Ben Stovall Blog

Author: Ben Stovall

  • D&D: Presentation and Assumption

    D&D: Presentation and Assumption

    Dungeons and Dragons leans pretty hard into stereotypes when it comes to encounter design. When a hulking, plate armored warrior with a greatsword comes lumbering out from behind a door, you don’t expect them to be able to dance their way out of a fireball unscathed. When a frail, elderly wizard is in your grasp, it’s the easy assumption to think they won’t be able to worm their way out of a grapple without magic.

    And this isn’t a mark against the system – this is a good thing to have. Even less detailed descriptions can still communicate the shorthand for these ideas. I don’t need to say anything more than “rogue” to fill a player’s mind with a dozen assumptions about the opponent’s appearance, demeanor, and tactics. Nearly everyone in the world knows what a dragon looks like and what it’s usually capable of.

    It’s a system strength, but it can trip up an unwary DM when they deviate from these stereotypes to present something unusual or uniquely challenging. So, to alleviate the potential for frustration, here’s some things to keep in mind when it’s time to exercise your right to break the damn rules however you like.

    Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Opponents

    Recently, I found a retrospective video about the differences between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II from a former Bioware Executive Producer, Mark Darrah. In the video, he describes a change in the development philosophy of the two games’ combat systems. In Origins, the combat was symmetrical: the enemies had the same abilities you could access through the talents of the classes. In Dragon Age II, they flipped the system into asymmetry with the characters’ abilities doing much more damage than the monsters’ attacks with adjusted health pools to match (Mark Darrah even mentions a specific problem where some of the companion characters might become hostile to the party and deal excessive amounts of damage, more than they’re built to handle).

    At first, I didn’t realize how this articulated a bias I had buried into my subconscious with D&D. Many of my old and current players, and even when I am a player myself, expect humanoid enemies to have symmetrical rules to the party, but with monstrous enemies I assume they have asymmetrical abilities. I inherently designed encounters with this in mind, only breaking the rule when designing a significant boss (such as recently adding Blood Hunter class features to a Loup Garou as a boss). In the first games I ran, I had players express frustration with humanoid enemies doing things they wouldn’t be able to do – perhaps this was a learned behavior that became part of my toolset.

    Regardless of where it came from, it’s been an unspoken, unwritten, informal rule at every table I’ve sat at. So, how do we break it?

    The Power of Presentation

    Breaking these norms can be an important part of designing an adventure, and it all comes down to ensuring that these peculiarities are implied beforehand. If a king tells the players about a rival nation whose soldiers have all sworn themselves to a dark entity, and now they have access to dark magic that has left the king’s army unequal to the fight, you’re more than halfway done. The players know to expect unusual stuff from the run-of-the-mill soldiery of the enemy faction. A classic, normal looking fighter might suddenly cast a spell of some kind! Awesome! It might go without saying that higher ranking soldiers have greater magic to hand, and the enemy ruler might have the greatest level of these powers of them all.

    Providing information to the players that doesn’t give away all the details about their foes, but prepares them for the abnormal abilities those enemies will have is invaluable. There’s a middle ground between surprise and perfect knowledge that’s ideal for the first few encounters with a new type of enemy. And it doesn’t always need to be well ahead of time, at the adventure’s introduction – it could be as late as when the opponent appears when initiative is being rolled to give those hints.

    It seems too-obvious, right? When you introduce a monster the players haven’t battled before, you might describe its long limbs and claws to give them clues as to how it will battle. Yet, when a humanoid opponent is introduced with something unusual in their statblock, a moment might not be taken to describe the arcane focus dangling at their hip just beside their sword scabbard. An aberration using magic to appear like a humanoid might be skilled enough that the characters can’t see all the through its masking magic, but they will be much happier knowing there is something off about their foe.

    With these tricks, you’ll be able to keep your players on their toes, but in a way that feels more fair and balanced. As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • Roe vs Wade

    It’s difficult to write about something like this. We’d seen it coming like a car crash in slow motion, inevitable and unstoppable since the hypocrisy of the Republican party in 2020. Now, a right to choose guaranteed across our nation by the Supreme Court in 1972 has been overturned by a dubious cast of that same institution. And Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t want to stop there – image below from the third page of his concurring statement on the decision.

    For those unaware, the original decision, and the decision of these other cases on Justice Thomas’s warpath were ruled to be protected by an implied “Right to Privacy” guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. From the fifth amendment: “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law.” And from the fourteenth: “… nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

    Overturning Roe vs Wade is chipping away at this Right to Privacy by disallowing women that privacy when discussing medical treatment with their doctors. It is no business of mine, my neighbor, my senator, or anyone else what a woman and her doctor must do for her health. That decision is for that woman to make alone. And removing the federally granted guarantee for that choice to be available nationwide is unacceptable. Deplorable.

    It’s difficult to write about something like this. Because things just seem to be getting worse and worse. I write a blog focused on D&D and media criticism. I write fantasy stories. But if what I say can convince one person to reconsider their stance, it’s worth it right? If someone in my small audience reads this post and thinks, “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” that’s a victory.

    So, let’s get into more detail, I guess.

    Republican Hypocrisy

    Back in 2016, during the last year of Obama’s presidency, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed. As part of his presidential duties, Obama was set to nominate his replacement. The Republican party controlled the Senate at the time, and they didn’t want Scalia’s seat to be taken by a left leaning justice. An informal rule in the senate from 1992 had a lot of precedence in this situation, saying that a nominated justice should at a minimum be someone playing closer to the center of the political spectrum. Enter Merrick Garland.

    Back in 2010, Republican Senator Orrin Hatch had publicly said that Garland would be a “consensus nominee.” One who would easily win confirmation in the Senate. In March of 2016 when Obama announced his nomination, he said “I have selected a nominee who is widely recognized not only as one of America’s sharpest legal minds, but someone who brings to his work a spirit of decency, modesty, integrity, even-handedness, and excellence. Presidents do not stop working in the final year of their term; neither should a Senator.”

    The Republican-controlled Senate decided that they might consider Garland if Hillary Clinton was to win in November’s election, as he’d be less liberal than any nominee she would put forward. So they were happy to have him only if they were going to lose again. Their principals about the people having a say in this vacancy since it occurred in the last year of the presidency were going to be thrown out the window regardless should the election not end favorably for them.

    And they doubled down on this hypocrisy in 2020 with the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) rammed Amy Coney Barrett through the process despite the election occurring during the process. Lindsey Graham, who’d gone so far as to invite everyone to use his words against him should he do the same in 2020 after 2016.

    Lindsay Graham “Use my words against me”

    Whether you believe that an upcoming election should serve as a delay for the nomination and confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice or not doesn’t matter to the Republican Party. They only care about furthering their agenda. There are no codes or morals they will not sully. They do not stand for anything.

    It’s a game to them. It’s just about racking up the most points, the most victories, and plastering a smile on their face like it’s their favorite football team and you were backing their rivals in one of the biggest games of the season. They don’t care that it actually affects people’s lives.

    What Exactly do They Mean by Pro-Life?

    People that are against abortion say they are pro-life. That they value life. That’s what it’s all about, right? Saving lives! Making sure a baby can grow up happy and healthy.

    Yet these same people are often against legislation that would improve lives. They advocate against universal healthcare. They don’t want the social safety nets to be expanded. They are in favor of the death penalty for crimes. They refused to wear masks during a pandemic. They refused to be vaccinated to protect both themselves and those around them. Their legislators cut programs to feed hungry children in schools. They shrug their shoulders when a school gets shot up and children die. ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is a title the Onion has used TWENTY-FOUR times since 2014.

    Are these people really pro-life? Do these people really value life above everything else? Or are they interested in control? In ensuring women don’t have access to a procedure that might save their lives?

    Why do these people have such a fixation on punitive pregnancy? “If you didn’t want a child, you shouldn’t have had sex.” It takes two to tango, so why isn’t there any legislation in the works to ensure men don’t abandon the children they sow with unprotected sex? Or even in the rare event that the contraceptives don’t work? Why is the case that guaranteed access to contraceptives on Justice Thomas’s warpath?

    What EXACTLY do they mean when they say they’re “pro-life?”

    I guess they’re arresting women for Miscarriages.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/21/oklahoma-woman-convicted-of-manslaughter-miscarriage/6104281001/

    This woman was charged for losing her unborn baby after she was shot. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48789836

    Conclusion

    It really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read my work what side of this issue I come down on. Ebonskar presents an emphatically clear opinion on a fascist state and its practices. The Adventures of Red Watch have centered around dealing with unwavering zealotry and how dangerous it is in each installment.

    There’s a lot more that could be and has been said on these subjects. It’s out there. Thank you for reading. I hope you learned something.

  • Pay-to-Win Video Games

    Pay-to-Win Video Games

    One of my earliest memories is about video games. I remember waking up one morning, I must’ve been around four or five. It was a Sunday, I think, and both my mom and dad were asleep, my brother was asleep. And, usually, I’d wake someone up to get breakfast made or something. Instead, I hurried over to the TV and the Nintendo 64, booted up Super Mario 64, and played. When my mom finally got up, she was so surprised to find me out there playing the game, having booted it all up on my own.

    Video games are an entirely different beast these days. Back then, you bought the game, you had it. That was all there was to it. I remember my brother and all his friends were way better at Super Smash Bros. and NFL Blitz N64 than me.

    None of them paid for that, though. They’d played the games more, they were older, and given time, I could match up to them no problem.

    Last week, Activision Blizzard released Diablo Immortal, and almost everyone I know is talking about this predatory pay-to-win video game. For those who don’t know, the math indicates that if you want to pay to get the best gear, it costs around $110,000 to max out a single character through the “legendary gems.” If you don’t want to spend a cent? About 10 years of daily gameplay. Assuming nothing more powerful gets added to the game from its launch state.

    Disgusting.

    Abusing Psychology

    These games use a lot of predatory tactics to get their players to throw their money at the software, no matter how miserly they might want to be. One of the most widespread tactics in games nowadays is utilizing your player base’s “Fear-of-Missing-Out” (FOMO). These games have cosmetics and powerful items that vanish after a set amount of time. Think you might want to use that cool superhero inspired costume? Buy it now for $19.99! Or try to gain enough in game currency in the one week its available to obtain it for “free.” It might never be available for purchase again.

    They also create these “daily bonuses” you “earn” by opening the game every day. They want booting the game to be habitual. These bonuses are usually redeemed in these games’ shops, to make opening them a more usual interaction for their players. Diablo Immortal, naturally, does this. Even worse, the game has a “battle pass” with a free track, a premium track, a super-premium pass with exclusive cosmetics, and an ability to outright buy the ranks of the pass. You buy it for $5, but if you fail to complete the pass, you miss out on the last of the rewards you didn’t earn at the end of the season. They’re just gone. Unless you spend some cash to boost through the last few levels.

    The battle pass purchase in Diablo Immortal also gives you extra inventory space – but just until the pass expires. This first one is gone on July 7th. And speaking of expiring rewards you might’ve paid for – there’s a “Boon of Plenty” system that grants daily login rewards and a few other perks. And if you don’t login on one of those days, those items that you’ve paid for just vanish into the ether. That’s worth $9.99, right?

    These games also use a secondary currency for their purchases. In Diablo Immortal, you spend your money on orbs that you then use to buy other items. Naturally, these orbs are sold in bundles that do not line up with the prices in the shop. The first time you play the game, you get a special deal to buy a box that gives you 60 orbs for $0.99 – but there’s nothing in the shop available for 60 orbs.

    Not to mention the elephant in the room: these games are targeted at children first and foremost. I remember when iPhone games were just becoming a thing. Seemed like there was a story in the news every week about some kid who’d spent $500 or more on a game without their parents realizing.

    Can Pay-to-Win be Ethical?

    There are some games on the market with features that aren’t as immediately pay-to-win as buying stronger units or better items than are available to free-to-play gamers. These games are often dubbed “pay-for-convenience.” People like to overlook that such a moniker betrays the truth of the systems: if the developers of the game have a financial incentive to make the game inconvenient, why wouldn’t they? If you can pay to skip levels, they have a financial incentive to make leveling as long and monotonous as possible.

    If, say, there’s a game that only has the same level of gear available for free-to-play and premium players, they have a built-in incentive to ensure that obtaining that gear is frustrating and repetitive, to push people toward a purchase. Why run the same dungeon, fight the same boss, dozens or hundreds of times, when you could swipe your credit card and be done with it? Be as strong as you can be?

    Even in a game like Lost Ark, which equalizes gear in a player-versus-player setting, still allows you to specifically purchase an advantage over other players. You can buy the items needed to reach the highest gear potency, or spend weeks, gated by daily timers killing the same bosses for the items to drop naturally. But doing the same thing over and over isn’t content. It’s a grind.

    Some games only release purchasable cosmetics, which can be a much more ethical model, but even then, in a lot of these games, having a cool-looking character is the goal of the endgame. Why make that very interesting set of gear available from in-game activities, when you can charge $20 for it?

    This gets even more absurd in another game from Activision Blizzard that I (until last year) played a lot myself. In World of Warcraft, you have to pay a monthly subscription to play the game (for the ongoing development of the game, allegedly), buy each expansion when it releases to access that part of the game ($40 minimum purchase every two years), and then there is a cosmetic shop that allows you to buy armor sets and mounts and pets for varying prices, and then there’s a way to exchange money for the in-game currency, which you can then use to buy services and goods from other players.

    It became obvious that the majority of work was going into these premium cosmetics instead of the ones added to the game. They’d add a mount with a dozen recolors spread out over several acquisition streams, and then a truly unique mount with a special skeleton to the shop for more money than you pay every month to play the game.

    Buying gold for your real money also lets people buy themselves through the hardest content in the game, obtaining achievements that normal players might work at for months without success. A rich player could buy themselves to “Gladiator,” a special PvP rank that comes with a unique mount each season, by buying gold for cash. A lot of people like to combat World of Warcraft becoming pay-to-win with the WOW Token (the option to exchange your real life money for the in-game gold) by reminding everyone that people bought gold or just straight-up exchanged money for these carries before the token was introduced, but that doesn’t excuse anything. Blizzard could have hired more employees to moderate their game to crack down on these actions that were clearly against the game’s Terms of Service, but instead they cut themselves in on the profit and legitimized it all at once.

    So, no, I don’t really think Pay-to-Win can be ethical.

    Becoming the Product

    Some people play these games with the stubborn insistence that it’s alright because they aren’t spending money. They aren’t aiding in the perpetuation of this predatory business model with their wallet.

    Instead, they’re doing it with their time.

    They become part of the product doing this. They become the fodder that high-paying “whales” (people who spend an inordinate amount of money on these games) are paying to smile satisfied at for having paid for their rewards rather than enduring the grind the free players suffer through. These are the players that get rolled over by the whales in competitive game modes, much to the spending player’s delight.

    The science has been around for a while: the vast majority of these games’ player bases never spend a dime, then a small percentage make a few purchases, and then the whales, a fraction of a percent of the player base, subsidize the entire game by spending thousands, such as the person who spent $14,000 dollars on Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer mode. Such as the streamers playing Diablo Immortal or Lost Ark and dropping thousands. These games need to exploit these players to financially justify their existence and all the time and money that went into their development.

    The Genuine Answer

    It’s clear by now that these games will never self-regulate. It is just a fact of business that these companies are always going to push the boundaries to obtain more money this quarter than the last. The only thing that stops them is legislation.

    Belgium and the Netherlands have laws preventing these games from obtaining widespread appeal in their countries. Games with “lootboxes,” where you spend money to obtain random rewards of vastly different value, are correctly identified as gambling mechanics and disallowed. These games must either adjust their mechanics, or as is the case for Diablo Immortal, never release in those two countries.

    And the gamers there are thankful for that.

    Additional Viewing

    Here’s an additional video if you are interested in learning more about this topic. This is a game developer conference discussing the exact methods they should use to entice “whales” into their games.

  • The Witcher: The Lesser Evil

    The Witcher: The Lesser Evil

    Sapkowski’s The Last Wish is a favorite of mine. I don’t often reread books, but after the second season of The Witcher on Netflix released, I revisited this one. One of my favorite short stories in the collection is The Lesser Evil, and I doubt it’s a coincidence that it’s what Netflix chose to adapt for their first episode of the series.

    If you’re unfamiliar with it, I genuinely recommend picking up The Last Wish and giving it a read, or at least watching that episode of the show.

    I want to talk about something from that story that I’ve seen be … misunderstood by a few people. Something that’s taken out of context and bandied like it means exactly what it says. Major spoilers for The Lesser Evil below.

    The Context

    In the short story, Geralt arrives in Blaviken and reunites with an old acquaintance who invites him to stay in his home. On his way into town, Geralt came across a monster and slayed it. He hoped there might be a contract for it in the town, but there isn’t. He’s about to throw it’s carcass out, when some of the townspeople mention that a wizard in town might have a use for the thing. Geralt decides to try his luck.

    The wizard doesn’t want it. But he does want to hire Geralt for another monster that’s been chasing him. He talks about a Curse of the Black Sun, that women born during an eclipse are mutated, cursed, or possessed by demons. The wizard had encountered such a one, and tried to have the girl executed, but she escaped. He asks Geralt to kill her before she can try to hunt for him here, in Blaviken, and by her presence, lock him in his tower. Geralt doesn’t kill people for money, only monsters, and Stregobor pleads that he needs to compromise, as the wizards of old did when the curse first came around, and choose the lesser evil.

    “Evil is evil, Stregobor,” said the witcher seriously as he got up. “Lesser, greater, middling, it’s all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I’m not a pious hermit. I haven’t done only good in my life. But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all.”

    Renfri, the girl allegedly cursed by the eclipse, speaks with him later. The legend behind the curse ruined her life, she was a princess, but Stregobor telling her family of the curse got her thrown out of the castle. She’s fought to survive, killed to avoid being killed, stolen to satiate starvation. She asks Geralt to kill Stregobor, as a lesser evil, and Geralt refuses again, saying he doesn’t believe in a lesser evil.

    “You don’t believe in it, you say. Well you’re right, in a way. Only Evil and Greater Evil exist and beyond them, in the shadows, lurks True Evil. … And sometimes, True Evil seizes you by the throat and demands that you choose between it and another, slightly lesser, Evil.”

    So Renfri employs the Tridam Ultimatum. Her and her crew are going to kill people at the market until the wizard vacates his tower. Geralt, panicked, rushes to the market before it opens to stop them. It ends in slaughter, Geralt forced to kill Renfri and her crew. Stregobor would have let them eradicate the whole town before he left his tower, and Renfri would not leave until she at last had her revenge.

    The Evil of Inaction

    Geralt, in his obstinance, didn’t act. Despite his sympathy for Renfri. Despite his existing disdain for Stregobor. It sticks with him forever. By not acting, he allowed a greater evil. By choosing to refrain, he chose a greater evil.

    It’s crazy how often I’ve seen the quote thrown around without irony. The story very clearly shows how that philosophy just doesn’t work. Refusing to choose doesn’t mean you are absolved – after all, you haven’t refused to choose, you’ve just chosen to do nothing.

    We can’t always see what all the consequences of our actions might be. We can only try and make our decisions with empathy and love in mind. Strive always toward good. Even if it means the most you can do is choose the lesser of two evils.

  • D&D: Your Boss Needs Minions

    D&D: Your Boss Needs Minions

    In my Running Dragons blog, I briefly mentioned the danger of an imbalance in the “action economy” during a boss encounter. A lot players coming into D&D might have their expectations for boss fights shaped by video games, where one extremely strong enemy takes on the party despite a numerical disadvantage. For your bosses in D&D, this is suicide.

    Even the game’s own mechanics for making this more available fall short. “Legendary actions” (special moves the boss monsters may take at the end of other creature’s turns) only go so far: a lone dragon with only the legendary actions listed in the official statblock will be destroyed by an appropriate level party without a problem. Hell, the two dragon encounters I’ve run in my current game both featured clusters of minions, and they were a tier above the players – at level 8, they fought an adult black dragon (a CR 14 monster), and just a few weeks ago, at level 14, they battled an ancient black dragon (a CR 21 monster). The party slayed both dragons with only one casualty between the two encounters (during the latter, and easily reversed with a Revivify).

    Part of that is because of some of the shortcomings that exist in the Challenge Rating (CR) system that we’ll get into in a moment. My table also consists of a lot of bona fide gamers that work hard to conserve resources and adequately prepare. They knew well ahead of time what kind of dragon lair they were walking into, and both times obtained some tools to mitigate the damage it could deal with its breath attack. All this to say that my advice here will not be good advice for every table: it could be that where I see failure in challenge ratings, they’ll be perfectly workable for your table. A crew of careful, calculating players, however, might want for a bit more difficulty when they roll for initiative.

    Here’s some tips to give them that.

    Reexamining Challenge Rating

    The first things to take to heart when trying to make a more challenging encounter for D&D is to take CR less seriously. It can be very useful for determining whether a creature is an accessible foe for your players at their level, but it doesn’t mean it can hold its own without allies. In the Dungeon Master’s Guide example of this, they mention a Rakshasa (CR 13) being something that might prove more difficult than you think against a party with its limited magic immunity trait, but with its low pool of hit points, any well-balanced group will annihilate one of these fiends no problem. I think the Rakshasa works best as a late tier 2 antagonist, for a party of 8th to 11th level, despite the spellcasters at this level having no ability whatsoever to damage the creature without some kind of physical weapon.

    And! With minions included in an encounter with a Rakshasa, your spellcaster players will have a valuable task to undertake once they know of its magic immunity while the more martial characters deal with the fiend himself.

    Perhaps the worst problem the challenge rating values suffer is how hard they crash the second your players obtain combat-oriented magic items. That fighter finding a +1 shield? Your barbarian getting a +1 greataxe? Your wizard finding a wand of the war mage? Banded accuracy is thrown out of a window.

    Your fighter is suddenly much, much more difficult for CR-appropriate creatures to strike. Your barbarian and wizard are both now landing their attacks much more often than the game was balanced around. Consider this: the scaling component included in the player characters’ power, their proficiency bonus, scales one point every four levels. An item granting them a +1 bonus accelerates them that much further ahead.

    Now, I’m not advocating for holding these items back from the party. Magic items are a lot of fun to have – especially homebrew items that are on the cusp of breaking the game. It’s just another factor that contributes to CR faltering in the mid-to-late stages of the game.

    Ultimately, I think bosses can comfortably sit a tier above a party playing strategically in combat and provide a healthy challenge. There’s a few cases that can cause that to fall short – spells that will pancake the player characters or attacks that deal an amount of damage they won’t be able to play around, but I think it’s easier to adjust those outliers than to try and scale a numerically-appropriate monster up to boss viability. I suppose that brings up another question …

    How Powerful Should the Minions Be?

    I generally include a creature or two very close to my boss’s listed CR as their lieutenants. In my ancient dragon encounter, I included a Blue Abishai (a CR 17 creature) as the primary lieutenant, with a homebrew dragonborn fighter opponent that I set at CR 11. The dragon and the abishai both began the battle away from the room’s entrance, hidden in the darkness of the cave, so the fighter and a few guard drakes (CR 2 creatures) were present to oppose the party while the big monsters got into position.

    The party ended up successfully locking the fighter lieutenant down with a Banishment spell, removing them from the battle until well after everything else had been handled. The abishai used its Greater Invisibility to fight unseen, but the players managed to break his concentration and used a Stunning Strike to keep him grounded long enough for his elimination. Even the additional bonuses I gave my dragon – an antimagic darkness zone lair action, an ability to use an action and legendary actions to heal if it was at its hoard, an immunity to movement speed reduction when using its Wing Attack legendary action – couldn’t make this monster powerful enough to battle the party alone.

    Create an array of additional enemies for your boss with a variety in their challenge ratings. Give them some chaff, weak monsters that can be eliminated with well-placed area-of-effect abilities. Give them an ally that’s dangerous, but wouldn’t be a problem without the heavier hitters in the room aiding them. And give them a powerful lieutenant almost as dangerous as the boss themselves to force a division of the party’s attention.

    Building Complex Encounters

    Another option for adding difficulty to an encounter is to ensure the goal isn’t just reduce all the enemies’ HP pools to zero. If every battle in the game runs that way, it can get stale regardless of the challenge you’re building. One of my most successful encounters in this campaign was earlier on (I believe they were around level 6, it was well over a year ago now). They had infiltrated the compound of an extremist group of zealots bent on using an ancient magic ritual to call radiant fury down on a village the party sought to defend. In that battle, I included a cleric NPC enemy as the boss, and calculated her to be about CR 9, gave her a martial ally based on an adjusted Champion statblock (down to what I thought to be CR 7), and a handful of CR 2 swordsmen and several priests. These priests, however, were first-and-foremost working on the ritual. The party needed to split their focus on interrupting the magic and defeating the dangerous enemies in the battle. Chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide has several other ideas for diverse encounter goals.

    The trick to these kinds of encounters if to ensure there’s a clearly defined win condition for the players – but not necessarily one that you’re responsible to prescribe. Your players can deduce a lot about your encounters on the scant amount of information each dice roll will tell them. They can calculate where the enemy’s AC might lie, they’ll know when a foe is putting out more damage than they can sustain for multiple rounds, and they can react accordingly.

    That said, one of the hardest things for newer players to learn is when they should run from an encounter. There are some situations that truly become untenable, and unlike a video game where everything is usually balanced around you being able to overcome it with the tools you have to hand, some battles in D&D might just not be feasible for you to win. I was in a game once where at level 4 we came across an ancient white dragon (CR 20). I had the most experience of all the players at the table, including the DM (who had rolled the encounter from his module’s table) and I immediately knew we needed to split. If it weren’t for a successful saving throw and a ring that conferred resistance to cold damage, one of our party members would’ve been killed outright by the breath weapon. (But we all made it out with the clever use of an illusion and Rope Trick.)

    A Never-Ending Education

    By the very structure of its rules, D&D is a more combat-oriented tabletop RPG than other contemporary systems. Encounters are something you as a DM will spend a lot of time cobbling together. All of your dungeons, your factions, and your wildernesses will be expected to have their own unique array of enemies to overcome. And designing these battles is a process that will never run out of things to teach you, and not just because every table is different.

    At my table, it would be blasphemous were I to on-the-fly adjust an encounter I designed and make it easier. That doesn’t mean that design stops when initiative is rolled for every party. If you had enemies in reserve, but the players are getting thwomped just fine already, maybe they don’t need to show up. Maybe that high level spell slot lingering up their foe’s sleeve got used on something before this battle. My advice in these instances is to keep any of these adjustments under wraps, and whatever you do, don’t begin making tactical blunders that the enemies don’t have a justification to make. Nothing has killed a mood at my tables quicker than them being able to tell when a battle got easier.

    Don’t be afraid to try new things with your encounters. If it doesn’t work, that’s okay. There will always be another roll.

    As always, thanks for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • RPGs: Introducing Your Villain

    RPGs: Introducing Your Villain

    Villains are integral to any great narrative. Whether they stand atop a battlefield and glare at your players, or they threaten them directly for a slight imposed, or if they are nothing more than a whisper on the lips of their soldiers in their final moments, your villain matters. But they need to do more than strike an imposing figure – if your characters never meet the villain, why would they care about him? Why would the heroes throw themselves into danger to stand between them and their goals? Why would their name ever pass the player’s lips with a hint of trepidation?

    There’s a delicate balance to strike, however. You could have the villain show up, blade (or spellbook) in hand and have him thrash your players in a deadly encounter with the intention being your characters performing a narrow escape – but that’s … risky. Playing through a no-win scenario (or a scenario with an unclear victory objective) often leaves a bad taste in players’ mouths. Once you let them know that the villain has hitpoints, they’ll think they can kill him. And what if the fight goes poorly? How many characters will they lose in the attempt?

    Or, even worse, what if they succeed? What if your villain who you’ve spent weeks preparing, whose plans will be the focus of the next several months of sessions, dies at their hands? What if they become the big damn heroes, the ones they’ve been working to become due to a turn of the dice?

    But your villain must do something. There must be stakes. In most stories, the heroes need to lose before they can win, but there must be a way for the players to accomplish some kind of victory; otherwise, it won’t incite fear against your villain, but frustration against the whoever’s behind the screen.

    So, what do we do? How can we pull off something this delicate?

    Defining the Stakes

    Number one: clearly define a path to success. If they can’t win in a fight, make it clear from the beginning – cause something that makes it clear they need to flee. Give them villagers to rescue and mooks to fight, don’t throw the villain and his lieutenants at the party. Two, don’t force the villain onto your players. Not yet. Have his stats ready but leave the decision to roll initiative to the players this time. The heroes aren’t even on your villain’s radar yet. Three, take something away from the players – now, I don’t mean steal their magic items or their armor; in fact, don’t try to take anything that has to do with playing their character away. Put a mentor or other NPC that the players have come to trust and love in mortal danger.

    As I mentioned in my Beginning the Adventure blog, I like to leave the first few levels of my games very open-ended. I lay seeds all around with various enemies and storylines to pursue, then either pick one the players have become invested in, or one that I’ve wanted to flesh out.

    In the game that went on to inspire Ebonskar, I focused on using hobgoblins. The eponymous general approached the game’s starting town, a fixture of the campaign for six or so weeks of play full of fun and loved characters, and he set the town to the torch. The characters woke in the early hours of the night to the scent of smoke and bright flames licking the buildings all around the home they’d come to know. People were screaming, the heat was oppressive, and hobgoblin soldiers (several types of which they had encountered in the early stages of the game) patrolling the streets with bloodied weapons in hand.

    This scenario met all my earlier criteria. The objective was immediately clear – one, save as many people as they can and escape the town before it’s death throes take them with it. Two, the general never even acknowledged the party until the end of the event, and by then there was a street covered in burning debris between them and him. Three, the town they’d spent most of the campaign with was reduced to ash, and only the NPCs they managed to save survived.

    When morning came and the villagers looked out at the burnt-out husk that had once been their home, the characters had a villain they hated, and they had become heroes to all they had saved. And as they learned what the hobgoblin general was after, they did all they could to stand in his way.

    The Visage of Villainy

    Another thing to consider is your villain’s appearance. Your players will assume a dozen things from that first glance they get of their foe – what kind of capabilities they might have, the way they might fight, perhaps even some guesses at the kind of things they value or idolize.

    From that first look at Ebonskar across the burning field, they saw him bedecked in black plate armor, they saw that nearly featureless ivory mask with its painted lines, and they saw his greatsword, sheathed on his back with no shield in sight. They knew immediately he was an in-your-face swordsman, aggressive and determined to strike his foes down. They’d learned a lot about the usual hobgoblin statblock, which meant the hints were there for how that might be emphasized for a soldier of his station.

    If your villain is a more subdued flavor of evil, present the places that disguised devilishness shines through. In my current campaign, an early-game villain was a zealot that had co-opted a benevolent deity’s doctrine for hateful and destructive motives. She looked disdainfully on the nonhuman members of the party – and the players were ecstatic when they finally had the chance to strike her down before she could accomplish her goals.

    This is your excuse to steal the spotlight for your villain. The players will have their moments, and they will be all the sweeter with a clear picture in their minds of their foremost opposition. Portraying a villain my players came to truly despise allowed them to latch on to pursuing their defeat both in-and-out of character. There is something to be careful of with that level of investment, however …

    Portraying Adversaries Vs. Being Adversarial

    As the game master, your role is to control all the bad guys. Sometimes you get to toss in a good guy too, but you’re almost entirely relegated to the forces opposing your heroes. But that doesn’t mean you’re actively working against the party. It’s a collaborative medium, and there’s a delicate balance between challenging the players and battling them.

    It’s something that can creep up on the table – you won’t always notice when it’s happening. A quick as-you-go rule of thumb is to remember that while you are trying to play the bad guys as faithfully as you can, you are at the heart of it all rooting for the players to succeed.

    Now, I allow the dice their seat at the table unshackled. If I were playing at a physical table with my current game, I’d be rolling in the open. But the players can still hear the excitement in my voice when they throw a wrench into the carefully laid plans of my antagonists. I’m always ready for something crazy to happen that I never expected. I’ve even played into some jokey antagonism when they slay one of the big monsters in a battle or lock it down with a loss-of-control effect to communicate how much I enjoyed their maneuvers to accomplish those ends. My players rise to the challenge time and again, as I set them against harder and harder foes week-to-week.

    I will often acknowledge it outside of game when just hanging out with my players, or even allow myself a little slip to say something to the effect of “we’re not out of the woods yet” when the tide is shifting into their favor in a battle. They know I want to see them overcome the deadly opposition I’ve designed, and knowing I’m in their corner while still allowing the dice to have their say allows the relief of every hard fought victory to be something the whole table shares.

    For my next post, I’ll be throwing together some tips to ensure you can construct a truly incredible encounter when it does finally come time to face those villains down. Until then, thanks as always for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • April 2022 Irregular Update

    April 2022 Irregular Update

    It’s been about seven months since my last update post. I do believe these posts will continue to pop up irregularly, but getting at least two major updates out in a year seems like a fair minimum to reach for. So, here’s how it’s been going.

    Where are you on Red Watch 3?

    Some mixed news here. Shortly after revisiting the project, reading through what I’ve written and my outline, I ended up making some major revisions. I caught on to some glaring pacing issues, restructured how I was planning to present the chapters, and ended up with an entire storyline that proved to be too much for the book. I hope not to leave that hook hanging, though. When I’m getting my completed draft into the hands of beta readers, I might work on that plotline as a companion novella – something similar in scale to Thuna, but it likely won’t be included in the book for Red Watch 3 as a collection. I’m still adjusting some stuff, finding out what I need to rewrite in the new draft, and more challenges could end up coming down the pipeline, but I’m making progress.

    It’s undoubtedly the most ambitious thing on my plate. I’m needing to be more considerate of how to keep the plates spinning with all that I set up in the first two Red Watch books and bringing everything forward in a satisfying way. I’m hoping to get a draft in the hands of my beta readers this year. I’m sorry that the wait for this book is proving so long, but I haven’t surrendered. Thank you for your patience, everyone.

    How’s the blog going?

    I’m enjoying it more than I thought I would. Being upfront about just writing about anything I wanted helped me open myself up to it, for sure. I’ve always been a quiet person socially, just felt like I didn’t have much of value to add to most conversations. But, building my own little soapbox on my website worked, since anyone who doesn’t want to hear from me can just … not be here? Easy enough.

    When I was starting the blog, though, my hosting service had a system for comments to be left on each entry and I was sad to see that disappear. I’m interested in some entries serving as a conversation starter, but I’m not trying to cross-post every entry here on every social media site. I never cared for them much – getting me to log onto my Facebook is like pulling teeth, and I use it specifically for book promotion.

    All to say that it’s good. I’m like the pace of getting out two entries a month, and I think I’ll at a minimum manage at least one. I will say most of my ideas right now revolve around D&D, and despite my passion for the hobby I don’t want that to be the blog. I’ve been working to ensure I don’t do too many posts like that back-to-back.

    Anything else?

    I’m planning to run a sale on all three of my books in May. I’ll, naturally, be mostly promoting Ebonskar as my newest book, hoping to get it into more people’s hands. So, if you were waiting for a sale to pick them up for yourself or as a gift, it’s right around the corner. Tell your friends! (If you want to.)

    As a more sore subject however, I decided to make another revision to A Tide of Bones earlier this week. Smaller in scope than what occurred before the release of Legacy, but something I’d been unhappy with for a long time. I’ve changed a lot as a writer and person since I worked on Tide and an early scene in the book wasn’t sitting right with me.

    I’m speaking, of course, about the scene with Lytha and the thieves. In the original version of the scene, there’s an implication of intent that I have now removed. The exchange is explicitly only about the money, now. The story ultimately was not improved by including that implication and in fact, likely worse for it. It’s something I have expressly forbidden from occurring in my tabletop games, and it didn’t sit well with me that it existed as an introductory moment for this character.

    As I understand, the change applies retroactively to the kindle version (unless you have the downloaded version and are offline on the device, perhaps?) but, naturally, old print copies of the text will retain the original scene. I include the mention here as almost a bit of future proofing – for if someone discovers the discrepancy of the scenes and wonders what happened.

    That’s about it.

    Thank you for reading.

  • RPGs: Beginning The Adventure

    RPGs: Beginning The Adventure

    Running a tabletop RPG for my friends is the most instantly gratifying creative experience I partake in. Each week I get immediate feedback on worldbuilding, narrative construction, character development, arena building, and several other things from people in a collaborative setting where the implicit goal is improving the experience for everyone present.

    I’ve written a handful of blog entries already about my love for this hobby, but none of them have provided much information that’s useful to begin running a game. That’s the goal today. I’ve started up at least a dozen games since my first time sitting behind the screen over a decade ago, two of which have actually reached a conclusion (which is rare, believe me), and I’ve thought a lot about ways to begin a game well.

    Here’s what I’ve got.

    Before the Beginning

    There’s a lot of things to consider before inviting everyone over and setting out the dice. The foundation, the first question, is, simply, “What is the adventure?” What is the driving action that throws the players’ characters together? The answer truly depends on how much work you want to do before the game begins. Running an adventure entirely from scratch (a “homebrew” game) isn’t right for every game master, and running from a published adventure is not inherently worse than a homebrew campaign in any way. I’ve run both in my tenure, using the Tyranny of Dragons two part module back in 5th edition’s infancy, and it was one of the two games I’ve run that ran to its conclusion.

    One of the best games I’ve had the privilege to be in as a player is my friend’s current game that started as a run of the Rime of the Frostmaiden module (which has now shifted into some homebrew after we reached the module’s conclusion and our DM wants to see if he can take a game to 20). Neither style is intrinsically more valuable than the other. It will all depend on the table.

    Where’s the Beginning?

    The backdrop for the start of your adventure is immensely important. For some players it will grow into a place that feels like home. Published adventures do a lot of legwork here, but even they can be improved.

    My best beginning towns have all provided a handful of smaller stakes hooks to pursue and investigate. I use them to determine what the table as a whole is most drawn to. In the game that inspired Ebonskar, sightings of hobgoblins had been noted by the town and the party had latched onto it pretty well – but their primary antagonist at the time was a hag that had just stolen a child.

    That’s not to discount a more linear beginning experience. When I ran Tyranny of Dragons, I used the opening straight from the book, with the party arriving at Greenrest as it was razed by the Cult of the Dragon and their blue ally in the sky. There’s several things I’d do differently if I ran that module again, but a lot of that attack on Greenrest would survive the transition.

    One of the most important things, unless your entire campaign is set in a big city, is to start somewhere that’s a shithole. My best towns – Borno’s Crossing, Saltwallow, Longmire – have all been in a decades-long slump. They’ve been forgotten towns that were once on a major roadway now bypassed by a trader’s highway or set in a forbidding locale that made them undesirable to visit. It helps to have that humble start, and it gives a lot of room for that first settlement to grow in response to the players’ actions. Even in big-city campaigns, beginning in the worse parts of town still aids in that feeling of becoming too big of a fish for the pond.

    Session Zero

    The first time you gather your party to venture forth, you really shouldn’t do much venturing at all.

    Seriously.

    Getting everyone together to lay the foundation for the game is massively important. It matters more than all the prep work in the world. It gets everyone on the same page, and can help you massively understand the type of game you’ll want to run for your table.

    You need to discuss what everyone’s idea for the game is. Do they want to be heroes that start from humble beginnings that go on to save the world? Do they want to fight liches and hydras and dragons, plumbing the depths of the darkest dungeons that ever were buried and forgotten? Or do they want to plan out the best party and make inroads with the nobility to affect change on a systemic scale?

    D&D might not be the perfect fit for every type of game out there. If you guys want to run something focusing less on delving into dungeons and swinging swords and spells at monsters, this is a good time to discuss other game systems.

    And you need to discuss what is and isn’t on the table. One of my current players has arachnophobia and asked that I avoid spiders as much as I could, while giving me the pass to use them occasionally. When they do show up, if he just says the word, I’ll stop describing their spindly little legs racing up and down the sides of the cavern walls or how restrictive the webbing is. It’ll be glossed over with no loss to the game. I have a few other things that aren’t going to be in the games I run, some rules that are hard and fast, and others that are malleable, at least to a degree. Listen carefully and take notes.

    Once you’ve got that squared away, you’ll be ready to truly begin your game. Just, one last thing …

    A Time and Place for Taverns

    Cliché, sure, but for good reason. Don’t let anyone rag on you for beginning your game in a tavern. It can be, and is, a perfect opening for many different games. I’ve started some that way, started many others, and some of my favorite times as a player began in taverns. Just because it’s been done before doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done again.

    A lot of the alternatives I’ve seen presented online seem like going out of one’s way to avoid the tavern. Some ideas take a really specific group of players to work well. But even those aren’t without merit. Beginning in the midst of a siege with the players all needing to take up arms can be exciting! In Dimension 20’s Fantasy High, the players’ characters didn’t interact with one another much until they all ended up getting detention. (Which, when watching I figured they’d all be told beforehand to try and land themselves detention day one – but that still doesn’t detract from how effective it was to group the PCs together!) Even Critical Role’s 2nd campaign began in a tavern – if Matthew Mercer can “get away with it”, then maybe he’s not really “getting away” with anything.

    And, hey, maybe during session zero your players decided they just wanted to have known each other beforehand anyway.

    Before You Go

    A few last-last minute things I wanted to include here.

    First of all, remember that as the game master, you are still a player too. If you aren’t having fun, there’s something wrong. Find whatever you need to find to alleviate that.

    Second, there is a lot of times that bending or ignoring a rule can provide a fantastically cool moment. Go for it! The rules are guidelines, right? And everyone will talk about it forever! The inverse, however, is also true. There will be times that you need to enforce the rules, things that are too janky or overpowered that they can’t become part of the game. Try not to beat yourself up over it, even if you get them wrong on either side.

    As always, thank you for reading. Good luck out there, heroes.

  • How Elden Ring Could Perfect the Soulsborne Formula

    How Elden Ring Could Perfect the Soulsborne Formula

    I’ve been following the Soulsborne series since I was in high school. I didn’t pick up the series at the time, busy as I was with school and a few other games (spent a lot of time playing MMOs in high school), but a friend of mine had the game and played through it at my house, the go-to hangout spot. Just watching, I knew the series was something special. But I was of a mind that I’d get frustrated battering my head against the same bosses over and over again, and didn’t give the game a shot.

    When Dark Souls III released, I took the plunge. My worries of frustration were immediately snuffed. The game was fair first and foremost – it wasn’t like the major boss encounters in the MMOs I was playing, where bad performance from one group member could sink the whole attempt. It was just me and the boss. If I died, it was because I did something I shouldn’t have.

    Seeing how much I’d fallen into the game, a friend of mine gifted me Bloodborne, and I slammed through it hungrily. Through both games I settled into fighting evasively with a big sword, weaving around attacks to find my openings.

    That playstyle (and my lack of passion for the aesthetic) led me to bounce off of Sekiro, but spectating alone proved enough for me to appreciate the game. And hopefully I’ll come around on it eventually and give it another go.

    That response to Sekiro made Elden Ring’s announcement feel like the exact thing I wanted to hear from FromSoftware. It’s been my most anticipated game since 2019, and a month ago I finally got my hands on it.

    It did not disappoint.

    A Perfect Storm

    It’s been a week since I finished my first playthrough. And I do need to clarify first – I definitely started another character the following day and if my six completions of Dark Souls III are any indication, I’ll sink several more hours into Elden Ring before I set it aside entirely.

    I’m not here to discuss the story, though. No interest in spilling spoilers today. Instead, as you might have guessed from the title, I want to highlight the game’s design.

    Adding an open world to Elden Ring could’ve been a mixed bag. I think, ultimately, it’s vastly more beneficial than detrimental to the game. In previous Soulsborne entries, if you came to a difficult boss, it was a roadblock. There might be some optional areas, but for the most part, you needed to break down the barrier before your story could continue. Now, it doesn’t have to stall out your experience.

    I know the first time I encountered our friend the Fell Omen, I was not yet good enough at the game. I wasn’t used to the delays in the enemy swing times, I was dodging far too early, and I built to wield a big sword in two hands so I wasn’t parrying either. Margit whooped me. In another Souls entry, I might’ve been more prepared for that first boss, but in Elden Ring I wasn’t.

    But, after an undisclosed number of YOU DIED screens, I turned away from that fog wall and opened that map up again. I’d basically gone straight to Margit from the opening of the game. What else was out there anyway?

    A whole hell of a lot. I got better at the game, I leveled up, and I came back and got my revenge.

    There’s two ways to look at that experience. You could say that the difficult spikes in the game’s primary progression path are uneven to justify the open world. I prefer to look at the game as offering more paths to explore than I expected. I know people that returned Dark Souls III after hitting a roadblock on Iudex Gundyr, the first boss. If those players give Elden Ring more of a chance since they can travel elsewhere, it can only be good for the game.

    Open World Done Right

    For the most part, I’ve cooled on open-world style games. Every now and again, one will come along with innovations or a setting that catches my interest, but there’s a dozen Assassin’s Creed games and only one Breath of the Wild (for now). That piece of Elden Ring was the one thing that made me consider pumping the breaks. But, FromSoftware knows how to do it right.

    Gathering? I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to stomach a game that forces you to entirely stop moving to collect crafting materials after Elden Ring allowed me to sprint passed rowa bushes and flowers on horseback spamming to grab them all up. Crafting? I almost entirely ignored it, but I know the value that it has. The consumable items like throwable firebombs and weapon enhancements can be used so much more now that you can find items in the world to make more of them.

    Even FromSoftware’s own systems were iterated on in a new way. Getting more flasks for defeating powerful foes or groups of enemies made exploring much easier to sink into. Stakes of Marika allowing a respawn location outside of sites of grace (bonfires) is inspired. I absolutely dived into the open world bosses and areas without hesitation, even if I hadn’t found a traditional checkpoint in a while.

    And exploration was so rewarding in Elden Ring. Each small little dungeon had something interesting in it. Even if the aesthetics or bosses became repetitive, there was nearly always something about the delve that made it different from anywhere else you’d been. Finding a Cleanrot Knight in a cave before I’d begun encountering them in the world forced me to respect their moveset and learn how best to battle them with how I’d built my character. For me, it never got stale to explore the game.

    I’d be surprised if a game better than Elden Ring comes out this year. But even all my love for the experience doesn’t mean the game was perfect.

    The Shortcomings

    FromSoftware’s approach to storytelling has its ups and downs. Every single item and piece of dialogue can help illustrate the world and lore in such a mystifying and enticing way that leaves you hungry for the next discovery. The other side of that coin, however, is how easy it can be to miss something.

    In my playthrough, I’d already been to many of Elden Ring’s endgame areas and reached the final few bosses before my friends directed me to huge, incredible dungeons I wouldn’t have found otherwise. Having no direction to find those places – even when some of them were directly related to quests I’d begun with the game’s NPCs – can lead to so much missed content. It can be convoluted in a way that isn’t intuitive to follow.

    Between that and the other instances of open world exploration, my character ended up vastly over leveled for some sections of the game. While that same ability paved my path to success against Margit, it felt worse in these areas – because I hadn’t left them to come back to them stronger later on. I’d arrived already more powerful than I would’ve preferred to be. While I still fall on the more positive reception to the open world in Elden Ring, there is absolutely something to be said for the difficulty scaling FromSoftware is able to achieve in a linear experience.

    And, as another potential detriment of the open world, its vastness may prove to be a deterrent for repeat playthroughs. While I’ve already begun a second character myself, I absolutely struggle to imagine plaything Elden Ring as many times as I did Dark Souls III. That’s not to indicate that it isn’t worth the cost, though. My one completed playthrough clocked in just under half the total time I’d spent on Dark Souls III. It’s a vast experience with a lot on offer.

    Though I might be tempted skip Melania next time …

    Looking Forward

    In conclusion, there’s lessons I think FromSoftware can take from this ambitious project that, in my eyes, is an overwhelming success. Truthfully, if there’s one AAA developer that can leverage that opportunity to learn, I believe it’s FromSoftware. I’ve got my fingers crossed for some sweet DLC, but if that’s not in the cards, I’ll be there waiting for their next release.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go collect my runes.

  • The Batman

    I’ve been a fan of Batman my whole life – or at least as long as I can remember. The animated series is one of the first things I can remember seeing on TV. My dad had VHS copies of the Burton and Schumacher films that he indulgently watched with me several times. We saw each entry into Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy together, I saw the Lego Batman Movie with my little sister, and now we have a new film released this past Friday.

    I don’t want to spill spoilers here, however, so all I will say on The Batman is that I genuinely enjoyed the film, though I am certainly not an unbiased source.

    Instead, I thought it would be fun to list out some comic runs that the movie most reminded me of, so that those of you who might be interested in further experiences of a Batman as presented in the film could have some places to look for it. After The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, I immediately fell into comics for several years, reading a lot of the most beloved runs of the Caped Crusader and picking up the at the time current run by Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo in the “New 52.”

    Here we go.

    Detective Focused Runs

    In these comics, Batman is pitted against a mystery with unclear answers that truly challenge his moniker of “World’s Greatest Detective.” I slot one of my all-time favorite comic runs into this category: Snyder and Capullo’s Court of Owls. It begins with a series of murders that Batman slowly discovers belie a greater conspiracy that reaches into the city’s very roots. Widely beloved, this series of comics is one I hope gets adapted into film, and I think our current Batman canon with Pattinson might be the perfect opportunity.

    Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween is another incredible collection following an uncertain mystery with twists and turns and several appearances of some of Batman’s most beloved rogues. I will say, personally, I prefer the art of the more modern comics, and that ended up providing some (admittedly unfair) friction for me from this particular story. But don’t allow that dissuade you from one of the most iconic runs of Batman.

    Another favorite of mine, featuring a titan of the comics industry, is Batman: Hush. Written once again by Jeph Loeb but with art by the incredible Jim Lee, this story features Hush’s first appearance and includes many of Batman’s other rogues and even other heroes from DC’s universe. This comic has echoes of Loeb’s decade’s earlier Long Halloween, but finds new ground to tread and leaves everything fresh and exciting.

    Against Organized Crime

    A lot of the earlier Batman stories focused on his battle against the large crime families that through corruption and greed had a stranglehold over Gotham. Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One focuses on Bruce Wayne’s first attempts to strip away that rot. An excellent look at the origin of our Caped Crusader that has inspired many runs and films since.

    For another more recent run, the year-long weekly series Batman Eternal features Carmine Falcone as a premiere villain, having returned to Gotham to reclaim his lost empire. This series had several creators behind it, and had a wider lens overall to focus on several characters of Batman’s allegiances. These 52 issues have since been collected in various trades and an omnibus.

    Riddles, Riddles, Riddles

    If the movie left you hungry for more runs featuring the most matched intellect to oppose the Dark Knight, I would recommend once again, Snyder and Capullo. In their Zero Year run, Batman is pitted against the Riddler from the jump, though Batman doesn’t know it as quickly as the reader. Nearly everything this team managed during their five year run on the Batman mainline produced magic, and Zero Year quickly became a favorite of mine.

    Whatever your desire, I hope the above might provide some more Batman stories to those of you who might be looking for them. Thank you for reading, everyone! Now to flip on the signal and remind everyone he’s out there …