The Essential Review

The D&D Essentials sub-line has been released and we’ve now seen what the products have to offer. The flame wars on the message boards continue to burn, but are hopefully dying out. I first mentioned Essentials here, and was not overly favourable to the idea. Now, a couple months after the books have released, seems like an opportune time to offer a quick review of the product line, a step back to critically look at the books evaluate where they met or failed to meet my expectations.

The Line Itself

Let’s start off looking at the concept of Essentials itself.

First off, the crux of the line is that the books are designed for new players, while the initial 4e books were not. That’s a lie, albeit a small one. The initial 4e books do present the game easily for new players, although they strike a balance between accommodating old and new players. The first couple chapters are all but skippable for experienced players. I’d argue that the introductory “how to play” and “what is the game” sections are among the best, and for all the complaints of 4e = WoW there was more role-playing advice than earlier editions. While not designed for new players, the 4e books were more accommodating for new players than almost any other edition.

Really, Essentials is a way to reprint the high-selling core books again without resorting to an edition change, a micro-edition change (i.e. 3.5), or just re-printing with errata (which would induce feelings of buying the same content again). It’s not 4.5, it’s something new; it’s not a new printing like in 2e or an edition facelift like in 3e, it’s the same edition and game presented in a new way with new content.

There’s some oddness to the idea. As the point of Essentials is to create an easier entry point – for new players baffled by the sheer volume of books on game store shelves – adding ten more books some counter-productive. It adds another level of potential confusion (is Essentials the same as these other books?) and the potential for misinformation (the D&DE = 4.5e forum protests). There’s also the touted idea of Essentials as an “evergreen product” that might always be in print. Except, WotC is really driven by its monthly releases and its new products. Most publishing companies are continually focusing on “the next big book” and WotC is no different. They’ve shown their willingness to quickly cut product lines that are not doing well (especially those related to miniatures), so I can’t imagine a product designed around long-term sales over an indefinite period of time doing well by their standards, it won’t have the same satisfying spike in quarterly sales. Especially since 4e only has so much time left.

Crimson Case

The first product of Essentials was the infamous Red Box. This is a bit of a curious product. It’s unfocused at best, trying to do many things at once. It’s the new starter set to offer a quick intro to the game for brand new players AND it’s a nostalgia-heavy product to lure back old players who got into the game in the ‘80s AND it’s a giftable product for gamers to give to young potential gamers to sell them on the game. The best results seem to be at getting old players back into the game. Priced very similar to one of the Heroes of ____ player books with a tenth the content, it seems an inefficient way to get players into the game.

The box itself is frankly “meh”. It gives the impression of three levels of play, when it sounds like there is only enough content to get to third level, where they have to stop. So, you can play up to 3rd level, so it’s two levels of play. The rules also don’t mesh with the published books, suggesting they continued to develop and tweak the rules after they had to send the box for printing. More development earlier followed by restraint might have been preferable.  And there are only enough power cards for one of every race, so if two people want to play elves it gets tricky.

The box itself doesn’t lend itself to introducing an entire group to the game. It introduces the game via a choose-your-own adventure that only one person can do at a time, meaning the rest of the group sits and watches for a lengthy period. And it doesn’t necessarily lead to a balanced group. And the choose-your-own adventure only works for a single of the player books, not selling the second.

It’s not a bad product but it’s only an adequate starter set, slightly inferior to the first one released for 4e.

Big Book o’ Rules

I love the Rules Compendium. It’s hands down the best product in Essentials, being useful for every group regardless of the flavour of 4e they play. It’s portable and well-index & organized, easy to reference without slowing play. Add some sticky tabs from any office store and it’s perfect.

Or close.

The book is missing some rules. The vehicle rules from Adventurer’s Vault are absent, as are many of the new weapon keywords and other content from later books. So it’s all the rules for Essentials but expanded games you’ll still need to reference other books or consult the Compendium.

The book contains a little more fluff and world information than necessary. It didn’t need to include any information on Nentir Vale, the gods, and the Points of Light setting. That’s wasted pages for anyone playing Forgotten Realms orEberron or Dark Sun or a homebrew campaign. Really, the majority of players. This makes the absence of rules all the more noticeable, as I’d rather have vehicle rules and the brutal weapon keyword than a pantheon of boring gods.

It’s a worthwhile purchase, especially for the revised and tweaked Skill Challenge rules and DCs.

Heroes of Adjective Noun

I like how Essentials handles PC classes. The initial batch of 4e classes were too samey, and needlessly so. Every class was as 3e sorcerer with the same power and resource management. Essentials really nails that it’s possible to have the hard math and balanced classes of 4e without giving fighters spells or every class having the exact same arrangement of powers.

The races are mostly good (except the needless drow nerf). The books are fairly solid and the builds interesting. I like much of the increased fluff for spells and races. It really helps the edition be more than just a game. I like the mixing of power sources (primal-martial ranger), the addition of a striker fighter, the return of a pet druid, and the like. Some of the builds (thief, mage, hunter, warpriest) seem a little redundant and don’t really stand out from the PHB1 options. It might have been preferable to just tweak the PHB1 variants rather than make something new yet unremarkable.

I was initially disappointed by the amount of content. I made some epic Essentials pre-gens to playtest some solo monsters, and after the second character I just gave every PC the exact same gamut of feats with only one of two variations. But with two player books this should be less of a problem, and the fixed number of options makes the game significantly easier. There are many people happily playing Essentials-only games to avoid the glut of content WotC has released. However, this benefit will quickly vanish as WotC churns out more Essentials-compatible content (Heroes of Shadow and Dragon and probably all the books for 2011) leading to the same imbalance and overwhelming options created by the “everything is Core” philosophy.

The BIG flaw with the book is the names. There’s nothing that says “players start here” or “basic rulebook” in the names. Essentials was meant to be an easy entry point, but this triples the number of potential starting books, adding another layer of confusion. A player wanting dwarves and fighters might buy the book with dragonborn and paladins, and vise versa. New players now have to ask a store-clerk where to start, assuming the books are being bought in a FLGS and not a box store where the clerks might be as baffled as the new player.

Masterful Tiles

I love the Dungeon and Wilderness sets. Great stuff, both as expansions on the existing sets and as starter stets. Very well done. The boxes are fantastic. They’re both a way to store and transport tiles (needed) and tiles in and of themselves.

I use a variety of mapping options. I’m giving Gaming Paper a try and have a couple smaller wet-erase mats as well as a collection of assorted pre-published poster maps. And a Gale Force 9 licences map of King’s Road for all those road-related ambushes. But for dungeons, the tiles work so very well, laying the tiles down as you explore and flipping tiles to reveal discovered traps (fire, pits, acid, etc). With the new set I’ve added a new trick: random traps. The trap is revealed to everyone when I flip the semi-random tile.

I was disappointed by the City set. The box sides were generic and I don’t like the emphasis on streets and interiors. Halls make sense in a dungeon, with the negative space being walls, as it is impassable. For cities, this is not so. You can climb the negative space, hopping from rooftop to rooftop. Fights can be set above the streets as well as below. I’d have preferred the set be buildings with no streets, with the negative space between buildings assumed to be streets.

DMing for Dummies

This is a handy box for anyone not planning on getting the Monster Vault or Red Box. But it’s the least impressive bit of Essentials. The DMG is serviceable for both new and old players. There’s little truly new content that isn’t handled by Updates or the Rules Compendium. The DMG with a separate box of tiles with a small update would have handled this product fine, and been both cheaper and more comprehensive. Alternatively, there could have been an advice on running the game included with the Monster Vault making that an all-in-one DM product. This might make more sense than having the DM required to buy 2-3 products compared to a player’s 1.

The advice is good, the content still valid, and the rules solid. But it just feels like much more of a rehash with absent content. The lack of trap and monster creation rules hurts, especially with the dearth of epic tier monsters. Really, this product feels like it was made to fill a niche, for a perceived need to fill all three Core books with three separate Essentials products. 

Beastie Bank

The other essential Essential product is the Monster Vault. I’m a little more hesitant to review book because neither I nor my players own a copy. I’m getting the monsters through DDI and have a giant tackle box of minis so the dozen sheets of pogs have less appeal to me. As I rely on customized monsters, I have plenty of monsters already.

However, the quality of the book should not be overlooked. The creatures included use the greatly improved design of MM3, with higher damage and (finally) some protection for solos against being stunlocked. Just like the classes of Essentials are what they should have been at release, so are the monsters finally what they should be. Iconic monsters have more of their classic abilities, creatures have been revised to play smoother and with more fun on the table. This is what 4e should have been two years ago.

The inclusion of the cardboard tokens (aka pogs) is a plus. While I think future books (the forthcoming Threats of Nentir Vale) do not need included tokens, it makes sense for a starter monster book to include them. For brand new DMs it is a great idea. I’d prefer the future sets to have separate token sets so mini fans can choose not to get a pack of pogs while players who enjoy tokens can buy extra.

The book does have its flaws. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, it relies on variant monsters over themes and alternate powers. Sometimes the book seems to spread-out the iconic powers over the multiple foes. It favours classic D&D monsters to identifiable foes from mythology, which might be significantly more recognisable to brand new players. The first few Monster Manuals of 4e seemed to really suffer from a limited selection of beasts, in part because almost every monster needed a variant or two, but also to pad future monster books with more iconic and must-have monsters. Between the Monster Vault and Threats of Nentir Vale we *should* have an acceptable number of monsters… for the heroic tier. That’s the other flaw of the Monster Vault, it all but ignores epic tier monsters. I.e. the monsters that most needed a revision and update. The vaunted “hard math” begins to break down at the epic tier, most well documented by Mike “buy my book” Shea aka SlyFlourish, as seen here. Given Essentials all but fixes much of the rest of 4e, it’s a shame we need to buy even more books to have a workable epic tier game, Essentials is far from complete.

That’s my review, excluding the dice. Because WotC and official D&D dice have always been terrible. $13 for dice and a bag is also a tad pricey, with an unnecessary amount of packaging to make it the same size as the books.

I’m growing fond of Essentials. If I start a new 4e game I’ll probably go with Essentials only. It’s simple with a restrained power level. The options are not overwhelming, but I can allow a trickle of other options if I so desire. Or not.

At this point, the only thing I’d like more is a hardcover printing of Essentials, so the books would match the rest of the books on my shelves. The paperbacks just look out of place, and just won’t last as long as the hardcover products. If they can reprint the core books as special collector’s editions they can re-release the Heroes of X books as a solid and sizable hardback book.

5th Package Feedback

The fifth playtest package for 5th Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (or 6th Edition Basic Dungeons & Dragons depending on how you look at it or who you ask) came out a few days ago. While I haven’t had a chance to playtest this yet, I hope to have a chance in a few weeks. But let’s do a little review and feedback based on a readthrough.

Skills

Tying skills descriptions to ability checks makes some sense, in that they’re not separate skills but bonuses to ability checks when performing certain deeds. This package emphasises this a little more than previous packages but has some other slight problems.

It could be done a little better. Instead of referring to the “bluff skill” or “spot skill” it could be phrased “you gain skill at bluffing” or “skilled at spot”. Flipping the phrasing keeps it familiar yet helps break the mental connection with past editions. But I still think naming them something other than skills would help, such as competency or proficiency.

I’m less a fan of describing the skills with the abilities. First, because the skills are codified and described in such a basic place, it’s a little harder to add new skills. Secondly, because the skills are tied to a single ability score it’s harder to justify applying the skill as a floating bonus to other ability checks. A character cannot make an appeal to reason and apply their Diplomacy bonus to an Intelligence check or bend an iron bar using Strength to Intimidate someone. This is particularly odd for something like Search, which is really just Spot but using a different ability. Someone that’s well-trained at Spot should be skilled at Searching even if not naturally proficient.

I like the addition of being able to learn new skills, but the skill improvement mechanics is unclear. I’m uncertain if all skill dies increase with level increase or just one, and also not clear if new skills learned start at a d6 or the current die. I’m likely overthinking it and the die is static for all skills, but there’s something funky about gaining a new skill at 17th level and having it start at a d10.

There’s still the problem of double skills. It’s less prevalent now with most races and classes granting advantage instead of skills, but the rogue still falls victim to this flaw. Ostensibly this problem goes away if you allow players to pick their skills, but that defeats the purpose of having skills associated with Backgrounds: I like Backgrounds having set lists of skills, as it makes the choice of Background more interesting and important.

Races

I love the stat change to races! It means all dwarves have good Con and all elves are Dexterous, as Odin intended darnit! But the second boost via subraces gives the races some Ability Score flexibility. This is perfect.

I also cannot gush enough about the change to halflings. I winced when I first saw the races as the stout halfling (hobbit) was fearless while the lightfoot halfling (kender) was stealthy. Now all halflings are fearless and the stout gets a different ability, one that also fits its “stout” name.

I also enjoy the return of darkvision to dwarves but I miss stepping up hit dice for the dwarf and weapons for the dwarf (and elf). I would have prefered weapon proficiency granted if the class does not confer it and the damage dice stepped up if the character already has proficiency. But this likely changed due to the problem of stepping up a d12, as the best increase was to 2d6 (the average roll only changing from 6.5 to 7).

Humans still feel a little bland, but they feel a little more in line with the other races. I’d still like an environment-based “subraces” or bonuses to the class. Or even something like a bonus to saving throws.

Overall I’m exceedingly happy with the racial changes.

Maneuvers as Feats

Initial Reaction: NERD RAGE! So much nerd rage. I liked the idea of martial classes drawing from a shared pool of maneuvers mirroring yet contrast the list of spells other classes received.

Secondary Reaction: Well, characters could take the Martial Training feat to gain any maneuver, so they were functionally already equal to feats in terms of power. And with the removal of Martial Damage Dice to fuel maneuvers, they would have looked a heck of a lot like feats anyway. So it’s not a huge change…

More than likely, the designers removed the MDD and changed the mechanics of maneuvers to their current implementation and then realized nothing separated maneuvers from feats save the name. Which makes it just a change of nomenclature. And there was some funkiness in the last couple packages were some options were maneuvers and some options were feats, with a few specialities giving out maneuvers by way of Martial Training.

And it’s better to have one mechanic than two. There’s less overlap and confusion that way. As the list of options grows, you don’t want to slow down things at the table searching for a maneuver only to realize after five or ten minutes it’s really a feat and you were looking in the wrong place.

Although I wonder if it would have reduced the initial gut reaction nerd rage if they’d called them “maneuver feats”. I imagine they didn’t name them that because they wanted to see how viceral the fan reaction would be. Which is also likely why they didn’t explain that change in Legends & Lore or warn us that it was coming; once again they’re poking the community to see how it reacts.

Classes

I’m less satisfied by high level play. Advancement just seems to stop after level 10 for most classes. It’s just more of the same for many levels. The same effect could be gained by just ceasing leveling-up. I’m aware that after 3e and 4e high level play the designers are tarried of introducing option paralysis. But I feel like they’re overcompensating somewhat.

Barbarian

Curiously, darkness is a barbarian’s friend. When not raging they can give themselves advantage at-will while granting advantage to attackers. So, when there’s no light or fog and no one can see, the barbarian (and their opponents) can fight normally. It’s weird but a corner case. (And it gets even better when they hit level 14 and snag Feral Senses).

Feral Instinct is worded curiously. Wouldn’t it be easier to just say barbarians have advantage on initiative checks? Unless this is meant to stack with potential advantage to initiative. I suppose the subtle tactical difference is the barbarian can choose to pick the lower roll if advantageous.

Unchecked Fury needs it’s recharge clarified. Is it the first time you miss in a turn? The first time you miss in a fight? Or the first time you miss each day?

Cleric

The renamed channel divinity options are nice, with the flavour better captured by the name. The boost in damage at 11th level is nice for the domain options, but I don’t see why it has to jump at that level when they could just have the power increase every 5 or so levels. If they could design the domain bonuses to increase consistently it’d be a nice way of filling out the cleric’s level chart

Domain spells seem to end early, capping out at level 5. It feels like someone forgot to update this list after the package advanced to level 20.

I have surprisingly little to say about the cleric.

Druid

I like the basic implementation, where the druid gets shapechanging and spells at first level but gets to choose which it focuses on. I miss animal companions and while I know they’re thinking of an advanced modules that adds them, they are missed. Animal companions all but defined the druid class in 3e.

The Wild Shape ability really feels limited. The 3e version where all your stats changed was a bookkeeping nightmare and far too broken, quickly making the game “find the most broken animal in the Monster Manual”. And I wasn’t fond of the 4e ability of “become any beast, but in name only”.

I think I might prefer a size-based statblock with a few animal-based power sets that you can add. So you can Wild Shape into a medium creature changing your stats but then choose to add “hound” gaining keen senses, or “ape” gaining climb, or “great cat” gaining stealth. Mostly utilitarian powers. And at higher levels you unlock more sizes as well and bonuses. The

Nitpicking the current version of the power, the hound form needs some kind of scent ability. And it should be clarified if the druids attack bonus applies to their animal forms or not. The bear form mentions the ability to climb in the flavour text but this isn’t reflected in the statblock. The great cat form seems superiour to the bear form in most respects, being stronger, more agile, faster, and more accurate. The bear form does more damage on a basic hit, but the great cat has the ability to do 3 attacks each doing 1d6+3 while knocking the target prone.

And like most of the classes, levels 15+ just seem dead. They not only lack a memorable capstone ability but level 20 is a dead level. They just get hitpoints. Whee…

Fighter

And the fighter returns to having unique abilities!

Here we first see the martial feats. Neat. The fighter gets three. That feels a little low. Although they do have one of the fuller advancement charts so I shouldn’t complain.

I can see Expertise making a lot of people happy. The fighter has a resource to manage and it’s an encounter-based one to boot. Although this makes Combat Surge seem all the more redundant and tacked-on. And oddity is that you can spend an action to regain an Expertise die, but only if you have no die left. I imagine this is so you cannot spend two actions in a row to regain both die, or spend an action in a turn you’re not in a good position to attack anyway.

(Aside: I’d love to see some developer feedback and thoughts in the playtest material. A “we didn’t do X because of Y”. Reasoning and justifications. Some design notes. We get a lot of this during the Podcasts and Legends & Lore articles anyway so having it in a place where the playtesters can see would be lovely.)

I dislike the name “Death Dealer” as a class feature. Would “Superiour Offence” not have worked?

The Superiour Defence options seem to work best in a game where the DM announces the numbers the monsters rolled, rather than when the DM knows the AC of his party. Especially in an edition where the attack and defence numbers don’t change the DM will learn to know what hits and misses his party and will likely skip the “the orc rolls a 17” and just jump right to damage. This means in many games the fighter will use this power and the ability will do nothing, opposed to when they know the odds.

There needs to be a skirmisher variant of Multiattack for mobile swashbuckler fighters. There’s also not a great option for the warlord variant.

Combat Surge feels tacked-on, like we’re really seeing a “surger” Prestige Class tested than the fighter. It was adequate when the fighter had no other resources, but now we have Expertise it seems unneeded and unrelated to the existing mechanics. It might be interesting to have a “burn out” mechanic where the fighter can strain themselves, using all their Expertise dice for either the Encounter or rest of the day for one heroic feat of strength. Or gain extra Expertise dice at a cost.

Monk

The first thing I noticed with the mistake in the “Ki” ability description where it doesn’t acknowledge the increase in usage above level 10. Did we even see a monk that only went to level 10?

I don’t have many new comments regarding the monk as it’s pretty similar to what we’ve seen before save maneuvers becoming feats. I dislike the static damage on most of the Ki powers. The 2d6 damage from Vortex punch is neat at level 8, but at level 18 it might be a little less impressive.

I’d like to see some support for monastic weaponry. The standard Asian fair. Plus more fighting styles that evoke real world monks and martial arts. We also need a variant that is slightly less mystical for those who just want a brawler.

Paladin

I’m okay with the paladin getting spells at first level, although it is a bit of a change. Spellcasting is something the class should do but it doesn’t seem essential.

The paladin gets their own Channel Divinity although a few are shared with the cleric. This is okay, as there should be some overlap. It’s a shame the paladin doesn’t get to choose a god and their patron has no influence. Paladins just seem to serve generic divinity. (“I am Galalot, paladin of vague abstract goodness!”) Like the cleric and the monk, the paladin’s powers deal static damage. It’s impressive at low levels where a 3d10 radiant smite will devastate a boss monster but significantly less impressive at higher levels. With eight dead levels where the paladin only gets hitpoints, there’s no shortage of places this could be added, even if meant knocking down Deadly Strike by a die.

Paladins being defined by their oaths seems like a solid design choice to me: they’re the class bound by a code of conduct. It’s their defining feature of fluff. I would have liked a little more flavour here, with some specifics on what their Oath entails. Suggestions for codes of conduct, restrictions, prohibited behaviour, and the like. What a paladin can or cannot do, what they have vowed to always do and to never do.

Ranger

Unlike the paladin, I’m less impressed by spells for the ranger. I would have like a spell-less variant. This could be as simple as “gain a Martial feat” every few levels. But even making sure to include some ranger-specific spells at each level that feel less magical and could be reflavoured as a non-magical ability usable a number of times each day.

I like the approach to favoured enemies (which was first suggested in these  blogs). Great minds think alike and it’s flattering to be on the same page as professional designers (but it should be noted the Terms and Conditions of the website do give WotC ownership over content posted, likely to prevent lawsuits over “but I had that idea first!”)

The ranger’s stat boosts don’t a include Wisdom, which is it’s primary spellcasting ability. I’d switch out Con for Wis as an option to gain a bonus for characters that do want to emphasise spellcasting.

As a whole, I’m unimpressed by the ranger. It feels lacking other than a couple generic wilderness abilities and favoured enemy. It needs other minor powers. Maybe something about hiding their own tracks or a Wild Empathy ability that gives them advantage on Charisma checks against natural animals. I wonder if it wouldn’t be possible to slip it an extra Marital Feat for a favoured maneuver or fighting style, to allow the ranger to compliment their speciality. So the ranger still needs to take the relevant speciality but they can be that little bit better.

Rogue

I’ll reiterate my point from the last package: the rogue needs d8 Hit Dice. The wizard should have the lowest hp, the “below average” number. Rogues are not as squishy as wizards and need more hp. Being comparable to the monk and cleric in terms of health works fine.

I’ll set myself apart from the crowd and say I like the new Sneak Attack. It’s functionally identical to the Sneak Attack from the previous package where the rogue sacrifices Advantage to deal extra damage. Only down they can make a Hail Mary attack with Disadvantage. This works nicely from a favour perspective: the rogue is trying to stab a very small and vulnerable target area which should be hard to hit.

I’m not particularly satisfied with the rest of the design, as all rogues gain sneak attack. I wonder if there could be an alternate power to choose from instead of just sneak attack. Or tie it to leveling up. Every odd level you can either increase sneak attack or some other ability.

Blindsense seems like a renamed variant of Feral Senses. I wonder why WotcC wants invisibility to stop working after level 10?

The final 10 levels still feel less like a rogue and more like a mandatory Prestige Class.

Wizard

Once again, the wizard is an example of a boring, boring class that only gets spells. They get a new power this package which is pretty much more spells, but on a delay so the wizard can’t nova.

How about adding some more magical feats and giving a few of those out at higher level? Or allowing the wizard to gain more lore skills as they increase in level?

Having a couple small bonuses tied to tradition would be nice. Maybe the ability to swap out spells?

I’m also not particularly happy with wizard spellcasting for a couple reasons.

First, you prepare so few spells at low levels you’ll often be casting the same spell again and again. At level 4 you can have 5 spells prepared (7 if the scholarly tradition is taken) but can cast 9 spells so there’ll be two doubled spells. It doesn’t leave a lot of space for utility spell. And while you can cast them as rituals it means relying on even fewer spells for combat casting the same spells again and again.

Now, in theory the wizard will be more of a blaster at low levels and memorize utility spells in low level slots as they gain levels. However, this doesn’t work well as wizards gain too few spells known each level. Their spellcasting is closer to that of a 3e sorcerer than wizards of previous editions. While at level 3 and 5 they can cast 3 spells per day of their highest spell level (2nd and 3rd respectively) they’ll only know one spell at that level. So they’re casting the same spell again and again (and again). And you can bet it’ll be a combat spell. There’s never a time you can learn utility spells unless you’re happy with a single combat spell at each level or relying on cantrips.

This goes away in theory if other spellbooks are introduced. But this suggests PC wizards will meet other wizards and places assumptions on the demographics of a campaign. There’s also no “scribe scroll” option. The cost is also quite high. The rules say there is no assumed amount of gold, the ballpark estimate it gives is 50gp per adventuring day per level. To copy a single spell into their spellbook a wizard must sacrifice all the treasure they accumulated for that day.

Exploration

I like the breakdown of time and scale, which is a handy for planning how large you want the area to be.

I’m uncertain about breaking pace into four categories. This seems a little granular. We really just need three: normal, fast, and slow. It’s odd that the fastest travel time (rushed) is the one that matches the expected overland movement rates.

There’s also no discussion I could see regarding terrain’s effect on speed, which seems more like an accidental omission than problem with the rules. I’d just like to see terrains (and the addition of mounts or vehicles) being handled with a multiplier on the distance.

The visibility paragraphs of the Your Outdoor Map section should be clarified for what that means to exploration and hexes. Ostensibly, in a 1-hour turn you should be able to see up to 4 hexes away while you can just about see the neighbouring hexes in the middle of your hex in a 1-day turn. I would have liked Wisdom/spot check DCs to see what the neighbouring hexes are, modified by terrain and height.

The above might help adding a new Exploration Task: scouting. You can scout ahead, gaining a bonus to Wisdom checks to determine the terrain of distant hexes. Speaking of Tasks, I quite like the Exploration Tasks, and the ability to multitask at a risk. I’d like to see a couple more though; with the current 5 it’s easy for everyone to pick a single task and not need to multitask. Extra potential action lead to the fun debate of risking multiple tasks or prioritizing the ones you need. From my times exploring at the table, other tasks include the aforementioned “scouting” as well as “gathering food”. It might be nice to include a “looking for campsite” option.

The Wandering Monster table is fun but I think we need more tables. Not all encounters are going to be combat, and many are flavourful. We need an initial Random Encounter table that leads to either this Wandering Monsters table or a Incidental Encounter table where you might have some other small event occur, such as passing traders, stumbling across a body, encountering a hazard, and the like. But this might work better as expansion or website material where it doesn’t eat into the page count. I do quite enjoy encounter distance is spelt out so simply. Although the possible 200-400 feet away you notice an encounter on a plan is a little awkward: my table isn’t big enough for a battlemap of that size.

I like the simpleness of the rules for getting lost. I also like that it’s independent of direction, so there’s no weirdness such as suddenly going south when you were trying for North. I might risk additional complexity by making the roll a d6 with a doubled chance of going 45 degrees off, so you have a better chance of going slightly to the side rather than the current odds of being knocked right off course.

I would have liked some resting and campsite advice and rules here as well. Just a little something for an oft overlooked bit of the rules.

Conclusion

I like how the game is shaping up and am generally happy with the changes. I’m very impressed with this package and hope they can continue to improve the game.

Now all they need to do is stop major revisions and stick to fine tuning. We need things to stabilize for a couple packages to get the really nuanced balancing done. The fighter has been completely overhauled in every major package. While progress has been made each time the game will never be perfect, just perfect enough. You can look at the entire history of D&D as slow continual tweaking of the classes and rules from the fighting man to the current iteration of the fighter. The game will never be done until it ceases publication. Eventually they will have to call it done and move onto other parts of the game, because if they continue to make sweeping revisions it will be harder to get the nitty-gritty balance just right.

Neverwinter Review

The first real Dungeons & Dragons video game in years is out. It’s called Neverwinter, the most recent in a long line of D&D video games to be centered on that city starting with the oft-overlooked SSI game Neverwinter Nights released in 1991. The name was recycled by BioWare hot off the success of their Baldur’s   Gate  series, who released Neverwinter Nights in 2002. A sequel was released by Obsidian Entertainment, unsurprisingly called Neverwinter Nights 2 . And now we have Neverwinter by Cryptic Studios.

TL;DR

This is long. So if you want the sound bite, here it is: Neverwinter is an action RPG that doesn’t provide solid enough action to really satisfy action aficionados. Similarly  the story is too light to really hold story fans for long, starting well but quickly moving into filler.

As a free2play game it needs invested fans willing to pay, but there’s not enough content to keep people reliably playing repeatedly or enough bonuses that seems worthy of paying for. And it’s easy for people who are invested to skip paying and grind to get that same content.

Prelude

Announced in August 2010, Neverwinter was initially supposed to be released in August 2011 to coincide with the release of the Neverwinter campaign setting book and a novel series by R.A. Salvatore. However, the game was delayed and on October 5, 2011, Cryptic announced the game would be shifting from free multiplayer game to a Massive Multiplayer Online Game.

In interviews, Salvatore mentions the Neverwinter book series (Gauntlgrym onward) was started at the request of WotC and Cryptic, with Salvatore given the responsibility of setting up the city for the state it would be in during the campaign setting and the MMO. With the first book having been released in 2010 and writing taking a little over a year, it’s safe to estimate Neverwinter began production in early 2009 or late 2008, setting the development cycle at four years and change.

Crypticon

Cryptic Studios is the company given the licence to make a Dungeons & Dragons game, so let’s get to know them a little. I like to describe Cryptic as having made three-and-a-half MMOs. Cryptic is an MMO company that was making MMOs before MMOs were what they are now. Their resume includes City of Heroes, City of Villains, Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and now Neverwinter. They’ve never released a game that isn’t an MMO.

I spent a LOT of time playing City of Heroes and it’s sequexpansion City of Villains. I preordered the game, participated in the closed beta, and logged in the first day the game was live. And I was dancing in Atlas Park when the servers went down. It was a decent game and scratched my super-hero PC game itch despite being 94.7% combat driven and overlooking all the non-beating up bad guys aspects of being a superhero. I like to compare the gameplay with Diablo in that you fought through wave after wave after wave of minions before getting to slightly harder boss monsters. But without the loot.

I also played some Champions Online which was really CoH 1.5. It had a nice free-form power system of CO, an improvement over the fixed powers of CoH, but it was really the system they wanted to do in CoH but could not get to balance at the time. Champions Online has a very simplified combat system and feels very much like a console port of a PC game, which makes sense as it was primarily  designed to work on XBox in addition to the PC, however the XBox port never emerged. CO was also announced shortly after Cryptic’s Marvel Universe Online was cancelled, suggesting they just acquired the Champions characters and pasted that over the unfinished game.  CO was similar to CoH in that you spent much of the game endlessly fighting waves and waves of mooks. Only moreso. In CoH it was common for missions to be “Kill 20 badguys” while in CO it became “Kill 100 badguys”.

I won’t heavily discuss Star Trek Online as I have not personally played it. (However, A friend I regularly game with has and when it went Free 2 Play I asked if he wanted to try it again and he declined, not wanting to do all the missions over again, which is telling and relevant.)

Neither Champions Online nor Star Trek Online were particularly well received. The CEO of the company said that they designed those games just like they had designed the well recieved City of Heroes, missing the fact that half-a-year after CoH was released World of Warcraft hit the scene. In the same year CO and STO were released, Wrath of the Lich King had been out for a year and dramatically changed how MMOs could tell a story with its focus on phasing over instances.

Cryptic has also frequently launched their MMOs without endgame content. Both CoH and CoV launched with 4/5th of the game, releasing the final zone and levels as a “free update”. While there is always going to be content that was not quite ready for release, the first three updates of CoH (the better part of a year’s updates) focused on content that was not quite ready for launch. In fairness, holding back end-game content is a standard MMO tactic. Under the assumption it will take some time before players reach those levels giving developers time to polish. This forgets the speed MMO players can consume a game and hit cap. It takes months to generate content that players compete in an afternoon. There are many, many gamers who blow through an MMO and then move onto the next game.

The Open Beta

Cryptic likes its “Open Betas”. They’ve had them for all their games, typically followed immediately with launch. They’re not so much Betas as Demos, only with the “beta” tag as players are often more forgiving of balance and technical issues. Then they wipe the servers and everyone starts fresh and you have to pay. So it wasn’t that surprising that they have an Open Beta for Neverwinter.

With that in mind, what we saw wasn’t really a beta. They weren’t really “testing” anything anymore, almost all the content was available (one class and race is absent) and there are no more wipes. Plus, they were taking payment in their e-store for items. Yeah… it was the launch. A “soft launch” maybe but still a launch.

Still… releasing an unfinished game and actually saying “hey, this is an unfinished game” is remarkably refreshing from Cryptic. It’s not “here’s the game, it’s finished” followed in a couple months by “here’s an extra class and zone as a *ahem* bonus”. And the missing content isn’t the last 5-15 levels or the end of the game but peripheral content, so there’s a complete play experience if less flexible.

Installation

The website gave two options to download: direct or torrent. I started downloading at around 11:15 am, MST, a couple hours after the downloads became public. I had checked the day before, late night on the 29th (read: very early on the 30th) and couldn’t download.

This was a little annoying. They could have easily allowed people to pre-download and install the game but not log in until the Open Beta officially began. And when the game launched there would have been far, far more people seeding than the paltry number I saw, and the load on their servers that morning would be far less.

Instead, I had to wait a number of hours to actually play (over four-and-a-half to be precise) with the direct download initially being much faster than the torrent, which promptly caught up and “won”. But barely.

The cynic in me wonders if this was intentional so the number of players early in the first day would be lighter, spreading the load away from the starting zone.

Now, with many more people seeding and less load, installation should be far easier.

Starting Out

The game currently has 7 races: half-orc, half-elf, human, halfling, elf, tiefling, and dwarf. Drow is in the game but is pay-only at the moment but will be available later. There’s a fair assortment of facial customizations, better than average for an MMO. However, you don’t get to initially customize your clothes or physical appearance as that’s handled by gear. So the game does not serve as a character visualizer. (There is limited customization of gear available, allowing some pallet swapping, but this seems to require spending real money.)

Speaking of armour, I was less than impressed by the gender disparity in armour:

*sigh* It looks so silly. And with body appearance governed by gear people won’t be able to making characters without  curve fitting armour and a boob window.

After race you choose from 5 classes: Guardian Fighter, Greatweapon Fighter, Control Wizard, Devoted Cleric, and Trickster Rogue. There’s a ranger also on the way. Or rather, the Adverb Ranger. As it’s based on classic 4e, each class has a set role, although I wonder if they could have just called the greatweapon fighter the “slayer” or something as there’s only a single version of the other classes. But I suppose they might add a second cleric or wizard later.

You also get to choose your starting region, picking for over a half-dozen places in the Forgotten Realms each with a choice or three for fine-tuning. I’m not sure what the benefit to this choice is, if there’s a skill bonus or small passive bonus. It does give you a free title, so can announce where you’re from. Whee. But it seems mostly cosmetic. You also get to choose your god, which grants another title.

You also roll your stats. Kinda. It “rolls” by handing out a randomized array, arranged to suit your character. So there’s a little variation. There’s not a lot of tutorial on what the stats mean though, which is very different than standard D&D. Each stat does an array of things. I’m uncertain if a balanced spread would be better than a standard 4e specialized arrangement.

Other than that, there’s not a lot of customization. You don’t get to pick powers at first level or feats. Customization comes later, at level 5 and then 10.

Following character creation there’s the big cinematic that establishes the story of the game. There’s an evil lich necromancer, her army of the undead, and a dracolich that is attacking the city of Neverwinter. This is mostly combat between a female rogue that is teleporting all over the place like a fey pact Nightcrawler. Martial power at its least mundane. There’s maybe two lines of dialogue in the entire piece, no motives or story and just action. But it sets a tone for a desperate besieged city.

First Impressions

My first impression was “yup this is a video game”. Standard WASD controls. It’s more First Person Shooter than your typical MMO, with mouse-look is always enabled. It took some time before I discovered that to interact with the UI via the mouse you have to click Alt (click, not hold) or pull up something like inventory or the character sheet.

The game holds your hand for questing. There’s a little sparkly trail that directs you right to the next quest objective. Because following big blinking icons on a map is apparently too hard. But Neverwinter is cut from the action game cloth, so the sparkly trail is similar to the directional arrow you often see pointing to your next story goal. It fits the genre.

You get the standard introductory quest with pop-up tutorials that tell you the basics of combat while you recover your gear from a ship sunk by the dracolich. Yup, starting on a beach washed up after a shipwreck. A dash cliche. Upon rewatching the cinematic, I was disappointed there was no establishing shot of the sea, or quick scene of the dragon strafing ships to further establish the cinematic is NOW. There’s not even really a shot of the sea. You can half-see it in the first shot of the city, but with the lighting and colour you might mistake it for more plains.

After the initial NPC’s mouth didn’t move while talking, I was pleasantly surprised that other NPCs seemed fully animated and all the NPC dialogue was spoken (with moving mouths). After Star Wars the Old Republic, going back to a non-spoken MMO would have felt cheap. However, your PC is still silent throughout. NPCs in chat have an unnerving tendency to stare blankly above you and to your right, like everyone is talking to another adventuring slightly behind you and off to the side. I often looked around to see if someone was standing behind me watching me play the game.

Quest text in MMOs has always been a soft spot of the genre. They often feel like the writer was being paid per-word. Which is ignorable when you can just skim the text and move onto the quest. But having the NPC dialogue spoken aloud really drives home how wordy and chatty every NPC is; I made a modest effort to listen before giving up and reading  text and walking away, leaving the NPC talking away as if I were still there. You have to hit a button to cancel the read aloud quest, which is a feature-bug. If I wanted to hear the text I wouldn’t be walking away, but it does allow you to keep listening while moving towards the quest, checking your bags, or healing at the campsite.

Your first couple quests are amazingly standard MMO fare. You have to heal a few wounded soldiers while sparse opponents wander around letting you choose to engage or not. Lacking the phasing technology of Warcraft, the field was littered with injured bodies so there was the standard MMO experience of walking away from injured soldiers because you had helped all the soldiers you were told to help. There wasn’t even the attempt to justify ceasing to help with a limited use item (“Sorry, I can’t help, I’ve run out of bandages”) or the ability to continue helping without reward, as you stop being able to interact with the injured soldiers once you hit your quota.

After that you’re gathering arrows to replenish the supplies of archers, pulling arrows from corpses. You’re not gathering dropped quivers of arrows or lost crates of arrows but individual arrows, albeit in bunches of 3. So you quickly turn in your nine arrows and everyone seems really happy with your contribution despite the innumerable arrows behind you.

Meanwhile, while gathering those nine arrows, you’re blasting zombies in groups of two or three, flattening a good dozen opponents. This is the type of game Neverwinter is: the quests are a flimsy excuse for you to run around blasting through enemies and little effort has been made to make the quest anything more than a said flimsy excuse. The game very seldom has “Kill 10 boars” quests because you’re going to kill 30 boards trying to get the single MacGuffin at the end of the zone.

Running through the opening tutorial, you also meet the tiefling wizard/warlock/something from the opening cinematic who goes on about the dracolich seen in the same cinematic (dead-ish at his feet) and how it might be permanently defeated. And then it’s never mentioned again.

After some short adventuring you reach a bridge with a young Red Shirt companion. You catch a glimpse of the Big Bad Evil Gal from the opening cinematic who “kills” the Red Shirt before sending some massive boss monster at you – despite the fact she’s an all-powerful NPC she doesn’t just squish you herself but vanishes, likely to appear again closer to the End Game.

Having defeated the boss monster you exchange words with the dying Red Shirt who has enough life left to ramble off half a Dostoevsky novel while slouched on a wall telling you your next quest goal. Then the Red Shirt falls over dead. Or rather there’s a camera change and he’s suddenly laying down, having died in the half-second screen refresh. And your character looks all sad over the death of the chatty nobody Red Shirt despite the dozens of dead people you’ve passed along the way. The funny significance of the Red Shirt (whose rank is literally Private, meaning expendable nobody) is echoed by the next quest giver NPC (also from the opening cinematic).

Moving into the city proper you enter one of the districts of Neverwinter and apparently the battle has ended. Guards are all calmly at their post and all the merchants are going about their business. Apparently, killing the low level ogre thingy (or really big orc) ended the war and saved the city and the lich just gave up. It’s very off-putting.

I think this is where I miss the phasing tech of Warcraft the most. It would be nice if low level characters not far along the main story saw explosions, siege weapons, fires, and soldiers running around. But high level characters who have saved the city see a calm peaceful place. This thought occurred to me even more after completing the next plot, where I killed the leader of a gang of rebels that took over a district but nothing in the district changed. It was still full of gang members who were still attacking me. As an alternative, employing Cryptic’s fondness for instances might work. It should be possible to have a separate Before & After instance of a zone, so you can have a sense of progress and achievement. But far too late for ideas like that now.

Gameplay

Gameplay is vaguely reminiscent of 4e. Inspired by 4e. You have the At-Will powers that lack a cooldown and Encounter powers with a short cooldown. Unremarkable for MMOs. However, you also have Daily powers, which show some interesting design. During combat you slowly gain Action Points, represented by an icon that resembles a d20 (nice). When you have a 100% Action Points you can use your Daily Power and then you have to wait until it recharges via adventuring before you can use your Daily Power again. Different classes gain AP for different things, such as healing or taking damage or using encounter powers.

After level 5 you start gaining Power Points, which can be used to improve powers, making an At-Will or Encounter power better, or increasing your number of available powers. After level 10 you start gaining Feats, which are really just standard MMO talents with a reappropriated D&D name.

Combat is quick, typically against many foes. The game tries to be a mobile action game with a dodge option and warnings of enemy attacks, so you know to get out of the archer’s line or fire or back away from the big bruiser. (Except for the guardian fighter who raises his shield to block.)

However, the animation of attacks stop movement and often the time between the warning and attack attack is so short you don’t have time to react after your attack animation has ended. And you can’t choose to abort an attack and dodge. Quite often I’d also be hit by an enemy after I was out of range, because I moved away after the animation had started. This could be the result of lag/ rubber-banding but it happened a little too often. Soloing with a ranged character (cleric) the game descended into me dashing away from enemies and then standing perfectly still while attacking. This felt clumsy and was exceedingly awkward (especially as I’ve been playing a lot of mobile FPS lately).

Hitpoints are handled curiously: you begin with hundreds of hitpoints and these quickly increase. By mid-levels you’ll easily have thousands of hp. Which is odd since even at low levels damage seems to be in the double digits. Reducing hp by 1/2 or 1/5 or even 1/10 would have been a nice way to keep the number bloat down. But the high numbers were likely to accommodate the curious choice of healing.

4e has a very video game friendly health system where you can rest and charge to full between battles. I expected swift out-of-combat healing like Champions Online or a Rest power like City of Heroes or Neverwinter Nights. Instead, healing while adventuring is minimal and even the cleric has limited  healing options, as their powers recharging a paltry portion of your staggering hp total. Instead of having full health your hp atrophies slowly over a number of battles until you find a campsite that heals via proximity (and acts as a new spawn point if you die) or you drink a health potion. It’s actually a better representation of Tabletop RPG adventuring than I’ve seen in most video games, but doesn’t feel particularly 4e.

Missions are heavily instanced, like dungeons are in Warcraft. So when you’re in questing in a small zone you’re the only one there. You’re seldom competing with other players, interacting with other players, or even seeing other players. Apart from the opening or when running around the city you might as well be playing a single player game. Group play is strictly optional. It’s comparable to an always online single player game that has a graphically rendered lobby and auction space. That said, there are a number of outdoor zones with filler quests between the big instanced story missions where you do interact with players. This allows some cooperative play, even in impromptu situations.

The instanced dungeon maps are standard nonsensical affairs. Here’s one of the early dungeons.

It’s a long giant crypt that doesn’t even try to match the structure it originated from or the space available. There are huge dead areas and negative space. Blizzard always worked very hard to make the dungeons and instances of Warcraft look like they matched the exterior, especially in later expansions. If the dungeon exited onto a balcony then you could see that balcony from the air when flying overtop the dungeon structure.

As a extra example, here’s a map of the exteriour of an orc structure and its interior.

Story

As mentioned, the story begins with a city-threatening siege by an army of undead. And then this story just seems to go away, instead focusing on people trying to steal the Crown of Neverwinter and then orcs that have taken over a district in the city.

In an interview, the CEO of Cryptic said “It’s not an MMO in the sense that there aren’t zones with hundreds-and-hundreds of people. You are not fighting for spawns. There’s a very strong storyline throughout the game. So it’s more of a story-based game closer to things like Dragon Age or Oblivion, which we really try to follow.” This struck me as odd as the last two Warcraft expansions have had pretty heavy stories and Star War the Old Republic was ALL about the story with numerous side quests. If you’re making a game that’s going to be competing with other MMOs you should keep abreast of what other MMOs are doing.

Unlike Warcraft that as two factions and often deliberately has two zones of the same level, or SWtOR which has two factions and eight classes each with their own story, Neverwinter has the one story. It’s quite possible to play WoW or SWtOR two times and never repeat a quest and a third time with only minimal repetition  And even the single player games used as examples have some story variation and choices that generate replay value. Past Cryptic MMOs have been criticised for their single set of quest chains and story and I was hoping Neverwinter would avoid this. Instead, the game continues to offer content for a single playthrough.

I also found it interesting that right after you get to Neverwinter and the game actually begins, the game immediately drops the initial story and starts new unrelated stories for five level. And immediately after wrapping up that story you’re shunted to another zone for another story unrelated to both the main plot or the previous plot.  It’s very tacked on.

But even this limited content isn’t really enough. The Nasher plot is ostensibly meant to take you from level 4 to 10 before you start fighting Many Arrows orcs, as reflected by the level of the gear given to you as a reward. But both solo (and especially grouped) I was nowhere near my expected level. So I faced level 11 orcs with my level 9 cleric and promptly got my ass handed to me. Repeatedly. I had to stop and grind a full level to get enough power to continue the story (and even then some timely intervention from other players was necessary).

Curiously, we’re also told very quickly that there are a number of factions fighting for control of the city. I thought this would be an interesting way to have some story divergence: pick a faction and push their agenda with related faction missions. Instead, we’re locked into supporting the guard and Lord Neverember. A very, very obvious missed opportunity for some repeat gameplay.

Except for the addition of player created content via the Foundry:

The Foundry

BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights was famous for its adventure builder and vast community of writers, who slavishly created stories and campaigns larger, grander, and even better than the official story. While tricky to use, this engine powered a wealth of content. NWN2 tried to do the same with some lesser success. And now Neverwinter is doing the same with the in-game Foundry that lets players create, play, and rate stories by other players.

At level 15 you can start making Foundry missions, and can do so without needing to be logged in as a character. Missions can be taken from Job Boards readily available in most zones.

Of all parts of the game, the Foundry seem the least polished. And by “unpolished” I mean “glitchy mess”. I spawned outside of maps more often than I spawned inside maps. Once while testing the game I spawned well outside the city but close enough that I was in play and died and died and died yet couldn’t get into the city no matter how many times I released, refreshed the map, or exited the test and resumed play. It’s frozen on me a couple times, buggered my mouse, and refused to save after much editing. And when I leveled-up a character to test the adventure, it didn’t always give me the appropriate gear (or any gear. I had a few naked runs).

There’s currently no tutorial or wiki but links are set up so they’ll eventually be there. Hopefully for launch. At the moment you have to learn how things work yourself. Having done some NWN modules and Architect missions in City of Heroes before figuring out how most of the featured worked was fairly simple. It’s really quick to learn the basics, and I imagine the Foundry will very quickly be flooded by innumerable basic “kill all” adventures.

There are some fun features. You can customize the look of monsters quite nicely, and add standard gear to humanoid monsters then change the colour palette of the gear. And you can change proportions and the size of some body parts. Plus you can position individual mobs and traps for nice effect, and do expected things like have patrols, triggered spawns, and the like.

Adventurers are also at no particular level. They vary to match the level of the person playing. So you can run through a Foundry mission at level 5 and then run through the same mission at level 25 or 55. And you can choose to playtest a run through your  mission with character of any class at set levels, which are assigned appropriate gear. So you can see how the mission handles for each class.

However, you’re mostly limited to the few monster groups and zones already in the game and it look like there’s only a few monsters not already included in quests (although, that’s hard to say for sure not having seen all the content planned for launch). And you’re limited to pre-built encounter groups. You cannot, for example, add an ogre to a goblin encounter or just have a wandering ogre. Ogres are fixed parts of orc encounters. Nor can you add boss monsters.

Likewise, there doesn’t seem to be options to have treasure chests or crafting nodes. This is likely for balance reasons. So you can’t just hand out treasure like candy.

There is the option to make your own maps, but these are limited to adding structures to outdoor zones and there’s no ability to make your own interior dungeon. Which is a shame because there are really few dungeon maps to use, a fraction of the ones in the game. This is likely because you place items using the same maps used for the ingame maps. Which means you cannot easily use any maps with multiple floors. And anything with special scripting like secret doors and puzzles is likely beyond the Foundry.

Edit: The above paragraph is wrong. There is a make-your-own dungeon feature which is pretty slick, allowing you to piece together rooms. There’s some pretty glaring clipping issues but it’s otherwise nicely done. I don’t know how I missed it earlier as I really looked for it. Glitch? Moment of blindness? 

Not all maps are equal. Where walls end and floors begin is a little fuzzy for caves, and the uneven floor makes placing some items difficult. I recommend running through an empty map first to get a feel for the layout.

Multiplayer

I recruited a friend to play with me and duo through the game. There was the initial annoyance of not being able to group until after the tutorial, despite running around beside each other.

The game also doesn’t seem to modify instances to accommodate parties. The missions my cleric soloed without much problem my friend and I tore through. A couple boss fights I had to play tactically with my cleric we effortlessly shredded as a team, despite the fact Action Points seemed to be gained at quarter-speed.

That said, I was playing a rogue which currently seems quite powerful when paired with a fighter. So perhaps it’s a class balance issue.

Sharing loot in a group is adequate. Coins are automatically shared, but seem to favour the person who picked-up the coin pile. While it might average out, melee characters closer to the loot might get a disproportionate share. But this is likely a low level issue when you cannot half a copper piece. Picking up items was trickier for a couple reasons. First, you have to choose need-or-greed via clicking shit-1 or shift-2 (as the mouse is locked into auto-look) but you aren’t given any information on the item so you still need to free the mouse to hover over the item – which is typically unidentified so you really don’t know if you need it or not. I can easily see this getting really frustrating at high levels with two of the same class but different builds.

There are two other ways to get group play: skirmishes and dungeons. The former is a quick match against waves of enemies that takes 10-15 minutes and gives you some gold and treasure. Dungeons are, well, dungeons. If you’ve played an MMO before you likely know what to expect from dungeons.

Edit: I should mention the one dungeon I played through was pretty much by-the-numbers. There were a couple tank-and-spank bosses that seemed very much like the single player bosses only with more hitpoints. There wasn’t a whole lot of gameplay change, just the standard stay-out-of-zones and watch-adds.

Pay 2 Win?

Neverwinter is a free game but has a market that takes real world monkey for perks. So you can pay real dollars for the ingame currency “zen”, which can be spent on bonuses like companion pets, the ability to rename or redesign your character, mounts, and the like. Cryptic has been firm that you won’t have to pay and that payment is strictly optional and that paying just lets you get things faster.

That said, they certainly want to encourage you to pay. The bank is tiny and you regularly get chests that contain special items that can only be opened by a key that you can only get via zen. $1 gets too 100 zen so you can drop $6 to get a bag of holding, $5 and get a mount, $5 to get more than 2 character slots, or $6 to double your bank space. So the aforementioned key is $2 or so.

But can you pay and win? Yes. Easily. There are a number of level 60 characters already who have done just that.

You can buy zen and exchange them for astral diamonds, which can then be used to speed crafting missions to rapidly gain experience. And astral diamonds are the currency used in the auction house to buy gear, so you can buy zen, convert to AD, and then buy whatever items you want. So if you have enough money, you can just buy a level 60 character and give them decent gear.

Of course, this does mean if you do many daily quests and auctioning, you can earn astral diamonds which you can then sell for zen, bypassing the need to pay. So nothing in the zen store requires payment. If you have enough time to grind astral diamonds. This is actually well done. There have been times playing MMOs I wished I could just drop $50 and get a few extra levels to catch up with friends. And times I’ve played some freemium MMOs and wished there was some way to work towards one of those fancy perks without spending cash.

That said, the store looks a little empty now. I’d love some more fancy clothing and customization options, especially cheaper ones. If you’re one of the people who paid $200 for the big fancy pack of goods, there’s likely precious else to buy in the zen store.

Rapidfire: Good

Bags have a sort feature. And you automatically have two bags: regular and crafting.

You have a second set of clothing, a purely decorative outfit you can swap on with the click of a single button. I love the idea of casual clothes, although I expect getting anything fancy will cost real money.

Harvesting is handled via skills tied to your class. Fighters get Dungeoneering, Clerics get Religion, etc. An interesting take on skills. But you can also buy kits that allow you to have a chance of accessing other skills’ nodes, which is a nice option.

It’s easy to help people in an area without feeling like you’re kill stealing. There is separate loot for different people, ala Diablo 3.

The controls are very keyboard and mouse centric. You attack via mouse buttons and all your powers are close to your WASD keys.

Edit: Additional Thoughts

I forgot to mention crafting. This is similar to the Star Wars the Old Republic system where you have a flunkie that crafts while you adventure. So you can always be crafting. It’s actually well done if simple but fits the game. There’s one type of crafting for each of the armour types as well as the bonus crafting profession of “Leadership” which gives you more experience and astral diamonds. 

The game also has a combat advantage feature, which is easy to miss as I never saw it described anywhere. When attacking with a friend you can see a coloured semicircle around the base of nearby monsters. If you attack from that direction you flank. So positioning matters. 

Naming is well handles. Like Champions Online characters are have names tied to the display name of your account. So if your display name is Bob and you make a character named Doug the character’s full name is Doug@Bob. Which sounds weird but means you can always name your character whatever you want, no matter how many people named their character Doug before you. This is nice.

Rapidfire: Bad

Currently, the game does not automatically move you to a friend’s instance when you log in. You need to switch manually, which is a pain (and can descend into tag if there’s poor communication).

When below half hitpoints (aka bloodied) an injured FX appears that makes the screen hard to see. So when you’re getting beaten-up the game makes it harder to play.

I hate the reappropriating of feats as talents. Standard MMO talents don’t fit the game, and even Warcraft began moving away from finicky talents with Cataclysm. I’d much, much prefer a single big feat every 3 levels rather than small “feat points” every level.

If you accidentally hit escape while looting a chest, you can’t re-loot. You’ve just lost treasure.

Quest rewards have a required level like dropped loot. So it’s possible to get a reward too high to use. If you’re powerful enough to do the quest you should be able to use the reward. Period.

There’s a two character limit per account and you need to spend money to unlock more slots. Or, given it’s a free game, you could just create a second free account. So that’s silly.

There are three currencies in the game: coins (regular), zen (paid), and astral diamonds (misc). It’s not particularly clear why this third currency exists. You earn diamonds by daily quests, refining, and miscellaneous tasks, all typically mid-level.

Auctioning is poorly done. Auctions use astral diamons for payment and the deposit, so you can’t auction anything early in the game. And you can’t auctioned unwanted items to get more gold to get better gear.

When items drop they’re unidentified, and the only way to learn what they are is to use a scroll to identify them. Which means you’re burning money on scrolls and down an inventory slot. It’s a bit of a pain for very little benefit. (I also haven’t found vendors that sells identification scrolls either and once ran out and had a couple items I couldn’t even sell. But I don’t want to say this is a bug as it could just be me looking in the wrong places.)

You’re not given any instruction on some items, like portable altars. As far as I can tell, these act like portable campsites that you cannot respawned at. But I don’t see why they’re called “portable alters” instead of “temporary campsites” then.

Crafting isn’t given a tutorial.

Healing in a group is a pain in the ass, as you can’t target portraits and have to just try and hit the right person.

Non-instanced zones can be crowded with monsters, especially with things that can knockback. I’ve lost count of the times I was sent into another mob or dodged and AoE and aggroed a second group, or had more monsters spawn atop my fight. I’ve ended up in pitched battles against two or three groups.

There’s a mini-event in one zone where you compete for lost relics, golden items made in the name of a goddess. And after the event and all that effort you keep the items but can’t sell them or turn them in for a reward and just have to kinda throw them away. LAME.

And there was that time the “go here” sparkly quest trail led me right over a trap. Thanks.

Edit: Additional Thoughts

Zones are a pain to travel across. You slog through waves of monsters while looking for quest items, end up on the far end of the zone (especially if there’s a quest/instance there) and then have to slog your way back. There’s no “hearthstone” option. Given there’s no real death penalty (if you have a spare injury kit or 5 minutes to kill) it’s easiest to just commit suicide and grab a drink while your injuries heal.  This is a pain if you have to leave the game suddenly, your bags fill up, or a friend logs in and you want to change zones. 

There’s precious little powers variation. The pre-reqs for putting points into powers are high, so you end up having having spare points you have to spend learning powers you already chose not add points to and have no space for in your action bar. You’re picking the order you want powers, not what powers you want. 

There’s little lore on things like the destruction of the city or the Spellplague unless you go looking for it. I saw an NPC that described this stuff but walked away to do a quest turn in and now I can’t find him again to read the lore.

There is no swim animation or interaction with water. You just pass through it and run normally. 

You cannot swap characters easily. You have to log out all the way and then type in your login information again. This would be a pain if it just made you enter your password and reconnect, but it also wipes your email/account name requiring that to be re-entered.

Conclusions

The game design is similar to Cryptic’s earlier efforts: a simple hack-and-slash experience. It’s mindless. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing as it also describes many other games I’ve enjoyed, such as the Diablo franchise and its clones. And it’s not a gameplay style anathema to D&D, demonstrated by games such as Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, which I spent endless hours grinding away, typically with a friend manning the other controller.

Really, it’s a Dark Alliance MMO more than Neverwinter. I’ve also heard comparisons to DragonAge II which is a pretty good comparison.

In that respect the game does what you want it to. The story keeps pointing you at the next zone and the new groups of enemies to fight before shaking things up with new enemies that have new tactics and powers.You can play alone but you’re more effective as a group and everyone gets to contribute and blast away. You get new powers and options, but you never have so many powers at once that you have too many choices. And the game really shines in multiplayer. While I can’t give the game a great review I am enjoying playing it with a friend.  In a group things just go faster, so I spend less time noticing the little problems, like the inability to attack while moving, outdoor zones where you can’t take 5-steps without aggroing, the slightly imperfect hitboxes, etc. It’s not that my problems go away, it’s just that there’s much less time for them to happen so I see them less frequently and are thus more easily ignored.

But the game has its problems. The static world reflects a style of MMO design on the way out. It’s very much a third-generation MMO despite every MMO in the last three or four years trying to become an early fourth-generation MMO. There’s not a whole lot of innovation. Excluding the Foundry, it’s an unremarkable game I would have not looked twice at had it not been using the D&D licence (and even then, only because it’s free).

There’s also only enough official content for a single playthrough. There are a lot of players who just play MMOs, who will blow through the content and move onto the next game. It’s quite possible to reach cap in two-days (without paying). If people feel like they’ve seen everything the game has to offer in a long weekend they’ll move on to their next game. If the game cannot hold a fanbase’s attention for long, few people will become involved enough to give it money. I’m enjoying it now

The existence of the Foundry, which exists to scratch people’s need for side quests and tangential tales, makes the extremely tacked-on main story all the more needless. If I wanted to spend ten levels wasting my time with rebels and orcs I would have picked Foundry missions focused on rebels and orcs. While player-generated can help, this content can be extremely hit or miss. And unlike the official content, it’s less likely to be continually checked for bugs and balance after each update and patch. At best, this makes the game feel like a limited single player game with a lot of fan mods.

Combat is also problematic. Not just for the small balance issues but for the inability to move and attack in a game designed around mobile action. Plus the slight disparity between the graphics showing a hit and the engine acknowledging a hit. But this isn’t insurmountable and is fixable after launch with a little effort.

There also isn’t a whole lot of D&D in the early game. It has some lip service to the Forgotten Realms with the names of gods and places, but the game could just as easily be set in any generic fantasy world (that has reptilian kobolds). The D&D experience is a large one, so this may vary due to personal experience. Really, if you find D&D 4e doesn’t feel like D&D than neither will Neverwinter. Although, the lack of tactical play in favour of button mashing doesn’t particularly emulate 4th Edition very well either.

Neverwinter is emblematic of Cryptic Studios. It’s a hack-and-slash online multiplayer game that isn’t quite “massive”. Their graphics have improved over the last decade by the gameplay and design is pretty much the same. If you liked Dark Alliance or Diablo but wanted something a little more 3rd Person then Neverwinter might be for you.

But don’t take my word for it. ENWorld has a good review as well.

D&D Encounter Changes

D&D Encounters is the currently running in-store promotional program design to introduce new players to Dungeons & Dragons with a public play experience. You show up at a store at a set time, always on a Wednesday night, and play D&D for an hour or two. It’s free for both the players (excluding certain stores) and for the DMs who are volunteering their time to run the game, but walk away with an exclusive adventure, some maps, and a couple other assorted perks.

With the forthcoming season this is changing. Rather than an adventure written just for Encounters, it will be adapting the published adventure Murder in Baldur’s Gate, the first part in the Sundering series of adventure modules designed to segue the Forgotten Realms from 4e into D&D Next. The catch is that DMs will need to buy the adventure to play it, which retails for $35 ($40CAD because WotC hates Canadians). Unsurprisingly, this has resulted in some anger.

It should be noted that game stores will continue to receive Encounter packages containing exclusive dice and maps, so volunteer DMs still receive some exclusive perks.

The Official Statement

If you don’t frequent news sites or the forums you might have missed this “announcement” as it wa only on the Wizards Play Network section of the site and seemingly aimed at stores and not everyone else. Such as, oh I dunno, the DMs who need to pay for the adventure and might like some warning that they have to drop $40.

The full announcment is here with more details here.

When ICv2 contacted WotC for clarification on this they received a “refer to our website” email. Similarly, there has been no notice on the main site, the Enounters section of the main site, and there has been no WotC presence on the predominantly angry threads on the subject, either on ENWorld or the WotC Community.

In other words, WotC is being characteristically non-responsive to the questions and concerns of its fanbase and consumers. I look forward to them forcing it awkwardly into an “In the Works” or “Rule of Three” article to address the matter two or three weeks after it was relevant.

Cons

Let’s start with looking at the negatives of the proposed change.

First, it’s pricey. DMs are already volunteering their time to run games, effectively acting as living advertisements for for D&D and now they’re paying for this privilege. Not only that, but they used to be rewarded, receiving an exclusive bonus adventure only available for those running Encounters.

While the product is often listed as a 96-page product it’s actually a 32-page adventure and 64-page description of the city. While undoubtedly some of the city descriptions will be useful when running the adventure, the product is really a fluff guide to Baldur’s Gate with an attached adventure. So DMs will be paying extra for irrelevant content.

The adventure no longer being exclusive to Encounters also means their less extra content. Players who might be playing the Sundering adventures with their home game will now have no reason to play Encounters.

The adventure was also likely less designed for the Encounters format (if designed for it at all) so there will likely be some conversion required, making for a less even and consistent play experience. Because it’s such a story based adventure (a murder mystery no less) it might be much harder to jump in halfway through the season. And if Encounters continues with the other Sundering modules, it might become increasingly hard.

It’s also potentially bad for the Sundering and the Realms. One of the selling features of the adventures is that players can report their results to WotC and their decisions and actions will influence the canon outcome of events and future of the Realms. Having the adventures played and reported via Encounters potentially skews results from dedicated FR fans to Encounter players (and potentially new players).

Pros

Now lets change tone and look at the positives of the change.

First, it supports game stores a little more. One of the big selling features of Encounters to game stores is having the game played somewhere that sells product: people have fun playing and can impulse buy product right there. Game stores are dedicating table space that could otherwise be used to sell or display product keeping the store in business. This is a big reason why Encounters has often tied a season to a recently released book. Similarly, encouraging sales via Encounters helps WotC make more money which pays for the production of the adventures and perks they’re sending out. However, with no D&D products on the shelf Encounters cannot generate sales which means it’s a big cash sink. Selling the adventure mitigates this cost.

Stores also have additional options if demand for the Encounters season is low. If not as many players show up as expected, stores don’t have unusable extra product in the store but material they can throw on the shelves and sell.

From a business perspective it also makes sense. WotC has to pays someone to write the adventures and generate the content. That’s money they’re not easily getting back. If the Encounters season uses a published module then it’s less of an expensive investment.

One of the complaints regarding past Encounters seasons with the unavailability of the content. We nerds are pretty obsessive in our acquisition and WotC makes it hard to be a collector, with RPGA exclusives, convention exclusives, Game Day exclusives, and Encounters. There’s a ton of really cool content many people would buy in stores that is only available as perks (ship Dungeon Tiles, condition cards, dice, miniatures, and of course the adventures). Tying Encounters to published modules means everyone gets the adventure content.

It also encourages Forgotten Realms fans to play the adventures. Fans of the setting who might not be in groups that use that world can still play and influence the events of their favourite world. And (if WotC advertises it enough and soon) fans of the novels can also try the game and influence the future of the novel line.

There’s also a time limit before the publication of the D&D Next FR campaign setting, they’ll need to results of the adventures submitted sooner rather than later. The more people reporting the results of the PCs actions and the end events of the adventures the more diverse the results will be and the more interesting the effects on the world can be. Plus, Encounters play has always felt fairly impermanent and unimportant. You play and then things hard reset and you start again, never really achieving anything. If you actions have a permanent impact on a campaign setting, that certainly makes Encounters less disposable.

It also has the potential to make the adventures better. Writing a module that will be on store shelves for anyone to buy encourages writers to give their A-game. It’s not some throw-away adventure that will be played once during the season and vanish. People still play published adventures from all editions. It also skirts some of the complaints of Encounters not being representational of the D&D experience and being low-narrative if you’re seeing the same content people will be using in their home games.

Plus, if they continue into the other Sundering modules it creates a longer consistent narrative between seasons, rather than the typical Encounters trick of resetting everything between seasons. People can keep the same characters and continue to play them again and again. It feels less like a series of unrelated one-shot games and more a real campaign.

Other Thoughts

Regardless of the positives and negatives, either way the effect on players is minimal. They show up and play.

I find the outrage a little interesting as Paizo’s Pathfinder Society has always charged for their modules, $4 a pop (plus ink and paper as they’re PDFs). Buying every module costs well over $100 each year and there’s no swag. A pretty stinging argument can be made about how PF players will pay to play their organized play program while D&D players have to be bribed. But I think if Paizo had the resources of WotC to send out complimentary adventures, they would.

There’s also the fact many (if not most) of the DMs would buy the adventure anyway. If you’re volunteering your time to DM Encounters you’re likely a dedicated fan of D&D who buys many of the products.

Game stores can also potentially subsidize the cost. They can purchase a few extra copies of the adventure as “store copies” that are used for Encounters, potentially rewarding regular volunteers with one of the store copies at the end of the season. Many stores already give out store credit so this might not even be a change.

Personally, I’m more irritated we had to find this out via the retailer section and that a blog broke the story (followed by ICv2 and ENWorld). This is a big change that affects the wallets of those involved. The classy thing to do is to tell us directly and explain your reasoning. We’re grown ups, we’ll understand if you talk to us like people.

Those are my thoughts on the Encounters change. You can read some other thoughts on the ICv2 follow-up.

Review: August Playtest Package

The new 5th Edition playtest package was released on August 2nd. Let’s talk about it.

Playtester Fatigue

In one of those odd little ironies of life, Morrus of ENWorld fame started a poll on Playtester Fatigue the day before the package dropped. Half the respondents say they’ve stopped playtesting. The two year process is rather long: we’re a year-and-a-half into the test, a full year from seeing the final material and things are still in perpetual flux.

It’s hard to maintain excitement and interest for two years and tricky to run a long campaign with an unfinished system that changes every two months. Two years is a long time to ask people to hold off on starting new campaigns. D&D us a hobby and the playtest is asking people to put aside their hobby to test a game. Even if its free this is a big thing to ask your audience. I’m not surprised many people have given up on testing. Life is busy and many people can only get together to play once a month. Spending every other session relearning the rules is the anti-fun.

I think the lack of hard progress does not help matters. I’m sure the staff at Wizards feels like progress has been made and has surveys with numbers showing increased satisfaction. They likely have a much better idea of what works and what doesn’t and know how to combine elements into a better package. However, the rest of us don’t see this so this first year of testing has really felt more like concept testing and less like playtesting. The rules are in a constant and heavy state of flux, especially the classes. The fighter has been radically reworked four times. It’s hard to feel like the game is actually being fine-tuned when every two months you have to relearn a class from scratch.

We’ve also been testing the same rough material for the year, with the exception of the seven added classes (five of which remain). We still have not seen the multiclassing rules, tactical rules, hireling/pet rules, legendary monsters, etc. Rules modules need to be balanced as well, especially big ones like the tactical rules, multiclassing, and the like.

How to Play

Just a grab-bag of thoughts here.

Ability Checks: The new packages retains the arrangement of former skill lumped into the Ability Check section of the How-to-Play guide. While this makes sense as skills are non-core and optional (and all but removed from this playtest) it does bloat the initial chunk of the rules. With the exception of Constitution each ability score receives a full page of text. And Con is smaller because its uses are not broken down and expanded (not being text cut-and-pasted from the older Skill document).

Advantage & Disadvantage: I dislike the reliance on advantage & disadvantage for any and all combat modifiers. Advantage is a lovely tool DMs can use to award creative thought and other on-the-fly situational bonuses. It’s handy for after-the-fact bonuses and cinematic moments when attacks simply should have hit. And its a lovely counterpart to the “DM’s best friend” aka a +2 to checks.

But while I love advantage and disadvantage it’s become a crutch. Certain things should just grant a bonus and there should be more possibilities for stacking bonuses. Any time something is common enough that it might have a separate line on a character sheet it can have a flat bonus (raging versus not raging, charging attacks, the great weapon power attack). Any time a bonus from a spell or power or class feature modifies confers a bonus that lasts for an entire combat (or two or three) it should provide a flat benefit as the modifier can be written down on the character sheet or a post-it note. Penalties that apply for a couple rounds can be written down on a scrap piece of paper.

And because one cancels out the other it’s possible to get absurd situations like the encumbered barbarian that has been blinded, knocked prone, and grappled by a monster that is hindering her attacks. She throws her javelin a long range hundred feet across the room at the sorceress who spent her turn dodging. But because the barbarian decides to rage she takes no penalty on the attack and attacks normally.

Aid, Hinder & Dodge: An example of the above, aiding an ally should not always just provide advantage. Two people working together should have a better chance of success, yes. But they should also be able to accomplish more than two people working independant. And three people working together should have an even better chance. I’d like to see Aid grant the character aiding the option of granting advantage or +1 to the check. Ditto Hinder, which could provide a -1. And something like dodge should actually make you harder to hit not just change the odds.

It’s a pain in the butt to forget small situational modifiers and have to reverse the game and retcon what happened. But if you spend your entire action doing something (Aiding, Dodging) it’s much more likely to be remembered.

Stealth: These rules need a little clarification as you cannot step out from behind cover and remain stealthed. You technically cannot dash from hiding place to hiding place. Stealth also references being “obscured” but the rules for being “obscured” no longer exist.

Critical Hits: Crits feel a little weak. While it does increase average damage the potential damage might be less. Over the course of a campaign it works out to a damage increase but in play you only remember the times you rolled snake eyes on a crit. As you add a die, on average a crit might only deal 2.5-6.5 more damage (d4 to d12). In contrast the Great Weapon Master feat lets you make an attack with a -5 penalty and add an extra die and your Str mod to the damage.

Force Damage: I’ve never liked force damage. Too few effects really deal force damage and its description just sounds like weapon damage from a magical source. The spectral object battering a target is a force effect dealing bludgeoning damage and the spiritual weapon of a longsword is a force effect dealing slashing damage. Spells aren’t even consistent: the blade barrier spell describes “blades of magical force” but the spell deals slashing damage. Dump force and just clarify in the four spells that deal force damage that it can affect incorporeal creatures.

Knocking a Creature Out: This rule is simple but it grates at me. I dislike the idea of stunning monsters with a fireball and it makes taking the villain alive a little too easy. It shouldn’t be hard to keep someone alive to question but it shouldn’t be automatic or effortless. Tracking lethal versus non-lethal damage was always a pain but there has to be another way. Maybe there could be a “pulling punches” option where you deal half damage but if you reduce the creature to 0 it isn’t dead.

Resting: Short rests still aren’t so short. But there are fewer “encounter” powers that recharge after a short rest, and I imagine they’re trying to move away from the 4e concept of stopping and resting after every fight. Which does make for an odd narrative.

Prone: Sniping does not work in 5e as being prone grants you disadvantage on all attack rolls, not just melee. So hiding in the tall underbrush of a grassy knoll with your heavy crossbow won’t help.

Invisible: Invisible references the missing “obscured” rules. It also makes reference to invisibility being defeated by the creature making noise. But since there’s no separation between Spot and Listen checks without skills, Invisibility confers no real bonus to Stealth; any reasonably wise person will automatically be able to hear as well as they see and thus detect a sneaking invisible creature.

Spells: I’d really like it if the game clarified how loud and clearly you need to speak to cast a spell. Most spells require you to “chant mystic words” but can you do this subtly so it looks you’re mumbling to yourself homeless man style or not alert a guard? Or does it have to be clearly said in a normal speaking voice?

Character Creation

With no 1st level feats customizing characters is going to be hard. This is especially awkward as most bonuses from a subclass don’t kick in until 3rd level. So two dwarf fighters will look and play pretty darn similar for their first two levels even if one is thinking about being a damage-dealing two-handed brute and the other a defensive tank with a shield. Characters are defined by their Background and equipment, but likely they could swap equipment and be equally effective.

However, the designers increased point-buy from 27 to 30 and removed the class-based stat bonuses. It wouldn’t be hard to reduce point buy again and give every class an ability score boost at 1st level. And thus a potential feat.

Races

Races haven’t changed much again. Unsurprising as the classes seem to get the lion’s share of the design. We’re not even seeing the lore for the three new races.

Gnomes: There really needs to be a third sub-race. They’re trying to squeeze the three major gnomish archetypes into two subraces. The three types of gnome are the Dragonlance tinkerer gnomes, the dwarf-like 1e-2e illusionist gnomes, and the elf-like 4e gnomes. There are also the 3.5e gnomes that were kinda the 1-2e gnomes with “bards” tacked on, halfway between the 1-2e and 4e gnomes.

The forest gnome fits best as the 3e/4e bardic fey gnome. It should get a boost to Charisma and some other minor power that suits bards but works as a general power for mages. Maybe even the 4e invisibility power, perhaps downplayed as some camouflage or enchantment. The rock gnome is the classic name of the 1e/2e gnome and it should get the the illusion cantrip and similar earthy vibe. The tinkerer gnome should be its own separate thing, possibly held back for a Dragonlance article.

Half-Elves: This race is poor. They get most of the same bonuses as the elf (low-light vision, advantage to spot & listen, and advantage to avoid being charmed or sleep vs immunity). But in place of the full immunity to sleep & charm, weapon training, trancing, and the sub-race bonuses half-elves get… the ability to choose where their second stat bump goes.

Let’s compare a high elf wizard and a half elf wizard. They likely have the same Intelligence, and the half-elf is more charismatic but the high elf is more agile. They speak the same number of languages and have equal sense. But the high elf sleeps less, has the full immunities, knows how to use swords and bows, and gets an extra cantrip from the wizard list.

Half-elves also need a subrace like all the other races. This way they can add new subraces to modify half-elves for various campaign settings, such as Dark Sun or Dragonlance. There could be a difference between half-elves raised by elves or raised by humans. Or there could be a difference between high half-elves, wood half-elves, or even drow half-elves.

Half-Orc: Yawn. Nothing really special here. Again, like the half-elf there needs to be a subrace so half-orcs can be differentiated in different worlds. While half-orcs are traditionally the strong simple race, the race for people who just want to smash stuff and play simple fighters, there’s no reason for them to be so bland. We have humans for that.

Given them a variant of the relentless ability orcs have. Or a call-back to Furious Assault from 4e. Or the ability to avoid death, maybe adding a bonus to Death Saves.

Human: With the option for classes to exchange two +1s for a feat why not allow the humans to do the same and swap the +1s for either physical or mental stats for a bonus feat? As a sidebar or option with the Feats this might be nice.

Classes

Once again, the playtest focuses on the classes.

What’s with the shading in the class table? It’s odd and inconsistent. Is there a reason?

I like the return of multiple attacks to martial classes. In a game based around being able to throw mobs of low level opponents at parties, having weapon users stuck to single-target attacks was painful and overly favoured spell-casters. However, the clarification that you can move between attacks in every entry is annoying.

Barbarian: I like the addition of the bonus to critical hits. Barbarians hitting hard works. The subclasses work nicely, with the simple non-magical barbarian and the more primal spiritual barbarian.

Rage. I hate rage just granting advantage on strength-based attacks. Advantage works best as a situational bonus, not as a bonus from class features. The invisible barbarian should be scarier than the visible barbarian. Given their attack bonus is less than the fighter’s give them a flat +1 or +2 bonus to attack rolls. The damage bonus from raging seems rather low; I haven’t been seeing a lot of ways for damage to increase at higher levels so high level combats might get up there in rounds. I wonder if barbarians should be prevented from making lore checks while raging.

Cleric: Oh man, I can see people raging against Divine Intervention and some pretty heavy abuse. It’s cool but there should be a limit, such as not having an effect more potent than a spell one level higher than the highest the cleric can cast. Otherwise every level after 10 clerics will spent every free day praying for for the Divine Intervention of “make me a demigod” or “smite the Big Bad of the campaign” or “I’d love a belt of storm giant strength”.

I like Religious Study granting a choice of lore rather than just religious. And I like the bonus to saving throws being tied to presenting a holy symbol (and the addition that it can be on your shield).

Druid: Uncertain how I feel about Wild Shape being pushed back to 2nd level. I suppose it made the druid too frontloaded. But the idea of playing a combat Moon druid and not being able to use your signature power for one level and not getting your combat power until 6th is annoying.

Shape of the rodent needs a climb speed. As the stealthy scouting shape this is the form used to sneak into places. But with a set Strength score of 5 the rodent is rocking a -3 to all climb checks.

I love the land focus on the circle druid. The spellcasting druid definitely seems potent given it’s gaining more uses of its spellcasting rather than a situational power: extra 3rd and 4th-level spells. This is pretty powerful when it already has the same spellcasting as the cleric. It might be better to have the base druid have fewer spells than the cleric and the circle of the land increases its power to cleric levels. That way the circle of the moon doesn’t have all the spellcasting of a cleric and the ability to wild shape into bears.

Fighter: Redesigned again?!? It’s really hard to tell if the fighter is becoming balanced if it keeps changing. You can’t tell if something is not working because it doesn’t work or you don’t know the rules well enough or you’re misremembering an old rule.

Defy Death is problematic with the current dying rules. So long as an attack does not deal 49-50 damage the fighter doesn’t drop. And at level 13 they have advantage. Get a 20 Con and attacks need to do 125 damage to kill even an average rolling L13 fighter and she succeeds her check on a “10+” with advantage (only 20% chance of failure).

Speaking of Indomitable, this is a great example of the overuse of advantage. It’s a constant ability that could be reflected in a +2 bonus written on the character sheet but instead it’s advantage. Which means that the fighter trying to make the Wisdom saving throw against the magic of the high level wizard might need to roll an 16 to succeed (darn dump stats). Even with advantage that’s still only a 45% chance. And since she already has advantage there is nothing the party can do to help her make the save.

The fighter subclasses really seem like each class is trying to reinvent the wheel. You have the gladiator granting superiority dice, the knight granting expertise dice, and the warrior not getting much at all. I imagine this is so they can have advanced subclasses that have more fighter powers and super simple fighters, so there’s the gladiator with maneuvers (which leaves them free to add more gladiator maneuvers) or the warrior that just crits more. But it makes fighters seem… inconsistent.

The defender power of the knight is a little screwy. If a creature attacks an ally within 5 feet of you, you burn your reaction and impose disadvantage but it can attack you to negate the disadvantage. However, if it attacks you, you regain your reaction and can then use the same power to impose disadvantage on the creature. So, really, the power should just read “you can use your reaction to grant disadvantage on a creature that attacks you or an ally within 5 feet.” Or, really, “you can use Hinder as a reaction when a creature attacks you or an ally within 5 feet.”

The Path of the Warrior is pretty darn weak. Improved Critical is nice but won’t make any difference 90% of the time. And it amounts to an extra d6-d10. Doing the math, assuming the warrior hits half the time (11+) one out of every ten hits will be the expanded crit. If she has a middle-of-the-road weapon this is an extra d8 damage (4.5 average dmg) every ten hits, or an average of 0.45 damage per attack. And at 7th level this increases to a whopping 0.9 dmg. Not exactly setting the power curve. This is very likely the result of powers that sounded good on paper recalling the potency of 4e crits or crits from prior packages.

Mage: The class formerly known as the wizard. Let’s start with the elephant in the room: why the rename? Likely to make it easier to work the sorcerer into the class as a subclass or alternate class. Mage was the name of the “wizard” class in 2e so this is a bit retro. And it allows “wizardry” to be used for class features and as a flavourful description of magic.

We continue to have the “screw the 5-minute workday” power of Arcane Recovery (although it’s not on the class table) and it’s unclear how it works with a short rest.

As an oddity, mages get scribe scroll and brew potion. Odd as scribe scroll is the 6th level feature and brew potions is the 10th level feature, yet the treasure table in the DM file have even chances of uncommon magic items being potions or scrolls. Shouldn’t scrolls be more common and frequent if they’re available four levels sooner? Scrolls are also limited to 3rd level which raises the question where higher level spell scrolls come from? Or is the only way to find new spells of 4th level or above by stealing spellbooks?

Brew potion is poorly written. Rather that make use of the uncommon/ rarer potion categories it lists all possible potions in two lists: potions that equal 1 potion and potions that equal 4 potions. It also means potions not on the list cannot be brewed, even if they’re wizard spells. This makes it tricky to add new potions.

Copying spells into your spellbook remains expensive. A single spell can wipe out an entire level’s worth of money.

I’m not sure what happens when a level 8 illusionist doesn’t know invisibility…

Monk: Ki is suddenly an Encounter resource. Interesting. It totally fits.

I find it interesting that a level 12 monk that spends a ki point can theoretically fall from orbit and survive.

I wonder if a level 12 monk can still be a drunken master.

Given the monk is South East Asian it’s a little odd it doesn’t use the Eastern five elements.

Undaunted Strike is a rather lame power. “Spend 1 ki point to not be penalized for not using weapons.” It might be better to have unarmed strikes treated as magic while the monk has 1 unspent ki, and spend the ki for a boost. Maybe a damage spike. A single super attack ala Iron Fist.

Paladin: I like divine sense. It keeps the flavour of detecting evil without bypassing plot.

Having Holy Smite be tied to a paladin order feels odd. It’s such an iconic power. Ditto the immunity to disease.

It’s hard to judge the paladin without knowing the other orders. If they’re similar to the warden and blackguard from the last package it might be better to “pull a Mage” and rename the class the cavalier and make the “paladin” a subclass of that. Given iconic pally powers are in the subclass this might be the best fit.

Ranger: I’ve never been the biggest fan of rangers casting spells. Let alone at low levels.

Tying fighting style to favoured enemy is clunky and will make adding more favoured enemy options harder as there are far more types of enemy than fighting styles. Rangers could easily have two separate options of customization: fighting style and favoured enemy. Spellcasters get to customize by subclass and spell selection, and this is less complicated.

As it is the favoured enemy bonuses are, well, terrible. There’s nothing dragon specific in its style (arguably excluding Uncanny Dodge which is handy against breath weapons, but no breath weapon exclusive).

I like the inclusion of Natural Explorer and the exploration rules being worked into classes. But autosuccesses are uninteresting. Track also has this problem. Autosuccess just means there’s no chance to excel and get better than just a base success.

Rogue: After much time fighting it, sneak attack returns to the baseline rogue. I imagine they could still make a variant that swaps it out. The phrasing is awkward though. They’ve returned to advantage being required but also allow “an enemy of the target” to allow sneak attack. Are three-way fights so common they need to be assumed in the rogue entry?

Trap Expertise is weird. Rogues get to add their expertise dice to checks to find and remove traps. But removing traps is a Dex check so they could anyway. So it’s really just finding traps.

I like that Ace in the Hole has become a capstone power instead of the only power above level 10. The revision to the rogue (and the fighter) to give them interesting powers across all levels is nice. While fixing dead levels is easy, it was distracting.

Feats

I like the change to feats making them these big impressive things that confer a number of bonuses. 3e and 4e style feats work because you get them so often. The little minor feats were unsatisfying in 5e when they were received so rarely. I really enjoy big feats that used to be an entire prestige class, like Arcane Archer. Really, at this point the concept is strong we just need more examples. A fighter can easily take seven feats and there’s barely seven fighter-worthy feats.

I like the ease of either taking stat boosts or feats, although the frequency of ability boosts for some classes make it awkward, mostly due to the cap on ability scores. It might be easy to hit cap on a couple key ability scores and be stuck picking which dump stat to bump. (Although I’d love a scaling cap based on level, with no stat being higher than 15 before race at character creation, no stat higher than 18 at low levels and no stat higher than 20 after level 11.)

As mentioned earlier it would be nice to have a feat at 1st level for some customization.

I like having a baseline power for feats. Before it was always awkward measuring the potency of new feats, and knowing how good a feat should be. It’s great to have a benchmark for expected feat power.

Because feats are so new it’s forgivable that the mechanics of some are shaking the wording of most is poor. The “lucky points” in Lucky are clunky. There’s something odd about taking the Arcane Initiate feat and then being free to choose Wis to cast those spells. The marking of Tactical Warrior is needless emulation of 4e terminology, and might be easier just impose the penalty and then mention this feat doesn’t stack with itself. Plus it has the verisimilitude problem of 4e marking, where the creature moves away and you cannot affect it yet it’s somehow hindered by you.

Backgrounds

Not much to say about backgrounds. While 5e touted it was going to focus on the three elements of character creation (race, class, and background/theme) they’ve certainly only focused on classes. I don’t think they’ve done any revision to backgrounds at all, save removing and revising how skills/lore works. With classes not granting any differentiation until 3rd level or higher backgrounds might be one of the few ways to differentiate characters of the same race/class combo.

It’s interesting how many Backgrounds have a benefit that amounts to “people will let you crash on their couch.”

Conclusion

This package brings changes and more changes but no real progress. It’s hard to say if the game is closer to done than it was six or even nine months ago. There are improvements (and there are problems) but there can always be more improvements. You can revise a game endlessly, continually making small tweaks and revisions and then even more tweaks and revisions to fix problems created by the last wave of tweaks and revisions.

There are more classes and races in the last couple packages, but that’s not a great reflection on the completeness of the baseline Core Game and its Big Four classes and races. We keep hearing about these great ideas on the website, in articles and blogposts, but so far multiclassing, legendary monsters, and rules modules are vapourware.

Review: Arena of War

A licenced D&D property, Arena of War is a mobile game for the iOS (and soon Android) set in the Forgotten Realms. It ties into The Sundering, where the gods are working through mortal champions to determine their future in the world. According to the Sundering website, the game will some influence on the final outcome of the Sundering, like the published modules (starting with Murder in Baldur’s Gate), and Encounter seasons.

Newly released, this game is a freemium time-waster game, best compared to the Angry Birds franchise and similar games. It’s also fairly similar to most Facebook games in that you can only play for so long before you run out of Energy – which regenerates in real time – and have to come back the next day to continue playing. It reminds me of a simpler version of Dragon Age: Legends, with less complicated gameplay (and no ability to do things like build castles or craft).

How You Play

You touch your character then drag back to launch them forward. Much Angry Birds. For melee characters they charge forward and attack. For characters with ranged attacks, they move forward based on how much you pulled back and then fired their ranged attack straight ahead.

You can also use powers. On your character’s turn, at the bottom of the screen are powers usable by your hero. These last a certain number of attacks and recharge after a certain number of turns. They generally grant a percentage bonus to the damage of your next hit. I believe some also reduce damage. I’ll get more into powers later.

The gameplay does have a subtle complexity. If you bounce an enemy off a wall and they rebound back into you, you hit them multiple times. If you pinball an enemy into another enemy both take damage, and if you pinball an ally into an enemy (or enemy into an ally) the ally gets a free attack. This applies to enemies as well, who can hit multiple allies or strike multiple times. This creates a Conga Line of Death.

The numbers can get pretty high pretty fast, so I’m not certain of the balance of these multiple attacks. You can see single attacks range from 20 to 30 damage and then spikes well over a thousand after explosive terrain, bouncing walls, and repeated blows. But your health ranges from 200 to likely 1000, so attacks that deal 3500 are excessive to say the least. If you are positioned poorly, you can get devastated pretty darn quickly.

Despite the deceptive simplicity there’s some strategy and tactics required for the gameplay. Grouping up on tougher monsters is handy, as you can get multiple attacks with a single action. But this is risky as it can leave you open for a painful counterattack. You’re told the next two creatures to act so you can weigh the benefits of grouping and likelihood of winning.

Launching your hero requires less finesse than Angry Birds, as you just need to get the direction right. This can be tricky across the screen but the majority of the time it is not hard to hit your target. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious benefit for pulling back just the right amount to reach your target rather than all the way, at least for for melee attackers. For ranged there can be a little more variety as you can choose to keep them out of melee.

The execution is inconsistent. Not every enemy will rebound as per expected, sometimes not moving at all. And if you launch in-between two enemies they won’t separate as in billiards: your character will just hit one and ignore the other.

The gameplay is also fairly static beyond a couple damaging encounter areas (flaming vents and poison clouds) and the occasional teleporter. One of the initial demo quests shakes up the dynamic by having a wall down the middle of the encounter map, but no other maps really change how you approach the fight. There are no puzzles or problems to think or strategize around.

Quests and Story

Like many RPGs, you have a map of locations called “Adventures”. Each Adventure contains around four zones, called both “Stages” and “Quests”. You cannot advance to later Adventures/ locations until you finish each Stage/Quest in an Adventure. Once you complete an entire series of Adventures a new region is unlocked, represented by a book.

You can replay quests for lesser rewards and experience. However, replay is not identical as the location of bad guys seems to change between attempts (and even the bad guys in a quest are sometimes inconsistent). The random element keeps quests dynamic, as you can sometimes be challenged by lower level quests, but also means you can’t try and “perfect” a quest through repeated attempts. There’s also no visible scoring in Quests; either one character survives and you win or all die and you lose.

So far there are three regions with increasingly hard monsters and longer combats. Monsters in Quests have a level denoting the difficulty but these are a rough guideline as much lower level characters can attempt a quest providing they have high stats. There is no real way to tell if a quest is an appropriate challenge save making the attempt.

There is also a fourth Region (Undermountain) that was unlocked during the time of this writing with special quests. These were higher level but offered alternate rewards (fewer treasure chests and more scrolls).

There is a story for each area and Adventure. But these quest dialogues are only a couple sentences long. The story generally amounts to “something bad is going on” which leads to four combats in four slightly different areas culminating in a boss monster that is a regular monster only 25% larger who can take a few extra hits. I’m not even particularly sure there’s enough content to even call the game’s narrative a “story”. I’ve seen more story in a fighting game. There’s not even static cutscenes of chapter ending finales. Just the single piece of recycled concept art of Isteval who comments on your previous quests like they were significant. (“Mind Flayers? That is a dangerous revelation of importance. I am certain it is vital. But let us never mention them or even hint at the Underdark ever again.”)

Each time you attempt a Quest it uses energy. You start the day with 100 energy and a quest uses roughly 20, so you can attempt roughly five quests in a sitting. It takes roughly an hour to regain enough energy to attempt a new quest, but your energy fully recovers a couple times a day, allowing you to play before and then after work or school.

You gain experience for the successful completion of quests, which periodically grants you levels. Levels potentially increase your stats and give you a free power. There are other reward in addition to experience, with the most common being powers and scrolls. Occasionally you’ll also receive a health potion.

As is standard for this type of game, there is a daily rewards for logging in every 24-hours. And there are Daily Quests, which are options to replay earlier quests for better rewards than a standard replay. These pop up roughly 24-hours after the last time you attempted daily quests, so it’s quite possible for them to occur later and later in the day. My daily quests began at 4pm but are now closing in on 11pm. Soon I’ll either have to miss a daily quest or log in during the middle of the night.

Gaining Powers

The power system in Arena of War is similar to a trading card game. You get treasure chests for completing quests, and inside each is a power of random potency. There are Common powers, Rare powers, and Ultra Rare powers. And more potent versions of the three (Common+, Rare+, and Ultra Rare+). Commons, Rares, and Ultra Rares are different powers and do not share art or names. The + powers share names and art with their counterpart. For every Common power there is a Common+ variant with slightly better stats and slightly modified art: different colours, flipped icon, more dramatic spell effects, etc.

Powers have two effects. You can activate them for a bonus in combat, typically a percentage increase to damage with a duration based on its rarity and level. As a static benefit they increase your stats (attack and hitpoints). You can have two active powers (ones usable in combat) and several passive powers that just boost your stats.

The rarer the powers the better the stats and the longer the combat effect, but also the longer the recharge. Rarer powers will also sometimes have an Area Effect. Although there are a few “meh” combat powers in Rares; I initially have poor Rare powers and used Common+ powers for my attacks and relegated my Rares to stat boosters.

As your characters share powers, the stats of all your characters will be roughly the same. There’s not much difference between a level 1 character and a level 5. Although low level characters level up more quickly doing harder missions. And as your energy recharges when you level up, it’s actually beneficial to have several alts, presuming you want a longer play session.

Powers also have a power source: martial, stealth, ranged, arcane, divine, and primal. Each character class has an affinity to one power source and those powers have increased numerical bonuses based on the character’s level. But this is pretty small: 1% per level. So being a level 10 fighter means a martial power increase in potency by 10%, from a 70 to 77. If all your powers come from the same source (unlikely) this bonus might be the difference of a hundred points, which would allow you to survive half an attack.

For example, I have a level 6 fighter with the stats 477 and 483 and a level 2 barbarian (using the same power source) is 468 and 474. The extra 5% from levels amounts to 9 extra attack and hp.

There are quite a few powers. While you can currently only get Ultra Rare+ powers, there are apparently Legendary powers planned.

As mentioned, you typically gain powers by opening treasure chests gained from quests. There are two different types of quest that you will see: Gold and Iron. There’s space for a third but that doesn’t seem to be implemented yet.

The difference between Gold and Iron chests is uncertain. Both award Common to Rare powers. Different pools of power maybe? Different odds of Rares?

As this is a freemium game, you can give them money. They want you to give them money. In this game, this is mostly through buying chests. $3 will get you a chest with a Rare, Rare+, or Ultra Rare power OR a chest with a Rare+ or Ultra Rare power.

Let me repeat that, for the same price you can get a chest with either three types of rarity or two types. Even more ironic, the Rare+ to Ultra Rare chest was discounted to$1 at the time of this writing making the other chest even sillier of a purchase.

There’s also the $10 special chest that gives you four powers from Rare to Ultra Rare, aka $4 value but with a guaranteed Ultra Rare.

This means the game is very much Pay 2 Win. If you give the game money, you will win more.

Powers also have levels, and the higher the rarity the higher the maximum level.

As powers can level up, it means a high level Common or Common+ power can become the equivalent of a starter Rare. So you can continue to play and compete without purchase, you just play longer and open many more chests.

You increase the potency of powers via Fusion. If you have doubles of a power (which you will) you can combine them to make the power stronger. The details of this are a little fuzzy and there’s not really a detailed tutorial. The fusion system seems needlessly complex. The complexity means it might have some flexibility for gamers with mastery of the system, but for casual players (i.e. the primary audience of the game) it will likely be confusing and lead to mistakes and inefficiently used powers and scrolls.

It also looks like you can combine unrelated powers at the moment using all your unused powers to fuel a few choice powers. There are also scrolls (of the familiar C, C+, R, R+ frequency) that can be used to boost powers. Scrolls are a common reward from Questing. It does not specify the reason for rarity in scrolls, but I assume they’re more effective on matching powers. But unless you’re throwing money at the game you’ll have far more R and R+ scrolls that R and R+ powers, so those will likely end up boosting C+ powers. And I’m uncertain why you would ever want to boost a C power with a scroll.

Currently, fusing powers is a MASSIVE time sink. After questing you can easily end up with twenty chests and thus an equal number of powers. And you have to combine powers in the right order, fusing lower level powers onto a higher level power. Fusing a C+ onto a C power doesn’t promote it into a C+, and while fusing a level 1 power onto a level 3 will get you a level 4 power, fusing a level 3 onto a level 1 will likely get you a level 2 power (3 at best). There are a few ways of sorting powers but these are inconsistent and do not always work, so there is inevitably a TON of flipping and searching for your hidden high level power so you can fuse a lower level power onto it.

As mentioned, powers do have a level cap. So it’s possible to hit the cap and effectively stop advancing in power until you get a number of Rares. As the gameplay progresses, to offer a challenge to characters armed with multiple high level Ultra Rare powers there will need to be quest difficulties far beyond the ability of Rares. The long-term sustainability of the game is questionable: either it will become too challenging for free players or too easy for anyone who pays.

The drop rate of Rare powers is also low. Having opened hundreds of of chests I have found only a couple Rares. It seems to be in the 0.5% range.

Faux Social Gameplay

The game is online. You need to have access to the internet, and ostensibly you can form groups and use friends’ characters.

This can be a bit skewed as it encourages you to find someone who is a dedicated player and group with them, as having a strong group greatly increases your odds and survivability. Casual players need not apply.

Really, there’s no reason NOT to get help for a particular adventure. It doesn’t seem to lower your experience or treasure. To advance beyond the first few adventures help is all but required. Joining with a powerful group also makes winning so much easier than it’s silly not to hunt for a group with high numbers.

However, the social aspect does not seem to be implemented yet.

You can “Ask for Help” and get some random people added to your group, but these seem like pregenerated characters. There is no transfer of information: the game doesn’t connects to its main server to download a random person’s group. I’ve also seen the same characters again and again and again (and having learned the most potent group group I often just refresh until they become available). The random groups also use a number of classes you cannot normally gain access to (the Tier 2 characters), well before anyone would be expected to have earned them. So in many ways this is a preview of content you can look forward to unlocking.

This is actually rather frustrating as there is such a limited pool of competent NPC helpers. It doesn’t pull from a list of comparable heroes or characters of your level so there is a wide disparity of power levels. Some have stats 1/4 of my character’s and some have stats 2x my character’s. When starting out more help was better so it didn’t matter if it randomly assigned you equally weak heroes, but at higher levels being continually assigned far weaker heroes is a pain.

Annoyingly, these random bot characters have a weird assortment of names. Names that make you think of someone’s internet handle with a bunch of random numbers to the end so it’s unique (Such as Gamer25436692 or tdev13). Rather than make the pre-gens personalities & famous NPCs in the Realms – or at the least names that sound like they’re in-world – it seems like a deceptive attempt to make you think you’re gaming with actual people’s characters. Admittedly, it *could* be betatesters or the dev team’s characters, but I’d hope people with first dibs naming characters would be a little more original. And renaming the NPCs into something more world appropriate would been a nice touch.

In the actual social screen it’s pretty obvious the game isn’t connecting yet. There’s tabs for Facebook and Twitter but these are locked out. You can search for other people and you’ll find them but it doesn’t let you create a party with them just yet.

The game still notifies you that someone has sent you a party request:

However, if you follow the link it tells you that you have no messages. There’s a break somewhere in the social system.

There’s also invite codes. You can type in a code if someone referred you to the game, and in theory that will reward the person who told you about the game. Likely with a random power (my money is on another Common power…). Invite codes are visible on the bottom of the Social screen, as can be seen in a couple images above.

However, when you enter the invite code it tells you that the code is invalid and that the device has already been used to enter this code.

I tried it on multiple iPads with no luck. This feature just does not seem to be working. It’s frustrating that they don’t just say this feature is not currently working and either blank out the Friend Invite Code or place to enter the code.

Other Features

There are a number of characters you can choose. You can’t pick you class and race as those are set combos. All fighters are dwarves, all barbarians are half-orcs, etc. You can choose your gender and a few colour options.

There are also locked classes. These are Tier 2 classes. When you get two appropriate classes to level 8 you unlock a Tier 2 class (and another power usable in combat). Tier 2 characters can also have two power sources, making them inherently better (if only slightly).

Most of the Tier 2 classes are 4e classes, like the shaman, warlock, and monk. But a couple are things like the ninja or pirate. Curiously, the half-elf ranger also does not work towards any of the Tier 2 classes (but the tiefling rogue counts towards two).

From the Character Sheet screen it looks like they’ve left room for Tier 3 and Tier 4 characters. I imagine those require tediously getting every class to level 8 or a couple Tier 2 characters to level 8. Although, as mentioned, as you share powers across your account by the time you unlock a Tier 2 character you should be quite potent and they should be able to quickly gain levels.

Death is frustrating. It’s never fun but to fail in a game, but as you lose the energy you spent attempting the adventure, it feels like a greater loss. The hour spent regaining energy was just wasted. When you die in battle you are given the choice of using a potion to continue the fight. You can use up to 3 in a single battle before it’s considered lost. A single potion revives the entire party.

Potions are occasionally awarded for completing quests. But are rare enough that you really don’t want to use them unless you really have to, such as being at the final wave of a hard quest and only a couple monsters left. And, of course, you can spend real money to get more or better potions.

If you do die, by giving up or running out of potions, the game taunts you a little by offering suggestions of how to get better. The options amount to “Spent money in our store”, “Do some timekilling busywork”, “Grind endlessly”, and “Get something you likely already did days ago”.

The above criticism is overly harsh, but the “Get stronger powers” button is needless shilling. The best way to make money is to make a game that is so fun to play people want to give you their money. Most freemium games do this through extra content, so you pay for more game. If they keep dying or feel stuck reminding them they can pay to win is a bit of a dick move, especially since it’s very likely the power curve and swingy combats of the game led to death.

Levelling up provides so little of a benefit (a 1% bonus to the numbers of a fraction of your powers), advising people to gain more is silly. And frustrating, as you likely were questing. Repeating quests also gives much less of a reward than a new quest.

Really, the best advice would be “try again with a group of higher average power” or “stay away from the rebounding wall”.

There are a number of unimplemented features, in addition to the absent social tabs. In the settings there is a tab for Auto Fusion. Which would be glorious. Assuming it was able to combine powers in the right order.

There are also titles which are unexplained. From appearances they increase your damage. But I have no idea how to gain titles. From the name at the top (Undermountain Titles) I imagine it’s related to the launch event.

(Also check out that glitched button on the bottom left.)

There’s also a Hall of Fame and rankings, but given the presence of locked classes at the top, this is likely beta testers, Devs, or just place holders. Of course, with the sheer advantage paying for R+ gives you, I imagine the rankings will very quickly become the domain of people who sink the most money into the game.

Final Thoughts

Arena of War seems to want to capture the same market of quick time-waster casual games as the myriad of free smartphone games. But it feels more like a Facebook adventure game with its energy usage and limited ability to play. The penalty for failure is much steeper than the usual casual game so you’re not encouraged to keep playing the same content again and again to get a perfect rating. Not that there’s a way to keep score.

The gameplay is particularly swingy. It’s very possible for a single bad combo to halve your health, or worse. The range of numbers is high. And the difference in power level between a good assortment of leveled powers and a bad is steep, making for some walls in the content where the enemies are simply too potent for the unlucky.

The powers have an element of random cards and collectibility. But managing the powers is a colossal pain, potentially requiring as much time as actually playing through the quests. And the chances of getting Rare powers are so low that your ability to collect them all is pretty much impossible removing the draw of obsessive collectibility.

The game also lacks the tone of D&D. You can’t pick the combination of your class and race. And any class can use any powers. There are precious few iconic spells, and the ones that do exist are often mechanically identical to martial or sneak powers. Core D&D elements like Ability Scores, AC, alignment, and saving throws are absent. Classes don’t have unique powers or bonuses. The only real D&Disms are the classes and races, which appear in 95% of other fantasy games. Plus the unique monsters. Just including an Illithid isn’t enough to make a game into “D&D”.

My main impression from the game is “unfinished”. The social aspect of adventuring with friends isn’t working. The Twitter and Facebook sharing isn’t working. Auto fusion isn’t working. Not all the rewards are available. Not all the classes are available. Balance is a little shaky. And the difficulty spikes in a number of places necessitating grinding. The game simply DOES NOT feel finished. I’m reminded of many other games where the budget of the expensive development cycle was exhausted and they had to go live to start paying for the costs. But an unfinished game doesn’t exactly inspire people to give them money to play, let alone continue playing. And development teams have a tendency to be moved to other projects once games have gone gold, so the polishing and final fixes might be slow to be released. Or, as the Android version is not yet out, working on that version while the iOS version gets ignored. Confidence is not inspired. However, I could be very wrong here. I have heard the studio (Mobage) has released unpolished games before but followed through with greater content, more features, and improvements. So the game might get much better in the following weeks and months.

It’s doubtful the game would attract much attention or interest had it not been a licenced game of a name property. There’s very little that stands out and is unique or remarkable. It’s just another quick mobile game like a myriad of others.

The game really lacks the casual gameplay to attract a non-D&D gamer. There’s too much fiddly power management. The requirement to play at the game’s scheduled and not the players also hurts casual play. This reduces the benefits of a mobile game: being able to quickly play whenever and wherever. And the game also lacks familiar elements of D&D in terms of execution and gameplay to attract fans of that game. There’s solely a veneer of D&D. Changing the names of some IP would easily turn this into Arena of Warcraft or Final Fantasy Pinbattlers.

The game also ostensibly connects to the Sundering, but the actual “how” is uncertain. It would be easy (and fun) to allow players to pick their deity, choose who they are the champion of, and use that to determine how many champions succeed at their tasks. Succeeding at small events might also have an impact. But this isn’t really implemented yet in the game. So it’s going to be the people who stumble across the game later who can influence the Realms rather than players who tried the game right away and left as those features were not included.

Advance Class Guide Playtest

Prior to Paizo’s announcement of the 2014 Pathfinder RPG books I participated in some fan speculation on that year’s GenCon release. I said that the one thing I was not hoping for was a “another big book of class options”, because I already have all the classes and class options I need for the RPG. There are four or five classes I haven’t seen in play yet, to say nothing of uncountable archetypes.

And then they revealed the big 2014 GenCon release is… another big book of class options.

Whee.

To their credit, Paizo is doing another playtest to balance the classes and really work out the bugs from the classes. So a review seems appropriate.

Arcanist

The sorcerer/wizard hybrid

The gist of the class is a new variant of spellcasting. Arcanists are essentially sorcerers that prepare their known spells each day like wizards. It’s quite a bit like the pseudo Vancian casting of D&D Next /5th Edition. Other than the casting variant there’s not a lot going on in the class. It gets the ability to bolster spells, which is interesting but could just as easily be part of a sorcerer or wizard archetype. The arcanist picks a school and bloodline from the wizard and sorcerer respectively, but unlike other hybrid classes there’s no personalized combination of the two mechanics.

The arcanist a fun spell system but that’s all it is: a spellcasting system. This isn’t a class. They could publish this as a single-page optional spellcasting system ala words of power. The 3e Unearthed Arcana had a couple alternate alternate systems in that book, I don’t see why this couldn’t fit in a similar book of house rules and customizations.

The point-based system used to bolster spells evokes memories of psionic strength points without making a purely point base caster class. Paizo staff has said before that they can’t do places in Golarion with mental magic without creating a “mind magic” system, so having system that combines points with vancian spells seems wasted on a hybrid. I’d honestly prefer the class if they dropped the very loose arcanist flavour and just called it a “mind mage” or “psion” and used this as the baseline for Pathfinder psionic magic. It’s a missed opportunity.

Bloodrager

The barbarian/sorcerer hybrid

You have to worry about how iconic a class concept is when its name is a compound word.

The bloodrager threw me for a loop. I had expected an uncivilized version of the magus, a spellcasting warrior for barbarian types and savage humanoids. Most of the martial-spellcasting hybrids are about allowing you to be a spellcasting warrior at 1st level.  Instead, it’s the barbarian equivalent of the ranger or paladin where there’s a dash of spellcasting. It doesn’t gain spells until 4th level, which makes it more of a curious class: you could multiclass a barbarian and sorcerer and get similar casting.

There’s some design oddity in it’s main ability: bloodrage. Bloodrage is mechanically identical to the barbarian’s rage, being a word-for-word copy. The difference is… well, there really isn’t a difference. There’s no reason not to call this “rage” and keep the class simpler. They don’t give the bloodrager bloodcanny dodge. Calling it rage would make it easier to qualify for feats, prestige classes, and the like.

The two signature class features for the bloodrager are the ability to cast spells while raging and redesigned bloodlines. While the ability to cast spells while raging is handy this could easy be a part of a barbarian archetype designed around multiclassing.

The bloodlines are interesting, highlighting the intent of the class as a hybrid. The list of bloodlines is the same as the sorcerer’s list where the bloodline abilities are replaced by rage powers. Sorry, bloodrage powers. It’s a combination of two classes that would be hard to do otherwise.

A neat way the designers kept the bloodrager’s spellcasting simple is by giving her the magus spell list, which guarantees future support without requiring every writer to consider “should this spell be a bloodrager spell as well?” However, the magus has six levels of casting while the bloodrager has four. So a magus might expect to cast a 4th level spell at level 10 while the bloodrager wouldn’t get that spell until level 13. The usefulness and utility of some spells is off. While the wizard can fly at level 5 and the magus at level 7 the bloodrager is stuck on the ground until level 10.

Brawler

The fighter/monk hybrid

I can see the need for this class. The monk’s medium Base Attack Bonus and d8 Hit Dice make it a poor front line fighter, and the monk has a lot of spiritual powers and eastern feel that does not work for everyone or every campaign world.  Some people just want to play Daredevil and not Iron First.

(Although, with the super hero analogy in mind, I’m sad the brawler not only not proficient with a shield but that the AC bonus doesn’t apply when using a shield.)

I could really see the brawler being a monk alternate class, but I suppose the higher BAB and HD make the alternate class idea impractical. However, aside from the HD & BAB there’s little that ties this class to the fighter – aside from bonus feats, which the monk has as well. It could just as easily be called a monk/ranger hybrid. Adding the ability to qualify as a fighter for fighter feats (like weapon specialization) would be enough to make the brawler seem more… fightery.

The signature feature of the class is martial maneuvers, which seems overly complicated for an otherwise simple class that’s otherwise just about punching people. I can see it potentially slowing down play as a brawler player searches through every published feat for the right one for that situation. It might really lead to option paralysis.

This ability needed a little extra development/editing. The text of martial maneuvers is pretty vague, but I suppose there’s no alternative other than a giant list of feats. There’s also an odd passage in the second paragraph that I’m not sure I understand. I think it means the brawler cannot activate this power twice to get two feats at the same time. But it could be read as saying if the brawler uses the feat they lose it and have to pick another.

The capstone ability of the brawler is awesome blow, which kinda sorta replicates the feat without actually giving the feat as a bonus. It’s odd. And it’s also problematic as it allows the brawler to knock back creatures its size or smaller but a brawler is unlikely to be fighting many medium sized creatures at level 20. And just getting a set bonus feat isn’t particularly interesting or evocative, which makes this a weak capstone.

Hunter

The druid/ranger hybrid

When I first heard of a druid/ranger hybrid I liked the idea,  mostly due to the potential concept of a shapeshifting ranger: there’s not a lot of shapeshifting in Pathfinder and a martial shapeshifter is an unfilled niche. Instead this is a ranger with more spellcasting, no combat styles or favoured enemy, and an animal at 1st level.

The hunter takes much of its cues from the World of Warcraft class of the same name. The class is a pet class who uses ranged weapons in combat, being proficient only in simple melee. And it can self-buff using animal themed buffs. In WoW these are “aspects” but in Pathfinder these are “animal focus” (although the term “aspect” is used in the flavour text). It’s a flexible little ability that lets the hunter pick from a list of powers and switch between options on the fly.

Rangers are often known for their animals, and the inability to really have a ranger designed to be the pet ranger from first level is an absence in the game. But that’s an archetype, not a class.

The hunter’s medium spellcasting keeps some druid flavour, but weaken the overall class: the druid already fills the gap of the spellcasting pet class. Most rangers I have seen in play want fewer spells, not more. The skirmisher ranger seems to have been a very popular choice.

The hunter is really a concept that would work so much better as a ranger alternate class – like the ninja or the samurai – swapping favoured enemy for a better animal companion and combat style for teamwork feats. And maybe spells for the animal focus. Maybe. The hunter gains nothing from being a hybrid except worse BAB and HD and unneeded spells.

One fixable problem with the class is that it’s limited in animal companion. Technically the only legal optionals are the Animal Choices in the Core Rulebook, and it even gives a page reference. There are lots of interesting animals in later books and it’s a shame to exclude those options.

Investigator

The rogue/alchemist hybrid

The investigator is an alchemist that replaces bombs with sneak attack and discoveries with talents. So, really, it’s an alternate class of the vivisectionist alchemist. Despite being a hybrid of a spellcaster and non-spellcaster the investigator doesn’t seem to lose any spellcasting.

As it replies on sneak attack during combat, the investigator is really equal parts Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes. It doesn’t get bows (apart from the hand crossbow) so it’s going to be sneaking or tumbling about. It’s an odd image.

The signature mechanic of the investigator is inspiration, which allows an investigator to add a d6 to certain checks. However the investigator has limited pool of inspiration and using it on untrained skills depletes the pool. Most investigator talents relate to applying inspiration to other skills, allowing inspiration to be used without reducing the pool. It’s a neat little mechanic but it only amounts to a +3 so it’s going to be very situationally useful. Inspiration will not help turn a bad roll into a good roll. While there is a talent that boosts this to a d8 I wonder if the class might be served by increasing the die at higher levels. Or rolling multiple dies but keeping the highest.

Shaman

The witch/oracle hybrid

I like the idea of this class. The idea of spirits and the spirit world is an underexplored part of the game. The shaman is a big concept that might work better without being forced into the role of hybrid, so it can bring in some druid elements and use its spirit familiar in combat. I even prefer the idea of a shaman to the oracle as a spontaneous divine caster, or the spontaneous version of the druid.  So it’s a real shame the shaman prepares its spells. At the very least, they could have given this class the spellcasting of the arcanist, thus saving us from the inevitable divine variant down the line.

The shaman forms a bond with the spirits of the world, which gives her a couple granted powers akin to domains. The bond also gives the shaman a familiar that is just like every other familiar. I wonder if it could have been a spirit. Or had alternate familiar powers with a spiritual slant. Okay, the choice of spirit bond does grant the familiar a small token ability, but most of these don’t make it more of a “spirit” and just make it seem like a raven on fire or a toad made of rock.l

The shaman spirits come from a list named after oracle mysteries, which grant set hexes like a witch. It’s an elegant design that emphasises the class’ place  as a hybrid of two different classes. However, I’m not sure it does service to the idea of the shaman. It forces spirits into the same boxes as the oracle’s paths, which don’t always fit. The shaman ostensibly draws power from the spirits of nature, from every living thing, but follows a spirit of Battle or Bones or Fire.

Skald

The bard/barbarian hybrid

The class is really a bard with a variant use of bardic music; a skald is a bard who inspires rage instead of courage. It’s interesting but at bit problematic, being really group dependant, as it has no impact on spellcasters and is of lesser use to archers or finesse fighters. This might be problematic in PFS games where the skald sits down at a table and her main class ability just makes everyone easier to hit before fatiguing them.
If the class had a more martial slant, being able to take advantage of its own rage, this might help the class stand out as more than the angry bard (the heavy metal bard?). But the skald is not proficient in more weapons than the bard, and still has a d8 HD and 3/4 BAB. Thus makes the skald a little awkward to play in combat – unlike the bloodrager, the skald cannot cast spells and lacks the health and attack bonuses to wade into melee. It’s really just a bard with a single unique song. Once the skald sings it either chooses not to buff itself or sits and watches the rest of the combat unfold.

The skald suffers from the renaming problem of the bloodrager: it does not have bardic music but raging song. This makes the skald ineligible for bardic feats and prestige classes, which is a big omission.

Giving the skald some alternate uses for raging song might be nice/ Such as being able to enrage the enemy lowering their AC or forcing them to provoke Attacks of Opportunity when they attack. Something more related to the skald and its signature mechanic than spell keening.

Slayer

The rogue/ranger hybrid

I’m really not a fan of the concept of this class. It’s meant to be the damage dealer. The DPR class. But “damage dealer” is a character concept not a class concept. And, frankly, there’s already no shortage of character builds that can almost break the game in sheer damage output: the ranger at my gametable can already destroy an encounter through high damage. Do we need to set the bar even higher? Ostensibly the slayer is trading out-of-combat abilities for higher damage, but that just makes for an inflexible character useless in non-combat situations (while also breaking the game by killing monsters disgustingly fast). The alternative is that the class is balanced with other damage dealing classes ‘n’ builds, but that just means the slayer is equal in combat while inferior in other situations.

The slayer gains favoured target (a variant on favoured enemy) and sneak attack, but not at the same level. It might be very possible to build a character very similar to the slayer using the current multiclassing rules. Favoured target really feels like an indiscriminate variant of favoured enemy. I can see favoured target working just as well in a ranger archetype. I think there’s already a couple that do something very similar. This means the slayer really lacks a distinct tentpole mechanic.

Swashbuckler

The fighter/gunslinger hybrid

The swashbuckler is kinda-sorta related to the gunslinger as its panache mechanic is similar to grit. Which is a little like saying it’s a fighter with a grit-based archetype. Aside from the renamed grit, there’s not much slinging of guns in the swashbuckler. There are many other classes that share mechanics without being hybrids.

Being a Ravenloft fan I like lightly armoured fighters with rapiers, and they’ve been hard to pull off prior to this class. So I’m pro-swashbuckler. The swashbuckler class is somewhat needed. Mostly because prior attempts to make swashbuckling archetypes have been imperfect. It’s a need created by previously poor design.

The big design problem I can see with the swashbuckler is that the entire concept of the class is it uses light weaponry. It is very unlikely there will be a swashbuckler who does not use a finesse weapon. However, the class doesn’t get weapon finesse until 2nd level (called swashbuckler finesse). It’s like telling people “okay, you’re going to have to retrain at 2nd level. Suck it up.” Giving the class deeds, panache, and the equivalent of a feat would be more abilities than the fighter gets at first level, but there are lots of classes that get a feat and other abilities; level 1 fighters do get shafted in terms of power. As some basic weapon finesse the ability doesn’t make the character better per se so much as make them as competent as anyone else at hitting it’s not that overpowered. However, as swashbuckler finesse is a class feature it would be easy enough to have a lesser version of swashbuckler finesse at first level (say, applying to a single weapon) and then increasing bonuses at higher levels.

According to the text of the Bonus Feats feature, the swashbuckler to count as a fighter for feat prerequisites. I believe this allows the swashbuckler to take fighter options like weapon specialization, but some clarification would be nice (such as using weapon spec as an example).

Warpriest

The fighter/cleric hybrid

The common response to the warpriest is “isn’t the paladin the cleric/fighter hybrid?” Yes, yes it is. The warpriest exists because Paizo doesn’t want to expand paladins beyond the scope of Lawful Good into other alignments. And many other clerics might need divine champions. I’ll buy that.

The warpriest gets a couple unique powers. The first relates to weaponry. The warpriest is focused around the weapon of her god and can enchant her weapon. A pretty potent ability that really makes their weapons even better. For a class based around smacking people with weapons this is really good. But as they don’t have a full BAB it should be balanced.

Warpriests also select a blessing. These are named after domains and have granted powers like domains. Often they replicate the powers of domains. But they aren’t domains because… umm… because it doesn’t grant spells and you get the secondary benefit at a different level. As the inquisitor gets domains without spells, I really don’t see the point of blessings. It’s just five pages that could be filled with other content.

The need for the Advanced Class Guide seems a little weak.

Many of the new classes of the Advanced Class Guide seem to exist solely because the designers decided to do a book of hybrid classes. There was a need for many of these classes in the book not at the table. Which is odd as one of the obvious hybrids that is missing in the game, the rogue/wizard, is not in the Advanced Class Guide. During the era of 3e, WotC did three different versions of a rogue-like wizard: the spellthief, the beguiler, and – to some extent – the warlock. Plus the arcane trickster prestige class.

The ACG is an oddity. It really does not seem to fit with Paizo’s business model, with how they plan and release their hardcover books. They made Ultimate Combat in part because they needed Asian classes to tell the Jade Regent adventure path. They made Mythic Adventures because they wanted to tell the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path. I don’t see the lack of an investigator preventing a mystery based AP or the absence of a solid swashbuckler holding back a Brevoy or Galt AP. But they’ve said multiple times that the lack of psionic/mental magic is preventing them from doing anything with Vudra. And there’s bound to be other APs that are slightly tricky without certain options or support.

I wonder how much of the 2014 schedule is a result of Paizo reacting to 5th Edition. While the could just continue doing what they’re doing and ignore 5e, it’s hard to not respond to the former market leader trying to steal a chunk of your audience. So we have the Strategy Guide coming out in the spring, which is the book for new players (likely ahead of 5th Edition’s release, potentially swaying a few new players curious about D&D during its anniversary year to Paizo while D&D still lacks products on the shelves). And for the experienced players we have the ACG. The “Don’t want a simple system or the same old classes? Here’s a whole bunch of brand new crunch!” response to 5e.

The Advanced Class Guide  is filled with missed opportunities and classes that didn’t need to exist. The arcanist is an optional spellcasting system, the bloodrager and skald are little more than archetypes, the hunter and investigator are really alternate classes, and the slayer’s concept is not compatible with balance. Forcing the shaman into the role of hybrid class is doing a disservice to the class concept. The brawler and swashbuckler fill a niche, but one created by poor execution in earlier rules. The warpriest kinda works as a divine magus, but this idea alone doesn’t justify an entire book.

Judging the Advanced Class Guide  solely by the playtest’s ten classes, the book feels like an idea that seemed good on paper, and had lots of fun ideas, but fell apart during the execution, likely when it was too late to start working on anything else. But hopefully the rest of the book will make it a worthwhile purchase; the classes are only 50 pages in a 250+ page book. Even adding new archetypes and feats there might still be 100 to 150 pages devoted to other content that might justify the ACG. Of course, they’ve talked about how some of the options will let people get a taste of the new classes, like how the amature gunslinger feat allows non-gunslingers to gain grit. If a regular ranger can gain access to favoured target or animal focus it does mean the new classes become much more irrelevant and needless.

Review: Shadows of Esteren

Shadows of Esteren is a French role-playing game (Les Ombres d’Esteren) translated into English, and funded through four different Kickstarters (so far). It’s tagline is “A medieval roleplaying game somewhere between Ravenloft, Game of Thrones and Call of Cthulhu.”

The game did quite well in the 2013 ENnie awards, netting gold ENnies for best interior art and best production values (beating out such stiff competition as WotC and Paizo) and the silver ENnie for product of the Year for Book 1: Universe.

Introductions

I first became aware of Shadows of Esteren back in 2012, some time after their first Kickstarter, when I came across their books at GenCon. The company, Agate Roleplaying Games, didn’t have much of a booth (it looking like they were sharing space with at least one other publisher) but the books leapt out at me. They had a nice display, with a stack of books and decent signage. They had the regular cover for Book 1 and a deluxe cover, mostly for Kickstarter backers willing to drop a little extra. Being a big Ravenloft fan, the horror aspects ‘n’ aesthetics appealed to me. The books looked amazing.

However, I came across Shadows of Esteren on Saturday, after I had thoroughly bankrupted myself. So I kept my distance. But I made a note of the name for future reference, so when the third Kickstarter came, with an option to get the first two (and a half) books for a decent price I threw my money at them.

What Is It?

Shadows of Esteren is a tabletop roleplaying game that combines a setting (the peninsula of Tri-Kazel) and ruleset. The game uses its own system and not the d20/OGL ruleset. There are currently four books for SoE: Book 0: Prologue, Book 1: Universe, Book 2: Travels, and Monastery of Tuath. A fifth book (Book 3: Dearg) has been published in French and is likely being translated into English shortly, and a sixth book (Book 4: Secrets) has been hyped since Book 1 and is in the works.

Book 0 is an introduction, with the very basics of the rule system, a description of the world, several NPCs/pregens, and a few short adventures. If not for the adventures, this would be a good book to give to your players to familiarize them with the world and game prior to play. (If you trust your players not to read the adventures, it still can be.) Book 0 is also available for free on DriveThurRPG.

Book 1 is both an introduction to the world and the game system. Clocking in at almost 300-pages, two thirds of this is taken up by description of the world, including ethnicities, nations, factions, and history. The final 100 pages is the ruleset, and a tenth of that is more pregen characters.

Book 2 is more descriptions and world lore, this time almost a travelog of assorted locales and places of interest. There is also some additional rules on travel, a few monster statblocks, some NPCs, and a few short adventures (and one longer adventure). It also introduces more mysteries and teases more factions, providing numerous adventure hooks and hints of other threats lurking in both the wilds and civilized reaches.

Monastery of Tuath is the feature length adventure, set in the eponymous monastery. The book greatly describes the building and inhabitants, allowing it to be used beyond the setting of a single tale.

Book 3 will describe the village of the same name, acting as the starting zone of a campaign, the centerpiece of the world. Most of the pregens from Book 1 are already tied to Dearg. Book 4 (Secrets) will be the big Game Leader book with all the little secrets on the world, truths behind the legends and the like.

Crunchy

The same system is mostly unremarkable. It’s a classless system that defines a character through skills and skill specializations. You add a stat and a skill which along with a 10-sided die to beat a DC. It is a lot like Fate in base concept, or d20 with a different sized die and skills for combat statistics. It’s not unlikely the World of Darkness or Cortex with static numbers in place of a die pool.

While the system is not revolutionary, this is not a bad thing. It’s easy to learn and fairly simple, which allows it to fade into the background allowing the focus to be on the story. This is important for a game based around atmosphere and horror: the focus should be on the character and not the statistics.

The most interesting thing of the mechanics is how ability scores are handled. In place of familiar stats (Strength or Might, Intelligence or Brains), SoE uses five abilities called “Ways” that are really combinations of mental and physical attributes. These are Combativeness, Creativity, Empathy, Reason, and Conviction. Ways range from 1 to 5 and not only affect the character’s mechanical effectiveness but also their personality. A high and low Way can be seen as both positive or negative, and characters have traits tied to their Ways. For example, a character with a high Reason score might be logical and highly rational or they might overthink things and have difficulty making decisions. In contrast, a low Reason score might mean the character is either spontaneous and bold or careless and forgetful.

The game also has three different magic systems: Demorthèn Art, Miracles, and Magientist. Demorthèns are druidic shamen, and use totemic stones to manipulate weather and the elements. Miracles are tied to a monotheistic faith and perform the familiar divine cocktail of healing, buffing, and righteous smiting. Magientist is a form of steampunk quasi-magical technology, your standard magitek.

The first two types of magic are skill-based but fairly rules lite. There’s a chart of effects (damage, number of targets, duration, etc) setting the DC for the skill check needed to successfully cast the spell. Characters have a number of specialities (such as water, life, or animals; purification, protection, or castigation) that a character dedicated themselves towards, allowing players to create personalized spells and effects so long as they’re tied to their speciality. A Demorthèn with a Flame Oghamic stone could start a campfire, throw a fireball, produce smoke, or cook food depending on the need.

Magientists use devices fueled by a quasi-magical substance (flux) distilled from matter, both organic and inorganic. Flux is then used to power steampunk devices (artifacts)/ Most of the rules are related to extracting this fuel, refining it, and attempting to use devices. Sadly, there are precious few artifacts provided in the book, so Game Leaders will have to make their own and do some design.

Combat is similar to a few RPG systems (Cortex for one). You attack with the related Way (typically Combativeness) plus the weapon’s skill and d10. This is compared to the target’s defence. If it’s a hit, you subtract the defence the add the weapon’s damage die and subtract the target’s protection (typically from armour). This means the better your attack roll, the more damage you do. It’s a neat idea but in practice it encourages people to double down on combat skills, because it increases both their chance of hitting and their damage.

Fluffy

Shadows of Esteren is a fluffy game. Most of the books are devoted to either flavour text or adventures. And most of the flavour text is written in-world. Each sub-chapter of the Book 1 has a different narrator with their own biases and perspective. The book covers the history of the setting as well as such topics as food, fashion, architecture, culture, and more. There’s a lot of diverse topics but each is only given a brief section so the book does not feel overloaded with details.

However, there are a lot of in-world terms used. The book throws you into the setting without a lot of explanation for a lot of terms. The book has a glossary and expect to use it. It might take two readings to really absorb all the details and nuances.

Tri-Kazel is a Celtic flavoured world. Odd for a French roleplaying game. There are old forests, the weather is cold, and nature is unforgiving. The land is divided into three nations, each of which is dominated by one of the three major factions: tradition/ Demorthèn, the Theocracy, and Magience. There is also the omnipresent threat of the feond, mysterious monsters that terrorize the land. Feond are a weird catch-all category for magical beasts and monsters, with a dash of Lovecraftian unnaturalness. There’s also the suggestion of witchcraft or other dark sorcery.

The Good

The books are beautiful. Shadows of Esteren has raised the bar on what I consider a good looking RPG. The art budget for the game must have been staggering.

The books remind me of White Wolf’s World of Darkness products, only full colour. There’s art everywhere and the pages resemble parchment with lots of small details. No two pages look alike. The art really helps sell the tone of the book, being an appropriate mix of gothic and horrific with highland terrain and lots of Celtic standing stones. The design changes slightly for the rules section, with the page background being more muted and the art less colourful, often greyscale with a single highlighting colour; appropriate for the different tone required for rules reference versus flavour.

The system is simple and has some nice design elements. There are a few combat maneuvers characters can learn and each character can choose to focus on offense or defence each round, tweaking their statistics.

The world itself is interesting, albeit on the small side. The entire setting encompases a small peninsula, reminiscent in scole of a Scotland. This is a world for smaller, more personal stories and not large world-shaking epic tales. There’s some good tension and different factions and sides to play against each other, with no clear good guy or bad guy. With the feondas, you have have a heroic campaign of humans versus the unnatural, or mankind can be the primary antagonist.

The Bad

The amount of flavour text makes the books heavy to read. It’s not dry, but it’s tricky to find information you want, having to read through what amounts to dialogue. Plus the near constant use of in-world terms, which require constant reference. The book does not hold your hand, easing you into its vocab, but thrusts you headfirst into the text and defines much later. If you’re lucky. Varigals were referenced over a half-dozen times before earning a brief description.

The translator/author also makes some curious word choices. I didn’t catch any mistranslations, but there some seldom used words that made frequent appearances and some curious phrasings. Such as “vegetal”.

The Ugly

The game has two large hardcovers and two smaller accessories, but still feels nowhere close to complete.

Book 2 had a small assortment of animals and some other opponent, but the game feels short of adversaries. While feondas are hyped as a major opponent, there are precious few provided, and no rules or advice on building or customizing a feond. The designers of the game say this is because all feond are meant to feel unique, but without more rules and options, many Game Leaders will reuse the same feond again and again making them feel repetitive and commonplace.

Similarly, there are only a handful of magience artifacts, making it extremely tricky to plan a campaign in the associated nation or have multiple characters making use of the skill.

At this point in its lifecycle, Shadows of Esteren is poorly suited for a rookie Game Leader, and needs an experienced GM who feels comfortable making their own content and generating their own options. The game would really benefit from some Web Enhancements or a larger fan community making homebrew content (which there very well might be, but sadly it’s en français.

Furthermore, the game world feels unfinished, and likely will remain so until Book 4 is released. There are numerous mysteries in the game making it harder to run a satisfying campaign (at least for those wanting to adhere to the canon). We’ll be unlikely to see Book 4 earlier than late 2015 in English, which is a long wait.

The book also seriously needs a larger North American distributor. I haven’t seen the books in stores, and while they’re available a few places online (amazon.com and even paizo.com), they’re not on amazon.ca, which hurts this Canadian. And the shipping prices they were charging the most recent Kickstarter kept me from pledging.

TL;DR

Shadows of Esteren is an interesting fantasy-horror role-playing game that is heavy in flavour and really works to maintain its tone. The first book doubles as rulebook and campaign setting, focusing on the later. And the books are most noteworthy for their excellent production values that have to be seen to be appreciated.

But the game still feels unfinished and cannot be recommended to novice GMs as some content generation is still needed to run extended campaigns.

But I look forward to reading future books and playing a short mini campaign, if I can get ahold of them in Canada.

Review: Emerald Spire

The latest release in the Pathfinder Modules product line is something a little extra special: the Emerald Spire Superdungeon. This 159-page book covers sixteen dungeon levels, details a nearby town, and takes a party of adventurers from 1st level to 13th level.

What Is It?

Emerald Spire is the first Pathfinder superdungeon. There have long been requests by fans of dungeon crawls for a larger-than-average dungeon, but Paizo never felt able to do this with either the Adventure Paths (which have to stand alone) or the module line (previously too short). Then came the second Pathfinder Online Kickstarter, attempting to raise extra funds for the forthcoming sandbox MMO. Paizo had already published the book Thornkeep as a reward for PFO’s first Kickstarter, establishing the precedent of supplementing/subsidizing Kickstarters with RPG products. This meant there was the opportunity to do something extra special to encourage gamers to pledge funds.

The hook of the dungeon was each level would be written by a different author, and as the Kickstarter raised more funds more authors would be added. The book would be written by a number of Paizo staff supplemented by a who’s who of past game designers. A couple planned authors ended up dropping out, so the final book is written by Keith Baker, Rich Baker, Wolfgang Baur, Jason Bulmahn, Ed Greenwood, Tim Hitchcock, James Jacobs, Nicolas Logue, Erik Mona, Frank Mentzer, Chris Pramas, Sean K Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Michael A. Stackpole, Lisa Stevens, and James L. Sutter.

The Cool

There’s something ineffably awesome about a book partially written by Ed “Forgotten Realms” Greenwood, Frank “Red Box” Mentzer, Keith “Eberron” Baker, Chris “Green Ronin” Prama, and Wolfgang “Kobold Press” Baur. In addition to the CEO of Paizo (Lisa Stevens) and the creator the Pathfinder RPG (Jason Bulmahn) and the creative forces behind the campaign setting of Golarion (James Jacobs and Erik Mona).

There’s also a lot of cross support. Paizo is doing its usual excellent job of releasing companion products, including a deck of Campaign Cards and a Flip-Mat Map Pack. The Campaign Cards are similar to the decks released for the last few Modules and Adventure Paths, and includes a deck of 53 cards containing items from the adventure, Face cards of various NPCs, and Quest cards summarizing important missions. The Flip-Mats set is more impressive, being eight double-sided flip maps covering every layer of the dungeon. The entire dungeon is pre-mapped!

For those fans of Paizo world of Golarion there’s another surprise: a heretofore unrevealed secret! Golarion has a series of underground vaults that are essentially magical wildlife preserves ( inspired by pulp stories and Hollow World tales, such as Journey to the Center of the Earth). While they filled the same niche as the Underdark of other campaign worlds, these Vaults had a mysterious origin having been created by an unknown race who once warred with the aboleths. The Emerald Spire reveals the identity of these mysterious Vault Builders.

The Good

First off, the presentation is excellent. The book features all new art and looks good. It’s not quite as drool worthy as Inner Sea Gods but the book has high production values. The layout is clean and it’s easy to find information.

Each dungeon level has consistent formatting with a full map followed by a page with flavour text and an introduction of the level. The third page features a sidebar explaining some key features of the dungeon layer, such as doors, ceiling height, lighting, etc. This is excellent and I wish most dungeons crawls would make use of that style: too often I’m left wondering if the ceiling is 10 feet or thirty feet high or if that particular level is well lit or pitchblack.

The dungeon is really diverse. Many dungeons – especially mega-dungeons – get a little samey, having the same rough tone and execution: the same types of monsters, the same architecture, and same level design. There might be a varying room or two but the majority is familiar for reasons of consistency. The Emerald Spire doesn’t even try for consistency; a steady design would have been impossible with sixteen different authors, nine of them freelancers. There’s a flooded level, a magma level, an overgrown garden, a machine shop, and more.

Similarly, not all layers are just kick-down-the-door combats. Some levels have the opportunity for some roleplaying and interaction. Two or three layers have the PCs choosing a side to support in that level’s conflict. One level could even serve as a headquarters for the party as they adventure deeper.

There’s a small element of non-linear play to the dungeon. At several opportunities PCs are given the chance to skip a level, ignoring a door or using a token to travel to a deeper layer. This adds a slight feeling of old school exploration to the dungeon, where players just pick a wing or area to explore: there is not a set order to the exploration that must be upheld, there are no rails for the dungeon.

The book presents a lengthy background describing the dungeon, with much of it focusing on an Azlanti expatriate that features heavily in the lore. He’s not quite the Big Bad of the dungeon, but he’s presented as such for most of the expedition. The history is accompanies by a very cool cross section of the dungeon showing the height difference of the various levels, as well as some side passages. This is actually pretty useful and evocative, showing just how deep things get while also countering the mental image of the dungeon being shaped like an inverted sixteen-story office building.  Although, looking at the cross section does not give the full scope of the dungeon’s depth; at two miles, the spire is four times the height of the tallest building in the world, and a little under half the height of Mount Everest.

The book describes the small city of Fort Inevitable, created as one of the starting areas for the MMO. This is a decent starting town, with lots of potential for side quests and adventure hooks, but not so much content that GMs have to use the city or cannot move the Spire elsewhere. There’s some excellent conflict in the city, tension between the ruling Hellknights and an underground resistance movement. The players could support either faction or freely decide to ignore the struggle. Heck, as the adventure is close to the city of Thornkeep, GMs could choose to set it there and forgo Fort Inevitable altogether.

Speaking of Thornkeep, the adventure has some ties to that product, referencing organizations from that town. But the references are largely self-contained, so Thornkeep is not required to play Emerald Spire. But it’s a nice nod to the earlier product and the fact the dungeon is equidistant from both settlements.

One final point is the new monsters. With so many monsters available for use, the new creatures here seem a little superfluous (save two). However, these are based on repainted minis provided to Kickstarter backers, exclusive figures for the Kickstarter. Including new statistics for these figures is a neat perk, as is incorporating them into the adventure.

The Bad

The largest problems with Emerald Spire are structural. Because it was written by sixteen people who only somewhat coordinated their efforts, each of the dungeon levels feel unrelated and do not connect well. There are two layers that have similar inhabitants (snake people) but the actual layers are independent of each other. There’s no cohesive story or sense of progress beyond getting deeper underground.

In more than a few cases it’s unclear why the inhabitants of a layer are unaware of others, or have no interaction with people above or below. Neither the rogues inhabiting level 3 nor the troglodytes of level 4 seem to expand their territory and the morlocks curiously don’t overrun the serpent people’s layers. The most glaring example is the Hellknight expedition, a party of former adventures who delved deep into the dungeon before dying but left no mark or sign of passage.

There’s a few odd omissions to the product. First, there’s no overland map of the surrounding terrain, a curious oversight as one was created for Thornkeep. There are also no guidelines for expected levels, requiring GMs to eyeball the Challenge Ratings of encounters to decide if their party is ready for a level or needs a couple random encounters first. And while there is some roleplaying and lots of combat there are precious few puzzles or areas that require creative thought or ingenuity. This last criticism is fairly standard of modern adventures in general, but d20/Paizo in particular; skills and the need for codification have reduced problem solving to chucking dice.

Speaking of problems tied to the game system, Pathfinder and 3e have the associated catch of assumed character wealth: magic items are assumed for power level. However, there are only a couple small cities nearby the dungeon, making selling the substantial treasure accrued at higher levels much trickier. There is also no spellcasters nearby able to cast spells like raise dead making death rather permanent in the campaign until the PCs can handle it themselves.

Unlike Adventure Paths, there is no Player’s Guide supporting the product. Modules do not typically need a Player’s Guide but an adventure covering 13 levels of content – likely an entire campaign – needs some suggestions on character creation. Player motivations might be a little problematic for the adventure, as there are fewer overt goals beyond exploring and completing the quests.

The Emerald Spire also feels a little tacked-on to the campaign setting. There are no shortage of established super dungeons that could have been detailed, places people have heavily requested such as the Test of the Starstone, Gallowspire, and other locales. The reason it’s the Spire is because it’s set in the same area as Pathfinder Online (and the exteriour will be featured in the game). Similarly, the revelation of the Vault Builders falls a little flat, as they’re a new monster. Their nature is a revelation, but it is not a twist on an established race.

The Ugly

I praised Paizo’s cross support, but this is very much a mixed blessing.

The use of the Campaign Cards feels a tad forced, with the quests in the book very obviously tied to the cards. The missions are less organic and more, well, like a video game: the PCs pass through a certain area or talk with someone and a just gain a quest. Cards and a quest log can be a useful reminder for goals, both long-term and short – there is a reason video games use them – but some are a little more forced. And there is a LOT of experience tied to the quests in the dungeon, and it often feels like padding.

The Flip-Mats are also a bonus feature with liabilities. With all visible rooms required to fit on the Mats, secret passages are often a little too obvious and visible. Managing the “fog of war” will also be challenging with the entire map potentially visible on the table. GMs will need to develop some strategies for covering and revealing details.

The size of the maps is also problematic, as the entire dungeon has to fit on a single poster. A few layers seem to have been compressed to fit, with entire settlements squished into an area the size of a city block. A few layers have opposing factions, but because of the size each faction is comprised of a half-dozen individuals. It’s a shame more maps couldn’t have described passages and chambers beyond the borders of the map, where conveniently no combat occurs or only non-combative creatures live.

A lesser annoyance is repeated use of the new monsters. As mentioned earlier, the book contains new monsters based on repainted Pathfinder Battles minis. But some dungeon layers use multiples of the same monster, monsters whose minis are going to be particularly difficult to acquire elsewhere. But this is mostly a problem for 4500 people who are receiving the minis.

TL;DR

The Emerald Spire is certainly a cool idea for a product: lots of Name authors collaborating and making a unique product. And lots of people like a good extended dungeon crawl. The Emerald Spire will certainly keep people occupied for a year of twice-monthly delving.

But the product is inconsistent and is very episodic. For a group of players meeting for long sessions of delving, each layer could be a single session. The superdugeon might feel like a long series of Pathfinder Society  dungeons. There’s a little foreshadowing and some suggestions of a larger menace, but for the most part the PCs just kick in the door of a level and fight their way to the next staircase down.

Thankfully, the problems of the adventure are nothing a skilled GM cannot overcome. Knowing that the menace of the “Crowned Skull” needs to be emphasised and reiterated, the provided random encounter table can be used. Signs of former expeditions and passage can also be added, suggesting the Hellknight’s previous delves. The GM can also add as much motivation for their players as required, adding extra quests and problems (although, as these will lack a card, they’ll be a little more obvious).

D&D5 Review: Starter Set

In the middle of July Wizards of the Coast released the first real 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons product to stores: the latest Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set.

Well… second if you include Ghosts of Dragonspear Castsle. Sixth or seventh if you include the other assorted PDF adventures. But this is the first physical product sold in stores.

Please excuse the lateness of this blog, as I’m sure every major review site has already posted a review or two. Maybe three. My FLGS sold out instantly, as did their distributor, so I had to wait for a copy. Slightly annoying, but it’s also kinda exciting to see a D&D product do that well. It even rose pretty high on the amazon bestsellers list; not just of RPGs but all books.

What Is It?

The D&D Starter Set is a boxed set aimed at new players and DMs. It includes dice, five pre-generated characters created using the D&D Basic Rules, a 32-page book with the rules for play, and a 64-page adventure.

I say “new players and DMs” but I think we can be honest and admit that 90% of the people that buy this product will be experienced gamers looking to purchase the first 5th Edition product (or sixth or seventh…). In a few month – maybe years – we’ll see if it’s still seeing a lot of use as an introductory product and how well it does as a gift.

It should be noted that this Starter Set is not the product you give new players, but one you give to new DMs. Which is a solid strategy: new DMs will try and find groups of players, and are the ones willing to invest money. Focusing on more DM content makes it an easier gift, as there’s more usable content.

Price And Quality

The boxed set costs $20. I’ve been critical of past $20 starter sets (the last two sets) for having 64-pages of rules and 32-pages of adventure, which takes characters from level 1 to 2 or 3, providing little more than a long weekend of play.

This set flips the size of the book, doubling the size of the adventure and providing enough play to reach level 5. Playing through four levels should take six or so sessions, meaning this adventure might provide over a month of play. That’s certainly much more valuable and desirable than two or three sessions.

However, $20 is still pretty darn cheap. These days, $20 is more “impulse purchase” territory than “gift”, which will be useful if the boxes can be stocked in box stores like Target or WalMart. Corners were cut, such as only one 10-sided die being included and no fold-out maps, tokens, and such (like the power cards and pogs from the last $20 boxed set). Apparently, the sets have been $20 for a while, with the 3e starter sets also being that price; with inflation, the same product would cost $28. So the value of the D&D Starter Sets has been steadily dropping over the years. At this rate, in ten years the Starter Set will be a box, a d20, and a URL on the back of a flier.

Going up to $30 and providing extra monsters and adventure building content would have been nice. An extra 32 pages of content would have been fantastic.

The Good

The adventure is fairly well designed. There are elements of non-linear exploration in the dungeons, with multiple routes that offer and potential for rewards for clever players, such as ambushing villains before they’re ready. It’s an adventure designed around strategic rather than tactical play. The adventure features large fights, but also has small incidental encounters such as lookouts or guards. There’s a range of combat opportunities. Also, in the middle chapter, the players have the opportunity to choose the order they investigate certain hooks, allowing a choice in encounters.

The adventure provides a lot of advice. It’s a decent adventure for new DMs providing lots of suggestions for how to handle certain situations, and guidance on running NPCs, directing the PCs, and even using a map. It holds the DM’s hand while not overly leading them, and still giving them the freedom to do their own thing if they so choose.

The adventure focuses on the frontier town of Phandalin, near Neverwinter, with a map of the surroundings. So the box provides a starting location that can be used as a launch pad for multiple future adventures. A place to call home. I like adventures that give the PCs a locale to care about and NPCs with whom they can develop friendships and rivalries.

The pregenerated characters are diverse with backgrounds designed to work with the adventure, providing an initial character hook. And instant motivation to become involved in the adventure. The characters have no gender or name, allowing each player to personalize the character. But personality traits are provided, so it’s not an entirely blank slate.

There are a few good NPCs, including Droop the goblin. (What’s a D&D adventure without a potential goblin ally/ comic relief?) The inhabitants of Phandalin are given some description and personality and the are several good opportunities to role-play rather than fight. And most of the big NPCs even have some roleplaying hooks. Although, there’s no sign of the roleplaying encounter rules we saw during the D&D Next playtest, and NPCs lack bonds and flaws.

Much has been said about the art of 5th Edition. It’s not cartoony and WotC has also abandoned the dungeon punk aesthetics of 3e and the exaggerated armour and weapons of 4e. It looks very traditional, with realistic armour and modest weapons. And there are some very different pieces but it mostly looks good. There are a few monsters that are less remarkable. I’m fond of the larger pieces at the start of the various chapters. The pages are also okay, having a slight background that is clean and does not distract from the text. It’s a nice compromise from the busy backgrounds of 3rd Edition and the stark whiteness of 4th Edition.

The Bad

It needs to be said: the lack of characters generation hurts this product. This *should* only be a minor complaints, as the Basic rules are available for people who want to make their own PCs. However, this only works if players know to look for the Basic rules. The existence of these rules are only mentioned twice in the starter set: once at the start of the rules book and again at end of the adventure. But very little attention is drawn to their existence (and the fact they’re free goes unmentioned in the second reference ).

Because of the reliance on pre-gens, a lot of world information is buried in the character sheets, such as classes and races. There’s no description of what a “halfling” is other than with the rogue. I don’t even recall seeing a picture of a halfling in the product.

There are also a few omissions in the rules, such as the spell faerie fire, which is used by a boss monster but not described in the booklette. But this is a minor quibble and an exception. A bigger omission involves the rogue’s background. Each pregen has an origin that drives them towards certain quests, an the rogue wants revenge on the Redbrands, especially the one that betrayed them. Which one was that? The adventure does not say. While none of the pregen adventure hooks are really called out in the adventure (giving the impression they were tacked on after the adventure had been written) this one stands out as an oversight.

Most of the monsters have art, especially some of the odd ones, the ones unique to D&D. The ones lacking art tend to be familiar monsters such as orcs. Most illustrations are in the actual adventure and not the monster section, so finding the illustration requires some flipping. However, the monster art in the adventure tends to be when the monster is encountered so it’s not too problematic.

There’s also some curious design, such as the times where it’s much more rewarding to kill villains than talk. Murder not only nets far more experience, but also awards treasure as well. Defeating an encounter with words or diplomacy should provide just as much experience as stabbing everything. The same goes for sneaking. As a product aimed at new DMs, alternative solutions should have been encouraged.

Speaking of treasure, the adventure provides a lot of permanent magic items very quickly. There are three +1 weapons in the adventure, more than I’ve seen in some 3e adventure. This is odd for an edition with the selling point of magic being less necessary. One particularly odd bit of magic item placement is an axe that provides a bonus against plant monsters that is likely acquired just after fighting waves or plant monsters. This is a little like providing a key on the far side of a locked door. And there are a number of other permanent magic items as well. Every character should have a couple items by the time they reach level 5.

There are also four factions that can be joined in Phandalin: the Harpers, Zhentarim, Lord’s Alliance, and Order of the Gauntlet. Not much is done with these in the adventure, and they seem a little out-of-place, especially with such a small town having so many factions. This likely ties into the Organized Play program. This could have been part of a document sent to participating stores rather than part of the book, freeing up space for more NPCs and flavour

While it’s nice being able to customize the PCs, characters a little too open. Especially given there are minis for each PCs. Giving the PCs names and pictures matching the minis would mean they’re not just faceless PCs but characters. Iconic characters, like those found in the 3rd Edition books, can provide a touchstone for players, a shared experience between tables.

The character sheets are also plain. There are a lot of walls of text, and no references to pages or sections in the rule book. The rules book is also written a lot like a traditional RPG book where you need to read all the pages to learn the rules. While I appreciate that format in Basic D&D (and likely the PHB) it’s not the easiest method for new players to absorb the rules in a Starter Set. The layout and presentation could have taken some cues from board game instruction manuals. There’s a lot of overlap between the rules in the Starter Set and Basic, and no obvious changes between the two products save minor editing for space. The Starter Set will likely work well for someone who gets it, reads it all, and then invites friends over to play. It’s less conducive to just jumping in and learning to play as a group.

The overland map is good and features all the places in the adventure but few other locales. It would have been nice way to seed future plot hooks and locations go to the DM without increasing the page count. Some locales of mystery or lore or potential dungeons and ruins.

The Ugly

The adventure is missing maps for a few places: Old Owl Well, Wyvern Tor, and Agatha’s Lair. This is likely for space reasons. However, there’s no reason maps couldn’t have been provided online. I miss the Web Enhancements of 3rd Edition that offered free expansion content. Similarly, the characters sheets are not readily available online, so you cannot print extras of the PCs (or copies you can write on without damaging the originals). WotC released three as previews, but only on Twitter, which doesn’t make them readily available as a long term resource. Similarly, there are also no blank character sheets (outside of the last few pages in the Basic D&D PDF). While you can photocopy the blank sheet for personal use, few homes have photocopiers compared to the number with black-and-white printers. (But this isn’t that surprising, as the WotC website is still focused on 4th Edition, occasionally still prompting new players to Essentials).

EDIT: Between the writing of this document and the posting, WotC updated their website. Blank character sheets are now available, including form fillable ones. Yay! And it has been reported that high-rez versions of the pregens are available, but I have not found that link yet. And there’s an art gallery, which includes a few images from this book. But not all images and, curiously, the art gallery includes a number of images not from the box. Weird.

All of the monsters are also in the same book as the adventure, at the very end. So some flipping is required. This is not a huge deal and a couple bookmarks (or a Post-It note) make this a non-issue. However, building on the above paragraph, I remember the 3e adventure Red Hand of Doom, which released a web enhancement of all the monsters in the adventure, making that one of the easiest adventures to run of any edition I have GMed. Another potential Web Enhancement we’ll likely never see.

The adventure features repeated ambushes, with a couple from deadly monsters. Including a bugbear! This could lead to TPKs. Or, at the very least, a dead PC. This can be a little distressing to a new player, putting them off the game. The very first encounter in the adventure is a surprise attack from goblins. Played smart and using their ability to hide, the goblins can tear apart a party.

This isn’t mentioning the dragon, which isn’t well telegraphed and just sorta appears in the middle (excluding the fighter background). I can imagine a few PCs stumbling into the dragon’s lair and picking a fight they cannot win.

While the presentation of the adventure is excellent, the adventure itself is overly reliant on dungeon crawls. There are five “dungeons” that feature wandering from room to room killing monsters, and quite a few filler encounters with monsters whose place in the ecology of the adventure are questionable at best. For a product designed to show new DMs how to run the game, there could have been much more diverse encounter areas, such as some wilderness exploration, natural hazards, and the like. To say nothing of puzzles and riddles and creative traps. The dungeons also feature few imaginative encounter areas or locations; there’s a lot of featureless rooms filled with monsters. It’s all very mundane with none of the fantastic locales of old school adventures.

While the presented NPCs are nice there’s no real other NPCs who exist merely for flavour or future stories. Phandalin exists for this adventure and DMs have to do much of the work of bringing the town to life themselves.

The art deserves a second mention. The artwork in the book features two generic backgrounds, ripped parchment and an ink wash. All the pictures have both. It works best as a framing for larger pieces, separating half-page illustrations from text. But for portraits, such as monsters, this is very busy and distracting. Having both feels unneeded. Alternating between the two would have been prefered. At the same time, a lot of pages feel identical; there is very obviously a left page and right page and many look identical on casual flipping. This is not normally a huge problem, but having just spent some time reading Shadows of Esteren, crammed with not only art but unique flourishes, my bar for good looking RPG books was raised making the D&D books less impressive. I keep thinking a background ink smudge, or burn, or blood splatter would differentiate a page nicely without taking away from the word count.

The Awesome

5th Edition demonstrates some incredibly easy monster modification, putting even 4th Edition to shame. Rather than rewrite an entire monster, a few named beasties just have more hp or an extra power. It’s very space efficient. And it’s a fun way of adding more monsters to the game without having too many options or overly specific monsters.

Similarly, there’s some fun treasure. Several of the magic items look unique, have names, and/or possess special little abilities or quirks. It’s long been said that +1 swords shouldn’t *just* be +1 swords, but 5e is the first edition to really demonstrate that.

The adventure ends with a minor mystery, a plot hook for future stories. That’s pretty cool, providing DMs with an easy starting point for a follow up campaign.

At one point the adventure describes what will happen if the PCs try to bluff their way through an encounter and the book says to have the players roll a Deception check *if* their roleplaying is not convincing. This is a lovely little statement as it essentially says solid roleplaying negates the need for a check. It’s nicely done and skirts the “diplomacy issue” where the success on the DC trumps roleplaying, or the charming character failing because the player is clumsy with their words.

Comparing Starter Products

Previous D&D Starter Sets could only really be compared with one thing: other D&D Starter Sets. Now there are many other boxed sets available, such as the Star Wars starter sets, the DragonAge RPG boxes, and most important the Pathfinder Beginner Box.

It’s not entirely fair to compare the Beginner Box to the D&D Starter Set. The latter retails for $35 (formerly more IIRC) and has a Flip-Mat, character tokens, a full set of dice, and almost twice the pages. So quality and quantity of product cannot readily be compared. For example, while the Beginner Box is able to include character generation, it has 64 more pages to work with.

The design of the common elements can be compared. The Starter Set is very much an adventure with rules cut-and-pasted from the Basic Rulebook. There’s no attempt at graphical formatting or arranging information for ease of use or consumption. In contrast, the Pathfinder box barely looks like a Pathfinder product, having very different formatting and layout. The character sheets cross reference sections of the rules and extra effort is made to make everything in the game simpler and more transparent. It is not just another product that just happens to be aimed at new players, but a product that was redesigned from the ground up to be accessible to brand new players. The Starter Set feels very much like any other D&D product except for the extra advice buried deep in the paragraphs of the adventures.

The 5e Starter Set is an improvement on past Starter Sets, and arguably one of the better Starter Sets that WotC has done. But it doesn’t change how people think about Starter Sets, and it doesn’t even try to do anything new or revolutionary.

Final Thoughts

The 5th a Edition Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set does not try and raise the bar for a newbie product. It settles into the comfortable niche established by many other WotC starter products of the past. It is not exceptional but neither is it terrible. It’s better than other recent sets but doesn’t offer anything new. It’s paint-by-numbers. Firmly average.

But… at the end of the day, a Starter Set lives and dies by how successful the adventure is in play and how easy it is to learn. And there are many, many reports of fun play sessions and first time players having a great time playing the set. It’s fun. That’s all you really need to know, and everything else is either a perk or nitpicking.

D&D5 Review: Player’s Handbook

Two-and-a-half years after it was first teased, the 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook has been released. The book hits Wizards Play Network (WPN) stores on August 8th and everywhere on the 19th.

I really love the design of this system. I am very excited by the new edition. But this review is about the book and not the edition as a whole.

What Is It?

The Player’s Handbook full colour hardcover book 316-pages (plus) in length and retails for around $50.

The book includes everything you need to play in a D&D5 game and more. It is the big book for players; it’s full of races, classes, spells, and all the rules to play. It does not include the rules needed to run a game, such as building encounter or awarding treasure, which will be included in the forthcoming Dungeon Master’s Guide (and/or updated D&D Basic rules document).

The PHB includes nine races (dwarf, elf, halfling, human, dragonborn, gnome, half-elf, half-orc, and tiefling) and twelve classes (barbarian, bard, cleric, druid, fighter, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, sorcerer, warlock, wizard).

The Good

There’s a lot of flexibility offered in the PHB. There’s a wide variety of different functional (albeit likely not optimized) character builds. Subclasses, subraces, backgrounds, and weapon choices provide enough options to easily design a variety of different player characters. I would even say more than any other PHB, even with far fewer feats. I think the 5e book comes with the most potential characters right out of the gate.

The options provided seem fairly balanced. However, things are not so balanced that the edition sacrifices sacred cows on the altar of equality. I like balance but there are literally hundreds of game systems I can play with balanced rules, but only one that’s D&D. (Well… maybe two.)

The playtesting evidently worked.

I’ve seen a few arguments of wizard versus fighter – the same argument that has been around for years – and there’s a lot that can be said about the damage potential of the 5e fighter and their usefulness at high levels. Roughly even numbers of people are arguing for each class, which is generally a good sign the balance is right where it should be.

Classes are also nicely diverse. The game has continued the move away from the forced symmetry of 4th Edition that began with Essentials. Classes look much more like they looked in 3rd Edition. Or even earlier, as you could make an argument that the classes are very 2e in design with a modern flair like avoiding dead levels. There’s few choices in each class beyond subclass; leveling your character is very simple if you wish.

The multiclassing rules are also good, being an improvement on the 3e system. Most importantly it allows easy stacking of spellcasting classes. As a character’s proficiency bonus is based on their character level and not their class levels it seems odd to include proficiency in the class charts.

The book is beautiful. I was a little worried after the Starter Set, but the PHB is clearly the superior product. The double framing of torn pages and ink washes is less obvious, and there are several full page pieces of art. There are two-page art spreads, little insert pieces, half page pictures, and more: every other page seems to have some flair. And it’s not all the same; there’s even a handful of pieces that remind me of the line art of 1st Edition D&D. These pieces are mostly limited to the conditions appendix and the introduction, which keeps it from breaking the tone of the rest of the book. However, I adore the gnome illustration with the diagram of spell effect shapes. It’s a must-see.

One thing that surprised me was the size of the combat chapter. At only 10 pages it’s possibly the smallest chapter on combat from any edition. This is a svelte game.

The Bad

The obvious complaint regarding the PHB is that it’s Basic D&D with more options: more classes, more races, more subclasses and multiclassing. There’s none of the promised modularity that was meant to be a defining features of 5e. There are no extra variants rules beyond multiclassing and feats. There’s nothing that might unite the various camps of gamers or fans of particular editions.

The book doesn’t feel like “Advanced D&D” so much as “Expanded D&D”.

While there’s slightly more options than 4e and even 3e, there are still a lot of missing builds. Several classes have only two builds, and there are very obvious omissions such as a bard focused on enchantments, a druid with an animal companion (despite all the druid art featuring animals), or a two-weapon barbarian. Normally this wouldn’t be much of an issue as the next available splatbook would provide additional options, but it does not sound like WotC plans to do many accessories this edition. Even the online magazines have gone. But, as said above, the PHB does have a solid number of option, so this is just me whining.

The book does not reference other pages, simply other chapters. This makes cross referencing rules awkward and involves extra flipping. Making this even more difficult, the bottom of the pages only has “Part” but not the chapter number, so finding individual chapters is a pain. One particularly annoying example is spellcasting focus; every spellcasting class can have a focus, and the description directs you to “Chapter 5″, the equipment chapter. But that just directs you to the spellcasting chapter.

I’m not a huge fan of how they handled the bard. The bard has always been described as a magical dabbler but this edition makes it a full caster. It’s no longer a dabbler but a master of the arcane arts on par with the wizard. It’s additional spells come at the cost of more class features unique to the bard. The counter to this argument was that the bard would get bare-only spells instead, but it only gets a few unique spells and these are limited to low levels.

The fighter subclasses are awkward. There are three: champion, battle master, and eldritch knight. The champion and battle master are entirely defined by mechanical differences, the former being the simple fighter while the latter having special maneuvers. There is no real flavour variance. This will make it harder to add new fighter subclasses that aren’t just variations on the two. If they ever opt to make, say, a cavalier subclass it will be a variation on the two.

The book ends in a three page character sheet. Normally this would be a good thing, to have usable character sheets that can be photocopied for use. But, realistically speaking, who has a photocopier anymore? If one has a photocopier it likely doubles as a printer (and/or scanner). A character sheet pulled from online will look clearer than one copied from the back of a thick book (and be gentler on the book). The character sheet is three pages that could have been used elsewhere.

The Ugly

The cover is unimpressive. The focus seems to be on the giant and not the adventurers fighting it. While King Snurre is a somewhat famous villain in D&D lore I’m uncertain he warrants a place on the PHB cover. The cover to the Starter Set was amazing, but this one is lackluster. Additionally, while the front cover is glossy, only half the back is glossy and the other half matte. This feels weird when handling the book.

The race section mentions the existence of several other subraces, such as the duergar, svirfneblin, and most interestingly the draconians. It even suggests how the draconians will be handled: swapping out the dragonborn breath weapon. This is cool but a colossal tease for content we might never see as WotC has doubled down on the Forgotten Realms.

While I like most of the backgrounds, folk hero rubs me the wrong way. Folk hero replaces “commoner” being the Everyman background but ties the background around an event where the PC did a heroic thing that was apparently more defining and life altering than their entire childhood and adult life. Because farmers and ranchers apparently need more justification for being an adventure than a librarian, altar boy, or hermit. Folk hero feels more like a variant of the much more iconic “farm boy” background.

A curious omission is the lack of monster summoning spells. WTF?! I loved my conjurer specialist in 3e, focusing on summoned monsters. He was a noble first and wizard second, so this edition would be perfect for him. Except the absence of his signature spell(s).

Much of the art feels heavily cropped, like the art director turned full-page pictures of art into half-page pieces. Sometimes it works, but there’s a lot of weird pictures and half-visible scenes where things seem to be happening off camera.

Something also needs to be said about the price. $49.95 USD feels steep compared to comparably sized books or previous editions adjusted for inflation. We’re likely paying a premium as the rules (i.e. Basic) are free. What I paid is different; while the WotC website says the PHB is $57 CAD the book itself says $58. It should be noted that at the current exchange rate puts $50 USD at $54.80 CAD. The CAD is at a low point now, but the dollar hasn’t been so bad as to warrant $57-8 price in over half a decade, and the dollars flirted with parity multiple times during that period. Oh, and since I opted to buy from my FLGS (because I wanted to support them, the sucker that I am) I paid the full price rather than the $29 Amazon was charging. That isn’t a typo: Amazon is literally charging half price.

The Awesome

There is an index. The Index. Capitals are required. Four pages, five columns per page, and something like a 4 point font. I love it. Game books live and die based on their index, and this one looks great.

The end of the book has a comprehensive list of gods for the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Eberron, and Mythology. There isn’t any descriptions of the gods and their ethos, just a list of alignments and domains. But it works nicely for quickly updating campaign settings. I am saddened Ravenloft didn’t warrant a mention.

I also like the return of the Great Wheel, but with the inclusion of the Feywild, Shadowfell, and Elemental Chaos. It works nicely. I really liked the Feywild.

An easily missed detail is that each class has received a little logo. It’s neat. I imagine this is for branding accessories and the like, but I dig neat little details like that. I expect of T-shirts and other merch with the logos. I’m totally willing to get a bard shirt.

At the back of the PHB is a small assortment of monsters, for familiars, druid wild shaping, and ranger pets. This is handy, so players don’t need to consult the Monster Manual for class features. Everything you need really is in the PHB.

I love the sorcerer’s wild surge chart. That brings me back to 2nd Edition. It’s so wacky and fun. I was happy  when the 4e sorcerer incorporated the wild mage, as they’re such a good fit.

The equipment section has two pages devoted to a table of 100 trinkets. Fun little items to flavour a character. I love it.

One of the monk’s subclasses melds the ninja and shadowdancer. It’s a good idea as they share the same Eastern flavour. D&D has always struggled with what to do with the ninja.

Final Thoughts

After all the playtests and the Basic document there are few surprises in the book. We’ve seen most of the content and a lot of the rules. There’s just more content.

The PHB is almost a splatbook for D&D Basic.

This makes the value of the PHB problematic. There is a lot of content, but you can play for years with just Basic D&D. All the customization and rules modules look to be coming later in the DMG. If none of the classes and races interest you, there’s very little else this book has to offer. But, really, if you’re even thinking about buying the PHB you likely want the included options.

While there are some gaps and absences, I imagine there will be a flood of fan content in the next few weeks. There are already a few backgrounds out there, including my tongue-in-cheek harlot background.

I would recommend buying some stick-on tabs for the chapters. Those are a must for navigating the book.

That’s it for the Player’s Handbook. I’ll have to do a review of Basic D&D looking at the nuances of the rule system itself, likely after I see more monsters and, hopefully, take the game out for a longer spin.

PF Review: Advanced Class Guide

At GenCon 2014 Paizo Incorporated (formerly Paizo Publishing) released their latest hardcover release for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: the Advanced Class Guide.

Like their last few GenCon releases, the ACG features a public playtest of the content prior to release, and I reviewed those options briefly in an earlier blog.

What Is It?

The 14th (or is it the 15th?) setting neutral hardcover release for Pathfinder RPG, the Advanced Class Guide is a 253-page full colour hardcover rulebook. It features 71-pages of new classes, 59-pages of new archetypes, 23-pages of new feats, 37-pages of spells, 35-pages of magic items, and a 10-page section of making classes.

There are ten new classes in the book: arcanist, bloodrager, brawler, hunter, investigator, shaman, skald, slayer, swashbuckler, and warpriest. All are hybrids of existing classes, merging two options that are not well supported through traditional multiclassing.

The Good

The book has a solid “hook” and it maintains this. Paizo is good for this; rules bloat becomes a problem when you cannot identify what book content is found inside. If you’re building a melee character Ultimate Combat is your source, if looking for spellcasters Ultimate Magic should be your first stop, and if mixing the identify of two classes then the Advanced Class Guide is the place to look. Each of the 10 new base classes mix two existing classes, and most of the archetypes also blend together classes. It’s not just new generic options for the old classes, but options that take advantage of the new mechanics or add a dash of another class.

The classes also seem fairly well balanced. There are a few that push the envelope, such as the bloodrager that seems a little better at first level than the straight barbarian. There are some good level dips, a few strong archetypes, and several good feats. But Paizo is doing their best to manage power creep; there doesn’t seem to be a repeat of the summoner.

The art is good, and there are some great pieces in the feat and spells sections. The production values are Paizo’s standard high quality. And the new iconic characters are drawn by Wayne Reynolds, so the new ones match the existing iconics. And, as always, there’s a nice mix of genders, races, and ethnicities among the iconics. If you read the blog, the dwarf shaman is even trans, but you’d never know that from looking at the book as the backgrounds are not included.

The advice on creating classes is solid. Unlike the race creation rules from Advanced Race Guide these are more general guidelines, like the spell creation advice from Ultimate Magic. It walks you through the steps of how to think of a new class, and discusses related options such as prestige classes and archetypes.

I like a few of the new classes. This gets a little personal, as there are some classes I really dislike as well that other people are really excited for. So it’s hard to go through the class list and say definitively “class X is good” while “class Y is bad”. But that’s not going to stop me.

Personally, I love the idea of the investigator and the move away from sneak attack works nicely. The non-combat rogue is a character concept I enjoy, as is the urban detective. I like my mystery adventures, so an investigator fits the kind of games I like to run. And the class is something that’s trickier to do with the established classes, being less combative and more skill based.

The brawler is simple and fun. I like the monk, but it doesn’t fit a lot of campaigns and worlds. The eastern mysticism doesn’t always translate. The brawler fixes that, and is arguably more effective than the monk. It could have been an alternate class of the monk though, but it includes some improvements we’ll likely see for the monk in Pathfinder Unchained early 2015 (like full Base Attack bonus and d10 hit dice).

And a swashbuckler class was also needed. Well… not “needed” per se, but past attempts at a finesse class were not great, so bad rules left room for this class to exist. I’m playing one in Pathfinder Society (originally to playtest) an am enjoying the class.

A small note should be made of a layout tweak for the spells section. Portraits of the relevant characters are included along with the class’ name. It’s minor but a neat way of making the spells section stand out.

The Bad

When I first heard Paizo was doing a book of hybrids I predicted a few classes, with one being the arcane trickster. A rogue/sorcerer or rogue/wizard that mixes sleight of hand with spellcraft. It’s been seen as a beguiler and spell thief in 3rd Edition D&D and the arcane trickster Prestige Class of 3e and PF. And while they mix the rogue with the alchemist and ranger we don’t get a magical rogue. Sad. It’s such a classic archetype, going back to the Grey Mouser and other trickster figures with magical powers. It’s certainly more iconic than a lot of the other classes that did make it into the book.

The vast majority of the book is just more class options for a game that already has five hardcover books full of class options. The one exception is the chapter on class creation, and while that’s good it’s a pretty short section. The section on designing spells in Ultimate Magic was twelve pages, and that covered a far smaller subject. There’s almost as many pages dedicated to mundane & alchemical equipment. They could have easily expanded the section with much more advice. Or created a class as an example, perhaps showing how they made a class and an archetype from the book to demonstrate the advice and balance concerns.

While the art of the book is not bad, it doesn’t compare well to more recent RPGs. Most of the art in the book is just figures posing or doing slight actions. There’s only images of the iconics in the class section, and with the size of some of the entries this means a lot of pages that are just walls of text. And the archetypes section is similar, only with less iconic figures. There’s some real generic pictures among the archetypes, and many that don’t really seem to fit any of the archetypes presented. And there’s a very obvious piece of recycled art, pulled from the cover of the Alchemy Manual; it’s a lovely piece, but doesn’t feature any of the new characters and feels really out of place.
The book doesn’t even have the bold borders or extra style of the Inner Sea World Guide and just looks rather plain. Some other recent Pathfinder books have been adding extra tabs at the edge of pages. When 60+ pages is devoted to a single chapter, some tabs identifying the current class on each page would not only make flipping easier but add a visual break to the page.

The Ugly

So many of the classes in this book just feel unnecessary. The skald is very much a bard with an alternate form of bardic music, the arcanist is just a wizard with an alternate form of spellcasting, and they really had to struggle to make the warpriest to be more than a fighter/cleric, tacking on some class features. I’m really not a fan of class design determined by the mechanics and not the store/lore.

For example, in addition to its alternate spellcasting, the arcanist also gets a pool of arcane points. But, a wizard archetype also gains access to those so the only difference is their spellcasting. It would have taken far less space to have just provided rules for the pseudo-Vancian casting and allowed spellcasters to pick which version they liked, which would also have allowed it to be used by clerics and druids. I expect we’ll see an oracle version of the arcanist soon enough…
The shaman especially seems like a mess. It’s a combination of the oracle and witch, but gets mostly druidic spells and is a prepared caster that uses Wisdom. It’s connection to the oracle is that their spirits share names with oracle mysteries, the most tenuous of connections that could have been removed by a renaming. The shaman also gets hexes like the witch, which is a little more connected as it shares actual mechanics. The class doesn’t really commune with spirits outside of the flavour of its “gain generic supernatural powers” features, lacking mechanics that allow it to act as a bridge between the mortal and spirit world. A shaman, a class with a strong connection to spirits, is an archetype the game did not incorporate well, but this shaman seems awkward due to its forced connection to two other classes. It might have been a much better fit in Occult Adventures where it didn’t need to have an arbitrary connection to two other classes.

All this makes the book feel a little like distilled rules bloat. I wonder if the intent of this book was very different and it just shifted over time. With 5th Edition looming, I imagine Paizo wanted to embrace the complexity of their system and provide a crunchier experience, and this was their answer.

I wonder if 10 classes was just too many, and if they should have just set their sights lower. The APG did well with just 6 new classes.

The Awesome

The slayer includes a new fighting style that can be used by rangers: thrown weapons. It’s a neat little addition I know some ranger fans have been wanting.

Speaking of throwing, the brawler has an archetype that allows it to throw its shield. Because of a technicality, brawlers get access to the shield as a weapon (they’re proficient with close weapons) and this was the logical extension. I love it, and it might be my next PFS character.

There’s a hunter archetype, the feral hunter, who turns into animals and gets wildshape. Pathfinder has been lacking in shapeshifter builds, so this is a nice addition.

The inquisitor gets some really fun archetypes as well, such as the mastermind, sleuth (think noir gumshoe) and even a spiritualist filling the role of the John Silence occult detective.

There’s a few classes and archetypes that might make for better villains than PCs. A strength of the 3e/PF system is that books like these are as much for GMs as for players, which is so often forgotten. But we have the aforementioned mastermind archetype and options like the cultist for the warpriest or cleaner for slayers (think “the Wolf” from Pulp Fiction).

Final Thoughts

If I was going to add a big new book of new classes and options to my PF game, I’d rather add Occult Adventures, the book announced for GenCon 2015. Counting alternate classes, there’s already 22 classes in the game, and 10 new classes is a LOT. The Advanced Class Guide just feels like filler. It’s just a big book of more: more classes, more feats, more archetypes, more spells. That’s fine for your second or third player-focused release in a campaign line – it worked well for Advanced Player’s Guide – but it’s less essential as the seventh release.

The ACG lacks the solid story hook of Mythic Adventures or the planned Occult Adventures and the big unique subsystem of Advanced Race Guide. Which is disappointing for Paizo, as so many of their past books have been focused around providing options necessary for Adventure Paths. Ultimate Combat was released so they could do the Jade Regent AP and Mythic Adventures was released to accommodate Wrath of the Righteous. Nothing in the ACG seems necessary for Iron Gods or Giantslayer. There are no stories that can now be told with the shaman or bloodrager that could not have been told before.

But… I’m sure there are a lot of players who just want more options. Despite my cynicism for the class, a player in my group is thinking of an arcanist for our next campaign; he was never fully happy with the spellcasting for sorcerers and wizards. So for anyone who thinks that two-dozen classes just is not enough, this book is for you. Most of the time, the ACG does what it sets out to do, which is faint praise but praise none the less.

PF Review: Advanced Bestiary

The Advanced Bestiary is a 3rd Party Product for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game product published by Green Ronin Publishing. Green Ronin is getting back to its 3PP roots after focusing on licensed products (2PP) such as DragonAge or the DC Comics flavour of their Mutants & Masterminds d20 hack.

Given it’s a Pathfinder product, I wonder if Green Ronin should have instead called it the Advanced Bestiary Guide or Ultimate Bestiary.

What Is It?

The Advanced Bestiary is a 311-page hardcover book that focuses on templates rather than monsters. It features 119 different templates ranging in CR adjustment from -1 to +6. Each template includes a sample monster, but there’s some variation allowing for 150 monsters ranging in CR from 1/3 to 29. There are also 5 feats, 6 spells, and some alchemist discoveries.

Some Backstory

The Advanced Bestiary was first published for 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, back in 2005, when it won the Silver ENnie for Best Monster or Adversary Product. It was released late in the life span of 3.5e when 3rd Party Products were legion and it was hard to get noticed, let alone make a profit. Many game companies were moving away from 3PP, branching off into their own IP. The Advanced Bestiary was very popular, and remains a frequently referenced book by Paizo, who regularly uses it for their Adventure Paths – Paizo even updated a few choice templates for Bestiary 4. However, due to shenanigans, the profits for the book’s sales vanished and the product ended up costing Green Ronin a fortune, and almost killing the company. But it remained popular.

To judge how popular, in late 2013 Green Ronin launched a Kickstarter for a Pathfinder update. They made more than 200% of their goal, which allowed the book to be published in full colour. Delivery was estimated for this July but, of course, was delayed. But, two-to-three months delayed is not that bad for a Kickstarter project.

For backers, Green Ronin sent out a pre-release PDF in August while some last minute layouting was done (and likely letting the backers do some unofficial editing, hunting for typos and errors as only a few hundred fans can. A practice I fully support as it means the final print product is better). The final print-ready PDF was sent out in early September, and this review is based on that version.

The Good

There’s a lot of content in this book. At 300-pages and change this shouldn’t be a surprise, but there’s still a lot of monsters and templates. Even if you don’t plan on using a templated beast this book is a decent purchase, having so many monsters. Many of the templates even include variates based on the subtype of monster; a good example is the jotunblood giant that include not only the base Bestiary 1 giants but all the giants from later bestiaries as well. There’s a good variety of complexity to the templates in the book, ranging from “phew simple” to “OMFG complex”. For example, there’s a single template that clocks in at just over four pages, not including the sample beastie.

To make things easy, the book even contains Pathfinder’s Universal Monster Rules at the back, along with a very details section on monster stat blocks and applying templates. And it offers some sound advice for checking the final product against the expected numbers in the Bestiary.

There’s some fun monster choices as well, although a few monsters get a lot of love. There are two or three purple worms in the book. But the Advanced Bestiary also makes use Frog God Game’s Tome of Horrors Complete referencing that book several times.

The book doesn’t just have example monsters for the templates but adds an extra bit of details. Some are presented as variants, but many are presented as unique creatures with a backstory and most of the humanoids are presented as individuals. They’re not monsters, they’re NPCs.

To make finding content you want easier, the book contains a list of all the templates by CR and all the example monsters by CR. The sample monsters are not just listed by name, as their race and type are also included so finding the hobgoblin(s) in the books is not too difficult. And there’s also a fairly decent index that not only contains the templates and sample monsters but the universal monster abilities.

The book itself looks good. The art ranges from good to excellent. The monster illustrations are the equal of many official pictures. It’s arguably better than Paizo’s early efforts, as it lacks the stinkers of the Bestiary 1.

The layout of the book is clean and simple; it reminds me of the layout of the aforementioned Tome of Horrors Complete with templates separated with a wide banner with their name (only in colour rather than B+W). The pages have some background flourishes, but these are minor. The monster statblocks are fully shaded and pop from the page, with little details like the drop shadow making them stand out and catch the eye.

The book includes various plane-touched and environmental templates, such as cold creature for adventures in arctic locales or a plane of ice. This makes it easy to slip favourite monsters into different terrains or planes, and enables you have longer adventures in planar locations. Or just make a nigh unslayable fire troll to roll over your party.

I’m fond of the dread undead templates. While a few undead are template monsters (skeletons, vampires, zombies) many are just static creatures. A level 1 human commoner and level 15 elf barbarian killed by a ghast will both become identical ghouls. The dread templates allow the latter to become a much scarier foe. And you can really be a dick to your players by warning them of a “wight dragon” and not specifying the spelling.

The Bad

The original Advanced Bestiary came out late in the lifespan of 3.X, when there were three Monster Manuals on the market and numerous 3rd Party monster books. This revised Advanced Bestiary is similarly late in the life span of Pathfinder. While there are fewer 3rd Party monster books there are more official monster products, so there’s no shortage of monsters. As such, the usefulness of the product will vary from person to person. If you have the four Bestiaries, the NPC Codex, the Inner Sea Bestiary, the Monster Codex, and the Tome of Horrors Complete then you might not need the Advanced Bestiary unless you’re really planning on running three or four more Pathfinder campaigns.

(Green Ronin deciding to start supporting Pathfinder at this time is a curious move. I wonder if it’s more a statement to Wizards of the Coast, picking a side in the PF vs 5e Edition War. Likely not, but it’s an interesting idea.)

With many of the templates being focused on adapting monsters for specific planes there’s a lot of grid filler templates. Just as there are so many demi-elemental and para-elemental planes that exist for symmetry, there are a lot of extra monsters. Like the scalding creature template for steam. I’m not sure how many people were crying out for steam monsters. I wonder if just applying aquatic and fire templates to the same creature could have served the same purpose.

There are also some weird templates. Thonefused is the strangest to my eyes. I’m not sure where the concept of a half-LaZBoy came from. And there are some less interesting templates like nocturnal. The activity cycle of animals is seldom important enough to template a monster to make it active at night. And the bipedal and manimal templates have narrative overlap.

The Ugly

There are something like four different “plant monster” templates (bramble, moss lich, plantblood, swamplord plus the green warden). 5% of the book is focused on making creatures into plants or making plants better.

The white background of the pages are rather stark. The lack of a background and the bright primary colours of the headers and stat blocks make this odd for a PF product. The book doesn’t try and “match” the Pathfinder aesthetic. While direct copying would be bad (a violation of Paizo’s Trade Dress), the book could try to feel similar. For example, Dreamscarred Press’ Ultimate Psionic copies the feel while still being its own product.

As a final nitpick, the templates often overlap, beginning in the middle of a page. Entries run together. Templates seldom occupy a concise spread of pages and the last third of a statblock is often found on a separate page. It’s a little bit mess. Gaming books tried to move away from that late in the 3e era, and Paizo follow’s WotC by having monsters or templates fill an entire page. But I know that trying to limit entries to full pages would inevitably mean less content and likely fewer templates in the entire book rather than more pages and room to breathe (or expanded backstories).

The Awesome

Reiterating an earlier point, there are some lovely pieces of art. I’m particularly fond of the Mist creature (and not just because I’m a Ravenloft fan).

I’d also like to draw attention to the licence page. Holy cow that is impressive. Five columns of teeny tiny font. If you don’t have Tome of Horrors this book will contain a lot of new monsters.

There are a few templates I found particularly nifty for various reasons. While I question the need for four plant monsters, the id moss is essentially the Vertigo comic character Swamp Thing, which is pretty neat. The Transforming Construct template lets you do just that. I totally want to make an iron golem that turns into a metal coach. The swarmblood template is a little different than the other “-blood” templates, which imply an unusual heritage, instead allowing a creature to literally have swarms for blood! It bleeds fire ants! Although, sadly, it’s only usable on living creatures, so no mummy that ooze scarab beetles when hit. (Unless you’re willing to bend the rules. Which I totally am. Swarm mummies away!!) There’s also dream creatures, fulfilling the “dream plane” checkbox. But it’s nice to see the Plane of Dreams get a little love. Editions seldom last long enough for Nightmare Realms to see a book (the planes of Dreams and shadows are personal favorites, and the former is just less “cool” so it doesn’t see a lot of support).

Final Thoughts

If you’re excited about D&D 5th Edition and planning on shelving your Pathfinder books alongside your 2nd Edition and Vampire: the Masquerade books then the Advanced Bestiary is not for you. Even from a fluff perspective (and there is some) there’s not much to hold your interest.

If you’re a big Pathfinder fan and rely on Pathfinder Society and/or the Adventure Paths then this books is also not for you. You’re just not going to be making enough of your own monsters.

But if you’re still committed to Pathfinder and running adventures of your own design then the Advanced Bestiary is a pretty darn good book. Even with the official monster books, having extra templates allows you to easily customize creatures without heavy use of class levels and lets you to surprise your players with old favourites while giving familiar opponents new tricks. And if your players have memorized the Bestiary or have apps allowing them to sneak a look at the stats, this book will really allow you to pull the rug out from under them.

D&D 5 Review: Monster Manual

September is the Month of Monsters, as Wizards of the Coast releases the third product for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons: the terrifying Monster Manual. It’s hyped as “A menagerie of deadly monsters for the world’s greatest roleplaying game” and certainly qualifies as such. It’s a heck of a lot of monsters.

What Is It

A 352-page hardcover release, the Monster Manual features close to 425 monsters ranging in Challenge Rating from 0 to 30. The vast majority of the monsters are below CR 10, with only 30-odd being above CR 15. Unsurprisingly, the book is full colour with illustrations on almost every page and good production values with thick, glossy pages and a sturdy cover.

The Good

It’s a magnificent book. There’s so much art and so much flavour. It’s a joy just to flip through, an excellent read crammed with adventure ideas. As a world builder, I kept reading monster entries and coming up with new ideas of how to integrate monsters into my settings, and feeling inspired to do some worldbuilding. I’m still fighting the urge to dust off my ol’ 4e world and give it a revision.

With so many pieces of art there are some so-so ones, but even the worst picture is decent. With over a hundred pictures needed, Monster Manuals are expensive, so there are normally there are a few stinkers: cheaply bought pieces or ones that couldn’t be replaced in time. But even these are not too egregious. And I only spotted a couple recycled pieces of art. (I came down hard on reusing art during 4e, but I’ve since relaxed as I’ve realized how expensive art can be. It’s hard to avoid.)

The book most resembles the Monster Vault from late 4th Edition, with each monster being accompanied by a sizable amount of fluff, divided by boldface subheadings. These sound bite headings are a little like aspects from Fate: small evocative phrases designed to encapsulate a concept of the creature, but followed by a lengthier description. The cloud giant has the descriptors “High and Mighty”, “Affluent Princes”, “Children of the Trickster”, and “Wealth and Power”, which emphasize what makes the cloud giant interesting and different from other giants. Monsters receive an average of half-a-page of description. Many monster receive a full page of flavour and descriptions, and several large categories of monster (demons, devils, and dragons) receive multiple pages of description.

This puts the text-per-monster above the 1st and 3rd Editon Monster Manuals (and far beyond the 4e MM), and close to the 2e Monster books. However, as all the (non-spell) abilities of a monster are contained in the stat block, the monsters arguably contain *more* flavour than their 2nd Edition counterparts, who often had lengthy descriptors of combat effects and abilities buried in their text.

There’s a wide variety of monsters in the book and a solid mix of D&D’s intellectual property (mind flayers & beholders) and mythological creatures (manticores & chimeras). A reliance on the IP was a failing of recent monster books, so I’m happy to see diversity. Creatures from mythology are more widely known and instantly recognizable, opposed to the weirder D&D critters. There are even a few old favourites in the book, including myconids, flumphs, quaggoth, magmin, and the return of piercers (along with their replacements, the darkmantles. That’s right, there are both!).

I like the design of 5e monsters. They’re simple creatures for quick fights without a lot of moving parts or rules to learn. 3e and 4e monsters could be daunting at times, especially at high levels. I like the non-symmetry of monsters, with some having high hitpoints and low AC while others being nigh-unhittable glass cannons. They’re not the same stat block again and again with different powers. Because the guidelines for what determines a monster’s challenge are broader than just hitpoints and because the math is flatter, there’s much more diversity to monster.

I also quite like Legendary monsters. These replace solo monsters as creatures designed to seriously threaten an entire party – the archetypal boss monsters – but with more flavour than just being mechanically designed to fight an entire party. Legendary monsters get to act multiple times each round, fixing the one vs. four action economy and *most* can shrug off status effects, but they also gain extra actions in their Lair and influence the terrain surrounding their home. It’s a neat effect that reminds me of Sinkholes of Evil and reality wrinkles from 2e Ravenloft or the corruption of the land of Dragonlance‘s draconic overlords.

The Monster Manual also has a lot of Easter Eggs and references. There are frequent callbacks to classic modules, locations, items, campaign settings, and even NPCs. And Wizard of Oz. It’s winking without seeming too much like an in-joke or self-referential; it’s done in such a way that I f you don’t get the reference, you don’t feel excluded. (“Bree-Yark” being a possible exception.)

The book also brings back templates as a method of tweaking monsters, although these are much simpler than in 3e. Included templates are the dracolich, shadow dragon (nice!), half-dragon, and myconid spore servant.

The Bad

The majority of creatures in the book are low CR. A high majority. Something like 50% of the book is CR 5 or lower, and 80% below CR 10. Considering classes don’t even come into their own until level 3 or 4 (and a lot of games will be starting at those levels) there’s a lot of monsters that will be non-threatening on their own. Even classically tougher foes, such as the chimera, medusa, or manticore are lower CR. Most monsters seem to have dropped down a CR or two. It feels like this is a Monster Manual for only part of the game and not an entire campaign from 1 to 20.

That said, with bounded accuracy, monsters are usable across more levels, so the low CR critters can still pose a challenge at higher levels. And the base difficulty of monsters seems higher. An even fight (four PCs vs. one creature with a CR equal to their level) is much more challenging than in the past two editions. And most campaigns do not make it past level 10, so focusing the majority of monsters on the low level band makes sense. An uneven spread of monsters is common to most primary Monster Manuals/Bestiaries, and a sequel is often needed. But it’s a shame this common problem wasn’t addressed or anticipated.

Similarly, no Monster Manual is ever complete or comprehensive, there are always missing monsters. Even the 384-page Monstrous Manual from 2e lacked a lot of iconic critters. Noteworthy omissions of this book include the allip, aquatic elf, assassin vine, barghest, bodak, catoblepas, cave fisher, derro, froghemoth, green slime, grippli, larva mage/ spawn of Kyuss, mongrelman, nerid, nymph, pech, sirin, and sylph. Being a child of 2e and the Monstrous Manual, creatures like the aurumvorax, formians, feyr (or fihyr), gibberling, hatori, ixitxachiti, and neogi are just as iconic to me as the mind flayer (or more so, as I never used an illithid until 4e).

While the earliest editions get numerous references and nods, 4th Edition seems to have been ignored. For example, there’s no mention of elemental titans in the giant section, no references to Primordials, no elemental archons or legless angels, no eladrin or other high fey, no devas, and the like. Even the humanoid racial powers are very different. The little ability of creatures such as kobolds, gnolls, and orcs are completely different between 4e and 5e. Many are flipped: goblins move like 4e kobolds and kobolds now attack like 4e gnolls. While I’m not a fan of 4e, it was still an edition of D&D and shouldn’t be entirely ignored, and reinventing all the racial powers seems needless.

While the art is decent something should be said about the “sketches”. Every now and then art resembling a pencil sketch will fill in some white space in a monster entry, providing a closer look at some physiology, a different pose, or other variant. Most of these are decent. But a few are just uncoloured roughs of the final illustration, which is a little boring and makes the image seem extra redundant, especially when the illustration could have been anything else. Pure filler.

Not all spells in Monster Manuals are included in the Basic rules, necessitating the Player’s Handbook. However, the PHB has been touted as “optional”, the big book of expanded races and class options. The PHB shouldn’t be required for the Dungeon Master; it should be possible to run the game with just the MM (and maybe the DMG), referring to Basic for combat rules and spells. This is further complicated as 5e has returned to only naming spells in a monster’s statblock rather than listing a full description. I’m personally alright with this change as it keeps stat blocks manageable in size, also leaving room for more monsters. In practice, full descriptions of “spells” just led to non-essential abilities being excluded, and monsters lost many non-combative powers or flavourful spells. However, having to reference a spell in a book that’s likely being used by the players is awkward. If the spells are in Basic at least the DM can print out spell cards or have a searchable PDF handy when running a spellcasting monster. (To say nothing of the Erinyes entry referencing a magic item planned for the DMG.)

While one cannot complain about the quality or amount of flavour in the book, there is little rhyme or reason to the order or presentation. Unlike 2e where each monster received a section on “Habitat & Society” and “Ecology” each 5e monster’s fluffblock is unique. In order to find a specific bit of information the entire entry might need to be read. Much of the time the boldface text is clear enough to make this easy, but there are some vague headers. And without the push to consider ecology or habitat, this gets omitted from some monsters.

There’s also a fair amount of wasted space in the book. Because each monster gets at least a full page (with one exception I’ve seen) some monsters with little lore and few motivations don’t make full use of their space. A few monsters have a really large illustration to pad their page. This is really a niggling, nit-picking complaint, but I wonder if they couldn’t have done more with the cockatrice (or given the couatl an extra column).

In terms of monsters, I’m not sure why merrow went from being aquatic ogres to evil giant merefolk. I’m not fond of the design of the aboleth, as they look too savage, more like a dire lamprey than a genius psychic mastermind.

The Ugly

Let’s start with the ugliest problem: the binding is ass. Like most of its books, WotC is opting for a Perfect Binding to their 5e books rather than a stitched binding. Think the difference between the original 1e printings and the orange spine reprints (like the infamous Unearthed Arcana). The pages are individually glued onto the spine. So long as the glue holds things are good, but if you got a less tacky batch individual pages will come loose. This has befallen more than one PHB. The printer they chose is also cutting the pages prior to gluing for potentially uneven page width.

I don’t foresee problems, as this was the same binding used for the 3.5e and 4e books, and my copies of those books held up just fine. But WotC does seem to be rushing the printing of the books, and using a new printer (US versus China or Canada), so it’s worth being a little extra careful with the book, being cautious liquids, evenly stressing the binding after purchase, and not over-opening the book. (Being able to test the binding is another reason to buy local and not from Amazon.)

A mechanical problem is a lot of monsters seem to deal damage to ability stats. I’m fine with that, as it’s a nice way to scare PCs of any level. However, this seems to have potentially been an afterthought, as only high level magic like greater restoration (available to casters at level 9) will heal ability damage. This is nasty for an ability inflicted by a Challenge 2 or 3 beasties. It feels like in-between the PHB going to the printer and the MM being finished someone decided ability damage was going to be a thing and forgot to include an easy way of reversing the effects.

There’s also a lot of omissions in the book. There’s no monster building rules, no estimating the Challenge Rating of characters created using the character classes, no adding classes to monsters, and no rules for playing monsters or making monster NPCs. There is also no monster-by-terrain chart, random encounter tables, or references to how much treasure is appropriate for monsters, and this information is also not included in the stat blocks. There’s no chart of Monster-by-CR, and while an official PDF of this was released  (and kudos to WotC for getting it out) it has no page numbers, making it awkard to reference.

The book includes a few choice templates. But there are some obvious omissions (lycanthrope, vampire, and lich). Some rules are provided although the Challenge Rating of the result is vague. It’s particularly irritating for the lich, which is a staggering Challenge 21, making it a boss monster for even high level PCs. Certainly a more potent threat than the lich has previously been, making it difficult to adapt adventures featuring lower level liches.

And a third comment about the art in the book. There’s a LOT of cropped images. Pictures blocked by the stat block or only partially shown. I’m hoping for a comprehensive art gallery on the WotC site.

While on the subject of art, lets talk about the vampire illustration. That, my friends, is the unholy abomination that is the 3rd Edition imitation Strahd von Zarovich by way of Lestat. Ugh. Just… ugh. After the excellent art in Open Grave, I had hoped the unholy abomination of Lestrahd had been staked and left for dead.

And then there’s the cover. I like it better than the PHB but it’s still bad. It’s far too dark. There’s soooo much black. And the composition is funky. There’s a third adventurer poorly positioned so he’s all but unseen in the corner, just cluttering the image. The lightning in the background is also weird. Even looking at the uncropped image I’m not sure of the source of the lightning. I’m not sure if the dwarf is scared or picking a fight.

The Awesome

The book continues the trend of decent indexes, with a two-page index using 6 point font and listing every stat block in the book. And the index is accompanied by some fun little illustrations akin to the condition appendix of the PHB. After so many years of bad indexes, it’s nice to see some attempt made.

I love how easy it is to make variants of monsters, and how many don’t even modify the challenge. I hope to see fewer full monsters in the future in adventures and sourcebooks and more variants. Plus it makes it so easy to surprise players, especially experienced ones who might know all the tricks.

Pierces are now immature ropers. That’s such a simple yet workable idea.

Metallic dragons are back. There’s quite a few creatures that are unabashedly good. It’s nice to see rather than trying to force everything in the book into a “you’re expected to kill this” box. Sometimes you need an ally or a mount or stats to trick or sneak by a good creature.

The kraken is a pretty cool addition. There are a few neat choices like the yeti, revenants, and scarecrow.

And while I hate the picture of faux Strahd, the image of Castle Ravenloft is excellent. A+ for that.

Final Thoughts

The 5th Edition Monster Manual is a beautiful book. And it’s very arguably one of the best monster books of all time, a contender to the crown. And with books like the classic 1e Monster Manual, the 2e Monstrous Manual, the Bestiary or Tome of Horrors Complete for Pathfinder, or even the Monster Vault for 4e, the 5e MM was up against some pretty stiff competition. Even after 5e has gone the way of earlier editions, this Monster Manual will still have some solid appeal.

If trying to hook someone into D&D I might consider skipping the Player’s Handbook and going right to the Monster Manual. The Starter Set might make it easier to play, but that requires an interest in wanting to try out the game. If you want to make someone curious about the game, to soften them up for the Starter Set and excite them with all the possibilities the game brings, this book is the one to hand out. In reading it I feel like I’ve thirteen again, skimming the 1st Edition Monster Manual borrowed by the public library and being fascinated by the boundless creatures. There’s just something appealing about reading about fantastic beasts and wondrous beings.

I’m really anticipating finding the time to work on some 5th Edition monsters. I’ve already toying with ideas for updated monsters, variants, and new lairs. The book has enflamed my imagination. I want to use it. It’s made me excited. I don’t just want to use a monsters or see a particular creature in a fight: I want to tell stories, make worlds, create new monsters, and more.

And this is the best thing I can say about the book.

Pathfinder Review: Monster Codex

The latest book for the Pathfinder Roleplaying game is the Monster Codex, the sixth monster book for that game. Sixth! The Monster Codex goes into greater detail on twenty established monsters, devoting twelve full pages to each monster. Each monster entry includes 7-9 new statblocks for the monsters, a brand new monster, a couple pages of new mechanics, a page of prebuilt encounters, and a full page of flavour text. The new mechanics vary depending on the entry and some monsters get a new class archetype, some get feats, other get favoured class bonuses, and others have magic items.

The book includes entries for the boggard, bugbear, drow, duergar, frost giant, fire giant, ghoul, gnoll, goblin, hobgoblin, kobolds, lizardfolk, orc, ogre, ratfolk, sahuagin, serpentfolk, troll, troglodyte, vampire.

The Good

I love the concept for this book. It’s actually a book I’ve been requesting for a few years. Pathfinder is a very… robust… game system and making NPC statblocks can be a very time consuming process. Creatures like orcs, gnolls, and ogres are very flexible and can be used at many different levels, but doing so is a chore.

This makes this book very usable for campaigns new and old. It’s a monster book for monsters you already have, for monsters that already exist in your game world. Even people running published adventures or Adventure Paths might find a use for this book, using it for new NPCs, random encounters, or extra monsters. If an encounter requires three fire giants, you can opt to pull out this book and have a single high CR fire giant or a mid-CR giant and a regular giant. It provides options. And there’s a goodly range of threats in the book, with monsters going from CR 1/2 all the way to 20.

The choices of monster are good, with most being low-CR monsters that fill a classic role in the game. They’re archetypal. It would have been tempting to add a few newer monsters or Paizo’s Intellectual Property to the mix, trying to make a new classic, but the vast majority are iconic humanoids (and the one exception is a good one).
As always, the art is top notch. Pathfinder has an excellent stable of artists. The art in this books is particularly good, with most pieces being decent. There’s a picture of a character every couple pages and the majority of pages have some artwork. The same artists seem to be used for each entry, keeping the monsters consistent throughout, so we don’t have clashing interpretations (although the hobgoblins look a little too much like orcs for my tastes). There’s a nice range of genders in pictures, and some token female orcs, goblins, etc.

The new monsters included in the book are hit and miss, but the Monster Codex also (re)introduces the flind and vampire spawn, previously excluded from monster products. A nice use of the space and appreciated revival.

The full page of flavour is also a nice amount of fluff. It’s not quite the multiple pages of a Revisted book from the Pathfinder Campaign Setting line, which means those books still have some value (as most monsters in this book were covered in products such as Classic Horrors Revisited or Classic Monsters Revisited), but the full page is significantly more than the beasts received in standard monster books (excluding the D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual). The flavour text is nicely generic, usable in any campaign world and (typically) not specific to Golarion.

The Bad

The flavour big wall of text for each monster is a LOT to take in. The flavour is nice, but there’s no separation or consistent organization to the information. If looking for a particular bit of lore you need to skim the entire entry. And because extra pains were made to genericize the monsters for non-Golarion worlds, some of the entries are uninspired and just not that interesting. And not all the entries are equally generic. I saw at least one god name-dropped. And the duergar entry has a LOT of Golarion-centric dwarf history.

Several of the new monsters not inspired. Particularly the drow entry’s abrakarn viper, the hobgoblin’s yzobu, and the kobold’s kyrana. They seemed only tangentially related to their monster. I wonder if new monsters should been optional, as that space could easily be filled with more new mechanics or another example statblock.

For a book that seems like a compilation of entries from the Revisited books, there’s not a lot of content pulled from those books. It would have been a good opportunity to update some of the 3.5e monster options to Pathfinder or reprint the best ideas for a wider audience. (I remember really liking a few of the bugbear feats from Classic Monsters Revisited.)

I question the inclusion of some of the mechanics like archetypes, as that content doesn’t typically have prerequisites, thus being usable by PCs, making this book a potential player reference. I don’t really like the idea of a monster book being a player book. While not included in the Additional Resources page of the Pathfinder Society, I imagine there will be some pressure to include it by players who want to use, say, the apocalypse oracle mystery.

A curious omission is the lack of content from the Advanced Class Guide. One of the talking points on the ACG was the inclusion of the shaman class, which would be useful for savage humanoids that don’t have standard religions. How they always referred to orc or lizardfolk shamans but that meant nothing in the game, but with the new class this changed. However, here we are with a book with divine magic using shamanistic monsters and the races are clerics and druids and oracles and witches. The absence of a dedicated shaman class doesn’t seem to be an impediment. (And doesn’t help my negative opinion of the ACG as the bastard child of rules bloat and filler.)

I also lament the missed opportunity of using this book to differentiate the low CR humanoids. Many lack unique mechanics or powers, and there’s little to differentiate a fight between orcs and hobgoblins and gnolls beyond choice of mini and description. With two pages of new mechanics for each monster, it would have been the perfect place for some alternate racial traits.

The Ugly

The sample encounters are okay, but often include a lot of low CR monsters in high CR encounters. Such as a CR 16 encounter with six CR 1/3 monsters. This is an extreme example and the half-dozen filler monsters aren’t likely meant to contribute, but there are a few examples of mid-CR monsters in high teen CR encounters, which just doesn’t work with the math of the game. This really stands out to me as I just finished an AP that high some high levels and there were a few encounters that just were not a challenge because the mob of monsters needed a 25 on a d20 to hit my PCs.

The book is also small. At 253 pages it’s 67 pages shorter than the other Bestiaries or even the NPC Codex, which tend to be in the 32-page range. But this book is the same price. Now, some of this might be the effect of inflation and Paizo opted to offer a book the same price as their other monster books rather than the same size. Half a decade of inflation has likely changed what they can charge for books. But I look at the teeny tiny Monster Codex and wonder what it could have been with five more monsters or each monster receiving three more pages.

The book highlights some of the problems with magic and treasure in the Pathfinder game. To keep the numbers appropriate for monsters, the creatures in the book have to be loaded down with magical treasure. Creatures like the savage troglodytes, incapable of producing much of their own goods and dressed in soiled rags, somehow has members with multiple magic items.

The highest CR monsters typically use male pronouns: fire giant king, boggard priest-king, frost giant jarl, etc. (The drow being an obvious exception.) Most of reference that females can hold the position, but I don’t see why one of them couldn’t have been a queen. This is even more insulting for the fire giant that does include a queen, who is 1 CR lower than the king.

The Awesome

The one newish monster is the ratfolk, which isn’t just new to the game but is fairly new to Pathfinder, appearing in the Bestiary 3 (although I believe it was also in the Advanced Race Guide). While there are no shortage of other monsters that could have been detailed (catfolk are popular in the community, and I’m a tengu fan) warren dwelling rats are interesting, and casting the ratfolk as mercantile salesmen works (it reminds me of Templeton from Charlotte’s Web for some unfathomable reason).

The vampire entry is particularly interesting with thralls and other vampiric servants rather than just more vampires. I kinda wish there were other entries like that, such as a fleshwarped creature in the drow section.

The book ends with simple templates for the Core Rulebook classes, which quickly allow you to add a dash of a class to monsters without adding individual levels. They’re quick-and-dirty but they look like they’ll work without making something too complicated.

There’s no shortage of pictures of goblins in Pathfinder products. They’re everywhere. But the goblin art in this book is particularly is excellent. They might be some of the best goblins I’ve seen.

The book ends with a solid appendix. There’s not just a list of monsters by CR, but a list of all the new rules content and references for where to find the abilities used by the monsters in the book.

Final Thoughts

The sixth monster product in a game system tends to be weak, filled with padding and unnecessary new monsters that try their hardest to be fun and iconic but are just awkward to fit into a campaign setting or fill a niche already occupied by a half dozen creatures. And yet Paizo has managed to produce an excellent sixth monster book that is not only useful but fixes problems with the system. It supplements existing monster products without directly competing or fighting too much for narrative space or place in an adventure or campaign setting. And its useful at multiple levels with the creatures being useful as bosses at low levels or mooks at higher levels.

Pathfinder Review: Occult Adventures Playtest

Paizo is doing their annual play testing for their next GenCon hardcover book. This time the book is Occult Adventures. It sounds awesome, being the (official) Pathfinder version of psionics, but with a tone of Victorian spiritualism and mystery rather than mental superpowers. I’m a fan of psionics and have various psionic books include the Complete Psionics Handbook for 2e, the Psionic Handbook for 3e and 3.5e along with Dreamscarred Press’ updates to the Pathfinder ruleset. I rather like the idea of mental magic and people unlocking doors of the mind to discover supernatural powers. But the tone of psionics can be a little more fantastic than I would like. Occult Adventures seems like a nice compromise whole also adding some wonder and mystery to the world of magic.

This books sounds pretty awesome. I wanted this book two years ago, when I was doing a Ravenloft campaign.

Kineticist

This is the psychic magic ranger that “shoots” rocks.

This class really reminds me of benders from Avatar: the Last Airbender. The kineticst can just launch blasts of fire or water or force. They also seem to be the oft-requested Constitution-based class that use Con for many of their powers, such as the damage from their elemental blasts. This and the regularity of their blasts remind me a lot of the warlock class from D&D, especially the 3e version that has at-will magic blasts and gains abilities that shape and customize their blasts.

The class suffers from a pure combat focus. This is a DPR type class that blasts people with boulders or jets of fire. They have almost no skills (and a *tiny* skill list). They can’t become a skill monkey role like the face, the sage, the acrobat, or strongman. Despite likely having a high Dex (it’s typically their hit stat), they cannot train into Acrobatics. There is a healer power that can be taken, but it’s not ideal as it deals nonlethal damage in the process, so that’s another role they cannot fill.

Despite being able to fire gouts of flame at will the character has no mechanical ability to, say, heat water or light a campfire or generate torchlight. The aether (read telekinetic kineticist) can choose the Light Touch wild talent to used an amped up version of mage hand, but that comes at the expense of offensive ability, and there’s no regular mage hand equivalent. So the kineticist can hurl a 20 kg rock across a dungeon chamber but cannot levitate a 2 kg object slowly to their hand.

During the 2014 and Beyond panel at GenCon the catchphrase for Occult Adventures was “more Penny Dreadful, and less Professor X” (coined by a staff member from Obsidian Entertainment). Which makes the kineticist pretty darn ironic and it would feel very much at home on the X-men (along with the Ultimate Psionic‘s soulknife).

It feels like a 4th Edition D&D striker class complete with combat utility powers, the only difference is formatting.

Medium

There’s nothing quite like the medium in the game. It’s has 4 levels of spellcasting but is exceedingly flexible allowing the class to be, well, anything.

The medium forms bonds with spirits to gain powers. They pick a new spirit each day gaining powers from that spirit based on their medium level. However, spirits have influence on a medium and if the medium uses the same spirit repeatedly the spirit takes control of the body for a day.

The medium needs a lot of work. A LOT of work. It’s a serious mess.

–edit–

11/04/2014

Okay, I misread a major ability of the medium, so I rewrote this entry.

Like the kineticist, the medium lacks built-in utility. The medium can ostensibly talk to spirits, but only spirits from their list and then only to get powers. So they can talk to spirits, except for any other spirits in the game, such as the dead, the undead, or haunts. You’d think a class called the medium would get some ability to cast speak with dead (or a variant that doesn’t require a body). It’s been commented that some spirits might grant this ability, which seems odd. A little like having a cleric that needs to take the “divine” domain to interact with god or a sorcerer that needs to be of the “arcane” bloodline to cast spells. But that’s silly. While it should be possible to have options that veer away from the base concept of a class, those are archetypes. The basic assumptions of a class’ abilities should *not* be optional.

The medium even has a limit on the number of spirits it can talk to, which really makes it feel like a “medium” in name only. Change the name of the spirits to, oh, vestiges, and this stops being the medium and becomes a binder.

The class has no dedicated role. In theory this is useful for a class, allowing a player to play the class they want, while still filling a gap in the party or adapting to the needs of the adventure. But you cannot easily use the same spirit again and again (not without risking losing control of your character) making it tricky to stick with a single role needed at the table. If the party needs a healer they always need a healer, not a healer every other day. And while the class can pick different roles, the player will still need to build their character around a specific role or two, picking feats and ability scores that complement that role. Which makes the daily flexibility irrelevant as options will need to be comparable (almost identical) to the planned role.

The weakness of spirits having influence over the character is very awkward. It’s such a heavy penalty (the spirit takes over and makes you do vague, undefined things) for what amounts to roleplaying reasons. And it’s such a vague penalty. Can the spirit riding in the medium meat suit join you in an adventure? Does it just become the medium with a different personality? What if the party is deep in an extradimensional dungeon and the spirit cannot go off and do its own thing? Really, it’s also not all that hard to avoid. If a penalty never comes up, why even have the penalty? That just adds complexity.  It’s also been said that the penalty is easy to avoid by having downtime. Except downtime is annoying. It’s so annoying an entire subsystem was added to give other characters something to do while some classes take their necessary downtime. And not every adventure (or adventure path) lends itself to downtime. You can’t just pause saving the world to take a day off.

The medium doesn’t really seem to fill any roles particularly well. For example, not having the skill selection to really be an out of combat utility class. Gaining a +1 to all skills every four levels doesn’t compare with actually having training in a skill. The class doesn’t have an obvious primary ability score. It uses Charisma for determining its spirits and spellcasting, but it’s only a 4-level spellcaster, so its Charisma just doesn’t need to be a dump stat. It does have the social skills, so it *could* be the party face, but there are better psychic magic options for that. Similarly, I’m not sure what they expect the medium to do from round to round in combat. It doesn’t have a lot of built-in options for actions during combat. They have 3/4 BAB, d8 hit dice, and limited weapons so they’re really not meant to be regular front line combatants. But they also don’t have any spells until higher levels. Many of their abilities seem to imply this class is expected to be a Dex or Str primary class smacking people around, but there’s just something odd about a class evoking John Edward running around in chainmail cracking people over the head with a mace.

There are also a crap ton of spirits: one for each combination of alignment and ability score. That’s too damn many. Even if each were dirt simple (which they’re not) reading through that many options is a pain in the butt. And it needs to be done every other level. Every six or so games prepare for some serious homework. 54 spirits just feels unnecessary. The hook of each spirit representing an alignment and an ability score is okay but leads to a forced symmetry. There’s not 54 good ideas for spirits, there aren’t 54 concepts that are just crying out for a spirit. And there’s certainly not 216 unique mechanical powers crying out to be added to the game. A lot of the spirits are just going to be plain bad. For a book like this there are deadlines to meet and a LOT of the spirits are going to end up being dismissed as “good enough”. Filler. I’d much rather see nine really good spirits tied to alignments that all medium can choose from, and have those modified by ability scores. So the medium adds his chosen stat to the spirit desired at that time. The list of 54 could remain as names/concepts of the spirits along with their compulsions, but each doesn’t need to be a unique butterfly.

The medium also holds a daily seance to channel a spirit. This takes an hour, like memorizing spells. Except at 2nd level the medium can invoice the rest of the party, meaning wizard-types need to spend an hour preparing their own spells then another hour while the medium communes with the departed. In theory the wizard could prepare their spells during the seance, but that makes zero sense as the wizard can not prepare spells in a distracting environment, and seances strike me as distracting. Again, this feels like slapping a medium-type name on an unrelated mechanic. The medium/binder is invoking their spirit/vestige and it’s just called a seance to make the class cosmetically seem like its source material.

The medium feels like the game designers and developers playing telephone. One group comes up with the story concept for the class and sends it to the other to design. They start designing, find a neat mechanic and follow that as it develops. So there’s a drift between the intended design and actual design. A disconnect between what you expect the class to do and what it actually does. The medium has drifted away from being an actual medium, and really needs to be refocused.

Mesmerist

The psychic magic bard that hypnotizes people instead of inspiring them, with a dash of witch and its evil eye.

The class is basically the hypnotist; the mesmerism touches someone to implant a spell-like ability that can be triggered later. I.e. the mesmerist snaps their fingers as the rogue sees a phantom flanker or the fighter shrugs off an enchantment.  Which is interesting and fairly tactical: you need to choose the target ahead of time and hope they need to use the buff. There’s some educated guessing going on. And the mesmerist is also skilled at removing conditions from allies, which can be handy.

Unlike the bard, the mesmerist doesn’t seem to have any ability to accelerate combat by providing a damage or accuracy buff. Their buffs are much more situation and far less universal than “making an attack roll”. The bard is already a class that can be a little boring to play, not having a lot to do on their turn after the first or second round (until a minimal level of spells are gained). The mesmerist seems like it has the same problem, only with the player waiting and hoping for the opportunity to trigger their special power. As triggering is an immediate action, the mesmerist still lacks actions to take on its turn. It’s a passive class.

Amping up the mesmerist’s hypnotic stare is likely a solid fix. It’s such a minor penalty and could easily be buffed. Adding far more options to the Bold Stare feature and giving them more often would be nice. Some utility powers could just be provided, so the mesmerist doesn’t need to choose between combat and social effectiveness.

The mesmerist also lacks the bards out-of-combat versatility, not being able to buff allies’ skills, fascinate creatures, or offering bardic knowledge. There’s a few potential fixes for this. As a Houdini-style character, the mesmerist  could have Disable Device on its skill list. They could also have the ability to aid people’s skill checks even if they’re not trained. Perhaps they could induce rerolls of failed skill checks, even checks that might not normally be attemptable a second time (by focusing the person’s memory to aid their recall of knowledge).

Occultist

The psychic magic gish. The occultist a limited spellcaster that can cast up to 6th-level spells, wear medium armour, and use martial weapons. But it learns spells unlike other spellcasters.

At first glance the concept for this class seems odd. The occultist uses items that are magical but not actually magic items, which are used to gains spells of a certain school. They’re specialists who gain more schools at higher levels. The idea strikes me as drawing from the idea of psychic/occult detectives. They’re most akin to spellcasters like Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, Hellboy, John Constantine, the Winchesters, or even Harry Dresden. Adventuring types who kinda sorta know spells but rely on relics and “magical trinkets”. The occultist doesn’t just cast burning hands but breaks out their blasting rod, and doesn’t overtly cast mage armour but presents the fingerbone of St. Gerome to ward off harm. I rather like the idea but since the class comes alive when the relics are emphasised, it really needs a sidebar of example items.

I like that the class can also do fun things like reading reading and creating magic circles. Small abilities that really hammer home the tone of the class. I really wish the mesmerist and medium had flavourful little powers like that.

Honestly, the armour and weapons of the class actually detract from the flavour for me. It feels like the need to fill the “gish” slot on the psychic magic Bingo card, and means the occultist loses some extra occultisty flavour. I don’t see scale mail and greatswords being overly necessary. As the psychic version of the investigator/rogue, they should be limited to light armours.

Psychic

The psychic is, of course, the psych magic equivalent of the sorcerer or wizard. It’s a spontaneous caster so it’s closer to the sorcerer.

As a full caster, the psychic doesn’t get a lot other than spells. And because it’s spell list is meant to emphasise it’s a psychic caster, it’s somewhat limited. So it’s a sorcerer with fewer options of spell schools. Thankfully, while limited, there’s enough of a range of spell choices for a few different types of caster. Honestly, it gets such a broad range of different spells I wonder why they didn’t just say it could pick from the sorcerer/wizard spell list and add a few choice extras in.

The psychic gets two unique mechanics: its discipline and its phrenic pool. Disciplines are basically the psychic’s version of a school/bloodline granting new spells and minor powers (along with determining the ability score used for the phrenic pool). Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. The disciplin or lore for example: it’s lets you use your Wisdom for your phrenic pool but grants a bonus on Use Magic Device checks (a Cha skill). Neither seem particularly lore-ish

The phrenic pool seems like a casual nod to psionic power points of classic d20 psionic powers, but not being usable to cast spells. They’re spendable for some minor benefits. Very minor. Almost forgettable. There’s so few options and they’re so limited it would be very easy to build a character that doesn’t have any use for their phrenic pool. Like the discipline of abomination that does gain a spell that would benefit from its phrenic pool unto 10th level.

As the two options are connected, with the discipline determining the phrenic pool’s ability score,  it’s odd that the discipline powers don’t use phrenic points. It makes the two class features needlessly dissociative. I think it’d be much more interesting if disciplines offered set uses for the phrenic pool, providing different ways of spending the points.

Spiritualist

The psychic magic summoner. It gains a phantom as a pet and has 6 levels of casting. Only it seems much more balanced than the summoner. (I imagine this is a preview of what we can expect the revised summoner to look like in Pathfinder Unleashed.)

The phantom is a little odd. It’s an outsider, but the reasons for this are not really stated. This doesn’t really seem to match the lore or origin of the spirit. (And the type is really buried in the text. I had to hunt for it.) I imagine the reason is for the extremely meta reasons of requiring a Con score, needing the phantom to be healed by positive energy, and affected by mind-affecting spells. I wonder if making the phantom a positive-spirit (tied to the positive energy plane rather than the negative) could be used to handwave those problems away while still letting the creature be “undead”.

Honestly, the spiritualist seems a little weak. It seems like in their efforts not to make the spiritualist as good as the summoner they overcompensated. Just being able to only cast up to summon monster VI, and requiring the full round, and not being able to keep summons around for a minute should help. As does not being able to customize and overly tweak the phantom/eidolon. The phantom seems much more in line with the druid’s animal companion, but the spiritualist themselves doesn’t seem as potent as the druid.

The spiritualist does gain some nice utility, being able to see invisible, detect undead, and transfer action denial conditions to their phantom. The detect undead ability at level 5 seems lacklustre, especially at that level. The wizard and cleric are getting 3rd level spells and the spiritualist gets the ability to feel the presence of undead. And unlike the paladin, it doesn’t start as if they’d been sensing for multiple rounds. It’s a bit of a lame level.

Final Thoughts

There’s some neat stuff in Occult Adventures but it doesn’t quite feel ready. There are a lot of problems with the classes and many are only “occult” in name, having very tenuous connections to the flavour and intent of the class. The story of the classes is good, but the execution just feels a little lacking. While the classes are doing some experimental stuff I wonder if they’re still being held back by expectations of what classes should be in the game. I’m guilty of that as well, pointing out the weakness of some of the classes round-by-round combat options.

Occult Adventures seems like a much more interesting book than the Advanced Class Guide and there should be a lot more room for interesting options, variant archetypes, and alternate types of adventure. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with the book.

D&D 5 Review: Dungeon Master’s Guide

The Dungeon Master’s Guide is the third and final book of the core rules of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. With its release, the core rules are at long last complete. Or as complete as an edition can be. WotC has already released a web enhancement for the DMG: a list of all the magic items by rarity. And lead designer Mike Mearls has already promised to digitally release two new races cut from the DMG (the kender and warforged) as well as the Battlesystem mass combat rules. And I’m sure there is a wealth of content from all three books that needs a home. So the core rules are complete-ish.

What Is It

The Dungeon Master’s Guide is 320-page hardcover book of rules and advice for running a D&D campaign. While it was designed for 5th Edition, much of the advice on adventure design and worldbuilding is edition neutral (or even system neutral), making this a decent read for any game system. The book includes all the necessary rules for building encounters, awarding experience, and handing out treasure. But there are also pages of optional rules, variant rules, and advice on running the game.

Unlike the last two (or three) editions, the 5e DMG is as big as the Player’s Handbook. It is a hefty tome. There’s a full 320-pages of content, not 318 and a couple ads.

The Good

Before the book really starts, before Part One, there is the breakdown of player types. It’s giving out essential information in the introduction. That’s the type of book this is.

As a worldbuilder, I love the entire first section of the book (Part One: Master of Worlds). It touches on designing a fantasy setting, campaign, adventures, and so much else. It starts with worldbuilding, including some decent advice on pantheons, governments, towns, and the like. There’s even some nice and simple descriptions of the types of game you can play, which elegantly breaks down the difference between heroic fantasy, epic fantasy, and swords & sorcery. While mostly content I’m overly familiar with, there was the occasional gem of an idea that fired the imagination and made me want to plan a new adventure.

The first section also includes the “Dawn War” pantheon of 4th edition, although its inclusion here feels like it was crammed in after being forgotten (read: omitted) from the PHB. But reasons aside, for those who wanted it, here it is. Clerics of the Raven Queen rejoice.

The DMG includes a quick gazetteer of the planes, with an excellent map of the Elemental Planes. Each plane only receive a small amount of detail, but the section is decently sized (there are a lot of planes). Each of the Outer Planes even gets a small optional rule based on how its influences or affects visitors. I’ve seen smaller write ups in DMGs, so this seemed comprehensive enough. Sadly, there’s no map of the Outer Planes, despite a couple different configurations being described. While the Great Wheel is in the PHB, a visual demonstration (or two) of an alternate configuration would have been nice.

There’s a lot more advice in the book than hard rules, and the advice is generally nicely done. I enjoy the focus on running an adventure or session rather than running “The Game”. Most of the adventure design advice was unexciting to this experienced DM, but I think it would be of use to a rookie. And there’s a really sizable section on being a DM. Larger than I was expecting really, with good advice on when to asking checks, handling checks and saves, and granting inspiration or advantage. While much of this section was “meh” to an old timer like me, it’s always good to remind yourself of the basics.

What rules that are present are decent. The encounter building rules emerged from playtesting in a usable state. Unsurprisingly, playtesting and mass peer review works. Encounter building can be a little complex when dealing with groups of enemies, but when pitting your PCs against one or two foes at a time the rules are fairly simple. So, really, you opt into the complexity. Good encounter building is almost an art, so there’s no choice but a little complexity: you either have simple rules or you have rules that work. And, really, perfectly balanced encounters are less necessary in 5e, so once you get a feel for your PCs I imagine these rules will quickly become guidelines if they are consulted at all.

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of optional rules. However, there’s not as many as I was expecting, as so much was made of this DMG being a “hacker’s guide” and 5e being a modular edition. But that’s a failure of my expectations and not the book. Mostly. (More on that later.) There are some key optional rules I was looking forward to and most are nicely handled. And there are options and variants I wasn’t expecting, which is nice.

I could spend pages listing my thoughts on the various optional rules, the rules I’ll be using, the rules I’ll be tweaking, and the like. But I’ll limit myself to a few gems. As a Ravenloft fan, I love that fear, horror, and madness received a place. There’s even an optional Sanity statistic for games that make regular use of the mindbending. There’s a decent range of healing options as well, which either increase or decrease healing, as well as options that modify rests. Combined, you could have a healing lite-game where hit points have to be carefully rationed, or a much more heroic game where injuries seldom last longer than a scene.

And the random tables. Great Gygax’s Ghost, the tables. Random NPC traits, random dungeons, magic items (both awarding and designing a backstory), the results of running a business, weather, and even some random encounters. There’s a wealth of randomness in this product. You could built a random city built atop a random dungeon, and start playing a Greyhawk-style delve with almost no prep.

The Bad

The cover is just okay. The third in a series of “just okay” covers. This time the colour scheme is purple, to contrast with the red of the PHB and the Blue of the MM (which is off for me, given the 3e PHB/DMG were red and blue respectively while the 4e books were blue and red with the MM being green). When I saw a preview of the cover I assumed it was a lich killing an adventurer, making it feel interchangeable with the Monster Manual. But looking closer it’s a mastermind lich raising an undead minion, which works thematically. But I would rather have seen said lich being more of a mastermind and observer and less active. The 4e DMG cover is the perfect combination of passive observer and potential menace. Still, the framing is good and the cropping/zooming is less obvious, making this the best cover of the core books (excluding the Starter Set).

In a related complaint, the inside description of the cover name-drops the undead dude on the front as “the archlich Aczerak”. Overlooking the fact an “archlich” is a rare good aligned lich, Aczie is a freakin’ demilich, not a lich. The demilich. That’s like putting Meepo on a cover and identifying him as “a small sized lizardfolk”. There’s so many other Name liches or necromancers it could have been. Azalin for example. But it’s not just an unfortunate naming, as the lich on the cover has a necklace in the shape of the leering devil face from the Tomb of Horrors (the first of three appearances in this book).

The primary sin of the DMG is one of brevity. It touches on a LOT of topics, but they only get brief amount of pages. And much is the loosest of advice or infuriatingly general. There’s a lot of “no duh” comments. For example, the book describes different types of fantasy but doesn’t offer suggested rules or ways of accommodating that style of play. There’s no suggestions for how to take the rules and play a swords & sorcery style game.

There’s a dearth of advice on how rules changes affect classes, and no talk of modifying class features for those changes. The book is vague on the player’s side, instead focusing on changes to the base rules. (Almost as if expecting more PC content and not wishing to render itself outdated, despite almost exclusively referring to monsters that made it into the Monster Manual.)

There are a number of omissions in the book. The classic “DM’s Best Friend” of a +/-2 modifier is absent, being solely replaced by advantaged/disadvantage. I like adv/disadv, but sometimes you want to increase the range of success/failure and not just the odds, and sometimes you want a couple bonuses to stack. There’s also no equivalent of 4e’s Page 42: a unified table of DCs and damage per level. (DCs are actually static, with “hard” being the same across all levels.) These tables exist in the book but are spread out, and very compacted in scope: a level 4 character is given the same damage range as a level 2. There are experience variants for milestones (read: quests) and social encounters, but nothing for exploration, gaining treasure, or other achievements. There are no alternate experience charts for faster/slower advancement, or even suggestions/advice for people who don’t want to rocket through levels. There are no rules for skill challenges or complex skill checks (first seen in 3e and a big part of 4e). There’s something like three diseases in the entire book. Oh, and there are no wands of cure wounds: the “happy stick” is no more.

A cheat sheet page would have been awesome. But I imagine they want to sell DM Screens…

Traps are especially poorly served. The two small pages on traps simply does not provide nearly enough rules and advice on the subject, neglecting to mention how to determine the detection or disabling DCs of traps, or if you should award experience. (RAW… no, so a trap-heavy dungeon like the Tome of Horrors awards negligible xp to survivors. This skews the risk:reward ratio for such endeavours.) There’s no solid advice on designing your own traps and only eight examples (in fairness, there are more in the random dungeon section, but just names). Traps are a big part of the exploration pillar of the game and sadly not well supported, which is particularly bad in an edition with a nostalgic slant; traps were a huge part of 1e/2e.

Looking back through the articles on designing 5e, there was a wish list written of potential optional rules.

Not all the planned options made it in. Omitted options include: encounter resources, alternate methods of xp (beyond advice), fantasy firearms (i.e. non-historical), managing strongholds (beyond upkeep), kingdom building, mass combat, variant critical hit rules, critical fumbles, hit locations, armour as DR, and sea battles.

There’s also no hit point variants like wounds/vitality. And during a panel Mearls and Crawford talked about an AEDU module, which is a no show. And the much vaunted “tactical play module” is a little bare bones, mostly involving using a grid (with cover and flanking) and some optional actions.

The Ugly

All magic items alphabetized. There’s no sorting of magic items into type or slot used. So if you’re wondering if that health based item you wear around your neck is a phylactery or necklace be prepared to hunt. Even the web enhancement only separates items by frequency and not type. I foresee spreadsheets with lists of magic items being popular.

There’s an evil cleric option and evil paladin option, but the necromancer wizard makes it into the PHB and there’s no blighter druid.

Making NPCs is a lot of work. If you’re building an orc wizard you build it like a PC it then compare its AC, attacks, and damage numbers to a table to figure out it’s Challenge. So if you need a CR 10 creature and want it to be a wizard, be prepared to fiddle with the design again and again – possibly levelling him up and down – to get the numbers where you want.

In contrast, there’s nothing that makes building a PC more complicated. Optimizers are one of the seven types of player, but are pretty underserved by this edition. People who like building characters don’t have much in the way of options for customizing. The lack of “building” is what makes 5e the hardest to sell to my table, as many spend their free time building characters and planning their current character.

There’s no alternate treasure tables for low/high magic. The starting equipment on page 38 suggests that you can award different amounts of treasure but there’s no advice telling DMs how much more/less treasure to award on an adventure-by-adventure basis. It’s easy to hold back treasure, but knowing how much more to add for high magic games is tricky, as is knowing how more/less treasure will affect encounters.

Lingering wounds suck. It’s too easy to lose a hand eye. Yikes! I just want bruises and non-crippling broken bones. Something that gives small penalties that build up until the PC heals, but doesn’t blind someone after a couple bad rolls. I want lingering wounds at a “4” and they’re giving me wounds turned up to “8”.

As a personal pet peeve, I dislike how domains of dread are presented. It’s the same as in 4e where each domain is part of that world’s shadowfell, which means they’re world specific (as each world has its own shadowfell). So there’s no patchwork quilt of Ravenloft.

The back of the book is filled with maps, which is pure wasted space. I’m sure twelve-year-old Jester David would have loved them, but past-me started gaming prior to the Internet being what it is, and a quick Google image search will produce farm more maps. The maps are neat, but as a web enhancement or art gallery feature. I look at those six pages (plus the monster lists and monsters by terrain pages pulled from the MM – useful so long as WotC never published another product with monsters) and then I look at the big long list of content there was no room for and those pages seem… less desirable.

One omission I want to call out is advice on changing rules. There’s advice on adding content, and a little on adjusting content, but none on changing the rules themselves. There are lots of optional rules, but no advice on making your own optional rules or designing house rules, which is a pretty HUGE . Some advice on why the rules are the way they are and the nuances of how the game is designed is pretty damn essential to a good hacker’s guide. It’s absence really hurts the book.

The Awesome

The DMG manages to include simple epic play. It’s a little like the d20 variant “E6″ where you gain small buffs with xp in place of levels. With a little expansion it could easily lead to demigods or Basic D&D/Mystara immortals. WotC isn’t always the best at expanding on stuff they introduced in earlier books, but the boons, charms, and blessings are neat enough that I hope we see more in later books.

There are rules for riding large creatures. Almost every single game I’ve ever played two things have happened that the base rules almost never cover: someone has tried to “mount” a dragon or other large monster, and someone has tried to get drunk. 5e lacks the latter but it’s sooooo nice to see the former (and, if push comes to shove, the poisoned condition works for being drunk).

I love the extra downtime options. Building and owning a keep or inn is one of those things that is seldom covered by the rules, or gets really complicated. These rules included are super simple but work.

And, of course, no review of 5th Edition is complete without fawning comments of the art. There are some great pieces, like Baba Yaga’s Dancing Hut, the tarrasque battle, and all the art for magic items. While much of the book is a little art scarce, that’s because there is a craptonne art for the magic items. Something like a half (or maybe even two thirds) of the magic items have pictures. Of the magic item artwork, the portable hole picture is excellent, as is the art for the shelves of potions, which was so awesome it was previewed on the WotC site (and is currently my iPad’s wallpaper).

Final Thoughts

5th Edition is a strong contender for my favourite edition. The Players Handbook was decent, if just an expansion of the Basic rules. And the Monster Manual was simply fantastic. At the end of the day, the Dungeon Master’s Guide is an excellent book, but it also a somewhat flawed book. The DMG is a worthy addition to the edition, but not the best DMG ever and arguably the weakest book of the three core books.

The advice and optional rules are excellent. But the book tries to do a lot and doesn’t quite cover enough topics, and is not comprehensive enough on the topics it does discuss. But, as complaints go, wanting more is a not a bad complaint to have (but it is still a complaint). This is a book that leaves you wanting so much more – which makes it more of a shame we’re unlikely to see more any time soon.

For new Dungeon Masters, both new to the game or just new to DMing, the book should be more than adequate. It does a decent job of teaching the running of the game and managing of the table. It’s an empowering book that fosters creativity as much as rules knowledge. It emphasises story and DM adjudication in all the right places, focusing on being the arbiter while also promoting fairness. I think, more than other DMGs, this product will help teach people to be good Dungeon Masters.

There’s are numerous examples of omitted content, like rules for critical fumbles, alternate xp and magic item tables, making house rules, and many other topics. The more you look at the book, the more you realize what isn’t there. However, there’s still a decent amount of optional rules, so the absences are less felt.

While the idea of a DMG that is equal parts how-to-play guide, worldbuilding book, and hacker’s guide is a nice idea, the amount of content requires makes fitting everything in a single book impossible. Which makes me sad, as I was such a supporter of the idea. Focusing on the main rules and essential optional rules while also planning an Unearthed Arcana or other dedicated book of customizations might have produced better results. Hindsight is 20/20 in that regard.

5e Review: Fifth Edition Foes

Despite the absence of a new Open Game Licence or Game System Licence from Wizards of the Coast, Necromancer Games has released one of the first 3rd Party Products for the 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons: Fifth Edition Foes. Quite possibly the first 5e 3PP that isn’t a short adventure.

What Is It?

As the name suggests, Fifth Edition Foes is monster book. In its 261-pages it contains 250-odd monsters and 115 are identified as “Special” Open Game Content, which refers to monsters used under special licence with WotC. This is a little less than half, and some of these don’t *seem* to belong, not originating in the pages of 1e books.

The product advertises that it is compatible with “5th Edition”, but leaves out the “5th Edition” of what: you’ll be hard pressed to find the term “Dungeons & Dragons” inside. That’s because this product is written using the 3e OGL and a special licence arranged between Necromancer Games and Wizards of the Coast back in the early days of 3rd Edition, which permitted Necromancer Games to update classic monsters to the 3e ruleset. Monsters from the Fiend Folio, Monster Manual II, and even Dragon Magazine were revised and updated. This book also contains some monsters created for Necromancer Games’ 3e monster books – the iconic Tome of Horrors line – and some created for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

So, summarizing, it’s a book legally presented as a 3e book but with statblocks, math, and mechanics compatible with 5e.

Along with a forthcoming companion book of spells, Fifth Edition Foes was funded through Kickstarter. As of this writing, the PDF of Fifth Edition Foes is out but the hardcopy is being finalized. Because so many smaller publishers use the early PDF release as a way to edit, I’ll be ignoring obvious typos (like “Gtrappling” in the adherer entry, or the legal entry beginning with “This printing of Tome of Horrors Complete…” and generally referencing the ToH repeated times); Necromancer Games is a small company run as a hobby so I won’t hold them to the same standards as a company with a full time editing staff.

The Good

The book has a lot of fun, classic monsters that are good but didn’t quite make the cut for the official Monster Manual. Monsters that are older than the mean average age of D&D players. I’m talking about critters such as the kelpie, hippocampus, cave fisher, crimson mist, and froghemoth. And the book includes some that WotC is unlikely to ever update, such as the flail snail, carbuncle, pech, lava child, tabaxi, crabman, grippli, and yellow musk creeper.

Fifth Edition Foes includes full indexes, including one that sorts the monsters by type and one that sorts by Challenge Rating. This is something the actual Monster Manual was lacking.

Most of the monsters seem to have been well converted to 5th Edition. The math seems workable: the balance of 5e is a little looser so thing just need to be “close enough”. Most of the traits and powers of the monsters are workable and most seem like they’d be fun at the table. The damage seems to be about right and I saw almost no obvious conversion problems, such as referring to “Bluff” instead of “Deception”; this can be a huge problem when updating existing content, and it’s all but impossible to catch every reference.

The book contains no dragons or devils and only a single giant. And the two demons included are demon princes. I put that in the “pro” column, as I get tired of the mandatory sections with new demons, devils, giants, and dragons in every monster book. Those monsters get tired and derivative as the writers stretch to wriggle some new terrain or variant into the world.

The Bad

I’ll start with the nitpicky. There’s no index by terrain or environment. This is handy for random encounters. Because Fifth Edition Foes is emulating the Pathfinder statblock there is an entry for “Environment”, but this is awkward to use when looking for a quick swamp monster. (This would be an excellent web enhancement.)

Because the book uses the 3e OGL, the monster entries and stat blocks are formatted like Pathfinder’s. This isn’t too hard to understand, but if switching between the MM and this book, the different formatting slows down reading. It can be harder to quickly find the information you’re looking for. Using the legacy licence also means the writing style different than 5e, with terms like “tactical advantage” instead of just “advantage” and other small differences, like abbreviating Strength as “Str” rather than writing the full word. But this isn’t consistant and a few instances of plain ol’ “advantage” slip in. Again, not deal breaking but a bit of a hinderance to easy play.

There are some small mechanical problems, such as most of the grappling creatures omitting the escape DC. And monsters tend to have a lot more conditional immunities. All undead seem to be immune to fright and unconsciousness, which is not consistent with other 5e undead. And many powers that incapacitate don’t allow new saving throws each round like most 5e powers do, allowing monsters to stunlock characters.

Fifth Edition Foes repeats the Monster Manual‘s problem of lots of low CR monsters and fewer high CR monsters. In fact, there’s only ten monsters above CR 10, fewer than the MM. Admittedly, this is less of a problem in this edition where multiple low level monsters can challenge high level parties. However, one of the things I really wanted to to see from a secondary monster product is more high level opponents. Now, if this was a big book of legacy monsters – like the Monster Manual – it’d be more acceptable, as the established monsters need to be an expected level range (for adapting adventures) and you can’t omit classics just for new high level threats. But, as mentioned earlier, half the monsters in this book are newish, being pulled from other Tome of Horror volumes. The designers could have easily focused on higher CR threats and made this book more useful as the high level monster book. Instead, there is a wealth of low CR humanoids and mook creatures. I wonder if the focus was on low level monsters because the designers were uncomfortable designing for a level of play they had less experience running in this edition.

For all the classic monsters included there are a LOT of absences. I counted well over thirty absent monsters from the Fiend Folio alone, and there are likely many more from the 1e Monster Manual 2 and Dragon Magazine. These include such beasties as the disenchanter, huecuva, necrophidius, and nilbog just to name a few. Their omission seems glaring, especially with so many merely adequate new monsters, as if the publisher was saving some monsters for a Fifth Edition Foes II. I wasn’t a fan of that strategy from WotC during 4e and I’m less of a fan now.

The Ugly

I’ll be blunt: the art is ass. Necromancer games may advertise their books as “5th Edition rules, 1st Edition feel”, but what this book truly feels like is an early 3.0 Edition 3rd Party Product. This is because that’s exactly what it is! The art is entirely recycled from the prior Tome of Horrors line. Some pieces are over a decade old. Now, I didn’t mind the recycled art for the Tome of Horrors Complete because that was expected: it was a reprinting of older books. Reprinting the art is expected. (But, even then, some of the art was painfully low rez and detrimental to the quality of the book.) This product does not get to play the “reprint” card. Standards of minimum production values in an RPG book have increased over the years, even from small publishers.

The flavour text for the monsters was also not updated. The entries I checked were word-for-word what was written in the Tome of Horrors Complete, even when the page had lots of negative space remaining. Some entries are particularly short, such as the chaos knight, which has zero lore. There’s literally no information on their creation, backstory, legends, or place in the world. Part of what made the 5e Monster Manual such an excellent book was the focus on the monster’s lore and story. The book made you want to use the monsters, and not just for their funky powers. The fact the designers didn’t even try to increase the lore for many monsters is a big mark against this product.

The formatting is also poor. Several entries awkwardly continue between pages. This is irritating at the best of times but this book does so awkwardly, pushing the title of the next entry down the page. I’d prefer if any overlap filled a column, as that permits the reader to casually scan the top of the page and identify the header of the monster without having to move the eye down.

The innovations of 5e monster design are also largely ignored. Only one monster makes use of lair actions and only five monsters are legendary. 5e has demonstrated its system is adaptable when customizing monsters, such as the ash zombies from the starter set or the examples of monsters with added spellcasting or variant weapons in the Monster Manual. With that in mind, not every monster in Fifth Edition Foes deserves to be a new monster. We didn’t need a full page for the fetch when it just adds cold damage and immunity to a zombie and a little fire vulnerability. Similar could be said of the hanged man, corpsespun, olive slime zombie, gallows tree zombie, or yellow musk zombies. This is especially noteworthy with the final one, which is the same CR as a regular zombie. That’s five new monsters they could have included by just having a page of alternate zombie traits, or a sidebar on the monster’s entry.

And as a final irritant, the death dog appears in the book but is already in the 5e Monster Manual. Which is a pretty sloppy error and means one less new monster.

–edit–

It’s since been pointed out to me that the blood hawk, fire snake, and giant seahorse are also printed in the Monster Manual, meaning this book is short four monsters.

The Awesome

When they developed these monsters they opted for hard fights, rounding down CRs. If a monster was in-between a 4 and a 5 they went with 4, to give players a challenge. Because players are a resourceful lot. I like this, and it’s nice to have some scary monsters. I like that they didn’t play things safe.

I’m thankful his book exists for many monsters I think of as iconic. My first monster book was the 2e Monstrous Manual, so I associate creatures like the aurumvorax, crypt thing, catoblepas, leucrotta, quickwood, and wolfwere with D&D. They’re as much a part of D&D to me as the illithid and beholder (and more so than the assorted devils and demons, which were not part of that book). Often moreso, as it took me many years to add a mind flayer to my 2e game, and I never used a beholder, while the aurumvorax made a couple appearances.

A few of the new monsters are pretty neat. Like the grue, which is really a nerd joke that has taken on a life of its own. It’s earned its place as a monster. The bone cobbler sounds fun, as does the grimm and midnight peddler. (But I would have loved some more lore and hooks for these.)

Final Thoughts

Wizards of the Coast has said that they were holding back the Open Game License to give people time to digest the rules and learn how to make good products, so publishers would make better 3rd Party Products rather than rushing to get them out the door. I’ve been skeptical of the full truth of that statement, but Necromancer Games does demonstrate the logic in the idea.

A couple extra months would have done wonders Fifth Edition Foes.

A delay would have giving time for new art to be commissioned, new lore to be added, and some sombre through on the wisdom of having six freakin’ variant zombies in the book. It would have permitted more time to learn the rules, to be able to tighten monster powers. And it would have given more time to feel comfortable with high level play, allowing some more dangerous creatures to be written and playtested.

Fifth Edition Foes feels like it was rushed out the door to make the narrow window where it would have no competition with other 3rd Party Products (or even official accessories). Rather than trust the quality of their monsters and product, they opted to release now and cash in on the post-launch excitement for the edition, while fans are hungry for new content.

It’s a useful product. I don’t really regret my purchase. But I did opt to get the $20 PDF (pricey for a PDF) rather than the dead tree version (over twice as much), which helps mitigate my disappointment. There are monsters in the book that I will be happy to use, and monsters I wanted to use from the Tome of Horrors Complete but never found time to use. More monsters is always good. But in the end the book is a poor example of how to upgrade a product for 5th Edition, and that you cannot make a 5e product just by using compatible rules. An important lesson I hope Necromancer Games learns and other publishers take to heart.

Review: Princes of the Apocalypse

The second storyline (read: Adventure Path) for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons is called Elemental Evil, which focuses on the cults of several elemental princes and their efforts to take over the Forgotten Realms and further the will of Elder Elemental Eye. The major details of the adventure take place in the recently released super-adventure Princes of the Apocalypse.

What Is It

Princes of the Apocalypse is a 256-page hardcover book that encompasses all the relevant story for the Elemental Evil arc (excluding whatever is happening in the Neverwinter MMO or D&D Expeditions adventures, which are ostensibly related, but only in name and theme).

Of the 245-page book, 76 pages cover the actual adventure, which takes player characters from level 3 to level 13, a full 11 levels of play. There are also 22 pages describing the region where the adventure is set, with a good dozen pages on the town of Red Larch. There’s also 33 pages of magic items, along with a small section for players with the genasi race and spells. Curiously, after the main adventure there is a chapter of other mini-adventures that can take a character from level 1 to level 3 along with some sidequests to tuck between events in the main story.

The Good

Princes of the Apocalypse sets itself apart as a sandbox adventure, which is very different from Tyranny of Dragons and thus a nice change of pace from recent plot-heavy WotC adventures. The adventure provides a lot of hooks to quickly get players involved in the story and directed towards Red Larch; lots of clues to follow are important in a self-directed story. Sandboxes live or die based on adequate motivations. And there are several NPCs in Red Larch that can further motivate PCs to get involved in local affairs or reiterate hooks.

The starting town of Red Larch is very useful as a detailed starting town for many campaigns, although it is predominantly human (I counted two half-orcs, a half-elf, and a halfling). If you need a town and don’t have time (or the creativity) to make one yourself, Red Larch can serve that purpose and comes complete with maps and inhabitants. There is a nice gender mix of male and female NPCs, with not all the women fit into traditional (read: stereotypical) feminine roles in the town.

The location of the adventure was well chosen. It’s set near the famous cities of Neverwinter and Waterdeep, situating events close to familiar territory. And it’s easier to incorporate characters who started near those locations – such as PCs who were involved in Lost Mine of Phandelver from the D&D Starter Set. The region hasn’t seen much prior attention or been the location for previous adventures, despite having been on the maps since the early days of the Forgotten Realms. It was loosely described in several earlier products during 2nd Edition, and many of those details are incorporated into this product. It builds on the past, which is nice. It also feels like the adventure could take place in the era prior to the Time of Troubles as easily as the post-Sundering timeframe.

The adventure itself is comprised of lots of several smallish dungeons with a few side encounters, making it an easy source of inspiration for homebrew adventures. There are essentially thirteen independent dungeons, each giving a single level of experience (more or less). Even if uninterested in the Elemental Evil storyline, the book is useful for a zero-prep water-themed crypt or magma cavern.

I like how each dungeon or encounter locale begins with a summary of the area’s features, such as illumination, type of doors, height of ceilings, etc. This is very useful information to have singled out.

Most of the evil NPCs are given surprisingly lengthy roleplaying notes, even if they’re likely to be killed on sight. Lots of the mook NPCs are given names and not all will fight to the death. These are nice additions because you never know who the players are going to talk to or try and interrogate or convince to change sides. And it’s often nice to know how a villain will react in combat or how they will act while fighting.

The inclusion of the genasi race at the end of the book is also cool. While available in the free player PDF, it’s nice to have a hard copy, and the genasi are a fairly iconic D&D race. Plus there are several genasi NPCs in this adventure, so having racial information here is useful.

Speaking of free PDFs, there is a support document for the adventure on the Wizards of the Coast website that contains all the monsters, spells, and magic items used in this adventure that were not included with the Basic rules. This allows you to run this adventure with only the Basic rules document, so the only purchase required to play this adventure is the adventure book itself. It’s a nice, cheap way of getting into D&D and playing for many, many months.

The Bad

Princes of the Apocalypse is another cult adventure, just like Tyranny of Dragons. I imagine this is to allow the same threat to be present in multiple regions at the same time, to accommodate story overlap between the MMO and organized play. Even ignoring the “evil faith-based organization” aspect of the story, the motives of the cult are even identical: take over a region and open portals to bring their extraplanar master into the Forgotten Realms. This makes Elemental Evil feel samey and unoriginal. But if you didn’t play Tyranny of Dragons this is easy to ignore.

While the adventure can be played with just the Basic rules, the associated free PDF not mentioned in the book. This is a very foolish oversight. This is a totally nitpicky complaint, but something WotC should be aware of for future adventures.

The adventure is short. Including the set-up, there’s something like 100 pages of actual adventure. 160 if being generous and including the town and starter adventures. And the adventure barely covers 10 levels of play. With the additional side-quests and starter adventures, the adventure does run for 13 levels, but these are only tangentially related so it’s not really fair to call them part of the adventure.

Despite the short length (or possibly because of it and the related unforgiving experience requirements) there are a lot of random filler encounters. Rooms that just contain a monster for reasons of there being a monster. This does allow a lot of the iconic creatures from the Monster Manual to make an appearance, but most don’t really serve a purpose.

The text reads easily, as a monster’s statblock are called out through bolded text. So when the book says ogre it’s apparent that the DM should use the ogre statblock. This reads fairly inoffensively and naturally but does not make things easy to reference as no page number is given. Similarly, rooms are just described naturally with no game text to denote challenge or experience awarded. If you want to know if a room is Hard or Deadly you have to build the encounter yourself.

The adventure includes the five factions used for the Adventurer’s League, which feel tacked-on. These are there for the fraction of people running the adventure for organized play and stand out as odd for anyone else, especially those running the adventure in six months or two years or a decade. It stretches credulity that all five factions are operating in a small frontier town of six hundred people that is in the middle of nowhere on the long road to more nowhere. I would have prefered less attention on the factions and a conversion document for organized play detailing the factions and assigning them to NPCs.

One of the big hooks is the “Mirabar delegation”, a group of travellers that were heading south and passing through the valley. This whole hook is problematic. The distance between Mirabar and Red Larch is some 300+ miles, comparable to travelling between San Francisco and Los Angeles. This is a two-week journey pre-automobile. The delegation is missing and a month overdue, so the PCs are somewhat tasked with finding them. Except when someone is a month late following a two-week trip, you don’t dispatch adventurers to rescue them, you send people out to find the bodies because they’re almost certainly dead. This whole plotline is dragged out far, far too long. You rescue the final delegates in the last couple dungeon levels, ten levels after you started out trying to save them and potentially a month or two after the campaign started. Saving some travellers is a job for lower level adventures, not ones working to prevent an elemental prince forcing their way into the Realms. Saving all the delegates in the first chapter would have provided a nice mini-end (especially for people playing Organized Play) and groups could either have continued out of personal desires to save the world rather than the high level heroes still being tasked with rescuing people they’ve been trying to save since 3rd level. That said, beyond continuing to look for the delegates there are few solid hooks driving adventures into the lower tunnels. The players are really expected to care a heck of a lot about finding a couple missing people who haven’t been seen for 90 days.

It’s also very possible to find a lower temple before finishing the surface temples and for the party to wandering into a much higher level area. Such as 5th level characters wandering from Sacred Stone Monastery into the Temple of Black Earth or stumbling from the 6th level Temple of Howling Hatred to the 10th level Fane of the Eye. It’s not incredibly obvious that they’re “changing zones” and facing deadlier opponents. Let alone having to backtrack to progress in the story, or remembering the entrance to the Fane was in a tunnel you passed three dungeons ago.

For a dungeon crawl, the adventure is solely lacking in traps and puzzles. The only puzzle I recall standing out was in one of the side quests and was solved as much by Intelligence checks as player cunning.

The absence of online maps is irritating. This is most frustrating for regional maps, which are needed as player handouts in a sandbox adventure like this one. Wizards of the Coast has not provided art galleries for this adventure or Tyranny of Dragons. The maps are available from the artists’ web stores here and here, but these become pricey quickly and it’s easy to spend  almost as much buying digital maps and the physical book.

The Ugly

Despite having a lengthy description of the town, I can’t find a reference to the population of Red Larch. This is a frustrating omission. Thankfully, there’s an article on the Forgotten Realms wiki puts the population at 600, but this is pre-Spellplague and thus two Realms Shaking Events out of date.

Princes of the Apocalypse ends with 5 pages of concept art, which feels like a waste of pages. Originally, this book was going to be paired with a second book, the Adventurer’s Handbook, but this was cancelled; it’s assumed some of the content of the latter book was moved into this PotA. I imagine these pages are literal filler to hit the proper page count necessary for printing.

Similarly, the pre-adventures are all kinds of awkward. They’re positioned curiously in the book, being after the main adventure when many are set prior. Many would have been better if they were positioned between chapters or folded into the main plot. I suspect this content was a late addition, added to expand this book and make it more worth the $50 price tag or to insert material written for the Adventurer’s League. Still, if the product was always to begin with higher level PCs, it would be easier to assume level 4-5 PCs and direct people to the Starter Set and Lost Mines of Phandelver for those levels, freeing up several pages for more relevant adventure material or monsters or the other PC races.

None of the NPCs is the book use personality traits (flaws, bonds, ideals, etc). Given the focus on roleplaying as “the third pillar” in this edition, it’s problematic to ignore the keywords designed to accommodate and assist RPing. This is especially problematic with the wealth of NPCs in Red Larch, who often don’t have a detailed personality.

Red Larch is flawed and incomplete. The book give everyone a one-sentence description but many have no motivation or aspirations being just “grumpy” or “idealistic”. Far more time is spent on providing adventure hooks to the optional pre-adventure adventures than is spent on the townsfolk’s personalities. This leaves Red Larch feeling a little flat and static: it’s not a living town, it’s a settlement that doesn’t really exist when not being interacted with by the PCs. No one in Red Larch has a relationship with the other townsfolk. There are no love triangles, failed romances, rivalries, feuds, and the like. If the PCs bond with the local innkeeper –  Kaylessa Irkell, the “fortyish matriarch of her family and a pleasant, sturdy woman” – they can’t help her take over Mother Yalantha’s Boarding House, or convince Nahaeliya Drouth to lower her prices for Irkell, or helping Irkell work up the courage to woo Feng Ironhead.

The earth cult were the group who captured the delegates, setting events in motion. The cult set them to work in their mines, despite the Cult of the Black Earth viewing “mines, quarries, and tilled fields as insults imposed upon the living rock”, which seems akin to having a group of evil Rabbis kidnap people to work on a pig farm. There doesn’t even seem to be a reason for the mine. No ore is referenced and the monastery is right atop the Temple of Black Earth so space isn’t an issue. And the earth cult has a bond with burrowing creatures like ankhegs, bulette, and umber hulks. Why in the name of almighty Odin did they kidnap a dozen commoners?!

Which really leads to the biggest complaint: the plot of the adventure is ass. Really, there is no plot. There are characters running around doing things and stuff happens but there’s no unfolding story. A drow named Vizeran DeVir – aka Sir Does Not Appear in this Adventure – created four elemental magic weapons. Then he just left them lying around and buggered off. Why? No idea. Where? No idea. The weapons call four elemental prophets who then come to the region and form elemental cults that proceed to cause problems with the weather, abduct people, and drawing all kinds of attention to themselves for no real benefit.  There doesn’t seem to be any reason for the prophets not to just keep quiet and open their portals to summon their elemental princes into the world. Unlike the Cult of the a Dragon, there’s nothing witten into the adventure stopping them from opening portals it in day one, weeks before the campaign started. There’s not even a flimsy handwaving excuse.

The Awesome

The adventure includes an assortment of adventure hooks to motivate the PCs. There are a good 21 hooks provided that tie into various parts of the adventure. These have the interesting mechanic of granting inspiration for completing key tasks, which is a love use of the inspiration mechanic. It’s a nice way of rewarding the completion of a person quest without awarding more experience or giving an unbalancing or permanent boon. (Although, 21 is a LOT of hooks, likely too many, even for a campaign with high PC turnover. And such an odd number too; stopping at 20 and numbering them would have made it easy to randomize with a d20 roll.)

The book ends with some solid advice on converting the adventure to Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Greyhawk, and Eberron. This includes suggestions on where to situate the adventure, how to adjust the story and villains, and even includes replacements for the five factions. These were very well written and really seemed to focus on the tone of the settings. Some effort and world lore was put into this section. It’s a great way of offsetting the criticism that WotC is only focusing on the Realms. And it’d be easy to move PotA to Greyhawk and run it as the third part of an Elemental Evil trilogy (following Temple of Elemental Evil and Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil).

The adventure includes statblocks for four of the elemental princes, who range in challenge  from 18 to 20. It’s always nice to have more end bosses and higher level threats.

I adore the adventure’s use of quickly modified monsters, such as an eyeless umberhulk with metal claws or the various monsters with variant weapons. Rather than a completely different monster with revised statblock the adventure just includes the different attack entry. It’s a very elegant method of adding variety, but also provides enough information that you don’t need to work out the math or attack numbers yourself. There are also the environmentally tweaked monsters, such as the magma roper or the aquatic ghouls & ogres who can breathe underwater and gains a swim speed. They don’t create a seperate monster statblock for the lacedon (aka the aquatic ghoul), choosing not to fill a quarter of a page when a single half-sentence does the job.

5e has long advertised that it is going to be a lower magic game. This adventure demonstrates this. While there are various magic items spread throughout the adventure, many are consumables or what was formerly known as “wondrous items”. There are all of 5-6 magic weapons in the adventure (excluding the four evil plot items) and all of a different types. There aren’t, for example, five magic longswords. A far cry from awarding a half-dozen magical items each and every level.

The evil elemental cult are presented as reactive and don’t just sit in their dungeon waiting for the PCs to come and thwack them. Text is provided for how the cult reacts to the PCs once they’ve earned a reputation, and there are replacement encounters for slain defenders, and there are a number of responsive actions for the cultists to make. Between delves there might be small encounters as the surviving cults try and start some trouble. Once one of the four prophets has been slain the others change location and move elsewhere. And the final prophet – the cumulative Big Bad – depends on the order the PCs assault the cults.

I enjoy the encounters of varying difficulty. Not every monster is exactly at the party’s level providing the precise expected challenge and the party isn’t just going to play through the regimented 3-5 encounters each day of appropriate difficulty. There’s a lot of lower challenge monsters that might wear down opponents or are given the opportunity to be challenging in ways other than their statblock.

The book also features the return of 4th Edition elemental archons, now called “myrmidon”. These elemental people were pretty key during 4e. While 4e was not my favourite edition, I don’t like all its creations being shoved to the side, especially when they filled a niche (similarly, I would have liked at least once reference to the elemental prices as “primordials”).

Final Thoughts

Princes of the Apocalypse is simple. The adventure is a kinda-sorta sandbox. The players can wander wherever they want, and the all-in-one nature of the book really helps it be a complete sandbox. However, the challenge of the dungeons really assumes a linear progression, but this isn’t obvious and there’s little accommodating players wandering into higher level territory. The adventure is only a sandbox in that the players get to choose the order of the dungeon crawls as there’s precious few overland encounter areas and no reason to explore the wide open map.

There’s some small plotlines strung throughout the book but, really, the story comes down to “bad guys in dungeon need to be made dead.” The characters might have lengthy backstories and villains personality but no one is really doing anything. Not really. The villains don’t have a larger scheme or an end goal beyond being evil. The adventure feels… amateurish. The design mistakes feel like ones a rookie DM would make. The “story” is really just a series of encounters that lurches towards a conclusion and the NPCs are a bunch colourful characters that exist in a quantum limbo until adventurers interact with them and then they vanish until needed again.

However, the problems of the adventure aren’t insurmountable. Random encounters (from the provided tables) can fill in the vast gaps in the overland map, and some handwaving can justify the lack of an end goal/ plot. And the book provides a dozen complete and independent dungeons complete with read aloud descriptions separate from the monsters that can be mined for ideas. It’s basically Dungeon Delve with thematic ties between the series of otherwise unrelated dungeons. All the heavy work has been done, and the adventure can largely be fixed on the fly. And if your players are the sort to like a series of back-2-back dungeon crawls they’ll likely be happily oblivious to the static NPCs and ineffectual villains, rendering most of my criticisms moot.

Postscript

One last criticism of  Princes of the Apocalypse stands out, but it feels unfair to mention this with the other complaints, as it’s unrelated to the adventure itself. But it’s still worth noting.

On its own, Princes of the Apocalypse would just be an unremarkable adventure. A simple series of dungeon crawls. In tone it’s arguably classic or – dare I say it – old school.

However, WotC is currently on a story kick, really emphasising their storylines and promising a renewed focus on adventures. But there’s not really any story here. There’s almost certainly no story connections between Princes of the Apocalypse and the Elemental Evil storylines in the Adventurer’s League or the Neverwinter MMO beyond the shared bad guy. But that’s like saying Batman and The Dark Knight are part of the same storyline because both feature the Joker. It doesn’t inspire confidence with their future efforts.

Pathfinder Review: Pathfinder Unchained

This year’s spring hardcover release for the Pathfinder Roleplaying game line is Pathfinder Unchained where the game supposedly sheds its pretences of backwards compatibility with the 3.5 Edition of “the world’s oldest roleplaying game” (aka Dungeons & Dragons) and lets the designers cut loose.

What Is It

Pathfinder Unchained is a 256-page hardcover book for the Pathfinder Roleplaying game. When Pathfinder was launched almost six years ago, it was advertised as being backwards compatible with 3.5e, so the wealth of books already owed by fans of that game would still be useful. And Pathfinder was, more or less, compatible. However, this backwards compatibility has proven to be somewhat of a liability and a lot of the problems with Pathfinder can be traced back to mechanics people knew were problematic but didn’t want to change because that would break books.

This book was pitched as breaking the backwards compatibility and doing things Pathfinder could have done if it had not tied itself to an established ruleset. It’s a big book of optional and variant rules evoking thoughts of Unearthed Arcana for D&D. There are changes to classes, multiclassing, skills, and the like along with new subsystems designed to change how the game is played in varying degrees. Or, as one of the designers put it:

This book is not a second edition of Pathfinder. Nor is it intended to be a “rules light” or “essentials” version of Pathfinder.

This book is designed to let the design team play with the rules in a way that we have not been able to before, revisiting some old designs and tinkering with parts of the game that are otherwise considered “sacred” parts of the system.

The Classes

At the forefront of the book are four revised classes, three being updated for balance reasons and one for playability. Because the new classes are the big selling point of the book I’ve reviewing them each individually.

Barbarian: The biggest changes to the barbarian is how rage works. Rather than changing ability scores (which adjust a lot of the character’s math) the barbarian just gains a bonus to attacks, damage, and Will saves, and gains temporary hit points. Many of the barbarian’s rage powers are also revised, being on for the duration for a rage once activated rather than requiring more resource management and tracking.

It’s an okay change but it does potentially weaken the barbarian. Because their extra hit points are temporary, barbarians no longer risk death when dropping out of rage cannot benefit from healing during their rage. And the unchained barbarian isn’t better at using Strength-based skills or making Fortitude saves.

It seems odd to have an entirely different presentation for the class when they could have just had a half-dozen rage powers and an alternate form of rage over a two-page spread. There’s honestly fewer changes between this barbarian and the core barbarian than there were between the 3.5e and Pathfinder barbarian. They could have easily had a few variant class features for other classes in space it took to reprint the entire barbarian and all its unaffected abilities. Perhaps such as a tweaked cleric or fighter.

Monk: The monk has often been considered a weak class. They’re meant to be the best at fighting unarmed but have a medium Base Attack Bonus and their signature ability further reduces their ability to hit. They’re also a melee class with poorish AC that has a d8 Hit Dice making them very squishy. They also suffered from “mutual attribute dependency” (or MAD because gamers love silly acronyms), which means monks needed lots of high ability scores: a good Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and Wisdom.

Unlike the barbarian, the unchained monk has a lot of changes. It now has d10 Hit Dice, full BAB, and their signature move – flurry of blows – is just an extra attack. Monks are now super accurate. Many of the common monk powers are now folded into Ki powers, giving monks more choices each level and different monks will have different abilities. But it’s easy to build a monk with familiar powers at familiar levels. There’s also the addition of style strike, which are a straight up bonus power to add onto attacks.

Unfortunately, to balance with the better hitpoints, accuracy, and new powers the monk loses its good Will save. This doesn’t hurt too much as the monk should still have a decent Wisdom score. However, nothing in the new monk makes them less MAD as heck. Its pool of ki points is still low and there’s no way to replenish them during the day (like gunslinger grit), and its fast movement power still doesn’t stack with haste, arguably one of the most common buff spells in the game. And because of the changes to the class it doesn’t mesh well with existing archetypes, unlike the rogue and the barbarian.

This monk still feels weaker than the brawler and the improvements didn’t always go far enough.

Rogue: Another weak class, the rogue has two major changes. The first is the addition of finesse training that basically gives the rogue the weapon finesse feat for free and allows them to use their Dexterity in place of the Strength for damage. I like this change because using rapiers and daggers made sense for rogues and requiring a feat to do so was just a feat tax. The rogue also gains the debilitating injury power, which lets them stack a condition atop their sneak damage.

The problem with the unchained rogue is that it possesses the same weakness as a normal rogue: when it can’t deal sneak damage it’s not very effective or useful in combat. The unchained rogue isn’t given any more tools to gain sneak attack damage. And the rogue is still ineffective at range have virtually no baked-in methods of reliably gaining sneak damage with a bow or thrown weapon.

Summoner: The core summoner was what I like to describe as “OMFGWTF broken”. Monster summoning spells are among the best in the game for its versatility, allowing damage mitigation, offence, crowd control, and utility. And the summoner’s eidolon is a potent force all on its own being comparable to an entire melee PC in terms of power. The unchained summoner is meant to weaken the class and bring it in line with other classes.

It fails.

The unchained summoner does get nerfed. But it’s only nerfed to broketastic. Very little about the summoner actually changes, just the eidolon. It seems odd to reprint the entire class when just printing the pre-built eidolon types would have worked. But the eidolons are only somewhat reduced in power, losing the ability to pick and choose all its evolutions. But the base powers are still pretty potent and while they removed options like extra arms it’s still easy to give an eidolon multiple attacks at first level. The eidolon is merely comparable to a druid’s animal companion.  Which just means the summoner is probably closer to being in line with the curve setting classes like the druid and hunter.

However, the summoner retains its potent spell-like ability to cast summon monster as a standard action 3+Cha times per day, and keep the summoned monster around for minutes. This alone makes the class potent even if its eidolon is built as a non-combat skill user. It means the summoner is always walking around with 6+ extra spells of their highest level, albeit ones limited to a spell they’re focused on casting anyway.

Also, given the summoner is fixing poor quality content released by Paizo it’s annoying that we need to pay for it. Having it printed here while also offering a free summoner PDF for anyone who just owns the Advanced Player’s Guide would be nice, especially since they likely want to encourage Pathfinder Society players to switch over and mandating people buy a $40 book is not easy.

The Good

There’s an option for fractional attack bonuses from classes. This is mostly useful for multiclass characters who might suffer from accuracy problems when taking multiple classes with lower accuracy. While not useful for all characters there are some builds and archetypes that benefit from the slight boost to base attack bonuses, such as arcane trickster types that mix magic users with rogues.

There’s a neat option for staggered advancement, which breaks up the benefits for gaining a level into smaller packages. This allows characters to have regular advancement without gaining levels at a crazed rate. It’d be very possible to advance after every session. Dividing things into quarters seems a little much when standard advancement is closer to a level every three sessions, so thirds might have worked better. As it is there’s a lot of sub-levels where nothing is gained.

The book includes quite a few changes to the skill systems. One option divides skills into adventuring and background skills. It’s very true that not all skills are equally useful while adventuring and I’ve had a few DMs grant bonus skill ranks for a background occupation. This seems to be an extension of this, codifying which skills are essentially for flavour and granting additional ranks to be spent on those skills. It certainly makes characters more rounded and less focused on being a murderhobo. This option even includes a couple new skills: artistry and lore. I’m a sucker for giving characters more, well, character.

While fighters and most other melee characters don’t receive an update, the book includes a new mechanic: stamina pool. This is your standard fatigue based resource that allows you to use special attacks at a cost. And if you expend all your stamina you become fatigued. The implementation of this is excellent and there are options for adding it to your game. Stamina is effectively gained via a feat which can be taken normally, granted free to some or all classes, or be restricted to fighters. Stamina is also tied to existing combat feats, so it’s effortlessly added to existing games with new stamina tricks being learned when combat feats are taken. It’s really slick. And it’s a nice little option for people who want fighters to be able to do things other than just attack.

There’s a few interesting ways of altering magic included in the book. Limited magic is a workable method for making spells less potent, removing the automatic scaling for spells. It also pairs nicely with the overclocking option later in the book where spellcasters can make a check to improve their magical power. I do find the name “overclocking” to be unfortunately anachronistic and would have liked something more flavourful, such as what they might call the option in-world.

The Bad

The absence of a conversion guide for the classes is frustrating. It would have been nice to having something pointing out the small changes that might be missed (like the changes to the monk’s proficiencies). This might have included advice on converting archetypes to the new class.

The art in the book is mostly uninspired. Most of the artwork is just people, the standard body shots of the iconic characters in somewhat relevant poses. It’s a little bland and becomes samey. I’m much more fond of larger pieces of art with backgrounds and scenery, implying a story of events unfolding. In most of the class sections the art is sparse with just the typical shot of the iconic character and then page after page of text. The later sections are less bland as they often give the random iconic something to do other than just striking a pose, but there’s a lot of truly generic pieces.

I’m less fond of the consolidated skills option, which lumps several skills together. This creates the same flaw as 4th Edition D&D where all Dexterity or Strength actions can almost be considered part of a skill (Acrobatics and Athletics respectively). This pretty much removes ability checks from the game as there’s practically nothing you can do with a Strength check that you cannot justify Athletic skill improving. With the exception of Intelligence, it’s a little too easy to just take all the skills that use your key ability score and throw bonuses at that like a game of mathematic horseshoes. The consolidated skills option also makes some curious choices, such as grouping Perception and Sense Motive, which were already almost must-have skills. Grouping them makes a skill so useful it’s almost foolish not to take.

There are a number of options that play with magic items. One is  inherent bonuses, which replaces some of the wealth gained each level with static bonuses. This is basically a math patch that replaces the six mandatory items all PCs must have (cloak of resistance, ring of protection, amulet of natural armour, a magic weapon and armour, and a item that boosts your key stat). I tried this in one of my games and my players found it lacking, as the bonuses were set and there were no choices. After all, lots of characters (especially ones who stay out of melee) might choose to forego one of the defensive items or delay its purchase. The chart also and favours spellcasters, prioritizing mental stats over physical, so all fighters and barbarians get to boost their Intelligence or Wisdom before their Strength. There are also no bonuses to skills, metamagic rods, pearls of power, etc. These items are equally “bland” but often seen as just as mandatory. While the section advises you to halve treasure awarded when using the table it also says you can skip magic items altogether and award bonuses from the chart as if the characters were two levels higher, it doesn’t give advice on how much gold should be awarded in this situation. The later levels of the chart also just throw out bonuses to character like they were candy, emphasising just how ridiculous the wealth gained at the end game is. It’s extremely unsatisfying and problematic for a fix to one of the most controversial and unpopular elements of the 3.X game system: assumed wealth-by-level and the magic item Christmas Tree.

There are a few options for tweaking alignment, which feel very much like an overlap with Ultimate Campaign, which handled that option better and in more detail. This bit just feels like content that didn’t make it into that product and was added here as filler.

The Ugly

The name of this book is just terrible. The hook is that this is what Pathfinder could be if “unchained” from the legacy of D&D, but that requires you knowing the history of Pathfinder and legacy of 3.5 as well as the intent of the book. Any time you need to explain the title you’ve failed. Plus, the full title (Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Pathfinder Unchained) is super awkward. It really feels like a committee name where they couldn’t settle on a simpler name and this was the only one everyone objected to the least. “How about Pathfinder Unleashed'” “No, sounds to fetishy. Pathfinder Unlocked?” “That seems a little rogue-centric. Pathfinder Unchained?” “It’s 4am. Good enough.”

The Pathfinder action economy is tricky with its three types of action (standard, move, and swift) and players often seeking to use all three to avoid “wasting” their swift action. There’s a revised action economy that replaces these with three actions, each of which can be used to attack, move, or perform other acts. It doesn’t particularly simplify things, being a lateral change in complexity: instead of having to remember what was a swift or standard action or what replaced an attack or not, the player will need to remember how many acts an action takes. This effectively makes things even *more* slow since characters will be even more hesitant to leave an action unused. This would be fine if things were balanced but the system is full of holes. The Vital Strike feat becomes much more appealing, and feinting in combat is suddenly much easier allowing rogues to feint and attack at level 1.

There are a couple of options tied to removing iterative attacks. Iteratives are a clunky part of the game, being slow (as a character makes multiple attacks and a player adds many dice together using different numbers). And there are diminishing returns as later iteratives just have too low of bonuses to be of use. However, this replacement option seem unnecessarily complex, requiring math not only to calculate if an attacked hits but then math to figure out how many attacks. A player is less likely to be able to just say they hit (based on a high roll) and rattle out damage but instead waits on the DM. This option also favours monsters whose base attack bonus goes up faster than their CR. The total number of monster attacks are also capped, but this requires some funky math to calculate.

There are variants for diseases and poison, which mirror the disease tracks of 4th Edition D&D. It’s an interesting bit of parallel design. (Especially curious since 5th edition moved away from those changes.) Instead of impacting stats or having specific effects the disease progress along a set track that imposes penalties. Only this option feels worse than the 4e implementation as they use the same tracks for all disease and poisons, making them all feel rather samey. Poison also feels less frightening regardless of a character’s dump stats. Because poisons only last for a set duration, it’s much, much harder to die from poison, even if it requires consecutive saves to shake off the poison. If you can save a couple times it’s not possible to reach the final stage and die. This alternate system also doesn’t fix the problem of poison becoming useless at high levels as creatures outlevel the save DC.

The book ends with the chapter on simple monster design. Pathfinder monsters are complex, using many of the same rules as PCs for gaining feats, ability scores, and the like. This new “simple” monster creation fills  47-pages of the book, opposed to the roughly 30 in the Bestiary for more complicated monster design (and much of those 30-pages also include the glossary of abilities which are used in the simple monsters as well). The simple monster design has the same problems as 4e monsters, in that it makes all monsters of the same challenge have roughly the same numbers. Only it’s worse since there’s three varieties for each challenge rather than six. It makes monsters rather samey. You no longer need lots of monsters or additional Bestiaries, you just need one statblock of each type from CR ½ to 30 for 93 monsters in total and adjust a couple scores on the fly and add a couple special abilities. It’s super bland, especially for a combat heavy game like Pathfinder.

I say monsters are “samey” but there is some variability, but it is not handled well. There’s a few suggestions for adjusting the numbers to reflect the monsters powers but it is not consistent or universally applied. For example, incorporeal creatures take half damage from most attacks and should have reduced hit points to account for this, but don’t so they effectively have twice the hit points of other creatures of their CR.

The simple monster creation also equates HD with CR, which seems off as the later increases much more quickly. Saving throws are also curiously high; these monsters are unlikely to fail many saves and don’t have the poor saving throw of most monsters. It also drops the ability scores in favour of just the modifiers, which has always seemed like a good idea for a change, but is something D&D couldn’t get away with (due to it being a familiar sacred cow). It’s certainly something a revised edition of Pathfinder could do.

There’s a lot of subsystems and variant rules I would have like to seen that this book doesn’t cover. A variant on Bluff and Diplomacy would have been nice. There’s no variants on critical hits or addition of fumble rules. While the simple monsters remove 1-18+ ability scores there’s no option for doing that for PCs and how to roll or buy stats. While this book is Pathfinder’s Unearthed Arcana, that book was open content and there are lots of options from that book which were not included and remain unconverted to Pathfinder. Including such gems as spell points, core classes as prestige classes (prestige bard and prestige paladin), facing or hex grids, complex skill checks, and the options of gestalt & generic classes. Or even classless play.

Lastly, most of the options in the book only add complexity to Pathfinder, which is already a heavily complex game. It would have been nice to have options designed to speed up play or build characters. There’s only a couple (like simplified spellcasting) that make it easier to play, and only for certain characters.

The Awesome

The skill unlocks subsystem is neat. This grants little extra abilities after gaining a set number of ranks in a skill. It’s a fun way to encourage gaining ranks in certain skills and grant little mechanical perks outside of feats and class features.

I rather like the variant multiclassing rules. In this subsystem you forgo every other feat and instead gain a class feature from your alternate class. This is a handy little option for players that want to mix different classes but where the mechanics are less compatible or a full dip is undesirable. It’s also nice for players who just want fewer feats. Pathfinder has a lot of feats and picking through the list can be a chore, and this provides a nice alternative.

I had a GM who would have loved the wound thresholds system, which applies penalties after you lose a  certain amount of hit points. It’s often been said that hp is weird in that you’re always fighting at 100% capacity even when near death. The system doesn’t work well at low levels (the thresholds of a level 2 cleric might be 15/11/7/3 so it it after just 5 damage the characters  has -1 penalties to a bunch of things)  and I wonder if the penalties might have been better starting at 1/2 and 1/4 hp than at 3/4. But that’s an easy house rule.

The simplified spellcasting optional rule is handy for high level play. Full casters can be a bear with dozens of prepared spells and slots to track. This reduces the number of low level spell slots to worry about, so the player just has to focus on their high level spells. It might also mitigate the waves of buffing high level casters can perform before combats.

The book also has wild magic. This is always cool.

I’m curious about dynamic magic item creation, which seems like an interesting little minigame. I’m intrigued by the idea and think it’s rather cool, but I’d really have to see it in play first before I decide if it works or is just a neat idea. Magic item creation in Pathfinder can be a bit rote, so anything that shakes it up and makes things interesting is fun. Although, I do worry that this minigame will focus too much on a single character. And it works best in lower magic game, otherwise the tasks will be done over and over again as the player creates their twenty-fourth magic item to complete the Christmas Tree set.

Related to the dynamic magic item creation are magic item perks, quirks, and flaws. These are just darn fun and easy to implement even if the dynamic system isn’t used.

Final Thoughts

Pathfinder Unchained is the book that breaks the chains connecting Pathfinder to the game systems that came before! Or not. Honestly, there’s not much that seems to veer away from backwards compatibility more than any other optional ruleset. And when you compare the Unchained monk and barbarian with the variants featured in Unearthed Arcana they seem positively safe in their compatibility. Other than the simple monster creation, very little really seems to be “unchained” and very few sacred cows of D&D are slaughtered. Most of the optional rules in this book fell, well, safe. I was much more impressed by the creativity that went into Unearthed Arcana, with options that really felt like they were presenting a very different take on the game that was still compatible with the d20.

I’m also uncertain how much use people will get use out of a book changing the Pathfinder rules. The edition is fairly old now, which adds a couple complications. First, there’s fewer and fewer people starting new campaigns and established games are unlikely to implement game-changing house rules. And after so long players comfortable with changing the rules have done so long ago. The 3e ruleset is now 14 years old, and many people are pretty darn proficient at hacking the system. These people don’t really *need* a book of optional rules. Very little of the book is legal for Pathfinder Society organized play, even the bits that would be of great use and easily implemented (fractional attack bonuses, skill unlocks, feat multiclassing, simplified spellcasting, and the stamina pool).

Books of optional rules are tricky to recommend at best. You’re very unlikely to use more than two or three of these optional rule systems at a single time, so the book is expensive for the amount of content in it being consumed. Realistically speaking though, outside of the Core Rulebook the amount of content actually used in a given accessory might not be that much more; I’ve probably used all of two pages from Ultimate Magic.

What I find most interesting – and rather unnerving – is the number of rules in this book that evoke feelings of 4th Edition D&D, the game Pathfinder was created as an alternative towards. The multiclassing and compiled skill variants resemble 4e, as do the simplified monster rules and disease tracks. It’s interesting to think that Pathfinder might be evolving into a very similar game as 4e, albeit years later, with the designers trying to fix the same problems in the same ways, and it will be interesting to see how this book informs the probably Pathfinder Revised Edition.