UA: Conjurer (Again)

 Like we did with the Necromancer, I'm going to look at the Conjurer Wizard in the revised Arcane Subclasses UA without comparing it to what came before (for the most part) and just try to look at it on its own terms as if it were brand new.

That said, I'll mention again that this subclass holds a special place for me, as it was the subclass my best friend chose for his wizard in my very first D&D campaign. Sadly, that campaign fell apart - I dream of reviving it at some point, though of the original players, he's the only one I still play with, so it would require a big re-tool. Boy, though, I had some crazy plans (involving his wizarding role-model uncle whom I always conceived as being basically a high elf David Bowie - not a stretch - and the idea that he had traveled to the Far Plane and became split into multiple versions of himself, so that my friend's character would have gotten a jeweled skull like the one in the music video for Blackstar as a magic item that was his uncle's skull, but also there was a version of him he would be able to meet get help from as well).

Ahem.

Of course, the 2024 PHB saw a massive redesign to a lot of classic conjuration spells, making it far harder to put a lot of bodies on the battlefield (ironically, the ones that can still do that are either Necromancy or Transmutation spells). Still, as a big fan of the Summon spells, most of these will work great for your Conjurer, and of course, you can also focus on the other aspect of Conjuration, namely teleportation. Let's look at the features.

Level 3:

Benign Transposition:

As a bonus action, you can teleport up to 30 feet to an unoccupied space you can see, or alternatively, you can choose a space occupied by a willing Medium or smaller creature and both teleport to swap places.

You can use this Int times (minimum 1) per long rest.

    Let's first point out that this, at worst, an uncounterable, free Misty Step. And with no components, you will never be stuck in a jail cell. That's already very good (it does have the odd consequence of potentially making you not want to take Misty Step). While I don't think the subclass builds on it like the Archfey Warlock, this is a spell that I take on basically any character who can get it, because it's such amazing mobility and insurance against grapples and restraints. Being able to swap with a friend is a great bit of extra utility. (You could even use it twice to get both you and a friend through a pinhole crack in a wall.)

Conjuration Savant:

This is updated like all the other Savant features, giving you a free spell of your chosen school every other level.

Level 6:

Distant Transposition:

Your Benign Transposition now has a range of 60 feet, and you regain all uses on a short or long rest.

    Hot damn. A good feature gets a buff. Not much to say about it except that it's good. This would be underwhelming if this were all you got at 6, but as an improvement to the 3rd level feature, this is simple but great.

Durable Summons:

When you use a spell slot to summon or create a creature with a Conjuration spell, they get Temp HP equal to twice your Wizard level. While these temp HP remain, they have resistance to all damage except Force, Necrotic, Psychic, and Radiant.

    Ok, so this is 12 temp HP minimum, and eventually 40, which is not a small amount. Furthermore, against most monsters, you're going to be able to effectively double those Temp HP thanks to the resistance.

    Notably, this would be insanely powerful using old Conjuration spells - giving all 8 of your Pixies 12 temp HP that is going to look like 24 temp HP in most fights would be insane. Instead, we should consider this in the context of a spell like Summon Fey. These guys have 10 HP per spell level (base 30 HP, though you're casting this at 4th level, right?) Thus, if we're fighting things that are doing, say slashing damage, you're effectively adding 24 on top of that. That's certainly a durable summon.

    Now, it does say "these temporary hit points," so I don't know if you can refresh them with some other spell or feature that adds more and still retain the damage resistance. But even with an hour duration, these summoned minions are still relatively disposable - this is going to make it more likely that they actually last the full hour duration.

Level 10:

Focused Conjuration:

Taking damage can't break your concentration on Conjuration spells.

    I think this is unchanged, but even if it's very simple, it's really great. You're still vulnerable to getting incapacitated or losing concentration in other ways, but especially at these levels, where you can start taking dragon breaths that would call for a DC 30 Con save or something, being able to just maintain that concentration regardless is really nice. Does it devalue War Caster? Sure. You might consider if you can afford not to take it. That said, given that this doesn't come online until level 10, you might have wanted to take that for the earlier levels (and it's still useful if you have non-Conjuration spells you might want to maintain or even to get your spell-opportunity attacks.

Level 14:

Splintered Summons:

When you cast Summon Aberration, Summon Construct, Summon Dragon, Summon Elemental, or Summon Fey (notably not Summon Fiend, nor Summon Undead, though the later is actually a Necromancy spell. Also, did they not reprint Summon Shadowspawn? Huh) with a spell slot, you can modify the spell to summon two creatures instead of one. The creatures have to be the same kind (I assume meaning you can't have a Fire Elemental and a Water Elemental, for example) and the creatures' Hit Points are halved.

You can modify a spell this way once per long rest for free, or can expend a 5th level spell slot to restore your use of the feature (no action requried).

    This is... honestly it might be too powerful. And it hurts to say that because it's so freaking cool.

    Consider, for instance, that the halving of the HP is actually not as bad as you'd think because of Durable Summons. If you conjure two Beholderkin Aberrations at 6th level, they'll have 30 HP apiece, but if I do this at level 14, they're getting 28 temp HP each, already basically putting them back to what a single creature would have gotten, and they're resistant to most damage while they have those 28, meaning that, outside of AoE, monsters are going to actually have to do more damage to these than they would against a single conjured aberrant spirit. Then, each of them is doing three Eye Ray attacks, each of which deal 1d8+9. Before accounting for miss chances, that's 6d8+54 per round, or 83 damage per turn. And next turn, you get to do whatever else you were going to do with your action. (Once again, it's not quite 83 DPR, because you're probably going to miss some attacks. But it's six attacks.)

Overall Thoughts:

    I think this looks pretty good to me. There's a lot of powerful Conjuration spells to consider here. I do think that if you had any interest in casting any of the heavily-revised "Conjure" spells, this subclass will strongly encourage you toward the Summon spells instead.

    While there's not a ton of mechanical emphasis on the teleportation/transportation aspects of Conjuration, I also don't know if there's much design space there. Benign Transposition's redesign I think basically covers you there. While you no longer recharge the feature by casting a Conjuration spell, I think in most cases this version will give you more uses per day, especially after the level 6 upgrade.

    I think it's neat! While Splintered Summons could be too powerful, I otherwise didn't spot any big mechanical problems here, and I would be fairly happy to see this version of it. It's thematically on point and feels powerful.

Draw Steel Class Deep Dive: The Shadow

 I'm not sure if I ever really went into what the various classes in Draw Steel do, per se. While almost all nine extant classes correspond roughly with familiar classes in 5E D&D (the Talent doesn't have a clear equivalent until the Psion class is published - unless you count MCDM's own 5E Talent,) the mechanics of the game and the design approach differ wildly, so the underlying mechanics are going to be quite different.

Shadows are the game's sneaky thief/assassin/rogue class. Your primary characteristic is Agility, which will automatically upgrade at certain levels. Shadows have a healthy mix of melee and ranged abilities, so you can be a long-range marksman sniping foes from afar or stalk from foe to foe and slice at them from up close.

Heroic Resource: Insight

Shadows gain 1d3 Insight at the start of their turn (each class either gains 1d3 or a flat 2, a subtle chaos/order theme). Shadows also gain a bonus Insight the first time in a round that they deal damage incorporating 1 or more surges.

    As an aside, Surges are mechanic I don't think I've touched on very much: various abilities can allow you to accumulate surges, which you can then spend to enhance your attacks in various ways. You can increase the potency of an ability by spending two surges, or, more frequently, you can spend a surge to add damage equal to your primary characteristic to an ability, using a maximum of 3 surges at a time. A Shadow starts with an Agility of 2, so if you spend a Surge to boost your attack's damage, you get 2 extra damage. Shadows in particular have a lot of ways to generate Surges.

Broadly speaking, Shadows have a lot of single-target damage abilities, as well as a lot of ways to evade foes and get out of danger.

Subclasses:

Shadows have three subclasses (at least in the core rules):

The College of Black Ash incorporates abyssal magic to teleport across the battlefield. Even at level 1, you're going to be able to teleport both as a maneuver and as a triggered action, so if you want to "bamf" all over the battle like Nightcrawler, this one's for you.

The College of Caustic Alchemy uses poisons, smoke bombs, corrosive fluids, and the like in their fighting, and even some beneficial substances for your allies on occasion. (Note that the game doesn't worry about having to work to produce all the things required for these abilities - you're assumed, for example, to carry an ample supply of smoke bombs that let you hide even when observed).

The College of the Harlequin Mask incorporates illusion magic to trick your foes into thinking you're one of them, sowing confusion amongst their ranks as a mischievous trickster.

Core Features:

As a note, I'm not listing every subclass feature here, nor the improvements to resource generation that every class gets. Likewise, I'm not going through the various new Heroic Abilities you can learn, which you'll get at most levels.

At level 1, every Shadow gains a free triggered action (meaning they can use it without taking up their triggered action as long as nothing is preventing them from using triggered actions) called Hesitation is Weakness. Normally, the rhythm of battle has players alternate with the Director on taking turns, but a Shadow can potentially jump in right after a fellow party member has gone - you might go right after the first party member in the round and potentially wipe out a bunch of foes before they can act.

At level 3, you get Careful Observation, a maneuver that lets you automatically gain both an Edge and a Surge to use on a strike against a target.

At level 4 (the first level of the 2nd Echelon) you gain a couple new features:

Keep it Down lets you communicate with any creature you share a language with in a manner that only the intended recipient can hear what you're saying, even if you're yelling to them.

Night Watch is a triggered action that allows you to halve the damage of an ability against a creature you can see while you're hidden, which does not break your hidden status. (The flavor here is like you're tossing a dagger that deflects an arrow or a sword.)

At level 6, you get Umbral Form, a maneuver that puts you into a kind of separate "mode," transforming into a shadow creature dripping with ash (yes, Draw Steel classes get hardcore). This lasts until you're dying or spend an hour of quiet focus to leave the form. The form lets you climb at full speed while moving, pass through enemies spaces without treating them as difficult terrain and dealing corruption damage to them if you pass through them, gain a surge at the start of each of your turns, and gain corruption immunity equal to 5 plus your level. However, creatures gain an edge on strikes against you and you take a bane on Presence tests to interact with other creatures.

At level 7, you get a few improvements to various other features, as well as Ventriloquist, which lets your voice sound like it's coming from a creature or object up to 10 squares away, without revealing you if you're hidden.

At level 9, you get Gloom Squad, and can choose, at the start of each of your turns, to make 1d6 shadow clones of yourself by forgoing gaining insight. The cones act on your turn and use your statistics, but they have 1 Stamina and don't have insight and can't use Careful Observation, Umbral Form, or any triggered actions. They can only use their action to make a free strike, and only against a target you or other clones aren't targeting with a strike. (In other words, if you were worried about having limited multi-target abilities, how's this?)

Finally, at level 10, you get various improvements to existing features, as well as the new Epic Resource, Subterfuge (which you get instead of XP given that you don't need that anymore) that can be spent as if it were Insight. You can also spend Subterfuge to get additional maneuvers on your turns, spending 1 per maneuver (meaning you could potentially get a lot of maneuvers on a single turn).

While features like Gloom Squad and Umbral Form are pretty far out there, I do think the Shadow is likely to be one of the simpler and more straightforward classes to play. The key, I think, is using your abilities to hide or otherwise avoid getting hit by your foes, striking hard and fast. While some abilities can help set up allies, I think generally the strategy for most groups for a Shadow would be to make sure that they're setting the Shadow up for success. Naturally, the abilities you choose (not to mention your kit) will have an impact on what particular role you might play - there are, after all, some AoE abilities, but in my opinion, the thematics here are probably better suited to really burning down high-priority targets quickly.

UA: Necromancer

 So, you might notice that I'm not starting with the Arcane Archer. The reason is, to be honest, to comment on the Arcane Archer would require so much cross-referencing both between the previous version of the UA and the original to find the subtle distinctions between them that I just don't have the energy to do right now. I'm reading House of Leaves right now (making better progress than my previous attempts) and my patience for jumping between several different related texts is being poured into that labyrinth of a book.

While I also have some (mostly good, I think) things to say about the Conjuration Wizard (a subclass I have a special affection for, as my best friend's character in my very first D&D campaign was one) I wanted to start with the great spooky wizard class and see how it looks.

For similar reasons, I think I'm going to approach this not as a big comparison with the versions that came before, but just treat this as if it were a brand-new subclass and evaluate it that way.

Level 3:

Necromancy Savant

This works just like any other Savant feature as we've seen in the 2024 PHB, giving you a free Necromancy spell for your spellbook every other level. I'm a big fan of the new Savant features.

Necromancy Spellbook

This is a multifaceted feature:

You get Necrotic Resistance, which I actually think is a pretty good - even at low levels, if you're fighting incorporeal undead like specters and ghosts, this will help out a lot. It's certainly situational, but I think it's a good resistance to have.

Grim Harvest lets you heal an undead creature within 60 feet of you when you cast a necromancy spell using a spell slot, healing them for the spell's level plus your wizard level.

    I had initially missed the "Wizard Level" aspect of this, which made the healing pretty pathetic. But actually, no, this becomes quite a big heal. You won't be using necromancy spells every turn - there's no 3rd level Necromancy spell that clears out a crowd of monsters like a Fireball. But this can boost the resilience of your minions.

Undead Familiar grants you Find Familiar in your spellbook (I kind of like the language that "[the spell] appears in your spellbook," as if you didn't actually write it there as part of your research, but some mysterious power put it there) and allows you to summon a Skeleton or Zombie to use as your familiar.

    What this accomplishes, and I appreciate that, is that from the very start, your Necromancer is going to have an undead minion following them around. Now, you might want to work it out with your DM whether town guards, innkeepers, etc., will freak out or not when you have this thing following you around, but then, you're playing a Necromancer - you're there for the spooky vibes. (I can't recall if the new version of Find Familiar technically lets you bamf your familiar into an extradimensional space anymore, but I figure you could rely on this if it does).

Level 6:

Grave Power:

This gives you two features.

Grave Resilience lets you reduce your Exhaustion level by 1 when you use Arcane Recovery.

    This is certainly cool... if you find yourself getting Exhausted. Personally, I think the redesign of Exhaustion in 2024 means that monsters and other challenges can be far more liberal in their doling out of Exhaustion, but it's still pretty rare.

Overwhelming Necrosis allows damage form your wizard spells and features to ignore resistance to Necrotic damage.

    This is basically useless. Almost nothing has resistance, rather than immunity, to necrotic damage. I get the intent: to make Necromancers feel good about using Necrotic spells. But it's already a very reliable damage type as long as you're not fighting incorporeal undead.

Undead Thralls:

You automatically get Animate Dead in your spellbook, and can cast it once (I assume this means per long rest, though the UA technically just says once) without using a spell slot. When you start casting the spell, you can modify the spell's level to effectively be one level higher (again, I assume per long rest, like when you use the free cast, but the wording here is flawed). Additionally, when you cast a necromancy spell using a spell slot that creates or summons an undead creature, they get the following benefits:

Undead Fortitude increases the creature's max HP (and current, as you summon it) by a number equal to the level of the expended spell slot plus your Intelligence modifier.

Withering Strike lets the undead creature deal extra Necrotic damage equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum 1) when it hits a creature with an attack roll.

    Ok, a lot to process here: Animate Dead will turn a corpse or bone bile into a zombie or skeleton, respectively, but upcasting it actually turns that one into three (you still need the proper amount of remains to raise). The creatures are under your control for 24 hours, but you can re-cast the spell to regain control. This means that you could, with this feature, maintain three skeletons/zombies more or less indefinitely (unless they're killed, of course, which is not unlikely to happen).

    In terms of combat capabilities, a Skeleton has a +5 to hit and a Zombie a +3. The former also has a ranged option for their attacks. That said, Zombies are far more resilient. There's no buff to their chance to hit here, so I do imagine that these will start to struggle a little at high levels to contribute much to the battle, but if they do hit, that's still going to be potentially 1d6+8 (mix of piercing and necrotic) damage from three different skeletons (so 3d6+24) once you get +5 to Intelligence.

    Animate Dead doesn't require concentration, so between this and the free casting of it once per day at 4th level, there's not actually much standing in the way of your having a bunch of undead minions following you around, which is, you know, the Necromancer fantasy.

    Notably, you might also have Summon Undead up at the same time, and this creature will scale a lot better because it uses your attack bonus. With +4 to Int and cast at 4th level, a Skeletal Undead Spirit is already dealing 2d4+3+4, or 12 on average with each hit. Thanks to this bonus, which does apply to that spell as well, you're going to be doing four more, or 16 on each hit, potentially dishing out 32.

    I don't love using low-level creature stat blocks at high levels, but even at high levels, you might send your undead minions to act more or less like additional familiars, giving all your party members the Help action, if you hit a point where they're really struggling to hit the bad guys.

Level 10:

Harvest Undead:

Immediately when you become bloodied but aren't killed outright, you can use a reaction to reduce an undead creature under your control to 0 HP. You then regain HP equal to your Wizard level.

    And hey, there's another use for your low-level undead minions. I really like that the limitation here is just how many minions you have. If this healing gets you back up from bloodied, you could use it again.

    That said, I don't love that this has to happen in response to the damage that makes you bloodied. I might say instead that if you take damage and are bloodied afterward, you can use this. Also, technically, is this intended to let you heal if you hit 0 HP? You're not "killed outright" if the damage doesn't go past your negative maximum (which is unlikely at 10th level,) but in theory you're unconscious if you hit 0 HP, so do you have a reaction to use?

Level 14:

Death's Master:

You get two benefits when holding your spellbook (DMs, be generous with that).

Bolster Undead lets you use a bonus action to grant any undead you have created with a necromancy spell within 60 feet of you temporary hit points equal to your wizard level. A creature can benefit from this only once per 24 hours.

    Interestingly, there's no duration here, so you'll want to use this right after summoning any of your minions. Note also that you don't need to cast the spell with a spell slot, meaning your three minions from your free Animate Dead each day can benefit from this.

Extinguish Undead lets you when an undead creature you can see is reduced to 0 HP, cause it to explode with necrotic energy. You roll d6s equal to half its unexpended hit dice (rounded up), and each creature in a 10-foot emanation makes a Dex save, taking necrotic damage equal to the number rolled and being unable to take reactions until the start of their next turn on a fialure, or half damage only on a success. If the target you explode is not under your control, you must use a reaction to use this and expend a 5th or higher level spell slot.

    Once again, a closer reading makes this better: initially I thought this took a reaction regardless of target, meaning it couldn't work with Harvest Undead, but that was wrong. A 5th level spell slot to target a foe is a bit rough, but consider that you might use this on something as powerful as a Death Knight Aspirant (or even a Death Knight,) which would explode for 21d6! 73.5 damage is for sure worth a 5th level spell slot, right? (Also, DMs, don't play the "oh, well, they had taken a short rest and expended a bunch of their hit dice" game.)

    Naturally, the most common use of this feature is to explode your own minions, possibly in tandem with Harvest Undead. Unfortunately, the Undead Spirit brought forth by Summon Undead doesn't seem to list hit dice, but given that exploding our own minions takes no action, we can ensure that they're all going to be a problem for anyone who takes them down. Just be careful using these near your allies.

Overall Thoughts:

    I'll admit that in writing up this summary, I found myself less worried about the subclass' power level than I was before, spotting details I had missed. First and foremost, what this subclass accomplishes is giving you the necromancer fantasy.

    Now, it does accomplish this in large part by going back on several changes I thought were wise from the 2024 revision: limiting how many extra creatures a player can control on the battlefield and also ensuring that the extra creatures have good attack scaling. This is a subclass that does, for sure, have the potential to bog down combat.

    As such, I'd highly recommend that players talk with their DMs and fellow players to make sure that they're ok with one player commanding as many as four or more creatures in addition to their PC in combat. And if you do play one of these, try to be good about planning out your turns ahead of time and ensuring that you're able to efficiently move through those turns.

    Again, I think my preferred version of a Necromancer subclass is essentially a pet subclass, or at least give it some Danse Macabre-style boost to your low-level minions' attack bonuses. But I do think that this is looking far closer to what people want out of this subclass.

An Epic Level 1 D&D Solo Monster (Attempt): The Gnarlblight

 While the previous post was really more about survival horror video games, it inspired some notions about TTRPG monster design.

As readers are likely aware, I've been poring over the rulebooks for Draw Steel, and would love to actually run it (and maybe even play it as a PC) sometime.

I'm really intrigued by the way that Solo monsters work in it.

In D&D, at least in 5E, individual monsters really struggle to be impactful fights. Especially at low levels, monsters' damage output means they have to be quick to kill.

I often find that D&D at low levels, especially level 1 itself, struggles to feel cool. Campaigns I've been in where the players start at level 1 have nearly always leveled up after just one session, regardless of how much XP we've earned or whether we've truly hit a good plot milestone.

The intent, then, was to create a monster that could feel epic and cool at level 1, giving the party a truly climactic boss fight, but would also be unlikely to result in a TPK.

The first, central key: drastically reduce the damage that the monster does on a hit.

Why do we do this? Because it allows us to keep the monster alive far longer.

    As a caveat, this hasn't gone through any testing whatsoever - it's based on my own amateur math and assumptions. But let me break it down:

Our monster does not roll damage dice, and in fact only does 2 damage (1 piercing and 1 poison) on a hit, and a critical hit only adds 1 additional piercing damage. That means that even a level 1 Wizard with a modest +2 to Con is going to be able to take 4 regular hits from this thing before they go down.

    (Note that we add in the poison damage because we don't want a Barbarian to take zero damage if they're raging. Ought this to be some other damage type? Perhaps. A raging Dwarf Barbarian will reduce both of those to zero. I believe that Force might be the only damage type that no playable species gets resistance to, though perhaps Thunder as well? Poison was chosen for thematic purposes, which we'll get to later.)

It still has a +5 to hit, because I think a reasonable average AC for a 1st level character is 16, and this means that they'll be hitting about 50% of the time. 

The monster does have multiattack - we want to smooth out that damage output and try to get at least a little closer to that average.

The next idea: low AC, very high HP.

The monster only has an AC of 13, meaning that level 1 characters with a +5 to hit are going to likely hit most of the time with their attacks, though with a reasonable 35% chance to miss (close to a third).

The thing's HP, though, is 100.

A party of four with two martial characters and two spellcasters might do, roughly, 1d10+3 and 1d10 damage with weapon attacks and cantrips, respectively. If my math was correct, that means that if each of them attack each round, it'll take them around 5 rounds to take the monster down.

That may seem like an insanely long battle, but remember that at level 1, players really don't have that many options for what to do in a fight, meaning that the fight will go faster than a 5-round combat at, say, level 10, or even level 3. Admittedly, this could use some playtesting - I imagine there will be instances where players try out other strategies that cause the fight to drag on longer than intended. 80 might be a more reasonable max HP.

Next: we're getting a bit more radical (and for sure cribbing from Draw Steel):

Less controversially (I say as if anyone else has glimpsed this to have a controversy over it,) but still somewhat radical: the monster's attacks will knock enemies back 10 feet, hit or miss. And they can knock back up to three creatures within 5 feet of them.

The intent here is that, by adding some unavoidable forced movement into the fight, the monster is going to prevent things from getting locked down. The forced movement carries no damage with it (unless there's uneven terrain and cliffs to knock people off of) and so the intent here is to let this monster be slippery. While that might make it hard for the Fighter or Paladin to keep it off of the Sorcerer, the low damage of its attacks means that it's not actually the end of the world if the monster spends a turn hitting the squishy caster.

Here's the more radical thing, again stolen directly from Draw Steel:

The monster gets two turns per round. The way we do this is that it has a second initiative that is 10 lower than its primary initiative. Admittedly, in edge cases, this could allow it to go twice in a row if the party all roll their initiative very close to one another.

Now, why do this instead of just giving them legendary actions? Indeed, Draw Steel actually has something akin to legendary actions in the form of Villain actions, a trio of abilities that a Solo Monster gets to use each once per encounter and from all of them only once per round. We could just let it make its attack as a legendary action, and then give it some other limited ability to use for their third legendary action. To me the key is to increase the movement during the fight - giving the monster both its regular movement and its vine-yank ability. Admittedly, this might be something one could do with legendary actions.

Its damage output is balanced around the idea that it will get two of these turns - two attacks per turn, two turns per round, and about a 50% chance to hit, and 2 damage on a hit, means it's only putting out roughly 4 damage per round on average.

Note that this does mean it is designed to knock a party member out - if it takes them 5 rounds to bring it down and it's doing 4 damage per round, it can knock out a Sorcerer or Wizard in two of those rounds if left to its devices. But that's in a white room, target-dummy situation.

The party will need to employ some strategy to protect their more vulnerable members. Something as simple as a weapon with the Sap mastery or a spell that can frighten or poison it will help a lot. Grappling is, admittedly, probably not going to be very good on it given that it can knock its grappler back, which might be something we revisit in the design.

However, one of the hidden benefits to the players by having its attacks do a knockback is that, if the monster has used all of its movement to get to a PC, being knocked back is almost like a free disengage.

To keep up with the theme of rearranging the battlefield, the monster has a bonus action that can either pull targets closer to them, or use the same ability to pull itself toward large objects and creatures.

So: let's talk about lore:

My concept here is that this is a gnarled construct of wood, meat, and twine called a Gnarlblight. Most typically created by Green Hags, it's potentially the servant of any dark sylvan corruptor, like a green dragon.

These are beings of horror and folklore, prowling the misty, mossy woods, and giving villagers a good reason to stay out of those dark, tenebrous forests.

I imagine something like a party's first quest taking them deep into the woods to deal with something like this - maybe it's responsible for the death of a village's best hunter, or it's been killing farm animals. Or maybe, it's an utter mystery encountered while the party is traversing a dark and shaded wood en route to something unrelated.

GNARLBLIGHT

Medium Construct, Neutral Evil

AC 13

HP 100 (the monster has 15d8 hit point dice)

Initiative: +5 (15)

Speed: 40 ft.

STR 17 (+3/+3) DEX 16 (+3/+3) CON 15 (+2/+2) INT 6 (-2/-2) WIS 14 (+2/+2) CHA 10 (+0/+0)

Skills: Stealth +5, Survival +4

Senses: Blindsight (30 ft.,) passive Perception 12

Languages: Understands the language of its creator, but cannot speak

Challenge: Special – Level 1 Solo monster, (400 xp) (CR 2 if you need one) (Could just say CR 2/450 xp, but with a special direction not to use more than one of these in a fight) PB: 2

Solo Monster: The Gnarlblight takes two turns each round of combat. The second of these turns occurs on an initiative count that is 10 lower than its primary initiative roll.

Actions:

Multiattack. The Gnarlblight makes two Thorn Strike attacks.

Thorn Strike. Melee Attack Roll: +5, reach 5 ft. Hit: 1 Piercing damage plus 1 Poison damage. On a critical hit, this attack does 1 additional Piercing damage only. Hit or Miss: The Gnarlblight pushes up to three creatures within 5 feet of it 10 feet away from it.

Bonus Action:

Burred Whip. Strength Saving Throw: DC 13, one creature or object the Gnarlblight can see within 20 feet. Failure: If the target is the Gnarlblight’s size or smaller, it is pulled up to 20 feet toward the Gnarlblight. If the target is larger than the Gnarlblight, the Gnarlblight is pulled up to 20 feet toward the target. This movement does not provoke opportunity attacks.

Thinking About the Rhythms of Survival Horror, (and Thoughts on D&D Monsters)

 Having beaten the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 the other day, I've been giving some thought to the way that the game, and the genre, treats its monsters.

Not long before I played it, the previous game I had played on my PS5 was Diablo IV, and it's actually kind of hilarious how each game treats its monsters in almost precisely the opposite way.

Diablo, the series of isometric action-RPGs from Blizzard, is all about mowing down waves upon waves of monsters. While individual creatures take a few seconds to defeat in the early levels, very quickly the game has you churning through dozens if not hundreds of them, the classes built to allow you to have many stacking and overlapping buffs that make it likely that you won't spend more than half a second with any given monster. The challenge, thus, becomes less about overcoming monsters and more about increasing your monster-churning efficiency, with only seriously powerful boss monsters getting instant-kill effects that you have to dodge.

It's a totally different genre of game, of course.

In stark contrast, Survival Horror makes each monster a challenge. And it does so in a way that I think is interesting: monsters don't actually hit very hard. Even if a boss like Pyramid Head slashes into you, you're probably going to be fine as long as you aren't already at death's door.

The challenge is one of lengthy attrition. Silent Hill 2, as well as Alan Wake II, are games in which there's no "reset" in which you heal up to full health or get a bunch of ammunition. Your performance in the early part of the game can have an impact on the later part of the game. Or at least, I believe that's true in Silent Hill 2. Alan Wake II, and I think others of this genre (even going as early as the FPS/Survival Horror classic Bioshock) have behind-the-scenes difficulty moderation that grants more healing items and other resources if you're struggling.

I don't actually know if there's any such thing in the Silent Hill 2 remake, but I suspect there isn't. And I think they can get away with that because there's a FromSoft-level "tough but fair" approach to its combat. You have a melee weapon that is pretty effective, and every monster's attacks can be dodged if you read the telegraphs right and dodge at the right time. Thus, if you find yourself in a situation where you're out of ammo and low on health, you can still proceed - you just need to be extra careful (this was how I found myself in the last part of the Otherworld Hospital).

It does make me curious, though, if you're someone who has truly mastered Silent Hill 2, if you might reach the hotel with hundreds of bullets and dozens of healing items.

The approach to monsters, as well, is interesting. Within SH2, I think the worst situations I ever got into were when I had, like, 3 monsters attacking me. There were segments with more, like the shower room in the prison, but the clear intent there was for you to run rather than fight them all, with several low barriers to hop over and open up some distance with.

Every fight feels pretty intense, even if you're not terribly worried that you'll survive this fight with a Mannequin or Lying Figure. The intensity come from the fact that if you fail to dodge them once or twice, that's less health to survive the next fight.

I remember when I first played Alan Wake II, I struggled a fair amount with the Nightingale boss fight because I walked into the fight with only a few bullets - far less than what I needed to actually defeat him. The helpful reset at the start of the boss fight after I died only meant that every attempt put me back into this running-on-fumes position. Much of the fight was spent scrounging for ammunition.

Having remembered that experience when I went into the Final Draft NG+ mode, I came in far better-prepared. I also realized, on that second playthrough, that there were actually only a total of three enemies to fight prior to that first boss, the initial taken cultist and then two guys just by the Witch's Ladle. Perhaps I was far more efficient in fighting them, and that allowed me to have an easier time on the boss.

It's a funny thing: I adore Alan Wake II, but I do think that the Silent Hill 2 remake's gameplay felt a little more refined. There were, I think, no moments in which I called BS on the game if I died. By contrast, there were times in AWII, like my first playthrough's fight against Cynthia Weaver, in which there seemed to be some kind of lag that kept me from moving properly - in a fight where you have a lot of things to dodge. That was the weekend the game had come out, and I don't think I had as much of a problem on my Final Draft run, so this might have been some optimization thing that was fixed in a patch.

More to the point, though, SH2 is very efficient with its monsters. There are only really three types of rank-and-file monsters, though there are variants of them that show up later, or four if you count the grate-walking Mandarins (which I treated more like an environmental hazard, except in the fight where you have to kill one, which feels more like a boss). But as a player, I found that the lack of enemy variety wasn't really a problem: if anything, it was a comfort. I knew more or less how to deal with them.

I'd be curious to see if anyone has a full count of how many of each monster appear in the game. While there are some that spawn at scripted events even in places you've already cleared, I think generally there's a finite number of them. One of the satisfying parts of the gameplay loop is when you get to stop worrying about an area and just run through the rooms because you know you've already killed all the monsters there.

One of the things that I don't love about Diablo is how its "hordes of hell" take on its monsters makes even some of the big ones that feel like they should have a big impact kind of disintegrate in seconds. Likewise, if you do die in that game, it's often from something that happens so quickly that you barely had time to react to it.

I don't know that the Survival Horror "every battle is dire" is necessarily my sweet spot, but I do kind of like the idea that a monster ought to feel like a serious thing to overcome.

This post didn't start off being about D&D, but it got me thinking a little about TTRPG monster design. I've been poring over the Draw Steel rules books, and I'm really fascinated by the Werewolf, its level 1 solo monster. The thing has 200 Stamina, which seems like a ton, but I need to see how much damage a party of 1st level characters can put out before I can know truly how long a fight that should be.

It did occur to me, though, that one of the issues of balance in a game like D&D, especially at low levels, is the degree to which player characters can go down very quickly, and thus, monsters need to be able to go down very quickly so that the players can survive against them.

It made me think about how the issue might be with damage output.

I've been mulling over some ideas about how to make a more exciting monster in D&D, particularly a solo monster. As mentioned here, in a game like Silent Hill 2, the monsters are often fought on their own, but they still feel like a threat.

If I have something cool to share, I'll post it.

Daggerheart, Draw Steel, and Death to Conventional Initiative

Daggerheart and Draw Steel are two TTRPGs that are intended as alternatives to D&D to do the kind of heroic fantasy that most players for the last decade at least have used D&D to play.

I suspect that I'll continue to run 5E, or at least the 2024 update to 5E, as my primary RPG for many years to come. But taking these two RPGs, I find it kind of interesting how both have taken similar routes to coming up with alternatives to long-held mechanics from the OG.

The main one that struck me here is the way that initiative in combat works.

Draw Steel is pretty straightforward: there is an initiative roll, but it's a glorified coin flip. Once it's determined if the party or the monsters go first, turns in combat are alternated between one hero and then one squad of monsters (Draw Steel is also designed so that most fights will be against a larger number of monsters than the players, so it's fair that, say, two "horde" monsters go between each player's turn).

The huge departure here, though, is that the players and the monsters need not take turns in the same order each round. The intent here is to encourage players to strategize with one another: one player might have an ability that helps set up another's ability, and it's possible that a player might benefit from going later in the round because, for example, one of their class's unique resource generation triggers might occur and allow them to use a more powerful ability.

There are some interesting consequences of this design: one is that triggered abilities must refresh at the start of the round, rather than a turn, because it's possible that a player might not get their next turn for a long while - if they go first on round 1 but last on round 2, that means that everyone basically gets two turns between theirs.

I do also think that it requires a little more careful bookkeeping. In D&D, I rarely worry too much about how many rounds a combat has taken because I treat the initiative list as just a big wheel - I don't care much about what part of my car's tires were facing up when I started driving somewhere. However, you'll really want to check off who has gone each round to ensure everyone is truly getting their fair share of turns (monsters too!)

Daggerheart has a far less structured form of initiative: inside and outside of combat, the "spotlight" passes from players to the GM. As a caveat, while I did read through the Daggerheart SRD, most of my familiarity has been from watching Critical Role's showcases like Age of Umbra (which I haven't finished) and the live Bell's Hells game, Oaths and Ash. (Much as I enjoy a FromSoft-inspired world like Age of Umbra, the one I'm really eager to see is the Colossus of the Drylands campaign frame, their sort of epic weird-west one - which apparently there is an actual play of on the Darrington Press YouTube channel).

Anyway, in Daggerheart, players who use an ability that involves a roll will pass the Spotlight back to the GM if one of two things happen: if their roll fails or if they roll with Fear. (As a reminder, Daggerheart is a 2d12 system, but the d12 must also be designated as the Hope and the Fear die, and things are better for you if you roll with Hope, meaning the Hope die is the higher result.)

Mathematically, I think this means that you're far more likely to pass the Spotlight back to the GM with any given roll. While your chance of rolling with Hope is higher because rolling the same on both dice counts both as a result with Hope and also a critical success (even double 1s,) once you factor in the chance to fail the roll (even if you get Hope,) most of the time control goes back to the GM.

Here's an area where I don't totally know how it works: if the GM is using a bunch of smaller monsters, I don't know if that effectively becomes easier because their spotlight is used to activate lesser creatures. Again, my familiarity with the system is a bit limited, but I do get the sense that it's designed to allow singular monsters to make a bigger impact.

The bizarre thing about Daggerheart's pseudo-initiative, then, is that technically, a single PC could take all the turns in combat. I don't think that's the intention, but I don't think there's any hard rule that every party member has to get a turn before anyone gets a second turn. And... I think that's the sort of thing I might make a house rule.

One thing to consider, though, is the way in which both of these eschew the standard set-order-of-turns that D&D (and most similar games) use. In both cases, the choice of turn order is put largely on the players, to talk out at the table. I think at a good table where everyone's respectful and having fun, that could be a lot of fun, but I think there's a potential pitfall in which players might argue about who gets to go next. Ideally, you're playing with cool people who are willing to engage strategically and think about the success of the group rather than their own glory, but I can imagine the GM/Director needing to intervene and moderate these discussions.

Again, I don't think it would be as much of an issue for Draw Steel, as each player still has to go once per round - you're not arguing who gets to take a turn, only when they do. But Daggerheart, like, frankly, a lot of its design, is oddly crunchy in some ways but also a bit vibes in other ways, and this feels like an example.

UA: Arcane Updates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going purely from memory:

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

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

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

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

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