Ben Stovall Blog

Tag: gaming

  • D&D: The Imbalance of Hard CC

    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.

  • OneD&D: The Cleric

    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.

  • D&D: Player Power Optimization

    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.

  • Ebonskar and D&D – How Much Changed?

    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.

  • D&D: Power Differential Between Classes

    D&D: Power Differential Between Classes

    In D&D, martial fighters and spell casters have vastly different powersets. In any game with choices that affect a character’s power, there will always be power differential between the presented options. One will always be the strongest, most efficient way to damage or control your foes – and one will always be the weakest, least valuable option. When it comes to the fandom at large, there’s a widespread conception that martial characters (fighters, monks, barbarians: those who do not have access to spells) are inherently weaker and more restricted than their spell casting counterparts.

    This is a bit of a strange topic for me.

    In my decade and more of running D&D, I’ve never had someone play a martial character at my table and be upset about the power differential. This is not at all to imply that it doesn’t exist or isn’t as bad as the math makes it out to be. A wizard throwing a fireball into a packed room is overpowered by design, and of course it does more damage for that action than the fighter can manage with two swings of their sword.

    Design-wise, Wizards thought that the best way to address the differential would be in limiting the number of fireballs that wizard can throw. At fifth level, the wizard gets two spell slots of the requisite level, and the ability to get another one back on a short rest once a day. In the books, Wizards listed their ideal adventuring day to consist of seven to eight encounters, so the wizard wouldn’t be able to fireball every battle, while the fighter’s steady ability to attack twice in a round would never lose value throughout the day.

    But I don’t know anyone who has ever had consistent adventuring days with that encounter volume. D&D has evolved a lot over the years, and it isn’t just a string of dungeon crawls with a half dozen encounters between each long rest. At my table, I generally only run somewhere between three and five encounters in a day, but I ratchet them up in difficulty: almost every one of them would qualify as a “deadly” encounter by the game’s rules, and once the party starts getting magic items, they ramp up even further. Yet, despite that jump in difficulty, I still haven’t had my players complain that their fighter isn’t able to clear a room like the wizard can. In my own limited opportunities to be a player at someone else’s table, I’ve usually chosen martial characters and never felt disadvantaged by the differential.

    So, I want to try and nail that down. Here’s some factors I’ve had on my mind since I discussed this with a few friends. Let’s see if we can parse something out.

    Choice in D&D

    One piece of this discussion I haven’t touched on yet is the versatility of spells. Wizards and clerics have a lot of different things they can accomplish with their magic, both in and out of combat. It trends toward the belief that fighters and barbarians need more things they can do outside of combat, more abilities and tools that can be used so they’re more valuable on the whole. In Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, they added some optional features to barbarians that trended this way: giving them more skill proficiencies and the ability to cast Speak with Animals as a ritual.

    I’m not sure that’s the right direction for them to move, though. A friend of mine is beginning a new game in a few weeks, and I’ve actually settled on a fighter for my newest PC. I’m incredibly excited about my character, who I’ve built to be a normal freaking guy. I specifically don’t want him to gain innate magic in any way during the game – from an item? Sure, that’s fine. But he is just a normal dwarf.

    I don’t worry at all that I’m going to be lacking choices with him. Not in combat or out of it. Every piece of every turn is a choice – where I’ll move, who I choose to attack, how I might spend an action if no one is in reach of my weapons. A wizard or cleric might have the same decision points and a few more when it comes to their long list of spells and different levels at which to cast them, but in the grand scheme of the game, I don’t think it’s really that many more.

    Because character creation is the most amount of choices anyone makes in D&D, and the moments between combat are nearly just as freeform as that. I think the standard volume of decision points that every character has access to is so high by default, that the additional decisions provided by access to spellcasting is negligible overall.

    And maybe it’s really an implicit understanding that fuels this. Anyone who chooses to play a fighter knows that they won’t have spells (with the exception of one subclass). Understanding that intrinsically might be why none of my players have ever broached the topic.

    Wizards Do Not Cast Spells in a Vacuum

    As I mentioned before, fireball is by design the most effective tool to clear a packed room. It is intentionally a spike of power that breaks the more linear advancement of spells. Burning Hands is the most near-equivalent spell at 1st level, and it is only 3d6 in a 15-foot cone originating from you. Fireball is a 20-foot radius sphere that you can place anywhere within 150 feet that deals 8d6 damage. It is safer, larger, and more damaging. Casting Burning Hands at 3rd level only deals a measly 5d6. The value between the two isn’t even close.

    It obviously does more damage on cast than a fighter can manage as long as there’s multiple targets. In a formless void of grey sludge, the wizard can destroy more of that sludge per round with his spells than the fighter can manage.

    But no combat plays out like that.

    If there are three enemy martial characters in a battle that the party’s fighter is keeping from chasing down the wizard, and, safe from repercussions, that wizard casts a spell that changes the texture of the battle? I believe it’s fair to say the fighter contributed to that spell’s casting. Battlefield control isn’t something that only spells accomplish – every square of movement affects how the enemies will act on their turn, and their actions affect the party’s decisions. Hold Person is an excellent tool to lock an enemy down, but it gets its best value when a martial can capitalize on the critical strikes it confers. The best way to remove an enemy from the fight is to reduce their hitpoints to 0, after all. Hold Person itself doesn’t do any damage, and the enemies can save out of the effect at the end of each of their turns.

    A Point of Philosophy

    All this boils down to D&D being first and foremost a game about teamwork and camaraderie. When I play a fighter and see a wizard cast Fireball and clear a room of mooks, I never think, “Man. As a fighter, I can’t do anything like that.” I think instead, “Wow, incredible! Thank goodness one of my allies can do something like that.“

    I’ve never sat at a table where the characters that killed the most enemies got bonus experience – when the encounter ends, everyone gets the same amount. That’s how I’ve always run it. That’s how Wizards intended it to be run with 5th edition, because no matter whatever differential in power exists, every encounter is affected by every member of the party.

    And, again, I am not at all claiming that the differential isn’t there – it is. But I do think it’s become a bit overblown of late. With the OneD&D information on a slow drip, people are wondering what, if anything, might be done to address it. Will Wizards back pedal to 5th edition’s play test and give every fighter some maneuvers? (I think that would be great.) With the nerfs to Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master, people are curious if the gap is going to widen. I’m not worried–because if things don’t shake out, I’ll just keep running 5th edition.

    Maybe the differential is felt more keenly for your players, or even for you. If that’s the case, the best thing to do is to talk to your DM or the table and find out if there’s something to be done for it or change tack. Keep presenting interesting arenas and scenarios that cause variation in the value of a spell – Spirit Guardians on an armored cleric is a great tool to deal damage to a thick mob of enemies, but when there’s only a few, spread out spell casters and bowmen, it’s not the end-all answer any longer.

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

  • The Pokémon Problem

    The Pokémon Problem

    Back in 2019, Nintendo and Gamefreak made a highly anticipated announcement for the next mainline Pokémon games, Sword and Shield. With one controversial decision made during development, this became one of the most divisive reveals ever made by the company. For the first time, a mainline entry in the Pokémon series would not launch with support for all of the previous Pokémon. Sword and Shield would release with a significantly reduced roster.

    This announcement ignited a backlash still burning to this day. People called for boycotts. Internet petitions were signed. We desperately wanted Gamefreak to reconsider this choice, but the fandom’s arguments fell on deaf ears. Sword and Shield were the first Pokémon games I did not buy.

    Now, new releases are yet again on the horizon: Scarlett and Violet, and again, they will launch bereft of hundreds of Pokémon. This post is going to dive in on this controversy – to examine why it mattered then and why it matters now. To clarify why Gamefreak’s excuses don’t satisfy many former fans.

    Every Pokémon is Someone’s Favorite Pokémon

    I remember reading through threads upon threads on Reddit when the announcement came through. So many people were upset with Gamefreak’s decision and they were listing their favorites and despondent at the possibility that they might be absent from a future title. It was astounding how varied each comment read. Pokémon I had no care for whatsoever were hailed as a poster’s favorite, or their sibling’s, or their child’s. Pokémon widely considered ugly or poorly designed (people harped on the ice-cream-cone Pokémon for years) were beloved by someone. Some artist painstakingly designed these creatures. And it never sat right with me that they would just toss them aside like that.

    One of Gamefreak’s chief reasons for their choice came down to the ever growing roster of Pokémon in their games. Right now, prior to the launch of their new games, there are 905 Pokémon in the Pokédex. Yeah. It’s a lot. But it has always been a strength of their design that you can nearly always tell what type of Pokémon you’re up against immediately. Each environment carries an implicit rule for the encounters you can expect. You never have to walk into a gym or Elite Four match blind. The design of their trainer sprites clued players in on the type of Pokémon those trainers would field. Ultimately, I don’t find the claim of a bloated roster compelling in the least – I believe it to be undermined by the excellent clarity existent already in each game.

    At the time of the announcement, a counter-argument sprung up to call for the fanbase’s understanding of Gamefreak’s decision. Commentors asked, “How many people will this really affect?” How many players of the Pokémon games will really be disenfranchised by these limitations? What’s the percentage of Gamefreak’s player base that use every Pokémon or have collected them each? And, clearly, collecting a “Living Dex*” or constantly switching between dozens and dozens of Pokémon is something a low number of players would do in these games. I myself collected a near-complete Living Dex (missing only a percentage of the event-only Pokémon) back in Pokémon Y (and though Pokémon Sun ended up being my last venture into the franchise to present, I did not at the time invest the time to fill out that game’s Pokédex). But, I think that’s ultimately incorrect.

    The truth is, this decision affected every player. Maybe their favorite Pokémon had the fortune to remain in the roster, but their second, third, seventy-eighth favorite–maybe they weren’t. Perhaps they just had an enormously abridged list of potential enemies. The games lost the true extent of their variability, and I don’t think that was the right decision to make.

    Regional Forms: A Flawed Compromise

    In Pokémon Sun and Moon, Gamefreak added a new variable to the mix: classic Pokémon with new appearances based on the environments in the latest games. Looking back, I think this was an attempt at future-proofing the games by reducing the volume of new Pokémon added each game. I think it’s possible Gamefreak by the time of Sun and Moon knew they would need to change their strategy when it comes to the addition of new Pokémon, and with regional forms they might’ve been trying to walk the middle road. They could add new, exciting Pokémon appearances and fill out the availability of Pokémon types, while having a version of older Pokémon that wouldn’t carry the expectation of being carried forward. Alolan Vulpix is from Alola, after all. Do we need to worry about its availability in the next region?

    But therein lies the problem, right? What if Alolan Vulpix or Ninetails becomes you favorite Pokémon in the space of Sun and Moon? With a DLC package, many Alolan Pokémon became available in Sword and Shield, is that going to be standard going forward? Is it acceptable to put these Pokémon behind an additional paywall beyond the game itself?

    New Pokémon are always the most exciting part of each new generation. My friends that have interest in Scarlet and Violet love Fidough and Lechonk. They had their starting Pokémon selected months ago. Just rebranding an old design doesn’t carry the same splash. Wooper’s got a new type and a palette swap! Ok? It just doesn’t land in the same way this adorably chubby pig.

    Regional forms fell short of both of their goals I assume they were intended to reach. They aren’t as exciting to obtain as truly new Pokémon, and they didn’t aid in the reduction of new Pokémon in a way that kept them from needing to limit the roster. And it is a shame, because Pokémon reacting to different environments to become discernibly different is a good idea: I just think it came much too late. That role had already been taken by a wide array of new Pokémon being available in every region.

    There isn’t a Hoenn region Pidgey, they have Taillow. They have Plusle and Minun, Pikachu was in the exotic safari zone.

    Conclusion

    This post isn’t meant at all to call for a boycott or dissuade a Pokémon fan from buying the next game in one of their favorite series. Scarlet and Violet will at a minimum be the standard Pokémon fare, and they’ve been the name in monster-pet-battling games for decades. It’s likely to be another fun romp in a beloved series I spent a lot of time on as a child and teen and young adult. But I won’t be there until all of the Pokémon are in again – and not as DLC, but from the jump.

    As always, thank you for reading. Now, I need to go run uselessly after a trio of criminals while an electric rat rescues himself with a blast of lightning.

  • OneD&D: Expert Classes

    OneD&D: Expert Classes

    Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast dropped their second set of playtest materials for the upcoming OneD&D featuring the rules for Rogues, Rangers, and Bards, the new spell list divisions, a wide selection of feats, and some updates to the glossary. Overall? I find myself immensely impressed – not only with the rules themselves, but with Wizards’ commitment to trying new ideas and responding to community feedback.

    So, here’s some of the highlights.

    General Rules Changes

    One of the best changes Wizards has settled on so far is to normalize subclass feature acquisition. Everyone in this UA gets those bonuses at the same levels, and it sounds like they want that to be the case for everyone. They’ve also moved the “Capstone” feature for each class down to level 18, which makes them much more attainable for the normal game group, and you’ll actually get to have them for some time before the game reaches its end. (I’ve yet to have a game reach level 20, but I don’t imagine it would go much further beyond that anyway.)

    Dual-wielding got a massive change to make it much more viable. Now, attacking with an off-hand weapon is part of your Attack action, instead of costing your bonus action. For rogues and rangers, this change is massive. Cunning action and adjusting hunter’s mark just got a lot less painful if you wanted to fight with two swords.

    They’re testing out some new stuff with Natural 20s and 1s. They’ve struck the line about an automatic success on a Natural 20 after the community reception, but they want to test having a Natural 1 grant your character advantage when it’s the result of a skill check. I think it takes the sting out of a one, certainly, but it mostly just moves that pain point onto rolling a 2. I talked in my last blog about enjoying the momentum of inspiring each other on Natural 20s, so it’s likely that I’d choose that rule over this one.

    Feats of at least 4th level all appear to have an ability score bump added to them now, which is great! My players and I have been talking about adjusting some rules for our next campaign, and one thing we’ve been considering is a much lower budget for point buy, but gaining more power on each ASI/Feat level to accentuate a power curve. Some feats got a bit better than they were before, others had some power stripped down. Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter both lost the drop 5 from your attack roll for 10 additional damage, and I’m in favor. Those two feats presented so much power it was nearly impossible to justify anything else if you cared even a little about optimization. Polearm Master also had its reaction attack changed to no longer be specified as an Attack of Opportunity, which makes its combination with Sentinel much less frustrating.

    Rogues

    Rogue is, in my opinion, one of 5th edition’s best designed classes, perhaps the best. It has a clear mechanical throughline during combat: you get one big hit, so ensure you’re set up to land it. Its subclasses have all added unique flavor and power without utterly invalidating the others as they’ve been released. I haven’t been a player often throughout 5th edition’s lifetime, but when it comes to characters I made for anything longer than a one-shot, I’ve run rogues more than anything else. My current PC is a rogue that is adventuring in the Sword Coast in some homebrew content post-Rime of the Frostmaiden. My first 5th edition character was a rogue.

    Wizards themselves knew they’d done a great job with the class, and so it’s seen relatively few changes here. Most of their features are intact, just shifted a bit in their acquisition. Evasion has dropped to a 9th-level feature instead of 7th, but that truly feels more in-line with its power and it makes room for earlier acquisition of subclass features – which definitely came in a bit too late before. The rogue picked their subclass, like most, at 3rd level, then didn’t get their follow-up features until 9th, 13th, and 17th level. The majority of Wizards’ published adventures end around 12th level, so most had a 6 level gap between their subclass features, then their games were close to finishing.

    Slippery Mind at 15th level now gives proficiency in Wisdom and Charisma saving throws, to make rogues even harder to nail down. (That’s four out of six saving throw proficiencies in the base class!) Subtle Strikes is the one new feature for the base rogue, replacing Blindsense, which is a massive trade-up in power at the loss of being able to detect invisible creatures within a mere 10 feet.

    Then there’s the Thief. In the interview with Jeremy Crawford, they talked a lot about just letting the thief cheat and break the rules, and boy did they mean it. Thieves gaining a climb speed flat out is an elegant adjustment toward using more concise rules language than before. Allowing them to use their Dexterity for the new jump calculation is great. Permanent advantage on stealth checks so long as they’re not wearing medium or heavy armor? Few rogues do that, anyway. And then they gain an additional item attunement, a chance to save their item’s charges, an ability to use any scroll they find (and with expertise, a way to guarantee they can use whatever scrolls they want), and then, finally, to occasionally get TWO bonus actions? I think this is a huge improvement for the subclass. Two bonus actions might be less powerful than getting two turns in the first round of a battle, but it’s much more game-friendly, and usable throughout an encounter rather than just at the beginning of one.

    Rangers

    I think the ranger here looks better than ever. Despite some decent updates and subclasses throughout 5th edition, the class never managed to entirely shake off its underpowered reputation from its reception. I’m a fan of them becoming a Prepared caster instead of a Memorized one, giving them the ability to cast Hunter’s Mark without concentration is great, since that spell iconic for their class. Allowing them to take Fighting Styles as feats even though they aren’t of the “Warrior” class group is great. I love roving giving them 40 feet of movement and a climb and swim speed. Rangers picking up Expertise is great, I think Tireless is awesome, and it looks like they nabbed the rogue’s blindsight feature and improved it, going as far as 30 feet of blindsight.

    Hunter’s features are interesting, too. They’ve removed the Colossus Slayer / Giant Killer / Horde Breaker choice, and made Colossus Slayer baseline, which I believe to be a good adjustment. They’ve changed the second feature to grant Hunter’s Mark the ability to reveal immunities, resistances, and vulnerabilities. And their last feature is like a rogue’s uncanny dodge, but it hurts someone else? I love it.

    Bards

    Bards are also becoming a prepared caster (and I think it’s even better for them than it is for rangers), but their spell choice limitation survives in allowing them to access the Arcane list, but only choose spells that are Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, or Transmutation. There’s a lot of good spells there I can recall from the top of my head, however. Haste, Hold Person, Catapult, Blur, Hideous Laughter. The biggest thing here is that their Magical Secrets feature is also spells the prepare! So each day they’ll get to pick a few spells from the list they chose without limitation once they get that feature.

    Bardic Inspiration is also so much cooler as a reaction, so you know it’s getting used and might change the result. Also, it can be used to heal now, which is incredible. At 1st level, a bard can heal you for 1d6 as a reaction after you suffer damage within 60 feet. It’s the best healing on the market!

    They’ve also given bards a selection of healing spells to have prepared for free, to really emphasize their support role.

    All of this to say, these new playtest rules have provided some very welcome context to the way Wizards of the Coast is considering the rules for OneD&D. If we can expect more drops like this, the next evolution of the game is looking very bright. I can’t think of a single piece of this set of rules I didn’t like, so I’m excited to see more. I think the biggest hurdle is going to be a fear that Wizards has a good idea that is shot down by the community for being too powerful or good: like the Battlemaster maneuvers of Fighter were originally intended to be a class feature, and not just a subclass, which would’ve been a much more interesting design space. I’d hate to see something like that get watered down again, but I’m feeling really hopeful for now.

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

  • Ben Recommends: A Starstruck Odyssey

    Ben Recommends: A Starstruck Odyssey

    It feels like every time I write about media on this blog, it’s in a negative–or at least critical light. Partially, there’s something easier about criticism; it’s really apparent when there’s something you don’t like. It can be harder to parse out the specifics of a piece of media that made you appreciate it.

    And it’s unfair, because there is a lot of media these days and so much of it is crafted with care and passion. So, that’s where this comes in. I want to celebrate works (movies, shows, etc.) that really resonated with me; I want to share out some positivity, some reinforcement. I want the things I love to get the recognition that they deserve.

    Welcome to Ben Recommends. Today, I want to talk about Dimension 20’s A Starstruck Odyssey.

    What is it?

    I’ve mentioned Dimension 20 and other “actual play” RPG shows on my D&D blog posts before. These days, Dimension 20 is my favorite of the bunch (more on that later). For the uninitiated, these “actual play” shows are a bunch of people playing a table-top role-playing game (TTRPG) on camera.

    Naturally, this isn’t something everyone will be interested in. You might love TTRPGs but watching someone else play will do nothing for you. You might have no experience in D&D or its contemporaries, and that lack of knowledge might cause the inherent limitations of the content to fall flat. However, there are tons of people who are fans of these shows despite never dabbling in RPGs themselves, so it might be worth a try regardless.

    Dimension 20 began after long-running Internet content creation company CollegeHumor picked up Brennan Lee Mulligan, featuring a mix of new and old CollegeHumor alumni as the cast (seven total, Brennan and six players). Unlike many other actual play shows, Dimension 20 has a staffed production team making their battle maps and miniatures and a set number of episodes each season (usually 17+ episodes for the core cast, and between 6-10 for “sidequest” campaigns with guests).

    In this specific season of Dimension 20, they used a heavily modified version of 5th edition D&D to run a crazy, galaxy-spanning adventure full of exciting shootouts and climactic space battles. This is the core D20 cast at their absolute best (yet). It is one of the most entertaining and compelling TTRPG shows I’ve ever seen.

    What do I like about it?

    Dimension 20 has explored a vast selection of settings since their first season. In Fantasy High, we have teenage heroes in a strikingly modern setting; the Unsleeping City is an urban fantasy in New York City; Escape From the Bloodkeep is an adventure about Not-Sauron-For-Legal-Reasons’s death and his lieutenants and advisors trying to keep everything they’ve fought for (evil) from collapsing.

    A Starstruck Odyssey is their first foray into the stars, and it couldn’t have been a more perfect setting for them to explore. It is an age of anarchy and the chaos gremlins are off the leash. The electricity of their first time at a table together since COVID-19 began fuels the game and their energy never comes down.

    It’s fast paced. It’s hilarious. I’ve never had more fun watching a show.

    How does it compare to similar shows?

    I mentioned earlier that D20 is my favorite show of its kind, and that’s for a reason others might view as a mark against the show.

    I like Dimension 20’s production. My longest-standing gripe with Critical Role (and even my own D&D games) is when the party waffles around, uncertain of what to do next. With Dimension 20’s limited seasons and driving narratives, there’s no time for that aimlessness. It is more of a “show” than Critical Role: less of a group of friends just recording their game and uploading as-is. But I’ve come to appreciate that artifice immensely.

    There’s less room for a long-term character reveal or mysterious overarching plot that spans several months of games, but for the trade they gained a show that I find vastly more watchable. I can actively view D20 with no distractions. Critical Role I generally listen to when I work or build maps for my own games. Where you fall between those two comes down to personal preference.

    Potential Cons

    There are some facets of this show that might be a dealbreaker for you.

    • Beyond the 1st episode, the show is behind a paywall on dropout.tv

    I think it’s entirely fair for the company and the team behind D20 to ask for compensation for their show, of course. But Dropout isn’t likely a service you’re using if you haven’t already seen A Starstruck Odyssey. I personally think the service is a great deal, and there’s other fun shows on there, but that barrier to entry might prove too high for some. (But! Those three other seasons I mentioned before? All of them are entirely available for free on Youtube!)

    • These are long episodes

    And the length is really variable. I didn’t have trouble keeping up week-to-week (or catching up on older seasons while I was unemployed), but there is a lot of content here. It might be unfeasible, even, depending on your schedule. But if I didn’t think it was worth the commitment, I wouldn’t have written this post.

    That seems to be the most critical and compelling talking points I could conjure. I’d love to hear from you if this post convinced you to give the show a try. As always, thank you for reading! It’s a tough galaxy out there, but someone’s got to live in it. It might as well be you!

  • 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.

  • 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.