5th edition brought D&D into the mainstream, and onto video platforms where thousands of strangers could watch a game. Suddenly people running that sort of game needed to worry whether their epic campaign in which the players fought against the orcs for control of a fantasy kingdom could be interpreted as being racist. And companies trying to sell something in the D&D space needed to make sure that they were sufficiently "woke" to not offend the liberals.

But D&D has a cultural problem: It is very much a product of white, heterosexual, male culture. And in the culture wars, this is the only group not allowed to have their own culture. Nobody would complain these days that Blues music is "too black", but people do complain that D&D is "too white". The cultural orientation of D&D was never by design. All the groups I ever played with loved having for example female players. The percentage of D&D players playing a character of another gender is actually much higher than the percentage of transgender people in real life. And groups pretty much always consist of characters of a mix of different races. But if you put up a sign in a local gaming store looking for players, you simply mostly get men, and most of them will be white. The heroic fantasy genre simply attracts certain groups more than others. That led to some conflict on platforms like YouTube, where some D&D groups who put up content and looked for sponsorship from companies like Roll20 were told that these companies refused to sponsor groups that were overwhelmingly white heterosexual males. The larger audiences created a culture war in a domain where actually no conflict existed before.

And like so often, this creates a backlash. Now some right wing nutters around one of the descendants of Gary Gygax are forming a new company using the original TSR name, and are pushing a deliberately offensive and anti-woke agenda. The natural tendency of gamers to claim "my game is better than your game" is now being expressed in terms of how woke or anti-woke the game is. When in reality pen & paper roleplaying is fundamentally neutral, as it is a medium, a form of expression, which like a blank piece of paper is able to be used to express all sorts of thoughts. Roleplaying is a great way of self-expression. D&D has always been a refuge for the less popular, less socially accepted kids. A kid who was "different" always had a better chance to find acceptance at the local D&D table than in let's say sports. The last thing the hobby needs is a thought police from either side.

Your party consists of the original 7 adventurers: Ranger, Elf, Dwarf, Thief, Barbarian, Ogre, and Wizardess, plus an 8th character, which you can choose between Paladin, Bard, and Priestess. As healing is quite important in this game, and the Paladin only tanks and doesn't heal, I took the Priestess. The adventurers are exploring the multi-level dungeon, frequently coming back to places they have already been, but now able to open doors that were previously closed.

The real highlight of the game is the turn-based tactical combat. There are no random encounters, only set piece fights, but they are all quite nicely balanced. You can set up your group in a deployment zone at the start, initiative is determined by your stats, and every character can do two actions every turn, like move and attack. Right from the start there is a nice variety between attacks, healing, and support abilities, and characters support each other when standing next to each other, making tactical placement quite important. There is an interesting system of critical failures, which power a bar you can use to trigger some divine intervention. Combat never feels trivial or unfair, which is quite an achievement. And as you level up, you get more active and passive skills, as well as stat boosts.

I also like the business model of this game: The base game costs a very reasonable €25. And if that isn't enough for you, you can get more of the same in the form of €10 DLCs. I don't think I'll need the season pass for 3 DLCs, as the 2nd and 3rd aren't out yet, and there is no apparent saving by buying them in advance. Fans can also get additional artwork and soundtrack.

The Dungeon Of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet Of Chaos is not an epic game, and doesn't take itself too seriously. If you are okay with that, I would recommend it as a fun tactical RPG.

In terms of medical ethics, vaccines are in a weird space: They protect both the person who is receiving the vaccine as well as the wider society around that person. For other medication, let's say chemotherapy against cancer, there is an argument to be made that a person should be free to choose whether he wants to receive that medication or not. For vaccines that argument is less obvious, because the person refusing to get vaccinated poses a risk to the people around him. There is the old adage that "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.". How about the freedom of a cruise ship operator to not let anyone not vaccinated on his ship?

Unfortunately the question has become highly politicized. The people who previously argued that a bakery should enjoy the freedom to not provide service to a homosexual couple are now arguing that this same bakery should not enjoy the freedom to not provide service to somebody refusing to get vaccinated. If a "stand your ground" law gives you the right to shoot somebody if you are in reasonable fear for your life, why should "the other guy was black" be a reasonable fear, but "the other guy was not vaccinated" not?

In the early days of AIDS, some right wing people argued that the disease wasn't so bad, because it mostly killed homosexuals. With more dangerous mutations of COVID arriving, and people's protection against the virus being correlated with their party affiliation, how long until Democrats say that COVID isn't so bad, because it mostly kills Republicans? Is it ethical to grant people their wish for personal freedom, in the hope that it kills them?

It is not as if the PC gaming market didn't have the occasional failure, like the release of Cyberpunk 2077. But that is only single games. The availability of both hardware and software for playing games on the PC is excellent, with a recurring theme on this blog being that we have too many games to play. To be *not* able to go out and play a game, just because you can't get hold of the hardware for it, feels weird. And except for a few die hard loyalists, most people will react to situations like this by realizing that there are a lot of other platforms and games out there. Just like anyone who was disappointed by the release of Cyberpunk 2077 won't be too excited for CD Project's next game, people who were disappointed by the availability of the PlayStation 5 might not be queuing up anymore for the PS6.

So I never had high hopes for Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. There have been previous Dark Alliance games, and they weren't very interesting to me. I prefer turn-based tactical combat to button mashing action. Today Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance was released, and even a cursory look at reviews revealed that something went massively wrong: Bad critic reviews, review videos calling it the worst game of the year, and a "mostly negative" rating on Steam. Not only did the developers produce a repetitive generic fantasy action game that has nothing to do with D&D, except for borrowing character names like Drizzt. They also managed to badly program it, and produce a nearly unplayable buggy mess.

Meanwhile I am sitting here wondering why there aren't more D&D computer games out there that actually use D&D rules. There are actually more of those than usual, with Solasta just having been released, and Baldur's Gate 3 in early access. But that still isn't very much, and Solasta is a lot shorter than I would have wished it would be.

The only good news is that Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance will be on Game Pass, so if you are subscribed to that, you can have a look at it without spending any additional money.

In part that has to do with the progress systems of RPGs. Whether it is pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons, or most computer RPGs, leveling up at the lower levels tends to be very interesting, giving you a big boost to your power and great new powers. At the higher levels the gains are marginal, and often not so interesting anymore. If you look at D&D, all the published modules, all the gameplay videos on YouTube and Twitch, you'll notice that very, very few people play D&D beyond level 15, and the large majority of games is below level 10.

In D&D, and in some other systems, the narrative also becomes problematic at high levels. "You open the door in the dungeon. There are three orcs playing dice in the room." makes total sense. "There are three liches playing dice in the room." doesn't. While computer RPGs usually have less problems using high-level minions, they also never explain why these people are minions if they could single-handedly defeat all of the starting zone of the game.

The last problem, which is more relevant for computer games, is that by mid-level you have worked out how the system works, and what strategies to use. Late-game new abilities tend to be just stronger versions of ones you already have, and don't really change that strategy. The harder the endgame, the less interest you have to stray from the best possible tactic, and fights become a bit sameish.

Between all of these factors, and the often not very well written endings of computer games, I frequently find myself in a situation where my ennui about the boring endgame gameplay becomes greater than my interest to see the end of the story. That is possible because I become invested in the gameplay aspects and powers of my characters more than in their story. What do I care if the Patriarch in Wasteland 3 lives or dies? He is a horrible person, but so is everybody else, and there isn't really any happy ending on offer. In Pathfinder: Kingmaker I was far more interested in the wellbeing on my kingdom than in some ancient curse on some fey. The more esoteric the endgame becomes, I'm looking at you Divinity Original Sin 2, the less I am interested.

After surfing Reddit for a bit, I found the Patreon page of InspiraSean86, which has plenty of color maps for Ghosts of Saltmarsh. I am not a big fan of Patreon for content like this: I want to buy a set of battle maps for my D&D game, not an ongoing patronage relationship with some artist. I didn't like the idea to pay the minimum $1 to download all maps and then cancel, because I thought that would be too cheap. So I paid for an annual subscription at $10.80, and then cancelled. This is how I handle most "subscription" services these days, I cancel on the same day as I subscribe. Otherwise you end up with dozens of subscriptions all over the place, which are very hard to keep track off, and are often for stuff you don't really use anymore.

(I also don't like how relatively complicated downloads are on Patreon. I ended up using the Patreon Downloader Chrome Extension to download my maps.)

I looked into using tools like World Anvil and DungeonFog for my new campaign. But again, you can't buy these tools, you can only buy a pricey subscription. I wouldn't mind paying $40 - $50 for a piece of software, but I do mind paying that much every year. Especially for a service where I am basically paying for keeping access to the content I created myself. There are free versions available, but for example in DungeonFog the free version gives you only 3 map slots, and limited assets to put on those maps. I'm rather putting my hope into Dungeon Alchemist, where I only had to pay €30 once.

I'm not sure yet what tool I will use to keep notes on my campaign. Obviously I could just do it in Roll20: That has the advantage of having the notes directly in the software I use to run the game, but Roll20 doesn't really structure information very well. I like the idea of World Anvil having interactive maps, where you can access the information you wrote about a city by clicking on that city on the map. But I dislike the subscription model for something I would want to have access to for a long time, but infrequently. So I have to look into "buy once, keep forever" solutions like Scrivener. Anyone got any recommendation for campaign notes software?

Investing has to do with forecasting the future value of an asset. You might argue that nobody can foresee the future. But to some extent you can make intelligent forecasts based on current events. For example Amazon shares were at $1785 on March 13, 2020, when the first COVID wave started to move markets. If you had been clever at that point in time and made the link between people in lockdown and online shopping, you could have doubled your money in a few months. That would have been a better investment than let's say in a company running cruise ships. And the evolution of these share prices wasn't totally random, there are real world factors underlying it.

In gambling, you just rely on luck. Like the content of loot boxes, the future value of Bitcoin or meme stocks has very little to do with real world values. If a tweet from Elon Musk can wipe out your assets, you are involved in gambling, not investing. The directors of Gamestop are selling their shares, because they know that the current market capitalization of 16 B$ massively overvalues the real world value of their company.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be gambling. The future value of things like Bitcoin or Gamestop shares is based on irrational factors, and yes, that means you could be making money that way. Or you could lose your shirt. Personally I am not much of a gambler, and the few times in my life where I felt like gambling I preferred casinos to cryptocurrency. The "gambling-like" assets you can buy tend to be more volatile than shares in brick-and-mortar companies. There is currently a not insignificant risk that these assets will take a massive hit if inflation turns out to be less temporary than the Fed claims. But they could also double in value next month for no real reason.

The important thing is that you realize what you are doing, gambling or investing. Are you risking money you can afford to lose? Or is it the difference between spending your retirement in comfort vs. having to work as a greeter in Walmart for minimum salary until you're 80? The reasonable thing to do is to invest the money you rely upon for your future more conservatively, and gamble only less significant amounts of money. With the money you'd be happy to buy loot boxes for, you might as well buy Bitcoin.

The number of players of a massively multiplayer game follows predictable patterns. There is an early rush, followed by a decline. Some games manage to bring out a steady stream of updates and expansions, keeping up player numbers for years. But there are very few games in which there aren't some problems at first caused by too many players rushing in (servers overloaded, login queues), and later there are other problems with there being not enough players around.

There is also some sort of curve describing the "quality" of any given player over time. Players start out as curious n00bs, and then over time get better at the game, plus they accumulate whatever power progression the game offers over time. But then at some point they get bored of the game, which results in them not caring about consequences anymore, which can result in some quite bad behavior.

While players generally *want* games in which they have some impact on the open world, both the fact that players leave the game, and the fact that they might behave badly when bored, forces developers to limit the impact of players. Ironically developers need to limit positive impact of players on the experience of other players, in order to limit negative impact. We can't have player run cities full of life, because they turn into ghost towns over time. We can't have unlimited PvP, because that turns into ganking.

As much as AI and NPC have their limitations, the quantity and quality of them can be constant. In the end, a bazaar full of NPC merchants ends up being more fun over time than a player-run version. PvE gives a more reliable combat experience than PvP. For the player as a customer, a massively multiplayer game is a risk, and a limitation: It is unwise to join such a game much later in its life cycle, because being a n00b in a game full of grizzled veterans frequently isn't all that great. Personally, seeing that a game relies on other players as content these days is a turnoff for me. I prefer single-player games, because they tend to improve over time with patches and additions, while multi-player games frequently get worse over time.

The result of this is that when I stop playing a game and start playing the next one, it becomes harder and harder over time to go back to the game I stopped playing, because I simply forget what I was currently doing in that game, or the details of the controls. Once in a while I go through the list of games installed on my PC, and uninstall those that for some reason I stopped playing a while ago. There are so many new games, taking up an old game again isn't that interesting in comparison.

Like most players, there are a lot of games that I start but never finish. And there are relatively few games that I finish playing, want more, and thus start playing again from the start. Sometimes I make a conscious decision to stop playing something. But it also happens that my plan was to just take a short break from a game while playing the new shiny that caught my eye, and three months later I notice that I never got back to that game.

Being conscious of that leads to some weird situations, like the one I am currently in: I am playing Wasteland 3, and I am not enjoying it as much as the other CRPG games I played this year. But somehow I am also reluctant to start playing something else, because that would probably mean that I never take it up again. I've only done one of the three children of the patriarch, so I guess I haven't seen even half of the game yet. In theory I should like the XCom-like combat system much more than I actually do. Does the game "get good" later, or is it really just not so much fun?

So there is not only a barrier to entry into a game, where it takes some time and effort to get into the game. But also a barrier to exit, where the FOMO (fear of missing out) makes me play a game longer than I am actually having fun with it. I'll probably overcome that soon, because honestly, I don't think my life will be any worse if I don't get to see the ending of Wasteland 3. But maybe I'll do the second son before stopping.

At that point I remembered to switch to Steam, in order to remove Going Medieval from my wishlist there. I know me; I would be perfectly able to buy Going Medieval again in a few months on Steam at some sale, not remembering I already have it on Epic Games. So I started thinking, maybe there is a way to add the game bought on Epic Games to my Steam library? Well, there is and there isn't. You can add any game to your Steam library with the "Add a non-Steam game to my library" function. But that will only enable you to start the game from your Steam library. It will *not* update your wishlist, or show that you already own the game. It would be possible with me to end up with two copies of Going Medieval in my Steam library. This is not the function I was looking for.

But, impressively, there is another function in the Steam store: If you go to the Steam store page of the game, next to the wishlist button and the follow button, there is an "ignore" button. And if you click on the little down arrow next to that ignore button, there is actually an option "Played on another platform". That hides the game from the Steam store, but still can use it to create recommendations. Great! It is quality of life features like that which make Steam my primary PC games platform, and everything else secondary. You could only beat that with a "import games library from another platform" button, and that is probably beyond the limit of cooperation between those platforms.

Now I am relatively unlikely to use Cheat Engine for xp. Yes, you can turn your level 1 character into a max level character, but then the game just becomes boring as hell, because you are still in that level 1 zone. There are quite a lot of games on which I never used Cheat Engine at all, because I found the game fun and balanced as is, and didn't feel the need to modify it.

The one value I am most likely to modify in a typical RPG is my gold, or whatever other currency there is. Because by the conventions of the genre, you are supposed to collect junk loot while adventuring, sell that junk to traders in town, and earn much of your gold that way. I never liked that game mechanic, and I am certainly not using that in my D&D campaigns. In computer games, it depends on how it is implemented. I especially hated Fallout 3 for this, because there were literally hundreds of containers to open in any locations, and most of them contained junk of very low value, so you really had to haul quite a lot of junk to earn currency, and spend half of the time in game opening drawers and boxes. I prefer loot systems like Diablo, where relatively little loot is coming from the archetypical barrel, and a lot of the stuff you sell is armor and weapons from enemies. You take the best stuff for yourself, and sell the rest. My dislike of junk also depends on how restrictive the inventory management is: After playing some Larian Studios games with horrible inventories, I appreciate in Wasteland 3 that there is absolutely no limitation to the number or weight of the stuff you carry around; not so much of a hassle to sell junk if it doesn't block valuable space in your inventory, and there is a "sell all junk" button too!

But when I get to the point in an RPG where my characters are overloaded with vendor trash and I am supposed to travel back and forth just for the gold, I am likely to pull out Cheat Engine instead. Leave the junk armor on the corpse, and POKE myself some gold. I want to play heroes, not trash collectors!

While away from Vallaki, the group had discovered that the circus ringmaster Rictavio staying at the inn was in fact the famous vampire hunter Rudolph van Richten, and the ally against Strahd that the fortune teller told them about. But when they tried to find him, they learned that he had left westwards in his circus wagon, with a tower having been mentioned. The group had seen that tower from afar, on a peninsula in a lake, when they were at the werewolf den. So they decided to go there.

However, on the way to van Richten's Tower, the group encountered a patrol of undead knights from Argynvostholt, from the Order of the Silver Dragon. These were ancient enemies of Strahd, defeated when Strahd conquered Barovia, and turned into revenants bent on vengeance when Barovia became a Domain of Dread. [DM's note: There are actually some story elements of Hamlet that I am using here. Like Hamlet, the group was given a choice of "to be, or not to be", in their case of either working for Strahd or rising up against Strahd. Like Hamlet, they decided to try a middle way instead. And like in the play that ends up satisfying nobody and leads to a worse outcome than if they had made a clear choice. Here potential allies against Strahd now consider the group as enemies and attack. This also serves to alert the group of the location Argynvostholt, and the Order of the Silver Dragon.]

After that encounter, the group continues toward van Richten's Tower, where an anti-magic field around the tower makes things difficult. Bilros climbs a rickety scaffolding and enters the second floor of the tower; nothing much in that room, but there is an elevator operated by 4 golems downstairs, leading up to a room above. Aëlis solves the puzzle on the puzzle door below, and simply asks the golems to operate the elevator, which was exactly the right solution here. So the group goes up the elevator to van Richten's room, who thinks they are the allies of Strahd come to kill him. They manage to persuade him that they aren't evil, only stupid/misguided, and they really want to fight Strahd. So, reluctantly, van Richten gives them some advice on how to proceed, gathering the artifacts needed to battle Strahd, and tells them he will come with them once they go to Castle Ravenloft.

Some of those are story moral choices. Sell the girl into slavery or rescue her? Well, selling her into slavery gives you some of the best gear rewards early game, while saving her gives you some useless reputation points. But what really annoys me are the dialogue choices which are related to a skill check: If you have certain diplomacy/intimidation skills you get dialogue options which allow you to solve a problem without fighting. But why would you? The skill check apparently doesn't give any rewards at all, while the fight gives you xp and loot. And I haven't seen any negative repercussions yet from murdering every potential enemy instead of talking with them. In fact, many groups of enemy trigger an encounter when you come too close, in which the enemy automatically gains initiative. So instead of walking up to them and having a dialogue, you better shoot them with a sniper rifle from afar, putting you into a much better combat starting situation.

Some skills do give xp, for example picking locks or disabling generators with the mechanic skill. But annoyingly only the one character who did the action gets the xp, so my characters that have these sort of skills are higher level than the others. Other skills not only give no xp at all, but are actually never used in the field. So you can make a ranger with skills like weapon mod or armor mod, and just use that one in your base, and never take him on adventures.

I like the combat system of Wasteland 3. And I really appreciate the fact that my inventory has no limits in number of items or weight, so I don't constantly need to go back and forth to sell junk. But in my opinion the xp system of Wasteland 3 is badly designed.

On the Epic Games Store there are free games every week, so I login once per week to check out whether I want that game. That is already more complicated than getting into my bank account. Although I am always on the same desktop PC, the Epic Games Store app always forgets me, in spite of the "remember me" setting. So first I am presented with an extremely long list of options of how I might have identified myself to Epic. I need to remember which of them I chose initially, then type in my userID and password, then Epic sends an SMS to my phone and I need to put is that security code.

This week I decided to "buy" the free game of the week, Frostpunk, for €0. And for this "purchase", Epic gave me a €10 coupon to use in their ongoing mega sale. Now I had already considered buying Assassin's Creed Valhalla at €15 off, and with the coupon it was €25 off, so I tried to buy it. Which kicked into gear another series of security measures, culminating in a screen popping up asking for my parental control PIN. I never set up a parental control PIN! So I had to navigate to Epic Games website, log into my account there, set up parental control, and then disable it. That caused the parental control screen of the Epic Games Store app to freeze, so I needed to kill the app, and start anew. Only of course when I tried to buy AC Valhalla, the Epic Games Store told me that I couldn't purchase it because I already was in the process of purchasing it.

I close all programs and reboot my computer. Now suddenly the Epic Games Store app tells me that I have already bought AC Valhalla, and I can install it. Only, to install it, I need to link my Epic Games Store account with my Ubisoft Connect account. Which of course requires me to go through the whole rigmarole again, this time for the Ubisoft site, userID, password, two-factor identification code via my mobile phone. The whole process of buying a game online took nearly as long as driving to a shop and buying a physical copy!

Is it just me, or have the security measures for games stores gone completely crazy? Why is it easier for me to do a €1,000 bank transfer than to buy a game for €34.99?

Part of the problem is probably the Fortunes of Ravenloft card reading. It randomly provides 3 locations in which powerful artifacts useful to beat Strahd can be found, plus 1 possible ally. To keep with the spirit of this, I actually drew the cards randomly in advance, just making sure that none of the results would be counter to the way I wanted to run the adventure (you could theoretically end up with all 3 artifacts in the castle). But in hindsight that random drawing resulted in 2 out of 3 locations being places where I had other story elements leading the group there.

So I am still left with a few locations that the group has no reason to visit. And now I have to invent new story elements myself to lure the players there. One location was the werewolf den my players visited in the last session: I simply told them that the third gem of the Wizard of Wines vineyard was there. The written adventure tells the story of the three stolen gems that need to be recovered for the vineyard to be able to produce wine again, but only says where two of those gems are.

For Argynvostholt and Van Richten's Tower, I will change the story and add some new elements that fit with what actually happened in my campaign to introduce them. As I tricked my players into overthrowing the burgomaster of Vallaki for Strahd, I have a rich story hook that I can play on. Still, I must say that the various locations in Curse of Strahd are presented in a weird order, and with too few suggestions on how to string them together into one coherent campaign.

As a veteran DM and having played the Ravenloft adventure in different editions multiple times (I even wrote a 4E version myself), I appreciate Curse of Strahd's expanded Barovia campaign setting. But even for me this isn't "play right out of the book", but necessitates a lot of prep work. I really wouldn't recommend the adventure to an inexperienced DM.