Ben Stovall Blog

Tag: ttrpg

  • 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.

  • RPGs: Defining Dungeons

    RPGs: Defining Dungeons

    “Dungeon” is a pretty evocative term. The mere mention brings to mind buried, ancient ruins of civilizations long past, or maze-like tunnel networks that have been claimed by a dragon and its army of worshiper-supplicants, or a tomb filled with restless undead and traps to prevent access by looters and graverobbers. These all make for excellent adventure spaces in D&D, but it’s unnecessarily restrictive to think these are the only things dungeons can be.

    It’s not a stretch to imagine the entirety of a cursed swamp can function as a mega-dungeon that requires days to progress to each small dungeon within its bounds, but even something like a siege or a pitched battle might be best designed to function as a dungeon for your players.

    Today, we’re taking a look at how I’ve come define “dungeons” in D&D, and how I use that in my own adventure design.

    What is a Dungeon?

    At its most generalized, inclusive definition, I look at a dungeon as any gauntlet of two or more encounters in which the party’s ability to rest is restricted. This can be from danger, from time pressure – any reason the party might be unable to lay down and rest and feel completely safe. To return to the “cursed swamp mega-dungeon” example, both of my last campaigns began with “Eth-terel, the Cursed Bog,” a large swamp cursed by ancient magic, forcing any creatures who died within to rise into undeath each night and filled them with a ravenous frenzy.

    For the first several levels, the party’s expeditions into the swamp were short-term, never more than a day or two, and they quickly discovered areas where they might be able to rest, but not for free, such as Kortho’s ogre camp. Each night they wished to stay at Kortho’s camp, they had to aid the ogres in defending their walls. For two hours, they were set as additional defenders, and they battled a number of hard-to-deadly encounters with only a handful of minutes between. To earn a rest within the mega-dungeon, they had to survive a gauntlet, something that design-wise was basically a single-room dungeon (a single arena, the walls of the camp and the clear-cut woods immediately beyond).

    As the party became more capable and created their own safe areas by removing dangers from the swamp, they were able to progress deeper and deeper and finally reach the center and break the curse upon the land. Other dungeons here included a sunken fort, a compound belonging to an order of religious zealots that intended to break the curse themselves (with an ancient magic that would eradicate a tribe of peaceful lizardfolk as collateral damage), the Wovenwood (a thicket of woods conquered by giant spiders), and nearing the end, a portal into hell, a dragon’s lair, and finally the buried vault of an ancient lord.

    More recently, the party arrived at a pirate town, Freeport. The town had become a political powder keg, with the pirate cult of the Leviathan, the Fathomcallers, wanting to drown the world (the party’s at that level these days). They discovered through their prisoner, a Fathomcaller captain, that the gang intended to attack Freeport and neuter its ability to stand against them. Upon arrival, the party marched their prisoner through the streets to the queen’s set, and discovered that their actions caused the Fathomcallers to strike several days before their planned attack.

    Beginning at the throne room, the party needed to fight their way down to the docks to recapture the city’s port defenses and return to their ship. They were ambushed in the throne room, they battled foes at one of the city’s major centers, Westwind Square, they had heroic vignette moments to affect the battle at large by spending hit die, they needed to run through a street being raked by cannon fire to avoid another lengthy encounter, and finally took the battle to the Fathomcaller vice admiral upon his ship in the bay.

    This quickly became the easiest way I could organize my thoughts when it came to a battle like this in D&D. I knew the party wouldn’t have the chance to rest, so I built in a system to allow them to spend hit die to aid the people of the city, but then use whatever they had leftover at the end of that segment for healing. They had no opportunity to rest at all, and had to budget their resources accordingly. Building it out as a dungeon just made the most sense.

    So let’s get into how I organize my dungeon design.

    Outlining a Dungeon

    As a writer, I like outlines. I usually leave mine pretty open-ended to allow the story room to develop as I go, but I like to nail down the overall vision from the outset. I’ve built my dungeons using an outline structure for nearly half as long as I’ve been a DM, and it hasn’t steered me wrong yet.

    In my notes, I had “the Battle of Freeport” as the title, wrote a scenario summary, then went down point-by-point through the encounter spaces. I included a description of the room (its appearance, its function, etc.), what kind of encounter was present (I mostly list these as Combat, Social, Obstacle, or Hazard), and then I have another bullet point describing the details of the encounter (such as enemy types and numbers or the effects of the obstacle / hazard).

    And there you have it! A narrow definition of what a dungeon can be is a disservice to the breadth of what you’re capable of doing in D&D, and hopefully you can create even more unique and diverse adventure spaces with that in mind. 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • OneD&D: First Impression

    OneD&D: First Impression

    In another classic display of arriving tardy to a new topic that fits perfectly for my blog, it’s been about a month since OneD&D was announced as the next evolution of the game from Wizards of the Coast. But! If there’s any benefit to this lengthy of a delay, it’s that I’ve had a lot of time to digest the news and organize my thoughts on the first set of rules (PDF here). So, here’s my first impressions: the good, the bad, the somewhere in-between.

    The Good Stuff

    One of the most overt adjustments made in the ruleset is the movement of a granted increase to ability scores away from a character’s chosen race and into their background. It’s effortlessly elegant, adjusting D&D in a much needed way to be less oddly restrictive. An ASI from a character’s race was a long-outdated idea, but that bonus to a character’s ability wasn’t something the player base wanted to see stripped away entirely. It coming from the character’s life before they became an adventurer is the perfect adjustment.

    They also stepped forward with grace, clearly outlining that these bonuses from a character’s background should be their choice entirely, with a few template examples included. It’s an open invitation to consider how your character’s life shaped them, and what skills they’ll have gained that will help them attain success as a hero.

    In a different space of the game, the Grappled condition had its effects changed. Previously, it did nothing more than reduce a grappled creature’s speed to 0. Now, in addition, it imposes disadvantage on the grappled creature making attacks against anyone other than the grappler, it is much more thankfully clear how a grappler can move a grappled creature, and, my favorite of all, escaping a grapple has been added as a repeatable save at the end of each turn. Since 5th edition’s release, attempting to escape a grapple cost a creature’s entire action.

    A new mechanic I’m excited to use is the exciting momentum of granting the adventurers Inspiration on every roll of a Natural 20. When you crit, you get a floating reroll, but you can only ever bank one. Should you crit again before you spend it, you get to hand it off to another character. I’m downright excited to see this in action, to see the heroes really swing combat with a wave of inspiring strikes.

    Now, for a bit of utter speculation, this ruleset included an adjustment for the Slowed condition applied by various spells and abilities, while containing no mention of the Stunned condition. Hard crowd control abilities is something my players and I have discussed ad nauseum, and I’m hopeful that Stunned‘s absence from this document might imply that it is going to be replaced by the softer but still very useful new interpretation of Slowed. Reason being, it sucks to lose an entire turn. Stunning foes for the party feels great, but the second a foe stuns a party member, it feels horrendous. Were these effects lessened to halving your movement, granting advantage on attacks against you, and imposing disadvantage on your dexterity saving throws instead of all of that in addition to denying your entire turn, I believe it would make for a more enjoyable experience on either side of the screen.

    And lastly, Wizards has created a new delineation for their spell lists. Rather than a completely unique list for each class with some spells available in addition based on your subclass, they’ve divided the lists down to Arcane, Divine, and Primal. I like the change, and I’m extremely curious to learn more about it. Historically in D&D, some classes have had reduced options for their spell lists to push them toward certain roles: i.e., a bard in 5th edition does not get fireball unless they burn one of a very limited amount of “Magical Secrets” to gain it. It’s created flavor for subclasses, such as only a Fiendish patron for a warlock allowing them access to fireball, or the Genie patrons being the only one to put Wish on their spell list. Flavor, though, is a small price to pay for many more interesting decisions players can make when building their characters.

    Now, on to some changes with which I find concern …

    The Questionable Stuff

    One of the first things I found myself quirking my brows at was the entry for Dragonborn character traits. A recent book from Wizards had some very welcome rules adjustments to their innate Breath Weapon abilities: they can replace a single attack on their turn with them, and it scaled in power based on character level. In the OneD&D PDF, it has returned to requiring an entire action to use a breath, and its damage has no scaling. Hopefully these were oversights. I allowed a dragonborn character to use Fizban’s rules in my campaign when they were released and it did not cause any problems in my game, so I hope they did not decide to revert those adjustments.

    Next, level one feats. I think, ultimately, this is a great addition to character creation. Feats provide so much value for defining a character’s talents that I love seeing them available earlier. Additionally, creating new “tiers” of feats with prerequisite levels will help define their power in a very useful way. So, why isn’t this paragraph in the previous section? Well, I’m worried about their balance against one another. In 5th edition, there’s tons of feats in the game, and some of them are so stand-out strong, they are a contender for many players even if they don’t fit thematically for the character: like, Fey Touched and a free cast of Misty Step, which contends on supposedly equal footing with something like Chef (which gives you +1 Con or Wis, a tool proficiency in Cook’s Utensils, an extra 1d8 hit points of healing for anyone spending hit dice on a short rest, and then 2-6 temporary hit points based on level). (And don’t get me wrong, that’s got some serious value in certain situations. But it’s also up against Sharpshooter and Great Weapon Master and Sentinel …)

    There’s also a lot of expansion on Inspiration as a concept, but one piece I didn’t like was their rule to remove it from the PCs when they take a long rest. With how much more liberally the rules want Inspiration to be used I can see what their thought is, but I also think that Inspiration, once earned, should last until used.

    And, on the topic of Long Rests, the rules now mention that combat of any kind will utterly and completely prevent the completion of a long rest. I’m more tentative than critical on this one for a few reasons. For one, the party is likely low on resources when they decide to risk a long rest in dangerous territory, and failing to complete a rest might be overly punishing for a few bad rolls. However, this might lead to more consideration and better decision making from the party when they seek shelter for a rest. It could also greatly improve travel through wilderness – for the most part, overland travel in D&D seems to come down to a single encounter a day, if that, and going into each engagement with full resources can make challenging the party difficult. I can think of a few other ways to counter that, however, so we will have to see.

    Wizards also proposed some interesting adjustments to Natural 20 rolls that I personally intend to utterly ignore. The first is a rule in the PDF mentions that a Nat 20 always succeeds on a roll when made, and a Nat 1 always fails; the intention here is that a call shouldn’t be made for a roll if the characters have no chance to succeed, but I believe there’s value in the characters not knowing if success is possible from the simple call for a roll. I’ve had a post about the Role of the Dice rattling around in my head for a while now, so I’ll have more to say on this later.

    Another adjustment is Wizards wants to remove the ability for spells to critically hit. As-is, only a spell with an attack roll is currently capable of such, and I think it just isn’t nearly as fun for a player to throw a Nat 20 and then deflate when they remember their Firebolt cantrip doesn’t crit anymore. Spell crits are sticking around at my table.

    Then, Wizards came gunning for my crits. The majority of my experience in D&D comes from behind the Dungeon Master’s screen, and Wizards wants to remove critical strikes from monsters. The current assumption in the community is that this will step in tandem with new, powerful abilities on monster stat blocks that will threaten the party without the need for a lucky roll, so I’ll hold my full judgement for now. We’ll see in time.

    The Whatever Stuff

    Lastly, there was something I had some thoughts on that don’t cause me worry for the game’s direction or excite me. Just an adjustment I realized occurred. The new rules for backgrounds don’t include the features that they had in the 5th edition PHB. With backgrounds being built from the ground up by the players, that makes sense, but there was some good thematic stuff there that could provide some texture to different styles of games. I, personally, will be sad to see them gone – but luckily, I can invite my players to simply include characters that might aid them in those ways in their backstories.

    So, there’s my first impression of OneD&D (well, actually, my first first impression was that’s-a-silly-name). I’m looking forward to learning more. Worst case scenario, I’ll steal what I like and retrofit it for use in 5th edition and keep running games the way I have been.

    As always, thanks 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.

  • D&D: Your Boss Needs Minions

    D&D: Your Boss Needs Minions

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

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

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

    Here’s some tips to give them that.

    Reexamining Challenge Rating

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

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

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

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

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

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

    How Powerful Should the Minions Be?

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

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

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

    Building Complex Encounters

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

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

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

    A Never-Ending Education

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

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

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

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

  • RPGs: Introducing Your Villain

    RPGs: Introducing Your Villain

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

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

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

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

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

    Defining the Stakes

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

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

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

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

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

    The Visage of Villainy

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

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

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

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

    Portraying Adversaries Vs. Being Adversarial

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

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

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

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

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