RPG rulebooks sometimes open with an "example of play" where players with whitebread names like Arthur and Samantha go through a scripted scene and probably some combat to give you an idea what roleplaying is like. Tabletop roleplaying games are a weird hobby, and back in the day if you didn't have an existing group to join and were just going off the rulebooks like me, the only way to learn what they were like was by reading the adventures of Artie and Sam.

Now, you've got it easy. There are like 400 episodes of Critical Role online, not to mention Dimension 20, the Adventure Zone, Acquisitions Incorporated, and Dungeon Masters with Neil Newbon and Devora Wilde out of BG3. I would have killed for this many examples of how to play RPGs when I was a kid in a country town with no game shops around. All I had was ads in comics promising "The fantasy adventure of a lifetime!" Now I've got more hours of Matt Mercer saying "How do you want to do this?" than I'll ever have time to watch.

Which is why it's baffling that the YouTube algorithm and Reddit have spent several years vomiting headlines at me like "How to beat the Matt Mercer effect" and "The Mercer Effect is real and can be extremely toxic to your game."

The idea of "the Matt Mercer effect" is that not only are actual-play series like Critical Role a bad introduction to roleplaying, they give new players dangerously high expectations, which are ruining people's games. A generation of kids think every Dungeon Master will be as good at accents and creaky door noises as professional voice actor Matthew Mercer, goes the claim, and they will leave your table in a huff because you are just an ordinary human GM who can maybe do one Cockney goblin at a stretch.

I'm not saying nobody has ever complained their GM isn't doing a good enough job and maybe even used Matt Mercer as an example of how to be a better one. I'm saying the problem goes back way further than Critical Role, and is one that's been playing out for years before anyone was making a living as a professional Dungeon Master.

One of the most important tools in a GM's bag is session zero. It's the part before the game where you make sure everyone's on the same page about what kind of game you're about to play. It's where you talk about whether there will be more action or roleplaying, whether player-versus-player conflict is allowed, which house rules you'll be using, and so on. Are you down with adversarial play, or with romance, or with safety tools? Are you going to get narky because I'm neurodivergent and sometimes looking at my phone makes it easier for me to concentrate even if it looks like I'm distracted? These are the things you hash out in session zero so they don't come up when play begins.

But the game taking place in the back room of a game shop probably doesn't have time for that, and the game being run by your friend's brother who let you join in this week but only because his parents made him probably doesn't either.

Overwhelmingly, rants about the Mercer Effect end with the revelation that the person running the game was running it for a group that included strangers, usually at their local game store, without a session zero. And while it's nice that those pickup introductory sessions exist, that someone who is curious about roleplaying can test it out in the back room of a comics shop then buy a rulebook on the way out the door, it's almost always a terrible first experience.

Roleplaying is best eased into with friends. It's a trust exercise where you need to feel comfortable spending a few hours pretending to be a gnome among people who aren't going to make fun of you for it, with a GM who isn't going to decide it would be fun if your character had to fight off a sexual assault, or had a magical pregnancy inflicted on them, or one of the many other nightmare scenarios that fill conversations like the Creepiest Person You Ever Gamed With topic on RPGNet.

That topic eventually reached 3,000 posts and was split into six separate subthreads if you want to understand how many gross dudes are out there. But anyone saying "You're not as good at GMing as Matt Mercer" probably isn't doing it because their first GM's an absolute creep. They're doing it because of a problem that's even more prevalent if less fun to vent about online—a simple mismatch of expectations.

A clash between expectation and reality is inevitable, whether those expectations come from watching an actual-play show or just imagining what it's going to be like. People who want more roleplaying being let down to discover the game they've joined is just another dungeon crawl is not a new phenomenon. Disappointment has been a common reaction to your first time roleplaying for decades. It was my reaction too, and all I had to build up my expectations were ads in comics and the adventures of Arthur and Samantha. Poor old blameless Matt Mercer had nothing to do with it.

Many of the complaints about Solasta 2 when it launched in early access were about the CRPG's character creator. While its results were better than the first game's freakish plasticine faces, it was hard to make a full party who looked and sounded meaningfully distinct.

The latest update has given character creation a significant upgrade. Now it has sliders for starters, so you can tweak your nose bridge width and upper lip height to your heart's content. Body morphing lets you hone how muscular your PCs are, and players like me who usually rock presets have twice as many to choose from. One of my favorite changes is that you can alter voice pitch, which will make it easier to differentiate characters with the limited pool of voice options.

More haircuts, tattoos and other customization options are planned for future updates. According to the roadmap, the Q3 update will add multiplayer and a new class, as well as more world events, with the Q4 update bringing another class, two more ancestries, a crafting system, the beginning of act two, and a level-cap bumped up to 6. (It currently cuts off at level 4.)

I had fun with Solasta 2 when I played it a couple of months ago, especially the exploration. Where the original had paths across the map you could follow out of town, the sequel goes full hex-crawl once you reach a certain point in the story. It's a much more classic approach to Dungeons & Dragons, and a clear point of differentiation from Baldur's Gate 3 or Esoteric Ebb.

Last year we were extremely stoked to learn about the development of Blizzard in Baator, a fan project to expand our beloved CRPG fave Planescape: Torment with new story, cinematics, music, characters (including a couple of recruitable companions), and locations (including the Frozen Wastes of Cania) It's finally here, with act one available now.

As the charmingly lo-fi video announcement explains, Blizzard in Baator is big. "Significantly bigger than Siege of Dragonspear," they say, and so it will be released in multiple separate parts. It's an ambitious mod. "We are trying to follow in the footsteps of the greatest RPG of all time," they say.

While Blizzard in Baator is available at Nexus Mods, it's recommended that you download it from Github instead, as it's an easier install. The new quests are balanced for a Nameless One who is about level 16, so you can either load an old save and play from there or start a new game and visit Zombie #000 in the Mortuary to get leveled-up and prepared to dive straight in.

I'm looking forward to the remakes of the original Baldur's Gate games, but Planescape: Torment is my real love and it'd be great to see it get a modern treatment. Sigil is a city on the inside of a curve, looming above you as you walk its streets, and the fact you can't look up to see it grinds my gears. I'm no fan of the realtime-with-pause combat either, though at least there's not as much of it.

In the absence of a remake, I'll take an unofficial expansion. The temptation to replay the whole thing from scratch and get to level 16 organically before beginning the added stuff is tough to resist.

Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil came out in 2003, adapting an old school tabletop adventure into videogame form while being remarkably true to the then-current third edition of the Dungeons & Dragons rules. It's pretty good! I like the bits where you doss around the village of Hommlet and the piratical cove of Nulb more than the temple of the title, but having a too-large dungeon at the end is just another way The Temple of Elemental Evil is true to the typical experience of a D&D adventure.

SNEG revived The T of EE and brought it to Steam last year, with a few refinements and updates. One much-requested addition was achievements, because modern players demand our motivational trophies I guess. SNEG gave in and added them in a recent update, along with some bug fixes.

Most notably, they fixed a problem with experience gain. While ToEE launched with a level cap of 10, you're supposed to be able to continue earning experience points after that. A quirk of D&D's third edition was that you had to spend XP to craft magic items, and if you wanted to be scribing your own scrolls or whatever you needed a steady income of XP. Cutting that off made high-level crafter-casters a bit pointless, a problem that's now been addressed.

Other fixes make Melf's Acid Arrow deal damage "as intended" and adjust curse removal so that "lifting curses using scrolls or spells should now work more reliably". As for those achievements, any you've already earned should unlock when you load your save, except for ones you get for visiting certain locations.

You'll need to head back to Emridy Meadows and the Moathouse dungeons and all the rest to earn those. Just writing their names gave me a tingle of nostalgia—time for a reinstall, I guess. You can find SNEG's revival of The Temple of Elemental Evil on Steam.

Hasbro has cancelled a Dungeons & Dragons videogame that was in early development at Giant Skull, the studio run by Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order director Stig Asmussen, also known for his work on the God of War series.

Hasbro announced the partnership between D&D stewards Wizards of the Coast and Giant Skull just last summer, but the publishing agreement was terminated earlier this year, reports Bloomberg's Jason Schreier.

Wizards of the Coast told Bloomberg that it decided not to "pursue an early concept" from Giant Skull, but that it's still taking pitches from the developer. Asmussen indicated that there are no hard feelings, and that "things are good" at the studio.

When the partnership was announced last year, Wizards of the Coast president John Hight said that Giant Skull was "the perfect fit" for the project. Asmussen said that the game would feature "immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal that players will fully embrace." Sounds like it would've been an action-adventure game in the vein of Asmussen's previous work.

Another D&D game appears to still be a go: Warlock, announced last year, is a third-person action adventure game from Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance developer Invoke Studios. That's due for release in 2027.

I'd be surprised if WotC has no secret plans for a new D&D CRPG as well, though—surely they'll try to repeat at least a portion of BG3's success, even though Larian has returned to its own original setting for Divinity.

The company is definitely trying to capitalize on BG3 in other ways: There's a Baldur's Gate HBO show and Astarion prequel novel in the works. In games, though, WotC's marketing attention is currently focused on Mass Effect-like RPG Exodus.

In a new video on his YouTube channel, RPG veteran and Fallout Designer Tim Cain talked about the first time he was ever exposed to Dungeons & Dragons, a pivotal influence on the developer: Some of his mother's coworkers showed him the ropes all the way back in the Carter administration. Oh, and they happened to be high-ranking US naval officers.

"If you started playing D&D on a computer, where there's no DM, the computer handles it all, … you don't have to learn how to run the rules," Cain said, contrasting his experience of learning D&D from first principles with how the game now informs so many assumptions about gaming and role playing.

Cain's mother worked at a Judge Advocate General (JAG) office, a division of the US military dedicated to legal affairs. "She came home one day and said, 'The boys at work are playing a game, we've been invited over this weekend to play,'" Cain recalled. The "boys," as Cain's mother put it, "were some captains, I think one admiral in the Navy," according to the developer. "We drove over on a Saturday and spent I think four to five hours at their house."

The seamen were playing sans-miniatures, something which surprised Cain at the time. "A good first two hours were just making a character," said Cain, who had played computer and board games before, but had never encountered anything like 1st Edition Advanced D&D's snarl of classes, rules, and contingencies.

Cain's first character? Unable to decide on just one class, he multiclassed right out of the gate with an elf Fighter/Cleric/Magic User⁠—a little bit of everything. "There wasn't really a limit to what kind of questions I could ask and what actions I could specify I was doing," said Cain. "Stuff was written on my character sheet, and I wanted to do it all.

"Everything that day was new. I wonder if you've had a day like this too, where you're sitting down, and you're playing this crazy game unlike anything you've ever played … The polyhedral dice were new, I'd never seen anything like that."

Cain said he was "absolutely enthralled" by the new game. "On the way home, I was super-excited. I was talking to my mom all about the game." While she eventually withdrew from the play session itself to trade chili recipes with one of the officers' wives, Cain's mother was supportive of his interest: "My mom just turned to me and said, 'Do you want to stop at the game store on the way home and see what they have?'"

The rest, as they say, was history. Cain got the AD&D Monster Manual and a boxed set⁠—presumably the 1977 version of the Basic Set, given the timing? He and his friends would voraciously play D&D in the coming years. In addition to eventually leading development on one of the great D&D games, The Temple of Elemental Evil, Cain has said that his deep understanding of 2E AD&D's THAC0 system helped secure his job at Interplay.

While it's certainly possible that Cain could have discovered the game somewhere else, it sounds like that fateful afternoon and the tutelage of the DM, who Cain called "Captain Dave," were the perfect introduction to tabletop roleplaying. So I feel pretty good saying a hearty "thank you" to Captain Dave for Fallout, Arcanum, and all the other games Cain has worked on or influenced⁠—there are a lot of them.

It's tough to pick a particular highlight of Solasta 2. It's a slight improvement in a bunch of ways, though no one change is dramatic enough to be a selling point on its own. A handful of name voice actors elevate the performances, the writing's a bit less cornball, the update to D&D's 2024 rules make weapon choices a little more impactful, and the character creator's less likely to strand you with a party of freaks—though it can be difficult to get meaningfully different-looking characters.

Which at least fits the fact you're playing as a group of four siblings. Adopted siblings, to conveniently explain why you might be a mix of humans, halflings, elves, and dwarves. (Other ancestries will be added later.) I guess this also explains why even with the wrinkle options it can be tough to make a character who looks properly old. The inciting incident that kicks off the story is your mother's funeral, and it would be confusing if it looked like you were the one who belonged in the ground.

The plot takes its time to get going, then finally cuts you loose with an agreeable amount of freedom. Where the first game's overworld map was a series of paths leading to quest destinations, Solasta 2 presents the wilderness of Neokos as a hex grid covered in question marks. Some represent permanent encounters that will wait for you to arrive, while others are temporary and might vanish if you don't push through a level of exhaustion to reach them before your next long rest.

You're crossing the land in search of your sister Deorcas (voiced by Devora Wilde of Lae'zel fame) on behalf of your brother Rickard (voiced by Ben Starr of upsettingly sexual Balatro clown fame, though he was also Clive in Final Fantasy 16 I suppose). Like the first game, the tactical battles are more important than the plot.

I've fought exploding rockmen in a burning town, terror birds that attacked from ground level while their masters fired arrows from a ledge above, and harpies who tried to divide the party with mind-control magic. (My cleric's Calm Emotions spell came in clutch as a counter.) Unlike the demo, this build makes good use of terrain and has NPCs who can navigate it—mostly. Some enemies lurked at the edge of the map in a couple of fights as if they hadn't noticed me even while their friends screamed into the attack.

The setpiece battles feel like playing D&D with a full table of miniatures and scenery. At one point I had to choose whether to side with a group of undead or the two-headed giant surrounded by traps they were attacking, which ended up being a messy fight up and down pillars and around spikes and caltrops.

I still haven't memorized all the conditions different weapons apply—there's a difference between "vexing" someone and "sapping" them, and one day I'll recall it without checking—but being able to slow a distant enemy with an arrow or give a close one disadvantage on their attack rolls is a meaningful choice my rogue can make each turn.

Swapping between two weapon loadouts is free, both to encourage this and to make spellcasting easier. Solasta 2 has a strict interpretation of D&D's rules and won't allow clerics holding shields to cast most of their spells, so I find myself constantly having to flip back to a crossbow. The first game had an option to get around that restriction by drawing a holy symbol on your shield, and I wish the sequel had kept it instead of transforming into the kind of stickler DM who says "um, actually" and makes your life less fun.

Early access is the time for changes like that to be made, and the roadmap has additional classes, co-op, and crafting all to come. I'm hoping the option to use a rogue's cunning action to hide gets added soon. Improvements to the character creator have been promised as well, though most of the vocal complaints about it come from dudes who are big mad the men don't look manly enough and the women don't look hot enough.

If you ever wondered who downloads all those Skyrim mods that make men look like Kratos and women like 2B I guess it's these weirdoes. The complaint I have about character creation is that you can't go back and tweak your choices after you start the campaign and see what they look and sound like in cutscenes, though that's always my complaint.

The rest of this year's updates promise to bump the level cap from four to six, let us play the start of act two, and add more customization and world events. A faction system is on the way as well—at the moment some of your choices do affect how different groups feel about you, which can limit what goods they sell, but the system's still to be rounded out.

It's all promising stuff building on a promising start, though at the moment I mainly recommend it to people like me who restart every CRPG a couple of times before we're happy with our characters and so don't mind revisiting act one while it's not quite finished.

Solasta 2 is currently available in early access on Steam.

It's not overstating things to say Tim Cain is a legend among PC RPG fans. The man's got credits on a roster of games that would make other developers green with envy: Stonekeep, Fallout, Arcanum, ToEE, Pillars of Eternity, and more. And it all began, as he recounted in his most recent video, because he out-nerded the other guy.

Cain played a lot of tabletop RPGs in his early days, which probably comes as no surprise: He developed a love for D&D in his early youth and carried it with him through college and as he pursued a PhD.

"In the evening, I'd often play tabletop RPGs with grad school friends of mine because we didn't have any money, so we couldn't do anything," Cain recounts in his latest video. "So we were kind of stuck in the student housing there. So we played a lot of games, including GURPS, which is where I learned it."

Knowing GURPS "became important later," Cain says in the vid, because GURPS—the Generic Universal Roleplaying System developed by Steve Jackson Games—was originally intended as the underlying ruleset for Fallout, before licensing issues led to the creation of the SPECIAL system. Before all of that, though, a different system proved even more important to Cain's career trajectory.

After deciding to leave grad school, Cain sent his resume to Interplay, apparently because it was close to where he lived. He was eventually hired as a contractor, he says, because "they asked me if I knew THAC0," and boy did he ever.

THAC0 is kind of famous as the best-known of the most-derided old-timey D&D rules. It's the number a character has to roll on a D20 to hit an enemy whose armor class is zero, which is adjusted during combat based on an enemy's actual armor class. Here's a quick breakdown if you're curious, but the short version is that it was a cumbersome system, made even more confusing by the fact that a lower armor class was better, and you'd often have cases where characters would have negative ACs, leading to all kinds of math headaches.

The system was dropped in D&D's third edition, but not before one last, great hurrah in the original Baldur's Gate games—and, as it turns out, helping Tim Cain get a job, opening the door to all that followed.

"They were down to me and another programmer, and we were both about equal in coding skill. But not only could I tell them what THAC0 meant—to hit armor class zero—I then asked them if they wanted the values for THAC0 for each of the four major D&D classes, fighter, magic user, thief, cleric, at level one.

"They said yes. And I told them the numbers, and I was right. And I got the job."

The irony is that soon after getting hired at Interplay, Cain started holding tabletop gaming nights, but instead of D&D it was GURPS that dominated because it enables all kinds of different settings. Cain developed apps to support GURPs gameplay, like a character generator and a star system generator—and when Interplay decided it wanted to do a licensed RPG, GURPs was ultimately chosen.

"I think part of the reason GURPs won is, it wasn't just me pushing forward, it's all those people I played GURPs with at night," Cains says. "And we already had these apps which I pointed out had underlying code that would already jumpstart us into making a GURPs game."

And the rest, and they say, is history.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister was a more combat-focused take on the rules of Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition than Baldur's Gate 3, and so it included a couple of tactical options that Larian's narrative-heavy RPG didn't. Dodge, for instance—an action that gives all attacks against you disadvantage and also gives you advantage on Dexterity saving throws—was an option in Solasta.

So was "ready action", which let you prepare an attack or cantrip to use on an enemy when they came into range. Basically, it was overwatch. In tabletop Dungeons & Dragons though, readying an action can be used for anything your heart desires ("I ready an action to feed my potion of healing to the paladin when they drop" or "I ready an action to push the boulder off the cliff when the ogre is beneath it," for instance), and while that level of freeform planning isn't realistic in a videogame, Solasta's designers want more options available in Solasta 2. As the developers at Tactical Adventures say in the latest dev update, "we aim to have most actions compatible with Ready Action over time."

The first of these is single-target leveled spells. They give some examples of how that'll be useful: "Can't reach your wounded buddy? Prepare a Cure Wounds and have them run to you on their turn. Worried that the Berserker next room might run in and cleave you in half? Prepare a Hideous Laughter and drop him as he rushes past the door (just pray that he fails his saving throw). That pesky crossbowman keeps popping in and out of cover to spray you down with bolts? Let's see how they like a little Guiding Bolt to the face next time they try to do that."

One limitation will be that readied actions can only be set up during combat, rather than as part of your complicated whiteboard goblin ambush plan. As Tactical adventures explain, "we would have loved nothing more than to make it exactly like on Tabletop and give you all the possibilities you could imagine on how to trigger Ready Action… but this would be a liiiittle overwhelming—if we did, we'd have to code a puzzle game inside your tactical CRPG, and as much as I love Baba is You we are not aiming to create the next Action is Readied."

Solasta 2 will launch into early access next month. When it does, you'll be able to ready "only single target spells and weapon attacks" with more options to come in later updates: "in the future, we plan to have AoE spells and multi-target spells (like Magic Missile) be usable too with this feature. Our Tech Director even tells me that he would love to add different conditional toggles if we ever have the time, such as not triggering Ready Action if you currently have disadvantage, or if the enemy is beyond a certain range… But no promises here—it's no secret that there's a lot we want to do, but only so much time to do it!"

Solasta 2 will arrive in early access via Steam on March 12.

The US edition of PC Gamer magazine liked The Temple of Elemental Evil enough to award it a respectable 79% in 2003, but we still had more than a few monster-sized bones to pick with Troika's D&D RPG: NPC companions silently loading themselves up with so much worthless loot they become encumbered by it; atrocious pathfinding; and numerous other obvious bugs and avoidable snags bringing down an otherwise promising adventure.

This matched my own experience with the game back then. The enticing promise of a full and faithful digital recreation of D&D's 3.5 ruleset—and a chance to throw magic missiles somewhere other than the Sword Coast thanks to the game's use of the Greyhawk setting—was brought down by frustrating technical issues and odd design choices.

I was never quite sure if I was doing something wrong or because the game had got its d20s in a twist again, so I quickly decided to stop playing rather than spend hours scouring forums in the hope of finding the right workaround. Which is why SNEG's re-release of this famously temperamental game, out now on Steam, is so interesting.

The 1000+ community-created tweaks, fixes, additions, and restorations within have been floating around the web for years, but for the first time ever they're baked right into the default install. I don't have to wonder if I should try to preemptively correct a common issue before it's even popped up. I don't have to manage a wobbly tower of patches that must be added in exactly the right order to hopefully fix something that should have never been this broken to begin with.

It's not a completely different experience like a remake would be, with everything simplified and sanded down out of a fear our doomscroll-addled minds won't have the patience for 2003-style tough battles and reactive questlines. It's pretty much the same game. It just works as intended, right from the first click.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's better than intended. Temple of Elemental Evil is littered with thoughtful additions and restored quests, all of them well-integrated and subtle enough to make it easy to believe they've always been there. NPCs can offer sidequests they didn't have before, unlocking further rewards. I can now find a magic chest to stuff my loot in, neatly sidestepping the original's boring, bagless inventory woes. I'm able to freely wander into a building that didn't make it into the original release, and take part in multiple storylines that were otherwise destined to remain unseen.

And it still looks amazing, too, with a very specific early 2000s style that no modern game has truly replicated. Thanks to new high-resolution support and an optional windowed mode I can display the game at whatever size suits me best, and the mix of pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D characters still meld together beautifully, my window of choice filled with more, rather than graphics stretched or squashed to fit.

Locations are detailed, pin-sharp, and packed with character. Smoke rises from chimneys, trees sway in the breeze, magic missiles twirl in the air before finding their mark, and gelatinous cubes wobble in evil temples.

Which is great, but why bother playing something this old anyway? Why not play through Baldur's Gate 3 (again), or Rogue Trader or Wrath of the Righteous or Pillars of Eternity or any other CRPG that isn't already old enough to buy its own drinks?

It's not complicated, really—because without those thousand-odd bugs, it's a lot of fun. The Temple of Elemental Evil is an interesting stepping stone in turn-based D&D's digital development, a halfway point between the classic "gold box" RPGs that were all about hand-drawn maps and manually flipping to journal entry #13 in an actual paper book, and the breezier, entertaining homebrew present in Larian's genre-reviving wonder. It's a uniquely faithful recreation of an underserved flavour of D&D; not better or worse than anything that came before or after but different in a way that means it will always stand out.

Regardless of how many glowing retrospectives better-known old games get, or how many awards the shiny new games win, they'll never play the way this one does. As PC Gamer's Jody Macgregor once put it, Temple of Elemental Evil might not be the best D&D game, but it is the most D&D game.

Even selecting the most basic "Please, I just want to hit whatever's standing in front of me" option in combat here brings up at least five different choices to pick from, all of them offering their own tactical strengths and weaknesses.

Movement is never just about picking where in range I want to stand: I have to decide if I'm walking or running, or taking a single five-foot step. I have to consider how a party member's tumble skill is going to interact with an enemy's attack of opportunity. I can see a group of monsters down a corridor and select Ready vs. Approach to prepare for the rush to come, and learn to appreciate how devastating a successful trip attack can be, my opponent left prone and vulnerable to coup de grâce hits when they're down (and yes, I'll pile on my free additional attacks should they survive long enough to stand up).

It's a tactically satisfying experience that only improves as my characters grow, new monsters and new encounters giving me the chance to flex skills I'll never find in another PC RPG, no matter how many I play.

I'd have never known if it wasn't for this new release. It's not a remake or a remaster, but perhaps something even better—a repair. The game fixed up and presented in a way that allows all the good that was always in here the chance to finally shine. For people old enough to still have the original CDs gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, this is a sensitive collection of curated improvements that retains all the fun and flavour of an older and enjoyably distinct ruleset. For anyone itching for more D&D after smooching Karlach for the hundredth time, the enormous array of helpful additions jammed in here make this impressively freeform RPG feel like a fresh take on the popular series.

It's taken far too long, but the temple's finally open for worship.

The idea of "canonicity" in RPGs is an odd one, given the whole point of both videogame and tabletop RPGs is that the players decide what the main characters do. But sequels, spin-offs, and sourcebooks have a habit of choosing particular outcomes as the "real" ones—unless it's the Elder Scrolls, where every ending of Morrowind happened at once.

Baldur's Gate 3 had to deal with characters from Baldur's Gate 2 having canonical events happen to them between games, like Minsc and Boo being turned to stone or Viconia and Saarevok backsliding into evil, and now the cast of Baldur's Gate 3 are in the same boat. The latest Forgotten Realms supplements, Adventures in Faerûn and Heroes of Faerûn, move the timeline on from 1492—when BG3 happens—to 1501, and hint at the fates of its cast.

Quotes from Karlach crop up throughout Adventures in Faerûn and she appears more than once in the art for both books alongside Astarion, Shadowheart, and Minsc. And in none of those illustrations is she a mind flayer or a pile of ash—two of the potential outcomes for her in Baldur's Gate 3.

The best ending for Karlach is that she returns to Avernus with the Infernal Engine still burning away inside her chest, which a lot of players weren't happy about, and in the epilogue Larian added post-launch she mentions finding blueprints for something that could prevent the timebomb in her chest from blowing up. Seeing her run around the streets of Baldur's Gate, fight a remorhaz with Astarion and Shadowheart, and generally be a heroic adventurer who doesn't have a gaping hole in her torso, makes it plain that Karlach's canonical ending is the good one.

Funnily enough, the same pictures depict Shadowheart with dark hair and bangs, which isn't how she looks in her best outcome in BG3, where she dyes her hair white and parts her hair in a way that makes it look like she didn't just go through a messy breakup. But hair color isn't proof that canonically she never gave up on worshipping Shar, and it's entirely possible she just changed her mind about being a silver fox.

Although if you helped Shadowheart achieve her redemption arc it's entirely possible that in act three you told Dame Aylin about the jerk wizard Lorroakan who wants to steal her immortality, and she wrecked the dude as he so richly deserves. According to Adventures in Faerûn that didn't happen, and Lorroakan is still alive and holed up in Ramazith's Tower. However, it's mentioned that he was "Humbled by a recent failed bid to achieve immortality through undisclosed means," so at least he didn't succeed. Presumably the canonical PCs lied to both him and Dame Aylin, preventing the conflict from ever happening.

Astarion gets his own supplement in a digital add-on called Astarion's Book of Hungers, which includes rules for playing a half-vampire dhampir as well as a string of adventure outlines where you get to hang out with everyone's favorite vampire spawn, although these are noted as being set before the events of the videogame. No canon conflict there.

It's not all videogame characters in these books, of course. The heroes of the D&D cartoon make another appearance, just like they did in the movie Honor Among Thieves, looking slightly older and perhaps a bit more competent. Elminster rates a mention too, though he's said to have been missing for a few years, which conveniently explains why he's not around to solve whatever problem your own players are involved in.

In a new interview with Polygon, fantasy (and sci-fi, and videogame) writer R.A. Salvatore dished on some of the unique challenges of writing stories that have to stay consistent with an ever evolving tabletop ruleset and world state.

Salvatore has notably contributed to the Star Wars Expanded Universe (RIP), but is most famous for his novels set in the Forgotten Realms, a world shared with classic PC games including Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and most of the Gold Box RPGs.

Like Realms creator Ed Greenwood's Elminster, Salvatore's characters have gotten cameos in Baldur's Gate. Heroic cleric Cadderly pops in to say hi near the end of Baldur's Gate 1, while Salvatore's signature Drow Ranger and memetic Best Swordsman Ever, Drizzt Do'Urden, can be befriended or fought in both Baldur's Gate 1 and 2.

According to Salvatore, making sure the action in his books hews close enough to the D&D rules of the day has been one of the job's more challenging demands. "That's been one of the toughest parts," said Salvatore. "4th Edition D&D almost broke me, not because I didn't like 4th edition D&D. I'm not making any judgements⁠—positive or negative⁠—on any of the editions, but the changes were so sweeping."

Even with the addition of feats and prestige classes, as well as fundamental reworks of systems like AC and attack bonus (goodbye THAC0) when moving from AD&D to 3rd Edition, it still felt more mutually intelligible with previous rulesets than the controversial 4th Edition. I've always found it telling that the explosively popular 5th Edition⁠—which Baldur's Gate 3 is based on⁠—plays like a more approachable riff on D&D 3.5.

But mechanics aren't the only 4th Edition zag Salvatore had trouble adapting to: He and Greenwood both objected to The Forgotten Realms' world state shakeup. Previous new editions moved the timeline forward a decade each, while 4th Edition skipped a century and introduced The Spellplague, which altered Faerûn's geography, politics, and cosmology. Drizzt would still only be a spry 180 years old or so (of a 700-year lifespan), but his human buddy, Wulfgar, and wife, Catti-Brie, weren't so lucky.

"Ed looked at me and says, 'Bob, what are we going to do?'" Salvatore recalled from the moment when the two found out about the changes. "I said, we're going to figure out how we're going to fix it because in about five years they're going to come to us and say 'Bob we got to fix this.'"

That timeline was pretty much on the money: Just as 5th Edition's rules hewed closer to 3rd Edition, The Forgotten Realms moved forward another decade or so, but underwent yet another metaphysical calamity that made its politics, geography, and metaphysics look suspiciously similar to how they did 120 years previously.

Salvatore even got a mulligan on Do'Urden's dead friends, with Catti-Brie, Wulfgar, Bruenor Battlehammer, and Regis the Halfling all getting a second chance at life. Salvatore's most recent novel, the 39th in the Legend of Drizzt saga, was Lolth's Warrior in 2023.

PlayStation 2 hack-and-slash The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is a mainstay of the ports being begged for on the GOG dreamlist (though it doesn't rank as high as bona fide classics like Silent Hill and The Simpsons: Hit & Run, of course). According to my memories of 2004 it deserves the nomination, because The Two Towers let you recreate the battle of Helm's Deep and that's always amazing whether you're modding it into Left 4 Dead 2 or playing Lego Lord of the Rings.

It's not likely we'll ever see a PC port of The Two Towers, but fortunately its creator, Stormfront Studios, made a similar hack-and-slash shortly after and that is on PC, with a rerelease by SNEG showing up on Steam. It's Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone, which may lack the cool moments where movie Viggo Mortensen transforms into polygon Viggo Mortensen and then you get to slice up some ringwraiths, but is otherwise very much in the same mold.

Which is to say it's a fixed-camera button-masher that throws you into epic fantasy battles with a lot of orcs, though since this is based on a Dungeons & Dragons setting there are also some bugbears and githyanki and whatnot. Right from the off you're in the middle of a battlefield being divebombed by a dragon, with conveniently placed war machines just waiting for you to cut the ropes and hurl medieval implements at people who probably deserve it.

The combat may be button-mashy, but as someone who resents games that expect me to lock on to one enemy rather than wildly swinging my longsword/paired daggers/magic staff at everyone in the vicinity, sometimes I'm in the mood for that. As you biff bad guys in Demon Stone their armor flies off, which helps to sell the impact, and there are plenty of opportunities to shove them off cliffs, into fires, down holes, or into a magical pool of death water that should probably have a guard rail.

You play as three adventurers, a fighter, sorcerer, and half-drow rogue, caught in a war between two extraplanar armies. There's the githyanki, ruled by a queen who is everything Lae'zel wants to be when she grows up, and the slaad, chaotic toad people whose boss Ygorl is voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan from The Green Mile. (Patrick Stewart also narrates from the point of view of local wizard Khelben Blackstaff.)

Though co-op was a standard feature for games like this, Demon Stone's purely singleplayer. That means you can switch between characters as you like rather than being stuck with Gimli (though sometimes the party is split and your choice restricted). Where the fighter's a basic sword-swinger and the sorcerer better at range, the rogue can duck into convenient patches of sparkling shadow to turn temporarily invisible, then get behind enemies for a one-hit kill. It looks ridiculous, but is actually pretty fun, which is Demon Stone all over.

When it takes away your freedom of choice, it's less fun. Having to protect the sorcerer against endless waves of enemies while he does a magic thing, for instance, or when a boss conveniently paralyzes party members, forcing you to switch to others. The boss issue isn't helped by every boss having way too many hit points—you learn the pattern to defeating them, then repeat it over and over. In both situations there's a proscribed thing to do and you just have to do it, where the best parts of Demon Stone are when you've got a choice between attacking the orcs on the wall or knocking down the ladders before the next wave comes and you feel like the flow of battle's under your control.

The 2025 re-release on Steam does come with some improvements the previous version lacked, like a separate volume slider for the music and both borderless and windowed display modes. It's also locked to the original framerate of 30 fps, and if that's a dealbreaker for you then enjoy your life, I guess.

As Richard Nixon famously remarked, "We are all Dungeons and Dragons guys now." The popularity of stuff like Critical Role and the fact the government mandates we all have, at minimum, one Baldur's Gate 3 tattoo now means absolutely everyone is at least a little Faerûn-pilled these days. And if you're desperately hungry for more D&D content, then, well, you should probably not actually pick up Humble's latest bundle. Sorry.

Unless you're cool, anyway. Look, I'll level with you: the games Humble's lined up for the Dungeons and Dragons: Classic Collection are the definition of crusty. We're talking good old glory-days early '90s RPGs, here, smothered in UI, often obtuse, and always clunky. If you loved BG3 so much you tried to play BG1 and 2 but bounced off, you ain't seen nothing till you try these puppies.

Most of these aren't RPGs in the sense you understand it now, mind. The majority of them are dungeon crawlers, with a kingdom management sim chucked in for good measure. Most of them have more in common with a Legend of Grimrock than a Baldur's Gate.

But if you're in the mood for some videogame archaeology? A trip to see the classics? You could do much worse. For $10 (£7.40), Humble will flog you 13 games that are, in reality, 30 games: many of them are bundles themselves, you see—multiple ancient games thrown together into singular collections.

Buying the lot will net you:

• Forgotten Realms: The Archives – Collection One
• Forgotten Realms: The Archives – Collection Two
• Silver Box Classics
• Dungeons & Dragons: Krynn Series
• Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Sun Series
• Dungeons & Dragons: Ravenloft Series
• Fantasy Empires
• Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace
• Forgotten Realms: The Archives – Collection Three
• Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse
• Dungeons & Dragons – Stronghold: Kingdom Simulator
• DragonStrike
• DeathKeep

Meanwhile, forking over a mere $5 (£3.70) will still net you the games in bold. Should you do it? Let me give you a definite maybe. The fact of the matter is for the average BG3-lover on the hunt for their next fix of Faerûn, this ain't gonna do it. But if you're a brave Indiana Jones of videogames? Someone unafraid to plumb the depths of the old and the shopworn? Well, it's like $10. You can easily wring $10 of baffling deaths out of 30 games in 13 packages.

I never want to be an RPG gatekeeper⁠—I want as many people as possible to find out what makes these games so great. But their inherent crustiness can make my old-head RPG favorites hard to recommend to people who haven't already bought in. I've got a lot of friends I recommend Disco Elysium to, but not very many I tell to play Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.

Thankfully, Aspyr's remaster of one of my favorite crusty RPGs, 2006's Neverwinter Nights 2 from Obsidian, has finally pushed it into the ranks of "games I can credibly recommend to a normal person." No more crashing when you try to change the resolution, no more unreasonably tiny UI past 1080p, just a game that works (and works well) on modern systems⁠—including the Steam Deck.

At $30, I also think it's a pretty amazing value, offering four classic RPG campaigns⁠—including one blow the doors down all-timer⁠—totaling somewhere north of 135 hours to beat. And that's before you factor in a mod scene that, while never as big as the original Neverwinter Nights', still put out some pretty stellar RPG experiences.

The best

I'll start with the real dinger, the thing you've probably heard of if you've heard of Neverwinter Nights 2, Mask of the Betrayer. NwN2's 2007 expansion is a moody, thoughtful, unforgettable RPG in the vein of Planescape: Torment, Knights of the Old Republic 2, or Disco Elysium.

It starts right after the lackluster cliffhanger of NwN2's base campaign, seeing your character wake up in a tomb thousands of miles away with a mysterious wound in their chest and an all-consuming, metaphysical hunger.

MotB trades the comfort food fantasy slurry of The Forgotten Realms' Sword Coast for the underexplored frontier between Rashemen and Thay, far to the east. This land has a society of Viking-like warriors led by matriarchal witches on one side of the border, and evil nerd wizards with ugly tattoos who believe in slavery on the other. Are the Red Wizards of Thay alt-right? Much to consider.

Similar to KotOR 2 and PS:T, Mask of the Betrayer squeezes a grown-up, thought-provoking story out of an inherently playful, wish fulfillment-oriented world by taking it absurdly seriously, and following its ideas to their logical conclusions.

MotB fixates on The Forgotten Realms lore tidbit that atheists are consigned to a horrific fate on dying, absorbed into a great wall surrounding a city of the dead, aware of every second of the ordeal until their souls are erased forever. An indeterminate amount of time before the start of Mask of the Betrayer, the high priest of the god of the dead led a crusade to tear this wall down, and the aftershocks have something to do with your current predicament.

MotB is also an extremely reactive game, with dialogue that takes advantage of your character's skills, and vastly different story outcomes depending on your choices. While it lends itself to telling a moving tale of humanism and forgiveness, that makes actively choosing to be an evil psycho bastard all the more delicious.

The rest

But all four of NwN2's official campaigns hold a special place in my heart. The original campaign is a wonky, uniwieldy thing, with a first third that gets bogged down in some serious RPG early game dogwater, and a final act that zips to an unsatisfying conclusion, the team at Obsidian clearly having run low on time and money.

But the middle bit is so good. You're put on trial for a massacre you didn't commit at the beginning of act 2, leading to one of my favorite questlines in any RPG: An open-ended mission to gather evidence proving the conspiracy against you, followed by a massive dialogue puzzle where you use all of your crunchy D&D character skills to go Ace Attorney mode on an oily prosecutor during your day in court. Afterwards, you take control of a castle town in a surprisingly deep management minigame where you upgrade and fortify your keep, recruit and equip soldiers, and decide what kind of feudal lord you want to be.

The 2008 expansion Storm of Zehir is an open-ended, tabletoppy sort of experience, letting you build a full party of four from scratch. It starts out in the refreshingly bright and tropical environs of Chult, a dinosaur-inhabited jungle peninsula far to the south of Neverwinter and Baldur's Gate.

It eventually transitions back to Neverwinter, letting you see some familiar locales from a new perspective⁠ while your original hero is off doing Mask of the Betrayer. My favorite part is coming back to that keep you built and fortified to find it under new management: Your amiable and bumbling companions from the base game. One of the best parts of SoZ is its gorgeous 3D world map, which feels like a prototype of the one we would see in Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire ten years later.

Last is definitely the most unsung part of this already unsung RPG: Mysteries of Westgate, an expansion developed by external studio, Ossian. Ossian has its own interesting RPG pedigree, having been founded by former BioWare producer Alan Miranda with development on Mysteries headed by author and NwN modder, Luke Scull.

MoW has a similarly pleasing, tabletop sensibility to Storm of Zehir, offering a deep cut into The Forgotten Realms that feels more like an episode in an adventuring life than a fully contained chosen one drama. Mysteries of Westgate takes us to the titular piratical hive on one of The Forgotten Realms' inland seas, and offers a great deal of dialogue-based skill checks and reactivity to player choice⁠—always the quickest way to my heart.

And after all this time, I've only just scratched the surface of the mod scene for Neverwinter Nights 2. My first stop will be The Maimed God's Saga, a clerics-only adventure that seems to take a similarly deadly-serious approach to the Forgotten Realms' silly religions as Mask of the Betrayer, to the adulation of those who have played it.

After 20 hours in Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition, I've fully committed to it being a Neverwinter Nights summer. More and more people are saying that it's the Summer of NwN, in fact, and who am I to tell them that they're wrong? If you want to be with "what's it" as opposed to "what isn't it," it's time to roll up your sleeves and roleplay as some manner of Orc Paladin or Genasi Red Dragon Disciple. Sorry kid, it's not my call⁠—it's the Summer of Neverwinter Nights.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is one of my favorite games⁠—if you want to know why you should play it, I've got a separate write-up here. Even though NwN2 released in 2006 after the dawn of the Xbox 360, it's aged more poorly than many of its contemporaries and even predecessors, making it harder and harder to recommend over the years until now.

I'm happy to say that Aspyr did a great job on its remaster, and this is the version of NwN2 you should play today⁠—whether as an old fan coming back or a first-time player. It's just $10 more expensive than the $20 complete collection on GOG (the original is not available on Steam), and offers a smoother, more adaptable, and more user-friendly experience that crucially has full compatibility with old mods and fan campaigns. Most transformative for me has been bringing NwN2 on the go with my Steam Deck.

How is it on Steam Deck?

Deck Heck

Neverwinter Nights 2 is a very mouse and keyboard-oriented game for many reasons:

• It's Party-based.
• Features real time with pause combat.
• With an isometric camera by default.
• And it's weighed down with all the hardcore RPG complexity of Dungeons & Dragons' foreboding 3.5 edition ruleset.

NwN2EE has been Deck-verified since before it was even announced, but that little green check can have a lot of variance, and I was worried NwN2 would feel unavoidably stepped-on and compromised when played with a gamepad. Thankfully, it never quite demands the same level of micromanagement as the OG Baldur's Gates and finds a nice groove with gamepad controls. Basically, it plays like Knights of the Old Republic.

The keyboard shortcuts squashed on a pad definitely make my brain heat up like it's trying to remember fighting game combos: Pause, a character menu, change target, hotbar select, party select, and swapping camera modes are each assigned to a button, but I've gotten used to it. A more minor gripe: It feels clunky that selecting a party member or hotbar action doesn't take you out of their sub-menus automatically. You have to press right trigger, select a party member, then press right trigger again to start controlling them. I'd like to see a menu option to streamline that added in a patch.

But we've come a long way since the days of received wisdom being that PC complexity can't work on a gamepad. NwN2 Enhanced feels great with a controller. Little complaints aside, I can't imagine significant improvements to the system Aspyr implemented.

Performance has been great on Deck for me, a fairly consistent 60fps, though I was amused to see two inexplicably framerate-killing zones from the original game still made the fan spin up and the fps chug (it's definitely better here though). My only complaint on this front is that NwN2EE is a bit of a battery hog: Sub-three hours on an original Steam Deck for a game whose min-spec GPU is the 13 year-old GTX 660. Far from a dealbreaker, but something I'd like to see further optimized.

Remaster upgrades

Facelift

I was hard pressed to notice a visual upgrade when I was just playing NwN2EE on my Deck, but it sunk in when I swapped between the same save in the OG and Enhanced versions on my desktop: The textures are pleasingly crisp now, and the UI finally scales well to HD resolutions instead of getting unusably tiny.

Comparing the same area of Neverwinter's Merchant Quarter side-by-side with the original, I also got more consistent performance in the Enhanced Edition. I didn't have time to invest in significant hardware testing and comparisons, but I noticed that the remaster was actually demanding less CPU usage overall, and spreading it throughout the various cores and threads more efficiently than the original.

Aside from scaling better to higher resolutions, NwN2EE's UI is more or less unchanged—it's less friendly and intuitive than the OG Baldur's Gates or Neverwinter Nights 1, let alone modern RPGs like Pillars of Eternity or Baldur's Gate 3.

But the remaster does feel better on M&K than the original. It's hard to pin down, but camera control in the original NwN2 always felt bad to me, no matter how I adjusted sensitivity settings in-game. In the Enhanced Edition, the m&k camera controls are smooth and pleasant, if a little too zippy by default.

Mod and save compatibility

Perfect continuity

Most impressive out of the whole remaster: Mods, fan campaigns, and even old save files from the original all work with NwN2 Enhanced Edition. Previous go-to CRPG preserver Beamdog managed that with its remasters, but I wondered if Aspyr would have the same touch⁠. I needn't have worried.

Enhanced Edition saves can't be brought back to the original game, which makes sense, but I was tickled to see the save file I started right after BG3 came out pop up automatically when I installed NwN2EE on my desktop. Cloud save support has been notably issue-free for me, with my progress on my Deck seamlessly unified with halfhearted playthrough attempts from a few years ago. The only cloud hiccup is that saved characters (for taking to different campaigns) aren't saved in the cloud. You need an actual in-game save to transfer them between devices, but that's a minor hurdle.

The mod compatibility really brought a smile to my face. I tested two: Remove Level Adjustment, an essential quality of life fix that does away with D&D 3.5's level handicap for certain races like Drow, and The Maimed God's Saga, a well-loved fan campaign.

Both worked without a hitch on Steam Deck, though I have run into a minor crash issue with The Maimed God's Saga: If I load my save from the main menu, NwN2 crashes back to SteamOS. If I load another save first, then TMGS, we're good. The only other problem was doing a lot of file management with the Deck's trackpad instead of a mouse, plus digging deep due to how SteamOS buries some game files.

For the level adjustment fix, what is simply dropped in "My Documents / Neverwinter Nights 2 / override" on Windows has to instead get routed to "home / .steam [a hidden folder] / steam / steamapps / compdata/ 2738630 [the game's numerical ID in Steam, found in its store page URL] / pfx / drive_c / users / steamuser / Documents / Neverwinter Nights 2 / override." Sweet merciful Christ.

But that's a Steam Deck problem, not a Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition problem. This is a fantastic version of one of my favorite games, an Obsidian and D&D classic that really deserves its flowers. This isn't a flashy graphics overhaul, but a competent, measured, and effective clean-up job, one that leaves plenty of eccentricities in place. Your party members still have the dumbest friendly AI I've ever seen in an RPG, but I don't know if I'd want it any other way.

Larian is out of the D&D game and that's left Wizards of the Coast scrambling a little bit to figure out how to follow it up. Today the studio revealed at least one of its plans for a post-Baldur's Gate 3 world: A publishing deal with Giant Skull for "an all-new singleplayer action-adventure title set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons."

You may recall Giant Skull as the studio founded in 2024 by Stig Asmussen, the director of Star Wars Jedi: games, who left Respawn in 2023 "to pursue other adventures." Well, a change is as good as a rest, I suppose, even if it's just a change of scenery.

In any event, Asmussen brought in veterans of other studios including Riot, Epic Games, and Rocksteady for his new thing, and now we've got... well, not much of a look at what's cooking, really, except that it's D&D.

"Our talented and experienced team at Giant Skull is built on creativity and curiosity," Asmussen said. "Our goal is to craft a rich new Dungeons and Dragons universe filled with immersive storytelling, heroic combat and exhilarating traversal that players will fully embrace."

Not a whole lot to go on there, and before anyone asks, no, I don't know what "exhilarating traversal" means. I do still get a bit of a tingle when I hear the words "you must gather your party before venturing forth," but that's probably not the same thing.

Wizards of the Coast president John Hight, who previously worked with Asmussen on the God of War series, was equally not-informative, saying that "worldbuilding and storytelling is in our DNA, and this collaboration reflects our evolution and commitment to our Playing to Win Strategy, building a stronger presence in digital play."

Carefully crafted corporate statements that expend a whole lot of words to say not much of anything always make me a little itchy, and following up on a monster success like Baldur's Gate 3 is no small task. That said, Asmussen has a pretty solid track record for this sort of thing: Prior to the Star Wars Jedi games, he served as game director on the acclaimed God of War 3. Even if Giant Skull's D&D game doesn't deliver a bigger and better experience than BG3 (and I don't think anyone reasonably assumes it will), I'm still hopeful it'll be quite good.

Giant Skull's D&D game is being developed for PC and consoles in Unreal Engine 5. More information will be revealed at some point in the future.

Earlier this week, Wizards of the Coast senior vice president of digital games Dan Ayoub said that we won't have to wait too long to see what the company has in store for D&D. In an interview with PC Gamer, I asked him just what that meant—did "soon" in fact mean sometime in 2025?

"Definitely," he told me.

While I couldn't lure Ayoub into saying the words "Baldur's Gate 4" in our interview, we did talk about the impact Baldur's Gate 3 has had on the company's future plans for videogame adaptations of D&D. It has made an impact—a big one—but Wizards is clearly looking to adapt the tabletop game in more forms than giant, systemic RPGs like Larian's.

"It certainly raised the bar in a really, really big way," Ayoub said. "It certainly changed the way we look at our big expressions of the game. But I think we want to have different entry points for people, and hopefully generally the expectations for a smaller indie title are not the same as for a BG3.

"I'll speak for myself: I was excited about BG3 for a lot of reasons, but I think it showed people what's possible in that universe. I've been playing D&D almost my whole life and it's probably why I make videogames today. I've been so excited to make D&D videogames here, so I think we can do some tremendous things with D&D."

Wizards currently has a number of games in development both internally and with partners, though the one we know is specifically D&D-related is from Invoke Studios in Montreal. Some other projects, including a planned big-budget D&D game being developed by Hidden Path Entertainment, were canceled in 2023.

"Whatever we do, we want to be diligent: we want to make sure whatever we're doing, we're executing to the best possible quality," Ayoub said. "That's for stuff we're doing ourselves or with partners. We don't want to just throw games out there—Baldur's Gate kind of raised expectations and hopes of what these things can be, so whatever we do around D&D we want to make sure it's well thought-out, well executed, and just a great player experience at the end of the day."

I asked Ayoub if Wizards has any plans to remaster or rerelease some of the back catalog of D&D games, like, say, Eye of the Beholder, but like the seasoned level 20 studio executive he is, he stayed right on message: "I really look forward to talking about some of our plans around D&D," he said with a laugh.

Larian is still prepping for Baldur's Gate 3's upcoming stress test of Patch 8, which it previously announced would include cross-play support, photo mode, and 12 new subclasses. In the first community update for 2025 Larian has now shared a few additional details about what Patch 8 has in store, before showing off the photo mode's potential via memes.

Community update #32 kicks off with a reminder about said stress test, which players can still sign up for here. Larian is particularly keen to see how players "get on" with crossplay " so that we can make any small changes before Patch 8 is released". The studio also reminds players that, while Mac is included in crossplay support, Mac players "won't be able to take part in the stress test this time."

Next up, Larian shares an array of specific bugs Patch 8 will address alongside the bigger new features it will add. It isn't a long list but, this being Baldur's Gate 3, it nonetheless makes for amusing reading. As of Patch 8 Barcus the gnome will no longer be "Mike Wazowski'd by various items like cauldrons and bottles blocking him off from view when you talk to him at Last Light". In addition, Larian says "we've also reminded Minthara that 'knocked out' does not mean 'dead', so she'll more reliably appear in Moonrise towers."

With the changelog out of the way, Larian reveals a few more details about the photo mode, specifically regarding when and where you can use it. In general play and combat encounters, you can deploy the full suite of photo mode's features. "Position [characters] to your liking, change facial expressions to fit the scene, and play around with the camera, lens and scene settings." During dialogue and cinematics, however, photo mode's features are more restricted. "You won't be able to alter the camera or position your party, but you will have access to a whole bunch of post-processing effects, such as colour-grading settings, frames and stickers."

To cap off the update, Larian yields the floor to the community, showing off some of the chaos it has created with the photo mode so far. You can view the full gallery here, but I must immediately share what I've dubbed 'Distracted bear-friend', by reddit user u/bwubwerr, if only for the sheer, unbridled swagger of that grizzly. 

Yeah, he knows he's got it.

In news that's only surprising on account of the fact that the game lasted as long as it did, Tuque Games' co-op hack-and-slasher Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance will be shutting down servers and be removed from sale on February 24, 2025. The game will still be available to play single-player, but as things stand there will be no more online functionality as of that date, which is pretty much a death knell for a game largely built around co-op dungeoneering.

In an update to the Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance Steam store page (via Polygon), the developers wrote:

"We will be shutting down the Dark Alliance servers on 2/24/2025 and it will no longer be available to purchase starting that day. The base game and all DLC are still available to play in offline single player by anyone who currently owns it."

Right from those early trailers, which were packed with squirm-inducing music choices, Dark Alliance felt like a game with an identity problem. It took the 'Dark Alliance' name from the well-liked Baldur's Gate spin-offs that originally came out in the early 2000s, but didn't really have anything to do with those games. Instead of top-down Diablo-like play (which the D&D setting is absolutely crying out for), Dark Alliance was a third-person co-op action game set in Icewind Dale, and starring the Forgotten Realms Drow bad boy Drizzt Do'Urden among other familiar faces from the setting.

In some ways this aesthetically pleasing arena-based stomp through fantasy climes felt like a more action-oriented, story-light Dragon Age: The Veilguard, minus all the bonkable companions and super-polished combat. The game got off to a shaky launch with tons of connectivity problems and bugs, and despite the dev patching the game up over the years and bolstering it with an expansion, the player base never really picked up.

That's not to say that Dark Alliance didn't have its supporters. In fact, our own Andy Kelly gave it a very respectable 82, which means that, according to Metacritic, PC Gamer holds the proud title of 'highest review score given to Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance in the world'. Kelly was enthralled by the game's environmental and character art, as well as its combat. He also said he had a great time playing through much of the game solo, so maybe there's a bit of fun to extract from this should it see a steep price drop (which it really should) before it goes off the market in February.

It's a shame the devs never delivered the split-screen update they said was forthcoming, because that could've given the game a lease of life beyond its doomed online multiplayer.

In 2018, a group of grad students at Georgia Tech published a paper that noted games had often been "an important testbed for artificial intelligence" in the past. AIs have been beating us at chess, checkers, and Unreal Tournament for years, after all. Since that was the case, they argued, it makes sense for future testing of AI to focus on whether they could learn to play tabletop roleplaying games. Games like Dungeons & Dragons would serve as an effective measure of the progress of AI, "due to an infinite action space, multiple (collaborative) players and models of the world, and no explicit reward signal."

What they didn't predict was how controversial AI would become by the time that was possible—a topic we'll come back to later.

In 2019, OpenAI released GPT-2, a large language model trained on eight million web pages that could generate narrative responses to short prompts. Though it wasn't fully released until November, a partial version was available by February, and three months later had already been used to create the first version of AI Dungeon.

Though more of a text adventure than a roleplaying game, AI Dungeon was an early taste of what it would be like to have a computer for a Dungeon Master. While the results typically descend into the surreal if not outright nonsensical, it made a fine proof of concept. Players were soon trying to craft the perfect prompt to turn GPT-2 into a DM, whether by creating opuses over 1,000 words long, or crafting something that took less than 100.

Problems emerged with both approaches. The chatbot DM would often try to wrap up an entire combat in a single reply rather than letting you play it out blow-by-blow. It would forget what had happened if you played for too long, and was averse to roleplaying conversations. It would take more than just a well-written prompt to create an artificial DM.

Professionals stepped in, and now there are several alternatives to choose from, like Hidden Door, which promises to let you play a story in the world of Wizard of Oz, Call of Cthulhu, or The Crow thanks to its use of "a unique architecture" and officially licensed source material. The end result has been underwhelming in my experience—stories hop from one disconnected scene to another in a dreamlike fashion and actions flip-flop back and forth. In one Call of Cthulhu game I was chased by a cloaked figure who I managed to escape from, then be caught by, then escape from, then be caught by all while gaining and losing and gaining and losing a pocketwatch in a tedious process of back-and-forth indecision on the narrator's behalf.

For a more traditional game of Dungeons & Dragons in digital form, there's Friends & Fables. Created by William Liu and David Melnychuk of indie game studio Side Quest Labs, Friends & Fables comes with character sheets, XP-tracking, an inventory, illustrated NPCs, and a narrator nicknamed "Franz" who acts as game master.

"It's not just one chatbot that you're talking to," Melnychuk tells me. "It's more like a system where there's one part of the AI GM that reasons about, like, is something new introduced? If there is, we need to save that to the game state—or do we need to update it? Things like that, it's a bunch of different modules that come together to create the final outcome that you see when you play."

The funny thing is, while Liu and Melnychuk needed to train their large-language models with examples so it knows when to add an item to the inventory (Friends & Fables mainly uses Llama), it already knew the rules of D&D 5th edition. "A lot of these large language-based models, they're actually trained on pretty much the entire internet," Melnychuk says. "They have a lot of just general knowledge about most things. That includes D&D and the SRD."

"The rule set, Wizards of the Coast has published it under the OGL and Creative Commons," Liu adds. "So it's on the internet for these language models to Hoover up."

OK Computer

When I play Friends & Fables, it certainly feels like a classic game of D&D. I start at an inn, with Franz describing several NPCs I could talk to. One of them has a lead on a magical artifact worth stealing, but wants to meet somewhere more private to discuss it. That leads to a journey into the tunnels beneath the city where a group of wizards have been meeting to conduct magical experiments on the sly. Along the way there are skill checks and back-and-forth dialogues with an insulting barbarian and a curious bard. It feels like exactly the kind of game of D&D an eager beginner might run.

One off-note is that Franz seems to be obsessed with the phrase "intricately carved wooden box," introducing more than one unconnected wooden box into the story with the same phrasing every time. When I bring this up Liu asks if I met anyone named "Elara", and I tell him I did learn about a goddess with that name. Turns out, that's another thing Franz keeps falling back on.

"The way that these language models work is that they're doing next-token prediction," he explains. "They're spitting out the sentence, and they're getting to a point—and a token is just like a word, or a string of words or characters—and so it's trying to guess, 'What is the most likely next one?' It's not that those are the only names that were in the training data, but that those are the ones that end up having the highest probability to be the next token."

Friends & Fables is still in beta, he points out, and "we're definitely working on fixing some of those things." Even with oddities like these—players on the Discord server have cataloged other Franz favorites, like windmills and hooded figures—my experience was more sensical than the amusing oddness AI Dungeon rapidly descends into.

"If we're being completely honest," Melnychuk says, "I think if AI Dungeon met our expectations of what we were expecting from an AI game we probably would have never built Friends & Fables."

Their motivation comes from a familiar story: the difficulty of getting an RPG group together in real life. "I have a couple of friends who play a lot of D&D," Liu says, "but they were deep in their own campaigns and I didn't feel like I could ask to just join after they're, like, three years deep. I also didn't really feel like just going out and finding a group for myself, of strangers."

It's a tale as old as D&D itself. Even now, with roleplaying at the height of its popularity, people struggle to find or maintain a campaign that suits them. "We get people that pop up in our Discord all the time who tell us, 'This is so great because I have two kids now, and don't have time to play,'" Liu says. "Or there's one guy who told us—he lives in Iraq, and there's just, like, nobody to play with there. He has a real hard time if he wants to play, so this was a solution for him. Just hearing people tell us that we're kind of solving this accessibility challenge for them is why we kept doing it."

Both are at pains to explain they're not interested in replacing human DMs, but rather in supplementing them. As well as providing a substitute for people who can't find a game, they want Friends & Fables to be able to help DMs run their own games.

"Think of it as a super-powered group chat," Liu says, "where you're the DM and you could send a message and say, like, 'Jody's character, roll a skill check.' Then a button on your phone pops up, and then you hit the skill check, right? That's definitely part of the future vision, but we're not there yet."

Ethics & Electronics

Who hasn't, in a moment of writer's block, turned to an online fantasy name generator? If an AI helps me run a game, is it any different to recycling bits of a pre-written scenario or showing my players NPC art I found by doing a Google image search for the phrase "elf pirate"? I use third-party stuff when I roleplay because I don't have time to do everything—my players don't need to know how often I steal NPCs from Brennan Lee Mulligan—and it doesn't make the games I run any less satisfying.

Still, AI has been a hot-button topic in the pen-and-paper RPG community. D&D publisher Wizards of the Coast came under fire for using AI-generated art, and though it swore off it, the CEO of its owner Hasbro has been much more chipper about embracing AI. Hidden Door CEO Hilary Mason has spoken at length about the ethical problems that come with generative AI, telling PC Gamer last year that the company is committed to using ethically sourced training data and paying authors.

"We want writers to get paid," said Mason. "We see what we do as a way of giving writers access to the technology that takes the work they've already done—all of that world building, all of that imagining, all of that writing—and then gives them another way to share that with their fans where they get paid more for the work they've already done. We're really excited to work with writers. And personally, I know this is controversial, but I don't think AI is innately evil. I think what we're arguing about is who gets to benefit, and we really want to see the writers, the creators, benefit from it."

To generate art for its characters and locations, Friends & Fables relies on Stable Diffusion—a deep-learning model that has been criticized for using a data set of publicly available images without the permission of their creators, which is why Getty Images filed a suit against it. "We totally sympathize with creators and artists who have gotten their data essentially trained on without permission from all these big AI companies," Liu says. "We don't think that's right either. Like, we think artists should be compensated."

He compares their use of Stable Diffusion to the way a DM running a home campaign might. "AI art generators unlock some really cool things there where you can't really hire a sketch artist to come to every campaign and draw things out for you on the fly," he says. "That's just not possible." Friends & Fables isn't just a home campaign, though. While you and one friend can play free for a while, eventually you'll run into the paywall.

Whether or not there's profit involved, generative AI's biggest critics won't touch it on the basis that it relies on stolen work, devalues real artists, and generates hollow mush. On the other side are people who enjoy refining prompts and finding the specialized use cases where AI can excel as an assistant rather than a replacement. The role of generative AI in RPGs is being explored and developed at dining room tables, tech startups, and big companies like Nvidia (which has been experimenting with conversation-holding NPCs), regardless of the ethical and legal battle lines having already been drawn, and both sides of the culture war using it as another way to holler at each as predictably as anything AI could come up with.

If you've not been keeping up with The Legend of Vox Machina's animated series on Amazon—first, I encourage you to do that, because it's genuinely proving to be some excellent high-fantasy TV, but secondly, you might want to stop reading here, because I am gonna get elbow-deep in some spoilers for episodes 7-9 of season three.

If you don't care about spoilers, though, let me catch you up to speed. The Legend of Vox Machina is an animated series based on a livestreamed campaign of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons that ran from 2015 to 2017 over the course of 115 episodes, going under the title Critical Role, which starred a handful of super prominent voice actors in gaming. It's still going today, on its third campaign, but the series is based on that 100+ episode debut.

In the TTRPG space, Critical Role is credited—pretty fairly—with causing a bit of a renaissance, easily on par with Stranger Things in terms of getting people into rolling dice. To put it in perspective, when the now-bigboy company asked for Kickstarter help to fund The Legend of Vox Machina, it broke $1 million in the first hour, then proceeded to rake in $11.3 million of funding total. They've got enough money to produce and distribute their own TTRPG systems: People like this thing.

Which means that the animated series' departures from the livestream story last week are very bloody brave—in the literal sense of the adjective. Two character deaths rocked the boat hard enough that water's getting in through the cracks, and I'm finding myself in the position of a sicko yelling "yes, yes!" through the window.

First up, Percival de Rolo—voiced by Taliesin Jaffe—has bit the bullet after Anna Ripley, who is supposed to get coup de grâce'd by a set of very pissed off adventurers (but doesn't), shoots him through the chest. The death itself isn't the interesting bit here, it's the permanency.

D&D 5e is generally pretty lax with resurrection rules, to the point where DM Matthew Mercer had to devise a homebrew resurrection ritual to keep character deaths meaningful back in 2015. The Legend of Vox Machina's in-universe rules are a lot less lax. Percy, who was originally resurrected not soon after Ripley killed him, is left dead as a doornail in a stone coffin. He gets a funeral scene and everything and, at the time I'm writing, is considered donezo by everyone involved.

His soul hasn't passed into the beyond—his toxic ex-demon, Orthax, eats the souls of gun victims, it's a whole thing—which means that his future resurrection is very likely. It does, however, change the tone of the entire rest of the season, as several beats from the livestream are now missing one white-haired goth nobleman.

Then there's Kashaw Vesh, a guest character from the livestream portrayed by Will Friedle, who gets turned to paste.

While Percy's death seemed like a brave, interesting departure from the source material, turning a pretty well-loved side character into a Red Dragon pancake is like stabbing a knife through it. Especially because I'm a lot less certain that dude's coming back—chosen oomfie of the goddess of death, Vax'ildan, watches him go into the Raven Queen's embrace. Which is the spiritual equivalent of taking a bow before backflipping into traffic, while on fire. It's not something you generally survive—Kashaw willingly went to that farm upstate.

The series hasn't been a stranger to narrative departures from its source material, obviously, but those changes have mostly been in the service of efficiency. After all, your average D&D session lasts around four hours, which is way too much runtime to condense into a show. Comparatively, these changes are huge—and as someone who sat down and watched all 115 episodes of the dang thing, bawling my eyes out live in 2017, I'm here for it.

These changes ensure that long-time fans like me aren't just sat here crossing off entries on a bingo card. I'd be gently entertained, but otherwise non-responsive, to the dramatic stakes of these final battles if that were the case. Now, Critical Role and the folks at Titmouse have made a statement that no-one is exactly safe—main cast members like Percy'll probably come back with an appropriate amount of gravitas, but side-characters? There's every chance they can get blown up for good.

As for the wider fan response, Matthew Mercer popped up on X with a tentative "So… how are we all doing this morning?" after the episodes dropped. I'm not going to go deep into quote tweets but suffice to say, it's not so good. I guess we'll just have to wait for a Critical Role videogame to make it to market so I can defend Kashaw Vesh with my own two gamer hands.

Listen—I know I like to have a good gripe and groan about Dungeons & Dragons, so much so that anyone familiar with my writing for this site might think I hate the damn thing. I don't, honest. I just hold it to a high standard in the way you might hold a politician under scathing scrutiny. It's the central monolith of the TTRPG gaming space, and it can take its licks—but I'd be lying if I said I didn't still like going on a high fantasy adventures, rolling to swing my sword, and getting shiny magic items.

The issue is though, when you like something, and wind up playing a lot of it, you start to notice its flaws, and boy does D&D have those—especially for the DM. Action economy is all over the place, encounter balancing feels like trying to spin plates covered in oil, and the game tears apart at the seams when you get to its higher levels.

Despite all this chaos, the more I've played D&D, the more I've felt like it's, well, conservative. I don't mean politically, I mean in the literal sense of the word. Wizards of the Coast occupies such a mammoth share of the space that changing anything, experimenting even the slightest bit, means potentially pissing off a fleet of fans. It's not a position I envy, even if I rag on them for holding it from time to time.

This weariness, unfortunately, trickles down into the game's mechanics. The new Player's Handbook has taken steps to address this, but I feel like it's fair for me to judge 5e on a habit it kept up for an entire decade, one it's only addressing recently, and to an extent as-yet-unknown (we're still waiting on the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual).

Cantrips like Blade Ward were left to rot for years, the Ranger was absolute dog water until it had a mid-edition rework in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. Certain spells and options and feats are downright stingy, and while 5e makes an effort to keep character creation simple (something that has worked to its benefits), the power creep of certain subclasses, like the Twilight Cleric, puts other options to shame. And yet, some classes manage to feel samey no matter how you play them. For example, a Paladin basically plays the same as any other Paladin—with just a sprinkling of differences between Oaths.

This has, over the years, produced a TTRPG that (despite being a game where you're meant to inevitably be strong enough to kill god and warp reality) feels somehow both inconsistent but overly controlled at the same time. Like a helicopter parent over your shoulder, whose base ruleset never wanted you to have too much fun. It's not immediately apparent, but the more familiar you are, the more you start to feel the leash around your neck.

All this to say, when the DM for one of my D&D games became too busy to be in the chair, I stepped up to the plate and ventured "well, I've heard good things about Pathfinder 2e, why not dip our toes in?" Innocent, naive fool that I was, I figured, hey—it can't be that much different from 5e.

If Pathfinder 2e was a body, then the bones would look almost identical compared to its more mainstream cousin. It's what is layered on top—the sinew, the muscle—that makes it feel very different. Both systems live in the same family, they share the same genetic code. They're even siblings to each other. But while D&D 5e eventually felt like a strict parent, Pathfinder 2e feels like a cool uncle that lets you smoke weed and listen to his vinyl albums whenever you visit his bungalow.

A warm welcome

I genuinely have no idea how Paizo, creators of Pathfinder 2e, make their money—I mean, logically speaking they make it via Adventure Paths, which are the prefab adventure books, but still. I'd gotten so used to D&D making you dig into your wallet to get started that I'd forgotten what it was like to get anything for free.

For context, pre-ordering a digital only version of the upcoming 2024 D&D ruleset (all three books) runs you around $90, or $30 for each tome. Physical versions are pricier, at $50 a pop, or $150 for the set. Do you know how much it costs to get access to all of the non-adventure material for Pathfinder 2e? The rules to build characters, the extra class options from books, most of the monsters from those adventure paths? Not a single cent.

Okay, there's an asterisk, here—Pathfinder 2e has an officially-sanctioned site with all that content on called Archives of Nethys, and it's slightly behind the official releases (the system's in the midst of a rules revamp). But still, it's basically all there.

If you want to play on a virtual tabletop, this generosity extends to Foundry as well. While you'll have to pay for a server licence (something you'd need to do to run D&D on it as well, anyway) the integration of everything is just there, baseline. It even gets updated a lot faster than Nethys, as well.

What this means is that if you're happy to homebrew your own setting, Pathfinder 2e is essentially free-to-play. It's nice to have the books for convenience's sake—especially if you're new to running it—but I was staggered by the generosity going on here. You're handed a free doobie by uncle PF2e the moment your parents drop you off, and things only get whackier from there.

4,500 feats

PF2e has options—heaps of options—for players starting out. To break it down, while characters in Pathfinder 2e have core class like D&D has them, they're primarily built out of secondary feat choices, which are split into a few categories.

You've got your Ancestry feats, which are determined by whether you're, a goblin, a robot, a skeleton, a plant person, and so on. You've got skill and general feats, which are either broadly applicable or hone in on a specific skill, and you've also got class feats, which are related to your class. Assembling these together is what makes a character sing—and because there are so many of them (4,500+ spread across those categories) you can go hog wild. That's not even getting into Archetypes, which are the equivalent of the game's multiclassing system, letting you swap your class feats for even more specific talents.

The way these classes play is also, broadly-speaking, less stingy as well. For instance, being a dedicated healer isn't really a thing in 5e unless you go for a specific Cleric domain (Life, or Grave). This is not the case in Pathfinder 2e—healers and supports are extremely impactful, and there's quite a few options for them depending on how hardcore you want to get.

The flavour of these feats is also tremendous. Some of my favourites include "Just One More Thing", an Investigator feat that lets you reroll a failed attempt to influence someone by pulling a Columbo and revealing that you had them on the hook the whole time. There's also the Automaton ancestry feat "Energy Beam", which gives you laser eyes.

If this all sounds tremendously complicated and overwhelming, that's because it is. And it's why I don't think simply saying "I think Pathfinder 2e is better than D&D" is exactly accurate. While I'm sure a table of game-savvy players could handle it as their intro to the hobby with a bit of homework, it's not a good first TTRPG unless you're already really into video or wargames.

If, however, you've been playing D&D 5e for a while? Pathfinder 2e fixes most gripes I have with 5e combat which—no matter what some DMs will tell you—is absolutely the core bread and butter of both systems.

Three actions and the beauty of crits

Stop me if you 5e players have heard this one before: You've just used your action to swing, have missed, and are now rifling through your character sheet looking for a bonus action, or staring at a grid wondering if moving somewhere will make you feel like your once-every-15-minute contribution to the combat actually did something. This takes about three minutes of staring at your sheet before you go "nah, I've got nothing else. That's the end of my turn."

The "Action, Bonus Action, Movement" system in D&D is the bane of my existence for this reason. Having a resource that only kicks in sometimes as well as a resource that must be spent moving will always slow a turn down. In Pathfinder 2e, though, you get three actions. That's it. You can use those actions to swing a sword, to move, to hide, and so on—but once you've done three things, your turn is over.

While PF2e is definitely a more complex game, this simple change manages to keep its combat (at the lower levels, at least) on pace with 5e, because you know immediately when someone's turn is over. There's no indecision—if they're done, they're done.

This also means that Paizo's been able to add actions that cost two or even three actions, giving players access to powerful, combat-defining attacks. Take the Heal spell, for instance: You can cast it with one action to heal someone in front of you, two actions for a more powerful heal that can be cast at range, or you can spend your whole turn rooted in place to heal everyone in a 30-foot aura around you.

Basically, players just have a lot more to work with. Instead of just always getting a move action by default, you're making a trade-off where you can plant your feet—but potentially stay in a vulnerable position—to do something even cooler.

Crits are also just better. In PF2e, critical failures and successes happen if you score 10 below or above your target. Say an enemy has an AC of 20, and you roll 18, then add 12? Well you rolled a 30, so that's a crit, baby. While I'm not sure how I feel about adding your level to just about everything yet (this makes the numbers get really, really high), this crit system is extremely elegant in that it keeps little bonuses—plus ones or plus twos—relevant, since they can push you over the edge and make your enemy explode.

It also means that, again, Cool Uncle PF2e is happy for a level 10 fighter to bowl through an entire pack of low-level mooks without any fear. Past a certain level difference, blows are going to glance off your armour, and every swing you land is going to crit—which is, like a lot of things with this system, tremendously flavourful. It also means you can have your ultra-powerful Strahd-tier villains actually show up, make a statement, and not be afraid they'll die to some bad luck.

A good second home for a seasoned table

There are some things I don't entirely like about Pathfinder 2e. The maths and more complicated conditions can get finickity. Not to mention, while your Cool Uncle PF2e is nice to hang out with, he gets a little too into talking about the types of kush he's growing, sometimes. Rules for many activities are hyper-specific, but they can also get frustratingly complicated. Pathfinder 2e also isn't immune to feats or options that just plain suck, it's just less noticeable because there are so many of them.

This also isn't a good game for players who don't know how Sneak Attack works after two years of play. The amount of options, and the unique ways in which they interact, means that you absolutely have to have a table of players who know their business. I run a table of six, and I have fully given up on understanding anything my players are doing. They could all just be lying to me for all I know, but I've got enough stuff to be getting on with.

Pathfinder 2e is also just a lot less thematically malleable in terms of its high-magic vibes than D&D, which is both good and bad. Now, I'm a firm believer in that people who try to homebrew 5e to fit super specific circumstances should probably just go play something else. For instance, if you wanna do teenage superheroes, go play Masks—it just does it better.

5e does, however, offer DMs the wiggle-room to play in higher or lower-magic settings. And while PF2e does have options for that sort of thing, you're also choosing to deliberately avoid the system's strengths even more. I wouldn't recommend this thing to anyone looking for a gritty, low-end, realistic campaign—even if I'm sure it's possible—because much of the joy within these rules involves getting to play a skeleton with a feat that lets you collapse into a pile of bones to ignore a critical hit.

But if you've already got a table of 5th-edition weary gamers who aren't afraid to hit the books and want a high-magic campaign? Pathfinder 2e is so genuinely refreshing. All of the things D&D feels afraid to lean into, it embraces. It allows players to piece together staggeringly weird, specialised characters bursting with flavour, and it's basically free. It's a little intense, sure, but it's well worth checking out if you'd like to do something new. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go remind myself how vehicles work for the 100th time.

I can't imagine why you'd leave both Karlach and Astarion out of your party, unless your version of Tav, the hero of Baldur's Gate 3, is some kind of obscene rogue/barbarian multiclass who has both their specialties covered. That's what happened at GenCon's live Dungeons & Dragons show, however, when voice actors Samantha Béart and Neil Newbon explored what their characters get up to when they wander off on their own, live on stage with Dungeon Master Aabria Iyengar and fellow players Anjali Bhimani (DesiQuest) and Brennan Lee Mulligan (Dimension 20).

Their adventure begins at a dive bar so low it's in the actual Underdark, but I won't spoil where it goes from there. Suffice to say it's an extremely silly good time, and the players get to take a couple of pot-shots at Gale and Lae'zel while they're not around. This is for sure the kind of shenanigans the NPCs get up to when I leave them behind, and that's canon.

The second half of the game includes a demonstration of Project Sigil, the 3D virtual tabletop Wizards of the Coast is currently working on. It looks a lot more graphically impressive than something like Roll20, which is what I'm using to run my current game of D&D, perhaps to a fault. There's a noticeable delay in the live game, and if your players don't have high-end desktop PCs I can see a virtual tabletop this graphically intense being a bit much.

The cast of Baldur's Gate 3, or at least its origin characters, previously played D&D on an episode of High Rollers (which gave us Bing Bong, an NPC so beloved Larian canonized them in the epilogue update), so they know their Constitution saves from their Charisma checks. A few years ago, Newbon even ran a campaign of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play over Twitch if you needed another reason to love the man.

When you think about it, hasn't every letter you receive been on its own epic quest, all the way from its sender to your door? What do you mean "No"? If you're going to be like that, you can come up with your own seamless introduction to a story about Dungeons & Dragons stamps.

That's right, even Royal Mail is getting in on D&D's 50th anniversary celebrations this year, with a collection of limited edition stamps up for preorder now, featuring new art from iconic fantasy artist Wayne Reynolds. Aimed at collectors rather than people actually trying to sort out their post (though presumably they're legal for that purpose too), they can be bought as a simple set of eight, as enlarged framed portraits, or even printed on metal, among other options. I particularly like the treasure chest stamp book that unfolds out into a mimic. 

Apparently there are even secrets to be uncovered—Royal Mail let us know that a "special surprise" will be revealed if you hold the stamps under an ultraviolet light. Maybe it'll be all the text from the upcoming new D&D core books printed really tiny in invisible ink? Nah, you're right, probably not. 

None of it's cheap, but then what D&D merchandise is? And Reynolds' art of the various iconic monsters—from a mind flayer to a red dragon—is genuinely lovely. Even those who've moved to Pathfinder may be tempted, as he created many of the defining pieces for that game too, and his signature style is as recognisable as ever.

This may seem like a very random collaboration, but Royal Mail's actually been doing stuff like this for a while now, from celebrating classic indie games to marking the 40th anniversary of Warhammer. There must be enough people falling into the middle of these nerdy venn diagrams to make it make sense, and honestly, god bless the lot of 'em. 

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go and post a birthday card to a displacer beast. 

Dungeons & Dragons' 2024 rules overhaul—stuck awkwardly between "not a new edition" and design update—is en route. The 2024 ruleset will be releasing its revamped Player Handbook on September 17, its Dungeon Master's Guide November 11, and its Monster Manual February 18 2025.

As part of its debut, Wizards of the Coast has announced further details for its pre-order bonuses and, gee, that sure is a videogame DLC chart, huh.

Typically, when faced with this sort of thing, I'd come out swinging with some snarky jab—or break down its pros and cons in the interest of nuance. My reaction to looking at this thing, however, is as follows:

This sucks. We can all agree this sucks, right? As a baseline, ground-level, shared assumption?

I cannot imagine any TTRPG enthusiast staring at this thing and going, "gee willikers, I sure am looking forward to unlocking my two weeks early access with my D&D Beyond Master Tier subscription(™), complete with 34 digital frames for all my characters!" Oh, also, you get a 3D model of a gold dragon for D&D's officially-licensed virtual tabletop, which fills me with dread and knowledge that, chances are, it'll be just as much of a "big-budget misunderstanding" as I thought it'd be.

To properly lay out the pricing, which the chart doesn't even really do beyond savings, pre-ordering the digital and physical versions of the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual on the D&D Beyond storefront individually will run you around $80 a pop, or $240 total. The bundle, as advertised, costs around $180. That is indeed a saving of $60.

The extras you'll get are (digital) dice, frames, and backdrops—but the main selling point really is that early access period, which will allow you to look at the new rules one week earlier for a Hero subscription (around $2 a month) or a Master subscription (around $5). Oh, you'll also get a digital artbook and, again, that 3D model of a gold dragon (yipee). This is so out of pocket, it's not even wearing trousers. I cannot imagine a single solitary soul who is psyched by this.

Now that Hasbro owns D&D Beyond, there's really no reason that a book shouldn't come with a code as standard—charge a subscription fee to use it, sure, but $10 extra for a PDF is nickel-and-diming. It does track that said PDF would arrive at your digital doorstep before the premium copy, but the "Early Access" period gated behind a few piddly extra dollars a month is a twist of the knife as well.

Ultimately, this smacks of a large company desperately trying so hard to treat tabletop gaming as a thing you can squeeze money out of like videogames—which tracks, because that's exactly what Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said he wanted to do two years ago, aiming for "the type of recurrent spending you see in digital games". Well, here it is.

I sorely hope this isn't a preview of the next few years of annoying nonsense. Let's just hope Hasbro doesn't hire the pinkertons to pay me a visit for sharing an illicit, subscriptionless nu-PDF to my mate in 2040, when I assume I'll need an Ultra subscription and a WizardsKey to jack into the Forgotten Realms via databank.

With pre-orders for the three new Dungeons & Dragons core books now live, Wizards of the Coast was kind enough to give me an early look at what you can expect from each. But while it's clear that a lot of work and passion has gone into these reimagined releases, I'm concerned that so much of what I'm shown feels stuck in tabletop gaming's past, rather than the foundation for a new future for D&D.

To be clear, I haven't read the full books yet—WOTC's presentation only offered a top-level view of what's to be found within, with key examples. But the parts the designers were keen to highlight felt, to me, hugely revealing of what they see as important, and though I did like some of what I saw, Wizards of the Coast doesn't seem to be addressing any of the game's core problems, or ensuring its game feels modern and relevant through these partial updates. 

You'd be forgiven for still not fully understanding why there's a new set of D&D books to buy. WOTC has been clear that this isn't a new edition of the game. What it's been rather less clear on is what the new core rule books actually are. So, to put it in plain terms: this is an update for 5th edition, like a big patch or a new season in a videogame, based on a brand new Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual that replace the existing tomes. The core system isn't changing, but it is being tweaked, added to, and reformatted. All this new material will, however, still be compatible with old books and adventures. 

The idea is that this will be the model going forward—incremental updates, instead of major shifts, with core books referred to by the year of their release rather than an edition number. We've played D&D 5e with the 2014 books, now we'll be playing with the 2024 books, and eventually we'll be playing with the 2034 books (or earlier, if this works out). 

New content

From what I'm shown, these books have been really substantially reimagined—don't fear that these are just minor updates to get you to buy the same things again. The new Player's Handbook offers an easier ramp into the game, with more comprehensive examples and explanations of the rules, plus reworked backgrounds and classes with a huge selection of subclasses and spells to choose from. The Monster Manual rebalances existing monsters and adds plenty of new ones, including apex monsters for each creature type that serve as epic bosses (as soon as I hear the name "Blob of Annihilation", I want to fight one).

Most changed is the Dungeon Master's Guide. The DMG has been an odd book in each edition, often feeling like the most inessential of the three and containing a muddle of different additions that don't really cohere into a useful resource. This new version, however, is actually designed to be a useful guide for Dungeon Masters—what a novel thought! It contains advice on the DM's role in the game and a step-by-step process for writing adventures along with some example ones to use. There's a section on creating your own campaign and world, and for the first time ever (somehow), the DMG includes an example campaign setting.

There's a lot of interesting steps forward here. The book's artwork is cleverly evocative, for example—the PHB depicts lots of adventurers, with an illustration for every subclass, while the DMG focuses on inspiring depictions of locations and villains Meanwhile, the MM shows monsters in the middle of combat, or exhibiting key behaviours. That's characteristic of what seems to be a much more practical approach to these books than we've often seen before. They're designed to facilitate play above all, a simple but admirable focus for the hobby's leading TTRPG. 

But, to be frank, a lot of this feels to me like D&D catching up to ideas other TTRPG designers cracked years ago—and, worse, it comes with a lot of elements that still seem miles behind. 

Old ideas

The DMG including a sample campaign setting is great, but that sort of thing has been standard in other big TTRPGs for a very long time already, and the setting they've chosen is a fairly rough sketch of Greyhawk. If you're not familiar, that's literally the first official D&D setting ever, from all the way back in Gygax's day. It's a really important part of the game's history, no doubt about that, but in a modern context it's a well-worn and generic fantasy world—it feels difficult to get excited about in 2024, and I'm not sure it's helpful inspiration to get a modern DM's mind racing.

Elsewhere, there's a focus on scale that seems counterproductive. The PHB includes an unprecedented 48 subclasses—more character options is cool, but this seems like bloat to paper over the fact that 5e's classes offer very little true customisation. Magic has a similar issue—there will now be close to 400 to choose from, but this is a game that already struggles to balance its arcane options and make them all feel meaningful against each other. Experienced players will simply drill down to a shortlist of the best and ignore the rest, as they always have, while new players will be overwhelmed by an artificially wide array of choices. 

The Monster Manual is the biggest the game's ever seen, with more than 500 monsters, including over 75 new ones, but it seems to be offering scale over innovation. One of the new creatures showcased is just a skeletal fire mage to add to an already long list of skeleton foes—another forgettable mook to churn through. Other additions seem even more niche, such as extra groups of NPC stat blocks (including "performers, pirates, and more"), and new kinds of merfolk said to be ideal allies for seafaring campaigns. 

It harks back to the 3.5 days, when everything had to have a detailed statblock regardless of whether it was relevant to actual play, with books enormously bloated as a result. Far more useful would be better guidance on creating those yourself, or advice on when numbers aren't needed at all. Just the suggestion that you might need to know the AC and HP of a "performer", or know exactly what differentiates a pirate from a land-dwelling bandit, is a throwback to an unhelpfully outdated mode of game design.

The future is the past 

Overall, there's a real lack of genuinely new ideas. There's plenty of added and reimagined content to justify buying three new books, but no sense of the game moving forward from 5th edition's launch in 2014, which was itself in large part a throwback to how the game felt in the early 2000s. 

So much innovation has happened since in the world of tabletop gaming—but none of it's happened here, bar a brief jog to catch up to other systems that have already moved the hobby forwards. We already saw during the bloated and unbalanced 3.5 era that bigger is not simply better—quality is more important than quantity. It's disappointing given that this is supposed to be a vision of D&D's future. 

I can certainly understand how the negative reception to the sweeping changes D&D 4e made to the game has left the company frightened of major change—that's clearly why this is being presented so vaguely, rather than being officially a new edition or even a D&D 5.5. But that doesn't make it any less unexciting to see D&D set out its stall for the future as "more of the same, but bigger, forevermore". 

The new Player's Handbook releases September 17, the Dungeon Master's Guide on November 11, and the Monster Manual on Feb 18 2025. All three are available to preorder now—you can get them separately, or all together, and there are preorder bonuses for jumping in early. 

Baldur's Gate 3 had a long early access period—opening its doors in October 2020 before finally dropping in August 2023, almost three years (1,031 days, to be exact) later. It was a vastly different game to what it is now. For instance, I remember my inner D&D rules lawyer being very upset that firebolt made a damaging surface—that misstep, as well as a few others, were corrected for the better, producing what I'll happily call one of the strongest RPGs we'll see this decade.

The success of those fixes stem from Larian's approach to early access, which is rooted strongly in player feedback, adjustment, and constant maintenance. While attending BAFTA's "An Evening with Baldur's Gate 3", Larian Studios co-founder and CEO Swen Vincke, writing director Adam Smith, and lead writer Chrystal Ding were asked by interviewer Jane Douglas whether they believed in early access as the future of game development.

"I don't think [early access] is the future of, because you never know what the future will bring," Vincke answers. "For us, it's been really good—I heartily recommend it, but you really have to mean it when you go in there. You have to work with the players on making your game better, otherwise you shouldn't be doing it."

What it feels like Vincke is warning against, here, is releasing an early access build as a preview you leave in the dust or, heaven forbid, an elaborate marketing scheme based purely on FOMO: "You need to take time for it … if you're only in early access for a month or so, that's fine too, but then it's probably just to test some technical things and you have to be open about that."

When asked about whether he'd recommend a similar three-year lifespan, Sven takes a moment, sighs heavily, and laughs: "My team is watching. No, it's long—it's actually quite long. I think the playerbase gets tired, also, I mean, we got tired in early access." Still, he maintains, it's important not to release or add to an early access game with features that are in a broken state—which is something Smith agrees with.

"You've sold someone a game," Smith says. "They paid for a game. So you need to maintain it and you owe them that—you can't just say, okay, that early access branch is now over there and we're over here and it's neglected. You can't do that. So that's a lot of effort, it's difficult."

The early access period of Baldur's Gate 3 certainly didn't drag its feet when it came to updates—over the course of three years it received nine major patches, adding new classes, spells, companion characters, and story beats. I know some players who sunk hundreds of hours into just mucking around Act 1 alone. I can't relate (I dropped off after around 30 to wait for the full release, so I didn't over-indulge) but it's still mightily impressive that Larian tended to the game's early access like a proper release while also developing, well, the other two thirds of it.

That commitment is something Vincke stands by as being vital to the whole operation: "You really shouldn't approach it with the attitude of 'oh it's just early access'. There's players playing this that care, so you should treat them with respect."

We can probably expect whatever Vincke & Co are cooking next to have a similarly tended-to early access period, though I'll rather selfishly hope it isn't nearly as long. You'll be able to find the full talk on BAFTA's YouTube Channel in the coming weeks.

Critical Role, a show where I'm told some "nerdy-ass voice actors" play Dungeons & Dragons, is the main reason I'm into D&D and TTRPGs today—and while I haven't kept up with its third campaign, I've watched the adventures of Vox Machina and the Mighty Nein in their entirety.

As I've mentioned in the past, it's been wild to see Critical Role go from a casually-streamed game with a small enough audience to accept public pizza donations, into a genuine multi-platform monolith.

One fun consequence of its rockstar popularity is The Legend of Vox Machina animated series, which primarily happened because Critical Role asked their fans if they'd like to see the first campaign animated and they said yes, please, here's $1 million dollars in one hour ($11 million total).

The show has already had its first and second seasons, following the OG stream's Briarwood arc, as well as roughly a third of its Chroma Conclave storyline. We found out last month it's going back in for a third dip—there's still dragons to slay, after all. Courtesy of an IGN exclusive, we also know exactly when—October 3. The site also shared a look at the show's fresh intro sequence, which you can watch below.

The intro opens on Vox Machina walking and laughing before Vax'ildan, the chosen baby of the goddess of death, turns around to see her porcelain mask wielding a thousand strings of fate—kicking off a flashback sequence that lasts for the rest of the intro.

The mentally well-adjusted, normal, and emotionally fine gunslinger Percy burns up the schematics for his weapon, now that he's past his goth—I mean, vengeance—phase. However, we also see Ripley loom threateningly in the ashes. Mild spoilers from the livestream, but yeah—we're not done with her, yet.

Then there's the heartwarming sight of Keyleth, who will live for thousands of years as a druid, slowly left alone as her party members fade one by one—a fact that definitely doesn't still haunt me after the stream's original epilogue.

As for the rest, it's mostly group shots and action scenes from the party of Vox Machina, putting their freshly-earned Vestiges of Divergence to good use. We're also shown a hint of what happens after the current Chroma Conclave arc—straight-up spoilers for that to follow.

The blindfolded individual pondering the world's most ominous orb is almost absolutely Delilah Briarwood from Episode 100 of the livestreamed campaign, Unfinished Business. In it, the party fails to stop the resurrected villain from opening a portal to the Shadowfell to resurrect Vecna, who is bad news for just about everybody.

To see it here makes me wonder whether that episode—and the massacre that follows it—will be a part of Season 3, or saved as a cliffhanger for Season 4. If so, it's going to be one hell of a drop to dangle over. While I'd personally still love to see a Critical Role game at some point, I remain thoroughly excited to see the old crew return for another gorgeously-animated retelling.

Dungeons and Dragons is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and Dead by Daylight is getting in on that action by bringing the powerful lich Vecna to the game as its next killer.

Liches in general are powerful and unpleasant in equal measure, but even by their usual high standards Vecna is noteworthy. He actually ascended to godhood at one point, although—as is so often the way with the obsessive pursuit of power—it didn't work out entirely well for him. 

But that's also what brought him into the world of Dead by Daylight in the first place: Unlike many other killers, Vecna actively pursued entry into the Fog, viewing it as a new realm to conquer and rule.

Vecna is perhaps not quite as powerful in Dead by Daylight as he is amongst the Planes, though, with just four spells at hand:

💀 Fly grants him flying speed for a short time, letting him pass over obstacles in his path.

💀 Flight of the Damned conjures flying spectral entities that pass-through obstacles and cause harm to all they hit.

💀 Mage Hand creates a ghastly, phantasmic hand that completes tasks such as holding and blocking the use of Pallets.

💀 Dispelling Sphere creates a moving AOE sphere that reveals Survivors and disables their Magical Items.

Naturally, a new killer demands balance with a new survivor, and in this case there are two: The bards Aestri Yazr, an elf, and Baermar Uraz, a human. My first reaction was why a bard, but in hindsight it makes sense: Bards aren't likely to start too many fights (at least not on purpose) and unlike, say, an angry dwarf with an axe, they're typically not going to be too inclined to try their luck throwing hands with a lich. They are, however, consummate survivors, which is exactly the role they're meant to play here.

The D&D trappings in the new Dead by Daylight chapter go beyond just the characters. The new map, called Forgotten Ruins, is a dungeon comprised of a ruined tower sitting atop "an underground lair of terrible experiments and horrifying secrets." In its halls are seven chests which are opened by rolling a D20: Rolling a 2 or 3 will grant you a standard Dead by Daylight item, while rolling 4 to 19 will earn magical gauntlets or boots that can counter one of Vecna's spells.

Roll a 20, however, and you'll score a critical success that will get you either the Eye of Vecna, enabling you to vanish briefly after exiting a locker, or the Hand of Vecna, which can be used to teleport between lockers. But they demand a price: Each use costs a health state, so you'll need to pick your shots very carefully.

Oh, and if you roll a 1? That's a critical failure. You'll see what happens when it happens.

Dead by Daylight: Dungeons and Dragons is set to go live on June 3, but is playable right now via the public test build on Steam. Do note, however, that any progress earned on the PTB will not transfer over to the live build.

You ever thought about why you find so many potent, powerful magic items in Baldur's Gate 3? No, really—while most of the places you delve into are dangerous, they're also abandoned and lost to the ravages of time. Why in the nine hells is there the arcane equivalent of a fully-functioning Glock in some chest in the deep wilderness?

Turns out there's actual, honest-to-Mystra D&D lore justifications for this, and they involve a kindly old Wizard. This isn't substantiated in-game—but it is one hell of a deep-cut that justified why I keep finding enchanted cloaks on corpses.

As spotted by SurroundBulky4109 on the game's subreddit (thanks, TheGamer), a passage in the 26-year old book "The Temptation of Elminster" by Ed Greenwood details the adventures of Elminster himself as one of Mystra's chosen. Elminster, of course, takes stage in Baldur's Gate 3 as an old friend of Gale, as well as the bearer of Faerûn's worst fantasy text message from an ex at the top of Act 2. 

The passage itself follows Elminster entering into The Crypt of Moondark. Not to pilfer it, but to add wealth to it. Hilariously, it reads:

"Eaergladden Moondark had died destitute, begging his kin for a few coppers with which to buy a roasting-fowl… but who, save one Elminster, was still alive to remember that? So accomplished a mage as Eaergladden could quite well have had a wand, and of course a spellbook." He proceeds to then put a wand, a spellbook, and a dagger in the tomb for later adventurers to find. 

"This work took up much of his time in the service of Mystra, these days, at her bidding, Elminster travelled Faerûn visiting ruins and the tombs of dead mages, planting 'old' scrolls, spellbooks, minor enchanted items, and even the occasional staff for later folk to find… and all such leavings were in truth items she'd just finished Grafting, and made to look old."

So not only are the magic items most D&D players find complete forgeries from the mother of magic herself—they're not even antiques. Elminster's generosity is great for tomb raiders, but must've wrecked havoc on any well-meaning historian trying to put together Faerûn's history. 

The reason? Mystra just wants magic to be proliferated, rather than in the hands of "a few archwizards lording it over the spell-poor or magically barren, as had happened in the days of lost Netheril." I shan't delve into it too much to avoid spoilers, but considering Gale's condition in Baldur's Gate 3, the plot thread of Mystra's opposition to Netheril is kept alive and well nearly 26 years later.

Considering his involvement in the game's story, it's extremely possible that—for the lion's share of items you find not on already-legendary creatures—Elminster Claus put them there. So there you have it: I've apparently got a futzy old wizard to thank for the gear that turned my Honour Mode bard into an absolute monster. 

Last month, Larian announced that it's going to "move away from D&D", and suddenly the future of Baldur's Gate seemed a lot murkier. The smash success of Baldur's Gate 3 has firmly revived the classic RPG series, but without Larian to continue to shepherd it, what can we actually expect from any possible sequels or spin-offs?

It's a question Hasbro, owner of Wizards of the Coast and by extension D&D, is in the process of figuring out an answer to. Following yet more success for Baldur's Gate 3 at the BAFTA awards, I talked to Eugene Evans, senior vice president of Digital Strategy and Licensing for Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast, about where the series goes from here. The good news is, a sequel is very much on the cards—but the company is still exploring its options when it comes to what that looks like and what developer might get to create it, and it could still be a long way off. 

"We're now talking to lots of partners and being approached by a lot of partners who are embracing the challenge of, what does the future of the Baldur's Gate franchise look like?" says Evans. "So we certainly hope that it's not another 25 years, as it was from Baldur's Gate 2 to 3, before we answer that. But we're going to take our time and find the right partner, the right approach, and the right product that could represent the future of Baldur's Gate. We take that very, very seriously, as we do with all of our decisions around our portfolio. We don't rush into decisions as to who to partner with on products or what products we should be considering."  

Of course it's not just the future of the series itself that's in question. Baldur's Gate 3 also introduced us to what are now some of the most beloved companion characters in RPG history, and there has understandably been some concerns among fans about what might happen to Shadowheart, Astarion, and the rest of the gang following Swen Vincke's confirmation that they're now owned by Wizards of the Coast, not Larian.

"Larian created a much loved cast of characters, who were even celebrated by their nominations, the voice actors behind them and the talent behind them was celebrated at the [BAFTAS]," he says. "And they are now essentially part of D&D canon."

So the question is, what happens to them from here? 

"I think it's too early to express specifics and I think that there's a much bigger question about how we approach Baldur's Gate in the future," says Evans. "But I would like to think that all of those characters, for the sake of the fans, could potentially appear in future products."

With how deeply connected fans feel to these characters, there's a real worry in the community that Hasbro might not do right by them in future. I ask Evans if that makes him wary, or whether there's any fear at the company of fan backlash around using them again—but he seems confident about rising to the challenge.

"Oh, we never have any doubt that our community are passionate and will be the first to let us know if they didn't like something that we did! And that's part of what we love about them," he says. "The bar has been set very high, and it's our job to reach and surpass that bar."

Gate keepers

Given Baldur's Gate 3's clean sweep of Game of the Year awards it's tempting to say that the bar isn't just high, it's in the stratosphere. I don't envy any developer the job of stepping into those enormous shoes. I think it's fair to question, too, how well-equipped Hasbro is to foster another smash success in the same vein in the wake of the mass layoffs it performed at the end of last year. According to Swen Vincke himself, there's now "almost nobody left" of the team at Wizards of the Coast that Larian worked with to make Baldur's Gate 3 happen—that seems like a huge loss of experience and expertise, and a difficult decision to explain given the game earned Hasbro about $90 million all told. 

But Evans effusively acknowledges what a miracle Larian pulled off and what a boon the game has been to D&D—if there is any bad blood to be found between the two companies post-split, as some have speculated, there's no evidence of it in our conversation.

"They have just done a remarkable job with the product. It's an amazing celebration of D&D," he says. "That team are incredible fans of D&D itself, obviously. And they've done just an amazing job of bringing that world to life, which has not only been celebrated by lifelong fans as we celebrate this 50th anniversary of D&D, but it's also brought many new players to D&D, which has obviously made us very happy."

That almost seems an understatement. Though D&D has certainly been building in popularity over the last decade, thanks to everything from a new edition to the rise of actual play streamers, it's hard to think of a time it's felt more mainstream and present than it did last year in the months following Baldur's Gate 3's launch. The sheer scale of its success has to have taken Hasbro by surprise, I put it to Evans—has that triggered a shift in how they view D&D videogames?

"So first of all, the level of engagement doesn't surprise us in some ways, because D&D fans are just so engaged with the hobby," he says. "They love every expression of it, whether it was the movie that was greatly celebrated by the fanbase, or Baldur's Gate 3. But certainly it has demonstrated, or confirmed if you like, the voracious appetite the fans have for content around D&D, in particular video games. Which is good, because we have been investing in new D&D game development ourselves."

It's going to take some time before we see all the fruits of those efforts, but it certainly sounds like fans will have a lot to keep them occupied while they wait for a new Baldur's Gate.

"Those games will appear over the next five years, and they will cover all genres, all platforms. And I think there's room within the D&D universe for many expressions of what D&D is all about, as long as we remain true to the things that people love about D&D and keep it authentic to the IP. And we're committed to doing that."

I am pleased beyond belief that the sentence: "There is an official NASA D&D adventure that's just an Isekai anime with scientists" is verifiably true. Titled The Lost Universe, this system-agnostic adventure is free to download and most certainly worth a read.

Here's the central thrust: a dragon kidnapped a bunch of alien wizards and forced them to rip the Hubble Telescope out of our reality. Yes, really. 

"Eirik linked to the Hubble Space Telescope after learning of its observations that have propelled understanding of black holes and dark energy (similar to the energy of the vacuum) on Earth … this drew the attention of a young dragon, Isilias, who stole the spell Eirik created, as well as Eirik himself and his fellow researchers, in order to steal Hubble itself so Isilias alone would possess its knowledge."

Rather than simply confusing a bunch of NASA scientists on Earth, this actually caused the Hubble to be removed from reality entirely. The adventure depicts a group of faintly-baffled researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland: "A subtle ache lives in your mind, insisting that you’re forgetting something, but it’s always just out of reach. The more you try to remember, the worse the pain gets." Then you all black out and wake up as D&D characters.

It sounds like I'm poking fun here—but it's the exact kind of earnest silliness that makes for a good game of tabletop. It's also reminiscent of the classic D&D cartoon from the 80s, wherein a group of teenagers are magically transported to a fantasy land at the behest of a disturbing-looking dungeon master.

While the game is technically system-agnostic, the adventure itself recommends a "party of 4-7 level 7-10 characters". Though if we're going with the adventure's suggested protagonist (a young green dragon from D&D 5e) a party of level 10 characters would make mincemeat of Isilias in a few rounds. There's ultimately quite a bit of homebrew the DM will need to bring in, in order to this to make it all click with their table.

But there's some genuinely fun fantasy concepts at work here, too. Wizard Planet (Exlaris, by its proper name) is a rogue world that drifted out of orbit, protected from the ravages of space with an artificial magic atmosphere—which is a neat setting idea to run with, even if you don't want to play NASA Isekai. If you do, however, the adventure's sprinkled with educational tidbits that'll teach you plenty of scientific history.

I've written a touch about Helldivers 2's slapstick deaths, reinforced by rapid respawns and a low punishment for beefing it—its Magika-esque friendly fire systems also contributing to its 'Warhammer 40k Gone Wrong' vibes. It joins Lethal Company as a game where dying is just inherently funny, each panicked, scrambling doom its own punchline.

Arrowhead Games history of games centred around friendly fire fun is—according to the studio's CEO and creative director Johan Pilestedt—directly inspired by the chaos of tabletop roleplaying (thanks, GamesRadar). 

"[Comedy] is absolutely what I'm going for when I design games. The concept originates from years of playing [pen and paper] RPGs, where the players manage to turn everything into a farce. No matter if it's Cthulhu or D&D, it always ends with us crying of laughter."

As someone with a vested interest in running tabletop myself, Pilestedt is bang on the money here. The improv nature of most TTRPG games always leads to a chaotic network of stacking consequences, which can easily result in four grown adults giggling like school children around a bunch of dice and pencils. 

That word choice—'farce'—describes it perfectly. A good old-fashioned farcical comedy is built on physical humour, absurd situations, and unlikely circumstances—all things the whims of the dice help to enable. In a bi-weekly Sunday game I play over discord, the ongoing debate over whether horses actually exist or not has grown into a running joke that raises my cleric's blood pressure while I remain in stitches.

Helldivers 2 doesn't have a single dice roll in it, but it does occupy the same space by virtue of every mission being a playground. Here's a video of one player having a grenade hucked back at them by a bug completely on accident, to which Pilestedt replies: "this is the reason why you always simulate everything even though it doesn't make sense at the time." You can almost picture the DM saying: 'You rolled a natural one? Uh. The grenade bounces off a bug's hand and flies back at you, and you swear it pulled the pin. Make a dexterity saving throw.'

I've even seen this play out over the weekend. As I mentioned in an opinion piece yesterday, my matches with some of the PC Gamer crew led to a situation in which we all equipped "Rover" Guard Dog backpacks, creating a game of deadly laser tag where none of us were in control. Shoutout to our guides writer Sean Martin, who kept throwing himself in the hole left by a deployed ICBM for The Bit every single time. Sterling dedication.

Pilestedt isn't the first to be inspired by his time playing TTRPGs. Here's a piece we wrote a few years ago detailing different devs from different games, and how thoroughly they've been inspired by the likes of Dungeons and Dragons. Deus Ex's Warren Spector, James Ohlen of the original Baldur's Gate games—even John Romero, father of Doom, said: 

"We never thought that the D&D games we were playing would end up influencing our game designs … It just flowed easily and was enthralling. We all liked playing together. No one pored over stat sheets, and no battle or rewards were held up due to some arcane rule lawyering. D&D was yet another way that we gelled as a team."

While games like Baldur's Gate 3 are obviously inspired by the freeform nonsense of TTRPGs, it's fascinating to me how the act of 'sitting around a table with four of your mates and engaging in dice-fuelled hallucinations' has genuinely unlocked the creativity behind many of gaming's classics—and now Helldivers 2 gets to join that canon. Once spots at the table are freed up, that is.

Every February, Kickstarter holds a month-long celebration of tabletop RPGs called ZineQuest, featuring all sorts of crowdfunded zines. What's a zine, you ask? It's a short, self-published book, in this context usually an adventure, a supplement, or a small, self-contained game. 

They tend to be a bit scrappy and weird, allowing creators to run with wild and niche ideas you might not see in full TTRPG books. This year's no exception in that regard, and there are lots of great opportunities to spice up your shelves with something unusual and creative.

You can check out the full list of ZineQuest projects through a search of the ZineQuest tag on Kickstarter, but it's a lot to sift through. To save you some time, I've picked out what I think are some of the most promising zines on offer this year—read on, and see if any take your fancy. 

Gas! Gas! Gas!

This one-shot scenario for excellent sci-fi horror TTRPG Mothership involves a catastrophe at a subterranean prison, where players will have to contend with both a malfunctioning computer system determined not to let them escape, and a rapidly spreading and oddly intelligent poisonous gas leak. You're in safe hands with this one—creator WacoMatrixo has previously worked on one-shots for Mothership called Aurora and Decagone, both scenarios that had really interesting and creative twists on the game's usual formula. They're also known for making great animated videos offering play advice and house rules.  

Blister Critters

A stand-alone game about mutant cartoon animals trying to survive in a world where both humankind and the ozone layer have disappeared. The tone of this one is a little muddled—it's like Looney Tunes with body horror, and I'm not sure the two themes gel perfectly, at least in the free quickstart. But it's bursting with personality, the art is brilliant, and I love its weird tree of mutations players can progress along, so I reckon it deserves the benefit of the doubt. Plus, I really enjoyed the style and charm of creator Anthony Grasso's previous project AMMU: An Eldritch Extermination.  

The Lair of the Skateomancer 

Sometimes all an adventure needs is a great, simple hook, a village under attack by an evil skateboarding lich is certainly that. This adventure for D&D 5e not only gives you a skatepark-themed dungeon to battle through, but also a magic item, the Board of Skateomancy, that if claimed will allow you to "cast gnarly spells by doing tricks". Radical.  

Beetle Knight 

With Hollow Knight: Silksong still nowhere to be seen, we must turn elsewhere for our bug adventures. Beetle Knight stands ready to fill the void. It's a stand-alone game where you play as an insect hero in the world of "Litterfall", a forest floor where flies, mantises, fire ants, and more form kingdoms and factions to interact with. Also included are two full adventures and even rules for playing solo.  

The Abbott Trilogy 

Designed to be easily adapted to your TTRPG system of choice, this trilogy of adventures can be run as one-shots or linked together into a short campaign. The stark art-style is very appealing, and I love the old school vibe—particularly with the mix of traditional dungeon fantasy with strange sci-fi elements. If you miss the days when it was perfectly normal for your D&D group to explore a wrecked spaceship and pick up a laser pistol, this is the zine for you.  

Meatheads 

I love the burly barbarian aesthetic of this dungeon-crawler—like a blend of Conan the Barbarian and that one episode of Adventure Time where everyone can't stop rough-housing. Mechanically it sounds like an interesting twist on old school-inspired gaming, where levelling is replaced by a system where you rise and fall in muscle mass by succeeding or failing at mighty feats of strength. Also included is a megadungeon featuring, among other things, magic snails, hallucinogenic toads, and a water gun axe—the perfect place to put a party of meatheads through their paces.  

Demeo is a videogame take on tabletop dungeon crawling that we quite liked: Weekend editor Jody Macgregor described it as "like having the Monster Manual thrown at your face," but in a mostly good way. Now Resolution Games, the studio behind that game, is taking Demeo's D&D roots a big step further in a partnership with Wizards of the Coast to develop the first official Dungeons and Dragons VR game.

"As anyone who’s played Demeo can guess, we’re incredibly huge fans of tabletop roleplaying games," Resolution Games founder and CEO Tommy Palm said.

"Dungeons and Dragons offers one of the richest fantasy worlds that has ever been created, and it only gets bigger with every new sourcebook and adventure. We’re beyond humbled to have the opportunity to work with such an incredible IP and look forward to sharing the first details of this new project in the future."

And yes, that is the unfortunate aspect of the announcement: There's no real information beyond the fact that a D&D VR game is happening. There's not even a proper title at this point. Even so, it's interesting for a couple reasons. For one, Demeo does a very nice job of recreating the classic D&D vibe, so it's reasonable to expect (or at least hope) that Resolution Games will be able to do good things now that it has full access to the real deal.

The success of Baldur's Gate 3 has also demonstrated that the D&D license still carries weight: Yes, it's also the continuation of a beloved CRPG from 20 years ago, but as much as we like to think otherwise, that is not actually a guarantee of major mainstream success. Yet BG3 absolutely demolished it, and maybe it's a bit of a stretch but I don't think it's completely out of the question that some people might think, "I enjoyed that D&D videogame experience, maybe I'll enjoy this one too." 

The VR requirement is obviously a limiting factor, but that's not necessarily carved in stone forever: Demeo originally launched for VR in 2021, but a standard PC edition followed a year later. Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro SVP Eugene Evans seemed to hint at that possibility in the announcement.

"Resolution Games has a clear understanding of how to bring players together and capture the fun of tabletop gaming on digital platforms in an accessible way," Evans said. "They are an ideal partner to bring a new Dungeons and Dragons videogame to life in VR and beyond."

A proper reveal of the new D&D VR game will happen "in the future."

In the era of D&D 3rd edition and its 3.5 update, character building was a wild west. The game's complex rules and deep customisation made it ripe for min-maxing—and an unbelievable barrage of first- and third-party expansion content meant there were always new races, classes, spells, and feats to mess around with, usually all hopelessly unbalanced against each other. 

It was a time when every DM cringed at the sight of a player dropping a new book on the table, but at least for most the goal was just to put together a character optimal enough to breeze through that combat encounter that took four hours to prepare. A deviant few had darker designs in mind, and out in the dark corners of the Internet (and the WOTC official forums), they conspired to break not just the balance of the game, but the fundamental laws of its reality.

The darkest and most ludicrous of these forbidden builds passed into online legend—and though that's perhaps where they should've stayed, I've decided to dredge up a few of my favourites for you today. Call it a cautionary tale for the 5e players of today—what starts as some innocent experimentation with a Coffeelock build can soon take a turn.

Half-Ogre Spiked Chain Fighter

We'll start with a gentle one—a classic build strong enough to be game-ruining but not so contrived as to give your group a headache.  

Creator: Various

The method

Pretty simple—just make a Fighter with the half-ogre racial template to make yourself Large, then take the Combat Expertise, Combat Reflexes, and Improved Trip feats. Oh, and get yourself a spiked chain—one of 3.5's most ridiculous weapon types.  

The result 

Large creatures can attack enemies up to 10 feet away; the spiked chain extends that reach to 20. Get someone to cast Enlarge Person on you, and that increases to 25. Here, 3.5's Attack of Opportunity rules kick in, and basically any time someone tries to move within a 20-25 foot circle of you, you get a free attack, which you use to trip them up. If you trip them, you get another free attack on them from Improved Trip. If they try to get up, or get away from you, you get another Attack of Opportunity. Any time they get remotely close, just move backwards a few feet. You're near-untouchable and make it a nightmare for any of your opponents to do anything.  

Does it actually work? 

Pretty much, though you have to hope your DM never introduces a monster bigger than you or otherwise good at resisting your trip attempts. And, as immortalised in The Order of the Stick comic, make sure to look where you're going.  

Pun-Pun the Kobold

Perhaps the most iconic overpowered build in D&D history, Pun-Pun elevates one of the lowliest creatures in the Monster Manual to godhood. 

Creator: Khan the Destroyer 

The method 

The key to Pun-Pun is finding a way to transform into something called a "sarrukh"—the original build exploits an obscure racial template called Mulhorandi Divine Minion combined with a shapeshifting-focused prestige class called Master of Many Forms. Once you've gained the ability to turn into a Monstrous Humanoid of up to 14 hit dice, you're golden—doable within your first five levels, by this method, with a diversion into Wizard to get a viper familiar.

Sarrukhs have an ability called Manipulate Form, that lets them modify the stats of reptillian creatures (kobolds and vipers qualify, naturally). They can raise ability scores to match their own, and even grant spell-like abilities… including Manipulate Form itself. Pun-Pun turns into a sarrukh, uses Manipulate Form to give his familiar the Manipulate Form ability, turns back into a kobold, and then gets his familiar to use Manipulate Form to give Pun-Pun the Manipulate Form ability too. 

The result

A few further steps are required, but the upshot is that Pun-Pun and his familiar are now free to endlessly raise each other's ability scores. They can also grant each other pretty much any special powers they want, thanks to the vague wording of Manipulate Form. Pretty soon Pun-Pun has over 20,000 Strength, Dexterity and Constitution, knows every spell and feat in the game, is immune to everything, and permanently invisible. 

Does it actually work?

Legendary as it is, the Pun-Pun build has some major holes in it, not the least of which is the fact that in order to shapeshift into something, you have to know what it is—given the sarrukh are an extinct precursor race from tens of thousands of years in the past, that's not especially likely. Qualifying for the Master of Many Forms class in the first place also requires some very over-generous reading of the Divine Minion's rules, not to mention the question of how you even manage to become a holy avatar of the Mulhorand pantheon of gods in the first place.  

Peasant Railgun

Maybe more of a concept than a build, though it'll kill a dragon in one round just the same.  

Creator: Unknown

The method 

Hire about 2,000 peasants and tell them to stand in a line. Get the one at the front to ready his action to make a throw attack, then get all the ones behind him to ready their actions to pass a rock down the chain. Then get the peasant right at the back to pick up a rock and pass it to the peasant in front of him. 

The result

As the peasants pass the rock along the chain, the rock travels about two miles in one turn—which is six seconds real-time. That accelerates it to over 1000 miles an hour, over Mach 1, before the peasant at the front chucks it. How much damage does that do? That's up to the DM—but surely enough to punch through pretty much anything it hits. The Peasant Railgun can fire every two turns, or 12 seconds, making it pretty trivial to lay waste to entire fortifications. For more power, simply make the line of peasants longer.  

Does it actually work?

This one's less a legitimate exploit and more a method of starting an argument with your DM. The key flaw in the Peasant Railgun is that it picks and chooses when to follow the rules of D&D, and when to instead follow the real-world laws of physics. If we follow D&D rules to the letter, then the rock gains no bonuses at all, because D&D doesn't have rules for acceleration like this. If we follow the laws of physics, then the peasants can't pass a rock at super-speed in the first place—and if they could, then the peasants in the latter half of the Railgun are getting their hands blown off before it can reach the end. Still, a good way to derail a quest you're not interested in with four hours of arguing about physics.  

Psionic Sandwich

The beauty of this build is that it's perfectly optimised to do something completely pointless.  

Creator: Tleilaxu_Ghola

The method

Get to level 20 as a Telepath. Make a sandwich. Polymorph the sandwich into a rabbit (or other small animal of your choice). Use the Astral Seed power to create a crystal that will store your mind and soul if you die. Commit suicide. From within the crystal, use the Mind Switch power to swap into the rabbit's body. Break the crystal. Use the Psychic Chirurgery power to restore the levels you lost by dying. Then, dispel all powers on yourself.  

The result

You are now a level 20 sandwich. With the Subtle Spell feat, you can still use your psionic powers, enabling you to fly around and control people's minds quite happily, despite being made of bread and butter with ham in between. 

Does it actually work?

There's an argument to be made that you shouldn't retain your mental ability scores as a sandwich, which would kill your career as a Telepath, though you would still have succeeded at turning yourself into a sandwich, which was of course the real goal here. Beyond that, it's a foolproof build.  

Chicken-Infested Commoner

This build unleashes the potential of the game's weakest class. And its weakest farm animal.

Creator: Various 

The method

There's a few different ways this build can go, but the first thing you need to do is take a level in Commoner—a feeble class usually intended only for NPCs to use. Use that to qualify for the Chicken-Infested feat, which was included as part of an April Fools feature on playing Commoners in Dragon magazine (the official D&D magazine). Thanks to this feat, every time you draw a weapon, you have a 50% chance of drawing a live chicken instead. Then buy yourself a spell component pouch. 

The result 

Drawing an item from a spell component pouch is a free action, and the pouch can contain as many components as you like. Combine it with Chicken-Infested, and you have the power to draw and drop as many chickens as you like in a turn. You are an infinite chicken machine. 

There are a few different ways to take advantage of this. Using necromancy, you can rapidly slay and raise them from the dead for a zombie chicken army—even better if you take the Destructive Retribution feat to make them explode on death. If you prefer to get up close and personal, you can throw a chicken into combat, attack it, and use Cleave and Sweeping Strike to bounce a load of free attacks onto anyone standing near it. 

But honestly, all that's just showing off. The truth is, there are few problems that can't be solved just with a thousand chickens appearing out of thin air. Trigger every trap safely by hurling chickens. Pour them into your enemy's fortress until there's no room left for anyone to move. Solve world hunger. The possibilities are endless.

Does it actually work?

Pretty much. You can definitely be challenged on the abuse of free actions (there's technically no limit on how many can be performed in a turn, but the rules do caution common sense on this point) but all that really does is slow down your chicken production. If your use of the spell component pouch is disputed, just take Quick Draw and as many clubs as you can carry instead (clubs are free, after all)—again, it's just reducing your rate of chickens-per-minute, not stopping you. 

Sure, the feat does technically come from an April Fools joke, but at least it was a first-party April Fools joke, which makes it more legitimate than all the third-party nonsense everyone else's builds use. 

With how downright good Baldur's Gate 3 is, it's only natural that players will be checking out Larian's landmark CRPG Divinity: Original Sin 2 (including our own Ted Litchfield, who has been having a blast). 

However, there's been a bit of a trend—as TheGamer noted last week, there've been some instances of players getting the CRPG bug from Baldur's Gate 3, turning to Divinity: Original Sin 2, and getting flattened. As one user shadownn02 writes on the Divinity Original Sin Reddit: "Is this game supposed to be super hard? What are we missing?"

My immediate response to this was 'hold on, DoS2 had its moments, but I don't remember it being that much harder.' Combat was more chaotic thanks to Larian's 'oops, all surfaces' design, but it had been a few years. Maybe I'd just blocked the teleporting crocodiles out of my mind.

So I decided to boot up a new save for the first time in years, and I immediately began to see the problem. DoS2 isn't harder than Baldur's Gate 3: its first act is just way less structured, and does a poorer job of easing you into the game. It's not bad, by any means—there's something to be said for the open, immersive-sim nature of Fort Joy. It's just far more aimless.

The fascinating thing is: they're largely the same. Both acts spit you out on a beach after your vessel crashes, both have you picking up fellow survivors as you take your first steps into their vast worlds. But while Baldur's Gate 3 clearly signposts the way forward, DoS2 hides a bunch of rakes in some tall grass and tells you to go hog wild. 

What's more, those rakes just aren't in how the act's designed—they're hidden in how the game's combat mechanics interact with each other, too.

The venn diagram of pain

DoS2's early-game has three main mechanics which intersect into something I'm going to call the venn diagram of pain. In isolation, these mechanics create interesting decisions for the player—but in Act 1 they overlap, combining into a baffling difficulty spike with the player squarely in the middle.

The first circle of Swen Vincke's Inferno is Armour. In DoS2, you have both physical and magical armour. These act as second health bars—instead of rolling to resist crowd control like you might in Baldur's Gate 3, you become vulnerable to all crowd control if your armour's depleted.

This is fun when you get past the early-game roadbump, because it means there's a place for both strong direct damage and controlling skills. It's a total nightmare in Act 1 though, because you start out as a prisoner in rags (a potato sack doesn't really protect you against the elements, who knew?) A lot of Act 1's initial encounters assume you've got a bit of armour, so this makes them incredibly harsh.

The second circle is Death. In DoS2, you die as soon as you hit zero hit points. This is by design, since having no armour left is sort of a soft 'dying' condition—except instead of making death saving throws, you're clawing your way back to safety. But because you have no armour to start with, DoS2 forces you to chew through your measly starting supply of resurrection scrolls.

The third circle is Books—scary, I know. Unlike Baldur's Gate 3, you don't immediately get new abilities on a level up. Instead, you go to specific merchants with specific skill books and buy them. But if you don't know where the merchant is for the skills you want (or if you're just poor)... well, tough luck.

This means that if you chose poorly on character creation, you're screwed. Not to mention, skills in DoS2 work on a turn-based cooldown system, with individual cooldowns for each ability. Having 1-2 additional skills you can fire off is a massive power boost. Overlap these three circles of pain: armour, death, and books, and you get DoS2's first act. If you're a visual learner, here's a hastily-cobbled together diagram.

All of these design choices amplify each other in the first act: you need money to buy armour and skill books to not die, but you also need to do fights to get money—which can cost you resurrection scrolls, which cost money to replace, which depletes your armour and skill book fund—and so on. The snake eats its own tail. But what about Fort Joy's actual design? Well, turns out that's worse, too.

More like Fort Sad 

Okay, I say 'worse'. What I mean is 'different, but in a way that hurts'. I kinda like how Fort Joy puts you in a desperate, disadvantaged situation and demands you scrounge enough funds together to get some clothes. I like how there are a lot of different ways to get past it, too. But just because some masochists enjoy the pain, a headache is still a headache.

Consider Baldur's Gate 3's beach: like DoS2, it's a (mostly) straight path you take towards a town. You immediately pick up Shadowheart, and the game puts Astarion, Lae'zel, and Gale along the route in short order. Granted, there's a gnarly encounter with two intellect devourers along the way—but it wouldn't be a Larian game if they didn't mess with you a little bit.

You can absolutely bank a hard left and get lost in the wider world, but the two main choices you're nudged towards are measured. You can either bank right and go through a manageable dungeon with some bandits to get some XP and gear—otherwise, you're funnelled into the Druid Grove and greeted with a big, cinematic brawl that encourages you to go inside. Doing so starts a few different quests that highlight areas of interest on the map, and gives you a chance to sell your loot for a bit of dosh.

It's a sharp contrast to Fort Joy. To rejig my memory, I decided to try and ignore my usual instincts to steal everything that's not nailed down and comb the map. Instead, I let the game funnel me towards Fort Joy—then banked right onto the beach, since the other direction had a massive impenetrable Fort next to it.

An assassin popped up to gank the Red Prince—he had a ton of armour, and nearly blew us all up. Beast was no help since I hadn't recruited him yet: he was too busy singing a boat-building shanty about someone touching themselves. Scratch one resurrection scroll.

Then I went for the infamous teleporting crocodile encounter and (despite having a decent set up) I barely made it out alive. Three more resurrection scrolls down, and all I got were these stupid gloves.

There are less deadly encounters in Fort Joy for sure—but the game doesn't naturally guide you toward any of them. You're expected to be thrifty and resourceful—which is cool—but there's a complete lack of direction that's admittedly frustrating. Baldur's Gate 3 really does seem like a second stab at the concept, just with a gentler guiding hand. 

In both games, you've been kidnapped and saddled with a worm/collar, a pressure cooker for your disparate groups of scoundrels to stick together. You're funnelled towards a town filled with people in need during a tense political situation—both seated under the shadow of a looming fortress, keeping everyone trapped.

The difference? Baldur's Gate 3 actually gives you the tools you need to get started, whereas DoS2 says: "Here's a sandbox, have fun kiddo, watch out for needles." Once you get past that initial hump, it's not actually that much harder than Baldur's Gate 3, and I hope that anyone struggling at first manages to muddle on through: because there's an excellent CRPG waiting for them in DoS2 under its misleadingly brutal first few hours.

Last month the streamer and YouTuber JoCat—known for his Monster Hunter, D&D, and Final Fantasy 14 videos like 'A Crap Guide to X'—announced an indefinite hiatus.

This was in the wake of an innocuous video titled "I Like Girls" (a gender-swapped parody of Lizzo's "Boys") which in his own words "reached outside of its target audience". JoCat said that wider reception from fringe elements caused waves of harassment, which included doxxing attempts, threats of violence, and a "suspicious package".

As stated in the original announcement, JoCat had some projects he wanted to finish up before making his departure. "I’ll still be continuing Heart of Elynthi and the JOmega charity, but once those are finished I will be taking an indefinite break from posting anything online."

Heart of Elynthi is JoCat's D&D livestream (which he DMs), and will be posted as an unlisted, demonetised video alongside the end of his Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough. The JOmega charity run however was completed yesterday.

In case you're unfamiliar with Final Fantasy 14's raiding scene, an Ultimate is a gruelling 8-man boss fight. They're considered to be some of the game's hardest brawls: a gauntlet of ultra-hard boss fights chained together where a single mistake spells doom for your whole team.

While an Ultimate itself takes around 15-20 minutes on a successful clear, actually learning the fight can take months. Or in JoCat's case, over a year. JoCat decided to turn the event into a charity drive for trans rights, creating stretch goals on Tiltify for players who wished to donate. He also said he would donate one dollar for every death.

JoCat has now completed the raid with a total death counter of 1,573. Since his charity of choice is Gendered Intelligence, JoCat converted his dollars to GBP, upping his personal donation to nearly $2000. At the time of writing the campaign has raised £53,607 (over $60,000), though donations are still open for the next week.

After beating the raid, a swarm of supporters met JoCat in Radz-at-Han and promptly flooded his screen with particle effects—the closest thing you can really get to a standing ovation in an MMO. JoCat issued a thank-you to them live on stream, then later uploaded the full saga in a YouTube video.

"I wanna thank everyone, including the [team] that helped me reach this point, and all my friends—including all the trans friends I've made along the way that inspired me to not just do this, but to be myself," he includes a few other special mentions, including the Ulti Project's Sausoftheroll for developing and sharing strats, as well as Gendered Intelligence for coordinating with him on certain stretch goals—though he regrettably won't be able to fulfil all of them.

JoCat then gives a heartwarming thank-you to his fans: "Thank you, I'm sorry to say that I think I do need this step away. For many years you've helped me—you've got me a house, you found me my fiance, you're helping me pay off my parent's house, and I cannot ever thank you enough for that.

"I don't know when I'll be back, if I ever [will be] … but after so many times of saying 'you're welcome'," a catchphrase he finishes all of his 'Crap Guide to X' videos with, "it's now my turn to say 'thank you'. So thank you, I hope you have a wonderful night and a beautiful year."

JoCat finishes the video with a clip from his time at the Latech School of Design in 2018, where after a presentation he's asked whether he does YouTube videos because "that's one of the best presentations I've ever seen, and it flows like a YouTube video … that's pretty amazing."

While Dungeons & Dragons' huge OGL stumble didn't quite convert the game's captive audience to the hundreds of other (very good) TTRPGs out there, it's still caused a resurgence of people checking out other games. 

It also prompted several creators (like the minds behind The MCDM RPG) to start doing their own thing—both to capitalise on some freshly curious players, and to avoid a scenario where a game with an uncertain future is vital to their livelihood.

MCDM is a company started by Matthew Colville, most known for his D&D videos on YouTube. It's produced several popular supplements for D&D's 5th edition (5e) such as Strongholds & Followers, which fleshes out the game's understaffed mechanics for base building. 

The MCDM RPG itself was announced by Colville back in February: "our goal is to make something tactical and cinematic … heroic fantasy, mostly fighting monsters, with like two other gameplay pillars we think are important." 

The game directly wants to get all the fuss out of your dungeon crawling. While 5e streamlined all of this considerably, it still has a lot of holdovers—such as lengthy equipment tables, a half-hearted stab at environmental and rations rulesets, and a zero-to-hero philosophy. 

While none of those things are inherently bad, all that old school crunch goes largely ignored by players wanting a more heroic experience (there's a reason lots of games start at level 3). As its BackerKit page states, the game is "unburdened by sacred cows from the 1970s".

It's been doing well. At the time of writing, the BackerKit looks like it could hit $4 million in funding, or at least come very close. Colville's promise to escape older editions of D&D is also very promising—and also a little funny, because that's exactly what D&D's 4th edition (4e) tried to do. And people hated that.

For the uninitiated, 4e looks a lot different from what you may be used to. That's because it tried to scrap the ye olde spell slots for specific abilities characters could use. Traditionally, Wizards have big spell lists whereas Fighters are limited to 'I roll to attack'. Instead, 4e had Powers, which were special abilities you could fit on a trading card, and everybody got them.

This wasn't well received at the time—it felt like players' precious D&D was becoming MMO-ified, transformed from the pen & paper game they loved into something distinctly gamey. 4e became something of a pariah, and a lot of its ideas were scrapped for 5th edition. Despite this, a lot of newer indie RPGs are borrowing from it.

An example of MCDM doing this is in its classes abilities, for example: the Tactician class can use "Come On Then". Aside from being a taunt I heard a lot from angry lads while growing up in the south of England, "Come On Then" forces an enemy to move a number of squares then lets you hit them if they end their turn within your reach. It also has complex tests that resemble 4e's Skill Challenges, a system that almost every 5th edition DM I know has sneakily added to their home games anyway.

Granted, the MCDM RPG does a lot of things differently. For example: you don't roll to hit—you just roll damage. This addresses 4e's sluggish combats, which could drag on forever. "You cannot miss. No more wasted turns, no more burning resources on spells only for your target to 'save.'"

It's very reminiscent of another indie system I've played and enjoyed. ICON RPG from Massif Press (the same devs who made the mecha game Lancer) is similarly 4e in vibe. ICON gives every character 'fray' damage, which applies whether you hit or miss—its engine is fueled by powers-style abilities, too. 

I'm glad to see more designers avoiding 5e's jack-of-all-trades pitfalls, as well as borrowing from Wizard of the Coast's black sheep. 4e's only major crime was that it was a sequel to Dungeons & Dragons—clashing with expectation rather than taste—but it still had a ton of good ideas, many of which deserve to survive.

I've been playing and writing about videogames for an awfully long time now, and I've seen my share of controversies come and go. Hot Coffee, anyone? At some point long ago, I may have thought that such things would become increasingly rare as our medium matures.

But it seems that the opposite has happened. As gaming has become bigger and more influential, it's intersected with a wider set of issues.

2023 was no exception, and so here we are to round up some of the biggest controversies of the year. There are so many, I'm morally required to split these into two articles to reduce the risk of scrolling-related injuries—we'll have the second half posted in a couple days.

Dungeons and Dragons updates the Open Gaming License

Our eyebrows: 😳

What happened: For 20 years, Dungeons and Dragons' Open Gaming License enabled companies to create tabletop RPGs based on D&D's rules without having to pay royalties to Wizards of the Coast. That was all thrown into turmoil by a January leak of a planned updated of the OGL: WotC planned to assert stricter control over third-party products, and companies making more than $750,000 on OGL products would be required to start paying fees. The reaction to the planned changes was overwhelmingly negative, leading Wizards of the Coast to apologize and amend its plans, but many of the most contentious points in the updated OGL remained. It also pledged to release the core D&D ruleset under a Creative Commons license. But that wasn't enough to satisfy the vast majority of the player base, who simply wanted the original OGL to remain in place.

The outcome: The D&D community got what it wanted: After a brief effort to ride out the storm, Wizards of the Coast threw in the towel and walked the whole idea back completely. Still, the damage was done, and numerous third-party publishers, presumably spooked by the whole affair, continued to push forward with efforts to distance themselves from WotC's grasp. 

Hogwarts Legacy grapples with JK Rowling's legacy

Our eyebrows: 😓

What happened: The trouble with Hogwarts Legacy wasn't the game but the creator of the Harry Potter franchise, JK Rowling, who for some reason has spent her post-Potter years transforming herself from beloved children's author to notorious transphobe. Avalanche Software and WB Games did their best to distance the game from Rowling: An FAQ on the Hogwarts Legacy website says the author "was not involved in the creation of the game," and Avalanche reportedly pushed to have a "trans-inclusive" character creator in the game. Voice actor Sebastian Croft also voiced his support for trans people, tweeting, "I believe whole heartedly that trans women are women and trans men are men."

Still, the bottom line was that Hogwarts Legacy is a Harry Potter property, and that means Rowling was going to make money from it. That left Harry Potter fans with a dilemma: Should they play the game they've been dreaming of, knowing that the author will benefit? Some people took a "forgive-but-not-forget" approach, but others drew a harder line in the sand: One person went so far as to create a website enabling people to see which of their Twitch followers had streamed the game, presumably so they could express their ire or perhaps unfollow altogether.

For die-hard Potter fans, the situation was made more difficult by the fact that Hogwarts Legacy turned out to be quite good.

The outcome: Despite the uproar, Hogwarts Legacy was a big hit, Warner made an actual billion bucks across 15M copies in five months, and we'll no doubt be seeing sequels in the future. Rowling, for the record, remains an unrepentant transphobe. 

Atomic Heart includes a racist cartoon

Our eyebrows: 😒

What happened: Atomic Heart was already facing controversy over developer Mundfish's Russian roots sparked by the invasion of Ukraine and concerns that the game might seek to glorify the Soviet Union and rehabilitate the KGB, its notorious intelligence agency. A different and more concrete issue came to light early in the year when players noticed the appearance of a racist caricature in a clip of Nu, Pogodi!, a beloved Tom and Jerry-style Soviet children's cartoon that first aired in 1969: Segments of the show appear on television sets in the game's safe rooms and they're generally pretty innocuous, but one bit contained a dated (to put it politely) depiction of an African tribesman shooting a bow and arrow. As we noted at the time, it's the sort of thing that would carry a content warning similar to what Disney has added to its classic films when they air on streaming services, but it appeared in Atomic Heart completely without context.

The outcome: A few days later, developer Mundfish apologized for the inclusion of the clip, and pledged to edit the relevant bits. 

Six Days in Fallujah finally comes out

Our eyebrows: 🤨

What happened: The military shooter Six Days in Fallujah sparked immediate outrage when it was announced in 2009. Developer Atomic Games promised it would be a sensitive and fair treatment of the infamous 2004 battle, with input from US Marines, Iraqi insurgents and civilians, historians, and senior US military commanders. But the use of a contemporary, then-ongoing US war as a setting for a videogame did not fly: Six Days was quickly dropped by publisher Konami, and the whole thing fell off the map and was forgotten until a surprise return in 2021. That triggered a a second backlash over fears that it would glorify or distort the events of the war, but the pushback wasn't as furious: The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Valve, Microsoft, and Sony to refuse to distribute the game, but more generally there seemed to be a resigned acceptance that Six Days was going to happen, wrapped in a hope that it wouldn't be as bad as some feared.

The outcome: When it finally arrived in June it was thoroughly unremarkable, in large part because it was an early access release and thus missing most of the promised content. But what we saw didn't give us much hope that the game would achieve its lofty goals. It was "just a barebones milsim," we said at the time, lacking any of the context that was promised: "What I'm seeing is a game that's more interested in depicting American valor than the actual losers of the story it's telling: Fallujah," staff writer Morgan Park declared. 

Reddit goes dark

Our eyebrows: 😒

What happened: Reddit announced planned changes to its developer terms in April that would, among other things, enforce a rate limit on access to its free API and introduce a new "premium" option for developers who want more. And it was really premium: The creator of the Apollo Reddit client for iOS estimated it would cost him $20 million per year to keep his client operating at the new rate. It was an extremely unpopular move, and in response thousands of subreddits took part in what became known as Reddark: A 48-hour shutdown in protest of the planned changes. That's just a tiny slice of the total number of the estimated 2.8 million or so subreddits floating around out there, but it included some of the biggest and totalled a combined subscriber count of more than 2.5 billion.

The outcome: Some subreddits stayed dark beyond the planned 48 hour window, prompting Reddit to pressure moderators to reopen, and threatening to remove those who did not. Protests continued in different forms—users on the Steam subreddit, for instance, began posting messages about literal steam—but in the end it was pretty much a return to business as usual: Most subreddits reopened, and the API changes rolled out as planned. The Apollo client, sadly, is no more. 

Linus Tech Tips gets sloppy

Our eyebrows: 😑

What happened: The popular YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips came under fire in August after a botched installation of Billet Labs' Monoblock cooling system led to a strong recommendation against it: "The experience of building with it is a nightmare," channel founder Linus Sebastian declared, "and the advantages over literally any other solution are negligible."

That led to a callout from competing channel Gamers Nexus, which accused it of "rushing content out the door" in order to achieve "quantity over quality." Gamers Nexus also accused LTT of selling the one-of-a-kind Monoblock prototype, rather than returning it to the manufacturer as promised. After initially defending the work, LTT posted an apology video that concluded with Sebastian admitting that he'd taken the complaints personally and overreacted to them, although he continued to defend the channel's behind-the-scenes dealing with Billet Labs. The channel also suspended production for a week in order to work on improving its content.

But that apology was something of a flop among followers, who felt it was too jokey and focused more on promoting items in the LTT store than on actually addressing complaints. Allegations shared by former LTT social media manager Madison Reeve, who said on Twitter that she was forced to leave the company because the toxic work environment and pressure to produce content was "ruining [her] mental health," eventually prompted a more serious response from LTT CEO Terren Tong, who told PC Gamer that the company would conduct a "thorough assessment of the allegations," including hiring an outside investigator, "and will commit to publishing the findings and implementing any corrective actions that may arise because of this."

The outcome: There's been no word on the results of those investigations at this point, and while analytics sites like Social Blade and VidIQ indicate that the channel's viewership took a hit as a result of the controversy, it appears to have bounced back to relatively normal levels since. 

Lies of P won't say ACAB

Our eyebrows: 😐

What happened: An early Lies of P gameplay trailer featured a brief appearance of a decapitated figure strung up in the arches of a bridge, with a crudely painted sign bearing the message APAB hanging from its neck. The message was obviously a play on ACAB, an acronym meaning All Cops Are Bastards that's taken on a charged political connotation in recent years due to its adoption by people opposed to police violence. But sharp-eyed fans noticed that the message was gone in later videos—in its place was a different sign saying "Purge Puppets."

Lies of P director Ji-Won Choi later confirmed that the message did in fact stand for All Puppets Are Bastards, and said that it was removed in order to avoid controversy. "We took it out eventually because we wanted everyone to enjoy the game exactly how we intended it to be enjoyed, and not judged based on any trends," Choi said. "We really wanted the world that we designed to be interpreted by the players exactly how we aimed it to be, so we took out factors that could be a little risky."

The outcome: Proactive self-censorship is rarely a good idea, but neither is co-opting real-world social struggles for a videogame backdrop. And unlike Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's use of "Mechanical Apartheid" and "Augs Lives Matter" in marketing materials, in this case it was a single sign, not intrinsically tied to the game's narrative, and the whole thing blew over pretty quickly. And Lies of P turned out to be pretty good. 

JoCat, creator of the 'A Crap Guide to X' series for both D&D and Final Fantasy 14, has announced that he'll be taking an 'indefinite break' in the wake of harassment, as announced on his Twitter yesterday.

In a further thread, JoCat lays out a timeline following the wake of his I Like Girls video—a gender-swapped cover of Boys by Lizzo. The video went viral, gathering over 11 million views at the time of writing. I Like Girls itself was a stream bit he decided to animate: "I decided it could be a fun project to animate the brief stream moment for my youtube audience."

The video itself is uncontroversial. It's a cutesy send-up of Lizzo's original song that similarly celebrates women of varying body types. A year later, JoCat writes that the video "reached outside its target audience", prompting harassment from communities who made "assumptions about my character, my history, my beliefs, my relationships, and all those of my partner, as well as threats of violence to me as well as my family," as well as "doxxing attempts". 

While JoCat mentions that most of this had previously been limited to Twitter, he adds that "no small amount has leaked into other parts of my regular day to day that is harder to ignore—private DMs over discord and twitch, suspicious packages being sent to my family."

As a queer person who occasionally dabbles in makeup: I get a sinking feeling that's all too familiar. Much of the harassment targeted JoCat's sexuality and gender presentation, the latter of which is 'non-conforming' by societal standards—which can make you a target for a swiss army knife of bigots with an axe to grind.

One major example that's brought up often is from a since-deleted Tweet that captions the video: "How the hell can this guy making liking women seem so fucking gay." Considering JoCat started a major charity drive for trans rights charities, harassment of this nature lends credit to the whole "outside its target audience" thing.

Dozens of other streamers and YouTubers expressed both solidarity and frustration at the news of his retirement, including D&D YouTuber GinnyDi, YouTuber and voice actor Gianni Matragrano (Ultrakill), and FF14 YouTuber Pint. At the time of writing, "JoCat" is currently trending with over 34,000 posts. The atmosphere is a mixture of frustration and anger.

JoCat himself has proceeded to quote-tweet a previous statement made back in March regarding an instance on his stream, where he writes: "I do not condone harassing people who do not follow my views … if they are harmful, be helpful."

The cast of Baldur's Gate 3 has evolved over the game's Early Access period and beyond—Wyll in particular had a whole rewrite between the game's conception and its full release. Whether it's whole storylines shifting or just toning down Gale's accidental thirstiness, finding the core of a character in a story this large is bound to be complicated.

But not for Lae'zel, according to a recent interview by IGN with Larian's CEO and Founder Swen Vincke, as well as lead writers Adam Smith and Chrystal Ding. "In the beginning she was very aggressive towards the players, so we toned her down a little bit", Vincke admits, but that was pretty much it.

"She is probably one of the companions that changed the least throughout the entirety of development. She was so very well-defined from the get-go," he continues, noting that Lae'zel's writer Kevin VanOrd "found her voice instantly." Heads up—I'll be getting into some spoilers for Lae'zel's character arc and endings.

What Vincke is saying here makes sense: Lae'zel isn't a simple character by any means, but she knows who she is—or, at least, she thinks she does. "She has all this confidence, and it's the confidence of youth that knows what is true," says Smith. As a character, Lae'zel's journey is more about unravelling her preconceptions about the world and her place in it.

Or, in the case of my playthrough, watching helplessly as she heads towards her doom with a smile on her face. "I think Lae'zel has some of the most heartbreaking endings," Smith continues. I never broke Lae'zel from the shackles of her dogma. In the new epilogue—courtesy of Larian's latest big patch—I got to see exactly what lay in store for her at the hands of Vlaakith. 

For those not in the know, Vlaakith (the Lich Queen of the Githyanki) is bad news. In the D&D 2nd edition book A Guide to the Astral Plane, she's described as a queen who "trusts no one and fears virtually everything and everyone—and her reaction to what she fears is to master it or destroy it." You might have experienced this yourself if you invoked her wrath in the Mountain Pass, perishing at the hands of a 9th level Wish spell.

The book also mentions that "she devours the life essence of any Githyanki blood that rises above 11th level", and even has rules for what that means for players who resist. Namely, hit squads sent by Vlaakith herself—"each one larger and stronger than the last." As for what this means for Lae'zel, guess what level you end Baldur's Gate 3 on?

Level 12, pushing her directly into Vlaakith's attention. Which means that, if you don't convince her to stay in Faerun, Lae'zel merrily marches off to have her life essence consumed by the Lich Queen—something she was taught is an honour.

Even if Lae'zel is steered away from this fate, she still needs to fight off Vlaakith's armies until she either topples the Lich Queen or dies. Vincke mentions that this, naturally, makes her one of his favourite villains. "I think [Lae'zel] has an incredibly interesting antagonist, when you think of Vlaakith and the many levels of depth that are behind that character."

Larian Studios CEO Swen Vincke has taken to Twitter today and—in a thread celebrating both Baldur's Gate 3's numerous awards and runaway success—mentions the recent layoffs occurring at Dungeons & Dragons. He reveals that, "of the people who were in the original meeting room, there's almost nobody left."

For context, earlier this week Hasbro (owner of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering) announced that it would be laying off 1,100 employees as a way to "modernize our organization and get even leaner". Not soon after, it was revealed that an avalanche of employees from both D&D and MTG had been laid off. 

Among many others, this includes art director Breeanna Heiss and head of publishing and licensing Liz Schuh, the latter of which has worked at the company for over 28 years. Since then even more layoffs have been announced, including senior data scientist Michael Rexford and director of universes beyond creative and production for Magic: The Gathering Megan Galbraith Donahue.

In an investor meeting in October this year, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks specifically mentions Baldur's Gate 3 as a contributing factor for a 40% increase in digital gaming revenue, alongside Monopoly Go! and Magic: The Gathering.

In terms of the game's indirect impact on D&D, the popular livestream Critical Role is often credited for a D&D renaissance of sorts after its meteoric rise to popularity in the mid-to-late 2010s. I can only imagine the massive success of Baldur's Gate 3 will be paying dividends for its tabletop roots for years to come. It's some of the best advertising you could possibly ask for.

Typically, when layoffs like this happen, you can try to get at the callous core of the issue, the money behind the decisions made. I think it's important to do this from a scientific viewpoint. It can help us understand the mechanics behind it all, and why one of the best years for games in recent memory has also been stage to a historic number of layoffs, not just in the gaming industry but in the tech industry at-large. 

At the moment, though, I'm stumped. I have no idea what Hasbro is doing. Yes, there are financial elements at play here. The company itself has had a difficult year. But the sheer severity of these layoffs and the senior roles they are targeting is beyond the pale. 

I assume that somebody, somewhere, has done the detached corporate penny-pinching to make this all make sense on paper. But this is a disastrous move from a consumer goodwill standpoint. If you have the CEO of a studio which handed you a major commercial success publicly mourning the depth and scope of your layoffs, something's gone wrong. 

Not to mention, D&D itself has its upcoming revised ruleset (with changes comparable to a new edition of the game) in the pipeline. It's really, really important that it does well. From where I'm sitting, this sudden plunge of key staff has a genuine risk of jeopardising the whole endeavour.

Earlier this week, Hasbro announced that it would be laying off approximately 1,100 employees two weeks before Christmas, as per an internal memo. At the time, I pointed out that the memo announced "the majority of the notifications will happen over the next six months, with the balance occurring over the next year." While it doesn't directly contradict this statement, many layoffs are happening right now.

A list of layoffs at Wizards of the Coast continues to grow—some have been substantiated via announcements on social media, while others are still being verified. Mike Mearls, a co-designer of D&D 5th edition, is potentially among their number—as per a BlueSky screenshot shared on Twitter.

Mearls had left WoTC's RPG design team, and had been working on the design team for Magic: The Gathering.

This has been further substantiated by a growing list at EnWorld, as well as one being assembled by tabletop journalist Christian Coffer on Twitter. While the full scope of the layoffs is still being verified, I've collected what statements I can from the impacted employees.

Among this list of confirmed layoffs is art director Breeanna Heiss, senior developmental editor Eytan Bernstein, producer and host Amy Dallen, game designer Dan Dillon, product manager Natalie Egan, senior communications manager Larry Frum, and Magic: The Gathering community manager Jesse Hill.

One reportedly-impacted employee (who has not yet made a statement on social media I can find) is Head of Publishing and Licensing Liz Schuh. If verified, this will mark the end of a position she has held for over 28 years, according to her LinkedIn profile.

I've reached out to Wizards of the Coast, who "are not sharing/commenting on breakdowns on geography or teams out of respect for employees". Despite asking, I did not receive a comment on what support employees will be receiving beyond being sent a further memo. It's still unclear whether "comprehensive packages including job placement support" will support the impacted employees through the holiday season.

In the memo itself, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks (who received over $9 million in compensation in addition to his $1.5 million salary last year) said the layoffs are intended to "modernize our organization and get even leaner", calling them a "lever we must pull to keep Hasbro healthy". Cocks has not announced any cuts to his pay or compensation to achieve these goals. 

During an investor meeting in October (thanks, Dicebreaker), Cocks noted that both Magic: The Gathering and D&D were having "record years", stating: "Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming revenue increased 40% behind strong contributions from Baldur’s Gate III, Monopoly Go! and MAGIC: THE GATHERING."

While the wider health of Hasbro as a company is another thing entirely, it's stunning that—despite these major successes—Wizards of the Coast is losing so many key staff, with the potential for more redundancies over the next six months.

Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition came with its own starter set way back in 2014. In it, players could go through the start of the Lost Mines of Phandelver adventure—which began with a harsh goblin ambush that could cause character deaths, and even wipe out the party.

Phandelver was free for a while, making it one of the first entries to D&D for a lot of players and DMs before it was replaced by the new paid starter set (as well as the revamped Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk book). Now, there's instead a far simpler, streamlined adventure up for grabs: Peril in Pinebrook.

To be completely fair, Pinebrook is designed for younger players. It makes sense to find ways to ease the youth (or maths-adverse adults) into D&D before they have to worry about the distinction between a Melee Attack, a Melee Weapon Attack, and an Unarmed Strike. 

In terms of doing that, I think the adventure's largely fine. It broadly explains what being a DM means, easing them away from a 'players vs. DM' mindset. It even shakes off the shackles of 'never say no to your players', a glittering piece of advice that's complete DM poison in disguise. Instead, Pinebrook encourages the more sensible strategy of using "'Yes, and…' or 'No, but…'".

When it comes to combat, things get rockier. The adventure does some smart things, simplifying character sheets and doing away with initiative orders. Its advice on running combat, however, is really toothless. This section in particular sticks in my craw:

"Running an exciting combat in D&D is like a thrilling amusement park ride: the players often want to be scared and excited, but they don't want the excitement to lead to certain character death. This is where you can perform storytelling and mathematical magic."

The section then goes on to recommend the DM spread out attacks, give the players advantage and the enemies disadvantage, or even have the baby dragon they're escorting intervene. This is 'fudging', and while it has its place, it's by no means universal advice.

I won't say I've never lied about a dice roll or chipped off a couple of hit points, but DMs who fudge everything rob their players of D&D's most interesting elements: gambling, risk, and consequence. Again, this is a book for younger players—it's fine to suggest a DM handles the players gently on their first go.

Which is a hair confusing, seeing as rules-as-written, players can't die in Peril in Pinebrook anyway, as mentioned in its section on hit points. "In this adventure, a character at 0 hit points remains unconscious until they regain hit points through healing or until the end of the encounter, when they regain 1 hit point automatically." Not a single death saving throw in sight.

But assuming this stripped-back D&D is targeted at an age range of around 10-15, I think it's kinda condescending to assume players of that age can't handle the risk of character death, or that they wouldn't find it exciting. That's a huge cognitive leap, especially considering all the edgy forum OCs I remember from my brief stint as a teenager.

This feels like an overcorrection of Phandelver—which is fair. In case you aren't as familiar with 5th edition as I am, the issue there stemmed from level 1 players having a piddly pool of hitpoints. For example, a Wizard with no Constitution bonus has about four. The goblins deal around five points of damage with their crossbows.

That's enough to knock our poor novice mage unconscious, but it's also enough to just murder them outright. On a critical hit, one of these goblins could hit you for 4-14 damage. If you take damage that knocks you out, and the remaining damage is more than your maximum hit points, you just die. 

There's also the fact that, being an ambush, there's a chance these goblins would give your whole party the "Surprised" condition, causing them to stand around sucking their thumbs until their second turn of combat.

Obviously, there's plenty wrong with the ambush. But I also do think some players get hooked by that experience. The danger is what draws them in. I feel like any good starter guide—even one for younger players—should make it clear that's an option. It's not like Wizards of the Coast doesn't know this already. One of the more popular adventures, Curse of Strahd, relies on mechanical danger to sell its horror aspects.

That's not to say Peril in Pinebrook is a terrible first introduction in itself. I like the setup—escorting a baby dragon back to its mother is a sweet concept. I like how it streamlines your first combat encounters, and how it prompts the DM to leave breaths in between exposition dumps for the characters to roleplay. 

It's certainly not perfect though. If the players try to harm the baby dragon, the Captain doesn't let them while the adventure sort of just shrugs as to what that looks like. If they try to attack the mama, the DM is encouraged to handwave it, which is a cardinal sin in my mind. 

The solutions presented are 'have it ignore the attacks' or, if pushed too far, it breathes magic 'teleports you outside' breath and they don't get a reward. I don't know if any of these options are better than giving the thing a very powerful stat block. There's also a suggestion for it to tell the party to 'stop being silly', and I can't imagine a faster way to start an argument between a table of 13 year olds playing a TTRPG for the first time.

Letting the players fight it and get (non-lethally) trounced with the rules they've already understood would be a good teaching moment. 'Sure you can fight stuff, but it can flatten you', rather than 'I don't want you guys to attack my big dragon'.

I just worry that, by treating a 'softer' DMing style as gospel, alongside a linear adventure that encourages railroading, this starter adventure risks giving DMs some bad habits early. Especially since it's free, meaning players of all ages will likely go for it as their first introduction to the game.

If you've ever thought to yourself that the Payday games are great but they'd be even better if they replaced the guns and bank vaults with swords, spells, and treasure chests, Starbreeze Studios has some oddly-specific good news. Its next big project is a "co-operative multiplayer" game set in the fantasy RPG world of Dungeons and Dragons.

To be fair, I don't know if Project Baxter, as the new game is known internally, will really be something akin to Payday: D&D. Starbreeze described Baxter as "the next AAA title in our niche of cooperative multiplayer games" in its August financial report, when it was still negotiating for the license, but also seemed eager to differentiate it, saying "it is a completely new project, in a completely new genre, compared to Payday."

Still, it sure sounds like the new game won't stray too far from Starbreeze's familiar formula: The new game "will carry the signature Starbreeze game cornerstones," the studio said in today's announcement, including "co-operative multiplayer, lifetime commitment through a games as a service-model, community engagement and a larger than life experience."

"It is hard to imagine a better pairing than Dungeons & Dragons and Starbreeze—both with their foundation in cooperative and community driven experiences, 'play it your way' and infinite replayability," Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren said. "When looking at prospective IPs for our future projects, Dungeons & Dragons was always at the top of our list and I'm incredibly happy to announce this license."

I actually find it quite easy to imagine a better pairing than Starbreeze and D&D. That's not a knock against Starbreeze, but let's be honest, it's probably not the first studio to leap to mind when you think about fantasy RPGs. It's first and foremost a shooter studio: Along with the Payday series, it's also responsible for The Chronicles of Riddick games, The Darkness, and the woefully underrated Syndicate. D&D-style games? Not so much.

Of course, fantasy RPG trappings can be applied to shooters, as we've seen in games ranging from Heretic and Hexen to Amid Evil and Immortals of Aveum, and I'd expect that's what we're looking at here: Less Baldur's Gate, more Baldur's Guns. Starbreeze does actually have one game that very loosely fits that mold to its credit, the 2002 third-person ARPG Enclave, which was remastered earlier this year for current-gen consoles.

And the more I think about it, the more it kind of makes sense. At its core, D&D is about putting together a crew, busting into places you're not supposed to be, whacking the guards, and stealing money and valuables that belong to other people. And that's Payday, right? So maybe Starbreeze is really onto something here.

Whatever's cooking, we'll likely be waiting a long time to get a good look at it: Starbreeze's new D&D game isn't expected to be out until sometime in 2026. For now, the studio's big focus is likely still on Payday 3, which finally got its first big patch last month after a rocky launch.

Baldur's Gate 3's latest patch added two whole new difficulty modes. Honour, a sort of pseudo-permadeath run, and Custom, which lets you fiddle around with rulesets to your heart's content. One thing that had alarm bells ringing in my head, however, was this line from the patch notes:

"[Honour mode] introduces over 30 new tweaks to all of Baldur's Gate 3’s boss-fights, with a new Legendary Action system designed to catch players off-guard and increase the challenge."

If you haven't played Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (D&D 5e), the tabletop ruleset the game is based on, you have no idea what you're in for. Adding Legendary Actions to Baldur's Gate 3 is a massive spike in difficulty, and I can prove it. How? I've DMed for too many games of D&D, and balancing an encounter makes me very tired, that's how.

A Legendary Action in D&D 5e is an action that a powerful enemy takes after a player character's turn, and they typically have three per round of combat. For example, the Ancient Red Dragon from the Monster Manual can use a Legendary Action to try and spot a hidden enemy or make an attack with its tail. Alternatively, it can spend two Legendary Actions to flap its wings, dealing damage to everyone unlucky enough to be close to it and potentially knocking them prone, then fly up to half its movement speed.

While this sounds simple in theory, it actually addresses a huge issue in the TTRPG that makes single enemies cakewalks and crowds of foes deadly. But first, it's time for a crash course in economics—specifically, the action economy. 

Turns for the worse

D&D 5e tells the DM how hard a monster is via its Challenge Rating (CR) system. This is sort of similar to an enemy's level in Baldur's Gate 3, except it's based on the assumption the monster will be fighting a party of four. So a "CR 5" monster is a challenge for four level five adventurers. 

Except not exactly. If you put your average CR 5 schmuck against that party, and said schmuck is on its own, it's going to get eaten alive. That's because the party has four actions every round and the monster only has one. 

The Dungeon Master's Guide actually calls this out when it tells you how to balance encounters by how much XP the monsters give you, which is… annoying, since it kinda stops CR being useful, but hey. There are online calculators that do the maths for you. "The more monsters there are, the more attack rolls you're making against the characters in a given round, and the more dangerous the encounter becomes."

Let's compare the Ogre from D&D's Monster Manual to the much weaker Swarm of Bats. The Ogre deals an average of 13 damage every round of combat with its Greatclub. A Swarm of Bats (treated as one monster) deals an average of 5 damage a round with its "Bites" attack. So what's more dangerous, an Ogre, or three bat swarms?

It's the bats, and it's not because of the 2 extra damage. If the ogre misses a swing, it misses—that's it. It's effectively completely wasted its turn. The bat swarms however have three chances to deal damage and three chances to crit. 

If you've fought that group of gnolls during the "Find the Missing Shipment" quest in Act 1, you'll have felt this in action. Huge group of enemies, some of whom frenzy into firing two arrows per turn—that fight can go south extremely quickly. Now you know why.

This can change based on positioning, obviously—if you have a chance to land an area of effect spell, the bats are suddenly a lot less scary. But I just used a very simple example. This problem only gets worse the higher level (or bigger party size) you have.

As to how this relates to the game—without Legendary Actions in the game at launch, Larian has had to buff up most of its major encounters with extra enemies. But layering Legendary Actions on top of those fights, when the action economy's already working against you? The implications are huge. These new suped-up bosses are going to end a lot of honour mode runs.

Even if they just get to take an extra pot shot or two, thanks to D&D science I can confidently say that all of these fights just got way, way harder. The action economy is king.

Critical Role is pretty much the biggest livestreamed D&D campaign, by sheer popularity and volume alone. Starting halfway through the group's home game in 2015, to call the game's rise to popularity 'meteoric' is an understatement.

It's gone from an experiment by Geek & Sundry to its own enterprise with heaps of merch, a charity foundation, officially-sanctioned D&D settings, board games, its own unique systems like Candela Obscura, and a very solid animated series with two seasons and counting. And, according to a recent interview with Dicebreaker, we could get a Critical Role videogame, too.

Responding to a question as to whether he'd like to make the leap to a digital world, Critical Role's DM Matthew Mercer responds with a bit of caution, saying it would "require the right idea, the right development studio and the right budget." However, he goes on to say that he'd "love to see that in the future, should all those stars align".

Coming from anyone else, saying 'sure, we'd love to make a game' wouldn't even register on my radar. Everybody with a world and characters they care about would love to make a game, it's just that games are both extremely difficult and wildly expensive to make. Looking back on Critical Role's history, though, I think it's very possible. If Critical Role as a company sets its mind on it, it's even likely.

Back when The Legend of Vox Machina animated series was being funded, Critical Role put up a kickstarter with a humble goal of $750,000. It beat that goal, raising $1 million. Sorry, correction—it raised $1 million in its first hour. In total, the Kickstarter for The Legend of Vox Machina broke $11.3 million in funding, which is about 1,500% of the original goal.

Not only would a Critical Role video game be able to easily get a huge wad of Kickstarter cash to get things started, it'd sell like hotcakes if it was even a little bit good. It also helps that Critical Role already has good ties to the industry, on account of the fact its entire cast are self-described "nerdy-ass voice actors."

Mercer, for example, voiced Minsc in Baldur's Gate 3—and you've likely heard his voice in a thousand other places before. Overwatch, Fallout 4, Pillars of Eternity World of Warcraft, League of Legends, The Legend of Zelda—he's been in the industry since 2002. If I went through the whole cast's portfolio (like how CEO Travis Willingham is Kingpin in Marvel's Spider-Man and Thor in like, most things that need voice acting for Thor, or how Ashley Johnson is Ellie from The Last of Us, or how Laura Bailey is Jaina Proudmoore) I'd be here all day. 

But that might also be what's holding them back. You shouldn't make assumptions about strangers, but Mercer was one of the minds behind a 2009 Super Smash Brothers noir film parody (yes, really) called There Will Be Brawl. I think it's pretty safe to say he likes videogames. Which means the last thing he'd want to do is make a bad one.

There's also the point that—yeah, $11 million is a lot of money, but plenty of games far exceed that in terms of production costs. For contrast, Baldur's Gate 3 had a budget of over $100 million. And while BG3 may be the first thing to come to an excited fan's mind when they think 'Critical Role D&D video game', it's also a mega-ambitious project from a large studio at the top of its game, so even a well-funded CR game wouldn't be anything that titanic. Smaller-scale stuff isn't out of the question, though.

Critical Role's first season actually got me into tabletop gaming to begin with, so my opinion on this might be coloured by nostalgia. But I was there, man. I watched the chain reaction of Season 1 into Season 2, into the Live Shows, into the animated series, into Critical Role becoming its own dang company. If Mercer and his friends want to make a game, they'll make a game, I have no doubt about it.

I chatted to Amelia Tyler earlier this week. In case you're unfamiliar, Tyler's the voice of Baldur's Gate 3's narrator, but she's also a huge nerd and a seasoned roleplayer. While we talked about her favourite voice lines—as well as playing the Dark Urge's inner monologue—the conversation inevitably shifted towards pen & paper.

We got to talking about how roleplaying—the act of make-believe and inhabiting a character, whether in a video game or a TTRPG—involves breaking off a little piece of yourself and experimenting with it. "It's amazing," Tyler agrees. "And that's kind of what I love about the tabletop version as well, because you have a bunch of people doing that simultaneously. And you end up with interactions you could never have predicted … it's so juicy and psychologically interesting."

That bit—"psychologically interesting"—twigs a memory on my end. A few times Matthew Mercer, the DM of the mega-popular D&D livestream Critical Role, has talked about a book called Me, Myself, and Why. Jennifer Ouellette, the book's author, suggests that the memories we record about our TTRPG exploits ("I rolled a natural 20 and killed that dragon!" or "I couldn't save that NPC we really liked in time") get put in the same area of our brains as actual, real-life memories.

Not only does Tyler agree with that theory, she has a plan to capitalise on it: "Some of my friends and I were like, so when we're old ladies, right? In the old people's home, we're gonna forget that this wasn't real—there's a group of us who've been playing A Song of Ice and Fire [a Game of Thrones TTRPG] for many, many seasons.

"When we get old, we're going to forget that we didn't take over the country and start a coup and murder a bunch of people at a wedding. We're gonna start telling stories, and we're gonna freak the fuck out of a bunch of carers, and I won't care. I'm gonna watch and laugh as they try and figure out if any of these stories were true or not."

We also get to talking about the bonds you make with your tabletop friends. Obviously, everyone has a horror story about how their table fell apart. But, just as often, you hear about people who have stuck together for decades. I myself play in a game that's over a hundred sessions long, and I'd consider those people—even though we met online, over Discord—real, genuine friends.

"The friendships that you've forged through tabletop and roleplay generally, they are stronger than any real-world friendship I've ever had, because you get to know somebody on such a complex level. You get to see them in different lives and different guises, dealing with massive world-shattering trauma and events you would never experience in real life … you get to see different aspects of their personality over and over again. It's fascinating."

Speaking of TTRPG groups, Tyler also mentioned a recent panel at MCM Comic Con in October, where Matthew Mercer was asked whether he'd want to have a specific member of the Baldur's Gate 3 cast on his show. He responded: "They're all so great … I'd probably have to jump out at Amelia, since she's such a big fan already."

"That blew my mind slightly, and I couldn't stop grinning-slash-having a massive existential crisis for about half an hour," Tyler says. "I would absolutely be down for that. I'm a life-long critter [a critical role fan]—lifelong," she laughs, correcting herself: "As long as Critical Role has been running, I've been a critter." She also mentions Dimension 20, College Humour's own show, which I'm also a huge fan of.

"There are a bunch of very cool people, who are known, that I'd love to roleplay with, but," she adds, when it comes to the long term: "I have my people. I have my party. They might not be massively famous, but I love roleplaying with them, and I do not want to stop. They are my number one party … I wanna bring them with me.  And hopefully at some point, like show them off a little bit more."