Ben Stovall Blog

Tag: gaming

RPGs: Session Zero

For the majority of the games I’ve run in my tenure as a GM, we had a perfunctory session zero, if we had one at all. In the early years, I was seeing my players throughout the week, and we’d have piecemeal discussions at random to talk about the upcoming game. Lately, however, I’ve taken to setting up a robust session zero with everyone present, and I’ve found it invaluable.

But, I noticed one snag in the process when I was making that switch. There’s plenty of discussion about the value of session zero on the internet, but I didn’t find a good blueprint anywhere. That’s why we’re here today: we’re looking in depth at session zero. What is it, why should you do it, and when should it be.

What is Session Zero?

Alright, say a gaming group is starting a new campaign. They just finished a published adventure and are deciding which one they might want to run next, or they’ve reached the end of a homebrew game and everyone is ready for new characters, or maybe it’s just been several months since they played last and they need something new to get back into it.

In all these scenarios, there’s a lot of different paths they could take. Maybe the group that runs published adventures just dealt with Strahd and they want a change of pace – something more laid back or comedic. Maybe the homebrew table wants to try another system. Perhaps the group that fell into a hiatus has been able to identify what wasn’t working in that last campaign and everyone wants to get on the same page.

For all these reasons and many more, hosting a session zero is the best way to discuss these topics. It needs the same respect as a normal gaming session: full focus, phone set aside, snacks at the ready, ideas prepared. Then you’re ready to begin.

What should we discuss for session zero?

Foremost, you should discuss your ideas for the campaign. Things like tone, themes, setting. If you have several discrete ideas that you’re equally interested in running, this is the time to talk about them and see what your players latch onto.

As an example, last August one of my players was going to be away for several weeks, and a friend-of-a-friend was interested in joining our campaign. Rather than go on hiatus, I ran a small scale campaign to introduce that friend to D&D. Our main campaign had reached the higher levels by this point, and my players and I were looking for a brief change of pace. So, session zero, we set the tone: this was a game for goofs and jokes. We decided the PCs knew each other – tangentially, at least – and that they’d been on a bender and lost their employer’s magic item. As part of session zero, I asked them each to tell me in secret one reason they might have stolen the magic item. They each remembered their own problem, and they used those hooks they generated to try and track the item down.

For players at session zero, I recommend arriving with a few ideas about the kind of characters you’d like to play. You’d hate to show up to a party dressed in the same thing – even in a mono-class kind of game, you’d still want your PCs to have specific strengths and weaknesses. Pick a couple classes, develop a concept that works with multiple classes, or come with a few different ideas and build a party that can work well together.

And, as implied above, discuss the campaign at large: what’s the trajectory? Are we heroic or villainous or just trying to get by? Is there a level range we should expect to conclude around? Decide what system you’ll use, discuss house rules; if there’s a mechanic you mean to make the backbone of your character, clarify that you and the GM interpret it the same way.

Perhaps most importantly, decide what’s off-limits. I have a hard rule against any portrayal of sexual assault. I had a player with arachnophobia who asked for limited spider encounters (and less descriptive narration for spiders). Do the players want to deal with racism or homophobia from the NPCs? – Are you as a GM comfortable portraying those kinds of people?

Session zero is the time to set everyone’s expectations in the right place, so everyone can engage with and enjoy the game.

When should you have session zero?

I think the best time to host it is one or two weeks before beginning the game itself, during your planned session window. Naturally, if your group meets less often, than just that first meet-up should be session zero, with the game beginning the following meet.

Any other tips?

My main goal in hosting session zero is to understand the PCs as much as possible. With that mini campaign and my upcoming game, I really wanted the direction of the game (at least at the early levels) to be player-driven. I want them to tell me their goals and desires so I can put them on pathways toward those items.

So. That’s my advice on session zero. I hope it helps make your games better. As always, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

May 3, 2023
Homebrew Mechanic: Heroic Vignettes

In my tenure as a GM, I’ve never been fond of encounters with a clear outcome. Spending upwards of half-an-hour running turn-by-turn combat where the characters are only in danger if they play extremely foolishly just doesn’t entice me. A battle needs stakes to be interesting at all, a chance for the party to fail, a consequence looming overhead, or it feels rote and my narration of events suffers from my disinterest.

At lower levels, every fight can carry a threat of permanent character death from poor decisions or poorer luck, but as my party reached the higher tiers of character power in my campaign, I needed a new solution. They had many enemies that had their own wealth of resources to bring to bear, but running every battle against an array of grunts or mooks was just going to waste time we could spend on more interesting battles.

So, I devised Heroic Vignettes. I mentioned this idea in passing in my Defining Dungeons post, but I’ve since had another chance to use this mechanic and I think it’s got real teeth. So, what better place to share it out than here?

The Basics

The idea began with me wanting to give my players a chance to use their hit die to recover from a battle when there absolutely wouldn’t be enough time for a short rest in our 5e D&D game. However, they had all of their hit die available to them, and I didn’t want them to be able to just spend all their hit die to reach full health without a worry. So, I created small instances – scenarios where a hero’s intervention would ensure a heroic result. As an example, my first use was during an attack on a city, and some townspeople were trying to evacuate some children, but the invaders were charging to slay them. These attackers were not going to be threatening to my party of 16th level adventurers, but they would annihilate the children and their shepherds.

So, electing to intervene, I asked the table to expend four of their hit die. Any of the four players could choose to expend the cost and in any variation: one player could spend four, intervening alone; they could have two characters split, each spending two; or all four of them could spend one. Whatever their decision, they spent the required hit die and rolled it, suffering whatever they rolled as incidental damage from the skirmish.

There were several more instances where they could spend their hit die and intervene, then, at the end of the gauntlet as they approached the next battle that would be run in initiative, I allowed them to spend whatever hit die they had left to heal as if from a short rest.

I also told them that would be the intention from the start. As we launched into the heroic vignettes, they all understood that any hit die they spent intervening they would not be able to use later to recover. But, they were quite high level adventurers with many hit die at their disposal, and they elected to intervene in each scenario I’d built and still recovered well for the further fights.

Open-Ended Vignettes

Just last week, I used this mechanic for the second time. My party is now four 20th level adventurers, making their way toward what might be the final boss encounter of the campaign. They’ve come to a land to slay a primordial elemental that was never meant to be on the prime material plane, but there are two forces they have to contend with: the Tempest Faithful, a cult devoted to this living storm, and He Who Has Laid Claim to the Skies, a storm giant who has gained the allegiance of a goliath clan to attempt to shackle the Primordial Tempest to their will and reclaim the ancient glory of their people.

This tribe of goliaths had attacked a flying city home to a clan of dwarves, Ava Dannad. The goliath tribe is massive, swollen with conquered tribes from elsewhere on the continent, but they are pretty run-of-the-mill combatants. Without attacking in ludicrous numbers, they shouldn’t serve as much of a threat to a party of four 20th level heroes – these are some of the mightiest people that may ever exist, after all.

My players wanted to strike into Ava Dannad using Transport via Plants and make a ruckus to draw out the storm giant and the tribe’s leader to battle them before they reached the Tempest. Rather than run several rote encounters with minimal danger, we launched into freeform heroic vignettes. I asked them to tell me how they would like to draw out or incense the goliaths and then we worked out how many hit die they might spend for each battle, and rolled to tally a score that once attained would successfully draw the giant from his perch. They also had a deadline as the giant was having the flying city crash into a mountainside.

They had several great ideas, using skills or the environment, using details about goliath culture they knew to incense them, casting Daylight on themselves to make a beacon visible through the storm raging all around to draw their enemies in. For each hit die they spent, we rolled 1d10 (with a few other bonus die thrown in for particularly good ideas) to rack up to a score of 200 that they needed to get the giant to come fight them. It still came down to the wire, with the battle against this storm giant and the champion of the goliath tribe meeting them when the city was a mere 5 rounds (we rolled 2d4) from crashing into the mountainside. And, as before, they were allowed to spend their remaining hit die to recover before that encounter and it still was a tough fight.

So that’s Heroic Vignettes. It accomplishes a lot in maintaining scope and world consistency without dragging extra hours of easy encounters into the field. I’m interested to see how I might be able to adapt this mechanic for Pathfinder in the future when we start using that system. For now, I think it’s a wonderful tool for 5e D&D games, and every tool we can put into our toolbox as GMs enriches our games all that much more. As always, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

April 18, 2023
Warcraft: Mythic+ Affixes Are Overbearing

Since its addition in Legion, Warcraft’s Mythic+ dungeons have become an insanely popular endgame activity. I’ve participated in most seasons, missing only seasons 3 and 4 of Shadowlands while I was unsubscribed. Overall, it’s been a huge boon to the game. Mythic+ serves as a PVE activity that doesn’t require the level of investment and set-up that raiding needs.

The system has survived some large changes since its inception. Fortified and Tyrannical were originally envisioned as a hurdle for keys beyond level 10, but are now present on all keystones. We’ve seen several affixes nerfed, rotating seasonal affixes, and some that have been introduced and removed entirely.

Presently, Blizzard is testing a new slate of affixes on the Public Test Realm, and much of the player base has had few kind things to say for them. Many players find the affixes to be unduly impactful, to the extent that players have to focus more on avoiding the negative consequences of failing the affixes over battling the mechanics designed specifically for the dungeon.

Others claim this criticism is the whining of a player that lacks the skill to engage with the affixes as they are. However, many of the top-rated Mythic+ players share these opinions, as I do. And, while I’m certainly not in the realm of the very best players, I’ve never lacked the ability to attain the goals I chase in the game.

But, as a pre-emptive counter to anyone who would discredit this post on the merit of skill or accomplishment, here is my raider.io profile. I have two characters beyond the rating threshold for Keystone Hero and several Keystone Master achievements.

Now, let’s talk affixes: new, old, and philosophically.

Playing the Affix

The most criticized affixes are the ones that become so intrusive to the standard gameplay that they overshadow the usual dungeon experience, such as Explosive and Sanguine.

With Explosive, we are constantly battling our UI to kill these priority target bombs before they explode for heavy group-wide damage. For many players, the task of killing these bombs falls on the healer’s shoulders – at the lower levels of play, players are unlikely to swap targets and kill them, while at the top-end of play, the group loses the least amount of damage throughput if the healer defeats them all. Since these spawns scale with the number of enemies engaged, many orbs might be active at once, rolling throughout the duration of a fight. On the PTR over the weekend, there was an adjustment in testing to make these orbs several more times durable, but with a reduced spawn frequency.

Now, conceptually, I don’t think this was a bad direction. However, the pool of hit points tested over the weekend was bloated such that players were simply ignoring them outright with their spawn cadence. I’d prefer to see the spawn rate reduced further, but I think another nerf to both values would be an even an even better adjustment. UPDATE: Blizzard has since proposed a huge change to the functionality of Explosive orbs, having them instead shield enemies based on the health remaining instead of damaging the party. I think this would be better for the experience of the affix, but I don’t think it addresses much the feeling of playing against the affix over the dungeon. We’ll see how it works when that begins testing.

Then, Sanguine requires a dedication to movement and area control beyond what is usually asked by the affixes or base dungeon mechanics. Even the tools players bring to aid the tank in repositioning monsters are suspect in many scenarios, with enemies that are immune to knockback and grip effects, or uninterruptible casts, which adds an element of target prioritization on top of this affix’s asks. I think it’s wrong to say that all affixes shouldn’t affect tanks because of the role they play in the group, but I think Sanguine is a bit heavy handed in that it requires the tank’s engagement the most with minimal impact from the other players.

There’s even a couple more affixes that have been adjusted since their introduction, but would’ve fit here before: Bursting and Bolstering.

Bursting changes the way every pull in a dungeon should be played, with the enemies afflicting the players with a stacking damage-over-time effect for each enemy they kill. This extends the danger of a pull beyond the point where the monsters are dead, and asks for halting damage to prevent refreshing the damage effect’s duration. It’s since had a change to make it dispellable, allowing a class-utility counter to make it much more bearable with a priest’s Mass Dispel, but I haven’t chosen to run a dungeon with this affix without a priest all season, and not all groups have that luxury.

Bolstering once called for adjusting target priority on many pulls in a dungeon, but the new duration limit on the buff has significantly reduced the impact of pulls with one monster of higher health than the smaller creatures around it that die from passive cleave.

And there’s many more affixes that contribute negatively to the experience of running dungeons without overtaking the gameplay loop to the degree of those above outliers. Quaking hits casters harder than tanks and melee players by interrupting their casts and has required multiple specific exceptions to be installed to avoid catastrophic overlaps; Raging can create unavoidable one-shot damage instances with the only counter being large defensive cooldowns or limited soothe effects; Overflowing affected some healers much more negatively than others; Necrotic and Skittish put more responsibility on the tank in an unfun way; Inspiring created painful monster groups by restricting the use of the class tools we had to overcome dangerous enemies; Infested and Beguiling were infuriating to deal with throughout their respective seasons.

And I think it’s bad for dungeon affixes to exist solely in this space – to add only annoyance to a dungeon. These were originally created to add variance to the dungeons week-to-week, because, for most people, running the same encounters ad infinitum would get stale fast.

But Blizzard doesn’t seem to agree. Let’s look at those new test affixes.

Our New Afflictions

So, available for testing over the weekend, we had Incorporeal, Afflicted, and Entangling. Despite the callout, Afflicted looked to be the least offensive of these three. It functions a lot like explosive, but in reverse. A ghost spawns with low health and dispellable afflictions. Removing any of these effects or healing the ghost to full health removes the ghost. Should the ghost be left alone, it afflicts the party with a Haste reduction (which we don’t want). Unlike Explosive, the affix is presented more directly healer-facing. They can address it with their usual game play, and hybrid classes can ease the burden at low-cost, and I think both have factored into its reception thus far.

Then, there’s Incorporeal, which has been adjusted a bit for the better since the weekend’s testing, but I still think could use a redesign. These creatures require direct crowd control effects or kicks to prevent them from massively hampering your group, but you generally would like to invest those abilities into the dungeon’s monsters instead. However, since it’s intended that they be immune to damage, and things like Blind, Polymorph, Hex, or Hibernate would deal with them completely, I think they’re not in as worse a place as they were when those effects were breaking.

And, last, we have Entangling. Like Quaking before it, this affix is just going to be at its worst creating painful overlaps with the dungeon’s mechanics. I know it’s going away next season, but imagine this effect occurring during Odyn’s runes in Halls of Valor. That extra delay of movement could spell catastrophe for an otherwise successful key. In Blizzard’s post, they do talk about increasing the visual clarity of the effect, which was a pain point for testers over the weekend.

Even as unintrusive as Afflicted looks, these affixes are all still annoyances to be layered onto the game. But I think it’s wrong to behave like that’s the best or only avenue to add challenge to the game.

Examining the Philosophy

In the past, I had discussions about my grips with the Mythic+ system and often talked about Hades, an isometric roguelite with fantastic game play. After you’ve had a successful clear or two, the game opens up a “Heat” system, where you can elect to add on additional modifier to make the run more challenge, and more rewarding.

There’s options here that would be an annoyance if they were prescribed: enemies need to be hit a number of times before they begin taking damage; monsters can deal up to 100% more damage and have up to 30% more life or both; you have to sacrifice a boon to climb between the underworld regions; you put yourself on a timer. Yet, these never felt intrusive because of two reasons: one, they affected the “Heat” of the run at different values, so harder affixes increased the rewards more; and two, you picked every single effect you were going to deal with on a run. So, why the hell doesn’t Warcraft do it that way?

Well, as far as picking your poison goes, I don’t think it would work as well in Warcraft. Hades is played solo, while Mythic+ is a 5-man group activity with the active player base of an MMO. Everyone having the same affixes on their key every week is good for people forming and joining groups. It just wouldn’t work as well to go from Volcanic in one key to realizing you have Spiteful ghosts chasing you down on the next.

As for the former, there is a built-in rating system for Mythic+, and Tyrannical and Fortified already provide semi-separate score values, but I don’t think increasing the requisite investment to have all players engage with every affix would be health for the game. Currently, you can get a real decent rating on one month’s subscription, but if every affix had its own point contribution, it’d take several weeks to clear your scorecard of any zeroes.

So, fundamentally, I think affixes-as-annoyances is a bad design space for Warcraft. It is good for the process of grouping to have keys prescribed for the week, and detrimental that we cannot opt-in to the annoyances.

So, I’d propose–

Affixes-as-Boons

I think affixes should exist. Tyrannical and Fortified don’t need to go anywhere; they do a lot of the legwork in modifying the week-to-week experience in these dungeons.

But positive-effect affixes – even built as a reward for engaging with something like Afflicted – would be better than what we have. I don’t propose this as a way to make dungeons easier; I’d want to see it paired with an adjustment to the overall scaling, so that obtaining the benefits from the affixes would affect the dungeon’s success.

I wouldn’t even begrudge the existence of an annoyance affix paired with a boon affix. Just by virtue of design, the affixes will always be less interesting than the dungeon mechanics, because the affixes must be designed to be applied to all the dungeons, whereas a boss or monster pack have a lot more freedom in their design space.

What affixes do to add variety to dungeons in the long-term is valuable, but instead of each week ending with the sentiment, “That goodness I don’t have to deal with that anymore,” dungeon affixes could instead foster excitement for the gameplay opportunities they provide. At the very least, I’d be interested to try.

As always, thank you for reading. I’m looking forward to starting the climb all over again in season two, even with all my complaints. I just wonder if things can be better. Now, to get after these last few portals for my paladin …

April 6, 2023
RPGs: Dungeon Traps as Encounters

During my table’s test run of Pathfinder, I came across a new way of thinking of traps in RPGs that I feel like a fool for not having considered sooner. In Pathfinder, traps have legitimate statblocks, like a goblin or bear or other monster your party would encounter in battle. A “complex hazard” will usually have a reaction to some way the players can interact with the environment nearby, and then they will roll initiative. The players can then attempt to hack away at the mechanism until it breaks, or find the device and disable it before it continues to affect them. A series of traps can become a full blown encounter this way, and I’d never thought to use them as such!

So, while we’re still playing D&D to finish out my current campaign, I decided to give this idea a go. My party is currently exploring an ancient wizard’s laboratory, and the first room of this delve I devoted entirely to a “trap encounter.” I found this map, the Mad Lich’s Crypt, on talestavern and stocked it for my purposes, so thank you to user JustcallmeWendy!

Now, onto the encounter.

The Room

So, the party began their exploration into this ancient and buried laboratory. A warning in an ancient dialect on the statues near the door gave them little pause, and the entered the first room. There, our fighter noticed a little barred grate near the floor that allowed them to see the blue brazier beyond. Just as he mentioned it, however, the party moved into the room itself, a hidden gate slammed down between them and the entrance, and I asked them to roll initiative.

These red, glowering grates in the floor I made the origin for a 3rd-level Fireball. A rune would explode twice a round, once at its initiative rolled, then again ten steps down in the order, always exploding where it would hit the most people. This encounter also involved a bit of a puzzle, with these levers needing to be thrown within the same round to lift a wall to allow them to even get near the blue brazier that kept the traps active. Because of the order of events, our cleric player cast a True Seeing spell before the first fireball exploded (worried an invisible enemy may be in the room), and noticed that the floor before the lever closest to them was merely an illusion, just in time to warn the fighter not to cross it!

Once a lever was flipped, it lit a torch beside the wall that would rise. However, after 1 round, the lever would reset unless held down by someone. Holding a lever down also caused a burst of cold damage (4d8) to whoever decided to do so, and thus the party was split, three members in the tunnel, and two left by the levers.

Also, while the wall was raised, a lightning ballista became active, firing a 10-foot-wide 3rd-level Lightning Bolt down this corridor. But, the party managed to access the blue brazier and extinguish its flame, turning all the traps off before anyone get too damaged (they are 19th level, after all). With the fire extinguished, they found the gate to the entryway reset, the wall raised, and the gate blocking their path forward opened.

I enjoyed this style of dungeon trap immensely more than the basic binary “I check for traps” rolls would usually fall into. I don’t enjoy overly punitive design, and hitting my players with a load of damage for failing to essentially bookkeep their progress through a dungeon never sat right with me. I still have a few things I want to improve on for this style of trap encounter more – a handful of which are explicitly in Pathfinder’s rules. I have further instances of traps being involved with and being full encounters in this dungeon, so I’m excited to keep honing the system further.

That’s it for this post. Thanks for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

February 28, 2023
Returning to Warcraft

In July of 2021, news broke about a lawsuit against Blizzard Entertainment. The suit alleged that, as a company, Blizzard had systemically mistreated their female employees. There was a “frat boy culture” complete with “cube crawls” in which workers would drink at one another’s cubicles during the workday and grope their female coworkers. Employees who reported these behaviors faced retaliation. A female employee committed suicide during a business trip with a male supervisor who had brought sex toys with him on the trip. Their courtesy rooms for recently pregnant employees who needed to pump were poorly furnished and lacked security with someone reporting their breast milk stolen from the fridge. In the midst of all this news, two people were promoted to fill J. Allen Brack’s position once he left the company, Mike Ybarra and Jen O’neal, and they did not pay Jen as much as they paid Ybarra despite both of them advocating for it.

I ended an eleven-year concurrent subscription to World of Warcraft the same day that this news broke. I was horrified and disgusted that this company that had been a part of my life for so long was like this. Unfortunately, it was more akin to the last straw than a strictly moral stance. Shadowlands was the least fun I’d ever had playing Warcraft, but I was more-or-less in charge of the guild I’d been playing with for over a decade, so I felt some sort of duty to stick around.

When this news broke, I told the guild that when my time expired, I was done. I didn’t think I’d ever be coming back. My game time lasted until November, and on the last possible night we managed to finish the raid on heroic after several weeks of attempts on the final boss. I did not open Battle.net for an entire year after that moment.

I kept up with some news. I watched the Dragonflight announcement and felt underwhelmed. I didn’t really think Blizzard would change – not in philosophy, and not in culture.

But, maybe they did.

New Direction

I’ve been a fan of Preach Gaming for a long time. I think I first found his channel in 2012 during Mists of Pandaria, but I probably became a subscriber and fan in the time of Legion (2016). Like much of the player base, Preach had been heartbroken with the news and resolved to risk his entire livelihood and stop his daily coverage of Warcraft as his primary work for his videos. Like many of us, he had been passionate about this game for a long time despite it feeling worse and worse over time.

Late last year, Preach spent his own money to take a trip to California and visit the Blizzard campus, interviewing the developers to talk about the new direction of the game and the fallout of the lawsuit. And, honestly, it began to look like the lawsuit had helped remove the problematic people who had been with Blizzard all those years. Things looked like they’d gotten better.

The game was headed to a healthier place: one designed for the player’s enjoyment and not just their retention. Gone were the nonoptional activities that advanced your character’s power outside of the endgame pillars. Gone were the restrictive systems and grinds that made players feel the need to engage with content they’d long since grown tired of to continue gaining artifact and anima power. Playing multiple characters became something encouraged by the game, instead of a burden as players saw a laundry list of dozens of things they’d need to complete again to get their characters ready for the fun stuff they wanted to do.

Even hearing this from friends, I was skeptical. Many of them hadn’t quit in Shadowlands, maybe it was just survivorship bias. Ultimately, I knew I couldn’t take anyone’s word but my own, so I decided to drop some of the gold I’d had in game for a token and give it a shot.

It’s been about a month since then. I’ve leveled four of my characters to 70, when I only ever got one to 60 in Shadowlands. I’ve just achieved Keystone Master with my friends, despite us now needing to find people to fill our groups instead of having an active guild to run with. I’ve been making gold with my professions, in the hopes of continuing to pay for the game with that virtual currency. I haven’t been into the raid yet, but I’ve been completely satisfied with the dungeon endgame.

That game is just fun again.

But I’m not ready to give Blizzard a full pass.

There’s Still Room to Improve

Ultimately, the monetization of Blizzard’s games is still disgusting. Diablo: Immortal is not even a year old. Diablo 4 is set to release this year with a battle pass system for cosmetics and so far, they’ve been quiet on what, if anything, they’re doing with this system to address FOMO. And, at any point, they could fall into their old ways and start designing poor systems that restrict the players again.

But, unlike before, I’m not going to stick around if the game stops being fun. There’s really not much else to it.

As always, thank you for reading. Now let’s drop that ready check and get this run going.

January 12, 2023
2022: Year in Review

As we come upon the end of 2022, I wanted to take a moment to look back at all of the media I’ve enjoyed this year and talk about what I loved. Consider this a graduation of a “Ben Recommends” post, one plus-sized entry to talk about several games, books, movies, and TV shows that I didn’t devote an entire post to earlier in the year. Not all of these projects were released this year, but they were things I experienced for the first time in 2022. As always, we’ll avoid spoilers as much as we can, so without further delay, let’s dive in.

Books

I didn’t read as much as I’d planned to this year, but there was certainly no shortage of quality books that completely ensnared me. The craft on display inspired me to keep honing my own writing, to pursue the best I can manage and always improve.

A Memory Called Empire & A Desolation Called Peace

Arkady Martine’s Hugo winning duology was instantly one of the best books I’d ever read. I remember a moment – the first “on-screen” interaction between Ambassador Mahit and her predecessor Yskandr – that I just felt floored. Every time I pick up a Hugo winner, I find something, an idea or an impeccable presentation, some way to present a thought in a way that I hadn’t been able to consider or articulate myself, that just reminds me why I was so drawn to writing in the first place. I read Desolation before 2022’s Hugos were awarded, but I had no doubt it my mind it would snag the win.

The Rage of Dragons

I first picked up Evan Winter’s novel to read while I was unable to engage in my more persistent distractions, but I found it so gripping that even when I’d finally returned home, it was still consuming my time. Reading it reminded me of the way Game of Thrones made me feel when the show had been at its best, even despite how different the two tales are. The book is so deliberate, so consistent, that even moments that might drag in a lesser novel remained just as enthralling here. I can’t wait to catch up with the Fires of Vengeance and join everyone else in waiting for the next novel.

Elder Race

Adrian Tchaikovsky is an author whose name I’d see pop up on the fantasy subreddit time and again, so I decided to give Elder Race a try to dip my toes into his work. I finished the entire novella in a day, moving only when my spot on the couch started to become uncomfortable. Only once I’d finished did I set the book down, adding more of his work to my wish list for the holidays.

Movies

I only found my way into a theater a handful of times this year, catching The Batman and the new Marvel movies, and when I did sit down with a movie at home it was often one I’d already seen. Still, there was a notable exception that deserves a spot of recognition here.

Knives Out & Glass Onion

Say what you will for Rian Johnson’s entry into Star Wars, but the man knows how to craft an exciting mystery. I finally got around to seeing Knives Out this year, and I immediately knew I had to share the movie with my mother. It’s a wonderful film with surprising twists and turns all throughout, and Glass Onion certainly serves as a great sequel to expand the canon on Benoit Blanc.

TV Shows

There were a lot of new shows this year that I didn’t ever get around to watching. I’ve heard great things about dozens of shows, but never had the opportunity to check most of them out. Of what I did see, the two below really stick out as the best of the best.

Better Call Saul

I was a huge fan of Better Call Saul since the first season. Each time they finally got added to Netflix, I slammed through each episode, hungry for more. Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan worked a miracle, following up one of the best television dramas ever with a spinoff sequel, that, for me, surpassed the original. It’s a master class in pacing, in setup and payoff, in following through, even if it might become predictable. The final season stuck the landing, and I can’t wait to see what these guys do next.

Andor

If it hadn’t finished so close to the year, I think Andor would’ve had its own entire post. This show was something I’d always wanted from Star Wars: a gritty, grounded story about people rising against the tyranny of the empire. It isn’t afraid to take its time, to build clear stakes and show us who these characters are. Despite the darkness it is hopeful – things are bad, but there are those who are willing to fight, to build a tomorrow they will never see, so that things will be better one day.

Video Games

The video game industry continues to swing wildly between the best and the worst it can be. In the same year that we get Elden Ring and God of War: Ragnarok as examples of the pinnacle of what games can be, we get Diablo: Immortal, a blatant pay-to-win cash grab, and Pokémon Scarlet and Violet releases as a buggy mess with very little in the way of innovation despite being one of the highest grossing media franchises in the world. I’ve always been a bit of a patient gamer, only buying games on day one when they’re a highly anticipated release, but I still got around to a lot of games that were new this year.

Vampire Survivors

I was an early adopter of this tiny little game, picking it up at the start of February in early access. Very, very few games are as much of a value trade as this ended up being. For that $3 price point I got 54 hours of excellent gameplay, and they just released a $2 DLC that I’m excited to get around to diving into soon. For a while, I was keeping up with each patch and collecting the achievements as they came, but I hadn’t played since April until a couple weeks ago and I had a lot of new things to check out when I got back into it.

Potionomics

I was never someone who was interested in dating simulator games. I’d confidently skipped over them all, certain I wasn’t missing anything. Then, I saw someone playing Potionomics on a stream and decided to give it a shot. It had just enough of a game laid overtop that I bought in, and I enjoyed the game immensely. I stuck around for two full playthroughs to get all of the achievements on Steam and I have no regrets. I don’t think it’s completely changed my opinion on dating simulators, but if this team releases another one with another decent game on top, they’ve at a minimum earned my interest.

Dicey Dungeons

A friend of mine played this game on Game Pass and immediately knew I’d love it. That same day he sent me a gifted copy, and he was completely correct. This little roguelike battle game has been an absolute blast to play. The game gives you items to equip on each run that you use rolled six-sided dice to dismantle your foes with. There’s appropriately six characters to play as, each with their own unique dice interactions and mechanics: the warrior can reroll dice to get better results, the rogue wants lower dice values to unleash a flurry of attacks, the robot rolls each dice one-at-a-time with a hard cap on how much their CPU can handle each turn. With lots of comedy buried in the enemy profiles you unlock with each achievement, this game is overflowing with charm.

My Game of the Year: God of War Ragnarok

Ragnarok is a sequel in the most honest sense of the word. Everything about God of War (2018) is improved upon here: the gameplay is smoother, the systems are more developed with more options, things are expanded naturally, and the story and performances are top-notch. Elden Ring is absolutely one of the best games I’ve ever played, but Ragnarok appeals more to me as a person. It would be a lie to say Elden Ring lacks a narrative, but presentation between these two games couldn’t be more different, and I’m a sucker for a great story.

There’s also something to be said for the difference in boss design in these two games. While you have so much more freedom in how you build your character in Elden Ring, there’s certainly a value in the way a God of War boss can have mechanics that require a specific answer to be dealt with. In Elden Ring and the Dark Souls games, what you’re capable of as a character can be so varied that I don’t believe there’s any mechanics in the game that the dodge roll can’t avoid. In Ragnarok, there was a boss that I needed to interrupt with a weapon throw, or a couple mechanics that I could use a specific arrow from my ally to interrupt, and it felt fantastic to go step-for-step in these dance-like encounters. Neither of these design philosophies is better than the other: what you gain in player choice and freedom in Elden Ring is incredibly valuable, while the limited choices you make in God of War can still adjust your playstyle, just not nearly as much as the decisions in Elden Ring.

2022 delivered some truly incredible stories, and I couldn’t be more thankful to have the opportunity to experience them. I’m excited to see what new stories we can share with one another in 2023. As always, thank you for reading. I hope you have a happy New Year, and I’ll see you again soon.

December 29, 2022
D&D: The Imbalance of Hard CC

Some of the most potent spells and features in D&D are focused around locking down enemies and limiting what they’re able to do. These crowd control (CC) abilities are incredibly impactful – when they work, they can completely change the dynamics of a battle. A dragon might be torn out of the sky and forced to battle on the ground by Earthbind, an enemy berserker might become paralyzed by Hold Person, an enemy spell caster might be Counterspelled or Silenced to neuter their ability to battle the party. A Polymorph might entirely end an encounter before it even has the chance to begin.

However, they can be a bit of a gamble. When a player spends their action on many of these abilities, their foes have the chance to resist them with a saving throw and be utterly unaffected, or have some other roll of the dice impact their effectiveness. Between the chance to fail, concentration requirements, and resource cost, these abilities are overall pretty balanced in battle.

But … there’s another facet of this piece of design that isn’t clear from the source books alone. When it comes to the use of these abilities, they affect a player in combat in a much heavier way than the DM’s monsters. And, while there are tools the party can use to address these abilities (attacking a concentrating spell caster, using Dispel Magic or a Restoration spell), it isn’t always something that feels like it’s a good use of their own turn. They might be too far from their allies or their enemies to affect the spell’s duration or otherwise unable to do something about the spell. In the upper levels of D&D, a character might have one of their weaker saving throws targeted and be unable to resist the effect, and in a difficult battle, it might be several turns before anyone in the party can find a moment that they aren’t also dangerously threatened to do something about their ally’s situation.

In effect, a player might be effectively removed from the battle by one of these abilities, leaving them to sit and simply watch the game continue without their input, only making a roll every so often to attempt to resist the effect. Is it good encounter design to disable your players with these spells? These people have all taken time out of their busy lives, maybe they’re even paying for a babysitter – is it fair to them for this to happen? Is it fun?

My players and I have discussed these abilities at length between sessions regularly since my campaign began two years ago. Lately, I’ve been using them a lot less than I ever had before in any 5th edition game I’ve run. We’ve talked about the degrees of effect they use in Pathfinder’s second edition, adjusting spells to function just for one round but to work outright, a stacking bonus or other cumulative effect to increase the likelihood for an affected creature to succeed over time – we still haven’t nailed any specific changes down for our next game, but it continues to be a regular topic.

And this isn’t intended to say that you should avoid using control effects against your players. I only think it’s important to be aware of how these effects sit on the scales on either side of the DM screen. So, today, we’re going to talk about some of the small adjustments we have made, and some of the design built into D&D intended to address CC (and how it still falls a bit short).

Giving the Players an Answer

One way we decided to address these abilities was to put more tools into the hands of the martial characters to use in response to control effects. A Dispel Magic or Restoration spell can end CC from the hands of spell casters, but giving the martial characters some limited use effects to overcome CC themselves had a dual purpose in helping bring them upward in effectiveness to close that existent gap between them and the spell casters.

So, we modified the Fighter’s Indomitable feature, allowing them to substitute whatever type of save they were asked to make with a Constitution saving throw instead when they used the feature. After the change, the fighter almost always succeeded against these effects with his proficient saving throw, but only so long as he had uses of Indomitable. It felt like a measured adjustment – repeated application of lockdown effects would overcome his ability to resist them and require another answer, but a single spell couldn’t neuter the fighter outright.

We also built a new feature for the barbarian I called Rage Against Restraint. When the barbarian was affected by a CC effect, I allowed him to burn a use of his rage to end the effect at the end of his turn. I ended up deciding this was too conservative in its implementation, and I’ve since adjusted it to allow the barbarian to end the effect at the start of his turn for the same cost. It’s also limited further by only having a single use, but I think it wouldn’t be game breaking if it were usable more often, perhaps just costing a use of their rage. This would only become infinite CC breaking at 20th level, and it still has them under the effects until their turn begins, which might allow enemies to capitalize on the effect anyway. Our change to Indomitable allows a fighter a second attempt at the save, potentially avoiding the effect, so when compared, I think Rage Against Restraint is weaker than the change to Indomitable, so it doesn’t need to be so harshly limited.

Both of these features came online for the party around the same time, Rage Against Restraint sort of introduced as a bit of a band-aid fix as we adjusted Indomitable, but I think they’ve both worked out well. I might even in the future include Rage Against Restraint as a feature at 7th or 9th level just as a carte blanche for barbarians at my table.

Experienced players are probably realizing this is a bit familiar to Wizards’ own mechanic designed to aid their bosses against these effects, legendary resistance.

Legendary Resistance: a Poor Compromise (for Monsters)

To ensure a boss isn’t utterly neutered by CC effects, paralyzing them and allowing the party to burst their entire pool of hit points before they can take a swipe of their own, Wizards of the Coast included “Legendary Resistance.” Significant monsters such as dragons and liches and other bosses created for each module published have the ability to force-succeed on a limited number of saving throws (usually three). Each homebrew boss I’ve built has had a number of these to stand their own if the party decided to focus them down outright.

In effect, they’re a tax the party has to pay to succeed in using any lockdown effects against a powerful boss. However, without them, an insistent monk might simply stun-lock a boss and never allow it a turn, neutering the keystone encounter everyone’s been waiting for. These monsters need an answer for these effects, so they can function as a boss, but the design of the feature falls short.

It’s the distilled problem of “save-or-suck” spell design. On a binary pass-fail system, significant monsters need a way to ensure they aren’t as ruined by these effects as their minions are. CC effects are so utterly debilitating in D&D, that they need an answer. If the system was built with gradations of success, such as in pathfinder’s second edition, these abilities wouldn’t be useless at the start of a boss fight.

There’s some quick and easy ways to help make this feel a bit better, with and without adjusting the feature outright. If you don’t want to personally redesign Legendary Resistance, then simply being a bit more descriptive with how a monster overcomes these effects can help. If the dragon is overcoming Hold Monster, describe it angrily snarling through the effect, succumbing until a final burst of rage allows it to escape. If a powerful demon lord is overcoming a Banishment, perhaps he had prepared for the battle with a ward that shatters, consuming the spell, but leaving them more vulnerable against future magics.

For more active adjustments, you could force your monsters to sacrifice health to shake these effects off, or spend some of its action economy on ending the effect. Perhaps as a legendary action that can’t be used until the end of the next member of the party’s turn. You could build your own degrees of effectiveness – maybe your dragon has its speed reduced, suffers disadvantage on his attack rolls, and allows a single critical hit from a melee attack, but that’s the full extent of a Hold Monster’s effect on him, and only for one round maximum. I’m building an upcoming boss encounter for my campaign to have the “legendary resistance” the boss has function a lot like how I’ve built Rage Against Restraint, the creature only able to end these effects on their own turn.

Try things out, take some swings, but if it isn’t a big problem for your table, don’t reinvent the wheel. As long as everyone’s having fun, you’re running an excellent game. Overall, I hope Legendary Resistance receives some more attention in the playtest for OneD&D – I’d love to see Wizards try some different approaches to see if they can land on something better before the next edition of the game releases, but we’ll have to wait and see.

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

December 22, 2022
OneD&D: The Cleric

Last week, Wizards of the Coast released their next set of playtest material for OneD&D: the Cleric and Revised Species. It’s my intention to try and follow each of these drops with a post of my own to help solidify my thoughts on some of the changes coming through before each feedback survey opens, so without further ado, here’s my first impressions.

Species Adjustments: Dragonborn and Goliath Changes

First up, we received a new version of dragonborn that helps bring them more in-line with what I and many other players were expecting after Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons. The breath weapon is back to being a one-attack replacement during your Attack action, it has a scaling number of uses per long rest, and it can even be either a cone or a line attack each time you use the feature. They also threw dragonborn players a bone here with the new Draconic Flight, allowing them to gain a flying speed for ten minutes once per day. I love this ability, I’m excited about the flair of it being made of your ancestry’s damage type (lightning, fire, ice, etc.), I’m jazzed about using it on a rogue or fighter character to keep up with flying foes – a dragonborn might be the first character I make in OneD&D.

Goliath characters also gained awesome new options here with the choice of taking a limited use effect based on the type of giant they’re descended from. Each option feels viable, with them all having different uses and effects that make them really excellent. This was something I myself scratched the surface on in my current campaign: one of my players is a goliath character and I coordinated with him to see if he wanted to be from a specific giant ancestry and adjust a trait or two from the lineage to reflect it. We only ended up changing the flavor of Stone’s Endurance to be based around a storm giant’s innate foresight to allow him to mitigate the damage from a momentary prescience, but it was still a flavorful adjustment. The other new feature present, allowing them to grow large for ten minutes, is kind of just icing on the cake that can create cool moments on its own.

Now, onto the one class included in this UA.

The Cleric

There’s a lot of adjustments here for the cleric. Previously, clerics were one of only two classes that chose their subclass at 1st level in their divine domain. This made some level of sense, of course: you were devoted to a specific deity, after all, so you’d probably already have aligned with one of their domains. With Wizards’ intention to normalize subclass feature acquisition, this has been delayed to third level, and the clerics received a few new things in the trade. First, they now gain Channel Divinity at first level with two baseline options: Divine Spark and the classic Turn Undead. I think divine spark is an incredible addition: it has two options for its own use, as either a straight up heal for an ally, or a potential damage burst for a foe. It’s been constructed with built-in scaling, gaining an additional d8 each time your proficiency bonus increases, and all of this is on top of Channel Divinity now having a number of uses equal to your proficiency bonus.

Additionally, with this iteration of Turn Undead, we have a look at a new condition in the game, “Dazed.” Dazed looks wonderful as a potential replacement for some of the more punishing stuns and other CC effects, since it still allows the affected creature to use either their action or their movement, rather than be completely locked down. Turn Undead also still specifically limits undead to only being allow to move, so there’s no loss of effectiveness for the cleric there.

Next, the cleric gains a new built option with Holy Order at second level. Now, a cleric can choose to either be trained in heavy armor and martial weapons no matter what domain they select, gain two additional skill proficiencies with an added bonus equal to your wisdom modifier, or an additional cantrip and the ability to restore one use of their Channel Divinity on a short rest. They also are able to select a second option later on at 9th level. This puts much more into the player’s hands when they’re building their cleric, and that’s a good direction for the game to be heading in.

We’ll dive a bit more into life domain shortly, so next I’m looking at the new functionality of Smite Undead. This sounds like a straight up improvement to me. Previously, Smite Undead outright destroyed undead monsters below a certain challenge rating, but, usually, monsters that would be destroyed by it were showing up less frequently as you grew more powerful. Now, no matter how strong an undead you’re facing, you can potentially deal damage and harm them.

Blessed Strikes is a transplant from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything‘s optional new features, and I think it’s great to see it become baseline.

And, last for this section, is Divine Intervention. In my opinion, this remains as a very odd feature in the game. It’s both extremely rare for its effect to occur, but also not at all rare if your players are gaming the system a bit and attempting it every day during travel or downtime? In a reddit thread, I saw a comment that proposed a complete redesign: basically, instead of it having the “ask for anything you want” component of the Wish spell, give it the other component – allow it to cast a spell from the divine spell list whether you have it prepared or not without consuming a spell slot. The commentor proposed it allowing you to cast a spell with a 4th level slot when the feature is gained at 11, and then bumping it to a 7th level slot at 18. I personally like this version so much, I might allow any future cleric players to switch to it whether it’s codified into the rules or not.

Life Domain

Life domain remains mostly unchanged here, for good or ill. Their domain spell list has seen a bit of a shake-up: there’s no 1st level spells on the list, Spiritual Weapon has been replaced with Prayer of Healing (more on both of these spells later), Beacon of Hope has been usurped by Mass Healing Word, there’s Aura of Life over Guardian of Faith, and Greater Restoration over Raise Dead. Personally, I think these are all much more fitting or better staple spells to have prepared, so that’s a win.

Disciple of Life has a cheeky little clause addition to close a rules loophole related to Goodberry, which is another good change. Blessed Healer has moved four levels down for its acquisition but remained unchanged otherwise, but that’s counterbalanced with Supreme Healing also staying unchanged and coming up from 17th level to 14th.

Lastly is the domain’s unique Channel Divinity, Preserve Life, unchanged and dropped from 2nd level to 6th. I think, ultimately, this now has a weird place in the system with Divine Spark’s existence. Unless you can really get nearly all of the hit points Preserve Life can restore, I think Divine Spark is generally the better option. Of course, it’s also got potentially many more uses with the new scaling on Channel Divinity, so its power might be fine: you could use Preserve Life to keep your party fighting in a challenging encounter well beyond where they’d normally be toast.

I’m still uncertain if I’m happy with it though. I’ve rarely seen it used overall, and it usually has a lot of HP remaining that it can’t spend when I do see it expended. It might be okay if it spent its pool of hit points to bring everyone in range up to their halfway point, then allowed the cleric to spend what’s leftover however they chose? But that might be overly complicated. Maybe I’ll make a magic item that does that if anyone picks up life domain in one my games in the future.

Now, onto the really controversial stuff: spell changes.

Adjusted Spells

We’ll dive right into the big one here: Spiritual Weapon. The overall reaction here seems to be anger at a nerf to the spell’s functionality, but … I think it’s a good change – a healthy one. The way Jeremy Crawford and Todd Kenreck discussed it in this video (@2:30) in regards to spells that are both effective over the course of several rounds that also extend a player’s turns makes perfect sense to me. As a trade-off, its scaling has been vastly improved, gaining more damage each slot used above 2nd level rather than every second slot level above. I think if its speed were doubled (or at a minimum set to 30 ft.), it would be perfect, because its inability to keep pace with nearly every monster in the game is going to feel even worse now.

Otherwise, I think most of what’s here is a clear positive. Resistance has become another reaction cantrip that makes it much more viable as a pick up. Guidance had its absurdly limited use clause removed and it’s just down to a shortened range to adjust its new functionality. Prayer of Healing is incredibly powerful now that it grants the party an abbreviated short rest with bonus healing, even if a creature can only gain the benefit once per long rest it’s an incredible spell.

The other elephant in the room here is Banishment, which, again … I think is overall a healthier adjustment to the game. Hard CC effects have been a long running topic of discussion between my current players and I (one which has a blog post in the drafting phase), and this spell gaining a roll to end the effect each round just brings it in-line with other similar spells. It does, unfortunately mean that its cool feature of potentially removing the target back to its plane of origin is a much rarer occurrence, but I think there’s potentially other ways that can be addressed here than making it a spell that just utterly removes someone from the fight anyway. Perhaps the spell’s effect can remain even if the creature makes its saving throw, and if you can maintain the spell for the full minute, it successfully banishes the creature. Maybe it can send them back to the demiplane at the start of their turns if they fail the saving throw again, like a reverse Blink. Maybe they can build-in the listed creatures having an innate weakness to this specific spell and they roll against it at disadvantage. I just remember a cleric enemy using this once against a player back when my campaign was much younger than it is now, and the only recourse the party had was to wail on the enemy until they broke their concentration, and the affected player just had to wait for them to succeed.

Well, that’s not entirely comprehensive of the changes presented in this UA, but it is everything I had something to say about. As always, thank you for reading! Good luck out there, heroes.

December 8, 2022
D&D: Player Power Optimization

The D&D fandom at large has baggage with the term “power gaming.” Across the internet, there are thousands of posts bemoaning the practice and deterring new players from pursuing power for their character. Some go so far as to say that anyone “roll-playing” over “role-playing” are unwelcome at their tables; that having even one such guest detracts from everyone else’s fun at their table. And, more power to them. If they think people who play this way won’t gel with their game’s style, that’s a perfectly valid reason to disallow someone from joining your table. It could save a lot of headache from coming up down the road.

But the stigma is everywhere. Which is a little strange, right? After all, it’s perfectly natural to want to be strong in the fantasy game you’re playing. You’re the heroes of the adventure. Not everyone wants to be the farmer kid out of their depth. Some people want to play a veteran adventurer who knows what they’re doing. It can be a great time to be a group of bumbling fools that somehow make their way through a dragon’s lair by sheer luck, and if you’re running a less serious kind of game, that might be the perfect fit.

But if you’re running a campaign that takes itself seriously, with dangerous foes that will challenge the players’ ability to think strategically – why should they be pressured away from making powerful characters?

But this aversion didn’t come from nowhere. I’ve got some theories; I’ve done some research. Let’s sort the whole thing out.

Optimization isn’t the Problem

As far as the D&D fandom goes, there exists a clear, hard line between “min-maxxers” and “power gamers.” And, defined the way I’ve seen, I don’t disagree with the delineation. So, by and large, “min-maxxers” are players who are making the best choices they can with their character to make them as powerful as they can be, and the fandom at large doesn’t consider this a bad thing. Building to get the maximum bonus from your primary ability score early into the game isn’t something they do with their nose pinched so they don’t have to smell the stench. It’s a normal and valid thing to do.

In an ancient post on Wizards of the Coast’s forums in 2006, user Tempest Stormwind made a post to really enshrine the dissonance as fallacious, the Stormwind Fallacy (reposted here on reddit). He concluded “D&D, like it or not, has elements of both optimization AND roleplay in it. Any game that involves rules has optimization, and any role-playing game has roleplay. These are inherent to the game.” It is pointless to behave like either precludes a player from engaging in the other.

But “power gaming” has an entirely different definition: one that newer players might not realize makes it something wholly uglier and less welcome than simple min-maxxing.

Power gaming, in this context, is reserved for players that don’t just want their character to be powerful. They want their character to be the most powerful. They aren’t satisfied unless the other players’ characters are weaker than theirs. They want to frustrate the DM by killing the biggest monster in one turn and ruining the experience for everyone else. Or they want to dictate to other players what they should be doing every turn to have the greatest effect on the battlefield.

In a lot of other gaming spheres, the terms are kind of interchangeable. And carrying that learned understanding into D&D might be a deterrent for newer players, forcing them to think that making their characters strong is something to be looked down upon. Posts still crop up across the fandom to ask why “power gaming” is so hated, what’s wrong with wanting your character to be powerful? And it might be difficult for them to discover that optimizing their character isn’t the issue.

But there is another facet here that’s worth discussing.

The Arms Race

Combat in D&D can quickly become an area of the game that creates imbalance. If you have a table that’s split down the middle between min-maxxers and people casually playing the game, the optimization-focused players are likely to overshadow the casual players’ characters, intentionally or not. If these optimized characters smash through an encounter or two, the DM may scale the difficulty up to ensure that combat doesn’t become an uninteresting slog and remains challenging. The min-maxxing players have further incentive to pursue power to ensure that the challenges presented can still be overcome, and those casual players might be left even further behind.

There’s certainly something to be said for how that can completely change the dynamics of the table. It’s unfair to assume that everyone enjoys optimizing their characters, and if we want to acknowledge that optimization is a way people have fun in games, then we also need to accept that suboptimal play and casual interaction is equally valid.

How can we address that? If we’re playing a game with our friends and they interact with games in different ways, can we come to some middle ground? Is the onus entirely on the DM, or the min-maxxers? Should they tone it down? Or ask the casual player to step up?

My own table could be considered split down the middle. My current party consists of a cleric, a paladin, a barbarian, and a druid. The cleric and paladin have optimized their characters to be strong, while the barbarian is a newer player, and our druid is extremely busy with her job so she can’t put in the time to game the system as well as the others can. What did we do?

Well, we weren’t utterly hands-off when they were making characters. We helped them allocate their points for point-buy, we advise them on feats when they ask, and discussed different subclass options. They’ve built powerful characters in their own right, even if they weren’t specifically engaging with the system to do so alone.

We also approached some rigid rules with some more leniency. For instance, barbarians in 5th edition are most powerful when wielding a greataxe or other d12 weapon, and my player wanted to take the Piercer feat with its synergy for adding more dice to his crits. Rather than force him to use a lance or rapier, I allowed him to just take it with his greataxe.

I also don’t get punitive with the rules. If my players are doing something suboptimal or if they forget to mention something, I don’t hold them to their lack of word, and I’ll remind them that they have another option that they might have been meaning to think of. For instance, our Circle of Stars druid had believed that the bonus healing provided by her Chalice starry form required her bonus action, but I reminded her that it didn’t, and she could still use one during a major fight.

It’s a simple thought for me: if we’re going to have a TPK, we’re going to have one by the rules. If their character is balanced to be capable of something or intended to be able to use an ability, I’m not going to be looking for a specific set of circumstances or a forgotten word to take it away from them. If my barbarian forgets to rage on the first turn, but they still have their bonus action, I’ll let them throw it on and add that bonus damage, even if they already rolled to hit an enemy. I run tough battles, but they’re not balanced to only be hard if they’re forgetting how to play their characters.

It’s a middle ground that works perfectly for my table. All the players feel like they have an equal chance to make big swings in an encounter to affect the battlefield, and no one is left to feel like they’re underperforming. It does require a bit more creativity when it comes to encounter design: more powerful monsters, unique challenges – but I’ve been at this for over a decade and I’m not even close to being out of ideas.

There’s only one wrong way to play D&D, and that’s only if people aren’t having fun. Knowing which rules you can handwave comes with experience, but a good rule-of-thumb is to allow flavor choices through without layering a drawback on a character’s efficiency. If you want to be doing wrestling maneuvers to style your attacks while dealing your longsword damage? That’s no problem for me. Just ask your DM, and I expect they’ll say the same. I always loved it when my players were engaged enough to say more than just “I attack,” chances are they will be too.

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

December 1, 2022
Ebonskar and D&D – How Much Changed?

Since its release last year, I’ve made it no secret that much of the story of Ebonskar was inspired by a D&D campaign I ran featuring the titular character as its primary villain. Obviously, a lot of changes occurred to craft a narrative fit for a novel, but many of the characters and facts of the world were kept whole in the adjustment. With today being the one year anniversary of Ebonskar’s launch, I thought it would be fun to invite you to take a closer look at some of the changes that were made.

As a warning, this post will contain some spoilers for the novel, but I’ll do my best to avoid anything too significant.

What characters in the novel originated in the campaign?

Several of the characters I created as NPCs carried over into the novel. In the game, Kheta existed, but she had fled Rafdorek alone. And, she wasn’t responsible for the invention of firearms: she’d just been a garden variety smith who got fed up with the society and decided to leave. She ran the only forge in the town the campaign began in, and was the first clue about where the game was ultimately going to go. One of the first quests in the campaign was to track down and defeat a Hobgoblin Iron Shade that had come to the town specifically to kill Kheta.

Captain Jameson had a different name (Captain Thomas), but his role as guard captain that’s been left in charge of the town because of a pause in greater politics remained. And Lieutenant Nicholas carried over, as did his heroic sacrifice when Ebonskar came to the town.

However, beyond them, it’s almost entirely the hobgoblins that carried over (Redeye, Scalpseam, Charscowl, many others – all names I used in the campaign). Most of the other characters were entirely invented for the novel, or were so fundamentally changed that sharing a name isn’t enough for me to think of them as being the same.

Did the Geren-thal change at all?

All of the Geren-thal with the sole exception of Inquisitor Suthri existed in the campaign and were defeated by the party eventually. Suthri was created for the novel when I expanded Rafdorek’s history and society more than I had for the campaign. An inquisition made perfect sense for the oppressive regime and the original Eighth of the Geren-thal was simply a ranger-styled hobgoblin fighter.

They were set up in a more gamified manner, however. Each one’s rank was an indicator for how powerful they were. Ebonskar was fourth, and the first the party encountered. In the battle, the party had two allies they’d gained that helped even the playing field. Ebonskar was built off of a 15th level fighter, and the players came up against him when they were around level 7 or 8.

Did any of the player’s characters transition over?

No – or at least, not in Ebonskar. Many of the characters wouldn’t work in the more restricted setting for the novel. In the party, we had a dragonborn paladin, a halfling barbarian, and my brothers were a drow gunslinger and a human ranger with a wolf companion. The setting as adjusted for the novel lacks both elves and halflings, so neither of those characters would transition over well. The deregal are more-or-less the dragonborn, so the paladin could work, but I also believe those characters belong to my friends who played them: even with their permission, I can’t say I’d want to write them myself.

The only facet that carried over at all was that my brother’s drow had discovered the plans for firearms when his people had raided a dwarven settlement and decided to hide them from his people and escape to the surface. The dwarves had long ago made firearms and decided they were horribly dangerous and refused to trade them. The other nations of the world tried to force them to do so, and lost what was then remembered as the Thundering War.

So, the deregal are basically dragonborn, the hobgoblins are practically one-to-one – did the Jerrath exist?

They did not! I decided before I got into writing Ebonskar that I didn’t want it to be as sprawling as a D&D setting with a vast array of fantasy races. Orcs are among my favorites of the usual inclusions, and I didn’t want to lose the “these people are just all big and badass” flair with their absence. I started creating the Jerrath, and my first visualizations had them more similar to the Amani trolls from Warcraft than they ended up being. (I had this very well defined picture of Zephal in my imagination: massive, muscular, long curled tusks coming down from his upper lip, a vibrant mohawk. It’s really just the tusks that didn’t carry over.) I also generally like the “we have been here longer than everyone else and we live longer” trait of elven races and how that can add a different texture to a setting, so that got rolled into the Jerrath too. In the D&D campaign, the world was even still named Crucible, only in Elvish!

Obviously the rules for magic are codified in a D&D game, how did the magic system in the novel evolve to where it ended up?

The “vancian magic” of D&D wasn’t something I wanted to copy full cloth into the novel, so I knew I was going to be changing things up. When I was writing Ebonskar, I was playing through Dark Souls III for the fourth or fifth time and happened to be running a pyromancer build. I loved the divide in the game of pyromancy, sorcery, and miracle-based divine casting and the divisions of magic were inspired by that. I love magic in fantasy novels because it can create incredible moments, but without any sort of included drawback having a wizard around can make it difficult to keep tension. Having magic turn into something of a faucet that the spell casters have to very carefully use or risk drowning themselves into nonexistence felt like a good stopgap to allow for some impressive feats that couldn’t solve every single issue the characters came across.

How did Tanda exist in the campaign?

As a different, much more centrally located town called Borno’s Crossing. It began as a bridge over a river along a major trade route before a Trader’s Highway went up and it fell off with reduced foot traffic. The premiere establishment was Brandywood’s, a tavern opened by Borno Brandywood when he founded the town about three hundred years before the campaign. When the party arrived, it was operated by his great-great-niece. A lot of the opening quests did lay hints regarding the hobgoblin threat, but the party didn’t track them down, and their big hurrah before Ebonskar arrived was defeated a hag that had been terrorizing the town for half a decade. Much like Tanda, it did suffer Ebonskar’s presence first in Vromali, and running the game that evening was really something.

As a bonus, I’ve used dndbeyond to create a more presentable stat block for Ebonskar (my old notes were a mess) and had some artwork done up! If you’ve got any interested in using Ebonskar against your players, here’s the stats I made to run him as an enemy against my own party.

As always, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this little retrospective.

November 18, 2022