What Kind of Path Forward (If Any) Should Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Have?

 One of the strange things about games, as opposed to movies and other storytelling mediums (media?) is the way that sequels can often seriously improve upon their predecessors. The first entry in what would become storied franchises are often kind of strange, proof-of-concept games that become the primordial, primitive blueprint for games that are far more beloved.

The two that immediately spring to mind are Final Fantasy and Assassin's Creed. The original Final Fantasy was a solid effort to bring elements of Dungeons & Dragons into a video game world, but it wouldn't be until the franchise's fourth entry that they truly realized the potential for operatic melodrama that is now such an integral part of the series identity.

Assassin's Creed hit its stride a bit earlier, with the second game introducing an actually likable protagonist, marrying meticulous historical research with its open-world parkour assassination missions.

So many of these games retain similar mechanical ideas that are iterated upon with each entry, and while there are often missteps (consider FFII's leveling system, which is a bit more like Elder Scrolls, which did not work very well in the team-based, turn-based combat system from the first game) usually iteration leads to improvements.

There's a general consensus among film critics that editing is among the foremost aspects of film as an artistic medium that distinguishes it from other forms - while film borrows plenty of artistic disciplines from theater, such as acting, directing, scriptwriting, set and costume design, etc., the ability for the editor to take the footage shot by the cinematographer (a discipline largely inherited from photography, though of course with nuanced distinctions) and create meaning from the juxtaposition of images and effectively "controlling the eye of the audience" within the simulated reality of the film's world is something you can't really do on stage.

As generations that saw video games as toys for children give way to generations that have grown up and continued to play these games into adulthood, the answer to the question of whether they can be art or not is becoming more of a clear consensus: absolutely, yes. I don't think anyone who doesn't just immediately dismiss the idea of games-as-art with prejudice could look at a work like Expedition 33 and conclude it was anything but art (indeed, the sense of melancholy heartbreak I have when thinking about the game's ending, if nothing else, proves that the game was not interested in presenting any facile moral message).

But, if we take as a granted that games can be art (I'm certainly of this camp,) I think a similar argument can be made that "gameplay" is an element of games that is unlike what is found in any other medium. Beautiful music, stunning visuals, excellent writing - all of these are also elements of, actually, filmmaking. It is the manner in which the game challenges us, the manner in which we interact with the game world, the systems that we must come to understand to make it through the story, that are unique to the games.

And it is this, if nothing else, that can also provide the throughline of a series.

As readers of this blog no doubt know, I'm a big fan of the "Souls-likes" games of FromSoftware (and even ventured outside of that studio for the excellent Lies of P - a game that also emotionally punches you in the gut, and probably only is diminished in this regard in my estimation by the fact that I immediately went to play Expedition 33 the very day I beat Lies of P).

Indeed, part of the agony of Expedition 33's conclusion is the invitation to question your very enjoyment of the story.

While my social media feeds are flooded with spoileriffic debates over which of the game's two endings is morally better (the debate itself is worthwhile, but I think misses the point if one believes you can arrive at a definitive answer) I'm going to err on the side of caution, and say that if you haven't yet been spoiled for this game's ending, and wish to remain that way, perhaps return here once you have rolled credits on it.

In other words, Spoilers Ahead!

More Sci-Fi Thoughts About Edge of Eternities

 As readers of this blog likely know, I'm an anti-purist when it comes to genre (and, frankly, most things - other than, like, the purity of food and medicine, you know). I'm also someone who got into sci-fi before I ever got into fantasy. Indeed, I came to fantasy as someone who was already an avid viewer of Star Trek The Next Generation, who got nearly-exclusively Lego's Space sets (there were some shorter-lived product lines set underwater, but the submarines were pretty analogous to spaceships, so I was still in).

But as I've found myself drawn probably more to fantasy than sci-fi in recent years, what I find really interesting is the way you can consider the two genres as depicting not necessarily different subject matter, but applying a different lens.

Consider this: a human-like alien species with an ancient civilization, older than humanity, is largely built around a mythology about a group of god-like beings known as the Prophets, who send them omens and prophecies about the past and the future. But then, our skeptical hero enters a wormhole  and discovers that within the strange extra-dimensional space of the wormhole, these are actually noncorporeal aliens who exist outside of the normal flow of time. A perfectly rational explanation, right?

And yes, this is the premise of the opening of Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

Well, depends on your perspective. After all, aren't things like angels - strange-looking beings (think of all those "biblically correct angels" you've seen or heard about) who are from heaven, a realm that is purported to be beyond our world, but in any spatial relationship to where we are right now. Can we only dismiss the supernatural nature of these things by moving the goalposts for where we'll actually consider something supernatural?

The point is: Edge of Eternities takes Magic the Gathering outside of the very Multiverse in which it has been set for the past 32 years, but only just outside: in a region called The Edge. Multiverse is now a term that doesn't broadly refer to the whole of Magic's cosmos, but instead the planes that compose its high-fantasy region.

Now, cynically, one could imagine that this then makes the "Universes Beyond," in which Magic has made cards set in other IPs (two of which have been Standard legal - though the Dungeons & Dragons set felt somewhat less like an intrusion given that it's A: also a WotC IP, and B: also a high fantasy IP and C: one that saw a crossover the other way first, with sourcebooks for D&D set in Ravnica, Theros, and at Strixhaven), but let's ignore that idea that is probably giving some soulless marketing executive a state of physical arousal and return to the idea of the Magic cosmos' sudden expansion.

One of the things that makes the Edge (our non-plane setting for Edge of Eternities) different is... well, the lack of planes. There are planets here, not planes.

Magic has historically treated planes and planets as somewhat interchangeable, which is a real distinction from, say, D&D's treatment. In D&D, for example, all the relatively mundane worlds (they still have wizards and dragons and such) are simply worlds (usually spherical planets) of the Prime Material Plane. And while the plane isn't quite like how modern science imagines our spatial reality, it's not super-far-off.

Magic is a game filled with monstrous beings like demons and helions and wurms and oozes. But the two that always felt the most disturbingly alien were the Phyrexians and the Eldrazi.

I mentioned in my last post about this that I think cosmic horror elements in a work of fantasy fiction or science fiction often work because they feel like an intrusion of one genre upon the other. In Sci-Fi, the eldritch abominations of cosmic horror threaten our sense of rationality, suggesting that the rational models upon which we built the technology to explore our cosmos are just a recent delusion, and only hubris allowed us to replace awe and terror with intellectual curiosity, and that delusion is now sending us head first into a concrete wall. But in fantasy, it's the opposite realization of the failure of our models of understanding: a cosmic horror entity within a fantasy world doesn't fit into the neat categorizations that a mythic theology grants us - eldritch horrors defy the usual safeguards against evil spirits, and obey no known rules like the way that a vampire must be invited before they can enter your home, or will perish in sunlight.

Oddly enough, this entire post was inspired by one of the leaked cards for Edge of Eternities: Virulent Silencer.

It's an artifact creature with the types robot assassin, and it effectively gives all your nontoken artifact creatures Toxic 2 (though it's not worded this way). But the flavor text is the real shocker:

"Nano-infectant: A category-Phi substance, capable of infecting both organics and artificials. Weaponizing it is a war crime."

Category Phi, you say?

Phi, of course is a letter in the Greek alphabet that is represented somewhat like a P that has the loop on both sides. It's also, you know, the symbol for the Phyrexians.

Now, could this just be a cheeky reference? Sure. Maybe the people of the Edge have never heard of the Phyrexians. The whole Phyrexian project was created by Yawgmoth, who was originally just a human man in the Thran civilization on Dominaria. But everything about the Phyrexians felt like an invasion of science fiction monsters into these fantasy worlds. The card describes this assassin's weapon as a nano-infectant, presumably some kind of substance that has the very sci-fi technology of self-replicating nano-bots that can kill, or perhaps re-structure, anything they infect.

Which is precisely what the Phyrexians' Glistening Oil is.

The March of the Machines actually ought to be the last we ever hear of the Phyrexians. I know that they're such popular monsters and so deeply tied to the three-decade history of Magic that perhaps we'll never be rid of them for good, but they should at the very least not be seen for a long time (I don't recall how long it was between Invasion Block and Scars of Mirrodin). And if there's any longstanding epic-level-threat monsters that are being more explicitly teased in Edge of Eternities, it's the Eldrazi (we're even getting at least one new Eldrazi creature card).

But it'd be really interesting if we find out some connection between the sci-fi world of the Edge and the technologically-advanced Thran civilization that pre-dated even Urza. Was Yawgmoth drawing on the research of the sci-fi world of the Edge?

The Adventuring Day and How Many Encounters to Use Per Day

 The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide provides a new formula for generating combat encounters for your players. It's actually somewhat similar to the 2014 system - both provide an XP-budget per-player, with different values at each level. The primary difference between 2014 and 2024's systems is that the old one would also apply a very punishing multiplier if using multiple monsters - thus, three 1st level characters in an easy difficulty encounter would face, for example, two Kobolds and an Octopus (that was the first encounter I ever ran, and none of the monsters lived to have a turn).

If I were to build that same encounter again in 2024 rules, it would be, I believe, six Kobolds - something that would probably feel far more substantial.

However, the, like 60xp encounter (and thus 20xp per player,) would only have contributed one fifteenth of what the DMG suggested for an "Adventuring Day" - in other words, it should have been the first of a grueling gauntlet of encounters, in which, surely, once or twice, the kobolds would have gotten decent initiative or the fighter and paladin wouldn't have landed their hits on the first turn (even with a 1 on the damage die, if they have a +3 to their damage, that's a kill).

By contrast, our six-kobold encounter, which would still be doable, but would last long enough to actually present some threat to the party, has a total budget of 150. We still divide that by 3 for the players, so it's only 50xp per player (the low-difficulty budget in the new DMG for one 1st level player) but what that means is that the 300xp daily budget per 1st level player means we're looking at 6 encounters per day. That's... actually quite a lot.

The thing I find interesting about this is that even if individual encounters are easy, the daily xp budget can make things start to feel a lot harder as you start getting into fights after blowing through a lot of your resources and potentially being low on HP as well.

My goal here is to use the 2014 Adventuring Day and the 2024 encounter XP budgets to arrive at a simple "how many of each kind of encounter can we do per day" value.

This might not work out linearly - it depends on how proportional the difficulties are with that daily budget. If it all works out, we can figure out an "encounter point" system similar to what is found in Flee, Mortals!

This will all scale with players, so we only need to figure this out on a single player basis.

So, let's start with level 1:

Encounter Budgets:

Low: 50, Moderate: 75, High: 100

Daily: 300

    So, we can fit 6 low encounters, 4 moderate encounters, or 3 high encounters.

    I will say, I don't know if any DM uses the 2014 daily xp budget system, because I don't know if I've ever had a campaign that was this hard - a high difficulty encounter is seriously hard in the 2024 DMG. Still, we can at some later point determine what our true daily budget is. With these values, we can easily turn 25xp into one "encounter point," and suggest that a Low encounter is worth 2, a moderate encounter is worth 3, a high encounter is worth 4, and we have a total budget of 12 per day.

How's it work at level 2?

Encounter Budgets:

Low: 100, Moderate 150, High: 200

Daily: 600

    The math is easy, because all of our values have doubled. Thus, it's precisely the same "Encounter Point" values and total budget.

If this works at level 3 as well, we'll jump to a much higher level and see if things are the same.

Encounter Budgets:

Low: 150, Moderate: 225, High: 400

Daily: 1,200

    Ah, now, here we're clearly off a little. Our daily budget has grown twofold, while low and moderate encounters have gone up by 50% but high has fully doubled.

    We could fit 8 low difficulty encounters in a day, moderate encounters are a nightmarish 5 1/3, and high difficulty is once again 3.

In other words, this isn't going to give us a super-clean formula. Two moderate encounters and five low encounters would satisfy this, or a high difficulty encounter and then two moderates, and three low encounters.

    To be fair, this makes sense: the thing that grows the most as you level up is the number of resources you have available. A 3rd-level full spellcaster has six spell slots - double what they had at level 2. Even though you'll be pressured to use those resources more liberally, you have greater control over your sustainability. A 1st level character is only going to be able to expend spell slots twice before they need to rest, which makes basically any fight one in which they really have to consider whether they want to expend a spell slot at all.

For my own purposes, let's check things out at level 18, where my players are at the moment.

Encounters:

Low: 5,000, Moderate: 8,700, High: 14,200

Daily: 27,000

    The math here isn't super-clean, but roughly, we can do five low encounters (with a bit of spare xp,) 3 moderate encounters (again, with change) and actually just short of enough for two high-difficulty encounters.

    This is kind of interesting: this is fewer encounters than we could do at low levels. And having run tier 4 combat now for a good while, that makes sense in just how long fights of these levels go - in tier 4, everything's basically a giant epic clash of titans.

What about mid-levels, though? Do we skew more or fewer encounters?

My Wizard is level 8, currently, and so we'll use this as an example.

Encounters:

Low: 1,000, Moderate: 1,700, High: 2,100

Daily: 6,000

    So, like at level 1, we can do 6 low encounters per day, then just under 4 moderate encounters, and just under 3 hard encounters.

Once again, I find myself wondering if all the complaints about 5E being too easy are because people haven't been taking the Adventuring Day seriously enough.

Checking Out the Lore on Edge of Eternities: Magic's Journey into Science-Fantasy

 Magic the Gathering is actually probably one of my foundational fantasy inspirations. I started playing when I was 8, roughly a year after the game first came out in the early 90s, and I encountered Ironwood Treefolk long before I read about Treebeard and the Ents' march on Isengard.

Magic always had little elements of sci-fi in it: Antiquities, the second expansion set after Arabian Nights, really launched the Magic story, telling the story of the Brother's War, though in an interesting way: the cards were antiquities - ancient relics of a bygone era. It wouldn't be until the recent Brother's War set that we got a look at that conflict presented with a contemporary perspective (one justified - I'd argue unnecessarily - by time travel and visions of the past). The point is, the Artificers of early Magic already infused the game's aesthetic with a quasi-sci-fi vibe, perhaps a "magepunk" or "dungeonpunk" aesthetic.

I'm always impressed by Magic's creative team and their ability to weave new worlds that are built around the game's central 5-color motif that nevertheless feel distinct from one another. If there's one disappointment to all of this, it's that the game and its flavor are somewhat divorced from one another (though the championship finale for Eldritch Moon, which saw the winner's Liliana and Zombies deck beat their opponent's Emrakul deck, was a surprisingly canonical expression of the events of that set's story).

In recent years, Magic has really started to push outside of the standard fantasy genres. While Kaladesh (the plane now renamed to Avishkar to better reflect a more likely "fantasy India" world) brought in significant technological elements, the technology was all based in more fantastical resources, like Aether.

I'd say where things really started to turn (and this includes the revisit to Avishkar in Aetherdrift) was the transformation of Kamigawa in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. Kamigawa was introduced in 2004 as a Japanese-themed setting that focused on Legendary cards as its biggest theme. However, the block (back when Magic had year-long three-set blocks) was also set in that plane's distant past - the central hero, Toshiro Umezawa, was an ancestor to one of the original legendary creatures from Legends, itself I believe depicting an era prior to the Brothers' War.

Coming back to Kamigawa thousands of years later, Neon Dynasty imagined the plane had progressed in its technology, appearing not as a feudal land of clashing kami and mortals, but fully a cyberpunk future of cybernetic implants, towering skyscrapers, and, as the name implies, a night lit by colorful neon.

Not much later, we were given Duskmourn (honestly one of my favorite recent sets,) a plane that is just one big haunted house, inspired by horror movies of the 1980s, with 80's technology like camcorders and televisions (a setting whose flavor was, admittedly, sometimes a little confused, as Spice8Rack pointed out).

It's thus, perhaps, not that surprising that we're getting a fully science-fantasy setting with Edge of Eternities. What is surprising (perhaps) is that the setting expands out the lore of the Magic multiverse in rather shocking ways.

I just read through the Planeswalker's Guide to Edge of Eternities, which takes the form of a kind of intelligence report delivered to Tezzeret. Tezzeret, one of Magic's enduring recurring villains, has strategically played the role of second fiddle to other big-bads like Nicol Bolas and later the Phyrexians, but his role in the March of the Machine and the Phyrexians' simultaneous invasion of nearly all the planes of the multiverse via the Omenpaths saw him sent somewhere beyond.

And we're now learning what that "beyond" is.

The Magic multiverse contains the various planes all sitting within an area called the Blind Eternities. But what I've read in the latest Planeswalker's Guide suggests that there's something beyond - and it's more or less a change in genre.

As Tezzeret writes in his notes, the universe he's found himself in is profoundly advanced in technology, but utterly primitive in the use of magic. The people of the Annular Space use things like Aether and Mana, but these materials are treated more as power sources for technology. What is annular space? Well, an annulet is a ring, and describes something like a toroid. There's this idea of a "donut-shaped" universe, where if you travel far enough in any direction, you'll come back around to the same point. It's a little different than a sphere, because if you travel "north" on a toroid, you'll still come back to the same point, but without also crossing the other side of the ring. Notably, the world maps in a lot of video games, like much of the Final Fantasy series, actually work like Toroids. A Toroid has a big advantage in making maps because you can flatten it out into a rectangle, unlike that of a sphere (you've probably seen how the Mercator projection of the world map makes places like Greenland and Antarctica look enormous while shrinking places closer to the equator, because those northern and southern reaches need to be stretched out to unroll the single points of the north and south poles into an equator-long line).

While a toroid-shaped space (obviously, this is an abstraction, flattening three dimensions into two to then imagine the shape in three dimensions, when we're probably talking about something that's more like four or more dimensions) doesn't have any edges, per se, there is something described in the Planeswalker's Guide where there are two edges - one inner, which is blue-shifted, hot, and destructive. It seems very much like the firewall just above the event horizon of a black hole. Essentially, because of the intense gravity at the surface of a black hole, only the very most energetic stuff has the momentum to avoid getting sucked in, and so there's this high-energy wall that will obliterate anything that tries to pass through it. Edge of Eternities also has a "Quiet Barrier" where things are red-shifted and fade away, which is actually also a phenomenon in our universe - the universe is continuing to expand, and the farther something is from us, the more space there is to continue expanding between us, creating what is effectively faster-than-light departure from us (which cheats the universal speed limit because it's not stuff that is moving faster than light, but just the space between us getting larger). Past a certain radius, the speed at which things are getting farther from us means we cannot (at least without figuring out FTL travel or observation, which current physics considers impossible) actually see anything beyond this barrier, thus creating a certain sphere around Earth that is the "Observable Universe".

Here's the really interesting thing, though: The blue-shifted, "Chaos Wall," is, I believe, implied to be the thing that separates Space from the Magic multiverse - in other words, we're beyond the planes, beyond "Dominia." This set takes place in a realm beyond. And, again, it's a realm that trades fantasy for science fiction.

Some other fun elements:

One of the central conflicts is between the Summists and the Monoists. I don't think either are implied to be "good guys," but they have vastly different philosophies. The Monoists see holiness in black holes, or supervoids (I'm not sure if supervoid is the in-universe term for black holes, or if it's an actual physics term describing them, or I'm actually mistaking it for something else,) and turn stars into them with their technology.

The messianic savior of the Monoists is the Immortal Faller, who they can see in not just one, but all supervoids.

This is actually a really cool reference to a real astrophysics idea: that if you observed someone (or an object) going into a Black Hole, time would warp in such a way that they would seem to be falling into it forever. (What's even more bizarre is that from the perspective of someone falling into a black hole, if they survived the fire wall, their experience would not match the observations of outsiders, and would maybe not even notice as they passed the event horizon - the fact that they can never return to compare notes allows for this seeming split in the reality of what actually happened to them - quantum physics is weird.)

Another big note: there is ample reference to an ancient conflict called the Fomori-Eldrazi War.

As far as I can tell, this conflict is like a "millions of years in the past, before any of the current vaguely-humanoid spacefaring species were around" thing. But it's one of the few places where familiar proper-nouns are introduced. The Eldrazi, of course, have been a big part of Magic's lore since their introduction in the first Zendikar block, posing a comparable threat to the Phyrexians and villains like Nicol Bolas. The Eldrazi are right out of HP Lovecraft - bizarre and utterly alien monsters whose hidden existence allowed the mortal races to misinterpret them (I love the way that the merfolk of Zendikar imagined them as humanoid deities, their shapes vaguely reminiscent of their true forms).

I've often argued that what makes cosmic-horror monsters so fun is that they're an invasion into whatever genre they're in from another genre. In more rational, sci-fi stories, they are like demons and monsters from the fantasy genre, but in fantasy, this is kind of flipped, with them emerging as something more alien and defying the mythological hierarchies of gods, demons, and such. They live in that uncanny area between the rational and the mythical.

And holy crap, if the Eldrazi are originally from this "outer" space beyond the primary Magic multiverse, doesn't that just retroactively make them that much more cosmic in nature?

Also, the Fomori are a name we've heard before: Thunder Junction, the Wild West-themed plane (another step outside of the typical fantasy genre) was home to a vast Fomori Vault. Are we now discovering that that vault might have served a purpose in that grand war? Did the Fomori send the vault through the Chaos Wall to preserve some part of their culture or world as the Eldrazi came to wipe them out? What else comes from the Fomori? (The Izolith on Ikoria feels like a prime candidate).

One last note: Edge of Eternity has a planet of sapient Kavu. Previously seen only as non-sapient beasts on Dominaria, there's apparently a whole planet (that's in the process of falling apart, prompting a global evacuation) of technologically-advanced, intelligent Kavu. Notably, this isn't like the typical "we use this creature type for the humanoid version of this creature" like Aven are for birds or Rhox are for rhinos, but instead, it seems like the Kavu of Dominaria might just not be living up to their potential. Did they emerge from a Fomori Vault on Dominaria?

Pure speculation here, but I've been playing with the idea of making the Golgothian Sylex come from outside of the Magic multiverse in my Ravnica D&D campaign - it was already a mysterious ancient artifact when Urza used it to end the Brothers' War. My plan for my players is that when they hit level 20, they'll go to the D&D multiverse and we're essentially going to have a Planescape campaign as the final chapter, with the Sylex created by two of my original deities as part of their path to apotheosis.

But canonically, could the Sylex actually be a technological weapon built out here?

Anyway, I'm really, really excited to get my hands on this set - obviously, the mechanics of Magic do all encourage you to ignore lore and just build whatever archetype does well (I'll be so sad if Red Deck Wins keeps dominating. I'm so sick of red aggro decks) but I think it's such a cool aesthetic and story move to go into the realm of science fantasy.

Animate Objects vs Danse Macabre

 I spent the last post talking about Animate Objects, a historically quite popular 5th level transmutation spell available to Bards, Sorcerers, and Wizards. The spell got a redesign in 2024, though it still does what it claims to do: animating up to 5 objects, or fewer if those objects are larger, and then having them fight for you over the course of their duration.

Danse Macabre is a Necromancy spell published in Xanathar's Guide to Everything. This spell animates up to 5 corpses or piles of bones, creating zombies or skeletons, depending on what remains you're raising.

Finding which spell is more powerful is going to be a complex endeavor: Animate Objects's new version uses the caster's spell attack bonus, which will likely scale a little bit better than Danse Macabre, and is especially affected by the fact that the two different stat blocks that Danse Macabre can create don't have the same attack bonus.

Danse Macabre is an interesting alternative to Animate Dead - both spells can create zombies and skeletons, but Animate Dead does not change the stat blocks in any way, while Danse Macabre allows you to add your spellcasting ability modifier to both the attack and damage rolls of your undead minions.

Furthermore, the scaling on these spells works differently - Danse Macabre lets you add two undead creatures for every higher level spell slot, while Animate Objects increases the damage dealt by each animated object.

So, where to begin?

I think we'll start with the best-case scenario.

Skeletons deal more damage than Zombies - in the 2024 version, they deal 1d6+3, or 6.5, while zombies deal 1d8+1, or 5.5. Furthermore, skeletons have a much higher attack bonus of +5, compared to a zombie's +3.

The two are the same CR, but that's because zombies are more resilient than skeletons. But if we're talking about maximizing damage, the skeleton is the clear winner.

Interestingly, skeletons got a buff in 2025, as they previously only had a +2 to Dexterity, so their attack rolls and damage both went up.

Animate Objects simply uses your own spell attack bonus. So, how does the damage compare?

Well, here's the interesting thing: at level 9, when you first get 5th level spells, barring some magic item to increase your spellcasting ability or your spell attack (which could be something as prosaic as a Wand of the War Mage) you'd have at most a +5 to that ability, and you would have just gotten your PB to 4, meaning that you'd have a +9 to hit with spells.

With the same statistics, using Danse Macabre to make 5 Skeletons, each has a natural +5 to hit, but you get to add your spellcasting ability modifier to that, so it becomes +10, meaning these guys are slightly more accurate.

And with different attack bonuses, we're going to need to do our hit/miss/crit chance calculations. We'll assume an AC of 18, which is a reasonable AC for a boss monster in tier 2.

As we discovered in the last post, the most optimal group of objects to animate when cast at 5th level is 2 large objects and 1 medium object, so we'll assume that's what we're doing.

We'll start with Animate Objects.

If we're looking at a +9 to hit, we will hit with a roll of 9 or higher, meaning we're talking about a 60% chance to hit.

Large Objects deal 2d6+3+5 on a hit, or 15, and deal an extra 7 on a crit.

Medium (or smaller) objects deal 1d4+3, or 5.5 on a hit, and an extra 2.5 on a crit.

So, first we get 15x60%, or 9, + 7x5% or .35, giving us 9.35, and then we double it to 18.7 as our damage coming from the large objects.

Then, we get 5.5x60%, or 3.3, + 2.5x5%, or .125, for an average of 3.425 from our medium object.

Thus, this spell grants us 22.125.

Now, we look at Danse Macabre.

Our hit bonus is one higher, so we're hitting 65% of the time.

Our skeletons deal 1d6+3+5, or 11.5 damage on a hit, and an extra 3.5 on a crit.

So, we take 11.5x65%, or 7.475, and then 3.5x5%, or .175, so we're looking at a 7.65 per skeleton per turn. We have 5, so it becomes 38.25.

    Clearly, that's more damage.

I had initially thought to compare this to just animating the remains with Animate Objects, which would have been the 5 medium object option, but it's clear that Danse Macabre works out better, at least at this level.

Now, I'd suspect that scaling here also favors Danse Macabre - but to be fair, let's examine that:

Animate Objects adds a damage die for each additional spell level for every object animated. Danse Macabre gives us two more undead creatures per spell level beyond 5.

Thus, with every additional spell level, with our assumptions above, we're adding 15.3 damage per round. (This being the damage we determined each skeleton was doing, and multiplying it by two for our two extra skeletons).

The math on Animate Objects is not quite as clean, especially because the scaling of that spell starts to skew toward the many smaller objects the higher you upcast it, which does favor our "use this to animate the corpses/bone piles as constructs rather than undead" scenario. But here, thanks in part to the fact that the damage increase is purely die rolls, we can actually say that we're looking at just 65% of 1d4 (60% for our hit chance, and then an extra 5% for the bonus crit damage) multiplied by our five objects, or 1.625x5, or 8.125. Clearly not as good as upcasting Danse Macabre. Even if we did for some reason have a choice between our two large and one medium options, we're basically adding up (2d6+1d4)x65%, giving us 9.5x6.5%, which is actually worse scaling (which makes sense, as we just said that the scaling favors the smaller objects).

All this being said, though, we should consider one additional thing:

Animate Objects has better attack scaling.

Even with characters getting epic boons at level 19 now, there are only a few ways to boost your spellcasting ability to give you more than a +5 bonus - it's either magic items or getting a second Epic Boon after playing at level 20 for some time (in my Ravnica campaign, I do plan to have the party receive a second Epic Boon right before the ultimate, final, truly climactic finale adventure) or getting a magic item that lets you break the usual limit (such as a Tome of Clear Thought - things I should note that the players in my Ravnica game actually got for finishing the tier 2 finale adventure. The characters mostly have +6s to their primary abilities, and the Artificer has that, as well as an Ioun Stone of Mastery that boosts their PB by 1, so they now have a +7, and then they also have a +2 All-Purpose Tool, so they're actually sitting at a spell save DC of 23, I think).

The point being: in most campaigns, you won't have a spellcasting ability modifier higher than a +5. And that means that your Skeletons will cap out with a +10 to hit. That's not bad by any stretch of the imagination. But even without any magic items, a level 17 Wizard with +5 to Intelligence will have a +11 to hit with spells, and various items like a Robe of the Archmagi or a +3 Arcane Grimoire could boost it well beyond that.

Hit chance should not be ignored, as it can have a serious effect on the damage you deal (it's why, for example, the new Great Weapon Master is better than the old one, even in tier 1, despite only adding a fifth of the extra damage on a hit that the old one could).

That being said, +10 is close to the highest attack bonus you can get without magic items, and you will only hit it at level 13, and only surpass it at level 17, again, unless you have a magic item to boost it.

The last, and perhaps most obvious caveat, is that while Danse Macabre will give you better damage, it's also much more reliant on specific objects existing in your environment. Zombies will not do as well as skeletons, and even then, if you're not in a place with a whole bunch of remains to animate, you're SOL. Animate Objects is far more versatile, as nearly any space will have some objects.

Treguna Mekoides Trecorum Sedes Dee: Mathing Out 2024 Animate Objects

 This is largely just for me - I play a Wizard in my longest-running-campaign-I'm-not-DM'ing, and we're level 8 (yes, my friends and I tend to level slowly - despite this running nearly as long as my Ravnica game, where players are level 18, we're still only level 8) and I've been giving a lot of thought, as I always do, to what spells I intend to take on level-up.

Wizards are, of course, incentivized to make their two free spells from each level to be from the highest level of spell slot they have, because it essentially saves time and money (though as a Scribes Wizard, even an 9th level spell would only take him 18 minutes to copy into his book).

Animate Objects is one of the few 2024 spells that lets you put a bunch of friendly creatures on the board, though it's limited by how many are actually in the space where you cast it. Still, given that the targets can be any objects you see, unless you're in an empty void-like room, you'll nearly always have something to cast it on - and you could bring along a set of silverware of something to unfurl any time you needed to use the spell.

In 2014, the statistics of the animated objects were variable, with fixed attack bonuses. Strangely, the smallest and largest objects had the best attack bonuses, and I think the optimal use was to animate as many tiny objects as possible - even if each only did something like 1d4+2, having ten of them meant that all added up to be the highest damage potential (especially with their +8 to hit).

The new version, wisely, gives us a single template for the objects, and the size affects the damage per hit and the HP of the objects, but the hit bonus is equal to the caster's spell attack modifier, which is always preferable. (And by level 9, it's not unreasonable to assume that a Wizard has at least a +8 to hit with spells).

The new version also narrows the size categories: Medium or Smaller, Large, and Huge.

These have 10, 20, and 40 HP, respectively.

The number of objects you can animate is equal to your spellcasting ability modifier, with medium or smaller objects counting as 1 object, large objects counting as 2, and huge objects as 3 (gargantuan objects can't be animated).

Interestingly, the upcasting of this spell increases the objects' number of damage dice, but not the number of objects you can animate.

Unlike the "Summon" spells, you need to use a bonus action to command the objects, so it's a bit more action-economy-dependent, but not overly burdensome.

Each object makes a single Slam attack when commanded to attack (you can issue this command to all of them with the same bonus action). Medium and smaller objects deal 1d4+3 damage. Large objects deal 2d6+3+your Spellcasting Ability Modifier, and Huge objects deal 2d12+3+your spellcasting ability modifier.

So: optimally, what kind of objects should we animate?

First, a caveat: you're at the DM's mercy as to what objects are available. Objects cannot be fixed to the ground, and have to be smaller that gargantuan, but in theory anything from bits of rubble to paintings on walls to bones - technically speaking, you could do some off-label necromancy here and animate a bunch of corpses, which are objects (there's probably another post to do here comparing it with Danse Macabre, another 5th level spell - I've heard arguments that Necromancy as a school of magic is kind of a cobbled-together set of spells that could actually be classified among the other schools).

But let's assume we're in FAO Schwartz, and we've got everything from little, tiny-sized dolls to a fifteen-foot-tall teddy bear, and we have our pick of different-sized objects.

We need to determine what "loadouts" of objects we can go with, and that first depends on our spellcasting ability.

At level 9, when we first get 5th level spells (ah, the bane of new players - levels versus levels) there's a decent chance we have a +5 to our spellcasting ability, but in fairness, we might not. If we use point buy or standard array, the highest we can get any score at level 1 is 17, and then if we want to take some half-feats, we might only be up to a +4.

Still, if we just use my specific character as our example, who was lucky enough to start off with an 18 in Intelligence at level 1 (and a 17 in Con!) we'll just make the assumption that you're capped on your spellcasting ability.

Thus, we have 5 potential objects. That means we could have:

5 Medium (or smaller) objects

1 Large object and 3 Medium objects

2 Large objects and 1 Medium object

1 Huge object and 1 Medium object

Now, proportionately, we will be getting a greater damage boost from a critical hit with the smaller objects, because a larger portion of their damage comes from die rolls. Or, is that true?

1d4+3 is an average of 5.5, or 2.5 from dice and 3 from our flat value, meaning we're just under half from dice.

2d6+3+5 is 15, with 7 from dice and 8 as a flat amount. That's actually pretty close, though we're slightly skewed further to the flat value.

2d12+3+5 is 21, but here 13 is coming from dice and only 8 is coming from our flat value, so I stand corrected: it's the huge object that crits hardest, proportionately.

In other words, in the grand scheme of things, our Huge object skews a little higher than its apparent average damage compared to the others, and the medium objects skew a little lower than their apparent damage (again, in comparison with others).

Good to know.

    Ok, now let's figure out the average damage on a hit for each of our potential groups.

5 Medium Objects:

The damage here should be smoothest, because we have a larger sample size. If each hits for 1d4+3, that's a flat 5.5 damage per hit, and thus between 5 objects, we're looking at 27.5 damage per turn overall (again, assuming all hit, none crit, and we're rolling average damage).

1 Large Object and 3 Medium Objects:

We have one object hitting for 15, and three hitting for 5.5, so that's 31.5 damage - a bit higher than our 5 medium objects, thanks to how hard that larger one is hitting.

2 Large Objects and 1 Medium Object

The math here is easy - 30 from the large objects and 5.5 from the sole medium object, so that's 35.5, meaning we're even better now.

1 Huge object and 1 Medium Object

We get 21 damage from that single huge object, but only 5.5 from the medium one, so that's a total of 26.5, which actually gives us our lowest damage potential.

    Funnily enough, this means that using Large objects actually gives us the best damage, which then makes it perhaps beneficial that the other objects do better on crits. In theory, for all of this to be perfectly balanced, a large object should do twice as much as a medium object and a huge object should do four times as much, but we can see that it's not quite that close. I doubt that critical hits could make up for the disparity here.

However, let's talk about upcasting.

Casting the spell at 6th level or higher will mean that each slam increases by a single die. Medium objects start doing 2d4+3, Large start doing 3d6+3+casting ability modifier, and huge start doing 3d12+3+CAM.

Because we're talking about different dice, the proportionate increase in damage isn't necessarily obvious, so let's run this as if we were casting at level 6.

5 Medium Objects

Each object now deals 2d4+3, or 8 on average, so we're doing 40 damage total.

1 Large Object and 3 Medium Objects

Our Large guy is now dealing 3d6+3+5, or 18.5 with our capped Intelligence, and then our three mediums are doing 8 apiece, so that's 24, giving us a total of 42.5

2 Large Objects and 1 Medium Object:

Now, our Large objects are giving us 37 damage, with our Medium giving us 8, so that's 45 damage.

1 Huge object and 1 Medium Object:

3d12 is 19.5 on average, so we're doing 27.5 with the huge object and 8 with the medium one, so that's actually only 35.5.

    Actually, the easier way to look at this is just totalling what we get for each upcast: 5d4, 1d6+3d4, 2d6+1d4, or 1d12+1d4. That's easy enough to solve, as these have clear average values of 12.5, 11, 9.5, and 9, meaning that the scaling favors the smallest objects best.

Which does mean that, if you upcast things by a lot, you might hit a point where it's no longer optimal to do the large objects. It's clear to me that the huge object option is not going to be the best choice, and even if you're somehow critting more often, that scaling skews away from the huge objects, as the damage-from-dice increases with the smaller objects faster.

Let's just look at the extreme now and see how much these would deal when cast at 9th level. If the second option (1 large and 3 medium) is still best, we'll know what to generally do when we can.

At 9th level, medium and smaller objects hit for 5d4+3, or 15.5

Large objects do 6d6+3+5, or 29

Huge objects do 6d12+3+5, or 47

So:

5 Medium: 77.5

1 Large and 3 Medium: 75.5

2 Large and 1 Medium: 73.5

1 Huge and 1 Meidum: 62.5

    So, a big fall-off four our Huge option, and by this point, you're actually doing best (but only by a little) with the 5 medium objects, but this only starts happening at 8th level spells.

Now, one thing we haven't touched on is HP. The HP of the objects is proportional to its size budget. Medium and smaller objects have 10 HP, Large have 20, and Huge have 40.

This becomes very relevant if dealing with a foe that has AoE damage abilities or spells. The animated objects do count as creatures - they become constructs - and so they will be fully subjected to things like Fireball or a dragon's breath. They also don't have any good saving throw profieicies - their best is a +3 for Strength, but they have severe negatives in all "mental" saving throws, and +0s to Dex and Con.

Thus, I wouldn't recommend using these against any creature that has AoE capabilities. If you do need to, the Huge creature is probably the best option because they might survive an AoE ability, whereas the medium creatures might even die on a successful save. They do have immunity to poison and psychic damage, so against a green dragon you should be ok (though the objects can't fly - which the smaller ones used to be able to in the 2014 version).

They only have an AC of 15, which means that by the time you're casting this spell, a lot of monsters shouldn't have that hard of a time hitting them. That said, an attack on one of these objects is an attack not against one of your party members, so it's probably worth it - the Huge creature will have a big target on their back, but a DM will need to weigh the value of using up several attacks to knock down your smaller objects.

The spell only lasts a minute, so at most you're getting 10 rounds out of these guys.

I guess the other major consideration is how these compare with the Summon spells. The latter last an hour, so you can potentially get a lot more use out of them.

If we compare this with, say, the Skeletal Spirit from Summon Undead, when cast at 5th level (not that I'd recommend casting those spells at an odd level) they'll be doing 2d4+3+5 per hit, or 13 per hit, and two attacks per round. That's 26 damage. You'll get a little bit to a lot better damage with this spell (depending on your object choices) with this at 5th level, but again, it only lasts a minute and requires your bonus action on each of your turns. Depending on your class, your bonus action might be pretty broadly available (even as a Scribes wizard, which takes your bonus action to direct your Manifest Mind feature, I can often get by with using it on other things). A Bard, or a Sorcerer who makes ample use of Quickened Spell, might be a little less inclined to give over their bonus action to this.

Still, I think it's a decently solid spell, and certainly if you want to use the objects as cannon fodder to absorb attacks, given that they only last a minute anyway, they become very disposable (not to say that this is an asset).

The balance between its possible uses is fairly decent - I think you're going to be in ok shape with most configurations, though it does seem that the most dramatic version of it, the Huge object, is actually the least powerful.

The obvious caveat to all of this is that you're still reliant on the environment. A DM has a decent amount of leeway in determining what you can use. But in a scenario where you have free choice, I hope this will give you some guidance on what is best to use.

Sea of Stars

 Despite the fact that I will be away from my PS5 for a couple weeks as I go on my summer trip home to Boston, I felt the desire to immerse myself in a new game, if only for the evening (and then, presumably, when I get back).

I had heard of Sea of Stars when it came out two years ago - a throwback JRPG (well, not technically a JRPG because its studio is in Quebec, but a Japanese-style RPG) with a 16-bit aesthetic.

The experience I've had with it is one in which the hours got away from me - I sat and played for I think 5 hours (maybe pausing to have dinner).

The premise is that two characters, Valere and Zale, were born on the winter and summer solstices, and have innate magic themed, respectively, around the moon and the sun. The game begins when they are children, playing with their friend Garl, but after Valere's magic (actually, it might be whoever is the active "party leader") allows them to enter a dangerous cavern and Garl loses an eye, the two empowered children are brought to the Zenith Academy, where they are trained for the next ten years to fight and use their magic.

So far, at least, the specifics of the world are left pretty vague - there's some kind of ancient foe known as the Fleshmancer, with various monsters that were set upon the world and that only people with these kinds of powers - Solstice Warriors - can defeat. There is also quite a lot of implication that the story we're getting is an incomplete one. Sinister-looking conspirators simply known as One, Two, Three, and Four are shown in cutscenes at some unknown location, and Valera and Zale's older predecessors at the Academy seem skeptical about the headmaster's methods and strategy.

Gameplay-wise, there's a clear inspiration here, and it's among the best games from which to take inspiration: Chrono Trigger. Battles are turn-based, and begin when you get too close to monsters out in the world, heroes and monsters taking positions that can sometimes become relevant if you're using an ability that can do splash damage to nearby additional targets.

The heroes do have MP, but the way in which this works is closer to a more modern build-and-spend style of gameplay. Your MP cap is pretty low, but whenever you do your regular attack, you generate some of it, and thus you're encouraged to weave magic and basic attacks. Like Mario RPG, your attacks can be timed to be more effective, with the basic attack hitting twice if you do the timing correctly, and likewise, you can mitigate the damage of incoming attacks with a timely dodge (the timing of which can be tricky to get right given all the different kinds of monsters). Granted, this mitigation isn't enormous - Expedition 33 spoiled me by letting me avoid all damage if I was really on top of my parries (but taking full damage here isn't as punishing).

Also like Chrono Trigger, you can get various combo attacks, which are fueled by a meter that builds up as you fight. One of the kinds of treasure to find in the world is the ability to use new combo moves.

Probably the most unique thing I've seen in the game so far is that, when an enemy is preparing a spell, you have an opportunity to interrupt them. Enemies each have a little timer symbol over them that tells you how many of your turns you will get to go through before they make their attack. If they're preparing a spell, they have a display of a few little blocks next to them. Using the correct type of damage - like Valere's blunt damage with her staff, or Zale's sun-magic, will break one of those blocks, and if you can get all of them before the monster gets to act, you avoid their powerful attack.

It's tricky, though, because often multiple enemies have these casting blocks up at a time, and sometimes even if you've already learned what damage types you need to break them, the sequence is long and complex enough that you won't have enough turns to actually successfully interrupt the spell before they get it off, so there's a kind of triage you need to approach this mechanic with.

The game looks gorgeous, and has an excellent, nostalgia-inducing soundtrack. As someone who grew up on SNES games, there's a funny kind of alchemy to this retro approach, where a game like this looks the way that you remember those older games looking, though this game gives away its modernity with realistic lighting effects (your characters can cast shadows when near a light source) or just in the fact that an entire large region will be on a single continuous map, rather than having to break it up so the game doesn't have to load too much at a time.

Anyway, I said to myself in the middle of playing that I felt like I was 12 again, so that's got to be an endorsement.