Видео

Regarding the "cast members following plot hooks immediately in Dimension 20", I do think Brennans explanation in the EXU Gamemaster Roundtable is very informative. He says it is kind of a railroad, but one that is handcrafted for - and in a way by - the players. He talks a lot with everyone beforehand to make sure he really knows who each character is and then crafts the plot and the plot hooks in a way that everyone can act true to their character while following along that path that is laid out before them. For example, in the opening for the first season of Fantasy High Brennan needs all the characters to end up in detention and because he understands the flaws of all characters it is easy for him to "bait" each character into doing something that will lead them there. But it also obviously requires an amount of buy-in from the players that you're probably only ever getting in an actual play that has a set number of episodes to work with. I think that's very easy to see in EXU Calamity (no real spoilers ahead) in the introduction segment. Brennan has a moment planned where two of the characters will meet and he hints towards it early in the scene, but the player kind of misses the signal (I also think there is a bit of miscommunication happening between Brennan and that player during that scene). But when the scene comes to a bit of a halt and Brennan brings up the hook a second time, the player gladly follows along when without the meta knowledge about the constraints of the format he maybe would not have otherwise. But as a general "rule" for helping GMs who may struggle to have players follow the right plot threads and not run after interesting set dressing unless an NPC tells them to do XYZ, really understanding the characters motivations by having multiple conversations with each player and then making the plot hooks as specific as necessary can really go a long way. And then when a player doesn't react to a presented hook, it's also okay as the GM to just ask the player directly how his character reacts or thinks about the plot hook presented.

I feel like some of these comments are really nitpicky. Runes can be dwarvish I. Their world if they want for example. Generally when you’re talking mechanics though I agree with the criticism.

Travis always seemed to like Orion the least to. Even in the very first episode he is glaring at that dude.

And this is the episode that delivers on Vex being greedy and obsessed with EVERY SINGLE COIN that she can possibly squeeze out of a dungeon... Because she's insecure and remembers the judgment of her and Vaxs' childhood and is wanting to come back with a fortune and prove all those assholes wrong that she can be successful and prosper even as a half elf with stubby ears. I know in the very beginning you found it a kind of weird character trait but it pays off really really well, emotionally. The culmination of everything leads to this episode when they are SO close to Syngorn...where she finally cracks and reveals that deep vulnerability to Percy. It's a beautiful moment and definitely one of my favorites in the campaign... Or at least one of my favorite Perc'ahlia moments, I agree with chat on that, for sure.

I’m amazed of how many notes you accrued. Just to clarify: Although Allura was a member of both, the Arcana Pansophical and the adventuring party that trapped Thordak in the fire plane are different distinct groups.

I'm enjoying the random breakdown of my home city's geography and culture in the middle of this Critical Role reaction. It feels weirdly, surreally familiar for a youtube video, lmao. Heya fellow (displaced) Kansan o/

That’s fair

Is it just me or is your voice very different from your stream voice here xD

Sam's characters are not evil. Yes chaotic but never evil

just found this video, and i wonder if Tiberius being Tiberius is partly why no one has played a Dragonborn in the later campaigns. Definitely agree that the Orion/Tiberius divide was practically non-existent and even when he was speaking in his Tiberius voice it was basically just Orion. I had a way easier time understanding the Marisha/Keyleth divide and Keyleth basically just spoke in Marisha's voice. As for Keyleth, I really enjoyed her character and the way she was kind of at odds with the group (she was way more of a good-aligned person with strict morals than the rest of the party and it brought them into conflict). I caught up sometime around the Umbrasyl fight.

I really want to stay up until 5am so I can finally be caught up with live on Critical Eyes after ~8 months of working through the backlog. I'm just glad I'll catch up to you before you catch up to your Patron's Critical Role Demystified series.

I noticed something weird about the talking budget. I think the decrement is happening mid-chunk, not just between chunks. The chunk for that last chapter about the Feywild was ~30k words but the budget only went up 12.5k (30/35k to 42.5/35k)

i like how this guy keeps smiling at the camera like billy butcher "bloody ell, omelander done killed my wife. also this mate orion is one cheeky cunt"

Yeah, CR is very generous with the applications of Druidcraft. In a later campaign, a character uses it to create berries and food in a setting that doesn’t otherwise have plants, and bargains with an NPC. I can’t blame them too much, considering druidcraft is probably the weakest of the prestidigitation-likes (and I love those spells), but they do stretch it a little far for my taste.

yes, Candela is on a different / modified set from c3, so it would be just a bit spoilery about the tech they have now (imo the quality only improves significantly when CR is getting close to being independent, G&S wasn't on top of their game). Candela has circles as parties and each get a 3 episode runtime with different GMs (in order: Matt, Spencer Starke, Aabria Iyengar, Liam) + a one shot in a theater with Spencer as GM in which Matt got to play finally. usually there's 2 core CR members in each circle, the rest are guests. I'd recommend watching it, but keep in mind that it's a horror setting, so there's plenty of gore and other horror elements in it. if you don't want to be spoiled even in the tech they have you can just watch the theater one shot, it's on a different location entirely. it's very good with very interesting experimentation with the format and the set. bonus feature: they filmed and shared part of the session zero for each circle, but it only aired after the arc was done, so it should be the last to watch.

What are your thoughts about broomgate being a potential inciting incident for vex

3.5 arcane archer was wild tho

Percy likes to be several steps ahead of everyone else. That is where his confidence comes from. He only knows a little bit about the Feywild from books he read in his childhood. So I get the impression that he feels out of his element which is causing him to have a mix of anxiety and overconfidence as coping mechanisms.

Fun Fact: Normal human autopsies take around 3 hours on average, so a mortician could realistically do two while watching this video.

3:48:30 I swear I have had the same rant before

Love your struggle failing to find a rephrasing for ‘post-nut clarity’ 😂 the meaning was immediately clear, it’s the perfect phrase for it! But so to is simply… ‘hindsight’ 🤣

40:00 it’s a pet peeve of mine how often Acrobatics is allowed to be used in place of athletics. You can choose either one for contesting a grapple, which seems to have set the precedent that dex characters can just use it whenever they’d normally have to use strength. Dex is already a way better ability score than Str. So a rogue going “alright can I backflip to make it acrobatics” and suddenly instead of rolling a -1 he’s rolling at +12 and can’t get less than a 22, is goofballs.

I roll all my rolls in the open as a DM (on a VTT that shows my rolls in the chat.) To me, it has so many more pros than cons. My players will never for a moment doubt my rolls, and you know when the monster rolls a nat 1 and everyone cheers or a nat 20 and everyone groans? I feel like the group is more excited when they SEE what the monster rolls vs when the DM tells them that the monster rolled. And my group is a bunch of math nerds and I don't mind meta gaming, I don't mind if they can see that the monster has +7 to hit on attacks and +5 to dex saves. Instead of fudging, my monsters makes worse tactical decisions if the fight goes on for long and my PCs are one the ropes. Like they'll "accidentally" move to a space where the barbarian can reach them on b's next turn.

Maybe I’m the only one, but I have had a hard time even finding your videos. Anyway, glad to see things coming back into full swing. Maybe I’ll make a live again at some point haha.

Please no spoilers from Critical Role Campaign 1 Episode 55 and beyond. This theory was made directly after they killed Umbrasyll, and I haven't seen much beyond that. If there are spoilers, I will have to restrict or turn of comments all together. Thanks <3

1:43:16 There is a moment in Critical role episode 96 where this could be interesting to bring up again :) Looking forward to how you will break down that moment!

We did a whole episode!! 🎉 The Mega is back. :)

This nighttime ambush reminded me of a conversation that I had recently in CR subreddit. Basically, what if I, a barbarian, find some high-CR humanoid sleeping and completely unaware of me. They have a ton of HP, and my axe only deals 2d12+3 damage on a crit. So... Should I still be able to decapitate them with a single swing, since we're out of combat? It's not like having a lot of combat experience makes your neck less vulnerable to chopping. This also goes back to what you said about introducing real-world things to the game, like aimed shots or freezing someone's eyes. And there are rules on attacking unconscious creatures (you get advantage and autocrit). But it's just in such conflict with the in-world narrative. If the axe stopped 1 centimeter into the bad guy's neck, and they'd wake up saying "t'is but a scratch", I'd instantly wonder "What is this creature?!"

I think spells having that broad or large trade off you mentioned gets too much in the way of what players want out of magic in like a system like dnd. Yeah, magic is largely powerful and is probably the easiest way to cheese and move around fights but in a way a player deserves those options for playing through the class and unlocking the spells and character’s magic ability. Impeding that in the way you said you would potentially nerf hold person would kinda be the equivalent of getting in the way of barbarian’s accessing rage or monk’s accessing ki points

"Scrip scrippity scrip!" /ref @12:40 it's scrip!

Hdhdi

"People loved Dragon Magazine! Why aren't they doing something like that anymore?" Because Paizo wrote Dragon Magazine and they are currently busy managing better tabletop games.

@3:29:35 While I agree with your point about it still being the DM's choice either way, I feel like the difference between "world building DMs" and "plot building DMs" is about how much they consider the watsonian vs doylist reasons, by default. I'd consider myself normally in the "world building DM" category, because when I make decisions during the session, the main thought process is "what makes sense to happen?" i.e. the watsonian reason. For me, the doylist reasoning is often more subconscious. Now, I think you're right that Matt was being more deliberate here, because I think he planned to end last session after they teleported, so he could prep what happened next depending on where they went. And @5:21:35, I think people that assume he's tracking dragon location on a round by round basis are misunderstanding what Matt means when he says he just plays the world. I agree, there's no chance he's tracking their location round by round. At most, he estimated how long it'd take in rounds to fly across the city, while prepping, to help him decide what round the dragon shows up on, but even that seems unlikely.

4:37:00 and a little bit farther. You realize that this is also the tame who constantly fails to open doors as well right?

4:15:06 Mega the poet! And he’d have us believe there is no script 😂 “ [This is not the same as talking to someone in real life.] You are interacting with the ghost of me; Delayed, and displayed, through elec- tricity. Even what you see Is not real- ity. I spoke these words in the past, you’re not seeing me. “

3:23:00 still not her beast swan dive.

I'd also let the players make one action or bonus action each if they're freefalling a long distance. The druid wildshaping into a bird, the sorcerer casting fly, the barbarian defiantly raging to take less damage? Theatrical, fits the class fantasy, uses other resources than HP, rewards player creativity and just FEELS right. "You plummet 500 feet and don't have the opportunity to do anything about it unless one of you have feather fall prepped" doesn't feel right to me as a DM. Then again, if they're falling a SHORTER distance, like 60 feet, I'd say that they don't have enough time to use an action. My cutoff point is generally 100 feet.

I'm obsessed with Dark and Darker right now!

@2:45:50 All-star friend move from Taliesin trying to share the blame "I read the card too, I didn't see it" @3:25:30 He mentioned Pike had dispel magic, but didn't know what was going on. I think he was trying to give them an out "Pike dispelling it", but wanted a PC to suggest it, so it didn't feel like deus ex machina? That was the only out I saw, at least.

with all the homebrew rules you have and come up with for spell casting, remind me never to play a spell caster at your table...

Yeah, Tiberius to me felt like a new player and just mildly annoying. Until the half chub comment. Then all of his shit finally hit home for me.

i think her use of "collaborative storytelling" is a good choice for another actor; they already think of themselves as part of that process anyway with their craft.

Currently in the process of catching up with these vods, looking forward to maybe catching up with the livestreams one day but as someone who has watched C1 of CR once, a few years ago, and is also currently DMing for the first time ever, this is really enjoyable to watch and quite informative too. Just a minor pet peeve that I've noticed a couple of times already: You use the term "sentient" (e.g. when talking about Duergar), but I think you mean "sapient". "Sentient" just means being able to perceive things and experience sensations (such as pain), whereas "sapient" in this context refers to the ability to think about those perceptions/experiences, have self-awareness, generally reason and have complex thought. So the vast majority of real world animals is sentient, while only few animals besides humans are considered to be likely sapient. Duergar of course are both sentient and sapient so it's not wrong to refer to them as sentient, but especially in the context of questionable things being done to them it seems like the moral quandry is about these things being done to sapient creatures, not merely sentient.

Genuinly, higher level dnd can be phenomenal, but abilities get crazy. A good thing to balance that out in my opinion is actually to do what in lower levels can make dnd less fun, 1 encounter per long rest followed by alot of social events or stories as turns get sometimes so long that running more combats just drags on,and if everyone allready has superhuman abilities and knows that fights are rare, they often are even more encouraged to usespells or abilities to interact with the world which can make campaigns incredibly interactiv (more than usual in my opinion cause players feel and are less limited by recources. Althoff gh it isnt everyones cup of tee I love it, great for mysteries (with some limitation to not immediatly sequence break everything session 1.

4:19:00 this is why in the campaigns I play in and run, I never use the term “Adventure”. You are a “Mercenary”, you get paid to go kill that monster or find that object.