As Great as Pact of the Blade is, Does It "Require" Multiclassing?

 I've played, technically speaking, two different Warlock characters in D&D. One was my very first D&D character, a Great Old One-patron guy whose mind was severely twisted by his interaction with his patron (notably, I'm not a big fan of the "slimy, tentacle" version of cosmic horror, preferring the "bizarre geometric shapes representing something one cannot totally comprehend," so my Warlock's patron was, or rather was best-perceived as, a possibly-infinitely-tall stone tower in a perpetual state of actively collapsing, its constituent pieces each seeming to explode out from it, but none ever hitting the ground and there always being more tower left where the massive stone blocks had fallen out). The other was made for Descent into Avernus, and actually made it all the way to level 14, completing the adventure (we got the golden ending, in which we redeemed Zariel,) and was an amoral bastard who had a Hexblade patron (in this case, it wasn't entirely clear whether the patron was a floating sword in a quiet, empty city in the Shadowfell or the ancient knight/queen whose bones sat in a throne facing said sword).

Both characters were built to be focused on Eldritch Blast - yes, I'm someone who took a Hexblade, of all subclasses, and still built them for blasting.

The thing is, Blastlocks still work decently well when you straight-class it. Warlocks are, of course, infamously dipped into to grab Eldritch Blast and some Invocations, but the common wisdom for the past decade has been that you'll generally want to mix that with some other class's features, like Sorcerers, Bards, or Paladins (basically the other Charisma casters).

Now, I actually think a full Warlock is still pretty good. Sure, there aren't as many feats that buff the damage of ranged spell attacks (though we'll touch on the lack of buffs for ranged weapon attacks as well in the new rules,) and the scaling isn't quite as good as weapons, even with Agonizing Blast (though it's pretty close).

I felt like I was a pretty strong contributor to the party during that adventure, and that was before they even added the new summoning spells from Tasha's, which I actually think can make a Warlock do very good damage.

But, I know that Bladelocks are popular. I examined building a pure-Warlock Pact of the Blade (and could have sworn I made a post about it, but can't seem to find it now,) but you run into a couple of problems.

The first is that Warlocks only get training in Light Armor, which for any character who isn't focused purely on Dexterity, is only slightly better than being naked (we could build for Dexterity, but I'm assuming the reason we're playing a Warlock here is so that we can use Charisma for our pact weapon and still have a good spell attack/save DC). The second reason is that the various feats that buff our melee damage, such as Great Weapon Master, Polearm Master, or Dual Wielder (the latter of which might require some extra funkiness, like casting Shillelagh on a Club to allow us to properly dual-wield) each both have not-insignificant stat requirements while also only buffing Strength (or Strength/Dexterity) and not Charisma.

The pure-Warlock build I created didn't actually get a chance to boost Charisma until level 12, spending the first two feats on Great Weapon Master and Moderately Armored. By much later in their career, they capped out their Charisma and would feel, I think, pretty good as-is (still focusing Eldritch Invocations and other Warlock features on buffing their melee damage) I have been thinking about how this could all be much easier:

Just start off as a Fighter.

After all, being a Fighter would grant you both Medium and Heavy Armor training. It would also grant you weapon mastery - something our previous build didn't even get. Thus, for this single level investment, you wind up with a lot of what you need. You'll already need a 13 in Strength to get Great Weapon Master, so you've got the minimum to multiclass out of Fighter.

You will still run into the issue that you aren't boosting your Charisma until later, but you're saving a whole feat thanks to the armor training.

Furthermore, Fighters have proficiency in Constitution saving throws, which will come up a lot as a melee-based spellcaster. It means you won't get a Warlock's Wisdom saving throw proficiency, but that feels like a fair trade.

In other words, I think it would work out pretty well for you to grab that first level of Fighter, granting you your chain mail and even starting with a Greatsword (not that you won't just be conjuring one with your Pact next level). You can even pick up Blind Fighting to get a poor man's Devil's Sight.

Ultimately, the price you pay for this dip is delayed spell slot and invocation progression (of particular note Thirsting Blade and Devouring Blade) as well as the inability to get Eldritch Master, though this latter one I think is less terrible given that you already have essentially half of this feature via Magical Cunning. And, of course, some good subclass features.

It could be tempting to take more Fighter levels, but in terms of solving some of the issues a Bladelock runs into, a single level does a lot for us.

To me, the bigger hurdle is the story behind it.

I... I don't love multiclassing. Actually, I sort of dislike it from both a mechanical and a roleplay perspective. It feels like multiclassing is basically only built to allow weird "hacks" to exploit more damage out of these classes than they're designed to do. It also pressures designers to hold back really cool and transformative features until higher levels. This is part of why I'm actually very excited about the fact that multiclassing isn't a thing in MCDM's Draw Steel (and given how that game's resource system works, multiclassing would be a total mess).

Now, I don't think it would be impossible to justify a Fighter/Warlock build. You could have someone who trained to be a master-of-arms who then, for whatever reason, began to seek out esoteric, eldritch knowledge.

Of course, you could argue that this is all a little too picky - you could just run a straight-classed Bladelock without taking any feats to support it and just deal with the low AC. But I think one of the things D&D '24 has done, largely by making Feats a core, rather than optional rule, and by incentivizing people to take General Feats by giving all of them an ability score bump, is that players are further encouraged to make "builds" rather than just following the straightforward route for their classes.

I enjoy the mechanical complexity of D&D, but I still think that the #1 goal for a D&D game should be to make characters who feel part of their world, that the player can get invested in emotionally, and to tell stories.

Some players (some of whom I play with) have an almost allergic reaction to any kind of "optimization," feeling that anything beyond making your primary stat your highest is too crunchy and finicky and distracting from the roleplay potential of the character. I don't agree with this: I think that you can roleplay a character who wants to be as effective a monster-hunter as they can, and that can make some optimization compatible with your in-world conception of the character.

To me, the danger is when you start making huge choices for your character that are purely for mechanical advantages, without thinking through the in-world reasons for them. But with a little effort, you can fit these together.

For example, when the 2024 PHB came out, one of the first characters I built was a Cloud Goliath Monk. I took the Sailor background largely because it gave the right ability score bonuses and the Tavern Brawler feat (which is honestly somewhat redundant for a Monk but still has some nice bonuses to unarmed strikes) but from that, I built out a whole backstory of a man from a flying city of airship-sailors who was shipwrecked and washed up on a remote island and rescued by the grandmaster of a monastery. The Tavern Brawler feat I justified as being the fighting techniques the character's possibly-dead ship captain/mentor had taught him after he got beaten up in a bar, which the monks then recognized as his own special combat style that he blended with their techniques.

So, yes, these were choices initially made from a mechanical point of view, but with not very much effort, I was able to fit it into a fun hero's journey story - his reckless style being the thing that sets him apart from the other monks, and why he's the guy they're sending out into the world.

So yeah, I don't think it's impossible to come up with a good story justification for starting off with a level of Fighter. And I also think that it's not anathema to good roleplay to consider the mechanical "build" of your character and use that as a framework for the character work and storytelling you want to do with it.

What I'd just say is: do try to put in that effort.

And yeah, I know that my table is not necessarily the typical one. My friends are largely actors and other "theater kids," so we're naturally drawn to the storytelling aspects of the game. But I think that if you aren't really getting into your characters, you aren't really getting everything out of D&D that you could be.

Napkin Math: Mauls vs Greatswords vs Greataxes

 In 5E, if you want to hit the absolute hardest with a melee weapon, the options that have the highest damage potential have always been the Maul, Greatsword, and Greataxe (this used to include the Lance, but that was brought closer in line with the other reach weapons in the 2024 update. Also, we should note that Muskets also have the same damage maximum, but those are ranged, so we'll exclude them here, as well as all modern and futuristic firearms).

There have always been some subtle distinctions, of course. Mauls, unlike the other two, deal bludgeoning damage (which historically has been slightly better than the other kinds of "kinetic" damage, but only slightly) and Greataxes, while they can still cap out at a roll of 12, do have a slightly lower average damage thanks to just being 1d12 rather than 2d6 (2d6 has a minimum roll of 2, while a d12 can get down to 1).

But generally, in D&D14, you could pick any of these and pretty much do well regardless, with very little difference in your overall experience.

That has changed.

Weapon Mastery has created distinctions between weapons that didn't used to have any. The Halberd and Glaive, for example, in the 2014 rules, were mechanically indistinguishable (the same in everything from damage to weight to properties to price). Weapon Masteries came around and created new distinctions between similar weapons. And these three classic "great weapons" now each have a different weapon mastery.

So, I wanted to know: how good are they in comparison to one another?

Greatswords have the simplest mastery, but the one that I think stands a good chance of being the most powerful overall, which is Graze. Graze (found, I believe, just on Greatswords and Glaives) allows you to deal damage equal to the ability modifier  you used to make the attack when you miss. So, while you'd typically be dealing 2d6+3 on a hit as a first level Fighter, say, even if you totally whiff it, you will still deal 3 damage.

Mauls have the Topple mastery. This forces any creature hit by the weapon to make a Constitution saving throw (the DC equal to 8+PB+the modifier you used to make the attack, most likely Strength.) Dropping a foe will of course convey advantage on future attacks (along with other issues). Advantage isn't terribly hard to get in D&D, but it's also a very powerful thing to get.

Greataxes have Cleave, which is the most niche of these features, and allows you to, after you hit with this weapon, make an additional attack against a target within 5 feet of the target. If this hits, you roll the damage die as normal and can add any bonuses from things like Rage or a magic weapon, but you don't add your ability modifier. So, you might hit a target for 1d12+3 on your action, and then another for 1d12 (only getting one extra hit per turn).

My suspicion is that Graze is going to wind up the most effective, though its value of course diminishes as your chance to hit increases. Still, the way 5E is structured, you'll still generally have decent chance to miss, and this will help smooth out your damage and ensure you're always moving the fight along. By the time you get a +5 to your Strength (or Intelligence or Charisma if you're a Battle Smith or Pact of the Blade Warlock, respectively, requiring a feat or multiclass to get the mastery, of course) you'll be guaranteed 10 damage done every turn once you have Extra Attack or the equivalent thereof.

Graze will also be the simplest to plug in for average damage, as the others will require some assumptions.

For Topple, we're going to make a couple assumptions. The first is that we're not getting advantage from any other source. The second is that our target has a 50% chance to succeed on their saving throw. The third is that our foe will stand up on their turn, meaning that we'll only benefit from this on our second attack.

For Cleave, we'll assume that there's an eligible target for the Cleave attack 50% of the time.

As we'll be using two attacks, we're going to assume that our character has a +7 to hit with their attack (reasonable at level 5) and that our target has a 16 AC. Thus, we have a 40% to miss, and then a 55% chance to hit normally and a 5% chance to crit.

Greatsword/Graze:

Our average damage with a mundane Greatsword is going to be 2d6+4, which comes out to 11 on average. We can actually just add 2d6x.05 to our overall damage per attack to account for the bonus crit damage. Our misses, however, will deal 4 slashing damage thanks to Graze. So, what we're looking at per attack is:

Miss: 40% x 4, or 1.6

Hit: 60% x 11, or 6.6

Crit Damage: 5% x 7, or .35

So, this gives us an average damage per attack of 8.55.

With two attacks, then, this becomes 17.1 damage per turn.

Maul/Topple:

Here, the math gets more complicated. We can calculate the average damage for our first attack with relative ease - once again, the hit and crit damage is the same (though it's bludgeoning) but our second attack will have a variable chance to be made at advantage or not. We've made a pretty convenient assumption about how likely it is is for us to knock them prone.

Actually, our average damage per hit is easy to get thanks to the Greatsword calculation - we just remove the 1.6 we'd be getting on a miss. Thus, our average damage on our first attack is 6.95.

Then, we have to calculate our damage in the case we do get advantage on our attack. This has two factors at play: the first is whether we hit on our first attack, the second is whether our foe failed their saving throw.

So, our chance to provoke the saving throw is 60%. Then, within that 60% chance, we're assuming they fail 50% of the time. Thus, there's a 30% chance that we have advantage on our second attack, and a 70% chance we don't.

Thus, for our second attack's average damage, we can add 70% of the average damage of the first one to represent the scenario in which we didn't get advantage, which comes out to 4.865. Then, for the remaining 30% chance in which we do have advantage, we need to calculate what our average damage would be on that second hit.

With advantage, our miss chance drops to 16%. And our hit chance is thus 84%, but our crit chance is now 9.75% (again, we can just add that extra damage on top of our hit to make the math simpler.)

Thus, our advantage average damage per hit is 9.24 plus .6825 for crits, coming out to 9.9225.

This, then, is multiplied by our 30% chance to actually have advantage, giving us 2.97675. We add this to the 70% chance that we don't have advantage, getting 7.84175.

Finally, we add this to the much-easier-to-get average damage of our first attack, giving us 14.79175 average damage per turn.

Greataxe/Cleave:

This math should be simpler, but we will need to recalculated it given that Greataxes do slightly less damage than the other two weapons (note that if you're comparing Glaives, Lances, and Halberds instead, Halberds might fare slightly better thanks to the fact that all three of those Graze, Topple, and Cleave weapons use d10s).

Once again, we're looking at a 40% chance to miss, a 60% chance to hit, and the 5% crit damage bonus.

However, our average damage is 10.5 now, and our crit damage bonus is 6.5.

So, 60% times 10.5 is 6.3.

5% times 6.5 is .325

Thus, our average damage per hit (not counting our cleave attack) is 6.625. With two such attacks, we're going to deal 13.25.

Now, if either of those hit our target, and if there is another target within 5 feet, we get to make our Cleave attack. How likely is that to happen?

Well, we're first making the assumption that there's a secondary target half the time (which might be generous, but hey). Our chance to have landed a hit on one of our two attacks is similar to having advantage on one attack, so we already know that we've got an 84% chance to have hit at least once (thanks to our earlier Topple calculations). We can then multiply that by the 50% chance we expect to have an eligible target, giving us a 42% chance to even attempt a cleave in the first place. This is what we'll multiply the average damage per cleave attack by to find the overall contribution the mastery is making to our damage.

Our hit damage is lower here, as we won't be adding our +4 from Strength, so our damage is a simple 1d12, or 6.5. However, it's the same hit chance as always, or 60%, with a 5% chance to deal an additional 6.5. Actually, given that the extra damage on a crit is precisely the same as what we deal on a hit (magic +X weapons and Rage and other such damage bonuses would change this) we can simply treat this as if we have a 65% to hit and no crit. Thus, our average damage per cleave attack is just 6.5x65%, or 4.225.

As we said we would do before, we plug that number into our 42% of even making our cleave attack in the first place, getting 1.7745.

Now, we add that to our average damage of the normal attacks, which was 13.25, getting a total damage per turn of 15.0245

    So there we go:

I'm honestly a little surprised that Cleave wound up doing better than Topple, though again, we're making some big assumptions regarding the foe's chance to save against topple and the likelihood of a reliable target for cleave.

I think it's worth noting, of course, that Topple can have other benefits. Grappling a prone creature will keep them stuck in that position, and your party members will benefit from their being prone. It can also slow a target down if you want to keep them from going after one of your allies. Also, a flying creature that doesn't have the hover feature on their fly speed will plummet to the ground if you knock them prone. Giving Fly to your Fighter or Paladin with a Maul and knocking a Dragon out of the air will cause some extra fall damage depending on how high up you are (if you're very high up, a pretty significant amount).

Cleave only grants additional damage. I think that it could be very good in scenarios with a lot of low-HP monsters, like a bunch of kobolds who have 4 HP, I really think that Graze is going to be the go-to choice. It's going to be the most reliable and versatile of these heavy weapon masteries. (I will say, though, that Cleave might play nicely with Great Weapon Master - because the cleave attack is still part of your action, you should be able to add your proficiency bonus to the damage, which you won't be able to do on a Graze). The point is, Graze can be useful regardless of whether you're fighting minions or a big boss - only in situations where your chance to miss is utterly minuscule, like against Zombies or a Gelatinous Cube, will its value really feel redundant.

Some Experiments in D&D Tank Damage Mitigation

 So, usually when I'm playing around trying to evaluate the general damage potential or whatnot of various classes and builds, I do my amateurish attempt at coming up with averages - averaging out damage, but also hit and critical strike chances.

However, sometimes, raw data can be helpful as well.

I wanted to get a sense of how well the 2024 version of the Monk, with the change from Deflect Missiles to Deflect Attacks, compares with other classic tank characters, namely the Barbarian and the heavily-armored Fighter/Paladin.

What I did was imagine typical examples of each character class, built to be somewhat tanky (though I didn't give the Fighter - what I'll be calling the Fighter/Paladin just to save on letters typed - the Defensive fighting style or take into account things like the Sap mastery). The Barbarian and Fighter in both of these cases is using a Shield.

I made a couple assumptions: first that, via point buy, our Monk is starting off with +3s to both Wisdom and Dexterity so that their AC at level 3 (when they get Deflect Attacks) is 16. Our Barbarian has a +3 to Strength and Con, but took a slight hit to Dex with a mere +2 so as not to have to utterly tank all mental stats, so with a shield their AC is 17. Our Fighter, of course, could have basically any stats and it wouldn't matter, starting with chain mail and a shield for an AC of 18.

I used the Knight stat block from the recent free Scions of Elemental Evil adventure, which has several monsters from next year's new Monster Manual. The Knight has a +5 to hit, and gets two attacks with a Greatsword (or Heavy Crossbow, but we're assuming melee here) and deals 2d6+3 slashing plus 1d8 radiant damage on a hit.

Here's how things would go:

The Monk gets one reaction each time to deflect an attack that hits them, reducing the damage by, at this level, 1d10+6. The Barbarian is assumed to be Raging, so they will take half damage from the slashing, though full damage from the radiant. The Fighter then will take all the damage when an attack beats their AC.

I then simulated ten rounds of attacks against the characters - naturally, this would be way longer than any fight was likely to last, but the idea was that we would hopefully smooth out the hit chance and damage to be closer to the average.

The Monk was crit 3 times and hit 5 times, which was a high number of crits (in 20 attacks, they'd normally take a single crit) and a low number of hits (the Knight had a 50% combined hit/crit chance, but only landed blows 40% of the time). Some of these hits were fully reduced to 0, though a lot of damage slipped through because two of the three crits landed on the same turn, meaning while one got reduced to just 3 damage, the other came through as a full 25. The Monk wound up, over 10 rounds, taking 58 damage.

The Barbarian was hit only 5 times, and never crit, which meant things skewed pretty low for them. Also, I seemed to roll terribly on the d8 of radiant damage, only once rolling above a 4. The Barbarian wound up taking a total of 40 damage.

The Fighter, despite having the highest AC of the group, wound up getting crit once (which is right in line with probability) and hit 6 times (the Knight had a 40% combined hit/crit chance, so even in this case, it was slightly less damage than they should have taken). And the total damage taken? 123.

Yeah, this surprised me a bit, though I suppose that the difference in AC is pretty small, while the ability to mitigate damage is non-existent for our Fighter/Paladin. Now, my main experience playing a Fighter has been as an Eldritch Knight, and as long as he had a spell slot left, his AC was much higher (he had gotten Adamantine Plate and a +1 Shield, along with the Defensive fighting style, which meant that against a Knight like this, they would only be able to hit him on a critical, which would then be downgraded in damage.) But I think that if you don't have some way to push your AC up into the stratosphere, the lack of further damage mitigation actually makes you, weirdly, not as good of a tank (again, having a Sap weapon might make up for this, though the Barbarian can also take advantage of that).

Then, because my Wizard in my longest-running campaign is level 7, I tried this out at that level as well. Here, the Monk is getting higher Dexterity, which increases their AC to 17 and also this and their level means their Deflect Attacks is now mitigating 1d10+11 damage. The Barbarian actually doesn't get really any further mitigation (as they probably boosted Strength with their ASI) while I'm allowing the Fighter to have upgraded to Splint armor (I think 8 is usually the level where you can finally afford plate armor).

Again, we're just using actual rolled dice, and so this isn't 100% indicative of how the average results would go:

The Monk took 8 hits and 1 Crit, and after Deflect Attacks, they wound up taking a total of 56 damage. (They probably should have taken a bit less as I was rolling pretty low on the d10 for Deflect Attacks). Still, the number of hits and crits here matched the expected numbers - they took 8 hits and 1 crit.

The Barbarian took 7 hits and no crits, which was a bit low, as they should have taken one more hit and one crit in there somewhere. They wound up taking a total of 56 damage, exactly equal to the Monk, but arguably with better luck (which means I give this to the Monk, actually).

The Fighter took 5 hits and no crits, again, both one fewer than expected. However, across those 5 hits, they took 75 damage.

    Now, there is one factor we haven't talked about, which is that Monks will generally have fewer hit points than Fighters and Paladins, and them fewer HP than Barbarians. I think the Monk, in this scenario at least, will wind up taking the least damage of them all, but the Barbarian is still a viable and possibly still supreme tank.

But, my major takeaway is that if you want a Monk as a front-line tank, it's actually very viable. The key, here, though, is that we're also in an environment where each of these characters is getting attacked only twice per round. While Barbarians and Fighters/Paladins (even an Eldritch Knight, because the Shield spell will last until the start of your next turn) will mitigate damage proportionately regardless of how many attacks are made, the Monk really prefers to face a single foe with one or two bit attacks, thus allowing them to use DA on proportionately more of those attacks. Against a big swarm of enemies, they're not as effective at tanking that damage.

Also, the Monk really does need to reserve their reaction, while the others are free to use theirs when appropriate.

Still, I think a Monk tank is quite capable.

Player Housing Coming in Midnight

 Well, it only took them 22 years... er, will have taken them.

While the details are basically nothing beyond "yes, we're doing this," Blizzard released a little animated trailer yesterday announcing that yes, our characters would finally have a place to kick up their feet and call home.

Given how this is something players have been asking for throughout basically the entire existence of WoW, it's a pretty exciting moment. The question is: how will it be implemented?

While I've played it for nearly its entire lifespan (starting a few months before Burning Crusade came out, so while I played in vanilla, I never had at level 60 characters before the level cap went up to 70... at least until Shadowlands) I haven't played really any other MMOs beyond WoW. Frankly, while I have a real nostalgic bond with WoW, I don't know that I love the structure of an MMO, the way that it (intentionally or not) uses FOMO and a kind of "keeping up with the Joneses" impulse to keep you playing. But the point I mean to make here is simply that I don't have a great sense of how other MMOs implement player housing, so I'm sort of looking at this from a blank-slate perspective.

In Warlords of Draenor, the garrisons were initially (if I recall correctly) pitched as WoW's version of player housing. However, their implementation, so central to that expansion, had a number of huge problems that honestly left Warlords as what I would call WoW's worst expansion (that coupled with the fact that Blizzard was still trying to do one-year expansion cycles, which would never have been a good idea, and seemed an idea that would only please shareholders, not players).

Garrisons, thus, I think, are good examples of how not to do player housing:

First of all, most importantly: Player housing should be totally divorced from any aspect of player power.

In Warlords, Garrisons were a perfect example of "solutions in search of a problem." Not only did the mission table reward gear that was just as good as any piece you might get out of the raid difficulty you were playing (and even if you weren't doing LFR, I think you could still get that level of gear from it,) but in particular, Garrisons kind of ruined professions in Warlords. In order to make Garrisons relevant, one of the major things they had was professional buildings, which then needed to have a function - and that function wound up being creating time-gated professional materials that every recipe needed a bunch of.

The focus on garrison design was the make sure that it was a relevant game mechanic for the expansion. But this focus A: meant that the expansion felt like it was played primarily inside the garrison. and B: it meant that only later in the expansion did they add any really superficial cosmetic customizations for it.

Housing, should, I think, be entirely a cosmetic, just-for-fun reward (yes, the entire game is just-for-fun, but you know what I mean). In many ways, I think it should be an in-game reflection on your accomplishments and achievements. The trailer, for example, shows Onyxia's head mounted on the character's wall. I think having various trophies and awards on display for big accomplishments would be a great thing for this.

Furthermore, it has to be customizable. Garrisons in Warlords only came in one style, depending on your faction. The Alliance one had the white stone and crenelated walls of Stormwind, while the Horde one had the spiky iron and red roofs of Orgrimmar. For my human Paladin, that was fine, but it didn't really match the aesthetic of my Undead Rogue, for example.

Midnight will mark a return to old territories - we don't know the exact scope of the expansion. It's supposed to be in Quel'thalas, but whether a new landmass rises up around that area or if it will dip down into the rest of Lordaeron remains to be seen.

I would hope, though, that player housing is available in many of the "home" regions. Naturally, it would make sense for my Paladin to have a place in Elwynn Forest, but it'd also be cool if I could have my Draenei Death Knight be able to return to Azuremyst Isles (I'll understand if he can't settle back on Argus).

While I'd really push for player housing to really focus on the cosmetic, I do think some conveniences could potentially be earned - maybe a bank and a mailbox, profession tables. Still, I think one important thing should be that players will need to leave their house and go to the capital city of the expansion to really do the kind of daily activities you'll be doing as part of regular gameplay.

I do think it should be very easy to get to and from your housing - likely have a portal in capital cities, and possibly a "personal hearthstone" to return there from anywhere.

Naturally, we're not going to be getting much in the way of detail until summer of next year, but it's very exciting to think how they're going to implement this.

Diving into the Bug Ruins of Hollow Knight

 I briefly played Hollow Knight at my sister's place a couple years ago, using my now-brother-in-law's console. The game, I think, is not one you can get a great feel for in a half-hour session when you feel very conscious of the fact that you're a guest in someone's house.

I had apparently gotten the game long ago for free from Playstation Plus, knowing its reputation as one of the great indie games of the past ten years.

Anyway, I've now put significant time into it.

Any comparisons you'd be tempted to make to the Metroid series, particularly Super Metroid, would, I think, be pretty apt. You arrive at a desolate village with a well that leads down into a series of caverns, but the caverns branch out to make an enormous, labyrinthine world.

Unlike Super Metroid, or its recent successor, Metroid Dread, Hollow Knight does have some more modern gameplay ideas, including a fast-travel system (notably one that still requires you to trek to your nearest fast-travel location, so it's not like you can just nope out of a scenario if you get lost). There is also a Souls-like element with Geo, the currency you collect around the world, usually getting a handful from each enemy you defeat. Dying, among other things, causes you to drop your Geo, and you have one opportunity to regain it before it's lost and you have to start your collection from scratch.

Like in Soulslike games, this incentivizes spending that cash as soon as you can, though it can be frustrating when you have just shy of the amount you need to unlock, say, an elevator, and then die while collecting more of it. The amount dropped by foes does seem to go up as you get into more difficult areas, but it's a real pressure.

Power progression is de-emphasized even from Metroid levels. Playing for several hours, I've only gotten one health upgrade and only the first fragment of a Soul upgrade (we'll get to what that means). I did get my sword - sorry, not sword, nail, because we're a little bug-person - upgraded, which I actually wasn't sure was going to happen. With rare exceptions, every enemy's attacks only deal one "mask" of damage (the units that your health is measured in) and only recently have I started encountering non-boss/mini-boss monsters that take more than three or four hits to take down (which then got reduced to around that number thanks to my weapon upgrade).

Hitting enemies will build a resource called Soul. The primary use for this, as I see it, is to heal yourself. A full soul meter will have enough to recover three of your masks, of which you start off with 5. Thus, you're going to need to take the fight to your enemies to heal yourself, which of course puts you at risk of losing more health. Healing requires you to concentrate on pouring soul into it, and if you're interrupted, the soul you've spent is still expended even if you didn't get to heal.

This is easier to manage when fighting regular enemies in the world, but against aggressive bosses, it seems like the intent is for you to just get better at dodging their attacks.

Dying causes you to leave a ghostly apparition in the room where you bit it, and you'll need to fight this ghost to get your Geo back. The ghost can hurt you, so it's technically possible for you to die to your own ghost.

In addition to dropping your Geo, though, you also have a fractured soul vessel, meaning you can only store up to about 2/3 of the Soul you can normally. This also means that if you just give up and leave your ghost somewhere, you're going to be fighting at reduced strength (though I suppose if you die again and permanently lose all that geo, your ghost will relocate to the new spot, which might be less of a pain to get to).

The game is hard, requiring some really precise platforming, sometimes forcing you to execute complex maneuvers like striking some bouncy fungus to get some air, dashing to a wall and hopping between spikes. The bosses can be very tough, too. And the runs back can... to be frank, get a little tedious.

One thing I really appreciated in Elden Ring was that, unlike basically all the Soulsborne games before it, most bosses had either a Site of Grace (bonfire) right before the boss room or at least had a Stake of Merika nearby that would let you respawn nearby (though in the latter case, not access the various things you could do at a Site of Grace). It meant, essentially, that once you had gotten to the boss, the game was only really concerned with whether you could handle the boss, and not the big run-up to the boss. It also saved time.

I honestly think a big reason I gave up on Dark Souls was that the run back to Ornstein and Smough was just so tedious. I knew I could fight the things in there, but probably not without losing a precious Estus Flask charge or two. I was nervous enough about the boss itself that I'd make mistakes running to them, and that just made it harder for me to actually beat them.

There's a little of that here - some bosses are buried deep in dangerous territory - I didn't realize the Mantis Elders were something I could come back to later, so I spent a long time running back through their village (where I had opened a bunch of shortcuts, but it was still a lot, especially because I had to stop and fight my ghost there) and showing up for what I can only assume is a super-tough fight with like one or two health, and getting almost instantly destroyed.

I know that this frustration is just part of the difficulty, but it is something I'm struggling with.

Now, art-wise, the game is really interesting. It's both creepy and cute - the fact that all the characters are some kind of bug-person is a nice unifying aesthetic, and the music and art style are both charming. It also means that when they want to get creepy with it, it can get real freaking creepy (I've stumbled into a waterway area - where I am struggling to even find the map - with worm-creatures that split into two separate creatures when you kill them, each attacking in different ways. It's nasty.

While not quite Dark Souls level of bleak, the world of the game does seem pretty bleak, with the caverns leading toward a ruined civilization - one that claims to be the only civilization that ever existed.

This game does not hold your hand when it comes to lore, but I suspect that there's some interesting stuff there if you take the time to synthesize it all. For one thing, I only just found a monument to the Hollow Knight, after thinking that that was my character all this time (or maybe they both are?)

I Can't Stop Thinking About Alan Wake 2

 For basically a year, after I finished the game the first time around in about two days, I've been sitting around going "man, I'd love to play a game like Alan Wake II." But that's the catch: what game is like Alan Wake II?

The whole thing, the whole reason for this obsession, is that it's really unlike anything I've ever experienced in a game before.

Last year was my induction into the Cult of the Remedy, playing first Control, then Alan Wake Remastered, that a few months before the release of Alan Wake II, one of the longest-anticipated sequels in video game history.

However, unlike most games that are stuck in development hell for over a decade, AW2 wound up being a masterpiece - a game that, upon finishing, I went into my apartment's front room and told my best friend/roommate that this game was the most artistically ambitious game I've ever played.

Was it perfect? Hell no. I struggled on the Cynthia Weaver fight because some bug kept locking me out of doing anything (something I think later patches fixed - the fight's also just plain hard). Alan Wake II is messy, but messy in a way that feels entirely because the game is striving so hard to do something so unique, and in most ways, it nails it.

I've written before that I like the action-gameplay of Control better. I cannot wait until Control 2 comes out, though I know that it won't actually start full development until next year.

I would love to go back and re-play Control, but I keep getting cold feet every time I get the prompt on Chapter Select or New Game that warns that doing so will erase all of my saved progress.

Really, Remedy? Really? You couldn't give us a couple different save files? You couldn't give us a New Game Plus mode? You really need me to just throw away the fact that I beat Mold-1, Hartman, all of those mini-bosses and side-quests, if I want to just experience the game again?

Even if I do bite the bullet and start a new game, I realize that nothing will compare to the feeling of entering the Oldest House for the first time. The profound mystery, my first time seeing Ahti, the nervous laughter I shared with said roommate as I facetiously repeated "oh yeah, everything looks totally fine here," while encountering monitors with "lockdown in progress."

But as much as I adored playing Control, and will still hop into my endgame save file and just look for Hiss to fight for the fun of it, it's very clear to me that Alan Wake II saw a quantum leap (not a break - I never played that one) in narrative ambitions.

I mean, when I sat in Poet's Cinema and realized that Yöton Yö was beginning to play, and then realized that it was a 20 minute arthouse horror movie just... there, for me to watch if I wanted. Holy shit.

The live-action, FMV experiments in older Remedy games, from Alan Wake 1's writer's room videos and Night Springs episodes, to the probably-too-far "TV-show in a game" concept of Quantum Break, to then, the more restrained Darling videos, Hotline calls, and occasional glimpses of Courtney Hope in live action when the Hiss try to take Jesse over, it's something they've been trying to refine.

Alan Wake II feels like it utterly nails the use of live-action. It's... it's just incredible.

This game has lodged itself in my brain - the three main chapters for each of its player characters feel as iconic as Brinstar, Maridia, Norfair, the Wrecked Ship, and Tourian do (those are the regions of Planet Zebes in Super Metroid, for those unfamiliar).

One of my favorite relaxation activities is watching video essays on YouTube - about lots of things, but particularly games, especially for people who have really interesting takes on them. While Jacob Gellar has not yet come out (at least on YouTube) with an Alan Wake-dedicated video (given his focus on indie games, this might be just on the other side of the mainstream line for him, though I believe it was his top game of 2023) I've also, in my searching for excuses to just think more about the game, become a big fan of Monty Zander's 5-hour long "Beyond the Lake" critique.

I've watched it 3 times. I don't think that it'll be the last time I watch it either.

To give you an idea of how amazing this game is, it inspired this Scottish YouTuber to make a 5-hour-long critique that, just like the game that inspired it, is a transmedia experience with poetry, original music, and a fucking interpretive dance routine.

The game is an incredible work, and one that really has interesting things to say - about depression, about memory loss (Zander makes a compelling argument that the game is, in part, about dementia), about the art and the value of collaboration, this last point being driven home by how the public-facing "auteur" Sam Lake, Remedy's creative director, made a game that emphasized how much he needs other artists around him to create games. It's honestly a beautiful idea, especially in an era of egocentrism and growing isolation.

And it's thorny - our title character's moral standing is left up for you to interpret: is he just trying to survive and not at fault for the bad things that happen because of his story, or is he using the people he writes about? Likewise, is the character revealed in the post-credits sequence to have been guiding him all along a secret guardian angel or a manipulating gaslighter?

I think you could make the argument that the game engages in some Mystery-Box storytelling trickery that has grown extremely sour in the past 20 years. I'm willing to give the game the benefit of the doubt because I don't know that it's really making any promises about revealing anything.

I have been following the stories about the game's profitability - I think it may have just broken even, after about a year, which I'm sure is not what AAA-studios want, but if this at least means that the game is now officially profitable, I hope that it will also mean that Remedy can continue putting out works of art like this.

The game's year-later DLC, the Lake House, is intriguing in its own way, a sort of micro-story (that is also apparently accessible from the main game, though I have to imagine it would be a very weird, pacing-wise, as I think it basically comes right before the Dark Ocean Summoning climax. Also, while I did beat the final boss of the DLC, I went back and replayed it and just couldn't seem to repeat that (not sure if it reset the difficulty to Standard, come to think of it).

But the Lake House honestly mostly just whetted my appetite for what comes next.

I know FBC Firebreak is coming out I think next year (trying not to think about what else happens next year) but while it does seem to be a PvE-focused game that will tell a story, I'm not sure how likely it is that I, as someone who doesn't really do online games other than WoW (grandfathered in from playing it for like 18 years now) and Magic the Gathering Arena (a game with next to zero actual non-game interaction with other players) I'm...

Look, we'll see as details emerge.

It's tough, though: I do have a friend who introduced me to Control, but he also doesn't do horror games, and so while I think he's seen a Let's Play of Alan Wake II, I don't know that he'll be as into such obsessive discussions as I really want to have.

So, I'm basically shouting this into the void of the blogosphere. This game has lodged itself in my consciousness. I feel lucky that it exists.

But it's all we're going to get for a while. So, I started playing Hollow Knight. I might write about that in a bit.

Martials and Monster Design

 In 5E D&D, there is no such thing as "magic damage." However, for the last ten years, a lot of monsters have been designed in such a way that weapon-based adventurers must use magical weapons in order to overcome the resistance or even immunities some creatures have from the three "physical" damage types, i.e., bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage.

What this created was a sort of unspoken moment of progression: a martial character, getting their first +1 weapon, is essentially initiated into the ranks of people who can actually do something about truly supernatural monsters.

It's always been a funny restriction, given that a level 1 spell caster straight out of character creation can damage, say, a Flesh Golem just fine (though I wouldn't send a level 1 character against a CR 5 monster). Given how much power spellcasters have, it feels like an extra "screw you" to martial characters.

Now, we don't have the full Monster Manual yet, but we've got almost all the pieces of the 2024 version of the game.

Notably, Monks and Moon Druids have features that let them turn their melee attacks into a rarely-resisted damage type. Monks can deal Force damage with their attacks at level 6, while Moon Druids' attacks in Wild Shape can start dealing Radiant damage.

Neither feature mentions "your attacks count as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistances and immunities," because that, as a concept, is going away.

The monsters we've now see that have the old "physical resistances" are mixed. The Stone Golem has no damage resistances at all, and immunity only to poison and psychic (the standard construct immunities). Whereas previously they couldn't be hurt by any physical weapon except one that was magical or made of adamantine (I'd like to know how many characters in the last ten years of D&D had an adamantine weapon before they got a magical one. Aren't adamantine weapons already magical because of the adamantine?) now, any dingus with a club can chip away at them.

However, Fire Elementals go the other way: they have resistance to Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing damage - full stop. You could be attacking them with Blackrazor and at least the slashing damage would be halved.

Anticipating this change, I had wondered if they were going to make some blanket thing about magic weapons dealing Force damage now, similar to the Monk's empowered strikes. But no: it seems that there is no such alteration.

So, where does that leave us?

I suspect that when we get the full Monster Manual, we're going to see far fewer creatures with these resistances, and very, very few with immunities. The Imp, for example, in 2014, had non-magical weapon resistances, but still has the classic devil fire immunity and cold resistance. I imagine this might extend all the way up to things like Pit Fiends and Balors.

In other words, I suspect that the creatures that do have these resistances will be exceptional - a rare case in which you martial characters might want to take evasive action while the spellcasters handle things. The Fire Elemental's new cold vulnerability reinforces this idea (I hope we see more vulnerabilities).