.

I will note, though, that if you're willing to spend 1500 gold on plate armor, this essentially makes Split into Plate and Chain Mail into Splint, so it's worth considering. It's also the only fighting style (except, situationally, Blind Fighting) that increases your own personal survivability.

Dueling:

The math here is pretty simple: you get two more damage per hit with an attack. If you have a longsword, you're now actually better off just using it with one hand.

Indeed, while 2 damage per hit might not seem like a lot, with multiple attacks this actually winds up being a pretty significant bonus - a flail, say, with +3 to Strength goes from 1d8+3 to 1d8+5, or 7.5 to 9.5 on average - a 27ish% increase.

Great Weapon Fighting:

On this, the math is somewhat more complicated but not by a ton. This allows you to reroll (once) 1s and 2s with any melee weapon you're wielding with both hands. Effectively, then, the way you can figure out the average damage for any die you're rolling is to first figure out the normal average (3.5 for a d6, 6.5 for a d12, etc.) and use that in place of 1 and 2 when adding up all the potential results. So, for example, our average d6 roll (such as with a Maul) would be (3.5+3.5+3+4+5+6)/6, which comes to 4.167 (4 and a sixth).

Thus, with 2d6 as the damage dice, a Greatsword or Maul goes from 7 average to 8.33, bumping damage for the dice alone by about 19%. When we account for Strength (let's look at a base of +3) that means 10 damage becomes 11.33, for a bump of 13% more damage.

Now, this will affect crits in a way that Dueling does not. Jeremy Crawford has said this is meant to only apply to the damage of the weapon itself, and not secondary effects like Divine Smite or Battle Master Maneuvers (or even Improved Divine Smite). I'd argue that in that case, while this is the only fighting style that pushes for maximizing damage with the hardest-hitting weapons in the game, it falls short of being really exceptional. However, if you home-rule it (like I do) to work with those other damage sources, it starts to look more appealing.

For instance, my Paladin has a +2 Greatsword. If she smites against a vampire spawn (she's in a Curse of Strahd campaign) at 2nd level, that hit would do 2d6+7+4d8. Without this, the average damage there would be 7+7+18, or 32 total.

With this, the 2d6 is now an average of 8.33, and the d8s are now going for 5.25 each, so the smite is now 21 damage, giving us a total damage of 36.33, which is... ok, it's 13% more damage.

Dang, maybe this fighting style just isn't that good?

Interception:

This is a fighting style I slept on until I saw both of our Paladins in our Wildemount campaign take it. And holy crap, folks. With this style, you can use your reaction to interpose a shield or melee weapon when another person within 5 feet of you is hit with an attack, reducing the damage of that attack by 1d10 plus your proficiency bonus.

Now, let's consider what this effectively means: on average, that's 5.5+PB, so at level 5, it's 8.5 damage reduced on average.

Another way to think about it: you get a potentially more powerful cure wounds as a reaction every single turn as long as you use it immediately.

Our party does not have a Cleric or a Druid or a Divine Soul Sorcerer, but our tactics are typically to have the two wizards far outside the fray (it's not a balanced party) or for us to each huddle up with a paladin. The number of hits that have been utterly negated by this fighting style is high. And even just reducing a hit from, say, 10 damage to 3 makes it a far less scary encounter.

Now, this will lose value as you start fighting creatures that hit harder (we'll compare it with the next one,) but this is still potentially a huge amount of damage negation without really any serious limitation on its use. I think this is a top-tier fighting style.

Protection:

The older cousin of Interception, this works similarly except it requires a shield (can't use this is you've got a two-hander) and rather than reducing incoming damage, this imposes disadvantage on the attack.

The math of advantage and disadvantage is complicated, but one of the issues you can have with this is that it might wind up not really doing anything - if the monster rolls two high rolls or two low rolls, you haven't really changed anything (you can ruin a sneak attack, potentially).

In theory this should be more useful if the monster is hitting so hard that 1d10+PB isn't really a significant chunk of the damage, but I think Interception is probably better than this in most cases.

Superior Technique:

I'd actually forgotten this exists. This basically lets you use a Battle Master maneuver once per rest, with a d6 superiority die to fuel it. Oddly, this might actually be best on a Battle Master, because I think you can use the maneuver you learn with this style using your other superiority dice.

I'd also consider taking this and Precision Attack if you are going with the Great Weapon Master or Sharpshooter feat, and thus potentially negate the downside of the -5 element of those feats.

Maneuvers are versatile and useful (and I think it's possible the One D&D Fighter will get them as a base Fighter feature,) making this a potentially exciting option - though it's also a little dependent on how often you take rests in your campaign.

Thrown Weapon Fighting:

This allows you to draw a thrown weapon with each attack, and gives you a +2 bonus to the damage of your thrown weapon attacks.

I think this would be great if there were better support for thrown weapons. The problem here is that past level 4 or so, you're probably looking for a magic weapon that you can use repeatedly. If you have an Artificer (a class that doesn't get Fighting Styles) to give you a Returning Weapon, this could be fun, but I think this is almost never going to be optimal. At most, it makes a thrown-weapon-based character just barely viable.

That, to be fair, is pretty cool. But this is still a big commitment just to be kind of on par with other playstyles.

Two Weapon Fighitng:

The math here is actually pretty simple - this will give you 5 extra damage per turn once your Strength or Dexterity is maxed out. With the One D&D changes to light weapons, dual-wielding looks a lot more viable as a playstyle, though with the 5E rules requiring a bonus action, it's a little more restrictive.

Still, given that we've shown that Great Weapon Fighting only adds 2 2/3 damage per round (with two attacks) and Dueling only adds 4, this starts to look pretty good. The one class I'd really not recommend it on is the Fighter if you plan to go to level 11 or higher, because as that class gets more attacks (not to mention action surge) beyond the normal two, this loses value while things like Dueling and Great Weapon Fighting get better (though even with three attacks, GWF still only gives you 4 more damage per turn).

Interestingly, at least in the 5E rules, Paladins don't get this, despite the fact that dual-wielding on a Paladin (or a Barbarian for that matter) is actually a pretty good choice, thanks to getting more chances to crit (and thus crit-smite) and the bonus damage of Improved Divine Smite.

Unarmed Fighting:

This gives your unarmed strikes a d6 damage die rather than being just 1, and adding Strength as usual. You can also deal 1d4 bludgeoning damage at the start of your turn to a creature you're grappling.

So, this is largely redundant to a Monk, who don't get Fighting Styles in 5E anyway.

This is niche, though while the Thrown Weapon style is not one I think there's much of a build for, you could definitely take this if you wanted to be a really grappling-heavy character. While there's some redundancy with the Tavern Brawler feat, there's also some synergy here, as well as the Grappler feat.

    So there you have it. Perhaps in another post we'll compare and contrast this with the One D&D Fighting Style feats and see whether their value rises, falls, or stays the same.

Vault of the Incarnates Wing 3

 So, Raszageth is not messing around. We managed to down the first boss on the first pull, but then it took us nine pulls to get the final boss of the raid down.

Let's do a quick overview of that first one though. I should say, though, that I broke my mental health rule on this one and tanked it the first go around - though honestly there's only one ability that really taxed me tank-wise on the final phase of Raszageth. Otherwise it wasn't too stressful (other than just watching my health ping-pong - seriously, she hits hard.)

Broodkeeper Diurna:

Diurna's kind of old-school in that they actually, genuinely, have the tanks do different tasks. One tank holds onto the boss more or less in the center of the room (maybe moving away from the adds when they spawn? I wasn't on this task). The other tank runs to where the various torch/brazier/spiraly stone things are around the room and picks up the adds that spawn near there.

The adds will get some kind of defensive buff if they're near the boss, so you need the raid to separate into two groups and have one group focus on taking adds down while the other focuses on the boss.

One mechanic I didn't interact with is that players will need to get some kind of laser beam to focus on them and destroy eggs that Diruna tries to empower.

After hitting some health percentage (I want to say around 30%) the fight basically becomes a tank-and-spank with a taunt-swap and the adds stop spawning. Again, DPS might have a more complicated task vis-a-vis egg destruction.

Raszageth:

You ready for this? There are five phases to this fight.

Phase One: You're on the platform where she starts the fight. Tanks will need to swap on each use of the Electric Jaws attack - relatively simple, it leaves a DoT on you, so healers will need to continue healing the off-tank.

Periodically, random (non-tank) players will be hit with an ability that leaves a kind of puddle/cloud of electricity on the ground that slows you and does damage to you. You want to place these in a kind of arch around the boss toward the edge of the platform. (They don't last forever).

You'll need these clouds/puddle things because periodically, the boss will knock everyone back, potentially off the platform to their deaths, but if you are knocked into these puddles (or get in before she does) you'll be stopped. (I actually recommend stepping in beforehand, as you won't be knocked back at all.) Much like on Dathea, Ascended and Sennarth, the Cold Breath, Death Knights can use Death's Advance to be immune to this external movement and ignore it (my co-tank was a DK who just got to chill out with the boss).

Additionally, on this phase, there are little blue circles that will briefly stun you if you get hit by them. Not terrible, but something to avoid.

Finally, when her energy fills, she'll summon a little storm sphere add at each player's position. These cast a spell that will do a bunch of raid damage, but if you interrupt them, they'll die instantly. Any sort of AoE stun or silence or what-have-you can be very useful here.

At 65% health, Raszageth will knock people off the central platform. Here, you'll need to figure out ahead of time how to divide the raid so that half get knocked to the left platform and the other half get knocked to the right.

Phase 2:

The divided raid needs to kill three big air elemental adds. Each has a shield that makes up about 20% of their health. When that shield goes down, eight or so Primalist adds show up, about half of whom are spellcasters. Kill all these adds and the big one and then move onto the next air elemental and repeat.

During this phase, Raszageth will strafe the platforms with her lightning breath, so keep an eye out for where she's coming from and move out of the way.

Once all the adds on your platform are down, you can step onto a teleporter to go to the fourth platform, where phase 3 begins.

Phase 3:

This phase is actually very similar to phase 1, though the knockback is less powerful and can just be run through (it might do more damage, though). Again, you want to interrupt the adds to kill them. When she gets down to I think 25% health, she'll fly away and phase 4 begins on the same platform.

Phase 4:

A giant air elemental will spawn in the center of the platform. You'll want to DPS it down while dodging the ball lightning it sends out in a circle from it, which stuns anyone it hits (briefly, at least on LFR).

The big thing here is that periodically the elemental will teleport away and spawn a bunch of tiny elementals that run directly to it. If they hit the big elemental, they heal it and also increase its damage done. Use any sort of AoE stuns, slows, roots, whatever to give yourself time to kill these quickly before returning to the big elemental.

Raszageth will also strafe the platform like she did on phase 2.

When the elemental is dead, everyone needs to group up on the side of the platform facing the original platform, because Raszageth will knock everyone back, ideally having them land on that final platform. (And not, you know, dying.)

Phase 5:

Ok, this is similar to phases 1 and 3, but there's one major thing tanks need to worry about. She'll do something called Thunderous Blast, which will hit the tank hard and then do raid damage based on how much damage it did to the tank. So tanks will want to save big damage reduction cooldowns for this moment, because the raid damage is enormous. Even with Guardian of Ancient Kings, the damage from this took out a lot of raid members on our last pull.

This is a mad rush to the end, and given how long the fight lasts, you might even get a second Bloodlust/Heroism/etc.

And with that, the first raid of Dragonflight is finished. We can talk about the lore implications in another post.