Completed: Desolation Island

After a break of several weeks for vacation, "Isles of Dread" resumed today with a big showdown with the Survivalist faction. After a hard-fought battle the party emerged victorious, defeating and capturing the Survivalists and driving off the traitor Kellen Son of Kærn. However, in the battle the Survivalists' stores were destroyed, including almost all of the gunpowder supplies.

The party now embark on an exploration of the rest of the Isles in Part Three of the campaign. What mysteries may lie beyond their temporary home? And will Kellen re-emerge to threaten them again?

2023 is not D&D's Year

There is still a long way to go, but right now it is looking like 2023 is not to be D&D's year. The year started with comments from within Hasbro that the brand was under-monetized (meaning they wanted more money for no more investment), coupled with other statements that they were "betting big" on the brand.

WotC then promptly declared war on their own consumer base with the OGL fiasco, leading to an humiliating defeat, a complete reversal, and indeed the release of key parts of their IP under a Creative Commons license.

The second part of their big bets was the D&D movie which, despite positive reviews, appears to have made a fairly sizeable loss. So that's not looking too healthy. (Still, at least it's not the toxic bin fire that was the older movies!)

The upcoming slate of products for 2023 is, frankly, anemic and unimpressive. There's only one that is of even marginal interest... and that interest drops with every etail they reveal.

Meanwhile, the final strand of their big bets are the development of "One D&D" - a massive investment into a Virtual Tabletop just as the end of the pandemic removes the demand for such a thing, and a new version of the game that is looking more and more like "D&D 5e 2nd Edition" - a version of the game that changes a load of mechanics that people were mostly happy with, fails to tackle the underlying issues in a creaking system, and makes a whole bunch of lore changes to pacify people who largely don't play the game, will be mostly oblivious to them, and anyway have no real intention of being appeased.

Frankly, at this point if I were a Hasbro exec, I would be taking a really close look at it, with a view to trying to cut my losses. Because 2023 isn't likely to be a success for the brand, and 2024 ain't looking too hot either.

Character Building and the Three Pillars

Following on from my previous post, one other big change I would make to character creation in D&D (that they definitely won't be making, worse luck) would be to have the character's class determine how they interface with the Combat pillar of the game and everything else about the character (ancestry, feats, proficiencies, even sub-class) determine how the character interface with the Exploration and Social pillars.

The key consequences here are that every character will be useful in combat (which is, frankly, the core experience of D&D) and every character will also be useful outside of combat. Furthermore, this means that you don't ever have to choose between eking out every possible combat bonus or being useful in the social or exploration arenas.

But, as I said, that's definitely not the way they'll be going. Having cleverly identified the three pillars of the game (albeit not actually knowing what one of those is), they've made sure to focus just about everything on one of them.

No More Half-elves?

Apparently, with the move to One D&D, WotC have decided to remove half-elves and half-orcs as 'species' options in their own right - players will be advised to choose whichever of human and elf/orc makes for the closer match for their character, and go with that. (This does have the advantage that it makes half-dwarves, half-halflings, elf-dwarves, or whatever trivially easy to handle.)

On the one hand, I'm not keen on this approach - for all that it's probably driven by their drive to remove problematic material, it feels like they're doing it by erasure of mixed-race folk, which seems rather counter-productive. Plus, of course, every edition of the game that has removed half-orcs has failed abysmally. (And I would prefer not to have orcs as a PC race. But that ship has long since sailed.)

On the other hand, I'm inclined to think that a better approach to mixed species in general would be to introduce "elf heritage" traits alongside each species description, allowing people to mix and match species as they go (and even allow those to be selected later to handle "discovered heritages" during play).

But, actually, I'm now coming to the view that the thing to do with species is to remove it from the mechanical expression of a character entirely. Instead, transfer all the various racial traits (darkvision and the like) into feats/advantages/traits/whatever, and then allow the player to choose from the wider list as they want. The character can then be described as belonging to any of the species (or a mix of any of the species) that exist in the setting.

(Ultimately, I don't think it matters if Gimli has darkvision because of his dwarven heritage, Geralt has darkvision because of his mutations, or Arya has darkvision because of her mystical training - it's the same trait, and all justifications work. And, likewise, one could easily argue that a dwarf who has lived his whole life on the surface may lack darkvision entirely, as it has atrophied with time.)

How Can It End Like This?

I'm finding myself increasingly dissatisfied with my current campaign - I'm convinced that the concept is good, I'm happy with the preparation I've done, and it's actually playing out in an entirely sensible manner given the material. And yet... meh. Something about it just isn't working for me.

I suspect that part of the issue is that the starting phases of D&D 5e are just naturally slow, because the characters are so squishy. And while those stages are also short, that's only true with something approaching a normal play cadence. As it is, we're grinding through week after week of the PCs at level 2, and they're constantly out of their depth. Which is a shame.

(Plus, all my best material is in the third part of the campaign, which kicks off soon. Maybe things will get better?)

But that's all an issue - I'm pretty certain that this is my final D&D campaign, possibly ever and certainly for a very long time. I'd really hoped to go out on a high, but this is really starting to feel like a damp squib. It's just a real shame.

(Indeed, had I known, I would have been better ending after the previous campaign - that one ended very well, and would have made for an ideal capstone. Oh well.)

Paranormal Power

One last review for a while...

I've always been a fan of psionics, at least in principle. And given that two of my favourite settings, Dark Sun and Eberron, were built assuming that psionics are present, I've always found those somewhat lacking in editions that don't have that support - notably including 5e.

So when a Kickstarter for a small psionics book was launched, I decided to jump on it. "Paranormal Power" is the result, which I received in PDF form.

I should note that due to a computer freeze I don't currently have access to the book, so I'm writing this from memory.

This was a short book of ~65 pages, with a decent amount of art. That art was AI-generated in the initial version, though my understanding is that it is in the process of being replaced with human-generated works instead. But lacking a critical eye, my view was that the art was fine - like all RPG art, it does the job, and then my interest ends.

The game material contains all the things you might expect: a new heritage (race), a new class, new subclasses for all the existing classes, some new spells and magic items, and some new monsters. And, crucially, a psionics system and the accompanying powers.

And it's all fine - good, solid material that I would have absolutely no qualms about allowing into any "Level Up" game I was ever to run. It's a really good work.

But...

My one concern with the book is that it very definitely is a "Level Up" book. And while "Level Up" claims to be 5e-compatible, and consequently so too should be "Paranormal Power", I find myself very hesitant to cross the streams. And where books like the "Dungeon Delver's Guide" include conversion notes for vanilla 5e, this book does not.

That's a very small quibble, but it does affect my recommendation somewhat. Which is as follows: if you like psionics and you're running "Level Up", I highly recommend this book. If you like psionics and you're running 5e, I'd consider it only if you're happy with blending material from LU into your games - this probably isn't the first book with which to do that. And, of course, if you don't like psionics then skip this one - there's nothing for you here.

And having said all that, I will be looking out for the author's name (Rachel Williamson) on future products, either under her own imprint or for other publishers, because this is a solid product that suggests other good things may be yet to come.

The Restart

After a fairly long hiatus for Christmas (and other things), the campaign resumed yesterday. It's fair to say that the first session did not go entirely to plan - there was a little investigation, and then the party was engaged in a combat in which they found themselves badly overmatched, followed by a retreat and another fight where the party was... less overmatched, but with the problem that three members of the party were surprised (and then there was a flurry of terrible dice rolls).

The upshot is that by rights the session should have been a TPK. And, in all honesty, that may have been for the best. But since I'm not quite ready to walk away yet, we contrived a way out for the party, and we'll see if we can pick up the pieces.

One of the problems, the lesser of the two, I think, is that the two encounters were deliberately right at the top end of what the party 'should' be able to handle. That probably wants adjusted down, slightly, for the future.

Another problem is party composition - I wrote the adventure assuming a standard mix of characters, but we've actually ended up with two barbarians, a monk, and a druid - three strikers and a controller. That lack of a dedicated healer and anyone to soak up damage makes this interesting.

But even that would be fine if the party were able to bring their damage-dealing characters to bear, and to focus their fire. But in the case of the first encounter the party was already somewhat split and then some characters hung back, while in the latter case the surprise meant that some characters were disabled even before they were able to act.

So there's certainly some food for thought going forward.

And since I'd prefer not to be entirely negative, I should note that the exploration part of the session did go pretty well, revealing some of the background of the underlying adventure and teasing threats to come.