UA: Arcane Subclasses

 Boy, they are really putting out a lot of these, aren't they?

Yes, it's a new Unearthed Arcana, this time playtesting several subclasses themed around the arcane. All but two of these would be revisions to existing subclasses, including the four previously-in-the-PHB Wizard subclasses that were cut from the 2024 Player's Handbook as well as a second proposed revision of the Hexblade after its rather poor reception in the "horror subclasses" UA from a while ago. Two brand-new subclasses are also included - the Tattooed Warrior for Monks and the Ancestral Sorcery subclass for Sorcerers.

Other returning options are the Arcana Domain Cleric and the Arcane Archer Fighter.

That means nine whole subclasses to go through, so buckle up!

It's interesting: we've now gotten several UAs without very obvious sourcebooks to attach to them. This could either be simply a matter of their not being announced yet (much as we got the "Gothic Subclasses" and "Gothic Lineages" before Van Richten's was introduced, and which strongly hinted at a return to Ravenloft) or it could be a matter of shuffling them a bit to obfuscate their ultimate appearance - we've seen them mix material from multiple unannounced upcoming books in UAs of the past.

On one hand, I could imagine a big "2024 update" rules-expansion/revision book that does all of pre-existing subclass options' revisions, though I also don't know that a product like that would sell that well.

But we'll just wait until we see those announcements. For now, let's get on with the subclass-by-subclass review posts!

Lies of P and the Turn of the 20th Century Fiction Crossover

 When Lies of P was first announced, there was something of a snicker amongst the gaming community: a dark, Bloodborne-reminiscent souls-like game starring... Pinocchio? That children's story most famous for its adaptation as a Disney cartoon?

Of course, the truth is that Pinocchio has been the inspiration for dark stories in the past. The comic series Fables, which connects many fairy tale characters into a modern story about refugees fleeing an oppressive empire, plays with the themes that arise from what it means to literally be a puppet, and Stephen Spielberg's completion of what would have been Stanley Kubrick's last movie, A.I., uses the story as an extensive metaphor for its central android character who wants nothing more than to be appreciated and loved as if he were a real boy, while living in a world that has only allowed such artificial intelligence to dampen human emotion.

Fairy tales are told to children because they allow us to introduce complex themes to young minds. The fantastical stories serve as metaphors, and create a language and a framework in which a child can begin to contextualize these ideas. Pinocchio, for instance, is a story largely about the puppet learning to be moral - his misbehavior is born more from ignorance than from maliciousness.

The first time I remember ever being punished for misbehaving, I was four years old. I was in pre-school, which was run out of the basement of the neighborhood's Congregationalist Church. (While we did say a quick, rhyming prayer before eating our lunch, the program was otherwise pretty much secular.) In the small playground just outside of the basement entrance, there was some gravel on the ground just outside a fence that looked out on a path that cut across the block, from one street to the next. Being four, I found that dropping gravel through the gaps in the fence was a sort of fun tactile sensation, so I and another kid would gather up handfuls of gravel and dump them out onto the path.

One of the teachers caught us doing this, and we were put in time out. I cried profusely - because I genuinely hadn't thought that I was doing anything wrong before I was caught, and I feared that I had unwittingly become a "bad kid" because of my ignorance.

Most famously, Pinocchio is told not to lie - that lying is a grave transgression, and so when he does lie, he is punished by having his nose grow longer. The odd thing, though, is that in Lies of P, lying actually serves a very different function: when we encounter the suffering inhabitants of Krat, we're often confronted with doomed, hopeless people awaiting death via the Petrification disease (or rather, a horrific kind of immortality). Our first example is a woman whose child was taken from her when she was sent into the (as it turns out, ineffective) quarantine zone. She claims her child is at City Hall, but what we find there is not a child, but only a little doll. However, we can bring this doll back to her, and lie to her and say that the doll is her baby. The truth is that, at best, her baby is somewhere with her family, in whatever shelter the surviving people of Krat have found (which may be none at all - the NPCs claim the Krat crisis is over at the end of the game, but I'm not convinced that there are many if any survivors of the city outside of the hotel) and very likely, the woman's child is already dead.

But the truth would bring her nothing but anguish, and so the game presents this lie as the morally correct thing to do. Yes, it's a deception, but its only purpose is to give this woman some peace before she passes on from this life. Pinocchio's humanity emerges from this act of kindness and empathy.

I've never actually read the original Carlo Collodi novel (my mom might have read parts of it to me as a kid, but that's some very hazy stuff in distant memory) but I'm given to understand that the game takes many, many characters and elements from the novel, transforming characters into its NPCs and bosses.

However, if you've beaten the game, a very strange thing happens: in a post-credits scene, we see Giangio (we'll talk about him in a moment) mention to some associate over the phone that they've found another "brother" who has discovered a new form of immortality. They then mention that the next person they're keeping an eye on is "Dorothy," and our last shot is just a pair of feet wearing red shoes walking along a precipice overlooking Krat who then clicks her heels three times, the last click coinciding with our cut to black.

This isn't from Pinocchio. This is Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, which most people know from its 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland.

Lies of P is claustrophobically trapped within the city of Krat, but this moment, post-game, suggests a larger world. In fact, functionally, it works almost exactly like the very first MCU post-credits scene after Iron Man - yes, we've been focused on this particular story, but there's a bigger, interconnected world out there.

But rather than superheroes, we've got darkly reimagined children's fantasy stories.

The message that Studio8 seems to be giving us is that, given that the story of Krat feels largely resolved, a sequel might instead take place in a different part of the world with a different conflict, while the gameplay mechanics are preserved or iterated on.

And the Oz books by Frank L. Baum are quite extensive: while the Wizard of Oz as we know it races through Oz to fit into its movie runtime, Baum wrote several books about Dorothy's continuing adventures there, and thus I think there would be lots of material to pull from.

This isn't the first time we get a fictional crossover, though: around the end of "Act One" of the game (defining this as your first loop around the city before you come back to Hotel Krat after the Malum District) you find a portrait of a young Carlo. As your humanity grows by telling those benevolent lies, the nose on the portrait extends, until it's finally long enough to be removed and used as a weapon. The portrait was painted by the famous "D. Gray," which is clearly a reference to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Interestingly, Wilde's story is not at all a kid's book - it's a work of gothic horror (and thus often misattributed to Edgar Alan Poe) in which Dorian Gray sells his soul to have a portrait of himself made that will suffer the consequences of aging, drug use, and all manner of immoral behaviors while he remains the picture of pristine youth, health, and beauty.

What's fascinating is how this all ties together to a central theme: Immortality.

In this post-credits scene, Giangio, now identified as Paracelsus (an actual historical figure who was a 15th Century alchemist and is considered the founder of Toxicology,) is on the phone with an unknown associate claiming that their experiment has worked - that they have discovered a new "brother" and a new form of immortality.

We don't know precisely whom he is referring to, but it would stand to reason that he means Pinocchio. As we discover over the course of the game, Pinocchio truly is Carlo Gepetto. The ergo that holds Carlo's soul was placed in the puppet body, and he's thus been given this second life. In the Rise of P ending, we do the same for Sophia, freeing her from the horrific process she was going through at the hands of Simon Manus and placing her ergo within her own puppet body. The truth of the matter is actually that all the puppets in Krat are really people, the ergo that powers them containing the souls of humans. (This turns out to be a really bad thing in the case of Arlecchino, given that the ergo they used for him was as serial killer's).

But functionally, this ability to take the soul of a dead person and put it into a new, artificial body, is a form of immortality, just as Dorain Gray's portrait lets him ignore the ravages of time.

When Giangio/Paracelsus departs Krat at the end of the game, we can find a letter from him in his old spot near the Gold Coin Fruit Tree. He leaves behind his case so we can continue to purchase wishstones (a game mechanic that I most often forget is even a thing) but he signs the letter "P.P.", no longer keeping up his Giangio pretense, his name evidently being Philippus Paracelsus.

However, I was not the only player to see those initials and think of someone else.

Giangio is pretty obviously lying to us when we meet him, tripping over nearly identifying himself as an alchemist. But we're likely to chalk this up to the fact that he seems pretty young. Indeed, he looks about the same age that Carlo was - maybe 20 or so. So, this clumsy lie could just be because he's inexperienced in the intrigue that the Alchemists are known for. The reveal that he's actually pulling the strings on everything (or at least has a separate and evidently unthwarted agenda) suggests that this slip-up might have actually been an intentional red herring.

He's not one of the Alchemists (or at least not among Krat's order of alchemists,) but is working on some global level. And, as we determine, he's on the lookout for new forms of immortality.

And that makes one think: isn't there a famous character from turn-of-the-20th-century literature who is A: eternally youthful and B: has the initials P.P.?

He's got to be Peter Pan, right?

Having grown up with the movie Hook, I've always thought of Peter Pan as being just another child taken from our world to Never Never Land, but the original story makes him a bit stranger and more alien - while Wendy and her brothers have this wonderful adventure, they return to the real world and eventually grow older, and so when Peter comes to Wendy's house when she is an adult to whisk her own children away on their adventure, he doesn't even recognize her, and doesn't even remember the adventure they had (including having evidently forgotten about his own fairy companion, Tinkerbell).

Metaphorically, of course, it's all about how the carefree innocence of youth is fleeting, and I can even see how Peter's total ignorance of who Wendy is represents the way that a future generation's childhood doesn't even resemble one's own (even some younger millennials seem to me to have had a very different childhood experience than I did despite us theoretically being of the same generation, and I can only imagine how differently my not-quite-1-year-old nephew will experience his childhood than I did mine).

But eternal youth as Peter experiences it is, once again, a form of immortality.

What's interesting to me about that throughline is the way in which I don't really see how Dorothy or her adventures in Oz actually fit into it. Admittedly, I haven't read the books. I saw, at least partially, the Return to Oz miniseries from the 1980s starring Fairuza Balk, though in true 1980s fantasy fashion, it was weirdly dark for a thing made for kids, and I remember being too scared to finish the whole thing.

The point, though, is that if there are any themes of immortality within it, I'm unaware of them.

Still, the Oz books are of a similar era to both Pinocchio and Peter Pan - Pinocchio was published in 1883, the Wizard of Oz in 1900, and Peter Pan was first performed as a stage play in 1904 (the novel would come later). The Picture of Dorian Gray came out in 1890. So, it's a pretty narrow era of literature that the game draws from, and very much fits its turn-of-the-century aesthetic (have we agreed to continue calling 1900 the turn of the century and to call 2000 the turn of the millennium?)

As a last note, it's interesting that the film adaptations of both The Wizard of Oz and Pinocchio each have one of the most iconic "I Want" songs in all of musicals, with "Over the Rainbow" and "When You Wish Upon a Star." Lies of P has shown that it's in conversation not only with the source material, but also its famous adaptations - Gemini is a stand-in for Jiminy Cricket, which was just an unnamed cricket in the novel, and our one glimpse of Dorothy shows her wearing red shoes, while in the novel, she had silver slippers (they made them red to take advantage of the bright Technicolor the 1939 movie was so famous for). Thus, these songs from adaptations might also potentially have some thematic connection in the game.

Building for Ranged Combat

 Generally, thanks to weapon masteries and other buffs, we've seen martial, weapon-focused characters get a pretty significant buff with the 2024 rules (which are nearing a year old!)

Perhaps most notably, we saw a redesign of Great Weapon Master. While the old version allowed you to take a -5 penalty to your attack in order to get a +10 bonus to your damage (which was usually, except in cases of very high-AC targets, or if you had some crazy magic weapon that already did enough damage that an extra 10 wasn't a significant enough boost to risk the higher chance to miss, worth it on average,) the new version cuts out any real additional cost while reducing the damage bonus to merely your proficiency bonus, and only on attacks made with the attack action.

This, as it turns out, is actually better than the old version. Not only does it scale up, so that you're actually getting half the old bonus by level 13, but the higher chance to hit means that (again, depending a little on the AC of the target) even if you pick this up immediately at level 4, when it's only a +2 bonus to your damage, it's still usually better even than the old version, at least according to the math that I did when the new PHB first came out - a result that surprised me (and I might revisit to check that math).

However, Great Weapon Master in 2024 had a very similar counterpart for ranged characters: Sharpshooter, along with its other bonuses, included a practically identical -5 for +10 feature, only that it applied to ranged attacks.

Ranged weapons generally don't deal as much damage as melee weapons, at least until you get into the modern and futuristic firearms categories, which are in the DMG (both old and new) rather than the PHB, because they're meant to be introduced only if a DM feels they fit in the campaign and setting (my homebrew world, for instance, has a lot of surreal New Weirdness, and thus modern technology has its place beside the ancient temples and medieval castles).

That said, with 2024's induction of the "renaissance"-era weapons to the PHB, the Pistol and Musket, we actually have some ranged weapons that deal comparable damage to the most powerful melee options. The Pistol has a d10 damage die, putting it on par with the reach-polearm options (Pike, Lance, Glaive, Halberd) and two-handed versatile weapons like the warhammer and longsword. The Musket uses a d12, putting it up there with the Greataxe (but no longer the Lance, which is now easier to use while not mounted but got a slight damage nerf in the process).

Firearms are tricky, though: if you're sticking strictly to the 2024 rules (which at this point only includes the core rulebooks) there is no Gunner feat to let you ignore the loading property on these weapons, meaning that, ironically, the only classes likely to get full effective use of these firearms are Druids and Clerics who take the more martial "order" options at 1st level, or potentially a Rogue with a dip into some martial class to get access to martial weapons. Naturally, I'd allow anyone at my table to use whatever options they want from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (except maybe the subclasses reprinted in the 2024 PHB).

To return to the point, though: while ranged weapons in the 2014 rules were a bit lower-damage than the melee options, that distinction starts to get diluted as you add on various damage bonuses, including the old Sharpshooter +10 damage. If you're doing 1d8+5 damage with a longbow, that's an average of 9.5 damage per hit, whereas doing 2d6+5 with a maul is 12. Thus, the longbow is doing about 79% of the damage. If we're getting GWM and Sharpshooter on both of those, it becomes 19.5 versus 22, or around 89%. (And, in fact, we're probably doing slightly more because we've probably taken the Archery fighting style and are thus hitting more often).

So, what's the problem now?

Well, the new Sharpshooter doesn't actually give any damage bonus at all. It still lets you attack without disadvantage at long range, but rather than giving you any sort of way to boost your damage, it now instead lets you attack in melee range without disadvantage, no longer requiring you to get Crossbow Expert for that bonus (similarly, various magic-focused feats, like Spell Sniper, also give you this).

There is, of course, always an advantage to being a ranged character rather than a melee one - while lots more monsters have ranged attacks and abilities than they used to, some still lack them, and many don't hit quite as hard or as accurately at range. It also means that you need to worry less about mobility, with a wider area in which you can stand and still make your attacks. If you can hit an enemy from far away, ideally you can take them down before they get to you. This is kind of an inherent element to combat that has proven true in the real world - very few soldiers these days fight with swords or other melee weapons.

But for game balance, we take a penalty in damage for this. And with the shift on Sharpshooter versus Great Weapon Master, that penalty has been expanded.

Or has it?

One of the other, subtler changes to Great Weapon Master is that it now applies to any Heavy weapon. And it just so happens that we have two ranged weapons that have the Heavy property: the Heavy Crossbow and the Longbow.

The tough part, though, is that GWM both requires a 13 in Strength and only gives a +1 bonus to Strength, without an option to boost, say, Dexterity.

We're also going to have to consider the following: older ranged builds could go with both Crossbow Expert and Sharpshooter, allowing them to fire their hand crossbows an additional time per turn. Once again, despite its small d6 damage die, the old Sharpshooter diluted the difference in damage - even compared to a Heavy Crossbow, a d6 only does an average of two damage less, and a whole additional attack with potentially 10 extra damage is going to more than make up for that.

GWM and Crossbow Expert don't work with one another, except to allow you to shoot a Heavy Crossbow more than once per attack action.

So, let's make a build! We're going to keep things relatively simple. We'll be making a ranged Fighter and ignoring subclasses.

    Weapon Choice:

Because we're limiting ourselves to heavy ranged weapons, we actually only have two options. As heavy as you might expect an Antimatter Rifle to be, no firearms actually have the Heavy quality. Thus, we can only use a Longbow or a Heavy Crossbow.

Longbows deal 1d8 damage and have the longest range of any weapon in the game, with 150 feet at regular range and 600 at long range. It will be very rare that a DM makes a fight in which enemies are going to be 600 feet away, but it's not inconceivable to have a battle map where you could be over 150 feet away (though still rare - on a 1-inch grid with each inch representing 5 feet, that's 30 inches, or 2 and a half feet). Sharpshooter is still going to be a valuable feat thanks to the lack of disadvantage when in melee range, but given that we can hold onto a rapier or the like for such situations, we don't necessarily need to grab that feat right off the back. Longbows have the Slow mastery, which isn't useless, but won't make you deal more damage than otherwise. While we might be tempted to take a Shortbow instead for Vex, we won't be able to get that GWM bonus damage.

The Heavy Crossbow is our other option. This does 1d10 on a hit. Its range is also a pretty reasonable 100/400, which in practical terms is almost always going to be good enough to hit anything in line of sight. The Heavy Crossbow has the Push mastery, which I think is actually more likely to be useful than the Slow mastery. If merely trying to keep an enemy far away from you, it'll potentially work better if you hit them multiple times, but you can also knock foes off of high platforms, into hazardous areas, and even help out an ally who doesn't want to burn their action to disengage.

The cost, though, that you pay with the Heavy Crossbow is that you will need to pick up the Crossbow Expert feat if you want to take advantage of Extra Attack at level 5. Notably, this isn't necessary in tier 1, but while Fighters do get a second feat at level 6 (one of their two bonus feats compared to other classes) I would definitely say that you'd need to take this feat at level 4 to ensure that you're getting your full combat capabilities at level 5. The good news is that level 4 is the level at which Great Weapon Master is the least powerful. Getting to use your second attack at level 5 is going to almost certainly be better than the extra three damage on your single hit at level 5.

That said, I think that this suggests the Longbow route actually winds up doing more damage specifically at level 5, because you don't need to wait on GWM to pick up the feat. That being said, Crossbow Expert does improve your Dexterity by a point, so you'll actually have a higher hit and damage modifier at level 5, while the Longbow going straight for GWM is probably stuck at a 17 Dex until level 6.

In other words, there's a bit of power jockeying between these options.

All this being said, eventually we hit a point where we have enough feats to get the things we want. And I think that, in the long run, the Crossbow route is probably going to be the better choice, in part because of the Push weapon mastery.

So, where should we aim, (no pun intended) to figure out how powerful this build is?

I think level 10 is a reasonable one. While Fighters get a huge boost to their power at level 11 thanks to their third attack, level 10 is a pretty good spot for a climactic campaign finale.

For a Fighter, this is pretty simple: we have three feats (level 4, 6, and 8) and we've got two attacks, along with Action Surge and other less damage-oriented features.

We'll assume we're starting off with a 13 in Strength to get GWM, and then we're going to go for a 17 in Dexterity to start (which we can get as long as we've got a background that somehow boosts Dexterity - or if we are using rolled stats and we get lucky).

We'll take the Archery Fighting Style Feat at level 1, naturally (one of the best fighting styles, though obviously only useful for this kind of build).

While I think a reasonable DM would by this point give you at least a +1 weapon, for the sake of just mathing this out, I'm going to just use a mundane weapon and arrows/bolts. We'll also do the Heavy Crossbow as our weapon choice, because I think that this will probably do more damage in the long run.

That said, there is the following trade-off: if we start off with a 17 in Dexterity, we won't actually be able to get to 20 by level 10 with only General Feats that aren't Ability Score Improvements, because we're sacrificing one to get Great Weapon Master, which boosts Strength. A Longbow build can get GWM and Sharpshooter, and then use their 8th level feat to get up to 20 Dex, but a Heavy Crossbow build is either going to have to sacrifice Sharpshooter or wait until level 12 to pick up one last half-feat and max out their Dexterity. Admittedly, Sharpshooter and Crossbow Expert have some redundancies - namely the "firing in melee" ability, so you might be able to get away with skipping Sharpshooter, but you probably also want to be able to ignore partial cover.

One thing that actually makes our math simpler is that GWM's Hew feature doesn't apply to ranged attacks. While this does mean that if we wind up having to stab someone in melee with a Rapier or the like, it will actually apply (this part of GWM doesn't require the weapon to be heavy) it means that in our typical scenario, we're only just getting the bonus damage.

The good news, though, is that by level 10, our PB is 4.

So, let's just commit to getting all three feats. If this campaign goes into tier 3, we can fill out that last feat at level 12 (Resilient: Dex might be a good option to have proficiency in all three physical saving throws).

Ok: let's get to the build:

We start off at 17 Dexterity and 13 Strength, the rest of our abilities being somewhat arbitrary (though I tend to like a decent Con and Wisdom if I can afford it). At level 4, we pick up Crossbow Expert, pushing our Dex to 18. At level 6, we take Great Weapon Master, bringing our Strength to 14, which doesn't do a ton for us, admittedly. At level 8, we take Sharpshooter, so our Dex is now up to 19.

With the Archery fighting style, we get +2 to attacks with ranged weapons. Thus, with +4 to Dex, a +4 PB, and the extra +2 for Archery, we have a +10 to hit.

On a hit, we're dealing 1d10+4 (Dexterity) and +4 (Proficiency Bonus), so our average damage is 13.5. We get to attack twice per turn, or four times with action surge.

Now, because we're going to want to compare this with a Greatsword GWM build, we need to talk about hit chance, because Archery does effectively increase our damage given that we're hitting more often.

So, if we're fighting at level 10, I think it's reasonable to have a lot of foes that are in the high-teens in terms of AC. An AC 18 might still be a little higher than our average target, but against tough enemies where we really need to maximize our damage, this is might be the goal to look at.

Let's get that math out there:

Hit Damage: 1d10+8, or 13.5

Crit bonus damage: 1d10, or 5.5

Hit Chance: 65%, Crit Chance 5%

Damage per attack: 13.5x65%, or 8.775, plus 5.5x5%, or .275, so 9.05.

With two attacks, that becomes 18.1 average damage per attack action (and we can double that to 36.2 with action surge).

    Naturally, with certain subclasses, we can boost that further, like adding Superiority Dice with a Battle Master, but we're going generic here.

Now, let's compare this to a Greatsword-wielding GWM build. This build will do more damage, almost certainly, because they can go all in on Strength, they'll get the full benefit of the Hew feature, because Greatswords have the Graze mastery, and because 2d6 is just more damage than 1d10. The question is by how much.

While the Great Weapon Fighting Style feat does actually increase your damage done, its effect is so marginal that I wouldn't actually recommend anyone take it (it wasn't good in 2014 and it's even worse now). Thus, your Fighting Style is going to be kind of irrelevant for damage output purposes.

Naturally, in real play, being a melee character means mobility is more important - you might spend a full turn just getting to the enemies, which will be a serious dent in your overall damage. But in our ideal "empty room" scenario, we're going to see how the damage compares.

We'll say we're starting with 17 Strength, and then picking up GWM at level 4, followed by two half-feats that boost Strength. Notably, this means that our melee Fighters is actually going to halve the power of the ranged one's Archery fighting style at this level, comparatively speaking. I will note that I taking Polearm Master and fighting with a Glaive instead of a Greatsword does actually give you more damage, and will probably outstrip the ranged character even further. But for the sake of aesthetics and simplicity, we're going to instead assume that they're sticking with a Greatsword, and perhaps taking Mage Slayer and some other Strength-boosting general feat at level 8.

Our melee character thus has enough half-feats to take their Strength to 20 by level 10. With a +5 to Strength and a +4 PB, their attack bonus is +9. On a hit (with their action) they are doing 2d6+9. Additionally, if they take an enemy down or score a critical hit, they can also make one more attack as a bonus action, which does 2d6+5.

Thanks to Graze, we also do some damage even on a miss, so we'll need to add that into the calculation. (Actually, it's now occurring to me that we could calculate this differently, finding out the non-Strength damage average and just adding it to a flat 5 to get our average damage per hit - I'll try that here).

Thus:

5 damage guaranteed per attack (added later)

Hit chance: 60%, crit chance: 5%

Damage on hit: 2d6+4, or 11.

Extra damage on crit: 2d6, or 7.

So: 11x60%, or 6.6, plus 7x5%, or .35, gives us 6.95 average damage beyond graze. Adding in graze gives us 11.95 damage per attack. Thus, for our regular attack action with two attacks, we're dealing 23.9 damage, or 43.8 if we action surge.

But we're not done:

Ignoring action surge, and assuming we're fighting one scary monster, we'll get a bonus action attack if we score a critical hit at least once. This won't get the bonus damage from GWM.

First off, with two attacks, our chance to land a crit on either of them is 9.75%, which we'll need to multiply our average damage on this attack by.

We still have our guaranteed 5 damage and the same hit and crit chance for this attack.

Damage (not counting Strength) on Hit: 2d6, or 7

Extra crit damage: also 7.

So: 7x60% is 4.2, plus 7x5%, or .35 (I realize we could have just said 65% times the whole thing, oh well) gives us 4.55, and then we pop on that 5 that we're guaranteed to get from Strength for an average damage per Hew attack of 9.55. However, our chance of getting this attack is only 9.75%, so the average we deal with it is roughly .93 damage per turn.

Adding this on to our previous damage sans action surge, and we get 24.83 average damage per turn.

Now, let's compare: our Heavy Crossbow build was hitting for 18.1 damage. This is doing 24.83 (maybe shave off that last decimal point. 24.8 is precise enough). This means that our ranged build is doing about 73% of the damage of the melee build.

That is pretty close to three quarters. It is a significant hit to our damage. That being said, we should consider a few things:

With a 100-foot short range, unless dealing with targets behind full cover, there's a very good chance that we're going to be able to target things from the start of the fight without moving. If a melee character has to spend their first turn just taking a Dash action to get to their enemies, then doing 75% of their damage means that it'll take the melee character 3 rounds to catch up to the ranged character's damage output, and in D&D, a lot of fights are going to be over or nearly over by then.

There's also, of course, the survivability angle. Especially with the Push mastery, if a foe has a 30 foot movement speed and you push them back 10 feet each time you hit, with a 65% hit chance, that means you're setting them back an average of 13 feet per round, nearly halving their speed (and potentially pushing them into hazards). If you're just 60 feet away from them (and you can be even farther) it'll take them four of their movements to get into melee range with you, giving you plenty of time to open up some distance. Even if they're dashing at you, you can probably kite a monster this way for several rounds before they catch up with you.

So, it is a trade-off, and I'd think a more significant tradeoff now than it was in the 2014 rules. But I do think that it's a viable way to build a character, even if you wind up with some redundant or less useful side-features.

Brushing Up on My Eberron

 I don't want to count chickens before they hatch, but one of my old dungeon masters, who ran the campaign with my Eldritch Knight, has said she's planning on a new Eberron-set campaign/adventure, and folks, I'm already falling down the rabbit hole.

I've never actually played in an Eberron-set game of any sort, but I'm familiar with its general premise:

Originally introduced in 3rd Edition as the winner of a design competition for new settings, Eberron was created by Keith Bakker. The Eberron setting primarily focuses on the continent of Khorvaire, which is reeling from the catastrophic fallout of The Last War, a conflict that saw most of its kingdoms and nations clash with one another, and one of them, the onetime dominant nation of Cyre, feel to a profound catastrophe: the Mourning, a moment where every last person within the kingdom died.

Inspired largely by 1930s pulp adventure fiction, the geopolitical situation is also reminiscent of that interbellum period. While Cyre must be considered the ultimate victim of that war, no other nation can claim to have emerged as a true victor, and while the "Last War" moniker is one given out of hope that such madness would serve as a warning to the people of Eberron that such a bloodbath should not be repeated, there's every possibility that war might return (and if it's anything like our world, that second conflagration would be even worse than the first).

One of the most notable aesthetic distinctions of Eberron is its technology. While the technology is all underpinned by magic (lest the fantasy purists worry we've gotten into sci-fi territory,) it is a world where airships and trains convey people across the world, and magic is said to be "broad but shallow," where everyday people might know a cantrip (or at least some of the functions of one) but very few people are fully capable of advanced spellcasting.

The primary 5E sourcebook for Eberron is Eberron: Rising From the Last War. This book gave us the Artificer. It also includes four playable species, the Shifter, Kalashtar, Changeling, and probably the most iconic and most tied to this setting, the Warforged.

The Warforged have a pretty interesting story: essentially sentient, sapient golems created to fight the Last War, now that the war is over, Warforged are trying to figure out what they're supposed to do with their lives. Meanwhile, in some places they've become pariahs, tricked into working as scabs for powerful people who don't want to pay workers who need to eat or sleep.

And speaking of powerful people, we also have the Dragonmarked Houses. While the nations of Khorvaire are all jockeying for power, the true power behind the scenes that transcends national borders is the Dragonmarked Houses, powerful families with a magical empowerment that gives them guild-like control over certain areas of commerce. One house runs transportation, and has monopolistic control over air and rail travel, while another controls all the forges that create the Warforged.

It's interesting, because given its 1930s aesthetic, it's not precisely in the same genre/aesthetic as Steampunk, but it's closely related - perhaps more in the realm of "dieselpunk" (though I've also heard the term Magepunk or Dungeonpunk).

Bizarrely, the best example of that aesthetic that I can remember is a Disney cartoon show from when I was a very little kid called Tail Spin. If you're too young to remember this (I have to remind myself that I'm pushing 40, and so stuff from my early childhood would feel like ancient history to a 20-year-old,) the, frankly, bizarre premise to this show was that Baloo, the bear from The Jungle Book, is now working as a freight pilot somewhere in the south Pacific on a seaplane. King Louie runs a bar on one of these islands, and Sher Khan is the evil corporate executive behind some weird plots. Baloo has a young bear sidekick (Mowgli is nowhere in sight - there aren't any humans) named Kit Cloudkicker, who has a kind of boomerang-shaped board that he stands on, tied to the plane by a rope.

Frankly, I think there's very little daylight between this kind of 1930s pulp adventure and your classic steampunk story, except that the Steampunk one might have wax cylinder records while the Pulp one will probably have the vinyl disks, and of course, in the latter, we've already fully started using petroleum-fueled engines.

Eberron, of course, is also mixing in the explicit supernaturalism of D&D.

In 3rd edition, there was less of an emphasis on the idea of unifying the various D&D settings as a cohesive whole, and so Eberron comes with its own planar system quite different from the Great Wheel. Thirteen planes orbit the world, and can wax and wane in their overall influence on things as they pass by. Furthermore, the world is defined by three primordial dragons: Siberys, Eberron, and Khyber. Siberys died and became a barrier that protected Eberron from other planes (i.e., the larger D&D multiverse) while Eberron became the land, and Khyber became a sort of underworld out of which fiends and other horrors emerge.

Anyway:

I believe (though I should confirm this) that this campaign will allow us to start off with the 2024 rules. While I've been wanting to play an Artificer for some time, and it would feel pretty appropriate in Eberron, I've also been very excited to play some of the revised classes from 2024, the Monk and Fighter being my foremost options.

In the latter case, though, the character I played with this DM previously was a Fighter, and I'm tempted to hold off on that in case we get a chance to revisit those characters (and I'd like to rebuild that character slightly to make him a Great Weapon Master).

Thus, Monk is probably the way I'm likely to go.

I actually have a character kind of figured out already as my initial character to play with the 2024 rules, which is a Cloud Goliath Elements Monk. The thing is, I've been wanting to play a Warforged character in something other than a one-shot ever since Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron came out - the pdf-only precursor to Rising from the Last War.

I'll need to get a bit more detail on what kind of campaign she wants to run: she said she has an adventure she'd like to run, and I suspect that means she already has a relatively strong sense of how things will go, so I don't want to write too heavy of a backstory if it's not going to be easy to make my plot leads line up with what she wants to run.

My initial concept was a Warforged Monk who survived the Mourning, but also witnessed the assassination of the Cyran army scientist/researcher he was assigned to serve shortly beforehand. That's a bit on the angsty side (he'd be called Char, not as his original designation, but because half of his face was deeply burned by the explosion that killed the scientist).

Another is to go closer to the Goliath character's backstory and have someone who worked on an airship (likely taking the Sailor background). While the Goliath character has a whole story about a mysterious dreadnought that destroyed his original ship, I might have this character be someone who saved his ship by replacing a broken part of the ship (maybe one of the struts that binds the elemental matrix) with his own arm, and he's navigating the dissonance of being hailed as a hero but also kind of discarded following the war.

I'll also need to see what other players are planning on. I think with four years and counting on my Wizard, I'm fairly satisfied in my pure spellcaster experience, and I'm eager to play something a little more martial and gear-focused (though admittedly the Monk is not terrible gear-focused. Give me my Wraps of Unarmed Prowess and my Bracers of Defense and I'll be a happy monk).

A Blood Artist Defeated

 Well, I feel a need to put an asterisk on this, despite the fact that I'd never before considered beating a game on the lowest difficulty to be in any way "illegitimate." Still, it was on my Guiding Butterfly Advance build character that I defeated the final boss of Lies of P Overture.

The thing I feel stupid about is that I progressed the main game past meeting Arlecchino at Arche Abbey, meaning that, having not defeated him in the past already, I didn't get any special dialogue.

The Arlecchino fight is pretty serious - even on this low difficulty and helping Lea up so that she aided me in combat (while I haven't summoned specters for other fights, I feel like the story demands that we get Alidoro to help with the Two-Faced Overseer and Lea to help with Arlecchino) it took me three or possibly four attempts.

Granted, I'm sure that on Legendary Stalker mode, even with Lea's help, it's probably take me far more than that.

I realized I had gotten some details wrong in my previous post speculating on the death of Carlo.

First off, it seems quite explicit on a second visit to the Rose Estate that Carlo had Petrification Disease. Whether that is what actually killed him or not remains more ambiguous, but I'm inclined to think that it didn't, based on some notes from the Alchemists - someone confessed to figuring out the "Devil's Path" or something along those lines that talks about how they need to collect a person's Ergo before they die and transfer it into a vessel that resembles that person - which seems to be precisely what was done to Carlo/Pinocchio.

The other thing I had misunderstood is that Valentinus Monad was not, evidently, the leader of the Alchemists, as he winds up getting excommunicated from them for handing over the "ancient one's hand" to outsiders, in the name of stopping the ethically-catastrophic actions of his fellow alchemists.

Who, actually, is Valentinus' superior? That I'm less clear on, because it's clearly not Simon Manus. Is it actually Gepetto?

I think I was right to think that Lea and Sophia are sisters - there's a portrait that appears to depict the two of them and their parents. (I'm not entirely clear what relationship Lea has to Markiona, though it might be that they were just friends once, given that her father and Markiona were both alchemists.)

I do think that Carlo might have been a kind of patient-zero for an outbreak of the Petrification Disease at the Monad Charity House (sorry for being inconsistent - the Rose Estate and the MCH are the same place). Valentinus, in his excommunication, is apparently given a cure for the disease, but as we know, the Alchemists have a tendency to give faulty cures that turn people into carcasses if they don't like the people. We see this happen to Lumacchio, and to the refugees at the Cathedral.

Anyway, the boss fight:

There are some pretty insane combos that go on for a long time, which is how I died the first couple times. Phase one is actually pretty quick, and his attacks are relatively easy to perfect block. But the second phase is much more relentless, and actually bears some similarities to Maria of the Atral Clocktower in Bloodborne's Old Hunters DLC, in that his attacks sometimes come with a follow-up attack in the form of a spray of blood.

I am actually really glad that they include a Boss Rematch option with the DLC patch - one of the most frustrating things about these games is that you need to start a whole other playthrough to fight a boss a second time. I suspect that beating them on a high difficulty (maybe the highest) unlocks their music for the hotel record player (which will for sure change to tone of Hotel Krat). I can't figure out what else would account for the uncollected records in the menu.

I'm also now trying to figure out if there are actually enough Ancient Disks in the DLC to buy everything from Klaus. There are still several items I have yet to pick up from him, but I've been very thorough (and even consulted walkthroughs in the twistier areas of the game to ensure I was getting everything). If not, and if I do a NG+ on this character (probably bumping it up to the medium difficulty) I'll probably prioritize the cosmetic items. Without any new Legion Arms to construct, for example, I doubt that I'll really need the Legion Calibers. Also, for an Advance build, I've already got most of the weapons that scale with it maxed out to +10 (insane to me that none of the boss/covenant weapons work for Advance).

Anyway, I still need to go fight the Nameless Puppet on this character, and then the question becomes whether to go into NG+. I know that the P-Organ enhancements expand into multiple new game cycles, and I'd be curious to see if they get any cool new functions.

Overall, I really have to say that this is a fantastic DLC - it feels substantial and complete, with memorable bosses and areas. Between this and Shadow of the Erdtree last year, Souls-likes fans have had some really great DLC content to chew on.

Also, true to Lies of P's MO, the game really hits you right in the heart with a lot of emotional damage. Not only do we have the tragedy of the collapse of Carlo's found family, but the conclusion to the Rosaura quest line, which takes place in "modern day," almost made me cry.

I'm super-curious to see whether the folks at Studio 8 make good on the post-credits promise (/threat?) to make a similar souls-like game with Dorothy from Wizard of Oz as the protagonist. First off, it'd be really cool to have a female protagonist to one of these games (admittedly most of them let you design your own character, but the few I've heard of with set main characters have all been male) but also I think there are some interesting and quite different visual motifs and themes you could explore, plus a lot of deep lore to pull from.

While perhaps lacking the design variety of the FromSoft games, the actual visual fidelity of Lies of P is excellent, and I'm hoping the game's success gives them the resources to really do some amazing things (if nothing else, the way that snow works in Overture is really stunning, between the way it slowly collects on Pinocchio's hair or hat, or how he leaves trails in it). I'll be keeping an eye out for "Wishes of D" or whatever they call the next game.

The Death of Carlo in Lies of P

 Unlike the FromSoft games that inspired it, Lies of P's story is a little more straightforward - a city thrown into chaos by callously ambitious men, a lie of progress resulting in suffering and death, and a special automaton who may be more than he seems.

This game is a couple years old, but I suppose what we're talking about will be spoilers, so just in case, I'm going to put the cut in here. The post will also discuss revelations found in Overture, the game's much more recent DLC.

Spoilers Ahead:

Hit Points and Damage Are Not the Same in Daggerheart

 As I've been reading through Daggerheart's core rulebooks, I've made note of a lot of ways in which the game pulls the rug out from under some of the assumptions underlying typical TTRPGs, but I wanted to walk through some of the implications of one of the more fascinating ideas within it: that the damage you take is not the same as the hit points you lose.

    (As a note, Daggerheart uses the terms "Marking" and "Clearing" to talk about certain values going up and down. In 5E, your max HP might be, say, 10, and your current HP drops as you take damage. In Daggerheart, if you have 6 HP, you Mark each point as you lose it, and if you are healed, you can "clear" those points. Essentially, marking any of these things is like losing it temporarily, but always reminding you what its maximum is supposed to be.)

To explain (and I'm going to refer to D&D 5E terms as a point of comparison):

Your character has an Evasion score, which is actually more or less exactly the same as AC in D&D - it's the number that an attack roll has to hit or exceed to deal damage to you.

Next, in a somewhat familiar format, if an attacker rolls a hit, they then roll their damage.

Here's where it gets a little different:

Each character has two thresholds - a Major Damage Threshold and a Severe Damage Threshold. Let's say I have a Major Threshold of 10, and a Sever Threshold of 20. Damage below that first threshold is Minor Damage. If it's 10-19, we're talking Major Damage. And if it's 20 or above, it's Severe damage.

And each of those is worth a certain number of hit points: Minor damage "marks" 1 HP, Major marks 2, and Severe marks 3.

A 1st level character might start off with 6 HP (I don't have the book in front of me right now, so I could be slightly off on that). Thus, if they took Severe damage twice, they'd be in danger of dying (using some different death mechanics that I won't get into here). They could also be thus imperiled by taking Major Damage 3 times, or Minor Damage 6 times, so some combination.

A character's class and the armor they're wearing can alter the thresholds - obviously, the higher your thresholds, the more punishment you can take.

On top of this, your Armor determines (or at least helps determine - I'll need to return to that part of the chapter) your "Armor Score," which gives you a certain number of times you can choose to have the armor you're wearing absorb the blow somewhat, downgrading Severe damage to Major, Major to Minor, and Minor to nothing at all - but "marked" armor slots need to be repaired during a rest to clear them.

Still, I think the really profound implication here is that the actual number of hit points that can be marked in a single instance of damage are capped (though there is an optional rule for a further threshold that would mark 4 HP).

    This has major implications:

First off, it allows HP to remain relatively small and manageable. While your character does have the option to increase their max HP as their level goes up, the more granular way to improve your survivability is to instead increase those damage thresholds.

The math here might be a little more complex than I want to be doing after midnight, but I could even imagine a system where you never actually get more Hit Points, and instead your damage thresholds just go up.

But I don't think it actually scales as consistently as you might expect: Let's say I have a monster who consistently does 12 and then 21 damage. If my thresholds are 10 and 20, that means that in a turn, I'm going to lose 5 hit points if they both hit. If both thresholds go up by 5, to 15 and 25, that gets reduced to 3 hit points. If my thresholds go up another 5, to 20 and 30, that's actually still 3 HP marked.

While I think the damage isn't going to be as consistent as that, and probably with greater variation in damage, these incremental threshold increases will have a more noticeable impact, it does mean that the exact relationship between these factors will require a little more complex math.

The second implication is that there's a cap on how much of a creature's HP can be lost in a single act.

And that's actually potentially huge.

In D&D, players are encouraged to optimize their characters to be able to pump out as much damage as possible. I did some napkin math on a great-weapon-master rebuild of my old Eldritch Knight using the 2024 rules update, and found that if he had a +1 Greatsword, he could put out close to 90 damage on average against a target with an AC of 20 (not consistently - he'd need to action surge, but without burning any resources, he could get around 40, and potentially a little more if the monster moves after he hits them with Booming Blade, which they might be inclined to do after he uses the Push mastery on them).

But here, once you cross the Severe threshold for an enemy, it seems that's the end of it - no further need to lay on the damage.

It does actually solve a problem many a DM/GM has faced: my cool boss monster got slaughtered in a single round. If a big scary monster has 12 HP in Daggerheart, that means that in absolute best case scenario, the party is going to have to land 4 hits on them, and probably more if the damage thresholds are high (which seems likely for a boss monster).

Similarly, a player character is not going to be dropped by a single attack or spell, it would seem.

Daggerheart's combat system is less structured than in 5E - indeed, the entire game is built around (what I at least assume is intended to be) a smooth back-and-forth between the PCs and the GM, but I wonder if the relative complexity of this system for resolving damage might actually help rein things in to ensure that fights are always going to feel significant but also surmountable.