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I think it's worth defining what this social science is and what it's not. Geopolitics is the study of how population groups are affected by the geography in which they life, and how that geography affects the way these population groups interact with each other...Geopolitics is useful for world-building because using nothing but knowledge of climate and terrain, we can make guesses about a regional population's access to resources. With these things in mind, we can then look at the communities as a whole, and make educated guesses about the needs and behaviors of these people. - Baron de Ropp (?), Dungeon Masterpiece, "From Baldur's Gate to Waterdeep: The Geopolitics of Faerun"

I've done a fair amount of complaining about low-effort video content, so let's change gears and look at some high-effort content that shakes up some basic assumptions about world-building in the Forgotten Realms, and particularly who should get credit for the verisimilitude of that setting.

Let's start off by pointing out that, while it is true that Ed Greenwood is the 'creator' of the Forgotten Realms, both in the sense that TSR bought the setting from Greenwood to make it into a D&D campaign setting, and in the sense that Greenwood had basically built what existed of the setting at that time, the setting as a whole has undergone significant revision and expansion since Greenwood's original creation, to the point where a handful of folks could be considered less 'contributors' to the Realms than co-creators, such as Sean K Reynolds and Skip Williams (and much like Carl Sargent and Roger E Moore could be considered co-creators of the world of Greyhawk, TSR's other major campaign setting).

Curiously, though, de Ropp's video essay suggests that a great deal of credit should be given to the cartographers of the Forgotten Realms for making the setting geographically believable and surprisingly scientifically accurate. De Ropp doesn't name them, but the first portion of his essay where he discusses the geography of Faerun, and paricularly how accurate the Sword Coast region in particular is from a geographical and geophysical perspective, with terrain features naturally flowing from the High Ice glacier into the rough steppes of Anauroch, and from there down to the swampy lowlands between Anauroch and the coast itself, finally leading down to the Sword Coast and its major cities. DeRopp actually credits Greenwood for this accuracy, even though Greenwood's original map looks to me as if it's not quite as accurate as the later third edition and fifth edition maps. The third edition maps are credited to a team of cartographers (Rob Lazzaretti, Todd Gamble, and Dennis Kauth) in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, while the fifth edition map is not only credited to Mike Schley, it's available as a print on his website.

De Ropp also makes some interesting observations about the terrain and how it's maintained -- for instance, he points out that it makes sense for many of the heavily forested areas of the Sword Coast (like the High Forest) and the more eastern regions adjacent to it (such as the Dalelands) to be near large bodies of water or otherwise fed by heavy rainfall, but that similar areas without dense forests (like the Giant's Plain) are likely home to large wandering herds of beasts, which both graze on the land and trample young trees so that they don't have the time to grow into a forest.

For me, though, the really interesting part of de Ropp's essay is where he gets into describing his impressions of what the cultures inhabiting the different areas of Faerun would be like based on the geography of those regions. It's in this area that de Ropp makes reasonable yet surprising observations, or at least surprising to those who have more than a passing familiarity with the Forgotten Realms setting:

De Ropp begins with Baldur's Gate, pointing out that despire not having as useful a natural harbor as nearly Candlekeep, the city would likely be more properous due to trade along the river Chionthar, which Candlekeep does not have direct access to. However, the lack of natural terrain barriers would make Baldur's Gate very susceptible to invasion; de Ropp likens this to the experience of Poland during the development of Europe, effectively suggesting that Baldur's Gate is to Faerun as Gdansk is to Poland, both cities being vulnerable by land (due to the many open spaces leading to the city) as well as by sea (with Gdansk being vulerable to power projected from the Baltic states or Sweden, while Baldur's Gate would be vulnerable to similar sea power projected from the Moonshae Isles. (Lucky for the Baldurians that the setting posits the tribes of the Moonshaes as fairly primitive and insular, while the closest nation-state to Baldur's Gate is Amn well to the south, with more nearby settlements either being well-trampled satellites of Baldur's Gate such as Fort Morninglord and Elturel, or the independent city-state of Waterdeep to the north.)

De Ropp next looks at the Dalelands, Sembia, and Cormyr, and points out that, based on both the small size of the towns in Cormyr and the Dalelands (based on the size of the markers on the map) and that roads that exist on the map between this region and the coast are not connected (and thus have either fallen into disrepair and are no longer used or were never built in the first place) that these regions appear to have nothing to offer the great cities of the coast. This surprises de Ropp, who points out that given Marsember's position at the mouth of a river, with stone and minerals form the Storm Horns close at hand along with plentiful timber from Cormyr's forests, and being a port on the Lake of Dragons which connects to the larger Sea of Fallen Stars, Marsember should be a very powerful city, being both highly defensible and with plenty of resources both for internal development and for trade. De Ropp compares this to the northern regions of Italy, which developed economic powerhouse city states like Florence and Venice, and wonders openly if there's a canon reason why Marsember isn't larger than Baldur's Gate.

de Ropp points out that the people who live within the Anauroch desert would be nomadic wanderers not unlike the civilizations of the Mongolian steppe on Earth, and this tracks with the existence of the Bedine nomads in that region. However, he goes on to suggest that, since the nomads from these steppes regions would frequently migrate into more habitable areas during rough times, that the Bedine would likely do the same, and even things like the name of the 'Mere of Dead Men' suggesting that such migrations led to great battles in the past.

de Ropp moves to the High Moor, pointing out that the rugged terrain and difficulty in moving people or trade good through that terrain would likely lead to small settlements comprised of rugged, insular peoples, not unlike the region of West Virginia in the United States. This, too, tracks, at least for the humans of the High Moor, which tend to be tribes of Uthgardt barbarians, but doesn't quite take into account the fairly sizable settlements in the region descended from the area's former status as an elvish nation.

de Ropp then moves to the coast region surrounding Neverwinter, pointing out that the rough terrain between the coast and the High Moor makes the cities defensible form land-based attacks, but vulnerable to sea attacks and piracy, which justifies the existence of large roads connecting the cities which otherwise would not be terribly efficient at promoting trade compared to water-based trade.

de Ropp finally turns to the Moonshaes, and points out that these islands are perhaps the most mischaracterized region of the Sword Coast. Caer Corwell, in particular, has vast timber resources and the ability to build highly defensible shipyards from which to construst and launch vessels either to prey on the shipping of Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, and other cities of the Sword Coast, or to project military power and force these states to become subservient to the Moonshaes. That the Moonshaes simply don't have that level of organization isn't a solution, as de Ropp points out that, given the strategic importance of the islands, any of the coastal cities that could take over the islands would immediately become the greatest power in the region, as they could use the resources that the current Moonshae inhabitants are not using. In de Ropp's own words, "Whoever has dominion over these islands has dominion over the Sword Coast."

Taking these observations at face value, one begins to wonder if the folks responsible for developing the cultures of Faerun took as much time and care in crafting those cultures to the terrain as the cartographers of Faerun did in updating and tweaking the maps of Faerun to take into account the geophysical realities of our world and how they might apply in a fantastic setting like the Forgotten Realms, and it makes me think that the map-makers should get at least as much credit for how 'real' the setting feels as Greenwood and his co-creators do.

The one thing I'd fault the essay for is not mentioning what the impact of the vast regions of the Underdark would have on the geopolitics of the surface world, but that's forgivable, as maps of the Underdark in this region simply aren't as prevalent as maps of the Sword Coast and adjacent areas of Faerun. Even so, de Ropp has put together a very thought-provoking essay that leads me to consider making a few changes to the world (or at least suggests some larger plot threads) the next time I run a campaign set in Faerun. Kudos to Dungeon Masterpiece for putting it together.

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Disappointment in Baldur's Gate

An official Mac release is planned for later this month – more details to follow. - Larian Studios official announcement that Baldur's Gate 3 is available on PlayStation 5

Ah, the bitter tang of disappointment that comes with being a Mac gamer -- I'd nearly managed to forget it over the past couple of years.

Since acquiring my M1 Mac mini, I've gotten slowly more involved in gaming on the computer again, and I have to say, gaming on a Mac has come a long way since Blizzard released the Mac version of StarCraft literally a year after the Windows version. (Though that Wikipedia article notes that, while the Mac version of StarCraft released in March of 1999, the Brood War expansion was supposedly released "for Windows and MacOS in the United States on December 18, 1998," which makes little sense - it turns out Brood War actually wasn't released for MacOS until June of 1999. Six months late is better than a year late, I guess.) A combination of the new MaCOS's UNIX underpinnings, increased mind-share, and more common use as a development platform have made it so that many publishers large and small have actually chosen to release MacOS versions of their games right alongside the Windows versions:

Pretty much every Paradox Interactive game, from the Crusader Kings series to Stellaris, is out and feature-equivalent between Mac and Windows versions.

Owlcat Games's Pathfinder-based CRPGs, Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, released on both MacOS and Windows.

Flaming Fowl Studios's electronic version of the modern classic boardgame Gloomhaven released simultaneously for MacOS and Windows, and supported cross-platform multiplayer from day one.

While there are a few studios that rely on dedicated Mac porting specialists like Aspyr to port their games to MacOS, even in those cases, more modern dev and communications technology means that the port doesn't have to wait months to remain feature-equivalent to the Windows version -- Firaxis Games has been using Aspyr as its Mac porting specialists for multiple versions of the Sid Meier's Civilization series, and the current version, Civ VI, has largely remained feature-compatible and cross-platform capable throughout much of its life (though there were some struggles with the latter shortly after release).

So it was with some excitement that, when I went to the Steam page for Baldur's Gate 3, I noticed that both the Windows and Mac logos were prominently displayed on the store page. Excited that this would mean that I could play the game on my Mac mini, I bought and downloaded the massive game, only to discover that, after I'd launched my first game, a message in large capital letters greeted me in the upper right corner of the game screen:

EARLY ACCESS

I'd just bought my way into an open beta test. Why was this so disappointing?

Well, for starters, the Early Access version of the game is not the full game -- it comprises only what most commenters refer to as 'Act One'. The first time you realize that nearly every quest in your quest log can't actually be completed because their resolutions are all in Act Two...

But that's par for the course for this kind of thing. Even if you can't complete the full game, nothing stops you from restarting with a different character to work your way through the story differently, right? Baldur's Gate 3, however, then proceeded to up the ante, making more and more decisions that turned my interest into disappointment the more I played.

A question of class

Since many of the mechanics of BG3 are based on the Dungeons and Dragons 5E ruleset, I really didn't have a problem with the question, "What kind of character do you want to play?" It turns out that, thanks to my early enthusiasm for 5E Organized Play, I had over a dozen characters -- fourteen to be exact -- all ready to slot into the CRPG version of D&D they'd originally been created for. This, sadly, revealed problem #1: in Early Access, each class only has two subclasses available.

You might not think this is a huge issue, since most classes in the 5E Player's Handbook only have two subclasses, but my favorite class -- the class for six of my fourteen characters -- is Wizard, and even in the PH, each 'school' of wizardry counts as its own subclass. BG3 offered me two of them: Evocation and Abjuration, eliminating all but two of my already-existing wizards.

Taken aback, I revisited my list of characters to see how many would remain unplayable until the full release. Lonic Tremolo, my evil Vengeance paladin? Unplayable in Early Access -- only Devotion and Oath of the Ancients paladins are available. Tengrit, my Champion fighter? Nope, only Battlemasters or Eldritch Knights are available in Early Access. Seeing that the Great Old One was available as a patron option for Warlocks, I happily rolled up "Kerri Goldsmith", my devious Great Old One warlock, but what wasn't obvious until reaching level 2 was that I couldn't take the Pact of the Tome, which was her tabletop choice, as only the Pact of the Chain was available in BG3.

I then went back and realized that not even the characters whose classes and subclasses matched what I had available in Early Access were all playable, as Ker'Vorzin, my Abjuration wizard, is a half-orc, which isn't a playable race in Early Access.

By the time I completed the math, it turned out that I could only faithfully re-create three of my fourteen characters in the Early Access version of the game.

Your experience may vary

Despite that disappointment, I did find the ability to traverse through the game in a relatively open-world order to be really interesting, allowing me to see how the game played if I chose to do certain events before doing other events. And that's when I stumbled on Karlach.

If you've seen any discourse surrounding BG3's companions, the two you likely have heard the most about are Astarion and Karlach. I'd found Astarion and found him useful as a rogue for my parties in which my main character couldn't serve as a rogue replacement. (Given 5E's rules, this is more than you might think, since Bor Korsikov, my hunter ranger, is Dex-based and thus has a high natural Sleight-of-Hand modifier even without proficiency, while "Kerri" with the Charlatan background gets that proficiency, making her nearly Astarion's equal at getting through locked doors and chests.) Every time I'd encountered and done the recruitment quest for Karlach, though, she'd just leave without joining either my party or heading to my camp. This was weird, since I'd seen at least one YouTube video showing Karlach joining you in fighting the paladins who are hunting her. But it turns out (say it with me), you can't recruit Karlach in Early Access...

Sigh.

Then one day while logging in, I actually decided to read the blurb promoting the Digital Deluxe Upgrade, and noticed this:

We're targeting early September for the release of Baldur's Gate 3 on Mac, exact date TBD. In the meantime, if you launch Baldur's Gate 3 on a Mac you'll be playing Patch 9, the most recent Early Access build.

So despite paying full retail price for an open beta, I wasn't even playing the most 'recent' version of the open beta? I'd need to wait until 'early September' unless I wanted to throw another $10 in the pot?

So I settled in to wait. The good news was that the original release date of the game was in early September, and Larian had moved that release date up a month for the Windows version, which meant that, in theory, the Mac version was still on-pace to release on the original date. Well, if you read the note that leads off this essay, you know that's not happening.

I have seen comments that suggest that Larian is actually waiting until Apple's September 12 special event to announce the release of the Mac version, but it's not clear that the positive press they'd get from being potentially featured in the Apple Event would counter the frustration of active Mac gamers being forced to wait another week for the full version of the game. Or maybe I'm wrong -- they've already got my money, after all, and it's not that I've felt the need to try to swim against the massive tide of good vibes Larian is getting for being micro-transaction-free and not requiring a network connection to play (unless you bought the game through Steam, of course).

Maybe I'm not even in the majority of Mac users in this regard, given that there are already YouTube videos talking about how to run the Windows version using an emulator/compatibility layer like WINE. Maybe the hard-core devs who all moved to MacOS as their development hardware are excited to use GitHub to download a home-brew WINE container in which to install and launch the Windows version of the game, but that's not me -- if I wanted to deal with a mess of configuration and compatibility issues just to get my main applications working on my workstation, I wouldn't be using MacOS -- I'd be on some flavor of Linux or...*shudder*...Windows.

Perhaps if the full Mac version is released within the next week, I'll forget all about the frustrations of dealing with BG3 in its full-price, open-beta form for a month. After all, as I noted above, it's certainly not as bad as the true Dark Ages of Mac gaming. Still, given all the other examples I'd noted above and enjoyed, I'd hoped that this frustration would be a thing of the past. That it isn't is probably my single biggest disappointment with Baldur's Gate 3.

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My 2023 Gen Con

If you want to have the most successful GenCon ever, I’m going to reveal the single most valuable thing you can do before you even start packing for your trip. After you found a successful podcast and get booted off by your co-creator over creative differences, whereafter he steals the show, erases you from its history, and runs it into the ground; spitefully start your own gaming blog and Twitter feed. Over the course of several years, build both up and become very successful. Network within the community, befriending other creators, doing guest appearances on podcasts and writing occasional pieces for other blogs. Maybe even do a little freelance work. Once you’re done with that, go to GenCon. It will be awesome. - Scott "The Angry GM" Rehm, "How to Even GenCon: The Complete Noob Guide"

After ripping off the Angry GM's guide to Gen Con and updating it for 2023, I figured I should share my own Gen Con experience, which is very different from the above description. (Note as well that since I discovered that the official spelling of Gen Con is as two words, not one, I will continue to use that spelling throughout this essay.)

Wednesday, August 2

Typically, the Wednesday of Gen Con is a travel day, and 2023 was no different. The biggest difference was that in past years, when I'd go with my friend Senior, we had a deal where he'd arrange the airfare and I'd arrange the hotel accommodations, and whoever got the more expensive option would collect the difference from the other. After a couple of health-related scares, one of which put him into hospital and left him in a coma for two weeks, he's been a lot more conscious of large gatherings, so he hasn't been back to Gen Con since COVID.

That meant that this year, my wife and I were traveling as a party of two, and given how expensive airfare looked to us back in January/February when we were looking into booking the travel, we decided to change up our plan and drive from the Twin Cities of Minnesota to Indianapolis. The most memorable stop we made on the way down was an emergency restroom stop at a gas station in Normal while we were driving through town to avoid freeway construction, but we ended up arriving and getting settled into the hotel in the early evening, leaving us time to pick up our badges and then visit the food court/beer garden to try the official Sun King beer of Gen Con. (We both liked it.)

This would be the appropriate time to reveal that I did not stand in the giant registration pick-up line that ran from nearly one end of the convention center to the other, but have been a VIG for over ten years, and thus was able to collect my badge and tickets in a far smaller line in the VIG Lounge. To me, the benefit of VIG is to remove as many irritations from my Gen Con as possible, and it's still worth the somewhat heavy price tag in order to do that.

Thursday, August 3

The official first day of Gen Con had me itching to visit the Consignment Store, where folks go to get rid of older games and game supplies. The store had moved from its spot across from the Dealer Hall to a designated area within the Indy Downtown Marriott ballrooms, which improved space to the point where they could let 60 people at a time into the room, but I hadn't considered the line to get in would be quite as long as it was -- the store opened at 10am, but with an event scheduled for 11am, I spent as long as I could in line (eventually getting to about 15th or so) before leaving tor the next event.

The next event was trying out the Funko-produced Avatar: the Last Airbender Crossroads of Destiny game. It proved more interesting than I'd anticipated, being a campaign-style game that modeled all of the different encounters in the entire animated series, and though we only played one scenario, we found the gameplay and the idea of stringing together multiple rounds of play into a longer story to be compelling enough to be worth the price tag.

After a lunch break, we headed to the second floor of the ICC for a session of Tales of Xadia: the Dragon Prince RPG. Using the Cortex Prime system, the game was compelling enough when I'd tried it out in 2021 to have picked up the rulebook, but hadn't yet managed to run a session for my wife, so we sat down to play together and had an entertaining time. I found myself pondering adventure structure, and decided that an ideal convention RPG scenario should contain a number of different scenes/encounters that can be connected narratively in whatever way the players prefer -- this lets you as the GM focus on the scene/encounter mechanics, which is where most new players are going to need the most help, while allowing the players to guide/shape the narrative experience to something they're going to enjoy. This is also useful when handing your adventure to multiple GMs in a convention setting, as it allows them to focus their prep-time on mechanics rather than plot -- a significant benefit in a world where some portion of GMs will volunteer to run your games not because they know and understand your game, but because you're the vendor who still has badges and/or hotel rooms to offer in exchange for the help.

We then checked out an area that is definitely not a high-traffic event at Gen Con: the Retro Video Game Arcade. You can buy an hour pass or a day pass and play at a number of refurbished stand-up video game consoles from the coin-op era, or sit down at one of a number of consoles (I believe they were all emulators, but couldn't confirm) complete with a screen with literally dozens of games for each console. We ended up playing Super Mario World on the SNES and our hour flew by. The console games were, of course, hit-and-miss, since the group is a charity that specializes in training students in technical skills by showing them how to refurbish donated consoles (if you want to learn more, check out their website: Video Game Palooza). So they're not going to have every classic stand-up console ever made. Still, it's a worthwhile way to spend an hour or two if you've got the time in your schedule and need something interesting to do but something you can still walk away from to get to the next event.

Originally, I thought I had scheduled our annual True Dungeon run for late morning, but to my chagrin, my wife pointed out that our schedule had our True Dungeon session starting at 11:14pm, not 11:14am. Though it worked out (we slotted in the Crossroads of Destiny event instead), we still needed something to do to kill time before True Dungeon, and we found a nearly ideal event: a session of Disney Villainous also being held in the Lucas Oil Stadium. We had fun, and then moved on to our True Dungeon event.

If you've heard of True Dungeon, nothing I can say will make you more curious about the event. However, given the experiences we've had with True Dungeon in the past, I can say we deliberately targeted the 'intro' event, Barb Beard's Treasure, for a few reasons. Mainly, because it's a bit shorter, and the longer, more involved sessions can get a bit stressful and/or overwhelming, especially if you're in a 'pick up' group with people you don't know. The other main benefit was that we didn't need to bring our own tokens -- in fact, the only tokens allowed in the intro event were the single bag of tokens you receive as part of your entrance fee. This made for a much more entertaining setup phase where even uncommon items can seem very cool if they fit someone's character or build idea. (Oddly, we did have a few more veteran players who were apparently hoping to either acquire or trade for more powerful tokens, but it didn't completely derail our experience.) We made it to the end, collected the treasure, and departed True Dungeon as victorious adventurers before heading back to the hotel to turn in for the night.

Friday, August 4

One thing I was looking forward to at this year's Gen Con were a couple of products being released by Modiphius for their Star Trek Adventures RPG line: specifically the Lower Decks campaign setting and the Captains Log solo play/GM-less play rulebook. Along with those purchases, which we made on Thursday, we ended up signing up for a Star Trek RPG adventure called 'The Fall of the Way', where six different allied ships at the end of the Dominion War seek to root out and apprehend the leaders of The Way, an organization trying to restore the Cardassian military government to power. This might be the one area where my advice above that the ideal convention adventure is a series of mechanical encounters or scenes linked together narratively in whatever way the players like, because in this case, since it's Star Trek, I was expecting to have a few scenes where we could talk about the folly of seeking glory in an imagined fascist past, but they never came. It was still an entertaining scenario, on the whole, not least because I got to command the bulgiest ship in the scenario, a Federation Sovereign-class command cruiser. My main regret is that the only person who might have been more excited to be there than I was (she was even cosplaying as an Orion) ended up getting 'stuck' with the role of Chief Medical Officer, and though I tried to give her some spotlight time by making her the lead officer on the away team in scene 2 of the scenario (and staying back with the ship to ensure I couldn't step on her authority while on the planet's surface), it didn't end up leading to any combat so her character's medical skills were barely called upon in any scene (since scenes 1 and 3 were ship encounters which left the poor medical chief with extremely little to do). In this case, though the 'six tables playing the same scenario' is usually a winning formula, I think this scenario would have been improved by being more crafted for each individual ship and provided crew, even if this didn't let the ships cooperate or coordinate in resolving the mission being played.

Next up, an experiment. I didn't get to experience True Dungeon when it was just starting out, but at this Gen Con, a new event was offered that suggested it would combine something of a True Dungeon adventuring experience with miniature golf. 'Critical Putt' proved to be a bit too ambitious to be really good -- though there were a few interesting encounters/rooms, on the whole there weren't enough support characters to help the players figure out what they were supposed to do in each room, and most frustratingly, there were some rooms where the mini-golf was key to the mechanical 'solution' to the room's encounter and others where the mini-golf was just a distraction or an afterthought. Probably the most jarring inclusion was an occasional 'room' which was just the party facing a computer screen which narrated an encounter -- it wasn't until the last such encounter that we realized that, instead of responding as our characters would and crafting a narrative experience, these were puzzles that were intended to be 'solved' with each character making a specific choice; as such, we didn't really do well in any of them. This is something I'll keep an eye on to see how the event changes, assuming it gets offered again, but I won't feel the need to jump in and grab tickets unless things do change for the better. New events are hard, though, so full props for the attempt -- Gen Con wouldn't be the same without groups like this taking chances and trying new things.

We'd hooked up with a couple of my wife's friends to play Critical Putt, and hung out with them afterward until our next events. Mine was going to be a Hackmaster session -- I'd played though my first ever Hackmaster experience at Gen Con 2021 and was interested enough to want to try more -- but by the time I'd gotten back to my room to wait for the event I realized I was exhausted from the 12-hour drive and two days of events and ended up just heading to bed early that night.

Saturday, August 5

Saturday was our D&D day. Though I've been involved in D&D Adventurer's League in various capacities since the beginning, changes over the past few years have convinced me to step away from the organization, and now Gen Con is just about the only time I (and my wife) get to play 'organized' D&D. Since Baldman Games (the group who runs the D&D Adventurer's League content at Gen Con) has been doing this for a while, we generally feel pretty confident that we'll have a good experience -- we played though the first two sessions of a pre-existing arc, the 'Dreams of the Red Wizards' arc. Our first session was fairly disappointing, though -- we had tickets and were seated with a GM, but my wife and I and our 5th level characters were the only ones at the table. One of the admins fished up another player from another table for us, but he ended up being an optimized 10th level character who used the opportunity to basically steamroll the adventure, robbing it of most of its interest. Our second session, though, continued a curious trend where I've been seated at a table with an Adventurer's League Admin: in 2022, our last session on Saturday night was with Greg Marks, one of the Content Managers for the program, while this year we were seated at a table with Claire Hoffman, veteran designer and admin who has been involved with Organized Play since back in the days of the RPGA with over 25 years of experience. Though we couldn't find tickets for the third session, we were confident we would be able to get in with generic tickets. Sadly, that proved to not be the case, since Baldman simply did not have enough GMs to accommodate us and we ended up spending our generic tickets on another hour in the Retro Video Game Arcade and then having calzones delivered to our hotel. Still a relaxing and rewarding evening.

Sunday, August 6

Our main Sunday event was the Epic related to the Dreams of the Red Wizards adventures we had played (and tried to play) the previous day -- the epic-style adventure setting is still fun, but I've played enough of them at this point to feel as though this particular implementation, with Baldman still short of personnel and the underlying story being less inspiring than in previous years, was merely adequate rather than a true capstone on our Gen Con experience.

We made one final pass though the Dealer Hall, spent way more money than we'd anticipated, including $120 on a copy of D&D Onslaught, a game I'd heard would be a spiritual successor to the old D&D Miniatures Skirmish game that connected me to my current gaming group. We then made one final pass through the food court before packing into the car and heading back home. One advantage of driving rather than flying home: we were able to break up the road trip and make a few more stops on the way back, including at a cheese shop in the Wisconsin Dells that allowed us to set up our dinner for our next Saturday night gaming session very nicely.

So that was Gen Con 2023 -- on the whole a ton of fun and something my wife and I are looking forward to doing again next year!

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The Newbie Guide to GenCon -- Stolen and Updated!

But then start all the other questions. Questions that start “it’s my first time going to GenCon… “ and end with “… HELP!” And I’ve noticed it’s sort of the vogue for bloggers to waste a week writing a “Guide to Surviving GenCon” every f$&%ing year. I was going to do something actually useful about narration and running games and s$&%. But no, people are DEMANDING I write this crap instead. So you get this. See, the thing is, all the GenCon advice out there doesn’t really tell you everything you absolutely NEED to know. It’s all these thousand word, top-ten-list style bits of bulls$&%. Me, I’m going to give it to you straight. I’m going to tell you about experiencing GenCon for the first time along with some awesome tips.

- The Angry GM (Scott Rehm), "How to Even GenCon: The Complete Noob Guide"

Gen Con is just around the corner. And as is traditional for this time of year, places are putting together 'guides' for how to enjoy Gen Con, even if you're attending for the very first time. Sadly, though, most of those guide are pretty lame, as the Angry GM notes above. So what to do?

Well, the Angry GM's own guide from 2015 is still fairly good, so I thought I'd just link to that. Except as I read through it, I realized that the guide definitely could use some updates and clarifications, because (shockingly) the guide as originally written by Angry is long on his perspective, and short on others' perspectives (the section on etiquette notwithstanding). So I thought I'd provide a service and update Angry's classic Gen Con guide for newbies, updating it for the (almost) post-COVID era.

So let's roll!

Okay, let’s talk quickly about WHY you’re going to GenCon. Because the biggest mistake I made the first year was not knowing why the hell I was going. And most people don’t. They are going just to go. Here’s the deal. GenCon is big. You just won’t believe how awesomely, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. You might think your local gaming convention in the basement of one hotel is big, but that’s just peanuts to GenCon. Listen… Every f$&%ing fandom imaginable is at GenCon, including weird crazy-a$& s$&% you’ve never heard of like SuperWhoLock. There’s RPGs, card games, board games, video games, war games, and LARPs. There’s video games, consoles, PC games, MMORPGS, MOBAS, MUCKs, indie games, all that s$&%.

That last sentence is actually a bit of a reach. If you're going to Gen Con with the idea that you're going to get the same sort of video-game experience you'd get at PAX, then you're going to be disappointed. You can find video games at Gen Con, if you look hard enough, but not a lot, certainly not compared to the board games, TTRPGs, and other games that are there.

But the larger point kind of still stands -- there's a lot to do at Gen Con, and why you want to go is important. For the reason why that's important...

So, why are you going. What do you want to focus your time on? You don’t have to devote all your time to your focus, but it’s a good fallback to have. When you don’t have anything to do and you find yourself lost, you can fall back on “well, I meant to come here and play plenty of RPGs, let me check the schedule and see if there are any games coming up.”

That's solid advice. You can go with the idea that you want to soak in as much of the Gen Con ambiance as you can, but it's good to have an idea of the main 'big thing' you want out of Gen Con and be able to use that as a fallback in case you find yourself awash in options that all seem really cool and you're at the risk of analysis paralysis.

To Angry's advice, I'd add just one thing: try to find one thing, an event, a panel, something, that you wouldn't otherwise consider doing if it was just something a bunch of your buddies back home decided to do. Find the one weird thing that you can only do at Gen Con and do that thing. Even if you don't end up liking it all that much, you'll have a story worth sharing (and you don't have to do that thing again next year if you really didn't care for it all that much -- you'll be able to find other things).

In case you have never been to GenCon or any other large convention before, here’s how GenCon actually works. Your badge gets you into the convention itself. That lets you walk around and enter the big public spaces. And that’s about all it does. Anything else you want to do generally requires you to register and have a ticket. There are whole bunches of official events scheduled. Everything from seminars to games to moving showings to dances to knitting classes. Every f$&%ing thing imaginable. Each event has a certain number of tickets available. If you buy a ticket to that event (which might be free or it might cost anywhere from $2 to $20), you can attend that event. At the event, your ticket will be collected and you will get to be in the event. IN THEORY. See, there’s a few things that f$&% with that system. First, you’ve got generic tickets. Generic tickets are wildcards. They cost $2 apiece and you can use them in a couple of different ways. Many events that don’t have a set number of seats ONLY ACCEPT GENERIC TICKETS as buy-in. If you want to play an official D&D game, for example, or play in one of the Magic: the Gathering tournaments, you need to bring generic tickets to cover the cost of the event.

That last bit is no longer really true. In the past, it was easier for event organizers with large number of events to just rent space in Gen Con and only take generic tickets rather than list out all the events they planned to run, but that's not really true anymore. Pastimes, the main orgnaizer for Magic events at Gen Con, have 456 different ticketed events in the online event catalog, while Baldman Games, who runs the official sanctioned D&D events that make use of the current Organized Play system for D&D 5e have 155 different ticketed D&D events. They will still accept generic tickets, if there is space to allow generic ticketholders into the event, but they will all prioritize actual ticketholders.

As far as I can tell, the two reasons for this are:

Gen Con has upped their administrative game, making it easier for these large event organizers to submit their events, and

The benefits of actual ticketed events outweigh simply accepting generics only.

What do I mean by the benefits of ticketing? Say you're Pastimes, and you check the online event catalog a month prior to Gen Con and notice that not only have none of your scheduled 8-player Commander drafts sold out, but most aren't even half sold, while your Pauper win-a-box tournaments have been sold out since the week of event registration. You can make the decision to cancel some of those Commander drafts, knowing that most of the players affected by those cancellations should be able to pick up seats in other still not sold-out drafts, and instead schedule more Pauper win-a-box tournaments which people actually want to play in. This is a great tool for organizers, and they have embraced it; as a result, generics are significantly less important than they used to be.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea to have some generic tickets available, on the off-chance you find an event in the catalog and can't get ahold of an actual ticket. You can definitely get into some events, even 'sold out' events, using generics (mainly if other ticketed players don't show up). But since generics can't be refunded -- only returned for system credit -- it's not very helpful to buy $30, $40, or $50 in generic tickets on your first trip and find out you only end up using less than $10 worth. You can always buy more generics if you really feel you're running low.

I'm skipping the entire 'Knowing Your Way Around' section, because it's still largely accurate.

Don’t touch anyone with permission.

The 'General Etiquette' section is very good, but this should clearly read, "Don't touch anyone without permission."

Putting that crap aside, this is the big one: Indy loves GenCon. The businesses love GenCon. Partly because they bring a huge amount of money into the city and partly because Indy thinks geeks are really nice, harmless, friendly, happy people. It’s true. Ask them. They all say the same thing. They love us. They love us more than the sports fans. Don’t f$&% that up. It’s actually kind of nice that the whole city basically becomes Geek Valhalla for four days and you can run a Dungeon World game in a hotel bar for three hours and no one looks askance at you. It’s neat that you can dress up like Slave Leia and still get served in a restaurant without anything thinking it is remotely weird. It is nice to have people genuinely think you’re a good person because you’re a geek. And you know why that works? Because most of the people who go to GenCon are actually nice, friendly, happy people just having a good time. If you like that experience, deserve that experience. You be nice too. You’re an ambassador for GenCon when you’re at GenCon. It’s part of the price of GenCon. Accept that. Oh, side note: lots of business try to get into the spirit of GenCon by changing their menus or offering special geek-themed stuff like a burger called The Desolation of Smaug or a cocktail called The Winter Soldier. It’s kind of cool. And some restaurants really go overboard. But… they only do that for like five days out of the entire year and most of the staff aren’t geeks. So a lot of those words are gibberish. I’ve seen geeks get annoyed with wait staff who have to confirm which burger the Eye of Sauron actually is. And that pisses me off. Don’t do that. The servers are working their a$&es off to make you feel comfortable by trying to celebrate your subculture. Cut them some f$&%ing slack.

I've copied this entire section because it suggests a point that it doesn't make -- the businesses in downtown Indy will say they love Gen Con -- especially places like restaurants that are busy pretty much the entire weekend. This doesn't mean that everyone working for those businesses loves Gen Con or even tolerates it very well; if you worked in a downtown where two days out of the year you could count on needing 45 minutes to get lunch or an hour to drive out of downtown at the end of the day, I'm sure you'd be a bit irritated as well.

And, despite how much the folks whose jobs it is to be nice to you want to be nice to you, they only have so much energy and stamina; don't just cut them some slack if they don't know the geeky names for their menu items, also don't actively be a jerk by complaining that a restaurant ran out of 'the only entree I'd eat in this restaurant' on Saturday night, or by showing up at 11:55 on Friday night when the kitchen closes at midnight demanding to be served.

In spite of capitalism, being treated nicely at Gen Con isn't a right -- it's a privilege, and one you should help maintain for all other attendees.

'Your Gen Con Bag' is excellent advice. No notes.

And here’s where I can give you an expert pro-tip. If you fly in, you will need a taxi to take you to the city from the airport. And you want to do two things. One, tip that cabbie extremely well. Like $5 to $10 well. Two, get that cabbie’s card. That cabbie is now yours. They will prioritize you. And, most importantly, they will prioritize your trip back to the airport on Sunday or Monday, provided you call about 30 minutes ahead. Keep tipping that cabbie a buck or two per trip, but if you don’t have extra change and you skip a tip, that cabbie will be okay with it. Because that cabbie is yours. You bought them.

I do have some notes on this paragraph, though:

$5 to $10 isn't really all that great a tip for an airport-to-downtown taxi ride (or vice versa), and cab fares have also gone up since Angry wrote his original piece. Expect to pay $40 or more for a cab ride to or from the airport; if the fare is slightly over $40, paying $60 and having the cabbie keep the change will have the desired effect. However,

The one time you really don't need to take a cab is from the airport to the convention center. There are shuttles that go past all the major downtown hotels surrounding the convention center, there is a bus line that goes directly into downtown and drops off right in front of the ICC, and there are other rental options. One year I went with a friend, we made acquaintances of a number of folks on the plane with us, and we all decided to go in together and rented a limo to take us into downtown. It might be more expensive now, but it worked out to about $10 per person then, so may still be worth looking into if you have a big enough group.

With that said, if you are not at a 'connected hotel' and need the option to cab back and forth from the ICC to your hotel, getting a cabbie you can call repeatedly over the weekend and who knows you tip well is an excellent option.

In general, any event is skippable. And if people know they can show up with generics and take your seat, that doesn’t have to be a problem. But still, show a little bit of restraint. Don’t sign up for things if there’s only a slim chance you’ll go. In that case, the proper thing is for you to show up with the generics and try to get an open seat. Just know that, just because you have a ticket for an event doesn’t mean you are bound to that event.

This is probably the thing I most disagree with in Angry's guide, and I'll illustrate why with an anecdote.

My wife and I met Irish folk dancing at a pub, and when we noticed there was a Sunday morning Irish folk dance event at GenCon where we could get the last two available tickets, we were pumped to go. We got up early Sunday, raced to the event, and then sat for 25 minutes as literally none of the other ticketholders showed up. Since most Irish folk dances require more than one couple, the organizer really had no choice but to cancel the event, and though we were able to get the cost of those tickets refunded, it didn't make up for the lost time, the inability to get into a replacement event, and the simple crushing disappointment at not getting to do an event we had our hearts set on.

Obviously, there are limits. If you are actually sick, then don't go to the event. But if you find yourself filling up your schedule with events you're not excited about, and you start skipping them, maybe turn the other tickets you're not excited about back in. Gen Con is huge, but that doesn't mean every event at Gen Con is huge. Otherwise, if you have a ticket for an event, make more than a minimal effort to get to that event. If you really don't want to be there, and you can see there are others there with generics who are happy to take your place, then go ahead and let them. But at least in this case, you're doing the polite thing and helping to ensure that the event still gets to happen for the people who want it.

Most of the advice in 'The Dealers Hall' is good, but...

And now comes some stuff about money. Look, lots of geeks deal in plastic rather than cash. And most booths can take credit/debit cards. But you’re best off using cash for several reasons. First of all, like flea markets, convention dealer halls are notorious dens of identity theft. And it’s easy to lose sight of your card as the staffer walks over to run the transaction through the dealie. I am not kidding about this one. It’s becoming a HUGE problem. Second of all, if you have a set amount of cash to spend, you won’t overspend and then discover you can’t afford a meal or a cab fare later. Third of all, the dealers prefer cash for a variety of reasons. In fact, if you pay cash and have exact change (and often, they will round off prices to make that EASY), the dealers will usually cheer you on. Seriously, there is an Exact Change Cheer many dealers do. It’s kind of neat. In fact, in general, even if it is not your normal habit, you should deal in cash. Cash makes it easier for cabs, to split checks in restaurants, to leave tips, to use vending machines, and so on. Get in the habit of pulling cash out for the day’s activities. If you budget well, you can actually leave your plastic safely in your hotel room safe.

The world has changed since 2015, and this entire block of advice is simply wrong:

Most places who do business in the dealer hall have adapted to e-commerce and now make use of Square or similar card-readers that are portable and will read chip cards without you ever having to let go of your card. In this environment, the odds of identity theft are virtually zero. If a vendor is small enough that they do need to take and swipe your card on something, they'll likely also be small enough that you can see them do that, and if you can't, feel free to refuse to use your card for that purchase. It won't be common.

Budgeting is a good thing, but you should be able to set a budget without carrying around large quantities of cash. Not to mention that carrying large quantities of cash is a great way to lose all that cash if you get your pocket picked or otherwise lose track of your wallet. Not saying it's common, but it is a danger.

Dealers do not necessarily prefer cash. There are some vendors who will actually refuse to take cash (this is actually getting fairly common in Artists Alley, since purchases tend to be large there), since keeping track of cash is a hassle and a headache, and electronic payments don't just walk away during the close of business.

The world, including Gen Con, has grown accustomed to dealing with electronic payments. Take advantage of that where you can to keep your own finances safe.

First of all, try to eat three meals a day and try to eat them at the same time every day.

Good luck with that. Not saying it's bad advice, but unless you're doing something like a full day of D&D where meal breaks have been worked into the schedule for the DMs, you probably are on your own for figuring out when your schedule allows you a meal break. Gen Con as a whole does not set aside any blocks of time where 'everybody' goes and gets a meal. If you're putting together an eclectic schedule of events, you're almost certainly going to end up with eclectic mealtimes as a result.

Breakfast is the hardest meal to find at GenCon.

This is true, but breakfast is also the easiest meal to work around, since you can eat it before, on the way to, or even during your first event (depending on the event). If you're flying in, you can certainly fit granola bars or breakfast bars or some other shelf-stable, high-energy option in your baggage. If you're driving, you have even more room to plan out meals and snacks, such as the classic PB&J. If you're addicted to your morning coffee, though, then I feel for you, because short of bringing your own coffeemaker (or using whatever is in the hotel/your room), there's few good alternatives.

Honestly, coffee is the biggest damned problem at the whole convention.

True.

Stay away from the food courts and vending machines inside the ICC. They are expensive, slow, crowded, and they serve s$&% food.

In a pinch, you can probably survive a hot dog from one of the ICC food vendors, but unless you are a young person with an iron stomach, you don't want to make the ICC food vendors a habit.

Last point, because it's not one that was a 'thing' back in 2015: do not harass, belittle, or even comment on other people at your events or in public spaces that choose to wear masks during Gen Con.

With all that said, if this is your first Gen Con, here's hoping you have a great time!

[simul16]

New Edition? Depends on Who You Ask

But it's a far cry from saying that someone is actively considering what a 6th Edition would look like to claiming that 6th Edition is right around the corner, and there are good reasons to think that 6th Edition, whatever it looks like, isn't just right around the corner but probably isn't coming along for quite some time. In other words, I believe that the 'gap' between 5th and 6th Editions will likely be larger than the gap for nearly every other set of editions of D&D, with perhaps only the gap between AD&D (2nd) and 3rd Edition D&D being greater. - Me, eighteen months ago

So, eighteen months ago, I criticized god-emporer of character optimization Treantmonk for arguing that a new edition of D&D was, in his words, "right around the corner." Now, eighteen months later, WotC has announced that a new Player's Handbook, featuring a number of already existing changes to the rules (such as the character creation rules in Tasha's Guide to Everything) plus new adjustments to the rules will be published sometime in 2024. This makes me wrong, and Treantmonk right, doesn't it?

In a way, it doesn't. If you go by the timeline for D&D editions posted on Wikipedia, the gap between 2nd edition AD&D, released by TSR in 1989, and Third Edition D&D, released by Wizards of the Coast in 2000, you find that my prediction, that the gap between editions currently will be shorter than the gap between 2nd and Third Edition ends up being accurate: AD&D 2E and D&D 3E had an eleven-year gap, while 5E and whatever we end up calling the new edition will have a ten-year gap. You can quibble with my use of the word 'only' in that prediction, though, because according to Wikipedia, the gap between AD&D 1st and 2nd editions was even longer, from 1977 to 1989, and is, according to Wikipedia, the longest gap between editions in D&D's history. Of course, that twelve year period saw the release of three different versions/editions of 'Basic' D&D, which helps to confuse the issue somewhat.

In another way, it does, since Treantmonk's point was that a new edition of D&D was "right around the corner" and here we are, eighteen month's later, looking at a playtest document of the 'character origins' portion of the new edition. Even though I gave myself an 'out' by claiming that it would be shocking if someone, even Jeremy Crawford, weren't thinking about what a new edition of D&D would look like and when it would make sense to release it, I still gave the impression that the actual timeline for that sort of release would be some distance away. Since then, however, circumstances have conspired to make things look a lot more favorable for releasing a new edition.

Ironically, one of the circumstances that make a new edition reasonable is in the very book I tried to use as evidence that a new edition would be some distance away on the timeline: Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. At the time, Tasha's was the best selling D&D book according to Amazon (which means it was also the best selling RPG book, period, on Amazon, beating out the recently released Pathfinder 2.0 books by a ridiculous number of ranking slots). This, to me, suggested that the business model being used for Fifth Edition was still strong, and was a pretty powerful piece of evidence against changing things up with a brand new edition. However, it also introduced new methods for character creation, which is a topic normally handled in a core book; if the designers felt that the new method was good enough that it should actually become the new standard method for creating characters, that's one point in favor of updating the core books to incorporate the new material, effectively creating a new edition.

And in yet another way, it doesn't, because Wizards of the Coast are making a heroic (pardon the pun) effort to not call the upcoming revision a 'new edition': they refer to the process of making this update as "One D&D", and no less a personage than Chris Perkins says in the intro video, "[w]e are no longer in the position where we think of D&D as an 'edition'; it's just D&D." So WotC, at least, won't be calling the new books Sixth Edition or even '5.5', which might be something of a rules-lawyerly point to make, but when arguing with a character optimizer, rules-lawyerly arguments are frequently the best arguments to make, so I'll make them.

Ultimately the big question isn't "was Treantmonk right or was I right?" but instead "are the changes going to be good or bad for the game?" I'm not sure we can answer that definitively yet, since we only have playtest material available for one portion of the game's revised rules, but I'll take my shot at reviewing those rules and give my feedback whether the proposed changes look to be good or bad for the game.

Backgrounds, not races, now give stat bonuses

Over the past eight years, a lot of energy has been expended in pointing out how the D&D rules reinforce ideas of genetic superiority/inferiority by assigning attribute bonuses (and in prior editions, penalties) to characters based on their 'race'. A related but different issue was that, due to these inherent bonuses, certain races were 'naturally' more suited for certain classes that made use of the stats in which they received bonuses. So even though it was possible to make a dwarf that has a higher Dexterity than the average elf, it wasn't really possible to make a dwarf that was more dextrous (or even as dextrous) as a fellow adventuring elf, which means that your dwarf rogue wasn't going to be quite as good at being a rogue than an elf would be. The updated character creation rules in Tasha's were one attempt to update the system to try to avoid these problems, but the playtest document for One D&D goes a step further: now, instead of being assigned to race options, ability score bonuses are tied to backgrounds, giving a +2 bonus to one score and a +1 bonus to a second score (or, alternately, a +1 bonus to three different scores).

This choice does solve the 'elves are better rogues' problem noted above, since both an elf and a dwarf can take the same +2 bonus to Dexterity and have identical starting Dexterity scores (assuming we're not rolling dice for stats, which admittedly doesn't have the same connotation -- if I roll an 18 in Dex for my elf and you roll a 16 for your dwarf, that's not an indication that I'm better at Dex because I'm an elf, after all). However, it does something weird to the superiority argument -- instead of an argument for nature, you now have an argument for nurture. Though the playtest rules make it plain that the assumed default is that players will build their own backgrounds and assign ability scores based on their character's needs, the rules also include 'default' backgrounds for players who just want to pick a background and go, and those backgrounds carry the same kinds of assumptions when used to assign ability scores as races once did: for example, all farmers are hardy (+2 Con) and wise (+1 Wis), all nobles are charismatic (+2 Cha) and intelligent (+1 Int), and all urchins are nimble (+2 Dex) and street-smart (+1 Wis). Instead of race being a marker of superiority, now (social) class can be! What an improvement!

Inspiration is no longer (strictly) a role-playing tool

When originally introduced in Fifth Edition, the Inspiration mechanic was a mechanical benefit (Advantage on a d20 roll) which was awarded by a DM for non-mechanical reasons. If a player did something particularly cool or memorable, or 'in character', the DM could award Inspiration for that action. In a sense, this made Fifth Edition D&D closer to a true role-playing game than any of its predecessors.

However, part of the problem with defining Inspiration that way is that traditional DMs from earlier editions weren't familiar with the idea of giving out mechanical benefits for role-playing, and many just didn't do it. In fact, in the four games of D&D I played at GenCon in 2022, including one run by Greg Marks, the Content Manager of the entire Adventurer's League program, not once did a player character receive Inspiration from the DM for something that character did during the session. The designers of D&D seem to realize this, and as a result have significantly modified how player characters can get Inspiration awards.

The big one is that Inspiration is now a reward for rolling a natural 20 on a 'd20 Test', the new term that combines 'ability check', 'attack roll', and 'saving throw' into a single keyword (more on this trend later). Personally, I think this is an error, and am wholly on board with those who argue that Inspiration should actually be an award for rolling a natural 1 on a d20 Test (so long as that roll isn't re-rolled or otherwise ignored via some other mechanic, like Inspiration itself); giving Inspiration on a 20 is basically just an 'I win more' mechanic, since rolling a 20 gives Inspiration which then gives a better chance of rolling a 20 on a later roll, providing more Inspiration, etc. Awarding Inspiration on a 1 would help provide a 'floor' under a player character's results, giving the player more chances to burn through a run of bad luck and get back to a more normal distribution of results.

However, Inspiration is also awarded to Human characters whenever they complete a long rest (which makes humans in all campaigns work like pretty much all characters do in Adventurer's League, who get Inspiration at the start of an adventure, and those adventures rarely last long enough to require a long rest).

Although there is still a reference in the glossary definition of Inspiration that preserves the original intent of the mechanic as a way for the DM to award role-playing, the number of mechanical ways in which PCs can claim Inspiration without needing for the DM to award it means that this mechanic is no longer as strongly tied to role-play as it once was, which to me seems both unfortunate and a push in the direction of optimization (since now, you can optimize for Inspiration by building a character who makes lots of d20 Tests, both in and out of combat).

Critical Hits are much less impactful

In Fifth Edition D&D, a critical hit is defined as an attack roll that comes up as a natural 20. (There are some rules, specifically the Champion Fighter's Improved Critical feature, that can expand this definition, but in the core rules, a nat 20 on an attack roll is a crit.) Though there is a separate rule that specifies that such a roll is also an automatic success, the rule for critical hits is that the critical hit results in any dice being rolled for damage as a result of that attack are doubled. This has led to certain 'crit-fishing' builds that take advantage of bonus dice from other mechanics, such as the rogue's Sneak Attack, the paladin's Divine Smite, or even spells that use attack rolls such as eldritch blast or disintegrate. If the new rules incorporate the current playtest rule on critical hits, this all goes away: critical hits now can only be made on attacks with weapons or unarmed strikes, and only double the damage dice of the weapon or unarmed strike, so no double Sneak Attack, no double Smite, and no spells. To make up for this significant loss of damaging capacity for player characters, the rule also only applies to them; NPCs run by the DM do not get to critically hit with their attacks at all.

In one sense, this seems reasonable -- since the major balancing factor for monsters is the amount of damage they can do per round, monsters with relatively few attacks but with high damage can get a disproportional benefit from rolling a critical hit (see, for instance, the difference between a hobgoblin, a giant, and a titan), when those monsters do get crits and particularly multiple crits in the same combat, things can get scary for the PCs in a hurry. Note that healing spells, even under the current rules, have no capacity to produce a 'critical hit' result, so when monsters crit a lot, that damage is basically unaccounted for in the system's math.

On the other hand, the practical effect of removing peaks from a system is that the overall terrain becomes much flatter and more predictable, which seems as though it would tend to make combat more boring overall. In the right hands, this might actually be a net benefit, as making combat more boring when compared to non-combat options would seem to make those non-combat options more attractive. On the other hand, making combat more boring might simply lead to more energetic attempts to optimize characters for combat to return some of that interest and excitement to that portion of the game, which would further minimize role-playing in games that go that route. It's hard to predict which result is more likely, or what circumstances will make one outcome more likely than the other, so we'll just have to let some play testing help determine what kind of game results from this rules change.

Feats are now a core part of the game, and have level-based prerequisites

Another interesting part of Fifth Edition rules is basically a vestigial part of the D&D Next playtest: the idea that the core rules would be spare, and there would be a number of add-ons or rules modules that could be added to the game to make it more interesting for DMs and players who wanted that interest, or could be ignored for those DMs and players who thought the add-ons added more complexity than they wanted in their game. One example of this in the 5E Players Handbook was that feats were presented as an optional rule: DMs could allow their players to take feats whenever the character would otherwise qualify for a stat increase (and if creating human characters, to take a feat at character creation as part of the 'variant human' build), but if the DM hadn't 'enabled' feats as an option, then the rules still worked just fine without them (there was still a 'standard human' build that didn't get a bonus feat, and the ASI rule would still allow you to bump your stats even if you couldn't take a feat).

"One D&D" makes feats a core part of the game rules, likely based on the idea that most games referenced in the D&D Beyond online tools (which WotC purchased some time ago and likely use as much as a source of play data as they do for the income they derive from owning the tool), as well as all Adventurers League games have feats 'turned on', so the idea that many games would choose to not incorporate feats seems to have been flawed. I might find this view disappointing, but I can't honestly say it's wrong.

One way the designers are hoping to mitigate the power-gaming impact that feats can have on the game, however, is to incorporate a level requirement into feat design. The playtest rules only list so-called 'first level' feats, which are feats that can be taken by characters at first level. (The existing playtest rules assign all characters a feat at first level based on their background, with Human characters retaining their traditional bonus feat, which must also be a first level feat under the playtest rules.) This suggests that more powerful feats will continue to exist, but will be restricted to only being taken by higher level characters, thus having less chance of unbalancing the game.

As with some of the other options on this list, this could prove to be a good or bad thing; my main disappointment is that now, if I want to restrict feats in my game, I need to do the work of finding out how to otherwise adjust the game rules to enable that decision, rather than the game rules being built to allow me to simply 'carve out' feats as an option with minimal difficulty.

Keywords begin to replace natural language

As we've discussed previously, Fifth Edition D&D has tried moving away from the idea of using 'keywords' or key phrases to represent specific meanings in-game, partly because the designers identified the huge glossary of such terms in Fourth Edition and Pathfinder as a hinderance in getting new players to try out the game. Arguably, Fifth Edition accomplished this goal by hiding its rules complexity from the players and forcing that complexity on the DM, requiring the DM to adjudicate situations that the rules didn't explicitly cover or resolve.

However, the playtest rules suggest that the designers are wavering on this commitment to a so-called 'natural language' approach to the game, based on an increase in the number of keywords used in this rule document. We've already mentioned the 'd20 Test', which is shorthand for what used to be called 'attack roll, ability check, or saving throw'. The playtest document also expands the concept of 'creature type' to explicitly apply to player characters as well as monsters, suggesting that Third Edition-like 'definitions' of common powers/abilities/effects possessed by creatures of the same type could be 'keyworded' into definitions of that type. The playtest rules also introduce a new condition: Slowed. You might think this condition would allow for an obvious simplification of the slow spell, but in fact the two have very little to do with one another: the condition requires an affected creature to spend an additional foot of movement for every foot moved, grants Advantage to attackers, and imposes Disadvantage on Dex saving throws. The spell, on the other hand, simply halves the affected creature's movement (without affecting the cost of its movement), imposes a penalty on Armor Class and Dexterity saving throws (but not Advantage or Disadvantage), and limits the number of actions it can take and actions it can make in a turn. This may mean that the slow spell is also likely to change as part of the new edition, though the spell might well provide additional effects not covered in the condition, such as how the entangle spell causes creatures that fail their saves to be Restrained, but creatures that succeed are still affected by difficult terrain while they remain in the spell's area.

What the new Slowed condition definitely means is that someone saw enough of a benefit to consolidating a number of creature abilities, spells, and the like in such a way that instead of typing out "requires an additional foot of movement for each foot moved, grants Advantage to attackers, and gains Disadvantage on Dexterity saving throws", the single word "Slowed" will work for the same effect. It is likely that the game can absorb some small number of additional keywords without becoming the glossary nightmare of Third Edition or Pathfinder 1, but steps along this path should be taken very carefully and with an eye toward only incorporating keywords that save the most effort and communicate the most information, because the more keywords are added, the closer you get to having too many keywords for new players to process them, and because, as the proverb says, "no single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood."

Ultimately, we will be seeing what is practically a new edition of D&D in 2024, regardless of what I or Wizards of the Coat might otherwise claim. The good news is that, despite a few items on this list that seem to be targeted toward making the game friendlier for optimizers and munchkins, there are other items, like adding level requirements to feats, that seem to be intended to mitigate the effects of those munchkin-friendly options. Insofar as the game has successfully grown the 'hobby' of RPGs by explicitly making itself more accessible not just to different kinds of players but different play styles, I would simply re-iterate that the more friendly to optimization the new rules get, the less successful the new rules will likely be in attracting or retaining that population of new players that Fifth Edition has brought into the RPG hobby.

That, not whether or not the new ruleset is called Sixth Edition, is what is going to ultimately determine how successful the new rules are.

[simul16]

Ginni Di Accidentally Opens a Nazi Bar

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring each other when someone sits next to me and he [the bartender] immediately says, "No. Get out." And the dude next to me says, "Hey, I'm not doing anything, I'm a paying customer," and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says "Out. Now," and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed. Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "You didn't see his vest but it was all Nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them." And I was like oh, ok, and he continues, "You have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend, and that dude is cool, too. And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down [early]." And I was like, "Oh, damn," and he said, "Yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people." And then he went back to ignoring me, but I haven't forgotten that at all. - @iamragesparkle, posted to Twitter July 8, 2020

Got home from GenCon, and found out that Ginni Di, a D&D YouTuber I respect posted a video that I very much disagree with. Ironically, it's a video where she argues that her older self was wrong when she previously made a video arguing that you should build your D&D character 'wrong', defined as 'not optimized'. In fact, Ginny in that earlier video includes a tweet responding to the 'flak' she had been receiving for building a warlock character without Eldritch Blast:

Hey. D&D is a game. If I wanna build a pretty elf with no hit points and shitty spells so I can tell a story about her with my friends, I'm gonna do it. Because it's a game.

Well, if you know me at all, you won't be surprised to learn that I believe, specifically on this point, that Ginny is clearly, unequivocally, 100% correct. If you have a vision for your character, and the vision for that character does not include a character option that other players have decided is 'optimal', then you are correct, and those other players are wrong, at least when it comes to your character.

Ginny does mention in her apologia that she has since played in other D&D games and, with experience, has learned that bringing a non-optimized character to a game that expects optimization, or vice-versa, can lead to a disappointing play experience; this, too, is 100% unequivocally true. But my problem is not so much with her conclusion, but rather with the chain of reasoning that gets her there, and it makes me fear that the optimization crowd is taking a more nuanced approach to getting their claws into games where they otherwise wouldn't be welcome, with inevitable tragedy eventually to follow.

For starters, Ginny points out that 'optimization' is really a thing that blew up in Third Edition D&D, and that truly 'old school' gamers had a reputation for being very much into story-based and RP-based games. The first part of her statement is true, but the second is actually fairly questionable. I played a fair amount of D&D back in the day myself, and I can say that we didn't call it 'optimization' then, because back then the term 'munchkin' wasn't quite the negative term that it became as part of the evolution to Third Edition. How do I know this? Well, I was there, but the evidence is also pretty clear to see if you know where to look, specifically in Chapter 1 of the Second Edition AD&D Player's Handbook.

Ask a grognard, and you'll likely get a story about how back when folks played 'real' D&D, they rolled 3d6 for their stats one at a time and liked it; there was no 'standard array' or other crutch to support weak players. And this, with perhaps a handful of exceptions, was a crock -- there were so many alternate die-rolling systems for coming up with character stats back during the AD&D era that, by Second Edition, a number of them were incorporated into the official D&D rules. The most commonly used was actually 'Method V', known by the colloquial name of 'roll 4d6 and drop the low die', but at some tables, even this rule was further modified to 'roll 5d6 and drop the lowest two dice', and even 'roll 9d6 for your prime stat and keep the three highest' with some variant of that very generous probability curve for the character's other, lesser stats.

A lot of us were munchkins, is what I'm saying. And we had to be -- if you wanted to be a fighter, there was a huge difference between a fighter with 'percentile strength' (the percentage rating that followed an 18 for a fighter) and one with a mere 17. You needed a 15 Constitution to get any bonus hit points when leveling up, and a 15 Dexterity to get any Armor Class benefit from your high Dex. And in a number of cases, you needed ridiculously high stats just to qualify for certain classes: if you wanted to be a paladin, you needed a 17 Charisma on top of whatever other stats would make you a decent front-line fighter, and to be an illusionist, you needed an Intelligence of 15 and a Dexterity of 16. Some games even played with the official but sometimes ignored rule that having a high enough value in your 'core stat' entitled your character to an XP bonus. In other words, if you didn't have high stats, you weren't 'special', so you did whatever your DM allowed to get those high stats. Ironically, once a character had been played for a long time and had left behind the main game of fighting monsters and taking their stuff, those characters would often develop unique personalities and stories within the game, but that would be by building castles, founding nations, or otherwise making their mark on the world using whatever meta-system the DM was interested in pursuing to allow the characters to continue to adventure long past the point where typical combat encounters would be any challenge. Nowadays, you don't have to wait to reach 'name level' before developing those kinds of interests for your character, and you appropriately don't need to be a munchkin to survive to the point where combat becomes irrelevant in order to pursue that kind of fun at the table.

Ginni also chastises herself for suggesting in her original video that, if you're optimizing, then you're not building a truly unique character. Again, in most cases, Ginni's criticism is entirely true -- in her new video, she argues that an optimizer could certainly come up with 10 unique half-orc barbarians, but for most optimizers, the only thing unique between the barbarians will be the specific class feature that the optimizer chooses to emphasize; the characters will be superficially unique, but will basically all be the same character, the big half-orc barbarian that does one specific thing really well. Even if those characters have different selections for backgrounds or slightly different backstories, those features won't actually influence the play of the character at the table, because the character will always be about doing their one thing as frequently as possible in order to emphasize how that character is 'better'.

The really bizarre point she makes in her new video is in apparently accepting that optimized characters still have weaknesses, and illustrates her point by noting, "That's why wizards are so easy to hit." It's the kind of statement that makes me wonder if she's ever actually played at the same table with a low-level elven bladesinger or mountain dwarf wizard whose AC against key attacks is well into the 20s (thanks largely to Shield) before level 5, which makes them nearly impossible to hit.

She also speaks for a bit about how her old video (and I'm paraphrasing here) 'prioritized the flavor of a mechanical choice over its impact on gameplay', without seeming to recognize that what she's describing with her example of building a musical wizard instead of a bard isn't actually an example of optimization -- if what you're trying to do is grab the flavor of a bard with the trappings of a wizard by reflavoring class abilities and choosing non-traditional skills, you're not necessarily optimizing. You're optimizing if you find a way to be a wizard and still be a mechanically more effective bard than an actual bard. Doing the latter is actually a Bad Move, especially if your wizard effectively sidelines another player's bard character by doing so.

And that drives to the heart of what I think Ginni is really trying to communicate here. She is careful to point out that some games do presume a certain amount of combat and thus expect the players to be fairly effective in combat situations, while other games de-emphasize combat in favor of alternative solutions to encounters and being 'loosey-goosey' with the combat rules, and that a non-optimized character in the former game would be as challenging to the 'fun' of the game as an optimized character would be in the latter game. She wants to re-build bridges, by making the entirely reasonable argument that there are games for optimizers and games for non-optimizers, and that you're not a bad person for preferring to play in one style of game over the other.

But then she hit the portion of the video where she defended the Stormwind Fallacy, and I was reminded of the story that leads this essay.

I've previously mentioned the Stormwind Fallacy as an example of a number of bad-faith arguments that optimizers will use to attempt to convince non-optimizers to allow optimization in their otherwise non-optimized game. And when used in this bad-faith manner, the argument is no different than an otherwise mild-mannered Nazi walking into a bar. In a sense, the Stormwind Fallacy isn't strictly wrong; an optimizer can choose to role-play if he chooses to do so. But the point, when used as part of a bad-faith argument, is that the optimizer will never prefer to role-play over optimizing, and any role-playing he does do is in service to making the game he's playing more amenable to optimization, until, without realizing it, the DM is now running a campaign for optimizers, regardless of what she originally set out to run.

Optimization drives out other play styles. That's what it does.

In fact, Ginni's entire recent video essay, taken as a whole, is a great example of what philosopher Karl Popper, in a note within his seminal work "The Open Society and Its Enemies", called the Paradox of Tolerance: A society that seeks to have unlimited tolerance will eventually lose all tolerance, because the intolerant will not show tolerance to the tolerant and thus will eventually drive all tolerance from the society. Ginni wants to show the optmiization crowd, which she admits in both essays criticized her heavily both for not optimizing her character Aisling and for suggesting that other players follow her example and find the fun in not being the best in the world at what they do, that she can be tolerant of their choice of play style, and based on the comments to the video, it seems that a number of folks are taking that olive branch in the spirit in which it's intended. But it also opens the door for an optimizer to point to Ginni's essay and say, 'See, even the self-described 'woke millennial snowflake' says that optimizing isn't bad, so you should let me optimize my character,' even though that's not really the spirit of Ginni's essay. In the name of tolerance, Ginni has given ammunition to the intolerant that I can promise you will be used to force optimization into games that don't really support it, despite Ginni's explicit assertion in the essay that optimizing is best done in games with other optimizers.

To badly paraphrase Popper, we should as role-players claim the right to keep optimization out of our games, by DM fiat if necessary, and that any movement that praises optimization places itself outside the bounds of reasonable discussion in the same way that we would not consider a player's argument to own slaves in a fantasy world to be within the bounds of reasonable discussion. You might think that an extreme position, but if you ever accidentally opened a Nazi bar, you just might reconsider. Because the end goal for most optimizers is to play in games that non-optimizers find awful, and you have to shut that down early, if you're going to do it at all.

[simul16]

5E - You're Doing It Wrong - Two-Weapon Fighting

A lot of weapons in 5e with the Heavy property also have the Two-Handed property. Which means you can't dual wield them even with the Dual Wielder feat. - Role Player's Respite (https://roleplayersrespite.com), "Your Simple Guide to Dual Wielding in DnD 5e"

Wielding two weapons is one of those things that looks bad-ass and as a result, players often want to be able to do with their characters. However, the process of actually fighting with two weapons is something of a mixed bag for most classes, and it doesn't make it any easier that many tables get the rules for two-weapon fighting wrong, most significantly, using the rule for two-weapon fighting when it doesn't really apply.

How most characters fight with two weapons

The key rule for fighting with two weapons, for most classes, is found on page 77 of the Player's Basic Rules (or page 195 of the Player's Handbook -- the text is identical):

When you take the Attack action and attack with a light melee weapon that you're holding in one hand, you can use a bonus action to attack with a different light melee weapon that you're holding in the other hand. You don't add your ability modifier to the damage of the bonus attack, unless that modifier is negative. If either weapon has the thrown property, you can throw the weapon in stead of making a melee attack.

First off, some rules explanation. A 'light' weapon is a weapon that has the Light property on the Weapons list on page 48 of the PBR (page 149 of the PH). In fact, the description of the Light property specifically says the weapon is ideal for two-weapon fighting and references the chapter with the rule for Two-Weapon Fighting.

However, one thing folks frequently forget is that the rule also requires that you attack with a 'melee' weapon, which is a weapon listed under 'Simple Melee Weapons' or 'Martial Melee Weapons' on the same list. I have seen a number of charts of 'eligible weapons for two-weapon fighting' that include the hand crossbow (including the linked article in the introductory quote above), because the hand crossbow is a light weapon, but the hand crossbow is not eligible for the rule for two-weapon fighting because it is not a melee weapon, it is a ranged weapon, even when used to make a melee attack. (You can still effectively 'dual-wield' light crossbows, but it requires the use of the Crossbow Expert feat, which contains a variant of the Two-Weapon Fighting rule that allows you to fire a loaded hand crossbow as a bonus action after using the Attack action to attack with a light weapon; note that this variant of the rule does not specify that the initial attack be made with a melee weapon, which enables the use of the light hand crossbow to enable a second hand crossbow attack. However, there is some discussion that this may not allow you to dual-wield hand crossbows for more than a single round, as while the Crossbow Expert feat removes the Loading quality for crossbows with which you are proficient, the feat does not remove the Ammunition property of the hand crossbow, which requires a 'free hand' to reload the crossbow after firing. Holding a hand crossbow in each hand prevents those hands from being considered 'free', based on a similar wording in the spellcasting rules for which the War Caster feat serves as an exception.)

The rule also points out that you use your bonus action to attack with a 'different light melee weapon that you are holding in the other hand', but this does not require that you be using two different kinds of weapons -- you can in fact dual-wield with two daggers, or two scimitars, or two of any identical light weapon, so long as you are actually holding two of them, one in each hand. (The rule effectively prohibits wielding one weapon and simply moving it to your other hand to qualify for the second attack.) In addition, if you have a positive Strength modifier that you would normally add to your weapon damage roll, you do not add this modifier to your damage for your bonus attack. (There are a few other implied restrictions, which we'll cover later when we talk about the rules that allow you to ignore them.)

Note as well that light weapons tend to do less damage than non-light weapons; there is no light weapon on the basic weapon list that deals more than a d6 of damage, while there are a number of 'two-handed' and/or 'heavy' weapons that can deal significantly more than that. This might make some players believe that two-weapon fighting isn't as effective as fighting with one big weapon, but in fact the rules are designed to try to equalize those situations as much as possible for most 'typical' characters. So, for example, say you have two characters with the same Strength score, one of whom is wielding a greatsword while the other is wielding two shortswords. The greatsword wielder will attack once, dealing 2d6+Str damage, while the two-shortsword wielder will attack twice, dealing a total of 1d6+Str+1d6 if she hits with both attacks. This sets up the basic mechanical difference between the two types of fighting: a 'normal' fighter will sometimes miss with a single attack, resulting in no damage, while the dual-wielder, while they will only reach the expected damage of the greatsword fighter if they hit with both attacks, will more frequently hit with at least one attack, resulting in at least some damage.

If you choose to go down the munchkin path, be aware that most optimization sources come to the conclusion that, with the appropriate feats and class options in place, two-weapon fighting is slightly better than great-weapon fighting at low levels, but great-weapon fighting becomes more effective at higher levels, for reasons we're not going to cover in this article. Just be aware that the rule we've already covered applies to all characters, regardless of class, so technically, anybody can fight with two weapons!

How Fighters and Rangers dual-wield

However, as you might expect, some classes are designed to be more effective at fighting with two weapons than others. For the Fighter and Ranger, this comes from the Fighting Style feature that the Fighter gets at level 1 and the Ranger gets at level 2. In each class, one of the options for Fighting Style is this one:

Two-Weapon Fighting When you engage in two-weapon fighting, you can add your ability modifier to the damage of the second attack.

This may seem like a fairly tame benefit, but for most low-level characters, not only is this a great bonus, but is the main effect that causes two-weapon fighting to be better than great-weapon fighting at low level. Recall our two-shortsword versus greatsword character from above; if the two-shortsword character has taken the Two-Weapon Fighting fighting style, now that character always does 1d6+Str damage on a hit, regardless of which attack hits, and does 2d6+(Str*2) damage when hitting with both attacks. Since melee fighters tend to have high Strength scores, this means that the two-shortsword character now expects to do more damage overall than the greatsword character.

You may notice that I didn't mention Paladins in this section, even though Paladins also have a Fighting Style class feature; this is because Paladins do not get Two-Weapon Fighting as an option in their class feature. This doesn't mean that Paladins can't do two-weapon fighting, but it does mean that they would need to take a level of Fighter or two levels of Ranger to get the Fighting Style feature, if it's important to them.

Notice as well that I didn't mention Barbarians in this section; Barbarians don't even get a Fighting Style option (at least none of the archetypes in the Player's Handbook do), so they do not have the option to take a Fighting Style without multi-classing, either.

How Monks dual-wield

Here's the next part of two-weapon fighting where people tend to do the rule wrong. Even experienced players can get this one wrong, as Cody of Taking20 does in his video essay on "Absolute Worst Dungeons and Dragons 5e Rules as Written". Cody wants to hate on the Two-Weapon Fighting rule because you can't use it with unarmed strikes. The rule could not be more explicit (on p.76 of the PBR, p. of the PH):

Instead of using a weapon to make a melee weapon attack, you can use an unarmed strike: a punch, kick, head-butt, or similar forceful blow (none of which count as weapons).

Since the rule for Two-Weapon Fighting above only applies when you make an attack with a light melee weapon, you don't get to use it when making an unarmed strike, since an unarmed strike is not a weapon. In addition, since the rule specifies that you make the bonus action attack with a weapon that you are wielding in your other hand, and an unarmed strike is not a weapon, you cannot make an unarmed strike using the bonus action attack enabled by this rule. Cody may have a point when complaining that bar-brawler type characters can't take advantage of this rule, but he's completely wrong when he complains that monks can't use this rule. Well, he's not wrong that monks can't use this rule, but the point is that monks don't need to use this rule: monks in fact have two different class-specific ways to effectively dual-wield without making use of this rule, both of which are at least as effective if not more effective than this rule.

First, monks have access to the Martial Arts ability at level 1, which resembles the rule for two-weapon fighting quite a bit; a monk has to use a 'monk weapon' which is defined as a shortsword or a simple weapon that doesn't have either the heavy or two-handed properties. The monk can also explicitly use unarmed strikes, as per the text of the rule. When the monk uses the Attack action on his turn to make an attack with a monk weapon or an unarmed strike, the monk can then use a bonus action to make an additional unarmed strike. Though this ability is less restrictive in terms of what weapons can be used, it is more restrictive in that the monk is also restricted in his ability to wear armor or wield a shield. In addition, martial arts attacks start with low damage (d4), but improve as the monk goes up in level, eventually reaching a d10 in base damage. Lastly, unlike with Two-Weapon Fighting that prevents the adding of damage to the bonus attack without the enabler of a Fighting Style, the monk can always add his Dexterity modifier to damage with this attack. On the whole, I grade Martial Arts as at least comparable if not equal to 'base' Two-Weapon Fighting for classes that don't have access to the Two-Weapon Fighting Style.

But that's not all the monk gets! At level 2, the monk gains Ki powers, one of which is Flurry of Blows. The only obvious restriction on Flurry of Blows is that the monk must spend a ki point and a bonus action to make the extra attacks. But the benefits are that the monk gets to make two bonus unarmed strikes, the monk isn't required to be unarmored or not wielding a shield, and the monk technically doesn't even have to attack; the rule for Flurry of Blows only specifies that the monk "take the Attack action on your turn", not that they use it to make an attack or to attack with specific types of weapons. Thus the monk could use a Flurry of Blows after making a shove or grapple attack (PBR, p.77, PH, p.195). And the restriction of spending a ki point grows less onerous as the monk goes up in level, as the monk has a number of daily ki points equal to his level, and recovers them all after a long or short rest; in the correct party (a fighter, monk, and celestial warlock walk into a dungeon...), a monk can often use many times his normal amount of 'daily' ki points between long rests.

So the real answer to 'how do Monks use the Two-Weapon Fighting rule' is, they don't -- they have better options in their class features, so there's no real reason for them to ever need to use the generic Two-Weapon Fighting rule.

How Rogues dual wield

The Rogue is an interesting case for Two-Weapon Fighting. On one hand, most rogues find Two-Weapon Fighting a bit too restrictive for their tastes; not only does it require the rogue to close to melee range (where the lightly armored character tends to be less viable than the more heavily-armored and higher hit-die front-liners like the Fighter, Paladin, and the like), but it also requires the rogue to use her bonus action to make the bonus attack, which the rogue generally wants to use for other things, most commonly a Disengage via Cunning Action. Most significantly, the main benefit that a rogue would gain from making multiple attacks in a turn doesn't actually apply, since the bonus damage from their Sneak Attack class feature can only be used once per turn; while making multiple attacks does give the rogue more opportunities to make a Sneak Attack, and thus less of a chance to pass through a turn without using her Sneak Attack, the trade-offs for a typical rogue generally aren't worth it except in exceptional circumstances.

However, with the release of the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide came the Swashbuckler Rogue, a rogue archetype explicitly designed to try to make use of Two-Weapon Fighting. This rogue doesn't gain any additional 'uses' of Sneak Attack, but she does gain an additional condition in which her Sneak Attack applies (via the Rakish Audacity feature), as well as the ability to move away from targets she hits in melee combat without requiring she use the Disengage action (via the Fancy Footwork feature); the former allows the Swashbuckler more flexibility in attempting to land a Sneak Attack and the latter allows the Swashbuckler a chance to get away from an opponent she's struck with Sneak Attack without suffering that opponent's melee wrath. The Swashbuckler was re-printed in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, so Organized Play games presume you are using that version of the class, but there doesn't seem to be any actual difference in the two versions printed in SCAG and XGtE, so from a practical standpoint, if you have either book, you have the ability to play a Swashbuckler, which would appear to be the 'official' way to play a rogue who wants to make use of Two-Weapon Fighting.

How casters dual wield

If non-Swashbuckler Rogues have a difficult time using the Two-Weapon Fighting rules effectively, then the casting classes, for the most part, have at least as difficult a time using that rule. Generally, the reasons for this boil down to one or more of the following:

Casters generally use spells rather than weapons to deal damage, which can't be used to enable a bonus attack via Two-Weapon Fighting.

In most cases where a caster does make a weapon attack, they do so via the Cast a Spell action rather than the Attack action, which also prevents the attack from enabling a bonus action attack via Two-Weapon Fighting.

Caster classes that do allow for actual weapon attacks often have restrictions within their class that make Two-Weapon Fighting difficult if not impossible to combine with their key class features.

Most caster classes simply don't have spells to buff their existing weapons; instead they typically create weapons that attack on their own using the character's actions or bonus actions

Reason One is pretty straightforward: most casters deal their consistent round-by-round damage via cantrips, whether that's the Warlock's Eldritch Blast, the Sorcerer/Wizard's Fire Bolt, or the Cleric's Sacred Flame. None of these are weapons, so they can't be used to enable additional weapon attacks via Two-Weapon Fighting.

However, the Sword Coast Adventurers Guide introduced a trio of 'weapon cantrips', cantrip spells that enable weapon attacks. These cantrips, Booming Blade, Green-Flame Blade, and Sword Burst, allow a Sorcerer, Wizard, or Warlock (mainly the Bladesinger Wizard also introduced in that book) to make weapon attacks by casting a spell. Note, though, that the Two-Weapon Fighting rule specifies that the character use the Attack action to make a qualifying attack, and these cantrips don't make use of the attack action; they each use the Cast a Spell action, and specify that the weapon attack made during the spell is "part of the action used to cast this spell". Since these spells don't make use of the Attack action, they also do not enable Two-Weapon Fighting.

But a Bladesinger Wizard might decide they want to try Two-Weapon Fighting anyway; though Bladesingers in prior editions tended to use longswords, nothing in the 5e version of the Bladesinger requires the use of that weapon; indeed, a sidebar of Bladesinger Styles in the SCAG points out that hafted weapons like axes or hammers have their own style, and both the light hammer and hand-axe are valid weapons for use with the Two-Weapon Fighting rule. At this point, though, you run into a potential issue with the key class benefit of the Bladesinger, the Bladesong, which ends if "you use two hands to make an attack with a weapon". Though some DMs do rule that this only prevents a bladesinger from making an attack with a two-handed weapon or a versatile weapon wielded in two hands, DMs familiar with prior editions of the Bladesong will often interpret this rule as preventing the Bladesinger from attacking with weapons in two hands.

To avoid this problem, you can switch gears and instead make use of the Hexblade Warlock, a warlock archetype that explicitly gains a bonded weapon that they can use with their class features. So long as this weapon qualifies for Two-Weapon Fighting, a Hexblade can use that rule with their bonded weapon. And it's at this point that you encounter the final problem with using Two-Weapon Fighting as a caster -- Rogues can use the rule to try to more reliably land their Sneak Attack, and Fighters and Rangers have class features that make the rule more efficient when used as intended, but casters just simply don't have spells that can be used to take advantage of having a bonus action attack available via Two-Weapon Fighting.

There are spells that buff a character's weapon, but most of these spells are Paladin spells, such as the various Smite spells (Branding Smite, Staggering Smite, etc.), and though they are cast on you rather than explicitly on one of your weapons, meaning they would trigger from a hit with a bonus action Two-Weapon Fighting attack, they only trigger once, meaning that you're not so much getting more use out of the spell as ensuring that the spell goes off more quickly. Of the few spells that buff weapons that aren't Paladin spells, the main one in the Player's Handbook/Player's Basic Rules is Magic Weapon, which Organized Play and games based on its rules of awarding magic items has rendered all but irrelevant (when every character has a magic weapon by level 5, there's little reason to learn or prepare a spell whose only purpose is to make a weapon magical after that point), and as with the Smite spells, most of the other spells buff you rather than your weapon, such as Tenser's Transformation from Xanathar's Guide to Everything, or Tasha's Otherworldly Guise from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.

Lastly, there are spells that summon or conjure weapons, but most of these do so to create weapons that act on their own. The most familiar to most players is the Cleric spell Spiritual Weapon, which not only doesn't qualify for Two-Weapon Fighting, but is basically what the Cleric uses instead of Two-Weapon Fighting, as both the casting of the spell and the use of the spell to attack while the spell is running make use of the caster's bonus action, and since the conjured weapon is superior to just about any off-hand weapon a Cleric might wield at low level, it's hard to see a Cleric choosing to make use of Two-Weapon Fighting when they could nearly as effectively just cast Spiritual Weapon. The spells Mordenkainen's Sword and Black Blade of Disaster do similar things, but at much higher level, and again basically have effects that make anything you might want to do with an off-hand weapon attack pretty much irrelevant.

About the only spell that would in fact enable a caster to perform Two-Weapon Fighting is the spell Shadow Blade from Xanathar's Guide to Everything (page 164). This spell creates a magical sword that counts as a light weapon and that you use with the Attack action, which would trigger a possible bonus action attack via Two-Weapon Fighting if you as the caster are actually wielding a second weapon that qualifies (or conversely, might allow this weapon to serve as the bonus action attack after attacking with a different qualifying weapon in your 'main hand'). The downside is that the spell is a concentration spell, which means you can't conjure a second one while you already have one, and the blade is defined as disappearing if you drop or throw it, which likely prevents another caster from conjuring one and giving it to you. The damage of the blade also scales up as you cast it with a higher level spell, meaning that classes with limited spell level caps like the Arcane Trickster, who you might think would be ideal for such a spell, wouldn't get quite as much value from it as the classes that get it directly on their spell list, the sorcerer and warlock.

So, without actually doing the math, it would appear that the best Two-Weapon Fighter caster class would be the Hexblade Warlock with the bonded weapon in the main hand, and a conjured Shadow Blade in their off-hand, triggered by the attack with their main bonded weapon. This also means that the Hexblade could still cast Shadow Blade without the need to take the War Caster feat (noted below) in order to 'set up' Two-Weapon Fighting mode.

Final caveats and thoughts

There is one last rule that can impact the use of Two-Weapon Fighting, and that is the Dual Wielder feat (PH, p.165). That feat grants a slight bonus to AC when holding a weapon in each hand, allows you to wield weapons that aren't light and still use the Two-Weapon Fighting rule*, and most significantly, allows you to draw or stow two weapons in the same amount of time that you would normally use to draw or stow one weapon. This last benefit exposes perhaps the biggest unwritten restriction of Two-Weapon Fighting: the 'free' draw or stow a weapon action that characters get each round only allows you to draw or stow one weapon. So if you go into a combat with no weapons drawn, in the opening round you cannot make use of Two-Weapon Fighting without this feat, barring something like the Fighter's Action Surge or a friendly casting of Haste before your turn: either you draw just one weapon, leaving you without a second weapon to use to make the bonus action attack, or you spend your Action to draw your second weapon ("Use an Object", PH, p.192), leaving you without an Action to use to even attack.

* - This brings us back to the quote that leads this essay: the author points out that, even with the restriction of only using light weapons removed via the Dual Wielder feat, you still can't use Two-Weapon Fighting with a weapon that has the Two-Handed property, as the rule requires you to make an attack with a weapon in one hand, which you cannot do with a weapon with the Two-Handed property. The trick is that the author notes that 'a lot of' weapons with the Heavy property also have the Two-Handed property, suggesting that there are some Heavy weapons that you can actually use in Two-Weapon Fighting. This is incorrect, as every weapon with the Heavy property on the weapons list in the PH and PBR (the Glaive, Greataxe, Greatsword, Halberd, Maul, Pike, Heavy Crossbow, and Longbow) also has the Two-Handed property. There are weapons with the Two-Handed property that do not have the Heavy property (the Shortbow and Light Crossbow), but these are both ranged weapons and wouldn't qualify for Two-Weapon Fighting even if the Two-Handed property could be removed.

A caster who wants to make use of Two-Weapon Fighting should also consider the War Caster feat, as that feat explicitly allows the casting of spells with somatic components while holding weapons in each hand, which without the feat would not be allowed.

[simul16]

The Best of the Unrecognized

If you apply statistical methods to look for the very best player in baseball history who is not in the Hall of Fame, the answer that you wind up with is George Davis." - Bill James, "Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame?"

When Bill James wrote the quote that leads this essay, it was arguably true: James goes into some detail explaining his case in Chapter 16 of his book, using both traditional statistics and a few 'tools' that he invented for his own use and describes earlier in the book. Different analysts may have come to different conclusions, based on what constitutes the 'best player' in baseball and how to compare that player to other players. (For example, if a player is still eligible for the Hall, but not yet in, does he count?)

But that was in 1995, when James's book was first published. (It had been published in an earlier edition with a different name, but I can't confirm if this chapter existed in that book.) By 1998, with attention focused on Davis at least in part due to this argument, the Veterans Committee that reviewed MLB players who no longer qualified to be inducted on the annual Base Ball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) ballot decided to put Davis into the Hall. Curiously, though some might find this reassuring and a vindication of Davis as a great player, James himself at the time he wrote about Davis was more sanguine, ending Chapter 16 this way:

George Davis is dead. He is forgotten. I can't see that it would accomplish a hell of a lot to vote him a plaque now.

In my last post, I pointed out that I had used Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) to simulate an entirely different 'modern' history of baseball, starting in 1961 when the Washington Senators moved to Minnesota, becoming the Minnesota Twins, and two new expansion teams joined the American League: the LA Angels and the 'new' Washington Senators. You might wonder whether Davis, whose last season in MLB was in 1909, remains the best player in history not in the Hall of Fame, especially considering that OOTP does not incorporate a Veterans Committee, instead choosing to only induct players via an annual ballot.

The first Hall of Fame ballot occurred in 1936, and in the 'real world' that first ballot elected five players, all of whom qualify as among the titans of the game: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Walter Johnson, and Christy Mathewson. You would think, given that my universe had the same history prior to 1961 as 'real' baseball, that the same five players would have been selected, and you'd be right, since OOTP seems to have kept the 'historical' results, complete with historical vote totals. With the absence of a Veterans Committee, though, any player who in the 'real world' had been elected by that committee after 1961 simply didn't get in. The best example of this would be John Montgomery Ward, a pitcher/outfielder who moved to the infield as the result of persistent arm troubles, and who attended law school during the off-season, eventually earning a law degree and becoming active in the managerial and administrative side of early professional baseball after his retirement. (Ward was also good friends with George Davis, which makes for an amusing synchronicity.) Ward had tremendous impact on the development of baseball as it moved from the 19th to the 20th century, but because not all of that impact was 'friendly' to the powers-that-were at the time (as an example, Ward was instrumental in forming the Players League, a league where players had significantly more rights and made significantly more money than they did in the National League or American League at the time, and was thus responsible for drawing many of the game's most recognizable players away from the other leagues), recognition for his role in popularizing baseball was a long time coming, and Ward wasn't named to the Hall until 1964. In my alternate universe, Ward was included on the initial 1936 ballot, hardly anybody voted for him (he was listed on 3.8% of the ballots, which even under the rules at the time would have caused him to be dropped from the next year's ballot), and he arguably faded into obscurity.

That's not quite what we're looking for here, though. For starters, Ward was playing a fundamentally different game than what we consider baseball -- in 1879, for instance, he won 47 games while throwing 587 innings, which are basically impossible feats in modern baseball. We're really more interested in players who got their start in baseball after that dividing line between 'real' baseball and our alternate universe -- did the alternate universe significantly change the fortunes of some players, and if so, which ones?

With apologies to James, if you use statistical methods to search for the very best player in this alternate history who started his career after 1961 and was not elected to the Hall of Fame, you get two solid candidates:

Cal Ripken, Jr.

When evaluating primarily by a metric called Jaffe WAR Score (or JAWS), the best player whose career started in this alternate universe after 1961 and is not in the Hall is Cal Ripken, Jr., but the reason why this is so likely says more about how the real Ripken is something of a baseball unicorn; it seems likely that, given a significantly large number of alternate universes, Ripken might well end up on the outside of the Hall looking in more often than he actually makes it in.

In the 'real world', Ripken was drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in the 2nd round of the June 1978 amateur draft. He quickly moved up the minor leagues, and made his big-league debut on August 10, 1981 when he pinch-ran for Oriole right-fielder Ken Singleton in the 12th inning of a game against the Kansas City Royals and eventually came around to score the winning run. This was at the tail end of the most successful period in Orioles history, which technically began when they won the World Series in 1966 under Hank Bauer, but really came into focus when legendary manager Earl Weaver took over the club during the 1968 season. During Weaver's 14 seasons at the helm, the Orioles finished first or second in the AL East division 12 times, getting to the World Series four times, and winning once in 1970. Ripken didn't join the team full-time until 1982, Weaver's last year as manager, and though Ripken won the Rookie of the Year award that year, the Orioles finished a game behind the eventual World Series champion Brewers in the AL East. The next season, though, under new manager Joe Altobelli, the Orioles won the World Series, and Ripken was clearly their best player, winning the 1983 Most Valuable Player award in the AL. Unfortunately for Baltimore fans, the old core of players Weaver had assembled was aging badly, and the Orioles crashed out of contention starting in 1984. Even summoning Weaver out of retirement for the 1986 season couldn't prevent the Orioles from falling below .500 and joining what traditional baseball fans referred to as the 'second division'.

Ripken, as the team's best player, was penciled into the lineup every day, but as he slowly became the face of the franchise, a weird sort of reality-distortion field surrounded him, and the Orioles' identity began merging with Ripken's identity in a way that's only happened a few times in baseball history. (As an example, the Cleveland Bronchos of 1902 were re-named the Cleveland Naps for just over a decade in honor of their best player and manager Napoleon Lajoie.) In 1987, the owners of the Orioles decided to lean into the merging of their team's identity with that of their best player and replaced Weaver as manager with Cal's father, Cal Ripken, Sr. Ripken, Sr. also brought up his other son (and Cal Jr.'s brother) Billy to play second while Cal played short. And, though Cal Jr. was clearly showing some signs of losing effectiveness from his habit of playing every day (he'd dropped from a .282/816 slash under Weaver to just a .252/769 slash in his first year under his dad), Cal Sr. continued the practice of penciling his elder son into the lineup every day. Though this didn't last long -- Cal Sr. was fired six games into his second season when the Orioles started the year 0-6 -- by the time Frank Robinson took over as manager, the idea of Ripken being an 'iron man' was firmly entrenched into baseball consciousness, and Robinson dutifully continued to pencil Ripken into the lineup, and continued to play him at shortstop, both practices that continued under later managers despite growing criticism of Ripken's now-obvious pursuit of Lou Gehrig's long-time consecutive games played streak of 2,130. Finally, on September 6, 1995, Ripken passed Gehrig, taking over the all-time consecutive games streak in MLB. Ripken continued to play, extending his streak until it finally ended on September 20, 1998, after a total of 2,632 games, by this time the longest consecutive games streak recorded in any professional baseball league in the world.

On the strength of two MVP awards, the second earned in 1991 playing for a team that finished 67-95, a career spent entirely in Baltimore as the face of the Orioles, and that consecutive games streak, Ripken was elected to the Hall in his first appearance on the ballot, being named on 537 of the 545 ballots issued that year.

Compared to that history, my alternate Cal Ripken seems pretty mundane. Drafted #5 overall by the Kansas City Royals in the 1977 first-year player draft, Ripken spent three years moving between various rookie leagues and A-leagues before, in 1981, the Royals brought Ripken up to the major league club. Ripken actually spent his first few seasons playing third for the Royals, as their regular shortstop was a fellow by the name of Robin Yount, while the club used another light-hitting glove man named Ozzie Smith as their utility infielder, subbing for Yount on his occasional days off. (Ripken actually won two of my league's equivalent of the Gold Glove award for his defense at third during this time.) After Smith was traded to Oakland in 1981 and Yount became a free agent after the 1983 season, Ripken finally took over at short full-time. The Royals had trouble finding a third-baseman to replace Ripken, though, until they slotted Howard Johnson into the role in 1985 and, along with an outstanding pitching staff, the Royals won the AL West three straight years from 1985 through 1987. However, after the Royals crashed out of the first division in 1988, finishing with a 75-87 record, Ripken decided to test free agency, signing a 4-year contract with a fifth player option year to play for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Though Ripken frequently played between 158 and 160 games per year, he had never played every game in a season, and there was no consecutive games streak for him to protect when he changed teams.

Ripken's move to Pittsburgh was almost prescient, as the Pirates improved by 10 games after he arrived in 1989, finishing just three games behind the powerhouse St. Louis Cardinals. The Pirates kept hammering at the door, though, and in 1991, they finally broke through, winning both the NL East and the World Series that year, with Ripken winning the MVP in the NL. Ripken and the Pirates went back and won the World Series again in 1992, but Ripken decided to decline his fifth contract year and become a free agent again, signing another four-year contract with a fifth player option to play for the San Diego Padres. The Pirates, meanwhile, never looked back, slotting 27-year old Jay Bell into the shortstop position and winning the World Series for the third consecutive year in 1993, and finishing as arguably the 'team of the 90's' by winning the NL East eight times during the decade.

If Ripken's move to Pittsburgh had been prescient, his move to San Diego was less so; though the Padres, like the Pirates before them, seemed on the verge of a breakthrough in 1993, having finished second in the NL West in 1992, Ripken's arrival didn't move the needle at all for the Padres, as they followed up their 85-win 1992 campaign with 83, 82, and 85 win campaigns in the next three seasons, coming within 6 games of winning a weak NL West in 1994 but not really getting all that close to playoff baseball. After the team's record crashed to 68-94 in 1996, Ripken again chose not to exercise his player option and became a free agent, though the soon to be 36-year old's skills had clearly degraded to the point where he finished his career as a journeyman, playing for four different teams (including the Orioles) in his final five seasons before retiring.

Ripken retired with over 3000 hits, 375 home runs, and a career batting average of .271, which while not phenomenal would still be solid when combined with his power, especially at the shortstop position. So when he first arrived on the Hall ballot in 2007, it was not surprising that he drew a lot of support, being named on 64.9% of all ballots, just over 10 percentage points short of election. He improved his showing the next year, as most players do, being named on 66.5% of ballots, and then...well, things just didn't go Ripken's way.

In 2009, Ripken's Hall of Fame support began to erode, as he dropped to being named on only 51.3% of all ballots. Normally when a player drops in support, there's some obvious reason; either a large number of clearly deserving new candidates arrive on the ballot at the same time and 'suck the air' out of the ballot for a year, or a new player who is clearly comparable to the player and more qualified than that player arrives on the ballot, usurping his support. Neither of these really apply to Ripken in 2009. When Ripken drew 66.5% of the vote in 2008, Will Clark and Chuck Finley were overwhelmingly elected to the Hall in their first appearances on the ballot, but in 2009, Rickey Henderson and Fred McGriff were the first-timers who got recognized, with less impressive vote totals than Clark and Finley in 2008, so in theory not taking up nearly as much space on ballots. There was another shortstop on the ballot as well during this time, Ripken's former teammate Robin Yount, but Yount was the one who was clearly losing support to Ripken, not the other way around -- Yount had garnered 46% or so of the vote in the two years before Ripken got on the ballot in 2007, then dropped to 39.1 in 2007, 36.4 in 2008, and 29.9% in 2009 before running out of eligibility and leaving the ballot for good. If there was a problem for Ripken during this time, it was that he was arguably the best at a position that had something of a glut of options for voting: Yount and Tony Fernandez were already on the ballot when Ripken arrived in 2007, then after Yount was dropped from the ballot after the 2009 election, Barry Larkin arrived on the ballot in 2010, and though Ripken still outpolled Larkin, 63.3% to 55.1%, had Larkin's arrival been delayed even a year, Ripken likely would have been elected in 2010. As it was, the shortstop vote was split between those three players, Ripken, Fernandez, and Larkin, until 2014 when the arrival of Nomar Garciaparra sucked all the air out of any other shortstop candidacy, by which time Ripken would have only two more years on the ballot. Even with Fernandez being dropped for running out his eligibility in 2015, Ripken could not gain enough momentum to rise back up the ballot before his own eligibility ran out in 2016.

Jaffe WAR Score tries to sum up the 'peak value versus longevity' argument into a single number to evaluate a player's Hall of Fame case based on Wins Above Replacement, but that's not the only metric you can use to evaluate players. James himself devised a pair of additional tools to use to evaluate players. James's Hall of Fame Standards measure looks at the player's statistics and gives points based on how those numbers compare to existing Hall of Famers, such that, at the time James devised the measures, the maximum score would be 100 with the 'average' Hall of Fame scoring 50. James also devised a Hall of Fame Monitor, which he doesn't really describe in 'Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame', but does describe in his Baseball Abstracts of the 1980s as a system that tracks a player's achievements, both statistical (did he get to 200 hits in a season) and as part of a team (did his team win the World Series); that system had no practical maximum, but was set up so that once a player got over 100, the question would turn from 'why should this player be in the Hall of Fame' to 'why shouldn't this player be in the Hall of Fame'.

OOTP tracks James's Standards and Monitor in its own database, and if you evaluate the players in this alternate universe by those measures, the best player whose career started in 1961 or later and isn't in the Hall is:

Mike Piazza

In 'real life', Mike Piazza played a long, distinguished career, mainly for the Dodgers and Mets, and though he never won an MVP or was considered the best player in baseball, and was considered to be an average at best defensive catcher, he was such an impressive hitter at the position that he found himself named to 12 All-Star teams and got elected to the Hall of Fame in 2016.

In this alternate universe, Piazza came up in 1991 with the Cincinnati Reds, and played 12 seasons with them, hitting well pretty much every year and being named to 10 consecutive All-Star teams as a Red from 1993-2002. Unfortunately, the Reds were woeful during Piazza's tenure, finishing below .500 in all but two of Piazza's 12 seasons with the team, and even in the two seasons they broke .500 they didn't do it by much, finishing 88-74 in 1997 but still finishing fourth in an insanely competitive NL Central, and finishing 82-80 in 1999, finishing third in the division but still 25 games behind the 107-win Cubs that year.

Piazza left the Reds in 2003 to sign as a free agent with the Atlanta Braves, who had won six straight division titles and a World Series in the 1990s while Piazza was playing for the Reds, but who'd fallen back to a lower tier (though not below .500) in the new millenium. Piazza hung on with the Braves until 2006, when they broke through again to win another World Series, though by this time Piazza was far from a regular contributor, falling behind both veteran Mike Matheny and 27-year old Jeff Bailey on the Braves's catcher depth chart. Still, Piazza had his ring, and retired after the 2006 season.

Piazza nearly got elected in his first year on the ballot, getting named on 74.4% of all submitted ballots, and probably expected to be elected in 2013. Like Ripken, Piazza was splitting support with another similar player, Javy Lopez, who was not quite the hitter that Piazza had been but was a much better defensive catcher. Though were it not for the presence of Dave Nilsson on the ballot, Piazza might well have been elected. Nilsson was an Australian-born player who won three rings, two with Cleveland and one with Philadelphia, won the MVP with Cleveland in 1998 and nearly won the batting Triple Crown in 1996 with Philly, finishing behind both Piazza and league leader Barry Bonds in homers while winning the batting title and leading the NL in RBI, and had dropped from a bit above 20% support when he came on the ballot in 2008 to under 15% by the time Piazza arrived.

2013 proved to be a mere replay of 2012 for Piazza on the Hall ballot; he finished at 73.4%, well ahead of Lopez at 56.8% and Nilsson at 6.6%. But a flood of newly eligible players entered the ballot in 2014, and six of them were immediately elected: Frank E Thomas, Pedro Martinez, Larry Walker, Nomar Garciaparra, Mike Mussina, and Curt Schilling all polled over 75%, with Gary Sheffield and John Smoltz also placing well in their first appearances on the ballot. But the big problem for Piazza was the arrival of Ivan Rodriguez, who was clearly a better candidate than Lopez (who dropped to 9.8% support) or Nilsson (who didn't even draw a single vote and was dropped from the ballot). Piazza and Rodriguez proceeded to engage in an epic duel over the next seven years, with Piazza often beating Rodriguez in vote share, but not able to gather enough to get to that 75% threshold. Piazza's last year on the ballot saw him named on 71.0% of the ballots, enough to be the top vote-getter in 2021, but not enough to get in.

There are a few other well-regarded, high-ranking players in both statistical and popularity measures who aren't in the Hall in my alternate universe, but for most of these, it's more accurate to say that they're not in the Hall yet, as players like Cliff Lee, Matt Holliday, and David Price have all retired recently enough that they're not yet eligible for the ballot. Given their pedigrees, they might well soar into the Hall once they arrive on the ballot. So with that said, we'll end our analysis for today.

[simul16]

Let's Use Them to Build Narratives!

(xkcd, Sports)

So I've been playing Out of the Park Baseball, and rediscovering my enjoyment of deep sports simulations. I had, however, started to burn out a bit on the whole 'take a bad team over as general manager, trade and draft your way to a championship, rinse, repeat' mode of play that's my usual default for this kind of sim, and wasn't sure what the next step should be, or if I should just set the game aside for a while and wait until my satiation with that style of play started to wear off again.

Then I discovered pfholden's YouTube video essay, I resimmed MLB history from 1984-2021, AMA, and realized that I had more than just a game on my hands: I had a powerful tool to explore potential alternate realities.

Well, that might be overstating it. OOTP does a lot of things, but as of OOTP21, which is the version I have, there are still a few things it struggles to do, one of which is playing historic games with historic strategies and modes of thought. On the other hand, the difference between history as it happened and history played out as we think it should have been run at the time (say, for example, with a pitch count in place for young pitchers to preserve arms rather than just relying on a seemingly infinite assembly line of new young arms coming up from the minor leagues to replace them) might just give us interesting wrinkles in history. As an example, pfholden's own essay goes over the fictional career of Mark Prior, a pitcher who (along with Kerry Wood) was one of the players who inspired the movement toward incorporating pitch counts for young pitchers; had Prior (and Wood) been held to pitch counts earlier in their careers, instead of being overworked and discarded if their arms couldn't handle the workload, what would their careers (and the fortunes of their teams) have been like?

So I was curious. But the fire didn't get lit under me to actually run my own long-term sim until I saw pfholden's follow-up essay, where he answered questions from his first video's comments about the sim he'd run, which reminded me that OOTP is a very deep sim, and that there's a lot to dig through in a nearly half-century of baseball history.

So I fired up a sim...

First off, I chose my own starting year. pfholden had chosen his year so as not to deprive his beloved Baltimore Orioles of their last World Series title in 1983, but I decided to go a different direction -- I went back to 1961, the year my childhood team, the Minnesota Twins, arrived in town from Washington D.C. I was curious to see mainly how the Twins would differ from the team of my youth, especially as the sim approached the years of Twins history I was more immediately familiar with, the Metronome era of 1982 through 2010.

The sim parameters, though, can make a huge difference. On one hand, OOTP allows you to sim through historical seasons using historical lineups, thus simply replaying all the games that were historically played as they were played 'in real life'; to facilitate this, OOTP turns off some of its other engines (such as its injury and player development engines) so that unexpected injuries or wild swings in player effectiveness don't render the historic lineups irrational (or at least more irrational than they would have been at the time). I figured, though, the weft and weave of adapting to unexpected circumstances, both positive and negative, would be part of what would make a sim interesting, so I chose to simply start from the same place as MLB in 1961, but then let the butterfly wings of chance guide my league to whatever outcome those changed circumstances would lead to. So, for instance, an unexpected Twins downturn in a given season might improve their draft position enough to grab a better player than they historically did, which would clearly change their future.

As it turns out, though, I was right -- the sim is far deeper than I gave it credit for, and I find that I can probably spend weeks just sifting through the numbers for this one sim, looking for interesting narratives to build out of the weighted random numbers.

So let me share one with you.

Meet Thomas Grubb. Historically, Grubb was a pitcher drafted by the New York Mets in January of 1967, who nevertheless found himself in the Atlanta Braves organization by spring, playing for their A-level affiliate the Lexington Braves of the Western Carolina league. It wasn't a great team (they finished 55-63 on the season), nor did it have any future major-league stars: the best player was arguably either 19-year old SS/OF Udell Chambers (.325/952 in 466 PA) or 22-year old 1B Paul Dennebaum (.311/947 in 471 PA), while the best pitcher was probably 22-year old Joe Berg, the only pitcher to earn more than 9 wins and who had far and away the best ERA of any pitcher who threw more than three innings. In fact, nobody on this team would ever play even a single major league game, and most would barely rise above A ball before being out of baseball entirely, and Grubb was no exception. Grubb didn't pitch badly (7-5, 4.73 in 15 starts), but he also didn't catch anybody's attention, and his one season with Lexington was his only professional baseball experience recorded on baseball-reference.com.

In this alternate baseball universe, though, Grubb was instead drafted by the Boston Red Sox a month prior, in the 1966 First-Year Player Draft, a draft that only came into existence the year prior (and is historically held in June rather than in December as it was in my ahistorical league). Grubb was taken by the Red Sox in the 34th round, with the 685th overall pick, which historically rarely ever produces even a major league starter, much less a star. (Based on this article, the best 34th round pick in MLB history was arguably Dan Wheeler, a relief pitcher who played for five different teams in his 13-year career and finished with the same number of losses (43) as saves.) And Grubb's first season in A-ball wasn't all that different than his first historical season, as he finished 6-6 with a 4.84 ERA in 17 starts.

The difference is that the Red Sox, for whatever reason, decided to promote Grubb to their AAA affiliate for the 1968 season, and something clicked.

Pitching for the Louisville Colonels of the International League, Grubb took off, finishing the year with a 19-6 record that was fully justified by his other stats (143 hits allowed in 229.2 innings, with 215 strikeouts). This kind of performance, on the doorstep of the big leagues, would attract nearly anybody's attention, and though Grubb started the 1969 season at Louisville again, after six games where if anything he was pitching even more incredibly than he had the previous season (3-1, 1.07 ERA, 32 H and 47 K in 50.2 IP), the Red Sox brought him up to the big club, where he filled the traditional young pitcher role of 'whatever the team needs at the time', starting 14 games, making 7 relief appearances, and pitching very well, if not quite as overwhelmingly well (11-6, 2 saves, 93 H and 96 K in 108 IP) as he'd pitched in Louisville.

The thing is, the Sox didn't need Grubb to be overwhelming; in 1969, these alternate Red Sox were in the middle of one of their most successful phases. They'd win 111 games in '69, then win over 100 in 1970 and 100 exactly in 1971 as they won the AL East all three seasons. The Sox were loaded with pitching, with their best young pitcher being 23-year old 21-game winner Ken Holtzman, supported by veteran ace Earl Wilson with 18 wins, Mel Stottlemyre with 17 wins, and 21-year old Gary Nolan whose 13-7 record was roughly as good as Grubb's. Add in 22-year old Gary Gentry (10-4, 1.97 ERA), and it was clear that Grubb was up because he fit with this group, not that he was expected to lead it. The Sox's problem, though, was an inability to go all the way; in 1969, they got beat in the League Championship Series by the Minnesota Twins, then got beat by the California Angels in 1970. They ended up beating the Angels in 1971 to get to the World Series, but lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers, maintaining the Curse of the Bambino for another year. By 1972, the Sox were starting to slip: Holtzman was still an ace, but age had caught up with Earl Wilson, and though Nolan still pitched well, Gentry struggled and spent most of the year in the bullpen or in the minors, and Stottlemyre was gone, traded to the Phillies prior to the '72 season for John E Briggs, a solid left-fielder in his prime at age 28. The Sox slipped just enough that despite continuing to win roughly 90 games a year over the next few years, they kept falling behind other surging teams, from the slugging Cleveland ball club in 1972 through 1974, to the resurgent New York Yankees in 1975. Grubb was still pitching well in each season (16-13 in both '73 and '74, 17-10 in '75), when the Sox dropped to 4th in the AL East in 1976 despite Grubb's excellent 17-13 campaign, it was clear that it was time to rebuild, and Grubb was not signed to a new contract after the '76 season.

Grubb ended up playing the early free agent market and signed a four year contract with the White Sox for the then incredible sum of $1.9 million. But after signing that big contract, something clicked again. Pitching in Comiskey Park rather than the pitcher-unfriendly confines of Fenway, Grubb lowered his ERA by nearly a full run while posting an 18-7 record. The White Sox surged from a pedestrian 80-82 record in 1976 to 97-65 in 1977, finishing 3 games behind the eventual World Champion Texas Rangers in the AL West. Then in 1978, Grubb had one of his best seasons, leading the AL in wins with a 23-6 record, leading the AL in strikeouts with 220 (while only walking 44 men), and serving as the staff ace on a club that won the AL West. Though the Sox were swept by the Yankees in the ALCS, Grubb won the Cy Young award as the best pitcher in the AL for the first time in his career.

In 1979, he won it again. His season wasn't as impressive as it had been in '78 (18-9), but he improved his ERA yet again to 2.73, and won the award despite not leading the AL in any single statistical category, nor even making the post-season as the Sox fell just two games shy of the Rangers in the division race. In 1980, the Sox again finished just shy of the Rangers, this time by one game, and though Grubb again pitched phenomenally, winning 21 games with an ERA of 2.81, and throwing six shutouts for the Sox down the stretch (3 in consecuritive starts in July, then another 3 in non-consecutive starts in September), he finished just behind Bert Blyleven for the Cy Young.

But Grubb's contract with the Sox was up, and instead of renewing him, the Sox instead decided to go with a patchwork of veterans, including 33-year old Larry Gura, 36-year old Joe Niekro, and 42-year old Gaylord Perry (not to mention 38-year old Jerry Koosman, who was almost immediately traded to the Dodgers). This worked for one season, as the Sox won 103 games and the AL West in 1981, but they lost in the World Series to the Dodgers, then crashed back to earth finishing 3rd in the division with 87 wins in 1982, and 6th in the division with just 78 wins in 1983. They'd make the playoffs just once in the next 21 seasons.

Grubb, on the other hand, signed another big contract with the Pittsburgh Pirates, a 5-year, $5.8 million deal. The Pirates had meandered after their World Series win in 1976, but they surged back up in the standings in 1981, improving from 76-86 to 88-74 and finishing second behind the New York Mets. Grubb's secondary stats held up (2.38 ERA, 170 K in 234 IP), but his record was a pedestrian 13-7 and, as it turned out, the record was prescient. In 1982, Grubb lost something on his fastball, dropping again to just 111 K in 205.2 IP, and his record and ERA (10-16, 3.63) followed. The Pirates fell back to .500, and though they rallied a bit in 1983, it was despite rather than because of Grubb (9-15, 3.43). Then, in 1984, the bottom fell out; the Pirates lost 104 games, finishing dead last in the NL East, and on June 22, after amassing a disappointing 1-6 record in his first 14 starts, Grubb came out of the game with an injured knee. The injury proved to be a torn meniscus, costing Grubb the rest of the season, and at age 36, facing the prospect of rehabbing his knee to try to pitch the final season of his contract, Grubb instead chose to retire.

Grubb finished his career with 227 wins, a 3.12 ERA, and 2770 strikeouts, which at the time was 15th most in alternate MLB history. He appeared in eight All-Star games and won two Cy Young awards, and though his overall numbers arguably fell a bit below the 'average' Hall of Famer, when he went on the ballot in 1990, his popularity as a player proved the deciding factor in seeing him named on 91.6% of all ballots, sweeping into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.

Not too bad for a guy who, in the 'real world', never got out of A-ball.

[simul16]

Cortex vs Savage Worlds - One Weird Trick

Since 2003, the Savage Worlds RPG system has grown to be one of the most popular 'universal' RPG systems available. Not only are there numerous sourcebooks for game masters to create their own campaign worlds in different genres, but there are an increasing number of licensed game worlds for the system, including a small number of worlds from other game systems, such as Rifts and Pathfinder.

Alongside Savage Worlds, another game system started out very small, but has grown in visibility, reach, and scope over the years to rival Savage Worlds in the category of 'universal' RPG systems, though currently it has grown into what might be better described as a universal game design kit. Originally the Sovereign Stone game system published by Sovereign Press in 1999, the rights were acquired by Margaret Weis Productions in 2004 where it began being used in licensed RPGs, starting with the Serenity RPG (based off the movie developed from Joss Whedon's Firefly TV series, but not the series itself) in 2005. It continued to be used as a 'house system' for licensed games until 2009, when Cam Banks came on board as developer and effectively extracted the core mechanics from the various licensed games that existed for the system, developing what became known as the Cortex Plus system.

Cortex Plus continued to grow and develop as a licensed game engine, and its arguably most successful implementation in this mode came in 2012 with the development of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying RPG, despite a relatively short license period that ended in 2013. (MHR ranks highly on lists of 'best Marvel RPG' systems, usually either topping the list or losing out to the Marvel Super Heroes RPG based on the FASERIP system first published by TSR back in 1984.) With this growing success, plus a desire by Margaret Weis to spend less time, effort, and money on RPGs and focus on novels and movies, Margaret Weis Productions licensed the Cortex system to Banks in November of 2016, and Banks immediately set to work on expanding and updating the system to become the modular game development system that it is today, Cortex Prime. Of course, the system still serves as an engine for licensed games, with the most recent as of the time of this writing being the Dragon Prince-based RPG Tales of Xadia, published by Cortex's new owners, Fandom Tabletop, who bought the rights to Cortex from MWP in September of 2019.

This isn't an essay about which game is better -- plenty of people prefer one system over the other, for varying reasons, and I'm not here to tell either group that they're wrong in their fandom. However, I have noted that some gamers (who don't seem very knowledgeable about one, the other, or both systems) tend to equate the two systems due to their both using dice as an indicator of character ability. Savage Worlds uses dice to represent a character's facility with various skills and, in some iterations, even to represent character abilities, and Cortex Prime does something very similar in assigning dice to various attributes, distinctions, and what-have-you, and as a result these folks seem to believe that, as a result, the two games are mechanically very similar.

I'm here to tell you that while the games may appear similar on the surface, they are actually quite different mechanically, and the best way to demonstrate that is to point out an odd quirk in the Savage Worlds system that doesn't exist in Cortex Prime.

The scenario: let's say your character is in a given situation and to get out of that situation, you need to make a roll with a target number of 6. Do you have a better chance of success when rolling a d4 for this check, or a d6?

Right off the bat, we encounter the main difference between Savage Worlds and Cortex Prime: In Cortex Prime, you'd assemble a dice pool based on your character's attributes, distinctions, etc., while in Savage Worlds, you'd pick a trait (an attribute or skill) to roll against that use that die, plus any modifiers you may have access to. But in Cortex, it is clearly better to put d6s into your pool rather than d4s; the system is so sure of this that is compensates you (in the form of Plot Points via the 'SFX' known as Hinder) if you choose to put d4s into your pool when you could have put a larger die in instead. But the math isn't that challenging -- if you have three d6s in your Cortex Prime pool, you have an over 85% chance that at least two of them will sum to 6 or better, whereas if you choose to replace all your d6s with d4s, you have a less than 65% chance that at least two of your dice will sum to 6 or better.

Let's dive into that in a bit more detail -- feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you're not into math. In the 3d6 scenario, there are 24 results on 2d6 that succeed regardless of what you roll on the third d6, so there are 24*6 = 144 successful results there, plus of the 14 results on 2d6 that would normally fail, four of them (1-4, 1-5, 4-1, 5-1) turn into successes if you roll anything but a 1 on the third die, adding another 4*5 = 20 successful results. Four more results (3-1, 3-2, 2-3, 1-3) succeed if you roll a 3 or higher, adding another 4*4 = 16 successful results, and three results (2-1, 2-2, 1-2) succeed if you roll a 4 or higher, adding another 3*3 = 9 successful results. Even if you roll a 1-1 on your first two dice (since a 1 is considered a 'hitch' and hitches can't contribute to a die result), you can still succeed on the roll if your third die comes up 6, adding one final successful result. So, out of 6*6*6 = 216 possible results on 3d6, 144+20+16+9+1 = 190 outcomes will give you a successful result, which is an 88% chance of success.

Meanwhile, replacing all your d6s with d4s means that you have only 6 out of 16 results that will succeed on your first two dice regardless of the third die for a total of 6*4=24 successes, plus 2 results (4-1, 1-4) that succeed if you roll anything but a 1 on the third die for an additional 2*3 = 6 successes, plus 4 results (3-1, 3-2, 2-3, 1-3) that succeed if you roll a 3 or higher for an additional 4*2 = 8 successes, plus 3 results (2-1, 2-2, 1-2) that succeed if you roll a 4 for an additional 3*1 = 3 successes, for a grand total of 24+6+8+3 = 41 successes out of 4*4*4 = 64 results for a success rate of 64%. Note, however, that this lowered success chance also comes with a number of Plot Points, meaning that you may be willing to take the reduced success chance in exchange for the reward of the Plot Points, which is why we are putting this in terms of 'do you have a better chance of success' rather than 'is it better for you' to roll d6s or d4s.

In Savage Worlds, you don't assemble a dice pool; instead you roll whatever your trait die is for the check and add any modifiers you may have access to in order to try to reach your target number, so you might think that it would be stupid to roll a d4 (which can't give you a result of 6 without modifiers) versus a d6 (which can). The kicker is that Savage Worlds dice can 'explode'; if you roll the maximum result on your trait die on a check, you can roll that die again and add the result to your total. If the exploding die itself explodes (i.e.: you roll another max result), you keep rolling until your die stops exploding, increasing your total result after each roll.

Because of this rule, it is actually better for you to roll a d4 than a d6 when trying to achieve a target number of 6 without modifiers. The math is simple: you succeed on a d6 by rolling a 6 (or about a 17% chance of success), while you succeed on a d4 if you roll a 4 (which happens 1 in 4 times), and then roll anything but a 1 on the exploding die (which happens 3 in 4 times). The latter result is equivalent to rolling two d4s and having the first d4 come up a 4 while the second d4 comes up anything but a 1, which happens 3 in 16 times (or slightly over 18% of the time). This isn't a huge improvement in the chance of success, but given that the assumption is that using a smaller die would normally reduce your chance of success, simply not decreasing the success odds would be a curious result, even without the slight improvement in odds that actually occurs.

Astute readers will note that the roll of 6 on the d6 also results in an exploding die, but that doesn't actually matter, because you've already made your required 6 on the first roll -- the result of the exploding die doesn't matter unless your game uses rules for 'exceptional success' in which achieving a success of a certain magnitude above the required number grants some kind of bonus or added effect. (Some Savage Worlds games do this, so in those cases, even though the odds of success are still better with a d4, the odds of 'exceptional success' are better with a d6).

Modifiers actually don't change this effect, either; they simply adjust the target number at which the effect is visible. So, for instance, if you had a +2 to your roll, you'd see the same effect of having a better chance of success by rolling a d4 rather than a d6 if the target number was 8. And though we've only shown this effect for a d4 versus a d6, the effect actually exists for every 'adjacent' die types -- if your target number is 8 and you have no modifiers, it's better to roll a d6 than a d8 for the best chance of success. (You can use a similar methodology to the one I used above to demonstrate this, which I leave as an exercise for the interested reader.) This, then, allows us to formulate a general rule for Savage Worlds -- if the target number for a roll minus any modifier you have for that roll equals the maximum result on a die, you have a slightly better chance of success rolling the die 'below' the die that would give that target number as its maximum result than rolling the die for which the target is the maximum result.

If you like the quirk, or it doesn't matter to you, feel free to try out or continue to enjoy Savage Worlds as your RPG system of choice. But if this does bother you, may I suggest trying out Cortex Prime instead?

[simul16]

Breaking the Broken Blaster

Barry is a character in the Multiverse RPG. Then he gets hold of the/a reality stone and become aware that he is in an RPG and grants himself unlimited cosmic power. Well not unlimited, he makes himself a rank 15 character. Then loses the stone. He then fights crime or does crime as the “Broken Blaster”, scourge of thematic players and characters who don’t min-max! - That70sBloke, "Marvel Multiverse: Broken Blaster - where I break the game by following the rules"

So I picked up a copy of the mighty Marvel Multiverse RPG Playtest rulebook and started messing around the way I normally do with a new super-hero game, by translating my first-even hero team dating back to Villains & Vigilantes into the new system. This proved to be a bit more challenging than usual, since the Playtest book only contains a fairly limited sample of powersets, mainly tied to the example pre-generated heroes also provided in the book. (I mean, it's a 120 page trade paperback, so you can't expect it would hold the same amount of rules material as, say, the HERO System 5E Revised rulebook.)

Then I got curious what other folks had made of the system, so I googled around and stumbled across the blog 'that70sgame', where a fellow has written fairly frequently over the past week or so about the Marvel Multiverse ruleset and his thoughts about it.

They weren't great thoughts. When I hit the post quoted in the intro above, I realized why -- dude is a wannabe min-maxer, with all the issues that implies. His fundamental argument is basically that the playtest book is weak and doesn't contain meaningful limits on characters, because you can dump nearly all your points into a single stat and dominate all your enemies.

He does have one point: the game definitely seems to assume that characters will be reasonably balanced among their stats. The book notes that the range of human ability scores ranges between -4 and +4 for each of the six ability scores, but that superhumans can exceed these normal human limits. But the game doesn't seem to think superhumans will exceed them by all that much, since none of the example characters has any ability score that even goes into double-digits, with the highest score being a 9, generally taken by the highest rank characters (with rank being similar to the concept of 'level' in D&D, though not quite as sharply delimited). Our dude, however, decides to go full-on munchkin, buying up his Agility to 20, which gives him a ridiculously high modifier (used mainly for attacks but also on checks, including opposed checks) and defense rating. He then explains that his character is obviously superior to every other rank 15 hero in the book, demonstrating with an example fight against the hero he considers the 'best' rank 15 sample character, Black Panther, and showing that Min-Max Man can put T'Challa down in three rounds while being completely untouchable.

Superficially, that seems impressive. However, there are a couple of caveats.

The first and most obvious is that Min-Max Man is profoundly helped in his mission by the fact that the powers in the playtest book focus on characters that mainly have Might and Agility attacks and aren't psychics or mentalists. If there was even one psychic in the book, even at rank 5, that character would likely wipe the floor with Min-Max Man, since MMM has chosen to have a Vigilance of 0, a Logic of -1, and an Ego of -2, which is the superheroic equivalent of mounting a 151mm howitzer on the roof of a 2004 Honda Civic.

But the real challenge comes from realizing that not only is it possible to beat Min-Max Man, it's not all that hard to do so with characters built from the existing playtest rules that are arguably weaker than MMM himself. So let's introduce you to the rank 10 character that cannot lose to Min-Max Man.

Meet the Punisher of Munchkins, scourge of min-mixers and protector of role-play!

Rank = 10

Archetype = Protector

Origin = Special Training

Profession = Soldier

AbilityCapScoreModifierDefense Might102+617 Agility167+1425 Resilience74+1122 Vigilance184+1324 Ego183+1223 Logic133+1021

Fight Damage = 3d6+7 (+7 w/Martial Arts)

Ranged Damage = 3d6+14 (+7 w/Firearms,+3 w/Tactical Mastery)

Health = 100

Focus = 125

Initiative = +7 (+edge)

Powers:

Firearms

Suppressive Fire

Return Fire

Martial Arts

Defense Stance

Reverse Momentum Throw

Do This All Day

Always Ready

Tactical Mastery

Battle Plan

Focus Fire

Traits:

Determination

Battle Ready

Connections: Military

Situational Awareness

Combat Trickery

Enemy (Min-Max Man)

Fresh Eyes

Signature Attack: Suppressive Fire

This character may not look all that impressive on paper, especially compared to Min-Max Man; MMM's got our hero easily beat in Agility, which also contributes to a massive bonus in Initiative. But that's part of the trick; our guy doesn't need to go first in order to win.

The key to the build is Return Fire, which triggers on a declaration of attack against our hero and gives him an attack against the declared attacker. The kicker is that the attack is Agility versus Ego defense, and MMM's Ego is his 'dump stat', giving him a defense of just 18, against which the Punisher of Munchkins cannot miss. (Well, that's not strictly true -- though usually a roll of 1 on the MARVEL die is treated as a 6, this doesn't actually happen if all three dice turn up as 1s, since that's treated as a Botched Roll, which would still fail. However, there are paths around this, as we'll see in a moment.) On a success with Return Fire, the Punisher of Munchkins deals half his Ranged Damage (3d6+21, as this is a Firearms power) as damage to MMM's Focus, and since MMM doesn't have any Damage Reduction (why would he, with an Agility defense of 44?), he takes that Focus damage, which causes his attack to automatically fail and causes MMM to become Stunned, preventing him from using any other actions other than Easy actions and stopping him from using Reactions. Note as well that once MMM is Stunned, our hero gains an Edge on all attacks against him, allowing him to re-roll a die in his d616 roll, meaning that if his initial roll comes up as all 1s, he can simply choose to re-roll one of those dice, failing only if the re-roll also comes up as a 1. It's a 1-in-216 chance to get all 1s on a roll of 3d6 to begin with, and the odds of the roll still being a Botch after an Edge re-roll rise to 1-in-1296. And though it is true that MMM could spend a point of Karma to negate our hero's Edge, our hero can simply spend a point of his own Karma to re-establish it, if needed, meaning that this 1-in-216 occurrence would need to occur five times in the fight before the sixth such roll might actually end up being a Botch. An 'optimized' character that requires that much good luck to escape his duly assigned fate is barely worthy of the title.

(And as a nod to That70sBloke about this not yet being a really well-designed game, tell me, based solely on the text found in the Playtest Rulebook, when the Stunned condition imposed by Return Fire ends. It's unclear, but I'd argue should at least be through the end of our hero's next turn, and arguably should be until the start of MMM's next turn, which for our purpose ends up being the same thing.)

On his turn, the Punisher of Munchkins follows up with Suppressive Fire, which is another Agility vs. Ego attack that he cannot miss with without Botching, dealing another bout of half Ranged Damage to MMM's Focus. Note that MMM has a Healing Factor, and being Stunned by Return Fire doesn't prevent him from using the Healing Factor, since it doesn't even use an action, but Healing Factor only restores Health, and the Punisher of Munchkins isn't dealing Health damage as his main threat.

This continues, round after round: MMM declares an attack, the Punisher of Munchkins Returns Fire, stopping the attack and Stunning MMM, and then following up by doing even more Focus damage. Even if MMM rolled well enough on initiative at the start of the fight to generate a bonus round, nothing in the rules says that characters who don't get a turn in the bonus round can't still take Reactions, meaning that there's literally no way for MMM to put a stop to this short of running away. (MMM's own Defensive Stance doesn't apply at all, as it only affects Fight rolls until the character is successfully attacked, and neither Return Fire nor Suppressive Fire are defined as Fight rolls.) Eventually, unless Min-Max Man disengages, conceding the fight, he will be reduced to a negative of his starting Focus and be Shattered, effectively becoming psychologically broken enough so that he needs to be retired from the campaign (although I suppose he could return as an avatar of Khonshu or, more likely, as a museum gift shop worker).

(I'll also note that I've built in another couple of 'gotchas' for unaware munchkins into this build, which I leave as an exercise for the interested reader to discover, but the best way to ensure those gotchas are effective requires a slight re-write of the character, swapping out his Signature Attack Trait for the Surprising Power Trait and swapping out the Tactical Mastery power set for Energy Absorption from the Energy Control power set.)

Note as well that, though rare, other attacks that work against defenses other than Agility exist in the playtest rulebook, and can be used in a similar way to apply strength against MMM's weaknesses to defeat him without much effort. This build is just, to me, the most entertaining, as it beats MMM by preventing him from being able to use his own strengths, which is exactly the approach I recommend to game masters looking to deter munchkins in their own games.

So That70sBloke isn't necessarily wrong when he criticizes the Marvel Multiverse RPG for not having a great design, but it's not because the system fails to put limits on characteristics; the game is instead trying to build a 'rock-paper-scissors' approach to balance, not a limit-based one, and the full release of the game will simply expand the options available to those who want to play the game of figuring out if there's a 'super-move' that can bypass all the options and counter-options available in character design. No, the actual flaws in the Marvel Multiverse game design will have to wait for a more thorough accounting in a later essay.

[simul16]

The Curious Case of the Original Women of Ravenloft (or Loose Canons Can Be Dangerous)

For many years, we in the Dungeons & Dragons RPG studio have considered things like D&D novels, D&D video games, D&D comic books, as wonderful expressions of D&D storytelling and D&D lore, but they are not canonical for the D&D roleplaying game. -Jeremy Crawford Those among us who are fortunate enough to become shepherds or stewards of the D&D game must train ourselves to become art and lore experts so that we know when we’re being faithful to the game’s past and when we’re moving in a new direction. We decide, based on our understanding of the game’s history and audience, what artwork or lore to pull forward, what artwork or lore needs to change, and what artwork or lore should be buried so deep that it never again sees the light of day. -Chris Perkins There is a very simple statement to be made about all these stories: they do not really come off intellectually as problems, and they do not come off artistically as fiction. They are too contrived, and too little aware of what goes on in the world. - Raymond Chandler, "The Simple Art of Murder"

There's been a bit of a stir in the D&D community over some comments that Jeremy Crawford made at a press briefing prior to the D&D Live event about how only the information published in a WotC Fifth Edition D&D product is 'canonical' for D&D. There was enough of a reaction that Chris Perkins, self-described as "one of the D&D Studio's principal game architects", published an article on the WotC site (linked under Perkins's name above) explaining this statement and explicitly calling out what it means when discussing an intellectual property with a long-standing and vast catalog of lore, where that lore is one of the primary positive features of that property.

On the surface, it seems pretty straight-forward. Crawford's comments focused on not overwhelming partners with lore requirements when producing peripheral products like novels and video games so that they can focus on producing their product rather than meeting arbitrary lore requirements (not that this seems to have helped the most recent video game product release). Perkins mentions this, too, explicitly evoking R.A. Salvatore's novels and how Salvatore (perhaps infamously) used to incorporate elements into his stories that were outright illegal according to the D&D game rules (such as Drizzt's dual-wielding of scimitars, only made legal in 5e, or his creation of Pikel Bouldershoulder, a 'mentally challenged' dwarf who believed himself to be a druid and even eventually displayed druid-like abilities, even though dwarves in the D&D of the era of the Cleric Quintet series, where Pikel appeared, were not allowed to be druids). Perkins's comments also refocused the discussion on players, DMs, and their games, making the point that every campaign develops its own canon, and that the version of the Forgotten Realms run at a given D&D table does not perfectly match either the version of the same world run at a different table, or even as presented in the official published campaign sourcebooks.

This position is easily defensible; I even presented it myself in a response on Twitter to Perkins's own comment on an event in the Acquisitions Incorporated campaign he runs and records for online consumption. A restaurant that exists in the Forgotten Realms of Acquisitions Incorporated might have been shut down for health reasons after a shambling mound attack in a different campaign, or a previous party of PCs might have made a disastrous error during the war with reborn Netheril that led to the fall of Cormyr, with the coastal area of the former kingdom being absorbed by their rivals in Sembia while the interior lands were allowed to be overrun with monsters migrating out of the Stonelands (which makes for a nearly ideal 'starter zone' for a new 5E Realms campaign, IMO).

But just because there are benefits to such an approach to canon doesn't mean that it's the best way to approach canon, particularly with respect to a property which has had a long lifespan and is expected to have an even longer one. There are plenty of ways to criticize such an approach, many of which have been brought up by other commenters:

In any long-lasting intellectual property, there is a core of fans that are devoted to the lore and canon of that property -- see Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc. 'Loosening up' the lore not only convinces your existing super-fans not to continue to support and evangelize your property, but also prevents the creation of a new generation of such fans to continue your property's life into a new generation of fans.

Since much of what is on offer in a published sourcebook is the current 'canon' (despite Perkins's statement that "we don't produce sourcebooks that spool out a ton of backstory", the reality is that much of the content of sourcebooks like the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft is setting material: i.e.: "backstory"), if you're not going to stand up for the lore of prior editions, and by implication make it clear that future editions aren't going to be beholden to the lore of even this edition, then why get heavily invested in the lore at all? (This ties into the above point, as the fewer people who get invested in the lore of a property, the fewer evangelists for that property you will produce.)

If you have any Organized Play for your game (which D&D does, as does so-called 'living card games' which are based on an advancing storyline), loosened canon makes it easier for those authors to produce content, but simultaneously makes it harder to incorporate the content that players enjoy into the overall game. In addition, the later stories can't take into account all of the potential outcomes that a given group might have taken through a given adventure, so in effect, this turns all adventures into "railroad plots" with respect to the larger campaign narrative, where the best outcome is assumed for each adventure and thus the PCs don't really have the ability to influence the overall metaplot. (This gets complicated, because it necessarily involves different campaign outcomes contesting with one another to become the 'canonical' outcome, which is itself pretty challenging. Regardless, one of the attractions of a 'living campaign' is that the campaign in theory adapts to respond to the actions of the players; a 'living campaign' that doesn't do this is no different than a traditional scripted campaign.)

Perkins's final point in his essay, though, seems just as important to the current 'administration' as any of the other explanations, and that's the quote referenced at the top. In effect, what Perkins is saying is that the 5E team wants to be able to take what they consider 'good lore' and keep in in the game, while revising or outright eliminating 'bad lore'. Again, this seems like a defensible position, but it also has a flip side: it assumes that your changes to the lore are not just lazy or arbitrary, but are made consciously and for specific reasons. This could work well if you actually follow through on your intention, but given the realities of publishing on a schedule, it's inevitable that some amount of lazy or arbitrary decision-making will occur, and in those decisions, you can inadvertently (or allow someone without your knowledge to deliberately) make decisions that harm the canon. The statement seems reasonable, but as we'll discover below, it's actually fundamentally dishonest.

With that in mind, let's explore...

The Curious Case of the Original Women of Ravenloft

The original Ravenloft setting as released in the early 1990s, like the game studio that released it, contained a lot of old white guys, and it didn't necessarily get any more diverse with time. The early 3E Ravenloft product "Secrets of the Dread Realms" by Swords & Sorcery Studios lists eighteen Domains of Dread, half of which were unambiguously run by old white dudes. Depending on how you want to define 'old' and 'white', you could even add a few more domains to the list (such as Verbrek, ruled by the son of the former old white dude darklord, and Markovia, depending on whether you consider Markov to still be human enough to qualify as an old white dude). Only five domains were ruled by female darklords, and one of those (Borca) isn't even wholly ruled by the female darklord. Comparing the darklords of Secrets of the Dread Realms to that of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft points out just how much of a priority it was for the 5E team to increase the diversity of darklords in the setting.

Curiously, though, the female characters retained from classic Ravenloft don't appear to have been changed in a manner that fits Perkins's explanation of what they consider when deciding what to bring forward from older lore, as in nearly every case, the character became less interesting and possesses less agency in her current 5E presentation than she did in her original pre-5E incarnation.

Jacqueline Montarri

Let's begin our survey with a character who technically doesn't yet exist in 5E lore, and thus by Crawford's definition doesn't exist in lore at all. It might seem odd to begin my presentation of 'female characters deprived of agency by their 5E presentations' by starting with a character who wasn't presented, but on the other hand, being removed from canon and thus from existence could be argued as the most severe loss of agency possible for a character.

Jacqueline doesn't exist in 5E because the organization she founded, the Red Vardo Traders, doesn't exist in 5E. In older editions, the Red Vardo Traders was both a legitimate trade company as well as a criminal organization engaging in smuggling, assassination, and other crimes, and are based in the Barovian town of Krezk. The version of Krezk presented in Curse of Strahd, however, makes no mention of the Red Vardo Traders, choosing instead to present Krezk as a small village dominated by the Monastery of Saint Markovia*, a location that does not exist in pre-5E Ravenloft. The Red Vardo Traders were founded by Jacqueline for a specific purpose, and thus both their legitimate business operations and their criminal pursuits are but shells for their true purpose: to find Jacqueline Montarri's head.

* - Saint Markovia himself was initially presented in the late 3E reboot adventure "Expedition to Castle Ravenloft", as one of the inhabitants of Castle Ravenloft's crypts; Markovia was changed from a man into a woman as part of Curse of Strahd, and the Sanctuary of First Light, the largest church of the Morninglord in Ravenloft pre-5E and placed in Krezk by its developers, was re-written in Curse of Strahd as the Monastery of Saint Markovia.

Montarri sought the secret of eternal youth, and in doing so, consulted with the Vistani seer Madame Eva to find it. Eva originally resisted, but finally revealed that the secret rested within the library of Castle Ravenloft, and Jacqueline, out of a desire to be the only possessor of such a secret, out of a need to do evil, or perhaps both, murdered Eva before departing for Strahd's castle. Unfortunately, Jacqueline's infiltration of Castle Ravenloft attracted Strahd's attention, and she was captured, turned over to the villagers in Barovia, and beheaded for her crime against Strahd. However, some of Eva's fellow Vistani asked to take custody of the body, explaining that the woman had murdered their leader, and Jacqueline eventually awoke -- wearing Madame Eva's head. She since learned that she could 'wear' the decapitated heads of others, and cannot survive long without one. Jacqueline's body has not aged, but her head ages a year for each day she wears it, requiring her to continually murder (and possibly assume the identities of those she murders) to survive while she searches for her original head, the only thing that can break the curse that Eva's kin placed upon her.

That's a pretty amazing backstory, and one I'd think would be very worth including in a new Ravenloft setting, save for one problem: Madame Eva's death. Now this isn't actually a big problem in the context of classic Ravenloft: both Eva herself and her tribe of Vistani were known to have a 'curious' relationship to time (former Ravenloft writer John W. Mangrum explicitly called Madame Eva a "time traveler" when it was pointed out that Eva's continued existence in Ravenloft canon suggested that she had not actually been killed), but it did cause confusion among those with a more static approach to continuity. Since Eva unambiguously exists in 5E Ravenloft, being referenced in both Curse of Strahd and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, it appears that the decision to jettison Jacqueline and her Red Vardo Traders comes mainly from a desire to untangle that confusing bit about Eva actually being dead but still walking around.

Granted, the need for an organization like the Red Vardo Traders is perhaps less significant in a Ravenloft where the Core doesn't exist and every domain is its own Island of Terror, but given that Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft still lists a number of organizations known to be capable of travel between domains, including two that they just invented out of whole cloth, it would seem as though making use of a pre-existing organization might have worked just as well. The other complicating factor is that Montarri is not herself a darklord; with the focus of the 5E Ravenloft experience on darklords as linchpins of the setting, having a compelling NPC who isn't a darklord (but who honestly could be made into one fairly easily, as her curse lends itself to a darklord's punishment and her formation of the Red Vardo Traders into her way of dealing with the limitations of being a darklord) would seem to detract from what the 5E designers were trying to do with the setting.

But this isn't the only or even the worst example of a female character deprived of her agency in the new regime...

Gabrielle Aderre

Unlike Jacqueline, whose elimination from Ravenloft seems like an editorial red pen taken to an otherwise merely irritating issue, anyone familiar with Gabrielle Aderre's backstory realized that her background would have to change significantly given the changes to the Vistani in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

In pre-5E Ravenloft, the Vistani were an exotic human culture of outsiders, driven by their heritage and abilities to make their own way within the Domains of Dread, and having developed mysterious abilities and customs to protect themselves from its dangers. Non-Vistani were viewed with suspicion, to the point where the Vistani had a specific word ("giorgio") for non-Vistani, and those who chose to breed with non-Vistani and their offspring were frequently outcast from Vistani culture. Female Vistani were often gifted with 'The Sight', a precognitive or divination ability, but the Vistani took great pains to ensure that no male children were born with The Sight, lest that child grow up to be a prophesied doom-bringer known as a Dukkar. (One such seer was Hyskosa, whose legendary prophesies eventually led to the Great Conjunction which nearly tore the realms apart.) Because of their separation from mundane society, more traditional settlements tended to fear the Vistani, especially their rumored skill with fashioning deadly curses when wronged, and though Vistani would often trade with such settlements, they were never truly welcome in them; ultimately, the Vistani would follow their wanderlust and move on, leaving even more strange tales and confusing lore in their wake.

Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft changed all that. Now, the Vistani are simply a sprawling human culture who "refuses to be captives of a single domain, the Mists, or any terror." Their abilities are no longer unique -- there are a number of Vistani who "possess the Mist Walker Dark Gift" that can be taken by any character -- though they are said to "understand how to employ Mist Talismans" with their "traditional magic". Instead of being seen by others as mysterious outsiders, now "the news and goods Vistani bring ensures a genuine welcome" from more traditional settlements, and only "more dismal communities view Vistani with suspicion"; likewise the Vistani themselves no longer refer to non-Vistani as "giorgio", nor do they seem to have any issues with those of mixed Vistani blood traveling or dwelling among them. Most significantly, the legends of the Dukkar no longer exist, with both male and female Vistani serving as spellcasters "with many favoring divination magic for the practical help if provides in avoiding danger." In fact, Hyskosa is no longer a lost seer prophesying the doom of the Dread Realms, but "a renowned poet and storyteller" who is alive and leads his own caravan of Vistani through the Mists.

Given all of this, Gabrielle's pre-5E backstory would need to change quite drastically. Gabrielle's mother was half-Vistani, and possessed enough of The Sight to prophesy that Gabrielle could never seek to have a family or tragedy would be the inevitable result. Learning to hate the Vistani based on her mother's incessant refusal to acknowledge her desires for a family, Gabrielle eventually abandoned her mother during a werewolf attack, fleeing into Invidia where she was captured and brought before the darklord, who sought to enslave her to command her exotic sensuality. Instead, Gabrielle made use of the traditional Vistani "evil eye" to paralyze the darklord, murdering him and assuming his lordship over Invidia. Not long after, Gabrielle was visited by a 'mysterious gentleman caller', after which she discovered she was pregnant, eventually giving birth to a boy who proved to possess The Sight. Delighted that she had managed to give birth to a Dukkar, she failed to realize how quickly the boy grew or how powerful he proved to be until her son, Malocchio, usurped her throne (but not the dark lordship of Invidia) and cast her out of his court. Though there are definitely some problematic things in this story, it's not so terrible that it couldn't still serve as the foundation of a tragic Darklord's origin.

In Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, Invidia is detailed among the short descriptions of "Other Domains of Dread", and her pre-5E backstory has been utterly thrown out. There's no indication of how Gabrielle became darklord of Invidia, who the father of her child is, or anything from pre-5E lore. Instead, Gabrielle has become one of the parents from the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -- a rich, bad mom convinced of her child's greatness and willing to accept anyone who supports that story while turning a blind eye to her child's misbehavior and cruelty toward his servants and teachers.

Pre-5E Gabrielle wasn't ideal, but at least she had a drive: she wanted a family, and refused to accept that her desire could not overcome the inevitable grinding wheel of fate. 5E Gabrielle arguably isn't even evil, just supernaturally deluded (ironically, her main flaw is her blind acceptance of the rightness of her own privilege), so it's not even clear why she rather than Malocchio is the darklord of Invidia. Rather than wanting a thing she can never have, 'modern' Gabrielle assumes she has a thing that doesn't exist, and is less a tragic figure desperately trying to assert her own agency than a deluded puppet, acting out a part in a drama that makes no sense. Granted, as we noted above, some degree of Gabrielle's old backstory would need to change to accommodate the other changes to Ravenloft lore as part of the 5E transition, but the decision to simply throw out the old Gabrielle and turn her into a character who isn't even aware of her own lack of agency in her situation is, in its own way, even more tragic than Gabrielle's original pre-5E story.

Isolde

Isolde is a fascinating character, because she was created after the Carnival, the group she leads in Ravenloft lore. In pre-5E Ravenloft, the Carnival was the Carnival l'Morai, run by a sinister being known as the Puppetmaster. The events that led to the Carnival breaking free of the Puppetmaster's influence are detailed in the 1993 Ravenloft novel "Carnival of Fear". Then, in the 1999 supplement "Carnival", John W. Mangrum and Steve Miller take the Carnival l'Morai and introduce them to Isolde, a mysterious woman who joins the Carnival and assumes the role of its leader and protector. Much of the internal story within the supplement itself involves the theories that many of the other characters have about who Isolde is and where she comes from, and how various aspects of the Carnival, such as the Twisting (a change that comes over those who remain with the Carnival for any signficant amount of time and seem to bring hidden or secret traits to the surface as exotic abilities or mutations), relate to her. In the end, though (spoiler alert!), Mangrum and Miller reveal Isolde's true backstory -- she is a chaotic good ghaele eladrin who voluntarily chose to enter Ravenloft in pursuit of a fiend named the Gentleman Caller (thus the Carnival supplement is also the origin of the Caller, one of the signature non-darklord villains of the setting). The Twisting is revealed to be a side-effect of Isolde's 'reality wrinkle'; as an outsider, Isolde can re-make reality in a short distance around her, and one of the ways she does this is by bringing someone's inner self out and making it visible to others. Honestly, if you wanted a domain or group whose underlying reason-to-exist seems tailor-made for a modern RPG audience, it would be one where having your inner self revealed to the world, one that you've been taught is freakish and strange, proves to be beautiful to those who accept you.

But that's not what we got in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, perhaps because of the book's insistence on page 6 that "Nowhere Is Safe". Instead of the 3E ghaele eladrin, Isolde is now just an eladrin, a 4E planar elf variant. Instead of entering Ravenloft and finding the Carnival l'Morai in need of a leader and protector, she was manipulated first by a powerful archfey into leading a fey carnival, then inexplicably decided to swap carnivals with a different carnival run by a group of shadar-kai through the Shadowfell, even going so far as to accept the intelligent (and evil) sword Nepenthe, who is the actual darklord of the Carnival.

Again, as with Gabrielle, some simplification of Isolde's backstory was probably inevitable, as the original backstory made use of very specific Ravenloft mechanics that the 5E version simply doesn't want to deal with (mainly Isolde's 'reality wrinkle' which drives the Twisting). But not only did the designers take a character who had explicitly chosen both to enter Ravenloft in pursuit of the Gentleman Caller and to take leadership of the Carnival to serve as its protector and changed her into a character who is manipulated into doing everything she does that gets her into Ravenloft (and leaves her no memory of how or why she got there), the designers didn't even decide to keep Isolde as the most significant character in Carnival, allowing the sword Isolde carries to take that starring role.

Oddly, a lot of the changes to Isolde's story are reminiscent of the classic Ravenloft story of Elena Faith-Hold and how she became the darklord of Nidala in the Shadowlands, which suggested to me that perhaps at one time the Shadowlands were not going to be included in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and the changes to Isolde's story were meant to be a call-out to what would be the missing story of Elena. But the Shadowlands also exist as an "Other Domain of Dread", so in the end, the changes to Isolde served no real positive purpose.

Interlude

It's worth taking a moment to contrast the characters above with the domains in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft that gained female darklords who didn't have female darklords previously:

Dementlieu, formerly ruled by Dominic D'Honaire, is now ruled by Saidra D'Honaire; it is hinted but not stated explicitly in Saidra's backstory that she is not actually related to the former darklord, but simply assumed the family name as part of her assumption of the rulership of Dementlieu, in which the Grand Masquerade must be maintained above all else.

Falkovnia, formerly ruled by Vlad Drakov, is now ruled by Vladeska Drakov; Vladeska's backstory makes it plain that she is a female re-skin of the original Vlad Drakov, himself a character from the Dragonlance world of Krynn. Other than her origin, which is now no longer tied to Dragonlance, her backstory is largely the same as her predecessor's, save that instead of the dead rising to battle Drakov's attempted invasions of their northern neighbor, Darkon, now the dead rise to reclaim Falkovnia itself from Vladeska's attempt to 'pacify' it.

Lamordia, formerly ruled by Adam, the creation of the mad doctor Victor Mordenheim, is now ruled by the mad doctor Viktra Mordenheim; Victor's hubris in his attempt to create life are matched by Viktra's attempts to defeat death.

Valachan, formerly ruled by Baron Urik von Kharkov, is now ruled by Chakuna; in one of the few backstories in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft that acknowledges a former darklord, Chakuna's backstory is that she had to become a monster (a were-panther, specifically) to defeat a monster (a panther who was polymorphed into a man as part of a revenge plot, fled from the Forgotten Realms into Ravenloft upon realizing what he was, where he was transformed into a vampire...look, not every convoluted backstory for the old Ravenloft darklords was necessarily a good convoluted backstory).

I'd argue that each of the darklords above retains her agency in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, but it's curious to note that each of those darklords seems to have inherited that sense of agency from her relationship to the male darklord that preceded her, sometimes literally (in the cases of Saidra and Chakuna) and sometimes figuratively (in the cases where Vladeska and Viktra are mainly female re-skinnings of the original male darklords). The designers clearly have the capacity to allow a female darklord to exercise agency and have drive and purpose to her existence, if that drive and purpose was inherited from or inspired by an original male character. If the character was a woman all along, though, then agency and drive and purpose are not really important to the designers, if they can fit that character into the specially designed hole the size of the concept they had for the new domain. Which brings us to the character who I feel was done dirtiest by the designers in moving from classic Ravenloft to 5E...

Jacqueline Renier

Jacqueline Renier is one of the original Ravenloft darklords, tracing her origins all the way back to the original "Black Box" campaign setting released by TSR in 1990. She appears in two different places in that boxed set -- once as the chaotic evil darklord of Richemulot in the Realm of Terror booklet, and in a portrait of the Renier family included as a handout in the box. The Renier family was actually an ancient wererat clan in the world they originally came from, and Jacqueline herself was the granddaughter of the patriarch of the clan, Claude Renier. When the Reniers fled into Ravenloft to escape the justice of their original world, they first appeared in Falkovnia, where they ruled the sewers until finally forced out by Vlad Drakov's troops. Fleeing into the Mists, the Reniers found themselves in the new domain of Richemulot, and Claude found himself the domain's darklord.

Jacqueline proved an eager student in the manipulative ways of her elders, however; both her grandfather, who maintained control over the clan through a combination of coercion and sheer force of personality, and her mother, who murdered Jacqueline's father seemingly only so that Jacqueline and her twin sister would not need to lose the Renier name. Jacqueline learned the game so well that one day she manipulated her own grandfather into his destruction at her hands, so cleanly that no one else in the family dared to oppose her ascension. Jacqueline was now the matriarch of the Reniers, and the ruler of Richemulot.

But 3E Ravenloft added a few additional wrinkles to Jacqueline's backstory. In the Ravenloft Gazetteers, it was revealed that Jacqueline's ambition to assume control of her clan and the domain of Richemulot were not just driven by a desire for power, but in the name of a vision of the future where wererats would reigns supreme over all other humanoids. She began encouraging migration into the largely undeveloped and underpopulated lands of Richemulot, while overseeing work in putrid laboratories to develop the Becoming Plague -- a disease that would transform humanoids en-masse into wererats under Jacqueline's ultimate command. In every speech Jacqueline would give about the glorious future of Richemulot, it was not the future of humanity she was referring to, but rather the coming age of the rat.

Jacqueline's backstory wasn't perfect -- as with other female darklords, she also got saddled with the 'she desperately wants to be loved and is terrified of being alone' trope -- but for the most part, this is a truly impressive backstory. And in our age, a domain featuring an ambitious politician pushing nationalism to motivate her partisans, only for that nationalism to not be what her partisans believe it is would seem to be an extremely fitting template for horror. It would certainly seem possible to re-write the few problematic aspects of her character with more modern tropes; make Jacqueline an 'ace' (asexual) but who still craves romance based on her upbringing and is both attracted to and terrified by anyone who might potentially prove to be her equal, and you've got what I'd consider to be one of the best darklords in the setting.

As you might expect, given Jacqueline's placement on this list, that's not nearly what we got in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft.

Instead, Jacqueline was born as a noblewoman within Richemulot, and was quick to notice that the rise of the bourgeoise would threaten the power of the nobility and lead to their diminution in society. Jacqueline's grandfather was not the charismatic, sadistic mastermind of a clan of wererats, but an aging nobleman growing infirm in his old age, and he proved unable and/or unwilling to work to change things, so Jacqueline would need to be the person to reverse her family's fortunes and the decline of the nobility in society. Not by doing anything herself, mind, but rather by trying to find an organization of nobles working to maintain the supremacy of the nobility. Finding them, she learned too late that they were secretly a society of wererats when she was forcibly made into one of them, but she quickly adapted, rising to command both the rat and wererat populations before finally unleashing a plague -- the Gnawing Plague -- upon the populace. Rather than converting the population into wererats, the Gnawing Plague just killed them, and when the people begged Jacqueline and the nobles for aid, Jacqueline made helpful noises but did nothing useful (it's not recorded if she uttered the words "Let them eat cake," as she watched the peasants die). Her 'torment' as a darklord is that she wants to return to the privileged life she had as a noblewoman, but can't, as the need to supervise the creation of new, more virulent plagues and unleash them to keep the peasantry from revolting and overthrowing the nobility prevents her from building the kind of society that would actually support a thriving nobility.

Instead of a domain where we have seen the future and humanity has no place in it, we have a one-percenter using every ounce of her privilege to stay above the ranks of the peasants she despises. Instead of an intelligent, ambitious planner capable of executing long-range goals flawlessly, we have a vapid, shallow socialite yearning to return to her days as a debutante. As villains go, Jacqueline has fallen a long, long way from her portrayal in pre-5E Ravenloft.

Probably the most offensive part of the redesign of Richemulot as 'the plague domain' is that we've spent over nineteen months living through a plague of our own, and the kind of horror that is presented as Richemulot's primary adventure cycle, the Cycle of the Plague, bears almost no resemblance to the reality we've lived through. Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft presents a world where common people are to be feared, and authorities abuse their power to heartlessly quarantine the sick to stop the disease from overtaking everyone, yet say nothing about the horror of those who refuse to accept that the plague exists, or who profiteer from bizarre 'cures' and treatments. The designers present Richemulot as an example of 'disaster horror', where "the world has fallen into ruin -- or it's getting there fast," when the domain could be an example of the most classic of all horror tropes: humans are the most horrible of monsters.

Thus, the final quote leading this essay. It's not my place to argue that the folks who wrote Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft are good or bad writers, and as Raymond Chandler noted, it's not really necessary. After all, "[t]he poor writer is dishonest without knowing it, and the fairly good one can be dishonest because he doesn't know what to be honest about." And ultimately this entire drive, to try to distance the product from the mistakes of the past by also distancing it from its successes, all while presuming that one can correct the deficiencies of the past without committing mistakes that, in hindsight, will seem just as obvious to our successors: that undertaking is fundamentally dishonest. The people writing, editing, and publishing Dungeons & Dragons today grew up on the old tropes that are now being rejected as no longer being relevant, as unnecessary complexity, as potentially harmful, without realizing that the harmful bits aren't just what was written down, but what was learned, such as a woman's motivation and agency meaning little unless they correspond with those of a man.

Yes, there's a lot of stuff published before 2014 that seems bad to us today that, for whatever reason, didn't seem bad to us back when it was published, read, and became part of our fictional worlds. But there's also no reason to assume that process ended in 2014. Update the lore where it's needed, but realize that the process never ends, even with the lore you're writing today to replace it.

[simul16]

The Fragile Strength of the Holy Trinity

You may not have heard about the Holy Trinity before, but you've definitely seen it in action. The classic RPG party lineup of a thief damage-dealer, a warrior-tank, and a supporting cleric has been around in RPGs since the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons, but the trinity goes back even further than that: in football, or my preferred alternative -- Rocket League -- the striker is a damage-dealer and scores the goals needed to win, the mid-field supports their allies by setting up plays, and the keeper acts like a tank, preventing the enemy from winning. By letting people specialize into these three distinct roles, each of which work together, not only can teams or groups act much more effectively than a disorganized bunch of jacks-of-all-trades, but newer players can ease themselves into a game by only having to focus on particular elements....So how is it that this obviously useful trick for designing group-centric games is despised by so many people? - Adam Millard (The Architect of Games), "Why Do So Many Games Have Tanks, Healers, and DPS?"

Adam Millard's Architect of Games YouTube channel is a great resource for learning and thinking about games, gameplay, and game design. Though Millard focuses mainly on video games, much of what he discusses is applicable to other types of games as well, and as noted above, the Holy Trinity definitely developed out of old-school D&D (though I'd argue that it was the magic-user, not the thief, that comprised the classic damage-dealer role in classic D&D).

But as Millard notes, the concepts behind the Holy Trinity arguably pre-date even D&D and can be found in games and sports dating back even further -- his soccer example being only a bit stretched. In fact, though some people these days are looking for ways to 'spice up' classic sports to update them for a newer fanbase (I'm looking at you, baseball), the simplest answer might be that older sports with a turn-based approach to play (one team has the ball and can score, then the other team gets the ball and can score) don't lend themselves to a Holy Trinity style design. (Though an argument can be made that Three True Outcomes Theory in baseball is basically relegating everyone on defense who isn't the pitcher to the role of support, with the pitcher being the tank, though this isn't necessarily helping make baseball more entertaining, just more predictable.)

But, as Millard also notes, just as the Holy Trinity is ubiquitous in cooperative game design, complaints revolving around the Holy Trinity are also ubiquitous. In some cases, these complaints are unjustified; the whinings of players who don't like having to rely on other players to accomplish a team goal. In other cases, the complaints are justified, typically in the context of games that push one part of the Trinity -- often the damage-dealer -- to such prominence that other roles and even non-optimal strategies become pointless. Once could even call this the 'Mel the cook on 'Alice' principle' -- the best defense is a good offense (advance to 2:00 and watch until 2:22 to see the key insight).

Millard points out that games can try to 'break out' of the Holy Trinity model by adding additional axes of interaction, but his examples seem to point out that the Holy Trinity as a design principle is as fragile as it is powerful: it's just as possible to 'break' the model rather than 'break out' of the model, and if your additional axis isn't powerful enough to break the game, then all you've generally done is add another method of interacting via the standard Holy Trinity. For example, Millard points out that in a RTS such as Starcraft, there's an economic element to the game revolving around gaining access to and controlling resources which are then used to develop the units that fall into the Holy Trinity when they meet in battle. In most RTSes, though, the economic element isn't merely an alternative method of strategy that can be pursued alongside the traditional Holy Trinity of building tank, DPS, and support units; if you're not good at the economic part of Starcraft, about how best to exploit resources and capture new resources, then you're really not good at Starcraft, save for a few explicit scenarios where you start with all the resources you're ever going to get and the challenge comes from using the Holy Trinity optimally to succeed with the resources you have.

A better idea seems to show up when Millard breaks down the Holy Trinity into 'modes of interaction' as a means of trying to develop games that aren't so reliant on Holy Trinity-style design. In Millard's analysis, the DPS characters specialize in 'ally-to-enemy' interaction (i.e.: allies defeating enemies directly, advancing the players toward their win condition), tanks deal with enemy-to-ally interaction (i.e.: controlling how the enemy deals its damage among the party, preferably with optimal inefficiency, often via taunts to provoke enemies into attacking the tank rather than other allies), and supports deal with ally-to-ally interaction (i.e.: providing buffs and healing for allies to both make them more effective in the fight as well as to keep them active in the fight). Millard points out that it's possible to develop a different axis of interaction -- for instance, ally-to-environment. Millard suggests that this axis is wholly independent of the Holy Trinity axes, but I don't think he put quite enough consideration into his argument here. While it is true that games like Divinity: Original Sin have classes that interact with the environment by either changing it to avoid harmful interactions or changing it to create positive interactions, interacting with the environment doesn't actually advance the player's goals directly in the same way that defeating enemies advances their goals. The ways in which environmental changes affect the actual goals of the players in the game still fall into the three core interactions of the Holy Trinity: pools of oil that can be set on fire are ally-to-enemy interaction that increases damage to enemies leading to their defeat, walls that prevent enemy movement or restrict them to certain paths are enemy-to-ally interaction controlling how enemies can deal damage to allies and creates inefficiencies in how enemies deal their damage to allies, and holy water that heals or buffs allies is an ally-to-ally interaction that improves allies effectiveness in defeating enemies without directly defeating the enemies themselves. Each of these abilities could be taken from an 'environment' class and given to a class that falls more directly into the Holy Trinity without breaking the design at all.

In effect, what Millard is suggesting is effectively breaking tanks into two different types of tank -- one that affects enemy-to-ally interactions by directly affecting enemies, and another that does the same task though manipulating the environment. The problem with this approach is already mentioned in the video itself when Millard discusses how Blizzard, in designing Overwatch, split the DPS class into 'offensive damage dealers' and 'defensive damage dealers', with the idea that offensive DPS would be better suited to combining with tanks and supports to capture contested objectives, while the defensive DPS would be better suited to holding the objective once it had been captured. Unfortunately, players simply played both roles as offensive DPS to the point where, in order to keep the game appealing to players, Blizzard collapsed the role into a more generic DPS type role, which effectively obsoleted numerous characters who had been designed for a more defensive damage-dealing role but whose design wasn't amenable toward making them more offensively-minded. Millard points out that this makes the game less interesting, and I agree, but I think Millard's suggestion for splitting tanks and supports into 'anti-unit' versus 'environmental' tanks and supports would repeat the same problem that Blizzard failed to correct with its split-DPS design. While I won't call it a mistake, since it wasn't really a design failure but a failure of players to engage with the design on its own terms that led to the ultimate problem, I won't argue with you if you want to call it a mistake based on the idea that the designers didn't make the difference between offensive and defensive DPS compelling enough within the context of their game to get players to stop thinking in terms of 'I'm DPS, so I go out and kill things to win'.

All if this is to point out that there isn't a simple, easy answer to the question of 'how do we move beyond the Holy Trinity'. If, as Millard suggests, the Holy Trinity has been a part of cooperative game design long before the advent of hero shooters or even tabletop RPGs, then perhaps the better solution is to design cooperative games where achieving the goal -- winning the game -- relies on different actions within the game than 'defeat enemies', as seen in games like 'One Night: Ultimate Werewolf' and 'Among Us'. 'Among Us' may not be a more commercially successful game than 'World of Warcraft', but that doesn't mean 'Among Us' might not be a better game for the particular group of players you want to play a game with.

Or baseball. Baseball is still a game, after all.

[simul16]

Low Effort in Their Own Way

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." - Leo Tolstoy, "Anna Karenina"

I've been watching a fair amount of D&D content on YouTube of late, for varying reasons, and if I may paraphrase Tolstoy's famous quote above, I've learned that all good D&D channels make high-effort content, while each bad D&D channel makes low-effort content in its own way.

Low-effort content tends to be:

Content that is or can be created quickly; it doesn't require a lot of prep time (and the presentation usually allows this limited prep time to show)

Content that copies current trends; while a certain amount of response to significant events in the gaming world is to be expected, low-effort channels regularly feature content that basically boils down to 'here's my reaction to whatever rumor or scandal is currently being talked about among the community'

Content that does not spark or contribute to a discussion; when such channels go beyond simply recapitulating a recent event, they frequently spend very little time explaining their own reaction and seldom spend any time at all explaining or exploring contrary opinions except to make jokes or elicit emotional reactions from an over-simplified or straw-man version of the contrary opinion

Now let's start off by saying that I'm not knocking low-effort content per se; anybody who knows anything about online marketing can tell you that low-effort content has a role to play in any marketing strategy. Ideally, though, your low-effort content, the stuff that you can get out the door quickly and easily and get in front of your potential customers, exists to guide those customers to your higher-quality content that convinces them to buy your product, order your service, or otherwise become someone who believes that you have something of value to say. Because it's cheap and easy to produce, low-effort content can be cast far and wide to serve as a net to capture many potential viewers and guide them to the gold mine of the really important stuff you have to say. Unfortunately, when your low-effort content is what you have to say, it very much begs the question of what exactly it is people should be coming to your channel for.

Here are a few but by no means an exhaustive list of the YouTube channels that to me seem to feature way too much low-effort content.

The Dungeon Dudes

The Dungeon Dudes are two guys (Kelly McLaughlin and Monty Martin) who mainly do scripted back-and-forth style discussions of D&D-related topics. I've talked about the Dungeon Dudes before, when taking apart one of their recent videos, but they also stream a D&D game they play in on Twitch (and frequently post recordings of those sessions on their channel), do product reviews, and generally do whatever they can to maintain a consistent pace of content output, generally a minimum of twice weekly. They've been around for nearly four years now, and have amassed about 273 thousand subscribers on their channel, with over 44 million views for their content, which seem like decent numbers for a niche content channel. (Contract with CinemaSins, which exists as a viral content manufacturer, and has amassed over 9 million subscribers and over 3.3 billion views. I'm not trying to say the Dungeon Dudes are the CinemaSins of D&D; if they were, their numbers would probably look a lot more like those of CinemaSins.)

The big problem with the Dudes as content creators is that, despite being a niche content channel, they are clearly in it to try to eke out some kind of income or living from the work they put into the channel: they've got a Patreon, they use affiliate links in the descriptions of their product review videos to gain some additional referrer income, and they do sponsored content when they can get a sponsor. They started back in the summer of 2017 with a very 2016-era plan on how to succeed at YouTube: put together a bunch of short (5-10 minutes, occasionally longer, but go over 15 minutes at your peril) videos and release them on an iron-clad schedule to get people used to coming back to your channel and looking over your new content, and to their credit, they've kept up their content production schedule very consistently over the past four years.

They've also learned a few things during that time and have adapted the channel in response: their videos explaining rules and reviewing new products tend to be more popular, so they work those topics in on a more regular basis. They've learned that the YouTube algorithm has subtly changed over the past few years to reward channels that can provide longer 'engagement' (which gives YouTube more opportunities to run ads), and have expanded their video length to an average of about a half-hour, with their re-broadcasts from Twitch being extra-long videos (between two and two-and-a-half hours) which, while drawing fewer total views, probably draw as much or more 'engagement' from the algorithm for the views they have.

But the need to spit out so much content on such a rigid, unforgiving schedule means that they have to aim for quick-creation and easy digestion: putting subclasses into a bog-standard tier ranking, making 'top five' and 'top ten' lists that seem like they're being cribbed from a more thoughtful resource, and generally getting stuff out the door (like their 'Powerful Spell Combos Using Teamwork' video) without spending too much time thinking about how valuable or even accurate their advice happens to be. More to the point, it seems to be taking its toll on the guys who serve as the hosts of the show: Kelly McLaughlin has a fairly dour expression in general, but lately he seems to have the countenance of a man who's about to post a 'very special episode' discussing the dangers of YouTuber burnout.

The Dungeon Dudes feature low-effort content because they have to in order to support the publishing frequency they've chosen; if they were to take the time to put together a truly high-effort piece regarding one of their traditional topics, their Patreon subscribers would likely be asking why their release schedule had slowed down before their work was even half-done.

Dungeon Craft

The Dungeon Craft channel is run by a fellow who refers to himself as 'Professor Dungeon Master'; I have not yet found any reference in his channel or elsewhere that identifies who he actually is, so I'll just refer to him as Prof. Prof has been on YouTube a bit longer than the Dungeon Dudes, having launched his channel in October of 2016, and has put out 185 'episodes' (as of the time of this writing), thus averaging between three and four episodes per month. Prof's own 'trailer' video explicitly states his channel's concept: "Some channels focus on running the game, others on building terrain, others on painting minis. I do it all!" You might think, then, that this would be a place to find quite high-quality content, especially related to terrain and miniatures painting tips, but it seems like the main effect of Prof making his channel be about multiple topics (and there are plenty of topics he discusses that don't fit into any of those three categories above) is that he can't successfully communicate what his channel is actually about, other than about his specific opinions. Maybe that's the reason he's sitting at about 65 thousand subscribers and just under 5 million views.

However, being at a slightly lower 'tier' of content production than the Dungeon Dudes is not itself any kind of crime or even indicative of poor quality -- after all, one of my favorite D&D lore channels on YouTube is RavenloftTravelAgent, and she's got just over a thousand subscribers and only about 50 thousand views on her videos. No, Prof could have a very high-quality, high-content channel with the subscriber numbers and views he has, but he doesn't.

Prof's issue is almost exactly the opposite of that of the Dungeon Dudes: instead of cranking out a rapid-fire, breakneck volume of content to keep up with an arbitrary content production schedule because that's how you make a living producing content for YouTube and you have to keep feeding the hungry algorithm, Prof cranks out content that's very easy for him to write because he's been involved in the game for a long time and already knows that the way he learned to play the game is the best way. Any topic that comes up related to D&D, he's got an opinion and can spit out a script explaining his opinion quickly because it's the same opinion he's held for decades. Classic D&D didn't have skills, so the next edition of D&D shouldn't have them either. Classic D&D had slow advancement, so slow advancement is better than fast advancement. This becomes even more obvious in the videos that have very little or nothing to do with running a D&D game, such as where Prof explains why he thought Avengers: Endgame sucked, or why he thought Season 8 of Game of Thrones was 'nearly perfect'.

Some of the oddest episodes of Dungeon Craft have to do when Prof makes admissions that make him out to be, well, the D&D channel for 'that kind' of old-school gamer: the ones who can make comments to each other that they can't make in front of their wives or significant others because the latter find the comments sexist, the kind of guys you can complain to about not being able to tell a Polack joke at work, the guys who treated D&D in the 1980s and 1990s the way that guys in the 1950s and 1960s treated golf where they could build a wall between the world as it existed and the world as they wanted to believe it was (and, if we're being honest, the way that they believed it should actually be). Nowhere is this more evident than in the video where Prof starts by discussing the hot, rich girlfriend he had once who tried but never got into D&D who he just had to break up with, and which by the 3 minute mark has him "calling bullshit" on the idea that relationships are built on compromise and negotiation. (I mean, you saw this coming, right? Right there at the end of the last paragraph about how the ending of Game of Thrones was so good? You knew that's where this was going, right?)

And, of course, he's not immune to just jumping on the latest bandwagon to contribute his drone to the chorus of voices talking about things just to be talking about things. It shouldn't be surprising that Prof jumped on the bandwagon of the lawsuit brought by Hickman and Weis against Wizards of the Coast over the upcoming Dragonlance trilogy, which turned out to be a nothing-burger. Even weirder is the tag in the description of that video which says "Analysis you can't get anywhere else", even though the video doesn't contain anything that hadn't already been discussed over the three weeks between the lawsuit and Prof's video other than Prof's own opinions about it. My favorite howler that Prof makes in this video is his assertion that, because Hickman and Weis got a lawyer to file a lawsuit, that means there's definitely fire under that smoke, because "big law firms do not accept cases they don't think they can win", which both ignores the existence of SLAPP suits as well as the existence of authors who seem to take perverse glee in suing rival authors just to drive them out of the industry. He's also responded with multiple videos in response to Cody at Taking20s controversial 'illusion of choice' essay, and his response to Ginny Di's essay on making online D&D suck less didn't include any of Ginny's solid advice on making online play more compatible with an in-person mentality (recognizing interruptive behavior, or using text chat to maintain side-conversations that would otherwise not be distracting in person), but instead gave these recommendations to players:

Keep your camera turned on

Mute yourself when not talking

Don't distract yourself with technology during the game

Nothing specific on recognizing how online play differs from tabletop play and suggesting ways to bring those two styles closer together, just commands because he's the DM and he says so. Or, in other words, low-effort, opinion-based content.

Nerd Immersion

Nerd Immersion, a channel by Ted that started in May of 2014 and has amassed over 70 thousand subscribers, starts his "channel trailer" video by leafing through a book, then looking up and saying, "Oh, hello" as if he'd just noticed that there was a camera on pointing at him while he's sitting in his orange-trimmed gaming chair. That, sadly, is roughly the level of thought that goes into the actual content contained on this long-tenured but seemingly still super-niche channel.

The weird thing is that at some point, it was obvious that Ted put some real effort into this channel. There are defined sections of the channel that focus on particular things, avoiding the Dungeon Craft problem of 'what topic is our channel about this week?' On Tuesdays, Ted posts a top-10 list. Ted comes up with an idea for a series, like 'Fixing 5E' or 'Reviewing Unearthed Arcana', posts regular articles until he's said what he means to say, then ends the series. (There hasn't been a new Fixing 5E video in roughly a year, meaning that Ted isn't wasting his own time and that of the viewer continually beating horses he's long since killed.) And he comes up with some great ideas for series, such as his series reviewing products on the DMs Guild; that particular series comes out somewhat irregluarly, but not so irregularly that you think he may have stopped doing the series without telling you.

Nerd Immersion's big problem can be summed up by simply looking at the list of videos on his channel and noticing that when he puts his own face on the thumbnail of the video, the startling frequency with which he's shrugging or has a puzzled face or just seems to be presenting himself as if he's not sure what's happening in his own video. I mean, I get it -- that's his image, the personality he wants to present to his audience. He doesn't have all the answers (a refreshing change from Dungeon Craft, honestly), but has some things to share if you're interested, so go ahead and take a peek. But then you take a look at those different sections we spoke about earlier and see that the 'Fixing' series all have the word Fixing at the top of the screen, the Nerd Immersion logo in the top left, two images underneath the text, one on the right side of the page and one on the left, separated right down the middle, and they all have Fix-It Felix on the far right. The Top 10 videos always have Top 10 at the top of the thumbnail. The Unearthed Arcana reviews all have 'Unearthed Arcana' at the top, then 'Review' in an odd off-set to the right beneath 'Unearthed Arcana'.

In other words, Ted has a formula, and he's damn well going to follow it.

Now it's not a bad thing to have a workflow -- if you're going to be cranking out videos at the volume that Ted does (not to mention the others on this list), you'd better have some kind of process for making the video, getting the thumbnail on it, etc.; otherwise each new video is a horrible nightmare of effort as you re-invent the wheel for every project. Nobody wants to do that, and the results would likely be unwatchable. Having a process is a good thing. But the Dungeon Dudes clearly also have a process -- they've put out at least two videos a week for three and a half years, so they damn well have a process or they wouldn't have been able to get out that much content. Looking at their channel, though, shows you that while they have a brand, and one that's evolving over time to boot, they're not just making the same video over and over again, or at least you wouldn't think that from looking at the thumbnails.

Ted's most interesting videos are where he's interviewing another person or even just having another person in the video, because having another person around clearly takes him at least a bit outside his rigid formulaic comfort zone. The problem is that those videos are few and far between -- the review of the infernal tiefling is about eight months separated from his interview with Celeste Conowitch about her Venture Maidens campaign guide. Also interesting are his unboxing videos, because Ted clearly likes minis and takes some degree of joy in cracking open and looking at new minis. His unboxing videos aren't as irregular as his interview videos, but they are fairly recent, with the first appearing just a few months ago, so it's still not clear if this is going to be a new regular part of the channel, or just another series that goes until he says what he wants to say about minis and then stops.

Most of the stuff on the site, though, is just, well, stuff, cranked out on a formula and thrown out into the digital void with the same soft-spoken volume regardless of whether it's major news or a press release. As an example, while pretty much everybody had an opinion on the Dragonlance lawsuit, Ted covered when the suit was announced, when it was dismissed by Weis and Hickman, when the actual trilogy that was the subject of the novels was announced, and the official release date of the first book in the new trilogy. When it came time to get ready to announce the newest campaign book, Ted was on the job, posting a video preparing for the announcement, another video later the same day when his original prediction of a Feywild adventure book seemed to be contradicted by other rumors that the book would be a Ravenloft book, then posted yet another video when the actual book was leaked on Amazon at 11:24pm later that same day confirming Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, posted the video discussing the official announcement of Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft the next day, and then the day after that followed up with more details on Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft revealed in Dragon+. That's five videos in three days, for a grand total of just over 100 thousand views combined. The intention seems like Ted wants to be the CNN of the D&D news scene, but with those kind of distribution numbers, the result is more like your local home town's shopping circular that occasionally also features stories about the latest project to fix the potholes on Main Street. Just like nobody's doing 24/7 news coverage of your local town council, nobody is (or probably should strive to) doing 24/7 coverage of the gaming industry and Wizards of the Coast. At some point it just becomes running a script, pressing a button to upload the next video, because it's news, and while you don't have to think about news to quite the same degree you have to think about more opinion-based topics, once you stop thinking about the process and what it is you're making, all you have left is executing the formula, over and over again, and both the input and the output becomes repetitive.

Repetitive videos, in repetitive formats, with repetitive text, to keep the monster fed for another day. I can admire the effort that goes into it, but the overwhelming presence of the formula involved in cranking out this content keeps me from feeling that it's worth engaging with. It's low-effort, because the effort has been meticulously removed from the process.

I could go on, but I think I'll stop here. There's not really any constructive criticism I could provide to these channels because, as I hope I've pointed out, it seems like low-effort content is pretty much the only thing these channels have to offer or in truth can offer, and anything that might cause their owners to re-consider their channels to improve their content would almost certainly lead to a very different if not wholly different channel. With things being as they are online, there's no guarantee that any new, higher-effort channel would be any more successful than the old low-effort one (remember the RavenloftTravelAgent channel with absolutely miniscule numbers; effort doesn't automatically equate with success). I can't even claim that being low-effort channels necessarily makes these channels bad (despite what I said in the intro); after all, they all have at least some good ideas, especially Nerd Immersion, and they each have subscribers and a following. I guess this is just my way of putting some small amount of effort into explaining why I don't feel like doing more to help these channels succeed, because I'd rather put my support toward channels making higher-quality, higher-effort content, especially because its not the content itself, but people engaging with that content that really drives a channel's success.

[simul16]

Somebody's Guide to Whatever This Place Is

Back in September of 2020, on the final day of the D&D Celebration online event, Ray Winninger, the then-newly-installed Executive Producer of D&D announced that three new campaign settings would be introduced into Fifth Edition D&D in 2021. Speculation over which 'classic' settings would be chosen was rampant, and nearly every old setting had folks who were willing to either predict that setting or at least express a desire for that setting to be one of the settings updated for 2021. (The article linked above suggested that Dark Sun, Spelljammer, and Greyhawk would be good choices, but again, this was more 'these are the settings I'd like to see' then 'these are the settings that are most likely to occur'.)

In the six months that have passed since then, we've gotten confirmation on two of those three settings. The first is Dragonlance, in the aftermath of the lawsuit brought by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman related to a new Dragonlance trilogy that was, in theory, going to be pocket veto-ed by WotC, but is now back on schedule to be published later this year.

The second was revealed in a recent product announcement: in May of 2021, a new setting book, Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, will be released. Few predicted Ravenloft would be one of the two settings Winninger referred to, as WotC had already released Curse of Strahd, a hard-cover re-imagining of the classic I6 Ravenloft module from AD&D days updated for Fifth Edition, and had at the same time allowed folks to update other parts of the Ravenloft setting to Fifth Edition via the DMs Guild. Now that the announcement is official, I'm filled with trepidation as to what WotC is going to do with the full campaign setting.

There are a number of things WotC could do with the setting that would make me at least appreciate if not love the new version of the setting, but I'm not holding out a great deal of hope that these things will actually happen. Nevertheless, I thought I'd note some of those things here as a preliminary 'wish list' of things that would make me happy about the re-imagined 5E Ravenloft, and more importantly, why.

Break up 'the Core' into Islands of Terror

Curiously, this is something we already know will actually happen in the 5E Ravenloft setting, thanks to information included as part of the announcement. Nevertheless, it's a change that has a number of more traditional Ravenloft fans upset.

"The Core" is a group of domains physically connected into a single giant land mass which can be navigated as any other continent on a campaign world might be, either via road, river, or what-have-you. Those who argue that the Core should remain do so under the presumption that, if you plan to use Ravenloft as a campaign setting, you need a way to migrate from one domain to another. There are some domains that aren't part of the Core, either in 'clusters' (smaller groups of related domains 'clustered' together into geographic units like the Amber Wastes or the Verdurous Lands, or as isolated 'islands of terror'. Since these other domains are separated from the Core by the Mists, they are at least in theory harder to get to; there are a few 'Mistways' which can be used to travel from one domain to a cluster or island or vice versa, but those Mistways are by their nature unreliable, resulting in anything from a small to an almost certain chance of not actually ending up where you intend to go. Meanwhile, simply marching down the Old Svalich Road from Barovia will ultimately and unerringly get you to the next domain along the road, unless Strahd chooses to close the borders of his domain, preventing your escape.

So why am I in favor of this change? Because it makes sense given the existing campaign canon. The last books to be published that actually defined and/or expanded the Ravenloft setting were published under license by Swords and Sorcery Studios back during Third Edition, specifically a series of Gazetteers with the conceit that they were written by a mysterious chronicler called 'S' at the behest of the lord of Darkon, Azalin Rex. Included in that chronicle was evidence that the lord of Falkovnia, one Vlad Drakov, had tired of being continually defeated in his attempts to conquer his domain neighbors (this is, in fact, part of Drakov's punishment as a darklord, that his military, supreme within his own domain, is powerless to project his authority outside it) and allied himself with the new Dukkar and de facto ruler of Invidia, Malocchio Aderre, to invade their mutual neighbor Borca. Whether this is simply accidental genius on Drakov's part, or whether he had puzzled out some aspect of his punishment and decided that an alliance with a power that wasn't subject to his personal curse might serve as a way around that curse wasn't made clear, but the underlying assumption was that given the relative military power of the domains in question, unless Borca's allies in the 'Treaty of Four Towers' came to its defense, Borca would not be able to survive the combined forces of both Falkovnia and Invidia and would fall. More to the point, nothing would prevent Malocchio, who is not a darklord, from entering Borca and removing that domain's darklord (or more accurately, twin darklords). The simplest way for the Dark Powers to enforce Drakov's curse and ensure that his mutual invasion with the Dukkar doesn't succeed, or at least results in such a huge cost that the victory likely won't be worth the price, is for the Dark Powers to close the borders around both Falkovnia and Borca; doing so would turn every passage from Falkovnia or Invidia into Borca into a Mistway, and even such a Mistway with 'excellent reliability' would cause the invading forces to be decimated -- 10% of all the creatures passing through the Misty Border would be re-directed to other locations and would thus be extremely unlikely to be able to contribute to the war effort. For an adventuring party, this is irritating, but for an army, where each different member of a unit is part of a larger structure, randomly removing 1 in 10 members of that army results in organizational chaos and disaster. Add in that communications between the army in Borca and its headquarters in Falkovnia also are now subject to the potential for Mist-led misdirection, and that Drakov, as a darklord himself, is unable to pass over the Misty Border at all, and Drakov's curse seems fairly easily enforced as a result.

But if the Dark Powers are going to isolate Falkovnia and Invidia, why not take the obvious next step and simply isolate every domain in the Core from every other domain? It only makes sense.

There is another reason why such a change makes sense, but it's more properly discussed as part of a larger idea:

Tie the changes to the Time of Unparalleled Darkness

Changes in D&D editions have often resulted in changes to D&D's associated campaign settings. The best example of this is actually the Forgotten Realms. When D&D moved from 1st to 2nd edition, the changes in the rules necessitated by this change were propagated to the Realms as part of a Realms-wide event, known as the Time of Troubles (or the Avatar Crisis), where the deities of the Realms were kicked out of their divine realms by the Overgod Ao and forced to dwell on Faerun in mortal forms. Some deities survived, while others didn't, which helped explain the changes in the world resulting from the changes in the D&D rules (the removal of assassins as a class option was justified by the death of the god of assassins during this time, for example). Similarly, when Third Edition was replaced by Fourth Edition D&D, the Realms was subjected to the Sundering, a worldwide disaster that unravelled the Weave, significantly modified the world's geography, and even posited a land swap between Toril and its twin sister world Abeir to explain the sudden appearance of dragonborn, which went from being an optional splatbook race in Third Edition to a core racial option in Fourth. (Nearly all of these changes were undone as part of the move from Fourth Edition to Fifth, but the Sundering still canonically happened in the Realms, continuing to support the changes in the setting that still needed to be justified by rules changes).

A similar thing occurred in Ravenloft, referred to alternately as the Grand Conjunction or the Great Upheaval (and referred to in even different ways in specific domains, such as in Sri Rajj, where it is called the "Rebirth of Kali"), and resulted in a reshuffling of the Core's domains, with some Islands of Terror becoming parts of the Core (Dominia), some parts of the Core becoming Islands of Terror (Bluetspur, G'Henna), some parts of the core being relocated (such as Markovia moving from a landlocked Core domain to an island in the Nocturnal Sea), and some domains being absorbed into other domains (Arak being absorbed into Darkon, Arkandale being absorbed into Verbrek, Dorvinia being merged into Borca, and Gundarak being split between Invidia and Barovia). PCs had the opportunity to participate in the lead-up to this event through a series of six adventures that represented the six parts of Hyskosa's Hexad, a prophecy from a past Dukkar that presaged massive change and destruction in Ravenloft. So in a sense, simply turning all of the Core's domains into Islands of Terror wouldn't necessarily be the most drastic change that's ever been made to the campaign's setting, but the past changes were at least tied to an in-game event that is both known and is significant to the domain's residents.

The Time of Unparalleled Darkness, another prophecy, though this one not from a Vistani seer but from a priest of the goddess of the Mists, already exists in Ravenloft as a future peril (at least it was in the future as of the current date of the setting while it was in the hands of Swords & Sorcery Studios); tying the 5E campaign changes to the Time of Unparalleled Darkness, and simultaneously advancing the campaign timeline past 775 BC (Barovian Calendar), the predicted year of the Time of Unparalleled Darkness, would further cement the event as part of existing Ravenloft lore, rather than making the changes seem arbitrary. This isn't to say that part 1 above (the breakup of the Core into Islands of Terror) has to be contemporaneous with the Time of Unparalleled Darkness -- in fact, a pretty good series of adventures, not unlike the Hyskosa's Hexad adventures, could likely be written as a prelude to the Time of Unparalleled Darkness, with the rising of the Mists occurring in an early adventure as part of the PCs' investigation into the joint Falkovnian/Invidian invasion of Borca and culminating in the event that results in more signficant changes to the domain.

De-emphasize the role of darklords in the setting

In reading about other folks' opinions on the upcoming Ravenloft book, it's a bit surprising to me how many of them are convinced that the 'point' of Ravenloft as a setting is to throw your PCs against the machinations and the will of the setting's various darklords, and I'll admit that Curse of Strahd, looked at simplistically, doesn't seem to go against this premise. Though much of what the PCs do in Curse of Strahd is only peripherally related to Strahd himself, the PCs can't actually leave Barovia without venturing into Castle Ravenloft and 'defeating' Strahd, which opens the way for them to escape. Because of this, a lot of folks who seem to be opposed to the idea of breaking up the Core seem to be basing their opposition on the idea that it would thus be harder for PCs to 'piss off' a darklord and then escape into a neighboring domain, where that darklord holds no sway. (This seems to ignore that most darklords of the Core have the power to close the borders of their domains, thus forcing irritating PCs to 'stay put' and receive their punishment for defying the darklord's wishes, but whatever.)

I happen to think that this is a fundamental misrepresentation of the role of the darklords in the Ravenloft setting, akin to someone believing that a Call of Cthulhu adventure isn't complete until and unless the characters have come face-to-face with one of the Great Old Ones, from which the adventure takes its flavor and inspiration.

To continue the comparison with Call of Cthulhu, the main conceit of that game is that the Great Old Ones are above humanity; so far so that not only can humanity not deal with the very existence of the Great Old Ones (any human who directly encounters one has their sanity shattered as a result), but that humanity is but a tiny speck against the long-term plans and goals of the Great Old Ones. The Great Old Ones don't hunt down and destroy those who defy them; at best, a Great Old One might wave away such irritations as we would wave at a gnat, but the real 'hunting', if it occurs at all, occurs by the cult (or cults) devoted to the Great Old One who take umbrage at their own part of the grand design being thwarted (even though, again, from the perspective of the Great Old One, it doesn't matter which of their irrelevant minions brings about their will, because they know their designs will ultimately come to fruition regardless). The role of PCs in Call of Cthulhu is not to destroy or even defeat a Great Old One, but to defeat a plan set in motion by the more mundane servants of a Great Old One, thus pushing doomsday off for another time, and for a later group of investigators to discover and (hopefully) thwart again.

This isn't to say that Ravenloft has to become the same game as Call of Cthulhu; most of the darklords in pre-5e Ravenloft were once mortal, so their motivations are not nearly as odd and inscrutable as the alien thought processes of the entities in the worlds of HP Lovecraft: the evils in a Gothic horror story are much more understandable and comprehensible than the evils of a cosmic horror story. I'd even argue that the classics of Gothic horror, on which a number of Ravenloft domains are based, are more akin to classical tragedies -- for example, the hubris of Victor Frankenstein in striving to create life causes him to build a monster and almost create a race of such monsters, and it costs him his own family. Victor Mordenheim's hubris is similar, and creates a similar, though slightly different tragedy. In this sense, one could create a Ravenloft domain based on the story of Oedipus and it would fit right in with the other tragic darklords of the setting. This kind of tragedy has a very different feel than the cosmic horror of Call of Cthulhu, and should feel different, though neither strictly fits within the existing structure of how stories are told in D&D.

The other thing that de-emphasizing darklords allows is for the focus of adventures to be put back onto those who fight the monsters rather than the monsters themselves. It's not coincidental or a surprise that the height of the setting's popularity was coupled with the most popular and well-known character unique to the setting (rather than either of the D&D adventures that preceded it): Dr. Rudolph Van Richten. Van Richten is rightly known for being a monster-hunter, yet never once does Van Richten defeat or even directly oppose a darklord; the only two times Van Richten (in pre-5e material) interacts with a darklord are once very early in his career, when the lich-king Azalin Rex helps Van Richten take his revenge on the Radanovich clan of Vistani for kidnapping his son Erasmus, who is turned into a vampire by Baron Metis, and later when Van Richten's stealthy intrusion into Castle Ravenloft while Strahd "sleeps" serves as the framing device for the self-serving version of Strahd's history related in "I, Strahd" to leak out into the Realms of Dread. Van Richten doesn't even defeat every enemy he comes across: for example, the fiend Drigor, whose serial possession of the Mandrigore family is responsible for the series of books known as The Mandrigorian, notably destroys all of Van Richten's adventuring companions, but leaves the Great Doctor himself alive to pass along the tale (as well as live with the error -- assuming that Drigor, the author of a centuries-long series of texts related to fiends and their relationship with the Lands of Mists, was lawful rather than chaotic -- that directly led to their deaths). Gothic heroes, after all, are frequently just as tragic if not more so than the villains they do battle with, and if they fail, as they sometimes do in such stories, it's that tragic flaw that is frequently the cause of their failure.

And as long as we're discussing Van Richten's tragic flaw...

Bring the setting's treatment of the Vistani more closely in line with their portrayal in Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani

When Chris Perkins set down to write his 'blood-soaked love letter to the Hickmans' that was Curse of Strahd, he largely left the Vistani as depicted by Tracy Hickman in that classic D&D module. This, understandably, was not considered a good move, as Hickman didn't even refer to the Vistani as the Vistani in that classic module -- they were 'gypsies' and served Strahd in an odd and inimical way which left them as representing many long-time stereotypes and prejudices of the actual Romani people. The reaction against that portrayal was one of a number of factors leading to last year's WotC announcement on Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons, and that WotC would be "working with a Romani consultant" to refocus their depiction of the Vistani to avoid these harmful and stereotypical assumptions. While the mention of the Romani consultant certainly helps them make their case that they are taking this task seriously when it comes to the Vistani, WotC already owns a much more nuanced view of the Vistani, if only they choose to make use of it.

To go back a moment to our previous item, Van Richten's tragic flaw is his sense of the rightness of his own actions, a tragic flaw that nevertheless doesn't expose itself until very late in the Great Doctor's career, when he finally comes to understand that his very first act as a monster-hunter, destroying the Radanoviches who were involved in kidnapping his son, caused him to be the target of a deadly Vistani curse. The twist is that the curse is not deadly to Van Richten himself, but to those who stand with him and whom he comes to care about, and it contributes to their destruction while leaving Van Richten himself alive to continue to spread woe just as he also brings hope. (See above for the tale of Van Richten versus Drigor both for another example of Van Richten's flaw as well as the operation of the curse.)

The story of how Van Richten comes to realize he is laboring under a Vistani curse, how he unwittingly cast a curse upon the Radanoviches as well, and how he and a Vistani whom he comes to know and befriend work to overcome their mutual curses forms the framing device for "Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani", written by David Wise, published by TSR in 1995, and inherited by WotC when they purchased TSR in 1998. Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani is one of my favorite game supplements of all time, for any game, and deserves to be remembered as more than just the supplement that provided rules to allow players to make full Vistani characters. The main reason why this supplement works so well (at least for me) is that the supplement humanizes the Vistani by having Van Richten travel with his new Vistani friend and living with different groups of Vistani, learning about them and the strange and wonderful (and terrible) things they can do.

No one doubts that there can be evil Vistani, just as there can be evil orcs, drow, and humans. The issue that some inelegantly fear will happen, though, is that rather than being portrayed as a complex culture of different views and perspectives, the Vistani will be 'Tolkienized' in much the same way as elves were within AD&D, made into a race that is strictly better than human in nearly every way. I don't believe that this is what is going to happen to the Vistani, however; if only because the old-school 'elves are awesome' perspective has already been unwound by the current design team in many ways (for example, by removing the racial-specific requirement to be a bladesinger). My concern is that the Vistani will become just another 'hat' that a PC can put on to look different than the default without actually having to be different from the default.

My biggest piece of evidence in favor of this approach is not the removal of culturally-specific items from each D&D 'race' (like bladesingers, which traditionally were elves, now coming from any race), but an argument made by a former administrator in the D&D Adventurer's League during the season in which Curse of Strahd was the feature hardcover, and in which all the associated AL adventures took place in the domain of Barovia. The first adventure in the series took place in the Forgotten Realms (the default setting for AL at the time), and described a family of wanderers from Barovia who physically resembled Faerun's version of a Romani-type culture: the Gur. It would make sense that typical residents of the Realms, unfamiliar with Ravenloft and their Vistani, would refer to this family as a curious tribe of Gur, since that's the thing they know. But this admin took the comparison a very large step farther, positing that every Romani-like or Traveler-like culture in any D&D campaign world was actually that world's version of the Vistani; in effect, positing the Vistani as a planar culture that simply goes by different names on different worlds. While this might be an interesting idea to posit with a new race of beings in D&D, my problem with this theory is that the Vistani are so closely tied to Ravenloft and iconic to that setting, that simply declaring that the Gur are 'Faerun's Vistani' is just as reductive and stereotypical as saying that the Gur are 'Faerun's Romani'. You're not solving the problem of problematic representation by claiming that every iteration of a real-world culture in fantasy is actually a copy-paste of a single view of that culture; if anything you're reinforcing the idea that any negative view of that culture in any setting is justified in all settings, simply due to the equating of that culture in one D&D world with the same culture on any other D&D world.

So the Vistani should remain unique to Ravenloft, in my view, and while a Romani consultant can certainly help with tweaking the portrayal of Vistani characters and the Vistani culture to be less overtly problematic, I don't see how it helps the Vistani retain their unique character that has helped them become such a well-known part of the Ravenloft campaign setting. More than just about every other work in D&D history, "Van Richten's Guide to the Vistani" actually does this, presenting the Vistani as a unique culture with its own drives, values, and heroes, while showing that the Vistani culture does not always agree with the 'default' cultures presented in other parts of the setting.

Perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised on this topic, and the same designers who ultimately figured out that the alignment rules as presented in the Fifth Edition Players Handbook suggested that sexism was bad, but racism was surprisingly OK and decided to do something about it will take a similarly nuanced approach toward the Vistani in their new Ravenloft setting book. Unfortunately, I think a much more likely approach will be to do exactly what that AL admin thought was such a great idea; since they'll have gone to all the trouble to finally make 'good gypsies' for Ravenloft, they'll save themselves a lot of potential work by simply declaring that every Vistani-like culture in any other D&D setting is just the Vistani by another name, thus making every Romani-like or Traveler-like culture in D&D into the 'good gypsies' by default, erasing any question of cultural complexity or questionable flavor in the hope of being more palatable to a mainstream audience that wants to believe that their new Vistani character is just as good as the default, but doesn't want to be bothered to learn why.

[simul16]

Five Dubiously Powerful Spell Combos and How to Beat Them

"They always say that two spells are better than one, and with some careful planning, these spell combinations might win you the day and end a combat encounter." - Dungeon Dudes, "Five Powerful Spell Combos using Teamwork in Dungeons and Dragons 5e"

On YouTube, the Dungeon Dudes channel released a surprisingly low-effort video relating five spell combos that a single caster cannot use, since the spells involved require concentration, and the rules prevent a caster from maintaining concentration on a spell while casting another spell that requires concentration. One of the Dudes helpfully gives the quote above at the start of the video, which entices you by imagining that you can gain the assistance of another spellcaster in your party and use these combos to dominate your campaign's combat encounters, prying easy victories out of otherwise challenging or even deadly encounters.

The problem is not that these combos don't do what the Dudes say they do (though in one case they come very close to misrepresenting what the combo can do), but rather that in most cases, the advantage they provide isn't as powerful as advertised, and more importantly, are fairly easily defeated with a single opposing spell. So, in the interest of helping DMs everywhere maintain their image of undefeatable, unflappable rules mastery, here are the combos suggested by the Dungeon Dudes, as well as why they're not as impressive as the Dudes make them out to be, and where applicable, providing the means to defeat those combos by adding a specific spell or ability to your encounter.

First, though, I'm going to spill the beans on the best friend a DM will ever have when dealing with PCs who are over-enamored of their spellcasting ability: Dispel Magic. A third level spell available on nearly every spell list (in the Player's Handbook, only the Ranger spell list doesn't include this spell), Dispel Magic allows the caster to choose a magical effect and automatically end that magical effect if the spell slot used to create it is equal to or less than the slot used to cast Dispel Magic, and even if the targeted effect was cast with a higher-level spell slot, the caster of Dispel Magic still gets a check to see if she can end the effect anyway. An additional bonus is that, if the caster of Dispel Magic chooses to target a creature or object instead of a specific magical effect, the spell ends "[a]ny spell" on that target, meaning that a single Dispel Magic can be used to completely remove all low-level buffs on a PC, from Bless and Aid to Haste and See Invisibility. Every one of the below combos relies on at least one long-duration spell, and though disrupting a caster's concentration is possible, many players who want to make use of these combos will likely have already taken steps to improve their ability to pass Concentration checks to the point where only the most powerful monsters have a reasonable chance to disrupt the PC's spells that way; a simple Dispel Magic is a far more efficient way to handle the same problematic spells.

1. The Witches [sic] Web

The first combo recommended by the Dungeon Dudes is an attempt to make useful in combat a feature of a spell that the designers have admitted wasn't intended to be useful in combat, but simply to add flavor related to folklore: the 'disadvantage on ability checks' feature of the Hex spell. The Witch's Web takes advantage of this by debuffing the target's Strength checks, then casting Web to force the target to attempt Strength checks at disadvantage to escape the web. The Dudes point out that this is particularly effective against monsters without spells or ranged attacks, and thus rely on powerful melee attacks to deal their damage.

The Flaw: Strength isn't the key ability score to beat Web, and disadvantage isn't as powerful in this context as you think.

The Dungeon Dudes correctly point out that, if a creature is already trapped in a web, it must use its action to attempt a Strength check versus the spell save DC of the caster who created the web in order to break out of the web. However, what the Dudes fail to point out is that a creature must first fail a Dexterity saving throw before it is even trapped within the web. So monsters with a high Dexterity saving throw can avoid being trapped, move out of the web, and avoid having to deal with the web in future rounds, and the Hex spell has nothing to say about it, as even if Dexterity is chosen as the affected characteristic, the Hex spell doesn't apply to saving throws -- only ability checks.

However, let's say you've got exactly the right combination of circumstances going -- a big, burly creature with limited or no ranged attacks and no spells and with a relatively low Dexterity score, so a correspondingly low Dexterity saving throw. Let's call him a troll, a creature with three melee attacks and no ranged attack, and with a Dexterity saving throw bonus of just +1, meaning the average 3rd level spellcaster will catch him in a web fairly frequently with her spell save DC of 13 (8, +3 from the spellcasting stat, +2 from proficiency). Now that the troll is caught, the warlock casts Hex, forcing the troll to attempt his Strength check to escape the web with disadvantage. Brilliant! The DM rolls the first Strength check with disadvantage, both dice result in totals of 9 or higher (which happens over 25% of the time this situation occurs), and the troll breaks free, then moves out of the web to annihilate the party. With a +4 on Strength saving throws, beating a DC of 13, even with disadvantage, isn't nearly as challenging as most PCs think. And this, of course, only applies to the one troll who has been Hexed; any additional trolls make their saves normally, which gives them a better than 50% chance of breaking free each round.

Higher levels don't necessarily improve the situation. Let's say instead that we're talking about an 8th level caster who has improved her spell save DC to 15 (8, +4 from the spellcasting stat, +3 from proficiency), trying to capture a fire giant (who for some reason doesn't have rocks handy to throw). The giant is even stronger, and thus despite the higher save DC only needs an 8 or higher on its check to break free of the web (it has the same chance of being caught as the troll, since it has a +3 to Dex saving throws versus the save DC of 15, against the troll's +1 to Dex saving throws versus the save DC of 13), giving the fire giant a 36% chance to break free each round, even with disadvantage. And as above, if there are more than one fire giant, the ones who aren't Hexed can make their saves normally, with a 60% chance of breaking free each round.

The key here is that too many players have bought into the idea that disadvantage is statistically equivalent to a -5 modifier, which it can be in the right circumstance -- for example, if a check that would normally succeed on a 6 or better (75% chance is made with disadvantage, the odds that both rolls will still be a 6 or better becomes 50%, equivalent to the odds of a single roll being made at 11 or better, which equates to a -5 penalty. But in situations where a creature already has a very high chance of succeeding on the roll, imposing disadvantage does very little to affect the outcome. A creature who succeeds on a 2 or higher (95% chance of success) who makes the roll with disadvantage still has a 90% chance of success (.95 * .95 = .9025), meaning in effect the disadvantage is only equivalent to a -1 to the roll for that creature. If a creature already has a great chance of escaping the web even without disadvantage, imposing disadvantage will not turn that creature's odds that much against it.

The win: Freedom of Movement

However, if the fire giants have a priest on hand, then it's even easier to frustrate your players who try this trick; simply have the priest cast Freedom of Movement on the giant they target with Hex. The spell requires touch, so the priest may have to be in the web along with the Hexed giant, but odds are that the PCs targeted the 'biggest' giant with the Hex to get the most 'bang for their buck' so to speak. Once affected, the target of Freedom of Movement "is unaffected by difficult terrain, and spells and other magical effects can neither reduce the target's speed nor cause the target to be paralyzed or restrained." Since the effect of a failed save versus Web is to be restrained, the creature affected by Freedom of Movement effectively becomes immune to Web (and similar spells like Bigby's Hand mentioned in the Dudes' video which work by either forcing the target to treat the area as difficult terrain or causing the target to be restrained). The best part of this counter is that Freedom of Movement isn't a concentration spell, so can't be defeated by damaging the priest. However, the now Free giant can seek out the caster concentrating on the web and pummel them in the hopes of disrupting the caster's concentration, causing the web to vanish and freeing all the other giants at one blow.

2. Combat Glow Up

The next combo is likewise an interesting combination of buffs with a wrinkle; it makes use of a spell that is seen on many lists of underrated D&D spells: Faerie Fire. The idea is that one caster, likely a cleric, will cast Bless on three members of the party, then another character will case Faerie Fire on the opponents, causing them to 'light up' and provide advantage to the entire party, including the blessed PCs. This results, in the Dudes' own words in a "massive accuracy boost" against the enemies.

The intent behind this combo is actually a solid one -- some monsters may have a very high AC for their challenge rating, and the challenge is to find alternative ways of dealing damage to those creatures. One example of such a creature is a Will-o'-Wisp, who has an AC of 19 despite having only a challenge rating of 2 (while most CR 2 creatures have an AC of closer to 13). An entire party of 3rd level characters going up against a group of will-o'-wisps isn't going to hit them all that often with weapons or spell attacks versus AC, as those characters are likely to not have much higher than a base +5 to hit (some exceptions exist, such as for characters using the Archery fighting style, but those character likely also have the Sharpshooter feat and rely on taking the -5 penalty to attack from the feat and still consistently hitting to deal significant bonus damage). At just +5 to attack, these PCs need a 14 or better to hit the wisps, which only succeeds 35% of the time. However, add in a minimum of +1 from the Bless spell (with the chance of getting as high as +4, for an 'average' bonus of +2.5), and advantage from the Faerie Fire spell, the odds of hitting easily doubles, turning a number of frustrating combat rounds into satisfying ones. Even better, the will-o'-wisps can't use their Invisibility actions to fade out while the faerie fire is glowing on them, as the spell prevents them from getting the benefit of being invisible while it's running. That's a win-win!

The Flaw: As with disadvantage in the previous example, advantage becomes less important when a character already has a high chance of success. Plus, between the saving throw and the inherent restriction on Faerie Fire, the spell is a lot easier to defeat than most players think.

It should be noted that will-o'-wisps are the exception and not the rule for monster AC versus CR, and there are as many monsters whose AC is far lower than would be expected for their CR as there are monsters who far exceed their expected AC. Let's look at the same trick done to a group of zombies, with AC 8. Given that the PCs already have a +5 to hit, and the bless spell will give them a minimum of +1 to attack, they already will only fail to hit on a roll of 1. Advantage will make it harder for them to fail that way, as they'll need to roll 'double 1s' to miss, but rolling a 1 isn't so common that you should feel the need to burn a spell slot to avoid the problem. Certain characters will still see a benefit regardless, such as the aforementioned archery PCs with Sharpshooter as well as rogues who will benefit from having Sneak Attack enabled for every attack, but those characters have a different problem to work around -- the benefit of Faerie Fire is conditional on the characters' ability to see their targets.

Now you might think this is a fairly challenging hurdle to get over, given that Faerie Fire causes the affected creatures to emit light, which illuminates them from within natural darkness, and it explicitly prevents them from gaining the benefit of invisibility, which prevents them from going unseen via that route. But there are more ways to hide than just going invisible.

The Win: Darkness

We've mentioned that 'natural' darkness isn't a barrier for Faerie Fire, as the affected creatures shed magical light in a 10 foot radius, easily enough to see for PCs planning to fight in melee or even at range on an open battlefield. Magical darkness, however, is another matter, and defeats Faerie Fire in two ways.

First off, the granting of advantage by Faerie Fire is conditional, and not noted by the Dudes: in order to gain advantage, the attacker must be able to see the enlightened target. If the attacker, however, is in a field of magical darkness, that character can't see and thus not only doesn't gain the benefit of advantage from the Faerie Fire, but gains disadvantage for not being able to see the target at all.

However, this brings up the better use of Darkness: "If any of this spell's area overlaps with an area of light created by a spell of 2nd level or lower, the spell that created the light is dispelled." (Emphasis mine) Note that Faerie Fire is a 1st level spell, so its lights qualify for this effect. And note as well that if any of the light from a 1st (or 2nd) level Faerie Fire falls into an area of magical darkness created by this spell, the entire spell is dispelled. Lastly, note that like the Light spell, the Darkness spell can be cast on an object and the object placed within or under an opaque object to 'block' the darkness, so that the caster could cast the spell, dispel Faerie Fire, then put the darkened object under a bowl or helmet to 'block' the darkness, preventing it from affecting her allies, then re-releasing it if a PC tries re-casting Faerie Fire to dispel the new casting.

Two other things to note as well: first, that Darkness is a concentration spell itself, and it does nothing to eliminate the Bless effect, but against opponents where the Faerie Fire effect is the more potent buff, Darkness makes an effective, elegant counter. Second, astute PCs can work around enemies who use Darkness as a counter to Faerie Fire by simply casting Faerie Fire with a minimum 3rd level spell slot, which makes the spell too powerful to be beaten by Darkness. (Darkness also explicitly only dispels light created by "2nd level or lower" spells, not spells equal to or lower than the level of the spell used to cast Darkness, so unless you want to rule otherwise, Darkness cannot be cast with a higher level slot to dispel a 3rd level or higher Faerie Fire.) However, at this point, your creatures can use Dispel Magic rather than Darkness to achieve the same effect.

3. Righteous Stampede

This combo is the first one I'd call truly dubious, as it makes use of two spells that honestly aren't all that potent and have been (rightly, IMO) called out for being underpowered for their level: Conjure Animals and Crusader's Mantle. Still, the theory is interesting: summon a number of beasts (that count as fey creatures while summoned by this spell), and have the paladin buff them with Crusader's Mantle to deal bonus damage, since the summoned creatures are explicitly noted as being friendly to you, and the Mantle provides its bonus damage to "nonhostile" creatures, resulting in massive potential damage output.

The Flaw: Beasts don't scale, nor does the Mantle

The problem with summoning beasts using a 3rd level spell is that the beasts you can summon aren't all that impressive to begin with, and the higher level you get, the less impressive the options become, especially since casting the spell with a higher level spell slot does not get you more powerful animals, but simply more of the currently underpowered animals you were already conjuring. (Granted, this is the main reason why alternative spells like Conjure Elemental or Conjure Celestial exist, but that doesn't make this spell any more effective.)

Two fairly common options for summoning beasts via this spell are elk (cited by the Dudes themselves) and wolves. Both are CR 1/4 beasts and thus can be summoned in a group of up to eight such creatures with a single casting of Conjure Animals. Elk have the advantage of a higher attack bonus (+5), and can deal solid damage following a Charge (a total of 3d6+3, not counting the Crusader's Mantle), while wolves have the benefit of gaining advantage on attacks against targets they team up against via their Pack Tactics ability, meaning that their lower bonus (+4) may actually prove more useful against a wider array of opponents. But note that Conjure Animals is a 3rd level spell, meaning the caster has to be a minimum 5th level to be able to cast the spell. At this point, it's less likely that you'll be sending these elk or wolves against orcs or kobolds than against trolls or more powerful or exotic opponents.

And if the conjuration portion of the combo is limiting, the Mantle portion is even more limiting. While Crusader's Mantle is a 3rd level spell, it only exists (in the PH anyway) on the paladin spell list, and paladins don't get access to this spell until level 9 at minimum; at this point, your party will likely have even left trolls behind and will be engaging giants, golems, and other powerful enemies with ACs high enough so that a mere +5 to attack will frequently miss, resulting in exactly zero bonus damage from the Crusader's Mantle spell.

The Win: Protection from Evil and Good, or do nothing

As the DM, you honestly don't have to do anything in order to feel like you're getting an advantage against your players when they use this combo. If all eight conjured creatures are within the area of the aura (and as per the spell's description, the 'nonhostile' creature must be within the 30 ft radius aura when it attacks to gain the bonus radiant damage from the spell), and all eight hit, the spell provides a bonus 8d4 radiant damage as a result. (One of the Dudes briefly mentions 10d4 as the potential damage from this spell, but with no explanation as to how he arrived at that number; perhaps he was considering the two casters also attacking while affected by the spell, but those characters would be attacking regardless of whether the summoned beasts existed or not, so don't really count as part of the combo.) Had the paladin instead simply used the spell slot for a Divine Smite, he would have dealt a minimum of 4d8 bonus radiant damage, with even more damage possible depending on the target attacked and if the attack resulted in a critical hit. Using Crusader's Mantle might be beneficial for buffing party members, especially against enemies who are vulnerable to radiant damage or against whom radiant damage has a beneficial effect (such as turning off regeneration or fast healing), but as a DM, you'd rather see this use of the spell slot than having the paladin save it for crit-fishing a Divine Smite in most cases. 'Doing nothing' is a valid response to this combo.

If, however, you find your players summoning wolves and getting a solid benefit out of the wolves' Pack Tactics ability, then Protection from Evil and Good is a useful counter, as the spell causes fey creatures (which the summoned beasts count as per the description of the Conjure Animals spell) to suffer disadvantage on all attacks against the warded creature, negating the wolves' Pack Tactics ability against that target. (This would also apply to the elk summoning option, though as we discussed in combo 1 above, disadvantage is not as harmful if the roll being made already has a very low or very high chance of success. Using Protection from Evil and Good against creatures to impose disadvantage rather than to negate advantage is thus more of a question of DM style than pure tactics.)

4. The Play Pen

Potentially the most useful of the combos on this list, largely because it's a combo that has existed in many prior editions of D&D (as well as Pathfinder) and is a favorite of cheese-seeking parties everywhere. Simply put, use a spell to create a hazard or monster, then use Wall of Force to entrap your enemy within the wall with the thing you created, then sit back and watch the fun!

The Flaw: Most things you create can't beat most things you fight solo, and watching a combat isn't nearly as much fun as participating in combat.

Though the Dudes suggest a number of lower-level alternatives to create a hazard to put in the play pen with your opponent, this combo relies on the ability to cast Wall of Force, a 5th level spell that requires a minimum of 9th level caster to be effective. This combo thus presumes a relatively high level party of PCs, and thus relatively high level opponents. The description of the combo makes it seem as though it would be ideal for a single solo opponent, though in honesty it's probably better thought of as an alternative to the Witch's Web for high level enemy groups as a means to isolate one powerful member of the enemy team and weaken it while dealing with the rest of the enemies in the combat.

The reason why this likely won't work for solo enemies is pretty obvious, once you spend any time thinking about it. Let's say you use the Dudes' suggestion of Summon Greater Demon (from Xanathar's Guide to Everything) and lock it in the play pen with your opponent. You've now put a creature capable of serving as a challenge for an entire party of 9th level or higher adventurers, and isolated it against a CR 5 demon. That's not going to end well for your summoned demon, and after that, you've got a (possibly slightly damaged) enemy inside a Wall of Force that you can't get at until the wall is lowered. The one advantage that this combo has over the other combos on this list is that the Wall of Force, the key component of the combo, is explicitly immune to being dispelled by Dispel Magic, but given that the Wall also prevents most spellcasting and that "nothing can pass physically through the wall", its unlikely that putting your enemy in a box is going to make your encounter all that easier to deal with; in fact, you've got one less 5th level spell slot to use on other magic to fight the monster once you find you have no other choice but to let it out of the play pen.

The Win: teleportation

Of course, just because nothing can "physically" pass through the wall doesn't mean that the wall is impenetrable. The simplest way around the problem is to have an enemy capable of teleporting itself, either via a spell like Teleport, Dimension Door, or even Misty Step, or via an item with the same ability. Many high CR enemies already have such abilities built-in to their design, possibly with this kind of tactic already in mind from prior editions of the game, but if they don't, there are many magic items in the DMG that can be used to provide such an effect to a suitable boss monster.

This move is even more entertaining once the PCs have set up their play pen and your monster simply teleports out of it, leaving the carefully chosen hazard trapped harmlessly inside the wall of force. Bonus points if the monster uses a spell scroll that, by implication, would have been treasure the party could have looted off the monster's corpse once they defeated it.

The last item to consider is that the Dudes also suggest that putting the enemy in the play pen with the party's barbarian might also be plenty entertaining, yet that option is actually a pretty shatteringly bad idea; yes, you get an opponent who can't escape the barbarian (assuming it can't teleport), but it likely couldn't have outrun the barbarian anyway, and now you can't get to the barbarian to heal him, restore buffs that the imprisoned boss monster is able to dispel or counter, or really do anything useful in the ensuing fight. Having to pass multiple turns in a fight where other PCs are happily rolling attack and damage dice is not a recipe for a fun night at the gaming table for any player, and doesn't lead to a happy party by the end of the night.

5. Bad Advice

I'll refer to this combo as the 'Illusionist's Delight', because it's the kind of thing that my old AD&D-era illusionist characters delighted in doing: setting up illusory situations and using them to manipulate enemies into destroying themselves. The specific combo here uses Phantasmal Force to create an illusory bit of safety over an otherwise deadly hazard, and then Suggestion to convince an opponent to make use of the illusory safety, to its downfall. However, the combo is significantly more powerful as presented by the Dudes than it really is, largely due to more of that 'low effort' research I alluded to at the start of this essay. There are a lot of holes in this strategy that a suitably prepared DM can use to prevent it from being more effective than intended.

The Flaw: Both spells are extremely single-target spells, and the Dudes misinterpret significant portions of the text of each

Phantasmal Force is a 2nd level spell that creates an illusion in the mind of its target that only it can perceive, and both gives the target an initial Intelligence saving throw to disbelieve the illusion, as well as a followup Intelligence (Investigation) check each round it chooses to use it to further cause the illusion to be dispelled. The Dudes make a big deal of the text of Suggestion that notes that a target cannot be persuaded to do something obviously harmful, but that "nothing in the rules" suggests that an illusory bridge that the creature didn't know existed prior to just a few moments ago would convince the creature that the formerly hazardous area is now safe. They also put a great deal of stock in the text of Phantasmal Force that they say makes the target rationalize "the oddity of something suddenly appearing"; that's not actually what the text says, rather, the text of Phantasmal Force says "[t]he target rationalizes any illogical outcomes from interacting with the phantasm." In other words, the target rationalizes falling off an illusory bridge by imagining that something pushed it or caused it to slip rather than that the bridge is an illusion; nothing in the spell description suggests that the target suddenly believes that something that didn't previously exist now does exist. I'd imagine that this specific situation is why the target receives an Intelligence saving throw versus the illusion; success indicates that the target realizes that the object it perceives could not possibly exist, allowing it to shake off the mistaken perception that it does exist, and in a situation where a caster does a bad job of presenting the illusion in a believable way, I'd even grant the subject advantage on that saving throw (keeping in mind that a suitably persuasive or convincing reason why the object should exist would also then justify imposing disadvantage on the saving throw).

Another issue, minor but possibly significant, is that the Phantasmal Force spell explicitly only allows creating an illusion no larger than a 10-foot cube (not the same thing as 10 cubic feet, but still not all that large); the example used in the video of an illusory bridge over a chasm is likely to be very hard to pull off unless you happen to be at a place where the chasm is actually less than 10 feet wide (because some parts of the bridge would have to exist on the physical 'land' parts of the chasm, or it would further suspend belief in the reality of the bridge); simply put, a chasm larger than 10 feet across can't be successfully 'trapped' using this combo without truly imaginative setup.

Another thing to keep in mind is that these two spells have differing, largely non-overlapping criteria for the kinds of creatures that can't be affected. Phantasmal Force outright doesn't work against constructs or the undead, so vampires, mummies, and golems are immune to that portion of the combo. Meanwhile, creatures immune to the Charmed condition, who are deaf, or who can't understand the caster's language are immune to Suggestion, so many low-Intelligence creatures who would otherwise be highly susceptible to Phantasmal Force won't be able to be convinced to interact with the illusion via Suggestion.

But the real wrench in the gears of this combo is that both Phantasmal Force and Suggestion are single-target spells, and if the enemy you're trying to persuade via this combo has any other allied creatures in the vicinity, this combo has so many flaws as to become near-useless. The one drow elf you've hit with Phantasmal Force is convinced that the thing you created actually exists, but none of the other drow in his patrol group see it, and they can just as easily hear the suggestion even though they aren't directly affected. They have many options to dissuade their addled comrade from hurting himself, from trying to convince him that he should examine the object before using it (persuading the affected target to make an Intelligence (Investigation) check before using the illusory object) to outright grappling or otherwise preventing the target from carrying out the not obviously suicidal request. Or, with a bit of planning, they could use...

The Win: Counter-illusions

Part of the fun of using illusion magic is being able to create a battlefield of perception in the mind of another creature, with the strongest caster winning. In this sense, a great option when dealing with an illusionist is to have that character's nemesis also be an illusionist, and thus any encounter featuring the nemesis, known or unknown, can turn into such a battle.

But how do you as DM adjudicate who wins those battles fairly? It's actually easier than you think, thanks to the rules for Combining Magical Effects on p. 205 of the Player's Handbook: "The effects of the same spell cast multiple times don't combine, however. Instead the most potent effect -- such as the highest bonus -- from those castings applies while their durations overlap." The example given in the rules uses Bless as the example, but the same logic can be applied to the use of Phantasmal Force.

So how do you know which casting is more potent? I'd use the following: if two illusion spells are cast to achieve contradictory effects, the higher level spell takes precedence; if the two spells have the same name, the spell cast with a higher level spell slot takes precedence; if the two spells were cast with the same level spell slot, the spell whose saving throw was failed by a larger margin takes precedence; if both spell saves were failed by the same amount (or you didn't remember to keep track of one or both of the margins of failure), the higher spell save DC takes precedence; if the spells have the same save DC, the higher caster level takes precedence; if the casters are the same level, choose randomly between the spell effects.

Note, though, that it's not always necessary to duplicate the same effect to render an illusion unbelievable: to defeat a Phantasmal Force of a bridge crossing a narrow rift in a chasm, a Silent Image that the chasm is actually 15 feet rather than 6 feet wide would be sufficient. Even though Silent Image is a lower level spell, its reality renders the reality of the Phantasmal Force absurd and thus defeats it, and Phantasmal Force cannot 'overwrite' the reality of Silent Image where the Silent Image affects the world outside of Phantasmal Force's area of effect.

So there you have it; five low-effort spell combos analyzed and defeated through (very) slightly more effort. Your game, if not your players, will hopefully be the better for it.

[simul16]

The Illusion of a New Edition

So, I've spent a few days thinking about that controversial gaming video on YouTube and have a few thoughts.

No, I'm not talking about the video where Cody from Taking20 says he's quitting Pathfinder 2 because of what he calls the 'illusion of choice'. When I first saw that video, I basically nodded in agreement, because Pathfinder, both 1 and 2, are designed for a particular kind of player who appreciates optimal play and 'builds'. Because a game gets the kind of players it designs for, that lends itself toward a playstyle where you as the DM see your players doing the same thing over and over again simply because it's the most efficient way to get through combat, even when that thing stops being 'fun'.

(I could have a few things to say about the cavalcade of response videos that came out after Cody's video, ranging from 'we've got to stick together as Pathfinder Youtubers' to 'D&D 5E has the same rules, why are you complaining?', but ultimately all of those videos boiled down to either inadvertently or deliberately missing the point in order to maintain a pre-determined opinion: that the style of play the video-maker likes is the best style of play, and since Pathfinder is designed for that style of play it must be by default the best game. Mostly it boils down to my standard screed on how optimization is a bad play style that drives out other play styles, though, so it wouldn't be especially fresh or new as a take.)

No, the video I watched that got me thinking was Treantmonk's "Winter is coming for D&D 5E", where he talks about the likelihood that sometime in the near future -- not the immediate future, but not that far off, either -- D&D will retire 5th Edition and bring out 6th Edition, or at least a revised version of 5E. I have a lot of problems with his analysis, and a good number of the individual points Treantmonk tries to make directly undermine the overall point he wants to make, but let me lead off by saying that it wouldn't surprise me in the least if there is someone at Wizards of the Coast, possibly even Jeremy Crawford, one of the lead designers of D&D Fifth Edition, who spends some amount of his workday thinking about what a 6th Edition would look like and what the circumstances are that would necessitate the release of a new D&D edition. "Failing to plan is planning to fail" and all that. But it's a far cry from saying that someone is actively considering what a 6th Edition would look like to claiming that 6th Edition is right around the corner, and there are good reasons to think that 6th Edition, whatever it looks like, isn't just right around the corner but probably isn't coming along for quite some time. In other words, I believe that the 'gap' between 5th and 6th Editions will likely be larger than the gap for nearly every other set of editions of D&D, with perhaps only the gap between AD&D (2nd) and 3rd Edition D&D being greater.

How can I be so certain of this? Some of it is from data provided by Treantmonk himself. For instance, Treantmonk points out that the D&D 5E 'core books' (the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual) still show up as Amazon 'best sellers' (though it took me awhile to find the actual category in which they are best sellers -- 'Puzzle & Game Reference'). This is maybe a bit misleading, as the Pathfinder 2E core books aren't ranked by Amazon in the same category, and even the Player's Handbook's ranking is a bit confusing -- #1 in Puzzle & Game Reference, but #2 in Dungeons & Dragons Game (behind Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, which isn't listed in the Puzzle & Game Reference category), but the best apples-to-apples comparison I can find based on the Amazon data suggests that D&D is still far outselling Pathfinder, even though Pathfinder 2E is a newer edition: the 5E Player's Handbook is still in the top 100 bestsellers among all books on Amazon (#1 as I write this is "Promised Land", Barack Obama's autobiography) despite having been published in the late summer of 2014, while the equivalent Pathfinder 2E book, the Core Rulebook, is just barely in the top 11,400 best-selling books on Amazon despite being less than 18 months old. This argues against a 6th Edition partly because at least part of the accepted wisdom for the reason 5th Edition was released was to try to regain the top-selling RPG slot from Pathfinder, which had eclipsed D&D Fourth Edition in sales. If Pathfinder 2E had stormed out of the gate and performed well enough to re-create the original Pathfinder's ascendency over D&D, there would be a more obvious reason for Wizards of the Coast to consider coming up with a new D&D edition to fight for that RPG crown. But with 5E not only regaining the RPG crown from Pathfinder, but also seemingly easily fending off a challenge from a new, improved Pathfinder in Pathfinder 2E, that pressure is effectively non-existent: why mess with success? (And if anything, Cody's video lends further credence to the idea that there's no reason to replace D&D 5E, as Cody explicitly points out that the game he's most likely leaving Pathfinder 2E for, and the game with fewer of the problems he has with Pathfinder 2E, *is* D&D 5E.) Treantmonk continues, though, with an analysis that boils down to 'here are the reasons I wish I was right' instead of the reasons he's actually accurate in his prediction.

His first major point is in discussing the difference between 'fluff' and 'crunch' in RPG books, and making the blanket assertion that "crunch sells better than fluff". You can argue that he's correct in a very limited sense -- consider a book with 100% crunch, an RPG expansion book full of new race, class, and other mechanics, versus a book with 100% fluff, a book which is just background, story, and other narrative items wholly divorced from mechanics. It seems pretty clear that players would certainly look through the crunch book looking for interesting things for their current characters or ideas for new characters, and would likely buy the book if they found them -- that's a pretty clear market for a 'crunch' book. Whereas, for a wholly fluff-based book, players would likely only consider buying the book if they're playing in a setting where they really enjoy the setting, want to know more about it without bothering their DM, and are convinced that the setting details as expressed in the fluff book are the same as those used by their DM. There's still a market there, but particularly if you are a mechanically-focused player, and you game with others who are mechanically focused, you'd easily see much less excitement for such a book than for the strictly crunchy mechanics book.

So although our thought experiment above suggests that a 100% crunch book would likely have a larger audience and thus larger sales than a 100% fluff book, you might expect to see that books Wizards of the Coast has already published that don't contain mechanical game content do appear to not sell quite as well as books that do contain mechanical game content -- but you'd be wrong about that. As an example, while "Heroes' Feast: the Official D&D Cookbook" isn't selling as well as the Player's Handbook (the latter, as discussed, is in the top 100 best-selling books, while the former is 'just' at #160 on that list), it's selling better than the Dungeon Master's Guide (#192), the Monster Manual (#232), and even Xanathar's Guide to Everything (#284), the last 'big crunch' book released for D&D 5E. "Heroes' Feast" is currently selling far better than any Pathfinder crunch book, and as I write this, the book is oddly the #1 bestseller in the category of 'Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Television' and #2 in 'Party Cooking' (with the #1 book being Snoop Dogg's cookbook). I don't think anyone at Wizards of the Coast is regretting their decision to publish a cookbook with no races, classes, or feats in it.

And therein lies the rub: no book is 100% crunch or 100% fluff, and fluff does appeal to some consumers. As a proportion of fluff to crunch, D&D 5E books generally fall higher on the fluff side of that balance scale than Pathfinder books do, but this hasn't caused them to be poor sellers. And while one could argue whether Tasha's Cauldron of Everything is selling better now because it's new versus whether it has a higher proportion of crunch to fluff than earlier books like Volo's Guide to Monsters or the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, the truth is that Wizards of the Coast can successfully sell high-fluff books to their audience, at least in part because they've cultivated an audience that can appreciate books with a higher fluff content. Now if Paizo tried publishing a Pathfinder cookbook and the book sold horribly, Treantmonk would likely point to the failure of that book as proof of his thesis that fluff doesn't sell as well as crunch, but really, all he's doing is showing that his thesis primarly holds for an audience that looks for crunch over fluff, which the Pathfinder audience clearly does -- Pathfinder is the game that makes breaking campaigns fun, and the audience they have, which is the audience they've designed to attract, is that proportion of gamers who look for some practical way to break their game rather than some entertaining way to impart practical information of no use to the game proper but which might be a great thematic addition to a special gaming event.

(Hold onto this concept of perspective-blindness -- that Treantmonk is writing things he thinks are true in general but are mainly true from his limited perspective -- because it's a common thread in the points he makes, and thus in my critique of them.)

Treantmonk then moves on to say that increasing crunch in a game leads to 'bloat', where greater and greater rules complexity (as expressed by having more rules available to choose from) results in players who have access to all the rules options developing characters that are always going to be 'better' than the characters developed by new players who only have access to the core options in the Player's Handbook. There's a lot to unpack here, but I'll simply point out that in both cases where Treantmonk tries to illustrate his 'tons of rules and options' point with a video image, he uses an image consisting of a large number of rulebooks...from D&D Third Edition. That all by itself should be a red flag for his general argument here.

There is one good point Treantmonk makes here, though -- he points out that, in order for an edition to have long-term success, it must successfully attract new players throughout its lifespan, and that traditionally, game systems like D&D (prior to 5th edition, at least) and Pathfinder (in their first edition) did in fact develop greater and greater rules complexity and 'bloat' which was identified as a reason why new players were turned off of the game. The flaw in Treantmonk's argument, though, is again in assuming that D&D 5th edition works in this same way. He does point out that D&D 5e has deliberately slowed the pace of high-crunch books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, but immedately loses whatever rhetorical points he earned by making this observation by insisting "this hasn't been the best model for short-term sales" (umm, did we miss that Tasha's is currently the top-selling D&D book, period, which means it's selling better than any Pathfinder book and probably every RPG book currently in print, at least on Amazon?), as well as insisting that even this slow pace of releases is causing a reduction in uptake of new players by forcing new players to have to exist with the sub-optimal choices in the core books rather than the 'obviously superior' options in the new books.

Does Treantmonk not watch his own videos? His 'quick and dirty' guide to Tasha's Cauldron of Everything (posted a week after the release of the book) suggested that he didn't think Tasha's was as 'good' as Xanathar's Guide, which jibes with the reactions of other optimizers posting online who seemed disappointed that some of the clearly breakable mechanics that existed in these subclasses in their playtest forms (available via the Unearthed Arcana feature on WotC's website) got 'nerfed' for publication.

To begin with, the simple strategy of putting out a 'big crunch' book only once every three years or so rather than multiple times per year immediately reduces the rate of 'bloat' in the system as Treantmonk defines it -- if you don't publish rules as quickly, it takes longer to get to the point where you can't deal with the overwhelming number of options you have in deciding what to do with your characters. Plus, by taking longer to publish and submitting the ideas to effective public playtest via Unearthed Arcana, the developers can ensure that they don't accidentally push the power envelope farther than they intend by releasing something clearly not ready for play, and thus keep 'core' options competitive with the newer options available in these crunchy books. Both of these strategies are part-and-parcel of an overall desire to continue to maintain the existing edition for as long as it remains viable, which clearly is still the case, given what sales information we have access to. However, a bigger point is simply that new players aren't just introduced to D&D by people who are long-established players any more: in many cases, a new player wants to try out D&D after having seen it played online on a show like Critical Role or Dice, Camera, Action!, or has heard a reference to it in a news article or some viral content, or even by encountering it through some of those zero-crunch works like Heroes' Feast. These players aren't as likely to immediately go out and try to find an established group and join that group -- they may decide to put together their own group based on what they saw online, or go to a convention where they might play D&D Adventurers League games with other new players, and while the existence of new rules sources like Tasha's might occur to them (especially in the dealer room of said convention), the characters they're playing may just be pregenerated characters using the tried-and-true mechanics in the Player's Handbook, or even just using stuff from the freely available Player's Basic Rules -- there's nobody to suggest that they're playing the game the wrong way if they're not using the latest and greatest rule book, which either Treantmonk or his players likely would be doing if those players were playing at his table. Again, this is a case where Treantmonk is mistaking his personal experience of RPGs for the universal one, which truly isn't the case, and certainly isn't the case for D&D 5E.

Treantmonk's conclusion is a masterclass of projecting your own needs into your argument and all but ignoring the stated justification you've made for proposing your argument. He accepts that Critical Role and similar online shows have enticed people into trying out D&D, but insists that WotC has to 'do more' to convert those curious observers into new players. However, his means of doing this is to suggest that WotC either release a revised Fifth Edition Player's Handbook to give experienced players something to be excited about, which has very little to do with bringing new players into the game, or release an entirely new Sixth Edition ruleset which effectively does the same thing (but at least pays lip service to the idea that 'it should be easy for new players'). This shouldn't be surprising -- as I've previously stated, optimizers are more than happy to make bad-faith, self-serving arguments in favor of an outcome they want, and Treantmonk's video essay comes across as just more of the same here, ignoring the many ways in which the D&D game has itself changed and in turn has changed the hobby of RPGs in new and interesting ways, but also in ways that threaten to leave older players who still view the game as an exercise in optimization behind.

There is one other thing from Cody's videos I want to highlight, specifically in his follow-up video where he explains how Pathfinder 2E embodies the thing he calls 'illusion of choice': he points out that the problem where Pathfinder players are incentivized to do the same optimal tasks over and over again in every combat doesn't come from being a 'munchkin' or having some kind of 'rules mastery'; it simply comes from having an idea for a character (like a ranger who shoots a bow) and taking the options that appear to best support that idea. Doing so makes them extremely effective at doing the one task they've set themselves up to do, while seriously hampering their effectiveness in most other situations, and in many cases the game refuses to throw up tactical roadblocks that would make the choices they've chosen less optimal than they 'should be'. Pathfinder 2E thus plays like 'baby's first optimization challenge', and leads to players who either embrace that playstyle, or grow bored with doing the same optimal tasks over and over in every combat, and preferring combat to every other means of resolving conflict in the game because it's best supported in the rules, and decide to either stop playing Pathfinder (as Cody seemingly has) or stop playing RPGs altogether. *This* is the real roadblock preventing curious people from becoming new and regular players of RPGs: that the game won't support the kinds of characters and the kinds of play experiences they want, but will rather try to train them into thinking that the kind of characters and the kind of play experiences the game is designed to deliver are the optimal ones, the ones the player should want.

I have myself occasionally bemoaned the idea that some D&D 5E DMs allow patently outlandish things to happen at the gaming table, even things that are, on their face, violations of the existing game rules. But having taken some time to experience play with less experienced players, I've come to realize that this option -- the option to do something interesting that the rules don't explicitly support but that the player finds satisfying -- *is* the core of turning curious people into regular players. I may not find it very satisfying when I sit down at a table with three other players who are playing:

Themselves with a sword and shield


A character with the most ridiculous accent I've ever heard, and


Deadpool

but I have to agree that, for those players, they each find something worth doing in the characters they've created and the game that results from their play. Not only isn't it my place to tell them how to find the fun in the game we're playing together, I find that if I relax my own preconceptions and let the game play out, that we still end up having a good time and telling an interesting story.

So no, D&D doesn't need a Sixth Edition or even a Fifth Revised Edition any time soon. D&D is going a fine job of meeting players where they want to interact with the game, instead of following the approach of other game systems which presume that there's one best way to play and requiring you to play that way to find any fun in the game at all, if you even can.