I noticed he seemed to come on knowing something about the player characters He seemed to zero in on keyleith and wanted to spend some time & love on her, being there for her character emotionally. My inner thought was that maybe that was around the time Marisha was getting c**p from the internet about her gameplay so maybe it was a personal nod to that too. He did the same as Liam which was explain her good points to her which simultaneously explains it to the audience. I can’t not think that’s on purpose! Part of me wishes he had less of an agenda to be caring and memorable as a nice guy & just had fun in a Chris Perkins way but that’s not who he is! So I respect that. He came with a plan of who he was and what he wanted to do and achieved who beautifully. I’d love to see him with them again one day! ❤ … and as a lover of his books, I am personally thrilled he is adventuring in his real life to grow and learn as a human to make his art better when he settles down to it. I’d rather he was happy than writing fast to please others! :)
He's a very different type of guest star. Most guest stars, in all of three campaigns, are "more PCs for that episode". Effectively, extra members of the party. Kerrek is not, and I think a big part of that comes from the fact that Patrick Rothfuss is a writer. Kerr is not an extra member of the party, he's an NPC that just happens to be played by someone other than Matt Mercer. I think that's really cool and not something I appreciated when I watched this episode the first time.
That moment, that edification of the city as the manifestation of human collective effort, spirit, and legacy was the most brightly I have ever seen Percival defined. It was beautiful.
Percy's speech is such a great example of what a good version of Lawful looks like to me: building a society and a culture that develops with generations of people living together and remembering, honoring, or evolving what those of the past accomplished.
Speaking of description, Liam practically narrating the episode introducing Widowgast's Nascent Nine-Sided Tower and Matt enjoying the break was a highlight of C2. Lol
It is pretty insane how in the first campaign they go so far as to travel to other cities and entire continents to identify their magic items and in campaign two Liam learned from their major oversight and learned that damn spell.
I think the dragon scale armor, at least, actually just comes from Matt and Taliesin being players from older editions where that meant something. Like, there were detailed crafting rules and rules for special materials like dragon hide
Notoriously, not everyone is a fan of the contrarion / hesitant attitude of Keyleth towards being a "hero", but in retrospect, Keyleth's constant remarks about whether they're doing the right thing actually ended up making sure the party was aware of the morality of their actions more often than not. Shoutout half elves for being the voice of reason
In a game I was in, the fairy barbarian ended up being the voice of reason, which should tell you how chaotic the game was. The barbarian was also the authority on magic.
I’ve always hated the abuse heaped on Marisha, but it wasn’t until I saw Mike’s video on an early Whitestone episode, making pretty much this point, that I realised how important she is to the group.
So many protagonists in stories are the good guys *because* they're the protagonists, but Keyleth is brave enough to ask if that's true. It's why I like her so much. It gives her character so much depth that typical Chosen One archetypes rarely get.
i don't like it myself, it kinda breaks the power fantasy I personally prefer. HOWEVER: Marisha is a blessing and the world is brighter for her. I understand that i dislike the character and not the player.
The relationship between kerrick and keyleth is one of my favorites of the entirety of C1. The letter she gets from him in a much later episode always brings me to tears. Thanks for the detailed episode Mike!!
Yesssss! I totally agree that Matt telling the player what their character is physically experiencing is good, maybe what their character might remember, but not telling Liam that Vax is annoyed by Vex doing a little carving on his boot. It should stay "You notice that your sister carved a little heart into your boot." and let Liam decide how Vax feels and responds. Also, thank you so much for your analysis on Kerr and Keyleth's conversation, it went right over my head when I watched the full ep. (You know what, props to Keyleth for admitting she doesn't know what Kerr makes! I probably would've nodded and looked it up later, and I appreciate Marisha showing Keyleth's lack of self-consciousness about things she doesn't know.)
The scene between Kerrek & Keyleth is still one of my favorites scenes from the Vox Machina campaign. To me Keyleth is someone who is very concerned with morality, & is constantly wanting to put more good in the world, & part of her struggle is realizing that it's not that easy. & Kerrek is an older person who has already realized that putting more good into the world isn't about always doing the right thing because like you said, there will always be unintented consequences, & is actually about just doing ones best with the information they have. This scene really hit me at the time & still to this day means a lot to me.
This episode does have some of my favorite moments: Vax and Vex arguing over the boots, Grog eating the endless mayonnaise "like a sad Pooh bear", and of course, the Cannonball contest.
@@zippomage Doesn't have to be the full scene, just at least a reference to it. But it still must have them say Percy won when he jumped in with the sodium.
Man, I forgot just how f*cking cool Kerrek is. Definitely one of those characters you understand and appreciate more as you get older. Thank you Patrick Rothuss. Where is Book 3?
If you forgot how cool Kerrek is, you need to go rewatch the letter he sent Keyleth in a C1E69 It was so well done Laura even said out loud "motherfucker that's cool"; Marisha was in tears. Hell, even if you remember the letter, it's worth a rewatch. A clip titled "Kerr's Letter to Keyleth" presents it well.
I remember when I was originally watching Critical Role, I was a big Keyleth hater for all the usual reasons. But this episode with Kerrbear really softened me to her, helped me empathize with her plight. Before I could only hear Keyleth's perspective from Marisha intentionally roleplaying low charisma and having to be antagonistic towards a party that largely disagreed, so it was easy to pick sides. But it's a lot easier to understand someone's perspective when you hear them discussing it with someone who agrees with them. Having the two of them discussing morality with no present stakes allows for more nuance than the brief insights you get during a heated exchange where the chips are down.
I loved Rothfuss' voice of perspective and reason, which made a lot of sense given the character he was playing. The only time I describe/dictate how a character feels is if they ask *and* it feels like a situation where it's warranted.
I really appreciate your channel, Mike. I am trying very hard to be a better player because of it. I am currently playing in a game where roughly half of the players (it's a big game, 7 people plus a GM) do not engage or roleplay. The rest of us are trying to push for a more roleplay heavy game. Part of this process is breaking bad habits that I think all of us are guilty of, myself included. It is my hope that with more conversations those of us that want to roleplay more can lead by example. The information and awareness and guidance you talk about on your channel has really inspired that process for me. So thank you so much. Plus I miss Vox Machina enormously so thanks for the opportunity to live with them a bit more. :D
I'm also in a group with 7 players (this is already split, we currently have 2 separate campaigns going on across 11 players total), and there are moments where I want to do some roleplay and it just kinda doesn't happen. Even though some of the others also want more roleplay, there's just a lot going on - in the beginning of the session everyone is hyped to get into it and do stuff, and the DM rather easily skips over travel time because we're pirates, we frequently spend 3 weeks sailing just to get somewhere, and travel is boring. We have some solutions to mitigate this, though. First off we can tell the DM before the session that there's something we want to do. We generally know beforehand when we're going to be traveling, and we can tell him "Hey, during this trip I'd like to craft this item/ talk to this person/ go for a swim and get myself a dolphin mount". As I make the notes, if I'm aware that someone wants to do something, I make a list at the end of my notes of the previous session with what people want to do next session. Secondly, we have a text roleplay channel in our Discord server that's being used a lot more now than it used to be. I started using it and the others followed. It allows us to take our time developing a scene, having a conversation or sparring or whatever, while the others don't need to sit and wait for us to be done. We still have sessions that are primarily RP - our pirates have just arrived on the pirate island and they have a lot of talking with NPCs scheduled - but on this occasion a lot of text roleplay has also happened during the journey there, because there was a LOT of roleplay we wanted to do between ourselves as well, and you also don't want 4 consecutive sessions that are all roleplay. Lastly, if absolutely necessary, we just... interrupt. If the DM is going "so you spend 2 weeks on the ocean - you rolled for random encounters and nothing happened - and you arrive back on the island..." I will just go "Actually I wanted to do a thing during the trip." Advocate for yourself. If the DM isn't a dick, they'll just backtrack and let you do your thing. I hope this helps you. A part of it is just reading the room (e.g. the very start of a session is often not a good moment to start RP because everyone is hyped and wants to do shit) and advocating.
One of my favorite things games or books or movies or shows can do when they're primarily about heroes doing hero things is explore the toll that might take. The doubts or the creeping feelings of repetition. Keyleth continually represented that viewpoint and I always liked when it came up. And it was also one of the things awful people hated on Marisha for during this campaign.
This is one of the few episodes that I watched in preparation for this video! So, let's see what extra comments I have because of that! Edit: Where is Book 3? This is very interesting episode because its not one Downtime sequence, its two. First we get the "take a long rest after the fight" sequence, then we get the "visit and resolve things in Westruun" sequence and they're almost unrelated! AND, Matt didn't anticipate the existence of the first sequence as anything other than a quick 15-30 min resolution, rather than the elaborate downtime sequence it became. What makes the guest star work in this episode is that Kerrek is not a character who could or would be involved in the first sequence, just the second, and Patrick Rothfuss is fully aware of and on board with that. Patrick Rothfuss's character in this episode is really interesting because he's not a typical CR guest star. Most guest stars are "this is a new member of the party, a new PC, for this episode" while Kerrek is basically an NPC, (and one that serves a very "writery" role; ie, helping a main character progress on their character arc) he's just being played by someone who isn't Matt Mercer. I think your comments about what Kerr and Keyleth are talking about is pretty accurate!
Whenever a creator like you says "an extremely long episode" I always have to double take. This video does not feel like an hour long. But boy this video sure is fifty one minutes long. Excellent work.
That child at the end was Raishan / Larkin in disguise as none of the villagers could have seen Vex ever ride the broom - one of the biggest most long-spanning mysteries in all of campaign 1 ;)
Would they have not possibly seen her flying the broom durring the battle for the titan stone knuckles. As thier where civilian hostages present durring the battle.
Awesome video as usual. Kerrek certainly is my favorite guest star for C1, mostly because Patrick Rothfuss's voice is just incredible. One side video I'm looking forward to is how to organize your music you use when you GM and all the advice you have when it comes to using music at the table. It's something I often find myself overthinking about.
Totally agree re narrating character feelings, but will add that in later episodes/campaigns I really enjoy Matt's narrations of dreams, as this provides a way for the GM to instil a sense of feeling or awareness in characters that is beyond their control or consciousness
I just want to thank you for this series! It's one thing to watch other people DM in shows like critical role, but it's so helpful for people like you who break down exactly why things do and do not work. I can't remember which episode in this series it was that you talked about, but it was where you talked about DREAMS. It had a little bit to do with the conversation you had here as well about how a DM shouldn't narrate how a PC feels. I had the opportunity to include a dream sequence in my most recent session. It wasn't planned at all, but I wanted to include one to emphasize the fallout of the events of the session, which involved a natural 1 and a Paladin character losing sight of his deity. I thought about the episode where you talked about dream sequences, and narrated a dream for this Paladin. After that the Paladin's player said something like "Can we all take a moment to appreciate what the DM just did?" Thank you so much for helping me improve my DMing abilities and allowing me to enhance the gameplay for my players!
43:21 - I think what makes this scene so strong is that Keyleth is being mentored by Kerric. It's a special thing and you can really see the difference in people who have received it and those who didn't get that privilege. It usually leads to people becoming mentors themselves.
I hope so too, but I imagine it is unlikely, based on the two seasons we have. Little moments of heart and character have largely been left on the cutting room floor so far.
Unfortunately they've already left Westruun and moved on to the next chapter, just like they skipped the downtime of rebuilding Whitestone and the Winters Crest festival. There is potential though that as Raishan becomes more prominent we will finally see some of Keyleths negative traits as she comes into conflict with the party, and we might see some of Percys good insight at that point even its if in slightly different context
Shameless Plug: The Dungeon Dudes just finished their third Kickstarter, for Monsters of Drakkenheim, which has a really awesome monster part harvesting/magic item crafting system.
I run 2nd ed and an all dwarf game, so all magic items are the province of the preisthood. My players always harvest and just give the items to the various clergy and occasionally are gifted something in return. That helps explain the time needed to craft such potions and items, yet not encumbrance the players with month long crafting checks. As the setting is in the far North, we do winter in the stead, so its perfect for covering a long winter break.
one time, our party had a stowaway toddler fairy dragon and my character spent all night bringing that baby back to the town we just visited. she was trying to make up for some irresponsible and cruel actions she took earlier in the campaign that had other PCs frustrated with her. later learned that this child was going to be a guest character so i felt SOOOO bad. and for context, i didnt know that we had a guest on board, and they wouldve been joining next week as this intro was at the end of the session. and our DM thought we wouldve been excited about the party getting a baby (which is true), but the actual dynamics during this story beat overshadowed that. not all is lost, our friend still may join in a future session now that we're all on the same page.
I love these reviews for how useful they are as a decent player and fledgling DM but also just as a recap for good CR moments. I'm sobbing all over again. I loved that moment with Percy and Keyleth so much but I haven't watched C1 since the first time I marathoned it. It's such a good point about humanity in general and truly was something I needed to hear as a person. Say what you will about the world and the philosophies of people but I am truly forever grateful for the ways in which stories especially ones like CR can inform us of our values and how we connect to others. Thank you for this series again. It's really nice to be reminded of why connections to other people, past or present, are so valuable. I hope one day to be able to bring someone else a similar feeling. Somehow.
I learned from Liam to elaborately flavor my spells :) For my dwarven artificer it was wooden animalbots, and for my present cleric of Sune I try to make things aurora-themed.
My party often does the same thing with harvesting monster parts. A lot of specific monster parts are useful in my setting (it's a large part of the reason for adventures in my setting). My party tends to just hold onto them instead of selling them though.
You should cover the "Monster Loot" series. It's a 3rd party book that goes over every monster (each entry focusing on a book e.g. the Monster Manual, Van Richten's Guide, etc.) and has simple in-built rules for magic item crafting, including armor, weapons and consumables. Really cool stuff I ran it in a campaign with a lot of homebrew monsters and it was very easy for me to look for similar-ish monsters of a similar CR or weaker and just pluck those in as the loot with some reflavoring
I was always under the impression that guest players were surprises, even to the rest of the cast. They were just talking about that on 4-Sided Dive this week, as a matter of fact. :O So I don't see their foot-dragging as anything but not knowing they were holding anyone up from playing in the first place.
I've had a long discussion with a few other DMs about having a DM tell a PC how they feel. I agree with your assertion that it shouldn't be done, broadly, but we agreed there were a few exceptions that were ok. "You get a sense of deja vu", "The eeriness of the room causes chills to run down your back", "The painting before you shows imagery that reminds you of home."
I started out in the present campaign with a dwarf alchemist artificer who just wanted to make stuff - out of any material she could get her hands on, except metal. Her spells were flavored as wooden animalbots with vials of chemicals inside (e.g. fearie fire was a swarm of wooden fireflies with vials of luciferin and luciferase), she made clothing, wooden puzzles (which I hoped to turn into spellboxes - basically scrolls with a password), a game set with bone dice, alcohols, what have you. This group had already had an artificer in a previous campaign so they were very used to a player wanting to keep everything and make stuff out of it. They're also very experienced and creative, so there were always ideas for what to make. One of the other players found a doc with potion brewing rules which we used, for which certain monster parts were required, and any monsters we killed that weren't on the doc, I'd keep some parts to experiment with. We killed a grey render and I was going to make stealth armor out of its hide. If nothing else, I could use the parts for just regular items, too: we killed a sea serpent and I used one of its vertebrae to make dice, and scrimshawed the teeth to sell. Once we get to market, the DM easily makes price lists for the stuff we haven't done anything with, asks us if we want to keep anything more, and then just has the stuff be sold. Of course in the case of Critical Role, a part of the difference is they roleplay out even most shop visits - this leads to memorable moments and characters, like the weird little guy who sold Percy black powder and the occasion where the Mighty Nein bought some drugs, but it also leads to you having to actually roleplay finding a person willing to buy a troll's heart - the only monster part the Mighty Nein ever harvested, if memory serves. In my present campaign, we're pirates, with an island that's like our base of operations, protected by a pirate god, where there's always a market selling pirated goods and traders present hoping to snap up the good stuff - and the DM just kinda handwaves us selling stuff. You wanna sell a bunch of dragon bones? Base price is X, the captain can roll to negotiate to raise that price. You scrimshaw a bunch of teeth to make them more valuable? Roll dexterity to see how much you raise the price.
Great video, Mike! With regards to handing over description of spells and such to your players, that's something that Matt specifically told his players he wanted them to do for campaign 2. Liam talks about that (maybe on a Talks Machina?) as explicitly being the reason that he described his use of components as Caleb from the very beginning. Marisha brings it up a few times when she describes something agile that Beau does as part of an attack, only for Matt to make her use an action for something she only intended as narrative flavour, like he'd asked for. So, it's definitely something this group improves on over time, and I 100% agree, it's great practice for GMs & players alike. As a player, I frequently ask my DM whether I can narrate my own failures and misses, so I can take a crap die roll and contextualize it within the fiction as something other than my character just doing a bad job. One of my favourite things to do on that front (when it's appropriate) is to recontextualize a failed roll as being an expression of their being conflict between what I the player want and what my character wants. Did I fail to pick a lock? Well maybe it's actually that my character has a moral objection to the act instead. Or maybe failing at a low-risk task is a sign that my character's mind is elsewhere, so what WOULD be on his mind? Maybe I should lean into something that happened recently being more traumatic than I'd figured, or maybe that NPC we interacted with this morning got under my skin for some reason. Anyway, that's beyond the scope of what you were talking about. I just think of them as being intertwined. At all times, the DM, the players, and the dice are all telling the story together.
32:43 I had a character who had done some good deeds, but was starting to realize he had not been the best person. When I expressed his inner thoughts about it in game, my DM shut me down, which just pulled me out of the game for pretty much the rest of the session. It also turned out to be the last game I played with him, as there was a number of lingering issues which he never grew out of. hard when this is your long time DM.
Fully agree about not telling players how their characters feel (outside of magic that impacts emotion, or maybe systems where there's a mechanical layer to character emotion) There is another difference between keeping guests waiting at home games and keeping guests waiting in Vox Machina. Guests in an AP as big as CR are (presumably) getting paid for their time. Guests in a home game aren't.
thanks for 37:52, I thought I was stupid for not understanding that scene but you explaining why it was a hard scene to follow made me feel better about missing the point EDIT: Also nice breakdown of Keyleth's psyche, really helped me in understanding the character and now that I do I find it really interesting. LAST EDIT: Civil War is a great movie. And I never thought about it like that. That is such an interesting way to see heroes. I really liked this episode of crit roll demystified. Your content is my most favorite ttrpg content to watch out of all the others I've seen.
About telling players how their characters feel: Agreed! But then again I come from roleplay, all my players were roleplayers. (Text based) And that's one of the biggest rules. You don't decide what other characters' feel. So luckily that doesn't happen too often at the table. If I want them to consider/think about a feeling, I might suggest it in a question. 'Maybe it strikes you as odd.' or, 'Perhaps it even makes you feel a certain way.' And leave it open for them to consider it and fill in those blanks. To anyone DMing I can always recommend to both the DM and the players to just look at the general roleplay rules for text rp. They're great! And they share a lot of similarities with tabletop rp!
New subscriber from Australia here! This is the first of the series I'm watching live after binging it - it's really great content and it's inspired me to give Campaign 2 another shot after finishing Vox Machina all those years ago and riding out the burnout - do you have any videos where you talk about or cover Campaign 2 @SupergeekMike? Or other actual play series? If not I'll have to stick around for that! I'd be interested in seeing your thoughts on the styles of other celebrity DMs if you watch any other actual play content in the style of these videos, or comparing them. But just popping down to say kudos on an insightful series of videos, and the treasure trove of side content! Will be sticking around for whatever comes down the track!
I had a "can things end peacefully" moment in a modified MoP campaign. Played a half elf trying to fit into a elf centric mercenary group(silent rain) and really was into goblin hunting. Near the last bit he started to realize that there is more to goblins than he thought. Talked to the cleric and asked what to do. He in turn helped form a truce and gave one goblin a +1 bow as a sign of faith. Yes he is being hunted by silent rain
I play a lot of Monster Hunter, whenever we have taken down a large monster, i always make sure to grab the parts of the monsters. Things like bones, Hide, Blood, Horns, and all that stuff comes to use at some time, most DM's also dont care about rotting of stuff. Creativity is also king, if you think of something to use that hide for, DM probably will let you.
3:04 I believe my players only started collecting monster parts because the CR cast was doing it. The ones who ask most often to collect parts have a tendency to try to do things without letting the dm know their intent in advance, and thus argue the option to try in the moment they are attempting to try. And that goes for things other than crafting, I recognize it as the player’s style. We’ve never discussed if crafting was something the players wanted to do or something the dm (me in this case) wanted to include, but it *will* be discussed in future campaigns. What doesn’t help is just the shear humor in saying “I have some umberhulk eyes from session 3 in my backpack, are they still good?”
I get what you're saying and the important of pointing out these moments to avoid making similar mistakes but I feel the Vax heart scene and the party scene are different things. With the Vex scene Mat is trying to tell Liam how his own character feels while the Vex scene seems to be him trying to the Laura "This scene is supposed to be safe I won't screw you guys over" since Matt seems very reluctant to explicitly tell them stuff like "Hey we have a guest waiting please wrap it up" as pointed out earlier. I hope I made sense.😂😅
I would love to hear Mike's take on the classic Japanese fantasy manga/light novel/anime trope of the "Adventurer's Guild" and how that can work in fantasy RPG.
Book 3 will be something i wait however long it takes to get to, but if you havent read The Narrow Road Between Desires, i very strongly recommend it (as well as the 2 mainline books and the other side story, but still)
Given the success of the Ainme Delicious in Dungeon I am guessing a lot of DM are going to have to deal with players wanting to eat the monster. For anyone wondering the show is about a group of adventures who are a massive dungeon crawl and they eat the monster they kill. I highly recommend the show.
In the topic of the DM explaining a PC feeling the thing i do in my table is ask for the emocion, just one word, if they say they fell happy, i narrate about how much joy that moment give them, if they say they are Anxeus i try to understand and extrapolate what is the reason and put it in words. like you say, take opinion fo the player and expand on it with your DM omnicient
When it comes to visualizing things I personally have trouble so if my GM were to ask me to describe what my spell looks like I would really struggle. My GM isn't super detailed when it comes to how things look most of the time, which works for me, he mostly describes vibes plus a few important things that might stand out and then answers questions. This works well for me at least. Sometimes another player asks for more details or will even ask me how does my spell look and it always throws me through a loop.
My DM has made a rule that we can identify magic items by experimentation, which led to me finding an enchanted dagger and (during a downtime session, with healing readily available) carefully stabbing myself with it to try and get it to do stuff. I actually got really close to figuring it out (It was a Poisonous Blade, so if eaten it does 6d6 poison damage, but if you stab someone with it it acts like a regular dagger) but another PC who was with me while I was experimenting stopped me from licking it.
It was actually a different Dragonborn cleric, but wow, good memory! It was Dut the Faithful, but I’ll give it to you, that’s absolutely close enough to be genuinely impressive 😁
@@SupergeekMike Dut the Faithful is amazing 😭, we just met our first Dragonborn at my table and I got so pumped then our gm brought out that Matt Colville raspy croaking voice, I was freaking out and* I* go, “Erys falls into the earth and disappears so I can play a Dragonborn paladin in this world”
1:10 I introduced a crafting system in my game. I had a hag give one of my players a crafting book that would help them find things that would be beneficial from monster corpses. Unfortunately, my player hasn't really been taking advantage of it. 10:00 I kinda work the same way as Matt, in that I allow the players describe their magic in their own way in some cases while doing it myself in others. It really kinda depends on who is helming the narrative at that point. I think that it really depends on how you play DnD, whether you play at a table or online. I invited new players before a session, so that everyone knew that we were getting new people and that there wouldn't be much delay in setting up introductions and getting the ball rolling. I think that it would be a little difficult to do in a table game because you have to hide your guest somewhere and then text them or announce their introduction, and they would be left waiting for their cue.
I think the players don't often know when there's guest that happens a lot and they do it to this day.. its more a question of whether matt should be telling them before the game starts that there's a guest
TECHNICALLY we are waiting on book 5, Name of the wind. Wise man’s fear. The slow regard of silent things- story about auri. He is just about to release a book about bast. We are still waiting on doors of stone :(
The Hades analogy is a really good one because it shows how to maintain focus when switching between pillars of gameplay. Yeah, Hades is ostensibly all about combat, but the fact it throws interesting interactions at you not only when you aren't in combat, but paces it in a way that you're almost happy that combat is over because you know you'll get something fun after is a useful thing to have in your DM toolkit. I just feel that's a vibe that perfectly suits a system like D&D that's so tied to combat as its cental pillar. ...can you tell I've played about twelve hours of the sequel since it went into early access at the start of this week? I might have a problem.
Kill a black dragon maybe ots teeth add 1d4 acid poison damage to a small quiver or arrows. Basolisk? Dc13 or lose movement speed. I mean its really REALLY Friggin easy to turn monster parts into non magic items for your party. Take effect of monster, make the effect a fraction of what it was and there ya go. It goesnt have to be a +1 1d8 acid damage arrow. Just let the players use the teeth as arrows and make it kinda cool. Can I slap some hide on my shield and have some resistance to acid damage but idk if i get hit really hard the hide rips? Yea sure thatll be useful like....Once go for it
I have a question about the “letting your players describe their spells” talk. I try to ask my players every time “what does it look like when you cast this spell”, and usually they respond with “I don’t know”, “uhh, a flash of light”, or blank look. Sometimes they describe it, but often they just look to me. Is it something that I’m doing that I can do differently to try and hand them the reigns more, or is it just the way my players are? They also seem to really like it when I “railroad” them, for instance usually when I ask them what they want to do, it ends up being either shopping or “we go find NPC and ask them what our next move should be” When I check in with the group above the table they all say they are really enjoying the game and we’ve been playing consistent in-person games for over a year with 7 players, so am I just overthinking it? (They were all new to TTRPGs when we started)
It sounds like you're going about it exactly right. You give them a chance to describe, and if they don't bite then that means they want to experience it as DM description instead. "I don't have anything in mind for this" is a perfectly valid stance for players. Keep in mind that Mike's real compliant in this video wasn't about spell descriptions or pushing the players to do something in a "railroad" fashion. Matt's been through exactly what you're describing, so he knows better than we viewers when it's time to embellish descriptions. He also has the pressure of effectively using DMing as a way to direct a TV show, which meant trying to force a new character to debut with a limited window while the cast were intent upon not going where that character could show up. Mike's complaint was about Matt telling players about their characters' inner life, which is a serious no-no for nearly every table. Matt does it, I think, because his players are actors who are used to talking openly about character motivations and feelings, and because he's working overtime trying to do the equivalent of putting on a _Lord of the Rings_ sized radio show live and without a script every week. When it's all just words and there are strangers listening, everything has to be said aloud, including the emotional responses that actors would express with their faces. So keep on giving your players opportunities to make interesting choices, just as you already are doing. When they have a good idea or something they really care about, believe me, they'll let you know!
iirc didn't they kinda regularly have guests just there watching around then? kinda explains why there wasn't any player urgency to get to a clean jump in point
I think Matt describing thongs ultimately comes from what we know about Sam. He's not one to be caught up with the particulars, certainly not at This point. The commonality is Sam.
Regarding the lesson about telling players how their characters feel... I think it's something very cool, but you need to know very well your player's characters to get an idea about how they would feel, and then you could suggest it. "Maybe you feel like this, maybe a little bit like that". Or ask them directly. And then there are other moments, like when he described how the characters felt in peaceful town, where the details that may differ from one to another are left in blank, so that the players know what each of their characters thought "what was worth fighting for" meant.
Back when I was running 3.5 games one of my players was basically min-maxed for dissecting monster corpses for crafting items. Anything the group couldn't make stuff out of was sold to stupid rich folk as exotic medicines thanks to his high bluff score. It led to the motto "if it leaves a body it leave a treasure horde".
Woah woah woah woah woah. Woah. "Patrick Rothfuss, author of the Kingkiller Chronicles and co-founder of the Worldbuilders charity"? How dare you do his career as both Viari and Driebus Beestinger of Acquisitions Incorporated dirty like that? He's definitely done more of that than he has writing Book 3, hey-oh! (Just kidding, Pat. You've brought so much joy in all your non-Kvothe endeavors, I can't complain about the Kingkiller Chronicles being a two-book-and-one-novella series that will probably never become the trilogy it was intended to be)
I can complain! I respect him, he's written more words in two (very good) books than I'm likely to write in a lifetime, and I don't hate him for not finishing book 3 - but I can still complain.
I loved Kerric as a guest character - it was my first encounter of Rothfuss and gave me a lot of respect for him. I still find it a pity the Kingkiller series didn't live up to my expectations. It occurs to me that I'd have found it so much more engaging if the protagonist had been Kerric rather than Gary "Kvoth" Stu!
You can just introduce people! A dragon just flew across the sky with giant eagles chasing it! Someone might look into that, or at least pass nearby. Whatever can be done to plausibly introduce a guest or new character, should be. It should be top priority. There's nothing worse than just waiting in the wings while everyone else has fun. (Even if he's fine with it, it's still bad form.) Generally, my rule is that if you are trying to figure out how your magic item works without Identify, you *have* to experiment through role play and rolls. If you do well, you get some info, if you do poorly you don't or even get false info. But you *can* succeed. That said, I also make an Arcana roll go along with Identify, with a difficulty based on the rarity of the item, to see if you learn every detail or if there's something held back or too complex for the spell to interpret. It keeps some of the mystery to magic items. (I've also started introducing roleplay into it like in the D&D movie, cause I think that was neat!) For spell descriptions, I fill in the gaps on things that players don't say, and I try to keep that in line with what the players have given me. Or I ask, but sometimes that's tedious or just puts them on the spot. I think if you know your players and group, it's fine to do, and if not you should do enough asking that they get comfortable describing things. I disagree about telling a player their character's emotional reaction, but it requires finesse and the willingness to retract. It's a co-operative bit of storytelling, and I think the language you use is important. Feelings and emotions are involuntary, but conclusions and actions or thoughts in response to those feelings are not. I think it should always be treated as a two hander, I say the premise, the player the conclusion. Simply by saying "I think," you make it a question while also not making the player have to ad-lib on the spot of a perception check. (This is commonly how Brennen does it. "I think Grog gets the sense that..." and the player can agree or disagree, but either way it prompts them to talk about it and get what you're suggesting as inspiration for a moment of some kind of reaction.) He could have said it was all clear skies and happy moments around her, and that he thinks she might feel like she could put that tension aside, almost feel a smile at the corner of her mouth, and then hand it off to Marisha to see where she takes it. Defining what a hero is, is a great arc for a character. And not an easy one to play out in something like D&D. I really like Keyleth and her growth. It's an ambitious character for a relatively new player, and I think she did a pretty good job.
I think it’s fine to kind of emphasize a moment of quiet beauty in that scene but there are definitely times where Matt has crossed over into “you feel this and think this about it” especially when it comes to characters brutally killing something or committing “bad” acts
What did you think of Patrick Rothfuss’ guest appearance as Kerrek?
Where is book 3?! 🤬
I noticed he seemed to come on knowing something about the player characters
He seemed to zero in on keyleith and wanted to spend some time & love on her, being there for her character emotionally. My inner thought was that maybe that was around the time Marisha was getting c**p from the internet about her gameplay so maybe it was a personal nod to that too.
He did the same as Liam which was explain her good points to her which simultaneously explains it to the audience. I can’t not think that’s on purpose!
Part of me wishes he had less of an agenda to be caring and memorable as a nice guy & just had fun in a Chris Perkins way but that’s not who he is! So I respect that.
He came with a plan of who he was and what he wanted to do and achieved who beautifully.
I’d love to see him with them again one day! ❤
… and as a lover of his books, I am personally thrilled he is adventuring in his real life to grow and learn as a human to make his art better when he settles down to it. I’d rather he was happy than writing fast to please others! :)
Exactly what the party needed. Maybe one of the best "build em up" showings I've ever seen in an improv setting.
He's a very different type of guest star. Most guest stars, in all of three campaigns, are "more PCs for that episode". Effectively, extra members of the party. Kerrek is not, and I think a big part of that comes from the fact that Patrick Rothfuss is a writer. Kerr is not an extra member of the party, he's an NPC that just happens to be played by someone other than Matt Mercer. I think that's really cool and not something I appreciated when I watched this episode the first time.
Kerr is one of the all time great guests and I still wish we'd had more of him tbh
Percy's "I live as long as Whitestone lives" speech is one of my favorite Taliesin lines ever.
That moment, that edification of the city as the manifestation of human collective effort, spirit, and legacy was the most brightly I have ever seen Percival defined. It was beautiful.
You listen to it and think it couldn't get any better, and then the little kid shows up! Perfect.
"The horrible woman might be right" is such a low key but terrific line.
Also love the bit of Scanlan doing the fantasy equivalent of turning on "find my iphone" for his daighter.
Calling her "new money" as well was just *chef's kiss*
@TierRune it just goes to show, you should never get into a roast battle with Taliesin.
Taliesens specialty is one liners imo
"No, I ate that too" is the peak of CR
FULLY AGREE. Travis' comic timing is incredible.
Percy's speech is such a great example of what a good version of Lawful looks like to me: building a society and a culture that develops with generations of people living together and remembering, honoring, or evolving what those of the past accomplished.
"Can you build a Civilization that will stand the test of time?"
Speaking of description, Liam practically narrating the episode introducing Widowgast's Nascent Nine-Sided Tower and Matt enjoying the break was a highlight of C2. Lol
It is pretty insane how in the first campaign they go so far as to travel to other cities and entire continents to identify their magic items and in campaign two Liam learned from their major oversight and learned that damn spell.
I think the dragon scale armor, at least, actually just comes from Matt and Taliesin being players from older editions where that meant something. Like, there were detailed crafting rules and rules for special materials like dragon hide
true, I have lost track of the various crafting rules I used, or didn't use in other editions.
Notoriously, not everyone is a fan of the contrarion / hesitant attitude of Keyleth towards being a "hero", but in retrospect, Keyleth's constant remarks about whether they're doing the right thing actually ended up making sure the party was aware of the morality of their actions more often than not.
Shoutout half elves for being the voice of reason
In a game I was in, the fairy barbarian ended up being the voice of reason, which should tell you how chaotic the game was. The barbarian was also the authority on magic.
I’ve always hated the abuse heaped on Marisha, but it wasn’t until I saw Mike’s video on an early Whitestone episode, making pretty much this point, that I realised how important she is to the group.
So many protagonists in stories are the good guys *because* they're the protagonists, but Keyleth is brave enough to ask if that's true. It's why I like her so much. It gives her character so much depth that typical Chosen One archetypes rarely get.
i don't like it myself, it kinda breaks the power fantasy I personally prefer. HOWEVER: Marisha is a blessing and the world is brighter for her. I understand that i dislike the character and not the player.
also I LOVE Beau and Laudna.
The relationship between kerrick and keyleth is one of my favorites of the entirety of C1. The letter she gets from him in a much later episode always brings me to tears.
Thanks for the detailed episode Mike!!
Yesssss! I totally agree that Matt telling the player what their character is physically experiencing is good, maybe what their character might remember, but not telling Liam that Vax is annoyed by Vex doing a little carving on his boot. It should stay "You notice that your sister carved a little heart into your boot." and let Liam decide how Vax feels and responds.
Also, thank you so much for your analysis on Kerr and Keyleth's conversation, it went right over my head when I watched the full ep. (You know what, props to Keyleth for admitting she doesn't know what Kerr makes! I probably would've nodded and looked it up later, and I appreciate Marisha showing Keyleth's lack of self-consciousness about things she doesn't know.)
The scene between Kerrek & Keyleth is still one of my favorites scenes from the Vox Machina campaign. To me Keyleth is someone who is very concerned with morality, & is constantly wanting to put more good in the world, & part of her struggle is realizing that it's not that easy. & Kerrek is an older person who has already realized that putting more good into the world isn't about always doing the right thing because like you said, there will always be unintented consequences, & is actually about just doing ones best with the information they have. This scene really hit me at the time & still to this day means a lot to me.
This is a good channel. This is a good series. I like Mike.
This episode does have some of my favorite moments: Vax and Vex arguing over the boots, Grog eating the endless mayonnaise "like a sad Pooh bear", and of course, the Cannonball contest.
I really hope the cannonball contest makes it into the animated show, but I understand if it gets cut for time.
@@zippomage Doesn't have to be the full scene, just at least a reference to it. But it still must have them say Percy won when he jumped in with the sodium.
Man, I forgot just how f*cking cool Kerrek is. Definitely one of those characters you understand and appreciate more as you get older. Thank you Patrick Rothuss. Where is Book 3?
In the same file as The Winds of Winter, I'd imagine
Definitely my favorite guest character of C1
If you forgot how cool Kerrek is, you need to go rewatch the letter he sent Keyleth in a C1E69
It was so well done Laura even said out loud "motherfucker that's cool"; Marisha was in tears.
Hell, even if you remember the letter, it's worth a rewatch. A clip titled "Kerr's Letter to Keyleth" presents it well.
I remember when I was originally watching Critical Role, I was a big Keyleth hater for all the usual reasons. But this episode with Kerrbear really softened me to her, helped me empathize with her plight. Before I could only hear Keyleth's perspective from Marisha intentionally roleplaying low charisma and having to be antagonistic towards a party that largely disagreed, so it was easy to pick sides. But it's a lot easier to understand someone's perspective when you hear them discussing it with someone who agrees with them. Having the two of them discussing morality with no present stakes allows for more nuance than the brief insights you get during a heated exchange where the chips are down.
I loved Rothfuss' voice of perspective and reason, which made a lot of sense given the character he was playing.
The only time I describe/dictate how a character feels is if they ask *and* it feels like a situation where it's warranted.
I really appreciate your channel, Mike. I am trying very hard to be a better player because of it. I am currently playing in a game where roughly half of the players (it's a big game, 7 people plus a GM) do not engage or roleplay. The rest of us are trying to push for a more roleplay heavy game. Part of this process is breaking bad habits that I think all of us are guilty of, myself included. It is my hope that with more conversations those of us that want to roleplay more can lead by example. The information and awareness and guidance you talk about on your channel has really inspired that process for me. So thank you so much.
Plus I miss Vox Machina enormously so thanks for the opportunity to live with them a bit more. :D
No disrespect, but you should consider splitting to two parties so the playstyle matches, if that works better.
let me guess, muderhoboing was one main bad habit in the party
I'm also in a group with 7 players (this is already split, we currently have 2 separate campaigns going on across 11 players total), and there are moments where I want to do some roleplay and it just kinda doesn't happen. Even though some of the others also want more roleplay, there's just a lot going on - in the beginning of the session everyone is hyped to get into it and do stuff, and the DM rather easily skips over travel time because we're pirates, we frequently spend 3 weeks sailing just to get somewhere, and travel is boring. We have some solutions to mitigate this, though.
First off we can tell the DM before the session that there's something we want to do. We generally know beforehand when we're going to be traveling, and we can tell him "Hey, during this trip I'd like to craft this item/ talk to this person/ go for a swim and get myself a dolphin mount". As I make the notes, if I'm aware that someone wants to do something, I make a list at the end of my notes of the previous session with what people want to do next session.
Secondly, we have a text roleplay channel in our Discord server that's being used a lot more now than it used to be. I started using it and the others followed. It allows us to take our time developing a scene, having a conversation or sparring or whatever, while the others don't need to sit and wait for us to be done. We still have sessions that are primarily RP - our pirates have just arrived on the pirate island and they have a lot of talking with NPCs scheduled - but on this occasion a lot of text roleplay has also happened during the journey there, because there was a LOT of roleplay we wanted to do between ourselves as well, and you also don't want 4 consecutive sessions that are all roleplay.
Lastly, if absolutely necessary, we just... interrupt. If the DM is going "so you spend 2 weeks on the ocean - you rolled for random encounters and nothing happened - and you arrive back on the island..." I will just go "Actually I wanted to do a thing during the trip." Advocate for yourself. If the DM isn't a dick, they'll just backtrack and let you do your thing.
I hope this helps you. A part of it is just reading the room (e.g. the very start of a session is often not a good moment to start RP because everyone is hyped and wants to do shit) and advocating.
One of my favorite things games or books or movies or shows can do when they're primarily about heroes doing hero things is explore the toll that might take. The doubts or the creeping feelings of repetition. Keyleth continually represented that viewpoint and I always liked when it came up. And it was also one of the things awful people hated on Marisha for during this campaign.
This is one of the few episodes that I watched in preparation for this video! So, let's see what extra comments I have because of that!
Edit: Where is Book 3?
This is very interesting episode because its not one Downtime sequence, its two. First we get the "take a long rest after the fight" sequence, then we get the "visit and resolve things in Westruun" sequence and they're almost unrelated! AND, Matt didn't anticipate the existence of the first sequence as anything other than a quick 15-30 min resolution, rather than the elaborate downtime sequence it became.
What makes the guest star work in this episode is that Kerrek is not a character who could or would be involved in the first sequence, just the second, and Patrick Rothfuss is fully aware of and on board with that. Patrick Rothfuss's character in this episode is really interesting because he's not a typical CR guest star. Most guest stars are "this is a new member of the party, a new PC, for this episode" while Kerrek is basically an NPC, (and one that serves a very "writery" role; ie, helping a main character progress on their character arc) he's just being played by someone who isn't Matt Mercer.
I think your comments about what Kerr and Keyleth are talking about is pretty accurate!
Whenever a creator like you says "an extremely long episode" I always have to double take. This video does not feel like an hour long. But boy this video sure is fifty one minutes long. Excellent work.
That child at the end was Raishan / Larkin in disguise as none of the villagers could have seen Vex ever ride the broom - one of the biggest most long-spanning mysteries in all of campaign 1 ;)
Well, there was that kid they revived...
WHAT
I totally missed that
Oh shit! I forgot about Larkin for a hot second. That's so good.
@@silversugar2140 but WHO IS Larkin?!
Would they have not possibly seen her flying the broom durring the battle for the titan stone knuckles. As thier where civilian hostages present durring the battle.
Awesome video as usual. Kerrek certainly is my favorite guest star for C1, mostly because Patrick Rothfuss's voice is just incredible.
One side video I'm looking forward to is how to organize your music you use when you GM and all the advice you have when it comes to using music at the table. It's something I often find myself overthinking about.
I can only say one thing, "MAYONNAISE! "
"Like the most depressing Winnie the pooh"
Totally agree re narrating character feelings, but will add that in later episodes/campaigns I really enjoy Matt's narrations of dreams, as this provides a way for the GM to instil a sense of feeling or awareness in characters that is beyond their control or consciousness
I just want to thank you for this series! It's one thing to watch other people DM in shows like critical role, but it's so helpful for people like you who break down exactly why things do and do not work. I can't remember which episode in this series it was that you talked about, but it was where you talked about DREAMS. It had a little bit to do with the conversation you had here as well about how a DM shouldn't narrate how a PC feels. I had the opportunity to include a dream sequence in my most recent session. It wasn't planned at all, but I wanted to include one to emphasize the fallout of the events of the session, which involved a natural 1 and a Paladin character losing sight of his deity. I thought about the episode where you talked about dream sequences, and narrated a dream for this Paladin. After that the Paladin's player said something like "Can we all take a moment to appreciate what the DM just did?" Thank you so much for helping me improve my DMing abilities and allowing me to enhance the gameplay for my players!
Your Eolian shirt was a nice touch for this episode. Love that mike!
Definitely earned your pipes.
43:21 - I think what makes this scene so strong is that Keyleth is being mentored by Kerric.
It's a special thing and you can really see the difference in people who have received it and those who didn't get that privilege. It usually leads to people becoming mentors themselves.
This is the first CR episode I watched, as it picks up more or less where season 2 of the show ended.
I agree on that being one of my most favourite moments of Percy and I hope we can have it at the beginning of S3.
I hope so too, but I imagine it is unlikely, based on the two seasons we have. Little moments of heart and character have largely been left on the cutting room floor so far.
Unfortunately they've already left Westruun and moved on to the next chapter, just like they skipped the downtime of rebuilding Whitestone and the Winters Crest festival. There is potential though that as Raishan becomes more prominent we will finally see some of Keyleths negative traits as she comes into conflict with the party, and we might see some of Percys good insight at that point even its if in slightly different context
@@hhylobates4098 Thank you. I totally forgot at which point ended the series (plan to rewatch before S3 buuuuut my memory of that was hazy).
I really appreciate this series, Mike. Thank you.
Another great video! I love rewatching your videos at work, and getting a new one always cheers me up!
Shameless Plug: The Dungeon Dudes just finished their third Kickstarter, for Monsters of Drakkenheim, which has a really awesome monster part harvesting/magic item crafting system.
I came to the comments to say this!
I run 2nd ed and an all dwarf game, so all magic items are the province of the preisthood. My players always harvest and just give the items to the various clergy and occasionally are gifted something in return. That helps explain the time needed to craft such potions and items, yet not encumbrance the players with month long crafting checks. As the setting is in the far North, we do winter in the stead, so its perfect for covering a long winter break.
one time, our party had a stowaway toddler fairy dragon and my character spent all night bringing that baby back to the town we just visited. she was trying to make up for some irresponsible and cruel actions she took earlier in the campaign that had other PCs frustrated with her. later learned that this child was going to be a guest character so i felt SOOOO bad.
and for context, i didnt know that we had a guest on board, and they wouldve been joining next week as this intro was at the end of the session. and our DM thought we wouldve been excited about the party getting a baby (which is true), but the actual dynamics during this story beat overshadowed that. not all is lost, our friend still may join in a future session now that we're all on the same page.
well now I wanna hear more about this story
I love these reviews for how useful they are as a decent player and fledgling DM but also just as a recap for good CR moments. I'm sobbing all over again. I loved that moment with Percy and Keyleth so much but I haven't watched C1 since the first time I marathoned it. It's such a good point about humanity in general and truly was something I needed to hear as a person. Say what you will about the world and the philosophies of people but I am truly forever grateful for the ways in which stories especially ones like CR can inform us of our values and how we connect to others.
Thank you for this series again. It's really nice to be reminded of why connections to other people, past or present, are so valuable. I hope one day to be able to bring someone else a similar feeling. Somehow.
One of my favorite experiences as a player was my DM adding his depiction of my magical attack and making me look and feel so much cooler than I could
I learned from Liam to elaborately flavor my spells :) For my dwarven artificer it was wooden animalbots, and for my present cleric of Sune I try to make things aurora-themed.
"...no I ate that too" lives rent free in my head
Mike's channel is amazing 🎉
I love how he breaks down CR content to better our own tables ❤
My party often does the same thing with harvesting monster parts.
A lot of specific monster parts are useful in my setting (it's a large part of the reason for adventures in my setting).
My party tends to just hold onto them instead of selling them though.
You should cover the "Monster Loot" series.
It's a 3rd party book that goes over every monster (each entry focusing on a book e.g. the Monster Manual, Van Richten's Guide, etc.) and has simple in-built rules for magic item crafting, including armor, weapons and consumables. Really cool stuff
I ran it in a campaign with a lot of homebrew monsters and it was very easy for me to look for similar-ish monsters of a similar CR or weaker and just pluck those in as the loot with some reflavoring
I was always under the impression that guest players were surprises, even to the rest of the cast. They were just talking about that on 4-Sided Dive this week, as a matter of fact. :O So I don't see their foot-dragging as anything but not knowing they were holding anyone up from playing in the first place.
46:22 I too love this moment!
I absolutely love Ashley's laugh at 20:13 and 20:36.
I've had a long discussion with a few other DMs about having a DM tell a PC how they feel. I agree with your assertion that it shouldn't be done, broadly, but we agreed there were a few exceptions that were ok. "You get a sense of deja vu", "The eeriness of the room causes chills to run down your back", "The painting before you shows imagery that reminds you of home."
I started out in the present campaign with a dwarf alchemist artificer who just wanted to make stuff - out of any material she could get her hands on, except metal. Her spells were flavored as wooden animalbots with vials of chemicals inside (e.g. fearie fire was a swarm of wooden fireflies with vials of luciferin and luciferase), she made clothing, wooden puzzles (which I hoped to turn into spellboxes - basically scrolls with a password), a game set with bone dice, alcohols, what have you.
This group had already had an artificer in a previous campaign so they were very used to a player wanting to keep everything and make stuff out of it. They're also very experienced and creative, so there were always ideas for what to make. One of the other players found a doc with potion brewing rules which we used, for which certain monster parts were required, and any monsters we killed that weren't on the doc, I'd keep some parts to experiment with. We killed a grey render and I was going to make stealth armor out of its hide. If nothing else, I could use the parts for just regular items, too: we killed a sea serpent and I used one of its vertebrae to make dice, and scrimshawed the teeth to sell. Once we get to market, the DM easily makes price lists for the stuff we haven't done anything with, asks us if we want to keep anything more, and then just has the stuff be sold.
Of course in the case of Critical Role, a part of the difference is they roleplay out even most shop visits - this leads to memorable moments and characters, like the weird little guy who sold Percy black powder and the occasion where the Mighty Nein bought some drugs, but it also leads to you having to actually roleplay finding a person willing to buy a troll's heart - the only monster part the Mighty Nein ever harvested, if memory serves. In my present campaign, we're pirates, with an island that's like our base of operations, protected by a pirate god, where there's always a market selling pirated goods and traders present hoping to snap up the good stuff - and the DM just kinda handwaves us selling stuff. You wanna sell a bunch of dragon bones? Base price is X, the captain can roll to negotiate to raise that price. You scrimshaw a bunch of teeth to make them more valuable? Roll dexterity to see how much you raise the price.
Great video, Mike!
With regards to handing over description of spells and such to your players, that's something that Matt specifically told his players he wanted them to do for campaign 2. Liam talks about that (maybe on a Talks Machina?) as explicitly being the reason that he described his use of components as Caleb from the very beginning. Marisha brings it up a few times when she describes something agile that Beau does as part of an attack, only for Matt to make her use an action for something she only intended as narrative flavour, like he'd asked for.
So, it's definitely something this group improves on over time, and I 100% agree, it's great practice for GMs & players alike. As a player, I frequently ask my DM whether I can narrate my own failures and misses, so I can take a crap die roll and contextualize it within the fiction as something other than my character just doing a bad job. One of my favourite things to do on that front (when it's appropriate) is to recontextualize a failed roll as being an expression of their being conflict between what I the player want and what my character wants. Did I fail to pick a lock? Well maybe it's actually that my character has a moral objection to the act instead. Or maybe failing at a low-risk task is a sign that my character's mind is elsewhere, so what WOULD be on his mind? Maybe I should lean into something that happened recently being more traumatic than I'd figured, or maybe that NPC we interacted with this morning got under my skin for some reason.
Anyway, that's beyond the scope of what you were talking about. I just think of them as being intertwined. At all times, the DM, the players, and the dice are all telling the story together.
Great episode!
32:43 I had a character who had done some good deeds, but was starting to realize he had not been the best person. When I expressed his inner thoughts about it in game, my DM shut me down, which just pulled me out of the game for pretty much the rest of the session. It also turned out to be the last game I played with him, as there was a number of lingering issues which he never grew out of. hard when this is your long time DM.
You made my day when you said you don't want to tell your players how they feel.
Fully agree about not telling players how their characters feel (outside of magic that impacts emotion, or maybe systems where there's a mechanical layer to character emotion)
There is another difference between keeping guests waiting at home games and keeping guests waiting in Vox Machina. Guests in an AP as big as CR are (presumably) getting paid for their time. Guests in a home game aren't.
“Curse a real sword” is such a fantastic reference. Well done.
thanks for 37:52, I thought I was stupid for not understanding that scene but you explaining why it was a hard scene to follow made me feel better about missing the point
EDIT: Also nice breakdown of Keyleth's psyche, really helped me in understanding the character and now that I do I find it really interesting.
LAST EDIT: Civil War is a great movie. And I never thought about it like that. That is such an interesting way to see heroes. I really liked this episode of crit roll demystified. Your content is my most favorite ttrpg content to watch out of all the others I've seen.
Love this series. It'd be great to have this for C3 so I can know whats going on without having to watch it
I got all caught up on this series and now I’m waiting for new episodes like for crack lol
The Best part about that Grog Mayonnaise thing is the 'winnie the pooh fanart' that came from it!
The more of your videos I watch the more I like you mike
About telling players how their characters feel:
Agreed! But then again I come from roleplay, all my players were roleplayers. (Text based)
And that's one of the biggest rules. You don't decide what other characters' feel. So luckily that doesn't happen too often at the table. If I want them to consider/think about a feeling, I might suggest it in a question. 'Maybe it strikes you as odd.' or, 'Perhaps it even makes you feel a certain way.' And leave it open for them to consider it and fill in those blanks.
To anyone DMing I can always recommend to both the DM and the players to just look at the general roleplay rules for text rp. They're great! And they share a lot of similarities with tabletop rp!
New subscriber from Australia here! This is the first of the series I'm watching live after binging it - it's really great content and it's inspired me to give Campaign 2 another shot after finishing Vox Machina all those years ago and riding out the burnout - do you have any videos where you talk about or cover Campaign 2 @SupergeekMike? Or other actual play series? If not I'll have to stick around for that! I'd be interested in seeing your thoughts on the styles of other celebrity DMs if you watch any other actual play content in the style of these videos, or comparing them.
But just popping down to say kudos on an insightful series of videos, and the treasure trove of side content! Will be sticking around for whatever comes down the track!
The Alchemy Jug's mayo ability seemed to literally exist so Travis could do that bit.
doing the algo thing. loooove this series
I had a "can things end peacefully" moment in a modified MoP campaign. Played a half elf trying to fit into a elf centric mercenary group(silent rain) and really was into goblin hunting. Near the last bit he started to realize that there is more to goblins than he thought. Talked to the cleric and asked what to do. He in turn helped form a truce and gave one goblin a +1 bow as a sign of faith. Yes he is being hunted by silent rain
23:48 Where's the Winds of Winter Rothfuss?
I play a lot of Monster Hunter, whenever we have taken down a large monster, i always make sure to grab the parts of the monsters.
Things like bones, Hide, Blood, Horns, and all that stuff comes to use at some time, most DM's also dont care about rotting of stuff.
Creativity is also king, if you think of something to use that hide for, DM probably will let you.
Man Kerrek is such an elite guest character. Definitely my favorite of C1
As someone who just finished campaign 2 I’m all for Matt handling most of the descriptions haha.
32mins in sounds like Mike might not enjoy Aabria Iyengar's style of DMing.
oh wow, it's THAT Patrick Rothfuss. How did I not realize that sooner? 😅
3:04 I believe my players only started collecting monster parts because the CR cast was doing it. The ones who ask most often to collect parts have a tendency to try to do things without letting the dm know their intent in advance, and thus argue the option to try in the moment they are attempting to try. And that goes for things other than crafting, I recognize it as the player’s style. We’ve never discussed if crafting was something the players wanted to do or something the dm (me in this case) wanted to include, but it *will* be discussed in future campaigns.
What doesn’t help is just the shear humor in saying “I have some umberhulk eyes from session 3 in my backpack, are they still good?”
I get what you're saying and the important of pointing out these moments to avoid making similar mistakes but I feel the Vax heart scene and the party scene are different things. With the Vex scene Mat is trying to tell Liam how his own character feels while the Vex scene seems to be him trying to the Laura "This scene is supposed to be safe I won't screw you guys over" since Matt seems very reluctant to explicitly tell them stuff like "Hey we have a guest waiting please wrap it up" as pointed out earlier. I hope I made sense.😂😅
I would love to hear Mike's take on the classic Japanese fantasy manga/light novel/anime trope of the "Adventurer's Guild" and how that can work in fantasy RPG.
Book 3 will be something i wait however long it takes to get to, but if you havent read The Narrow Road Between Desires, i very strongly recommend it (as well as the 2 mainline books and the other side story, but still)
New Drakkenheim book gonna have a new magic item crafting system
Given the success of the Ainme Delicious in Dungeon I am guessing a lot of DM are going to have to deal with players wanting to eat the monster.
For anyone wondering the show is about a group of adventures who are a massive dungeon crawl and they eat the monster they kill. I highly recommend the show.
The “new money” is so savage. 😂
My favorite Percy line lol
does pathfinder have corpse harvesting mechanics? could've been a pathfinder appendix (the organ not book section)
In the topic of the DM explaining a PC feeling the thing i do in my table is ask for the emocion, just one word, if they say they fell happy, i narrate about how much joy that moment give them, if they say they are Anxeus i try to understand and extrapolate what is the reason and put it in words. like you say, take opinion fo the player and expand on it with your DM omnicient
When it comes to visualizing things I personally have trouble so if my GM were to ask me to describe what my spell looks like I would really struggle. My GM isn't super detailed when it comes to how things look most of the time, which works for me, he mostly describes vibes plus a few important things that might stand out and then answers questions. This works well for me at least. Sometimes another player asks for more details or will even ask me how does my spell look and it always throws me through a loop.
My DM has made a rule that we can identify magic items by experimentation, which led to me finding an enchanted dagger and (during a downtime session, with healing readily available) carefully stabbing myself with it to try and get it to do stuff. I actually got really close to figuring it out (It was a Poisonous Blade, so if eaten it does 6d6 poison damage, but if you stab someone with it it acts like a regular dagger) but another PC who was with me while I was experimenting stopped me from licking it.
Nudd the faithful reference? I probably got the name wrong but I definitely remember the drawing
It was actually a different Dragonborn cleric, but wow, good memory! It was Dut the Faithful, but I’ll give it to you, that’s absolutely close enough to be genuinely impressive 😁
@@SupergeekMike Dut the Faithful is amazing 😭, we just met our first Dragonborn at my table and I got so pumped then our gm brought out that Matt Colville raspy croaking voice, I was freaking out and* I* go, “Erys falls into the earth and disappears so I can play a Dragonborn paladin in this world”
1:10 I introduced a crafting system in my game. I had a hag give one of my players a crafting book that would help them find things that would be beneficial from monster corpses. Unfortunately, my player hasn't really been taking advantage of it.
10:00 I kinda work the same way as Matt, in that I allow the players describe their magic in their own way in some cases while doing it myself in others. It really kinda depends on who is helming the narrative at that point.
I think that it really depends on how you play DnD, whether you play at a table or online. I invited new players before a session, so that everyone knew that we were getting new people and that there wouldn't be much delay in setting up introductions and getting the ball rolling. I think that it would be a little difficult to do in a table game because you have to hide your guest somewhere and then text them or announce their introduction, and they would be left waiting for their cue.
Mind sharing the system. Asking for a friendm
I think the players don't often know when there's guest that happens a lot and they do it to this day.. its more a question of whether matt should be telling them before the game starts that there's a guest
TECHNICALLY we are waiting on book 5,
Name of the wind.
Wise man’s fear.
The slow regard of silent things- story about auri.
He is just about to release a book about bast.
We are still waiting on doors of stone
:(
Thinking about campaign 3 keyleth.
The Hades analogy is a really good one because it shows how to maintain focus when switching between pillars of gameplay. Yeah, Hades is ostensibly all about combat, but the fact it throws interesting interactions at you not only when you aren't in combat, but paces it in a way that you're almost happy that combat is over because you know you'll get something fun after is a useful thing to have in your DM toolkit. I just feel that's a vibe that perfectly suits a system like D&D that's so tied to combat as its cental pillar.
...can you tell I've played about twelve hours of the sequel since it went into early access at the start of this week? I might have a problem.
Kill a black dragon maybe ots teeth add 1d4 acid poison damage to a small quiver or arrows.
Basolisk? Dc13 or lose movement speed.
I mean its really REALLY Friggin easy to turn monster parts into non magic items for your party.
Take effect of monster, make the effect a fraction of what it was and there ya go. It goesnt have to be a +1 1d8 acid damage arrow. Just let the players use the teeth as arrows and make it kinda cool.
Can I slap some hide on my shield and have some resistance to acid damage but idk if i get hit really hard the hide rips? Yea sure thatll be useful like....Once go for it
I have a question about the “letting your players describe their spells” talk. I try to ask my players every time “what does it look like when you cast this spell”, and usually they respond with “I don’t know”, “uhh, a flash of light”, or blank look. Sometimes they describe it, but often they just look to me.
Is it something that I’m doing that I can do differently to try and hand them the reigns more, or is it just the way my players are? They also seem to really like it when I “railroad” them, for instance usually when I ask them what they want to do, it ends up being either shopping or “we go find NPC and ask them what our next move should be”
When I check in with the group above the table they all say they are really enjoying the game and we’ve been playing consistent in-person games for over a year with 7 players, so am I just overthinking it? (They were all new to TTRPGs when we started)
It sounds like you're going about it exactly right. You give them a chance to describe, and if they don't bite then that means they want to experience it as DM description instead. "I don't have anything in mind for this" is a perfectly valid stance for players.
Keep in mind that Mike's real compliant in this video wasn't about spell descriptions or pushing the players to do something in a "railroad" fashion. Matt's been through exactly what you're describing, so he knows better than we viewers when it's time to embellish descriptions. He also has the pressure of effectively using DMing as a way to direct a TV show, which meant trying to force a new character to debut with a limited window while the cast were intent upon not going where that character could show up.
Mike's complaint was about Matt telling players about their characters' inner life, which is a serious no-no for nearly every table. Matt does it, I think, because his players are actors who are used to talking openly about character motivations and feelings, and because he's working overtime trying to do the equivalent of putting on a _Lord of the Rings_ sized radio show live and without a script every week. When it's all just words and there are strangers listening, everything has to be said aloud, including the emotional responses that actors would express with their faces.
So keep on giving your players opportunities to make interesting choices, just as you already are doing. When they have a good idea or something they really care about, believe me, they'll let you know!
I agree with the Vax heart, but the Vex moment was based on what she said to keyleth in the hot springs
iirc didn't they kinda regularly have guests just there watching around then? kinda explains why there wasn't any player urgency to get to a clean jump in point
Who hasn't gotten wasted then ate a whole tub of mayonnaise?
I think Matt describing thongs ultimately comes from what we know about Sam. He's not one to be caught up with the particulars, certainly not at This point. The commonality is Sam.
Regarding the lesson about telling players how their characters feel... I think it's something very cool, but you need to know very well your player's characters to get an idea about how they would feel, and then you could suggest it. "Maybe you feel like this, maybe a little bit like that". Or ask them directly. And then there are other moments, like when he described how the characters felt in peaceful town, where the details that may differ from one to another are left in blank, so that the players know what each of their characters thought "what was worth fighting for" meant.
Back when I was running 3.5 games one of my players was basically min-maxed for dissecting monster corpses for crafting items. Anything the group couldn't make stuff out of was sold to stupid rich folk as exotic medicines thanks to his high bluff score. It led to the motto "if it leaves a body it leave a treasure horde".
Woah woah woah woah woah. Woah. "Patrick Rothfuss, author of the Kingkiller Chronicles and co-founder of the Worldbuilders charity"? How dare you do his career as both Viari and Driebus Beestinger of Acquisitions Incorporated dirty like that? He's definitely done more of that than he has writing Book 3, hey-oh! (Just kidding, Pat. You've brought so much joy in all your non-Kvothe endeavors, I can't complain about the Kingkiller Chronicles being a two-book-and-one-novella series that will probably never become the trilogy it was intended to be)
I can complain! I respect him, he's written more words in two (very good) books than I'm likely to write in a lifetime, and I don't hate him for not finishing book 3 - but I can still complain.
❤
I loved Kerric as a guest character - it was my first encounter of Rothfuss and gave me a lot of respect for him.
I still find it a pity the Kingkiller series didn't live up to my expectations. It occurs to me that I'd have found it so much more engaging if the protagonist had been Kerric rather than Gary "Kvoth" Stu!
BOOK THREEEEEEE!!!
You can just introduce people! A dragon just flew across the sky with giant eagles chasing it! Someone might look into that, or at least pass nearby. Whatever can be done to plausibly introduce a guest or new character, should be. It should be top priority. There's nothing worse than just waiting in the wings while everyone else has fun. (Even if he's fine with it, it's still bad form.)
Generally, my rule is that if you are trying to figure out how your magic item works without Identify, you *have* to experiment through role play and rolls. If you do well, you get some info, if you do poorly you don't or even get false info. But you *can* succeed. That said, I also make an Arcana roll go along with Identify, with a difficulty based on the rarity of the item, to see if you learn every detail or if there's something held back or too complex for the spell to interpret. It keeps some of the mystery to magic items. (I've also started introducing roleplay into it like in the D&D movie, cause I think that was neat!)
For spell descriptions, I fill in the gaps on things that players don't say, and I try to keep that in line with what the players have given me. Or I ask, but sometimes that's tedious or just puts them on the spot. I think if you know your players and group, it's fine to do, and if not you should do enough asking that they get comfortable describing things.
I disagree about telling a player their character's emotional reaction, but it requires finesse and the willingness to retract. It's a co-operative bit of storytelling, and I think the language you use is important. Feelings and emotions are involuntary, but conclusions and actions or thoughts in response to those feelings are not. I think it should always be treated as a two hander, I say the premise, the player the conclusion. Simply by saying "I think," you make it a question while also not making the player have to ad-lib on the spot of a perception check. (This is commonly how Brennen does it. "I think Grog gets the sense that..." and the player can agree or disagree, but either way it prompts them to talk about it and get what you're suggesting as inspiration for a moment of some kind of reaction.) He could have said it was all clear skies and happy moments around her, and that he thinks she might feel like she could put that tension aside, almost feel a smile at the corner of her mouth, and then hand it off to Marisha to see where she takes it.
Defining what a hero is, is a great arc for a character. And not an easy one to play out in something like D&D. I really like Keyleth and her growth. It's an ambitious character for a relatively new player, and I think she did a pretty good job.
I think it’s fine to kind of emphasize a moment of quiet beauty in that scene but there are definitely times where Matt has crossed over into “you feel this and think this about it” especially when it comes to characters brutally killing something or committing “bad” acts
Like Sgt. York WWI.