I have always found the rogue trait of "I don't tell anyone else I found this loot" to be worse than stealing. I have had several campaigns (with the same player, unfortunately) where she justified gatekeeping loot from the party because she was the rogue and didn't want to share.
Just last night i had to Take away our Barbarian's "Sword Privledges" because he decided to randomly start attacking the monster-folk in the krezg chappel without even talking to the abbot, we pulled him off after he stabbed the second head of the guy in the bell tower and while the rest of them were distracted by some wine i took his sword and i plan on giving it back to him only if and when we get into an actual fight that he doesnt cause (Which might happen soon as our druid let all the animals free in a stampede about 2 minutes later) This is my and most of my parties first time playing C.O.S so i probably butchered the location name
Yes, and I felt awful about how it turned out. We had finished an area and left behind a bunch of very weak drow. Something my character did not agree with as, 1 he assumed all drow were evil, and just because these drow were down on their luck, doesn't mean they wouldn't take over and cause problems for other people, including the party, once they were back on their feet. After all, it's what he would have done do. and 2. My character was slowly changing away from that same situation. The GM had made it clear that if we wanted to kill the drow, there was really only one that even could put up a fight, and if they were dealt with, it would be a narrative conclusion, and my character was built to be a single target assassin. He had one shot a giant when he had the drop on it, and that was a couple of levels ago. The only problem was that we had been washed down a river, but one other character had a cloak that would let me easily swim back up. So after everyone else took a rest, my character borrowed the cloak without asking, fully intending to be back before the next morning with no harm done (to the party). However, due to a series of bad roles, my character not only failed, but died. This isn't just three or four failed coin flips either. I needed to roll higher than a 7 on any of 15 D20 rolls to succeed, and return with the player's magic item, and I didn't even get one. I wish I was exaggerating. So that's how I stole from another player, and I still feel bad about it.
Exact reverse thing. I had an ongoing joke with another player when neither of us could remember who owed the other 1 gold, so we kept sneaking a gold piece on the other person whenever there was the slightest opportunity. Even got to the point of commissioning art of it. Good times!
Something I think is worth considering in the "stealing from guests" conversation: Guest players might be awarded magic items with less concern for balance, either because it'll help bring them in line with the party's strength, or achieve some specific fantasy, with the expectation that even if the item might be something the GM would avoid offering to the party, it's fine for the finite span of a guest appearance. Here, Matt already knew Laura might try to get this broom, and the party is exceptionally high level and thus the broom doesn't present some great shift in how the players can solve problems (and as illustrated here, Vex has room for a boost like the broom provides). However, in a lot of other games, I could see a guest show up with a powerful magic item, and the act of stealing it becomes a concern because it presents design problems for the GM if the item is constantly in play rather than just around for a couple sessions.
Yeah, it could be that Matt felt Laura should have a replacement for the flying carpet, which he had to destroy because it rendered a lot of exploration problems irrelevant. A firing platform might be important to someone's archer fantasy, but you probably don't want the whole party ignoring elevation and difficult terrain challenges, or most of the party being able to rest while one person drives.
Yeah this is kinda what I was thinking. I'd be very apprehensive about giving guest characters anything nice if they're just gonna have it stolen from them by the "Real" characters
@@CthulhuOnCam - That's not what I said. The guest was clearly not staying long-term (he made a joke character and was a bit disruptive at times), so Matt could have used the opportunity to give Vex a solo flight item, knowing she'd probably take it. Translating Vex from a Pathfinder 1e Ranger into a 2014 D&D 5e Beastmaster was a significant downgrade in how effective Vex was, so Matt may have wanted her to have a flying firing platform. The flying carpet introduced the problem of making elevation and terrain challenges trivial for the entire party, while a solo item for Vex helped recover some of the archery effectiveness Laura wanted for her character. As a side effect, giving in to the temptation to steal the broom could make the players and audience question how heroic the party really was. Will the lure of power corrupt their motives? Of course I don't know because secret plans are secret; I'm just saying that maybe the guest was in on it, so while it was PCvPC, it wouldn't necessarily be PvP.
MY DM, fixed that with a simple fix. The item the guest had was cursed, so when it was stolen, they could keep it, but it caused them some really nasty headaches as a result. In the end, they got rid of it because the curse was sticky (even if broken, it returned as long as they kept the item) and not worth the effort.
The bit about Wheaton being willing to sacrifice his character if needed definitely gave me a chuckle. His dice were certainly on board with that plan :D
23:25 - This point gets made often enough that it's not unnoticed, but it REALLY should be on a billboard. The ranger is clearly inspired by Strider from LOTR, the fact that *by design* Rangers can't just disappear into the undergrowth or express their mastery of the forest mechanically in useful ways like hiding... is just nonsensical.
Absolutely right, IMO. The PHB version of the Ranger is laughable, and I can't comprehend how it got through the playtest phase into that form. Mind-bogglingly bad.
@@Heavensrun I really like this. Even more, it's almost like the two classes should be merged, with a "woodland sneaky-shooty" subclass and an "urban sneaky-stabby" subclass. Because the more I look at the two classes they just look like flavors of "leverages familiarity with their environment"
@@PVS3 At least from my perspective, there is more underneath the Ranger than just nature stealth. Another of the core fantasies informing Rangers seems to be that of "game warden" or even park ranger. There's an element of a desire to nurture, protect, and maintain a natural balance within a given realm, and so a ranger should have intimate familiarity with things that are not really stealth (tracking, for example, or survival skills like campsite selection, gathering food and water, stuff like that). A Rogue, OTOH, has more of a pickpocket/misdirection/stakeout-a-target vibe, less a vibe of all stealth all the time. Difference between Druid and Ranger might be as simple as care-with-magical-assistance (Druid) vs care-via-hands-on-methods (Ranger), which lends well to separating them into the spell caster vs. martial type, at least as a broad categorization.
@@PVS3 This makes it sound like them being separate classes is a holdover from older editions where the line was clearer. A legacy that should be let go.
I disagree that changing player alignment is removing player agency, it's rewarding players choices even if not how they want to be rewarded. To remove Laura's agency Matt would have told her no, she can't put his broom in the bag of holding without permission because she already chose to be neutral good so she can't steal from her allies just because she want's something. Matt just said, 'do whatever you want, but you don't know what the consequences will be'
I hear you on the initiative thing, but I do really love the drama spawned at the start of encounters where Matt has to ask for several ranges before he gets a response. It just adds a dynamic of “oh sH*T” that I find super fun to watch.
I should preface this by saying I love Laura - she's probably my favorite cast member and I adore her characters. No roleplaying choice is justification for online abuse. But honestly this particular Vex moment definitely did rub me wrong, and the guest seemed like he was trying to be a good sport but was actually annoyed about it. I have complicated feelings on the alignment shift but ultimately I think I like how Matt handled it. Less of a punishment and more of a reasonable consequence - do selfish things to the harm of others, move into an alignment that reflects your actions. In parenting terms (because I think about that a lot), a punishment is doing something to make the other person feel bad, but isn't related directly to the thing they did (you kicked the cat so no candy after dinner - unrelated punishment, teaches nothing). A natural consequence is something that happens without your interference (you refused to wear a coat so now you get to be cold - may teach something, but not always easily available or immediately understandable for every misdeed). And areasonable imposed consequence (which I think is mostly what Matt does here) might be, you colored on the wall so I'm going to put the markers where you can't reach them and you're going to help me wash the wall instead of going to the park. Washing the wall isn't fun, but it's also not an unreasonable outcome. Alignment, when used, seems largely to do with how the world interacts with a character (aka only a good-aligned character can attune to this item created by a lawful good deity, and it's the item/deity and not the character who judges the definition of "good"). In that sense, I totally get what Matt is doing. There are many moments in VM where he has to remind them that in game actions have in game consequences. As an aside, I don't use alignment in my games much, but if I did, I might also have made a call like Matt's here. I've definitely had characters show up stating they're "lawful good" and then going around and doing war crimes with the justification of "this is within my character's personal code of ethics and they perceive the action as good and right" and i just roll my eyes behind the DM screen and then have the world interact with the character in question AS A DANGEROUS MURDERER because that's the reasonable outcome of their actions. 🤷♀️
I agree, but on the flip side, even with Alignment as a descriptor, an alignment change should never come as a surprise. In my opinion, Matt should have told Laura something like "Stealing a stranger's magic broom doesn't gel with a Neutral Good alignment; if Vex continues acting like this, we might need to move her to Chaotic Neutral." Or if the act is so egregious as to warrant immediate alignment change, "So, stealing a magic broom and lying about it is *really* not the way someone who's Neutral Good should act. If you do it, we'll have to shift your alignment to Chaotic Neutral. Do you still want to?" 'Cause from Laura's side of the table, she could very much have thought she was still acting in a Neutral Good manner. If Matt wasn't warning her that her alignment was in jeopardy, then it's not unfair for her to think she was doing fine, which makes the change feel a lot more like a punishment
@@Kafaldsbylur I'll agree that it probably might have been nice to have brought it up when he saw the pattern instead of surprising her with it. I think Matt frequently tends to be in the FAFO school of DMing and probably just saw this as a part of that. He probably assumed his player understood what the alignment descriptors meant... But yeah, communicating it might have been nice! I do think we agree that the alignment change makes sense though! I can feel the DM frustration of watching a player who thinks of themself as a good and righteous hero constantly doing borderline evil things. 🥲 Boy have I been there.
@@KafaldsbylurI personally really disagree with this approach. It feels like babysitting and extremely condescending. It's like talking to a child when they're being naughty to other kids. "Now good little girls don't steal other kids candy do they?" If a character has to be reminded they aren't being good, they aren't a good character. That's fine, not all characters are good and if you know as a player that you like to do actions in game that aren't good don't play a good aligned character or modify your choices consciously to reflect your character decision. If you can't be consistent with that, I think an alignment change is warranted. I've done it a bunch, and after the game my players thanked me. The pressure of being a good aligned character was wearing on their fun in the game. If I had taken this approach and scolded them every time they did something evil I would've made them hate their experience even more. Hell I've done it the other way. "You're trying to play an evil character but you're doing objectively good things with no alterior motive... Are you sure you want to keep playing an evil character? It feels like you picked evil because they sometimes lie and want the creative freedom of a non-good alignment. We can change this to neutral if you'd like. Or would you rather have a character arc of self discovery so that change feels more natural?" Is almost word for word a conversation I've had with a player. And I was exactly right. If I'd gone "if you keep doing these good actions, your alignment is gonna change to reflect that" then it does feel like a punishment. I'm threatening them with altering their character if they don't alter their behaviour. No, their behaviour alters their character I'm simply reflecting that. It's up to the players to decide how much they care about alignment and if they don't care until it's changed, well then that's all the more reason to pay attention to their role play. I can't dictate what they're allowed to have fun with, but I'm not going to just let them call objectively bad things good because that's what they wanted their character to be when they made them and I'm not scolding them every time they veer from that path. If it was important enough for my scolding to feel good and not annoying, they wouldn't need the scolding anyway because they'd be consciously thinking of the path.
@@bye1551 I agree with you. I think the fundamental consideration is "consequences versus punishment". Players, from the very first moment of D&D and unlike almost any other game, learn that their actions are consequential. If you steal and get caught, you can't just reload or say "well I guess I didn't do that then". Alignment changes are a form of a consequence of your decisions, at least when they are taken as a trend of behavior. Vex was frequently demonstrating greed on a personal level that rightfully would not align with a 'Good' character. Conversely, Matt did not change Pike's alignment after she slit the throat of a dying foe with her mace. He gave a solid in-character warning about the consequences of that action and it seemed Ashley internalized it, but did not punish her harshly with an immediate change to the alignment.
@@kasimmorathi exactly. As I said in the original comment, the player decides how much their alignment matters to them with their actions. They don't get to complain about it being unfair after I demonstrated the consequences for their choices because they never actually took it into consideration. If they actually cared about their alignment, I wouldn't be changing it because they'd be role playing effectively. It's only caring retroactively, which I'm personally really against. Ashley did care. She thought pike had good in character justifications for what she did, Matt pointed out how that's at odds with her alignment and Ashley cared enough to change her behaviour because she understood it's up to her to demonstrate how much alignment matters to her. Laura could have done that many times. Maybe Matt should've given a warning, but I genuinely don't think it's necessary considering the mountain of evils Vex was committing. She just didn't care about her alignment, and that's fine, but the upset after the consequence has been demonstrated just isn't it. But I'm literally judging a grown woman over a dumb make believe game she played half a decade ago by now so really it genuinely doesn't matter, I just think it's an important example for how alignment matters or it doesn't and it's fine if it doesn't just don't pretend it did all along when your actions show it didn't matter to you until I pointed out how little you cared
I understand what you’re saying about the alignment - but I far prefer Matt’s approach over the approach of “You can’t do that, it doesn’t match your alignment”
I mean if you lay out your character's morals you'd be hard pressed to explain why they would act contrary to that. Like would someone with a sense of justice steal a walking stick from a small child?
On the alignment thing, what always bothered me was the jump. Like, why go from Neutral Good to Chaotic Neutral? Like, surely if a change was needed it should come in steps no? Why was she not made True Neutral or Chaotic Good? Honestly, I kinda understand where Matt is coming from. if I had to guess, at that point of the story I would peg Vex as Chaotic Neutral as well, myself. But that is just one more reason for why he really should have had more of a talk with Laura about what being "Good" means" to both of them (and also why he thinks she is "Chaotic"). They were clearly just not on the same page on that regard.
Also, personally, the smaller increments of the step by step change to chaotic good first would have served as a good warning that these things can happen if you start playing your character out of alignment too much. It gives the player a chance to course correct if they want, before they lose the "Good" alignment which usually has more mechanical impact than the chaos/law spectrum
@@ToaArcanoutside of that one specific (and very personal) set of circumstances, Percy tends to try and do what’s good for everyone else, almost to the point of self destruction. Vex was a repeated pattern of behaviour across many situations. And while I agree, Percy could have gone off the deep end, he never quite got there, as for much of the Briarwood arc he was fighting between personal revenge against justice for the dead and freeing those stuck under their thumb.
@@Heavensrun Hard disagree. Taliesin has stated multiple times: Percy is not a good person. He's a deeply troubled man who thinks he's the smartest person in the room and knows best. Percy did far worse things far more consistantly with nary a peep from Matt. This isn't to say I dislike Percy; he's easily my favorite character. But the idea that he did terrible things for the greater good isn't born out.
That’s actually a fantastic point I had never considered. I agree with the shift to Vex’s alignment, but holding Percy to the same standard, he absolutely would have shifted at some points.
I really feel your argument about the alignment but I still agree with Matt that your choices should reflect on the alignment. cause characters are able to change and grow that way. They feel more human. You get more attached to it and make you think what my character is feeling about it.
I agree. This is speculation, but my guess would be that Laura needed this to sting. It is one of life's biggest personal questions: Am I a good person? Am I on the right path? Matt has answered that question for her, but it is up to Vex (Laura) if she wants that to change. Clearly this does not sit well with Laura who has some thinking to do on her choices. I think it is a good teaching moment. Not a punishment.
Totally agree - a conversation about alignment is absolutely reasonable. But if at the end of it, the player and the DM don't agree about your new alignment, then the conversation was not long enough.
@@SupergeekMike our old DM had a point system for that. We started all as neutral and either got "good" points or "bad" points after three points in either direction you changed your alignment. I really liked that because you had room to grow with that.
The vex alignment issue is something i have so many disconnected thoughts about. Because on the one hand, i absolutely agree with Matt that alignment should reflect the actions of the player character whatever those were. But i do also agree with you in that this was absolutely a breakdown of communication between Laura and Matt. But I also think that the GM, providing they can explain it with a TREND of behavior from the player, has a right to change their players alignment, even if they dont like it. I also think that he probably should have bumped her to Chaotic Good, avoiding the later mechanical issues and likely the feeling of punishment from being bumped from good to neutral
For initiative, if you use an online initiative tracker, you can just put the numbers in any order and then it will sort them for you. Super easy way to manage it
I don't get the controversy either, I thought Vex stealing the broom was just a funny moment and nothing more. It was honestly a highlight of the episode for me
My rogue made a joke on day one about how she should never be trusted with the bag of holding because they'd probably steal something. It was a joke, and they didn't steal from the party... until someone handed her the bag of holding and she saw there was a gold bookend in it. So far, no one's noticed it's missing, and I plan to send it home to my much smarter but sickly little brother.
And if they find out, you can literally just say exactly what you warned them and come clean. It would definitely be funny that the one thing you took from the bag of holding was a gold bookend of all things
I really disagree on your view when it comes to aligment. Its not a punishment to change the aligment, aligments are nothing but story bait. Laura wanted to play good well then she actually has to roleplay good.
Yeah, I stopped using alignment because I've known a lot of players who pick "good" on their sheet but very much do not play good; but also get mad when you say they aren't. Personally, I don't see it as a punishment, at least in modern d&d. When it was first a thing, alignment shifts gave penalties as long as it differed from your original alignment. I've actually assigned my own characters alignment shifts more often than the dm; usually by pointing out a trend in my character's behavior, explaining the character psychology behind it, and asking if I can change it.
I agree and disagree with you. Changing an alignment should not be a punishment, it should be a reflection of the characters choices. And, Matt is correct, Laura was not playing a Neutral Good character and her character was not making Neutral Good choices and so she should not have Neutral Good on her character sheet. You are correct. The problem is how it was received. Laura saw it as a punishment rather than a consequence. Consequence has negative connotations, but it's literally just another word for result, albeit with more direct impact from a single source. Punishment is "what you have done (or things you have done) is 'wrong' and the course of retribution is varied and occasionally arbitrary." It was a necessary wake up call for Laura to PLAY Good if she wanted to SAY she was Good, but there needed to be a conversation. The way this was handled was a bit more "you ARE bad" rather than "you are DOING bad," a subtle but important distinction.
@@DisneyLover258Yeah, I had about the same thought. You could say it was a punishment in the sense that Laura viewed it as a punishment. You could also say it wasn’t a punishment because Matt didn’t view or intend it as one. I agree with Matt changing her alignment (her metagame-threatening the potion salesman was also distinctly not-good, if we’re keeping track), but I also agree that it could have been handled better.
@@DisneyLover258and punishments are tools the DM can use. Dealing damage to PCs from a trap is also a punishment as well because they didn't follow your playstyle of tapping things with a 10 foot pole.
Also changing alignment for all intents and purposes has no mechanical or even narrative consequences for Laura. It is purely a matter of perception and Matt telling her that he perceives a shift is a way of communicating to the player how they are being viewed by the inhabitants of the world. If you want to be seen as a paragon of goodness, then you need to act like a paragon of goodness. Simple as. The PCs play the role in the story that they play. The idea of ‘rewarding good behaviour’ in the context of morality shifts is a conflation of two meanings of the word good.
On the topic of alignment, I 100% disagree with you and agree with Matt Mercer. You don't get the benefits of a particular alignment if you aren't prepared to maintain that alignment. If a lawful good paladin thinks nothing of casually breaking the law or behaving with cruelty, then they're not being lawful good. If the player has an issue with the Dm changing their alignment to reflect their behavior because it robs them of some of their best abilities, then it's the player's fault, not the DM's. You want all the powers that come with being a symbol of purity and righteousness? Then you best be righteous and pure.
@@zippomage A GM is a story-teller, and it is perfectly valid for them to change the story or character sheet as fits the player's actions. If Luke Skywalker wants to murder a shop keep that refuses to give him a discount, he doesn't get to complain when he loses his best light side abilities, because that was a very Sith thing to do.
@@CaptNightflash I think the difference here though is that it doesn't seem like there was any discussion prior to this moment, outside of maybe session zero. Luke Skywalker had an entire upbringing where role models taught him right from wrong and the consequences thereof, and then teachers guiding him in the ways of the light side of the Force. Matt said he saw a pattern of selfish behavior leading up to this bigger action, but doesn't seem to have mentioned to Laura that her behavior was outside of her alignment until he finally decided to change it. I think that's part of why Mike keeps saying in comments there should have been more discussion - before Matt finally decided to step in and change her alignment - and why it felt like a punishment. To Laura, there was no warning. It's like a parent telling a kid "you keep breaking your brother's toys so you can't play with them anymore" without ever having told the child "hey, it's not nice to break your brother's toys, if you keep doing that you're not going to be allowed to play with his things." Especially considering that other party members have gotten away with equally selfish and harmful things and not had alignment shifts made for them.
@@danitini14 I don't know what the other party members alignments are, but I would feel safe betting that most of them, except Pike, obviously, are some flavor of chaotic, and their actions are not out of character for them. Also, this stream picked up from their home game, which we didn't see, so we have no idea if Laura's character was meant to be super strict from her inception, or perhaps Matt did provide warnings back then which have since been forgotten. Maybe they talked about it off camera after the game ended for the night, or maybe not, we don't know. What we do know, for sure, is that Laura behaved in a way outside of her alignment and the universe (i.e. Matt) reacted accordingly. That is completely fair.
As someone who had their alignment reversed (chaotic good rogue to lawful evil rogue)... not due to actions but due to a bad (forced) pull from the deck of many things, it can come as a bit of a shocker... even a involved a bit of mourning about playing the character as I originally intended. Our DM had put us into a situation that we were faced with the demon patron of one of our players. The player hadn't been upholding his end of the pact in the patron's eyes, and so the demon gave us the choice of some very dangerous task or giving him a number. My character said "seven" not knowing that it would mean drawing seven cards from the DoMT. I actually got really lucky... six cards were good or at least non-harmful, but the seventh card was the fate card. I actually didn't find it until after the game ended. The DM let us take the cards with us, and when I got home I was checking out the artwork on the cards and noticed that I'd missed a card. The DM had told us not to look at the cards we picked until we went around the table and revealed them one by one. I'd been stacking my cards back under each other after I revealed them, and missed showing the fate card thinking that I'd revealed all my cards. Anyway, I did some soul searching and had to decide whether or not I told the DM about the missed card. I didn't want to since I knew that it would mean switching how I played my character and I really liked my character being an honest and good-hearted rogue. But in the end, honesty won out, and I confessed to the DM about the missed card. It actually turned out to be a good thing. The other players in the campaign love her, and it even made sense for her character arc since one of the other cards that I pulled from the Deck righted something from her past, but in righting that wrong it also meant that she changed her childhood and background... instead of being raised in a poor, kind and loving adoptive family, she was raised by cold and power hungery nobels who saw love as a weakness to be exploited. She isn't as much evil as she is calculating and cold. Emotion doesn't really factor into her choices... it's more, "How does doing this 'thing' benefit me? Does the result to me outweigh the cost/effort?" As one of her first actions withe the new alignment, she walked away from a sick child being held captive by hags because she saw no benefit to herself in helping the child. That's when my fellow players saw just how much she changed. lol Now, ultimately she did go back to speak with the child to get more information about the hags the party were about to fight, and ended up freeing the child. But she was also ready to kill the child if she thought it was tranforming into a hag as well. So, all that is a long story about how alignment changes, even forced ones, can add an interesting character arc to play. Vex always seemed to be more of neutrally aligned character... yes, she did good things, but she also did very selfish things (understandably due to her childhood) in equal measure. So, saying her character was "good" aligned was pushing it. The stealing of the flying broom was just a final step in Matt's eyes. I never liked the character of Vex all that much, though I never hated Laura, and I remember being very angry with Vex's choice of stealing the broom. It came on the heels of still being angry at her for her greed getting her killed in the Sunken Tomb, and causing Vax to enter into his deal with the Raven Queen. lol Matt also "punished" Pike for her actions early on in the stream. I don't recall if it actually involved an alignment change, but it definately resulted in a strain in her relationship with her Goddess. Pike was able to make ammends and restore the balance after a time, much like Vex restoring her alignment.
Sooo, this is the first episode I watch on release date after binging the other demystified videos for the last two weeks. By far not as hard to catch up to critical role. Thanks Mike, thanks a lot. 🙌🏻
Wait until the realization you hqve tonwaitb2 weeks for next one now. Two videos I look forward to. One that comes out on Saturdays and this one every other Thursday.
I think the problem with the way of dealing with alignment in this way is that Matt changing Vex's alignment is a meta-commentary on her character, not an in-world one. It's not that Vex did something wrong and then had some real-world consequence for it, and then subsequently changed her behaviour to going forward; it's that Matt made a meta change to Laura's character, and Laura didn't like it, so she decided to play Vex differently to try to get her alignment back. This is where I think comparisons to, say, Percy, are faulty, because on the one hand, yes, Percy's alignment didn't change despite doing some really awful things, but on the other hand, Percy experienced some very serious in-world consequences for his decisions. It wasn't necessary for him to be 'punished by the gods' with an alignment change; Percy got to see where the destructive path he was following would lead first hand. Contrast to, instead of changing her alignment, Matt had made it that Chris' character figures out that Vex stole the broom, becomes angry and takes revenge on the party in some way later in the story. Now you have an in-universe consequence for Vex, and have a legitimate reason for her to want to change her behaviour.
I believe the most problematic thing about alignment in D&D is how people insist in thinking of it as a roleplay tool... when it is actually a game mechanics. Simply put, it is, mechanically speaking, to have laser guided weapons. Considering the typical Good party of PCs, versus the typical Evil opponents, alignment is more than just a suggestion of how to behave or a gauge or how moral or ethical someone is; it is LITERALLY a weapon, because when you summon a Holy Hand Grenade and explode, blind, or banish a bunch of enemies around your unscathed friends, it is no different than casting a Fireball in a group of enemies among your party that is immune to fire damage. Powerful relics and artefacts are aligned based, which means that Good/Evil, Law/Chaos translate not only in good fun and roleplay, but in actual power. Not only points of view, but actual cosmic forces that interact and influence the world just like gravity or termodynamics, and a PCs control or resistance to those forces must be taken into account. So it becomes quite complicated to consider that alignment doesn't or shouldn't have an impact on the table other than roleplaying, because its presence is there and has to be accounted for in encounter balances as well. So yes, it does come to a certain level of punishment, specially for aligned based characters like Clerics and Paladins. Which is why the point of communication of expectations Mike brings here is VITAL. Excellent call.
Seems like Vex was more of a Chaotic Good character. I do think the DM may adjust players alignment if their actions are outside of the box. It is basically the world reacting to their actions.
I definitely agree she feels like a fairly chaotic character. She follows rules sure, but only as far as they are useful. She’s happy doing any dirty trick if it’s a better option such as lying, threatening, stealing and so on, often being the first to suggest such tactics (not knocking her, I’m partial to a reasonable chaotic character). And in my mind she falls almost between neutral and good. She does care about the outcomes, wanting to help innocents and such, but also shows a good amount of self interest and even greed. But that’s just my take
I appreciate, while also finding tiresome, the disclaimer at the top about Hardwick. (Tiresome, only because it feels like this unfortunate topic comes up fairly often, and I just find it a little exhausting at this point, while recognizing that it's a sensible thing to do.) It's always a tough thing to handle, and I think you handled it well. I liked Hardwick, I found that whole situation really tough to deal with, because I don't know what happened, I just know what she said, and what he said in response, and then I found myself less interested in spending my time with his work because it all felt messed up and unpleasant. But I can't deny I enjoyed a lot of his content, and I'm pretty against just erasing people from history because we find them questionable (it's just a bad way to think about history, even if it makes us feel better). So I'm glad you didn't gloss over his involvement, but also glad you didn't ignore the unpleasantness either.
The thing that always bothered me about Matt changing Vex's alignment is that he never changed Percy's alignment. Like Percy has done worse things than stealing a broom. Even other members of the cast called this out, I remember specifically Liam called it out in one of the Q&A's and I don't remember Matt ever actually explaining why he felt Percy's alignment shouldn't change.
To my knowledge all Matt ever said on the matter was “there’s a difference between doing occasional bad things and being a bad person regularly” or something to that effect. Immediately after, some people said that Percy DID do bad things regularly, but that part of the conversation quickly fizzled out iirc. As sucky as it might sound, Matt may have subconsciously been a tad bit more lenient with Percy since a large part of the campaign revolved around his backstory, and because the Briarwood saga was probably made with the idea that Percy would be fighting off corrupt tendencies during it. Granted, that’s purely a guess. I could be totally wrong.
Maybe it could've been because people threw so much fuss about the theft? AFAIK people were mostly stoked for No Mercy Percy. Personally, I use changes to alignment, because I just don't think it should be how the character percieves themself, but how the world percieves them. And as a DM, I'm the world. If I have some "chaotic neutral" character being consistently problematic in a harmful way, I'm sure as hell gonna change his alignment to evil. If you're consistent about this, then it's a game feature. But if you're not, it can cause huge issues.
@@doctordee6321 I believe he said there's a difference between thinking/planning bad things and actually doing them. Which is a baffling retort when it comes to Percy. Percy DID do terrible shit. And if given the opportunity, he'd have done MORE terrible shit.
I like to think that if the Briarwoods arc had ended any differently, and Percy hadn't rebelled against Orthax in the end, his alignment would've changed. I agree that Matt's justification didn't make sense (I believe the exact wording was "you can have fucked up thoughts and not act on them", but the other PLAYERS instantly called out that Percy very much DID act on them), but I wonder if it would've been handled like this.
@ jakubguziur7522 on the note of chaotic neutral, what do you think qualifies as that alignment? I’m currently playing with someone who I think does an amazing job because he looks out for himself but doesn’t randomly murder. Like, he acts completely on a whim, but he never does so maliciously. We’ve even gained two valuable allies because we saw people we thought were dangerous and he just went up and casually started a conversation. I’m curious what others think chaotic neutral means.
I’ve played Chaotic Evil characters before. I once was referred to as Chaotic Splendid once. I have manipulated NPC’s to aid the party (& myself). If my party wins, they know my machinations were to the party’s advantage. Selfishness is Evil, but not always harmful to role play.
I have an idea for a new video series: controversial dnd moments and what we can learn from them (expanding into d20, dice camera action, that infamous Adam koebel moment etc)
I really enjoy how plainly you lay out optional directions players and DMs can take when faced with similar issues. It seems like one big piece of advice you give regularly centers around consent. I love this- and you may have a video talking about this. But I would love a video specifically talking about agreements and consent in the context of playing DnD. When should you seek to obtain OOC buy in ahead of time, vs when should you let it ride and play it out IC? As a DM, what is your role in mediating character interaction and collaboration both in and out of game? I would love an exploration into this from your experience and perspective.
If i was Matt, i would have approached Laura and asked her to pick between some of the Neutral alignments. That way there still a consequence, but it atleast gives the player some agency.
A discussion should be had, but ultimately I agree with Matt's decision: You don't get to choose your alignment, you choose your actions and THEY define it.
My initiative tracking system is similar to your paper form method. I have a 3/8" dowel with evenly spaced marks up to 30. This dowel is attached to my DM screen like a flagpole. I have clothespins with my PC's names written on them. When I call for initiative, i just go around the table from left to right and clip names to the dowel at the appropriate value. For enemies, I have more clothespins with letters that correspond to an enemy list behind the screen. The added benefit of this system is that the players can easily see who is next without constant reminders of who is next in line.
I never really saw a large problem with Vex stealing the broom, largely because it was just a one-off guest and he was already playing such an obviously joke character. The alignment change alos didn't bother me because it didn't seem like a punishment, more as a natural change because Vex clearly wasn't being roleplayed as good, or at least as good as expected. Also, Gern being a joke character in such a serious episode also never bothered me, although if I went back to the episode I could see how it may. The entire episode just seemed t me like they were having a good time.
Thank you for explaining what you do with initiative. I recall you complaining about Matt's method earlier, and I'm glad to see you elaborate on it. That being said, I think I prefer Matt’s method. It just seems wasteful to print out an entire sheet just because my players *might* not be listening during initiative collection, when I could just use Matt's method instead and fit my turn order in the margin of my notebook (right next to the HP totals of my monsters).
To throw my hat in the initiative thing, back in college we always played in classrooms, with whiteboards, which meant I could just go around the table and have everyone say their number, then I could just sort it once everything was up on the board, which is extra easy because players are really eager to help with basic stuff when its on a whiteboard apparently. Including when you track damage dealt to enemies on the board and you have someone who can do addition in their head very quickly. When I get back into in person games, a small whiteboard to write on is definitely going to be part of my kit. Write them down, let your players sort them.
I frequently find myself missing playing in classrooms and drawing simple drawings on the board so the players can better understand what's going on! (I will forever cherish the time the DM said "brassieres of fire" and had to draw them for the party to go "OH! Braziers!" and that day the DM learned it was pronounced bray-jzhers 😂)
For initiative I use a set of magnets with the character names on it. Super easy to move around as players roll. I'll be enhancing it with the number list like your sheet has. Thanks
Regarding initiative: I make laminated initiative cards. Every player gets a card, writes their initiative on the card, and gives them to the DM. You can clean off the cards to re-use them when you're done.
Same and same. When I first heard the episode I was very surprised when I heard him speaking in his natural accent. (There are some tells if you listen out for them-to my ear he never quite nails the T sound. He knows what he’s going for but always falls a bit too hard or a bit too soft.)
For Intiative, I like to use Google Sheets or Exel. I have my players' names in column B, and in column A I can imput their number. Then I sort fron Z-A in column A, and I have everything in the correct order! It isn't perfect, but it saves a bit of time. I might shift over to the MCDM RPG method in the future, just having having the players pick who goes when and alternating between them and the monsters. Just thought I would share!
my thoughts on the alignment change the punishment argument is weird cause there are things that are predicated on being a specific alignment, so being one alignment vs the other can be what someone wants, so changing someone's alignment could be construed as a punishment.. but that's kind of the point right, the character was selfish and acted purely out of their own intentions multiple times until now and stealing from another player just cause she wanted their item (when it was apparent these items exist in the world cause he had one) should not be something the character can just do without any consequences. Just cause something is a punishment for bad behavior does not mean the punishment is bad, or unwarranted. Otherwise alignment has no meaning in a game if you can do whatever you want without any issues. You mentioned she was excited to be back to her original alignment 30 episodes later, when it took her 46 episodes of poor behavior to have it changed initially. Good, she should be excited. it should feel like she needs to earn that alignment back over time, since it took 46 episodes to loose it. if your not going to care about alignment in a game then there is no point in even having it, and actions done should be counted against the alignment. Like in older editions if your a paladin and lawful good, and commit a brutally evil act for w/e reason the god just says "nope no spells for you" and "punishes" the paladin for acting against their alignment, and then they need to essentially earn their forgiveness back over time (if ever)
and the other side of this is the players perception of what their alignment means to them, because you can always justify any action if you just say "my character does not think its against his alignment" so that paladin who brutally murdered a homeless person can say "well he was homeless and going to die slowly, so i just ended it quickly for him as an act of mercy" even though that's not a good action if you give 100% of the agency of alignment to the players it becomes meaningless, there needs to be a line in the sand, and at the end of the day the DM is that line in the sand, if you don't want the DM to be able to change alignment then alignment in the game, then alignment does not mean anything to you anyway, since you would just argue your way out of any "wrong doings" anyway. having alignment be determined by the DM based on actions in my opinion is the only real way alignments work, cause like i said people will just argue away any thing they do that breaks alignment if they think it would shift their alignment to one they dont want it to go to. morality is tricky cause there are times when you can argue and it makes sense, like someone stealing food because if they don't they will die of hunger, not an evil act and everyone can kind of agree to that, but stealing something just cause you want it, is still not an "evil" act but its still a dick move, but arguing that stealing something from someone while maintain your "good" just cause you wanted it is a harder sell (unless again you allow the player 100% agency of their own alignment without any consequences to actions.
Agree - What the word "punishment" is being used to describe here is better called "consequences". If you undertake evil actions too frequently, you lose your "good" tag. You may regret that, you may seek to rectify things, you may rejoice at your redemption - these are the point. Without consequences, there are no stakes. Without the failure and fall being meaningful, there is no worthwhile redemption.
@@PVS3 yeah like if i go around smashing things around the town just cause i want to, i cant really keep calling myself neutral good when im obviously doing things purely out of my own interest or desires. I can just say "well my character things society is to rigid and a little mess here and their is healthy for a town to grow... its what my character thinks, and in a warped way makes sense to him, so no consequences leading to an irrelevant "good" tag on my character so who cares.
Spoilers for campaign 2 in this When fjord told ukatoaa to fuck off his "punishment" was loosing his spells for a while, this was a consequence to his action of rejecting his patron, and he rejoiced when he got his spells back, the fall meant something and when he corrected things he was elated to have his stuff back
@@maxthompson1997 Exactly. If I can't lose the "Good" sticker by doing bad things, then it has no significant meaning. It *should* be upsetting to the player when their bad actions come back on them, that's what drives the drama of a good character arc.
Mike I really gotta disagree with you about Laura’s alignment change. Yes it sucks whenever the DM has to make a decision about your character, but let’s remember something you often say about Matt Mercer. Matt is a DM who very much strives to honor his player’s choices in game. Matt definitely created Taldorei as a world where the player’s choices matter and I would argue that allowing Vex to exhibit a string of highly selfish behavior without her alignment changing robs her of more agency than changing it. After all if you can do things like that and still remain Neutral Good the implication is your choices about how your character interacts with the world don’t matter.
If a DM and a player discuss the player’s alignment, and the conversation ends with the player not on the same page about whether or not they should have that specific alignment, the conversation was not long enough.
@@SupergeekMike Not necessarily. Some players are just never going to agree. But the DM is the one that has the omnipotent view of the world and the morality of the world. Ultimately, they are the ones that decide where actions fall on the alignment chart. Ideally, they would explain their view to the player, have an honest discussion about it, and come to a mutual understanding, but that won't always be the case. If a player is convinced their Lawful Good character remains Lawful Good despite torturing bad guys for information because it is all for the greater good of the world, despite what the DM says, then tough luck for the player, but their alignment just became Evil.
@@BearTheGrudge Laura had never encountered any mechanics that involved alignment, so "interacting with the game in ways that offer her mechanical benefits therein" had nothing to do with it. She just did not think of her character as chaotic neutral. I think it's pretty reductive to assume every choice she made and every opinion she had must have been motivated by a desire to be more powerful, when that wasn't always the case.
Imho created works and achievements should not be deleted (or canceled) if the creator is deemed undesirable later. Everybody makes mistakes and many do something bad once in a while. And mistakes and bad urges are best prevented in the future if they are remembered to be learned from. By removing the good works/deeds of that person, we 1) punish everyone by not being able to enjoy what was done/created. 2)prevent people to learn from past mistakes and behaviours.
22:05 Sometimes when players get creative you just have to take it on the Djinn! 😝🤣 *Djinn and Efreet are different but the pun is too good to pass up.
I personally love Vex’s selfishness, it’s an appropriate flaw given her upbringing and it prevents her from being too perfect. It’s also obviously not a Laura thing, Jester is blasé about money most of the time and freely shares, and Imogen is sometimes selfish but once again, it’s for character-relevant reasons. I’ve always seen alignment as descriptive and not prescriptive. I had a neutral good wizard who after a couple sessions shifted to chaotic good as I got comfortable playing as him and figured out his personality and motivations through RP. Vex’s alignment shift isn’t a punishment, it’s just a reflection of her choices- and as she grows as a character and gets over some of her insecurities around wealth and status, her alignment shifts back to good to show the change in the choices she makes
to be honest after that happened and not being familiar with D&D to that extent, i kinda hoped it would have been just a broom that was flying because of the owner enchanting it
I honestly don’t even play with alignment at all. I have a vague idea on my character’s morality and where they are coming from in their priorities and reasonings, but I still don’t really ascribe to alignments. Large part of this is due to the wide or narrow range other people perceive alignments and how these don’t always overlap for everyone’s understanding of the alignments. Not a bad thing! But I’d rather explain the complexity of my characters than throw it into a vague box. For example, I have a healer character, a ranger. They have a weapon and do head into danger and have taken down enemies assassin style (silent one shots and then pulling the body in and tucking it away). Yet, they also ran over to a dying guard, got a spear to the back by the enemy for the audacity of disguising themselves as one of them, and prioritized healing the guard so he didn’t bleed out. When asked why, I mentioned that, while my character will take out others, one of their main creeds is to preserve life where they can afford to. They do this from a place of protectiveness though, not necessarily as holy mission or the like. This means they will be sneaky and stealthy and even dip into being shady. But over all, their mind is on leaning the balance towards life and agency of people. This also means they lean towards a more rebellious vibed faction when presented, so long as it is for the people and community. Their priority is the preservation of their loved ones. In fact, this character is searching for a kidnapped childhood friend and has already intimidated many a captured enemy already to get information. Also they have swiped a few valuables when the party was broke to tide us over, but also been known to return looted items to the town where the bandits may have stolen it from. For all this, they are still considered the kind and generous healer of the group who will largely promote "good" aligned courses of action. So for alignment? I consider this roughly neutral good. I still know my character enough that, under the right circumstances, they will lean "lawful" or "evil" in their actions but it all depends on context for me. Anyway, my point is, that alignment is too subjective for me, so I don't lean into it. I feel it also restricts "evil" aligned players and makes it more difficult on a meta level for us players to have our characters get along and stay together as a party. I also feel it pushes people to lean too far into tropes and use that as a crutch rather than flesh out their character's organically. But thats me. I prefer a roleplay/storytelling style of dnd so it works in those types of campaigns. I can see how this alignment thing might be a better fit for a different style than my preference.
My group uses the number range system, but with one added tool: The Whiteboard. Each party member's name is on a magnet for ease of reuse and one of the players writes down every item on the list for easy tracking both for the DM and the players. This also makes it clear who is next and lets the players manage turn order a bit if the DM gets distracted for some reason. If the DM has any secret characters or initiatives, they track that behind the screen and insert them as needed. The whiteboard has plenty of other great uses, large scale maps, group notes, day counts, setting tone.
For in-person play I always have a notebook page with the numbers 30-1 down the side, just like your doc. Simple to set up and use, can erase the vales between encounters, and use the rest of the page to track hit points and statuses
For initiative, what we would do in the table I used to play at was we each had an index card with the character's name, the player's name and certain relevant stats, like passive perception and passive insight. We'd also put any special senses (darkvision, etc) or relevant other stuff, like the Observant feat's ability to read lips. The DM would hand out those cards to us at the beginning of each game and we'd record our initiative on there. Monsters and lair actions would also have their own cards. Old initiative numbers would get crossed out neatly so the DM didn't get confused and once it didn't have enough space to be effective anymore, the player would make a new card.
The weird thing is, and slight spoilers for the next episode When Vex is with Scanlan trying to get the broom to work, and Scanlan is like "wait, you stole it from a candlemaker who was just trying to help us?" Vex (and I'd hope Laura recognized it too) kept saying "I know, I know, I'm a terrible person! But I really wanted it because I just wanted to fly" Call it a head scratcher after a scene where you repeatedly called yourself a bad person and voiced that it was a selfish reason for taking it that you don't agree that your character is no longer 'good'
the way i used to do initiative before the computer started to do it for me, is i would write out all the players initials as well as the monster initials or some other shorthand for them the go down the list and ask for their rolls. and id have them add their actual dex stat to help avoid overlap. then i'd just list out their initials in initiative order. and every time their turn was done, i would put a tally mark behind their initials. it also helped me keep track of how many rounds of combat happened. i also mathed out the amount of gallons in the tidal wave a few years back, and it was.... alot. roughly around 22441 gallons of water... a little bit more than 50...
I think there's 100's of ways to organically introduce a guest PC to a group that one could find on the internet, but I believe it much more difficult to find a way to organically have them leave right at or near the end of a session, especially if you have a group such as Vox Machina where they could either be in a "stab, stab, kill, destroy" mood and plow through prepared content, or a "lets sit and have a narrative moment for an hour" mood. I don't envy Matt's position of having to plan around that for each session. The last thing you want is to have a guest come in and play, and have to call time on the session when they won't be able to make it back, or to set up some end goal for them that gets accomplished much faster than you expected, and there's still 2 hours of playtime that they either trail along the party and just say "bye" at the end, or awkwardly sit there with the game going on around them since their character walked away into the sunset.
For initiative: instead of having to write down names (takes too long) just have the names on the sheet already. When the players call out their initiative, they say [name, number] where name is their character name and number is what they rolled. Then I only have to write down their number beside their name. They don't have to be in order from top to bottom. We roll for initiative every round, so I just make a crude grid by drawing a line between each column. This also allows me to track round numbers easily, which can help with stuff that lasts for x rounds.
One thing my DM's do for initative is write our character names onto small specialized magnets or tiles on a digital graph. then they just move those tiles around based on who goes first. Kawa goes before Kenneth? Okay, we'll move her tile above his. Bracken goes after Kawa but before Kenneth? Okay, we move Kawa up and slide Bracken in the middle. Zama delays her action to go after Bracken? Okay, we push her tile to be after Bracken as well. This way it's more fluid and flexible, and you don't need to write down any specific numbers, you just measure who goes before who by arranging them vertically in a column, and having some method of determining who's term you're on. be that by moving a tile to the side briefly, or having a separate tile that points at the tile of whoever's turn it is.
For your point on how Matt rules failures, I usually try to avoid this for certain checks, basically if I feel like the player's character wouldn't commonly fail this task (based on the fanatasy of the character) I'll describe as bad luck but if it's something I don't feel the character is usually reliable at I'll rule it as a failure similar to how Matt would (i.e. the heavy armour cleric crit fails the stealth check because their armour clinked off something, whereas the rogues crit fail would be more like a dagger falls loose from their bag or something)
my initiative method is a double-sided magnetic whiteboard and small whiteboard magnets. All the players get two magnets and they write their initiative on it after they roll. Then we just...put them in order on the board, I have a side and they have a side. They add the spare magnets on their side as they learn the badguys initiative and they can write other things like spell durations because its a white board, and I track enemy health on my side.
20:10 We just had a moment like that happen recently at our table with me and my friends. We were facing off against a long-running enemy from multiple campaigns and climbing a tower of undead shades based on previous NPC allies from the last campaign. We get to a druid we had worked with on many times and we roll initiative. I play a Triton Swashbuckler. First couple rounds of combat we fight her and her sentient weapon that we must destroy to weaken the BBEG. As the weapon is about to be destroyed, she wild shapes into a fire elemental and looms over our team. My turn comes up and I use wall of water and make its ring form around the enemy. My goal was to slow it down; my DM asks what Matt asked. Being a SPED math teacher, I found the formula for converting cubic feet to gallons and learned I did 1496 cold damage to her. DM had to take a 10 minute break because I obliterated another boss with a bs tactic that I didn't mean to! I love D&D sometimes!
A thought about the moment where Vex attempted to hide, but didn’t have enough levels in rogue to do so - I remember hearing from somewhere that Laura had originally wanted to play a rogue character, but decided she would let Liam play the class instead and settled on ranger. Matt allowing the bonus action stealth roll, although against RaW, feels like the way to go to let her actually play out the character she really wanted from the beginning. I don’t recall where I heard that bit about Laura wanting to be a rogue but giving it up for Liam, but I also remember hearing the same thing happened with her wanting Jester to be a warlock but letting Travis play the part instead. I appreciate her looking out for the fun of the other players.
I can't wait until you get to the episode where Sam stole from the party and fans lost their collective minds even worse than they did with Laura...oh, wait, they didn't, they were completely fine with it. Never mind... 😉
If we’re talking alignment shifts, Scanlan using Modify Memory to force Jarret into being his drug dealer is one of the most fucked up nonviolent things I can think of a party member ever doing. EDIT: and now that I think about it, he also once fried two civilians to hit a boss with a Lightning Bolt. He had the option to hit Vax instead (who would have almost certainly passed the save and taken no damage), and of course didn’t have to use the spell in the first place, but he actively chose to kill two innocents in that moment.
@@ColonelMustache I like to think that Scanlan lost his Good alignment at some point during that downward spiral, although that'd be going against Matt. Heck, I feel Scanlan should've been Chaotic Neutral from the start, or at least until he met Kaylie and re-evaluated his life choices, but that's the alignment minefield for you. Few people agree on what a character qualifies as.
Scanlan’s modify memory is easily the most evil deliberate act any CR character has done during a campaign. The only thing that comes close is Chetney and the shopkeep in C3. And Scanlan essentially has zero consequences for it. Honestly as entertaining as Sam as a person is, Scanlan was a horrible character that did awful and creepy things throughout the campaign. But Scanlan rarely if ever gets any ire from the audience. His antics in C2 were even worse, literally putting the party at risk on more than one occasion. If Laura or Marisha’s characters had done anything similar to some of what he does you can bet the comments would have been vicious about them.
@@troikas3353 "If Laura or Marisha’s characters had done anything similar to some of what he does you can bet the comments would have been vicious about them." Not only would they be playing the game "wrong", they'd be "stealing the spotlight" too. ;)
I have a rule in my games that there is no rolling dice or doing something detrimental against another PC, unless both PLAYERS are on board with it. To me, if Laura had asked Chris (not as PCs, but as players) and then done it if he agreed, I would have had no problem.
As far as initiative systems go, before I started using apps (like DND Beyond or Roll20), I used to use Index cards... each card would have a PC's name on it, or Monster-1, Monster-2, Monster-3, or NPC-1, etc. and then one more card that reads "END OF ROUND." When they roll initiative, I go through the stack, write down the numbers and shuffle the cards accordingly. Then during combat, it's a breeze to just go through your stack of cards, one by one, moving each card to the back of the pile after that person or group of monsters takes it's turn. It's a great system, because once you've created the cards, it takes almost no time to put them in order when combat starts, and as combat progresses, no one ever gets missed. No one. It's the only foolproof system I've ever used.
I probably said this last time you talked about Matt's initiative system, but THANK YOU!!!! Its SO BAD! I tried it when I first started running D&D and IMMEDIATELY was like "Why the fuck am I doing this? I'm already confused!" After that I would just take a sheet of notebook paper out before the game started, and numbered it from 1 to 30 from the bottom to the top, and from there just call on each player one at a time, and you'll never miss a number! Like, I really want to know what in Matt's tabletop career made him start using his system, cuz like it happened for a *reason*, right? And I'm fascinated.
For my party's initiative, we each have a clothes pin with our name written on it, then there are additional clothes pins with numbers to represent baddies and also a lair clothes pin only used when applicable. We do Matt's initiative range system to call out initives in general order, and the DM just pops the clothes pins on top of the DM screen in the right order, so it's easy enough to swap someone if they missed a range or have to roll again pt something. It works well enough for us.
16:03 #irlproblems This doesn't happen in digital bc turn order is sorted automatically, or if you use a text editor, you can easily insert lines between given init order
I’m so used to Mike going into these careful, articulate discourses about D&D issues that his response to the “stealing from another player is CRAZY” hubbub being “are you high?” cracked me up more than any other joke on this show.
When it comes to initiative I do both. I have some paperwork that’s kinda numbered the same way, but I ask out in sections of 5. That way, only a couple of people at a time will speak up, and very rarely do I get more than 3 in the same block of 5. Idk, I think it works really well with my large party of 7
In my current campaign first session, another player tried to steal a locket that's important to my character. I noticed in character and stopped it, but it would've really upset me if it had succeeded...
I play online so initiative tracking is simple, and built in to the vtt i use, so players can add their own or others to the list, and i often default to asking one player to say the nrs
I'm catching up fairly well with VM, and the episode after Hardwick joined, is when it started to sink in. I was not a fan of all the interactions Vex (and to a degree the party) has been acting on or justifying why they did things. Like it was all very selfish means to get results immediately. Sam in the following episode I think did well by laying into her about the ordeal on a moral standpoint, but kind of backtracked by superficially stating "you hurt one person, so we'll have to help someone to balance it out, karma." Vex agrees and Scanlan quickly adds "for a person of MY choosing" knowing she might try to easy mark the task to absolve herself quickly. It's not my personal choice to upset other players or intentionally pvp characters, but it should be a discussion at some point if these issues arise. Lingering resentment for a minor thing isn't fun for a parties morality in the longterm.
Regarding how Matt handles failures/successes, there's definitely a shift in approach after Campaign 1, where he introduces the "which brings you to a total of?" principle. I.e a Nat 20 won't automatically make your character good at something they're bad at (e.g Grog on Intelligence). Regarding low rolls not being a character's fault, I often find it's best if it's left up to the PLAYER to roleplay hilarious failure if they want to. There's many times when the cast of Critical Role do this, though it's tricky to encourage this as more metagame-y players might not want to make their character fail. I love the Gern lore drop because, like you said, it's played as a joke in the moment. But coming back to the episode after later developments and I realized what seemed like a non-sequitur at the time was actually foreshadowing major things about Draconia. The whole tails vs no tails thing was interesting to speculate about because Matt... probably intended it as an arc for Tiberius, but obviously that can't happen now. So we'll see what he and VM do with it later.
I don't use Alignment often but I expect the players to have some idea of what their characters' Alignments are. Mostly because that helps set up conflict if an opposing magical item is found; such as the time the NG Ranger ended up with a LE Githyanki's silver sword. Unless a cursed item is involved, PCs' Alignments are usually left alone. Although many years ago we had a group of CN/CG PCs who spent so much time planning that I jokingly threatened to change them all to LN. In both Taliesin's and Laura's cases, there would've been warnings IF I picked up on it. The proscriptive and punishing Alignment rules of yesteryear have never been used in my games. For some time now, my Initiative rules have been basically d12+Proficiency Die and rolled each round. If a PC has a bonus from a class feature, that's added as well. The characters are written on a small whiteboard (roughly the size of a laptop) in alphabetical order and I record the numbers against each. Then it's a matter of erasing the numbers as we go.
when you talked about this episode, the joke character and keyleth’s moment i thought it would be a slack, but i kinda saw that marisha was all on it, she enjoyed every joke, it made me more secure about the episode and a good moment in a moment when even vax wasn’t all himself
I'm 'relatively' new watcher of Cr, only at episode 68 for the first time. but im an old D&D'player. Now I adore Laura and i generally really like Vex. Except for her selfish greed. imo stealing within the party8including guest stars) is only okay if your charecter is of an alignment that would justify said stealing: ie. if you are playing evil you can steal what ever from what ever, why would you care? But if you are claiming a good alignment you can only justify that by stealing items that can be used to harm innocents from evil charecters. Vex stole from a freindly good/neutral charecter that was helping them, she stole 100% for Her own selfish greed. A charecter of a good alignment would Not do that. So Laura isnt being punished by her alignment shifting, Shes the one who actively shifted it Matt is simply telling her he's seen it. But honestly its been comming a long time, the whole groupe but especially Vex will happily blackmail and threaten innocent shopkeepers to get their way even forcing them under what would be 'at cost price'. When it comes to money and getting stuff they are all way closer to evil than good alignment. Vex is the worst though. So while I do not agree with Vex's action here, it was 100% in alignment with how she's acted all campain.
Alignment is just a reductive descriptor of actions, not a concrete determiner of them. A truly terrible person may never have stolen anything in their life, a good person may have. Alignment is just a set of training wheels to use at the start if a player has trouble getting into their characters pov. Using it for anything more than that is unneccisary and arguably actively harmful to organic development.
oh you absolutely do not have to use alignments in your games and they can be fine. BUT if you do chose to use it then you have to accept the consequenses of your actions on your alignemts. Such as cheeks on charecter: are they a good trustworthy person or not? vex is actually an extremely untrustworthy person lying and scheeming all the time, and mostely for her own sole benifit. but that doesnt make her evil, just not in any way cabable of claiming a 'good' title either.@@troikas3353
@@troikas3353disagree, the organic development happened right here with VM. Having a lawful alignment didn't prevent reprehensible behaviour, so the adjustment made sense, especially because now artifacts that have alignment-specific behaviour will work correctly. Vex should not be able to claim the immunity of a lawful alignment while stealing and extorting her way around exandria
Make a spreadsheet, list all characters and players, ask the players their initiative numbers and apply numbers for all others in the encounter. Sort column.
17:03 I use this method now but it’s coupled with the index cards on my DM screen. I have sticky notes with enemies that I put up in between as a clear visual for me.
I love your content, even when I disagree with some of your takes this episode. I can see your points of view and you construct such wonderful talking points. Excited for more and more episodes.
I very much agree that it's nice when the players put in some work to explain why they're hanging out together. It makes a DMs life so much easier. The "Broomgate" thing is one of the rare times where I'll side against Laura, my usual fave player (although I'm not justifying some of the weird stuff the fans got up to when complaining about her). In my experience PVP theft is often a warning sign that something is about to go toxic or that one player is only thinking of their own fun rather than the group's enjoyment as a whole. Your policy on the matter sounds like a good solution.
When I'm playing a bard, I will pick out instrumental songs that fit the narrative and play them quietly (playing pathfinder which is based on 3.5 rules) both for ambiance and as a subtle reminder that you have the bonus' from my bardic song. Keeping it instrumental keeps it from being too distracting, though I did get a laugh out of everyone when I started playing the Jurassic Park theme in violin while we were fighting a t-rex skeleton.
Great episode Mike. A couple things, shame on the community for hating on Laura. So what if she stole a broom,. second, I agree with Matts way of handling alignment. We all like to think we are one way, but our alignment isn't how we see ourselves it's how the world sees us. It would make sense for Lauras actions to hurt her alignment. Plus, when she finally gets back to good it makes for a better moment. If he hadn't changed it she just would have went about doing bad things. Great episode though.
i love the episode as always, i hope some time we get one of these for EXU Calamity, or any of the shorter games could be interesting to help new gms structure a one shot mostly i just really like calamity
I really do not run alignment as something mechanical in the slightest, and I think the issue here is kinda that for those DMs who still do, like all other variable rules and lore that is unique to someone's games or setting, the DM is the one dealing with alignment. Just like if someone wrote on their sheet that they speak elvish, and the DM goes "actually in my setting there isn't an elvish language, so let's change it to something else" I see a DM telling you your alignment has changed the same way. As much as some people would like to act like it is, alignment is not nearly enough of an airtight system where every character is easily divided into the grid, and people are gonna disagree about that all the time, so again, while my and many other DM's solution is just not to use it, if it is being used, their needs to be an understanding of what sorts of character and actions fall on the chart. While this can probably be done more smoothly by having a group discussion and ironing out a sort of compromise between everyone's beliefs, if you don't think to do that ahead of time then the default answer is the same as for every other ruling, whatever the DM thinks is right. Laura's honestly one of my favorite players, but this is one case where I just think I'm too different from someone to understand their feelings. This isn't an indictment of her as a player, I'm just saying people are super different and I wouldn't be surprised if Matt straight up didn't understand why someone would be upset by something like that, because I feel like if I was in his place I definitely wouldn't be.
I get that you intended the disclaimer section as just that: a disclaimer. However, the way you put it really made it sound like a “He definitely did some bad stuff but this isn’t the time or place to go over that” kind of thing. It was only after reading some other comments and doing my own research that i found out the situation is, at most, uncertain, and that chris was pretty much completely reinstated after the companies he was involved with investigated the accusations. I know you meant well, but if you’re going to be really vague about a serious topic like this, its probably best to just not touch on it.
Don't you ever think that when they're telling their initiative order that it's for the people that are listening sometimes it's nice to see somebody yell out their natural 20 or something else
if you go around the table and ask for everyone's initiative in turn, they will still get to proudly proclaim their nat 20 - plus bonuses- and it's still a cool feeling.
I'm gonna throw my hat in and say that yes, Laura absolutely had the alignment shift coming. She didn't LIKE it, but you've pointed out multiple times that Matt wants Exandria to be a real, living world, and there are consequences to what happens. Tiberius buzzsawing the old woman in episode 25 is one of the big ones, but this is another one. Truth be told, Vex's actions and Laura's attitude for the post-Briarwood stretch nearly made me gave up on the show a few times; basically the entire stretch, Vex enabled several plans centered entirely on "greed" - wanting to go fetch the treasure out of the well during the episode with Garthok, being a large part of the reason the purple worms showed up under Krieg's house because she wanted to loot the treasure still there, arguably the interactions with the peddler who fleeced Grog in Vasselheim, and even farther back with conning the dwarves in Kraghammer out of MORE money by pretending that half the party died when they went to get their 25,000 gold reward. She's pissed as hell that she loses a haggling session for the first time ever in the campaign to buy that book in Vasselheim. Even, to a *small* extent, opening Purvan's coffin, though yes that was mostly Percy and/or bad communication and she absolutely did not deserve to die - but she still immediately dropped helping her brother out of the hole he fell in to go over there when it was called out that they were looting the coffin when it wouldn't even take another minute to get him out. It's a repeated pattern of greed, and if you watch some of the other non-CR stuff the cast was involved in on G&S around that time, it's *very* clear that this is a thing with *Laura* and not just Vex. Someone mentions on an early Talks Machina that she loves to go thrifting and is an absolute nightmare about haggling for discounts, much as Vex is in game, and in the "escape room" show with Janet Varney hosting Laura repeatedly yanks stuff other people find out of their hands so she can inspect or just have them. Janet even gives her a nickname for it, something like "Grabby McGrabhands," and Laura admits it herself in one of the post-game talk-to-the camera bits. Now, obviously none of this is evil. Bumping to evil would be completely wrong, but "Neutral" fills in for a lot of stuff, and Vex has repeatedly demonstrated a "get mine" attitude that she acts on whenever she reasonably finds it possible to do. Laura has also talked about how post-death Vex kind of felt like she could get away with basically anything because she's already survived (for a given value of the word) the worst that could happen, so she was free to follow her impulses. And, frankly, some of her impulses were bad. Vex/Vox Machina being so powerful in Exandria and this being just a game means she can Do More, whereas in reality I'm sure she's lost several haggling sessions, and she just doesn't have as much power to exploit. To me, this felt like Matt remembering all the things she's been doing for awhile and pulling another "reminder" that she's not invincible just because she's high level. It didn't nerf her skills, just locked her out of a few things that only that alignment can provide, and as far as I can remember she wasn't using any of those anyway. Was it worth having a conversation with her over this after the game? I'm on the fence, because she definitely would have rejected the change, and frankly Matt had more than enough reason to put it through. I can see the value in the conversation, and he could have maybe explained to her why it was happening rather than just break it on her. At the very least, he could have talked to her about his reasoning in doing so, but I'm also pretty sure he *did* , though quite possibly after he'd already made the decision. She didn't like it, and this is "actions, meet consequences" territory here. She does start calming down after this, though, and seems to at least accept that there *was* a lesson to learn from it, even if she doesn't like it. We also start learning more about why she is this way as the twins' backstory gets discussed more, and Laura seems to keep the "impulse" actions to fun tricks in combat or stuff that will actually be helpful to the party/harmful to the enemy. Mostly I feel like Vex was somewhat unsettled, not just because of the death but because of several other things like everything happening with Vax, and she needed to find a new center to herself, which she absolutely does and it is wonderful character growth to see in action. The alignment change holds up a mirror to what she's becoming and helps her realize that it isn't *quite* what she wants to be. Notably, she never *loses* these qualities, but they are tuned back into strengths and benefits for the world at large rather than just for her own benefit or the benefit of people she personally likes.
At this point in the campaign, I had your same concerns and I had Vex ranked as my least favorite character. To me it's a matter of table disruption and table respect. You can point to other characters who had "annoying" aspects, such as Scanlan's frequent jokes and Keyleth's preachy morals. But (YMMV) I felt like Sam had a good handle on when not to ruin a mood with jokes, and Marisha picked her battles to only put her foot down when an action was really going to grate against her character's morals. Maybe that wasn't enough restraint for some viewers, but I at least felt like an effort was being made. By contrast, I didn't feel like Vex had that same restraint. Every opportunity to haggle was taken, which is only a problem because it means that the scene is paused until Vex is satisfied and the other players (often) cannot participate. Players and viewers were frustrated when Tiberius tried to buy every mirror in town, and I felt similarly when Vex was haggling a 30g book by herself. I haven't finished S1, I don't hate Vex, I don't hate Laura. It's just a recurring point of frustration that tempts me to fast-forward through scenes.
@@pavfeira Yeah, I never hated her, but it was definitely frustrating to watch - admittedly partially because I'm in customer service, and this type of customer is an absolute *nightmare* to deal with. I can't even count the number of times people have gone some variation of "I don't want it to be that expensive," and, well, tough crap. You want stuff, you pay for it. Matt even calls out the party very early on when they're all bitching about the price/scarcity of healing potions (I think in Kraghammer). It does feel like this is one of the ...I guess "blind spots" of the cast, that in this world, basically everything they want to buy is made by hand (or magic) and so they're not used to having to pay by-hand prices for everything, and it just comes out the worst in Vex. They do get better about it over time, but it's pretty disconnected early in Vox Machina - they still haggle later on and in future campaigns, but it's at a more reasonable level. The post-Briarwood and first few Chroma Conclave episodes feel, to me, like a very long set of transition episodes. The group has just conquered their first big, *significant* personal battle against Percy's deadly enemies and there's five-six episodes of them just... doing things. Things that are important and will be more important later, but no quests, no crusades, no absolute, direct goal, and in a way I feel like that allowed some things to show that otherwise wouldn't have gotten much focus. In a way it's great for character exploration, but it did also feel like a holding pattern, like a time for, in a way, no consequences. Sure they got in some fights, but nothing completely awful. And the first few Conclave episodes is them settling into this new norm, with the big wrench of the Sunken Temple thrown in at the end. 46-48 feels like the last of the transition episodes to me, where after that everything is more focused. Even though there's a whole bunch of mini arcs in the larger arc, they last long enough to give them good exploration time, mostly have personal connections, and there's a real reward at the end of each. It feels like everyone's characters really *solidify* in the post-48 stretch, in wonderful ways. It's been said pretty often that VM is a group of cliches and stereotypes, and there is some truth to that statement because everyone just created characters for a one-shot that grew, but what they do when they outgrow those starting origins is magnificent.
My feeling, and I feel very strongly, is this: If a DM and a player discuss the player’s alignment, and the conversation ends with the player not on the same page about whether or not they should have that specific alignment, then that conversation was not long enough. The DM has not accurately expressed that this reflects a pattern of behavior, or that this is meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, or that alignment is a holdover from another edition that he doesn’t think is sacred, or whatever other reasoning he needs to share to get someone on the same page before something about their character is fundamentally changed. This also isn’t something that Laura would have known was possible to change. There’s a moment in C2 where Matt changes something pretty dramatic about Travis’ character (which also divided the internet, but we’ll get there another day), but the difference is that (A) the mechanic was an in-world thing, much more tangible than alignment, so the idea that external forces could change it is something the players are more amenable to already, and (B) Travis ABSOLUTELY knew there would be consequences to his Great Big Decision. When Laura didn’t have that context, then yeah, I feel really icky about this being a “punishment” that changes something so drastic (to her) about her character. All of your observations are completely valid - I’ve had my own frustrations with many of these, and while I don’t often discuss them in the videos because not all of them are moments we can learn from (plenty of people play the game in a different way from me), some of them still bother me on rewatch. But I still don’t think it’s reasonable for Matt to unilaterally change something as profoundly tied to a character’s personality as alignment is in C1. (And yes, as many pointed out, this is an issue with alignment being both a personality trait and also something that has in-game consequences, which is why Matt seems to stop using alignment entirely starting with C2.)
How many gallons of water *are* in a tidal wave? 🤔 There are 7.48052 (US) gallons of water in a cubic foot. At max size, a tidal wave is 3000 cubic feet. Max, a tidal wave spell unleashes 22,441.56 gallons (US). So, even the tweeted correction is wrong.
225 gallons would be approximately correct for a 30 cubic foot tidal wave. If it was specified that the wave was 30' long, 1' tall and 1' wide, the number of gallons would be 1% of the max size, or 224.4156 (US) gallons. But, Matt says aloud that it's 10' tall and 10' wide, to which Marisha adds the 30' long (which is what the spell description also says). As a result, the calculated total is off by a factor of 100.
Have you ever stolen from another player character, or has another player character ever stolen from you? (I’ve done both!)
I have always found the rogue trait of "I don't tell anyone else I found this loot" to be worse than stealing. I have had several campaigns (with the same player, unfortunately) where she justified gatekeeping loot from the party because she was the rogue and didn't want to share.
Just last night i had to Take away our Barbarian's "Sword Privledges" because he decided to randomly start attacking the monster-folk in the krezg chappel without even talking to the abbot, we pulled him off after he stabbed the second head of the guy in the bell tower and while the rest of them were distracted by some wine i took his sword and i plan on giving it back to him only if and when we get into an actual fight that he doesnt cause (Which might happen soon as our druid let all the animals free in a stampede about 2 minutes later) This is my and most of my parties first time playing C.O.S so i probably butchered the location name
Yes and Yes. Most of the time it was a jerk move. Once or twice it was good for the story.
Yes, and I felt awful about how it turned out. We had finished an area and left behind a bunch of very weak drow. Something my character did not agree with as, 1 he assumed all drow were evil, and just because these drow were down on their luck, doesn't mean they wouldn't take over and cause problems for other people, including the party, once they were back on their feet. After all, it's what he would have done do. and 2. My character was slowly changing away from that same situation.
The GM had made it clear that if we wanted to kill the drow, there was really only one that even could put up a fight, and if they were dealt with, it would be a narrative conclusion, and my character was built to be a single target assassin. He had one shot a giant when he had the drop on it, and that was a couple of levels ago. The only problem was that we had been washed down a river, but one other character had a cloak that would let me easily swim back up. So after everyone else took a rest, my character borrowed the cloak without asking, fully intending to be back before the next morning with no harm done (to the party). However, due to a series of bad roles, my character not only failed, but died. This isn't just three or four failed coin flips either. I needed to roll higher than a 7 on any of 15 D20 rolls to succeed, and return with the player's magic item, and I didn't even get one. I wish I was exaggerating. So that's how I stole from another player, and I still feel bad about it.
Exact reverse thing. I had an ongoing joke with another player when neither of us could remember who owed the other 1 gold, so we kept sneaking a gold piece on the other person whenever there was the slightest opportunity. Even got to the point of commissioning art of it. Good times!
Something I think is worth considering in the "stealing from guests" conversation: Guest players might be awarded magic items with less concern for balance, either because it'll help bring them in line with the party's strength, or achieve some specific fantasy, with the expectation that even if the item might be something the GM would avoid offering to the party, it's fine for the finite span of a guest appearance. Here, Matt already knew Laura might try to get this broom, and the party is exceptionally high level and thus the broom doesn't present some great shift in how the players can solve problems (and as illustrated here, Vex has room for a boost like the broom provides). However, in a lot of other games, I could see a guest show up with a powerful magic item, and the act of stealing it becomes a concern because it presents design problems for the GM if the item is constantly in play rather than just around for a couple sessions.
Yeah, it could be that Matt felt Laura should have a replacement for the flying carpet, which he had to destroy because it rendered a lot of exploration problems irrelevant. A firing platform might be important to someone's archer fantasy, but you probably don't want the whole party ignoring elevation and difficult terrain challenges, or most of the party being able to rest while one person drives.
Yeah this is kinda what I was thinking. I'd be very apprehensive about giving guest characters anything nice if they're just gonna have it stolen from them by the "Real" characters
@@CthulhuOnCam - That's not what I said. The guest was clearly not staying long-term (he made a joke character and was a bit disruptive at times), so Matt could have used the opportunity to give Vex a solo flight item, knowing she'd probably take it.
Translating Vex from a Pathfinder 1e Ranger into a 2014 D&D 5e Beastmaster was a significant downgrade in how effective Vex was, so Matt may have wanted her to have a flying firing platform. The flying carpet introduced the problem of making elevation and terrain challenges trivial for the entire party, while a solo item for Vex helped recover some of the archery effectiveness Laura wanted for her character.
As a side effect, giving in to the temptation to steal the broom could make the players and audience question how heroic the party really was. Will the lure of power corrupt their motives?
Of course I don't know because secret plans are secret; I'm just saying that maybe the guest was in on it, so while it was PCvPC, it wouldn't necessarily be PvP.
Spoilers for Campaign 2
See the Folding Halls of Halas
MY DM, fixed that with a simple fix. The item the guest had was cursed, so when it was stolen, they could keep it, but it caused them some really nasty headaches as a result. In the end, they got rid of it because the curse was sticky (even if broken, it returned as long as they kept the item) and not worth the effort.
The bit about Wheaton being willing to sacrifice his character if needed definitely gave me a chuckle. His dice were certainly on board with that plan :D
23:25 - This point gets made often enough that it's not unnoticed, but it REALLY should be on a billboard. The ranger is clearly inspired by Strider from LOTR, the fact that *by design* Rangers can't just disappear into the undergrowth or express their mastery of the forest mechanically in useful ways like hiding... is just nonsensical.
Absolutely right, IMO. The PHB version of the Ranger is laughable, and I can't comprehend how it got through the playtest phase into that form. Mind-bogglingly bad.
Rangers and Rogues should both have stealth abilities with rangers gaining benefits in natural environs while rogues benefit more in urban settings.
@@Heavensrun I really like this. Even more, it's almost like the two classes should be merged, with a "woodland sneaky-shooty" subclass and an "urban sneaky-stabby" subclass. Because the more I look at the two classes they just look like flavors of "leverages familiarity with their environment"
@@PVS3 At least from my perspective, there is more underneath the Ranger than just nature stealth. Another of the core fantasies informing Rangers seems to be that of "game warden" or even park ranger. There's an element of a desire to nurture, protect, and maintain a natural balance within a given realm, and so a ranger should have intimate familiarity with things that are not really stealth (tracking, for example, or survival skills like campsite selection, gathering food and water, stuff like that). A Rogue, OTOH, has more of a pickpocket/misdirection/stakeout-a-target vibe, less a vibe of all stealth all the time. Difference between Druid and Ranger might be as simple as care-with-magical-assistance (Druid) vs care-via-hands-on-methods (Ranger), which lends well to separating them into the spell caster vs. martial type, at least as a broad categorization.
@@PVS3 This makes it sound like them being separate classes is a holdover from older editions where the line was clearer. A legacy that should be let go.
I disagree that changing player alignment is removing player agency, it's rewarding players choices even if not how they want to be rewarded. To remove Laura's agency Matt would have told her no, she can't put his broom in the bag of holding without permission because she already chose to be neutral good so she can't steal from her allies just because she want's something. Matt just said, 'do whatever you want, but you don't know what the consequences will be'
I mean, 'do whatever you want, but you don't know what the consequences will be' is basically the premise of a game of D&D, isn't it?
I hear you on the initiative thing, but I do really love the drama spawned at the start of encounters where Matt has to ask for several ranges before he gets a response. It just adds a dynamic of “oh sH*T” that I find super fun to watch.
I had the same thought - I don't think Matt does it for efficient bookkeeping, he does it for ✨drama✨
I should preface this by saying I love Laura - she's probably my favorite cast member and I adore her characters. No roleplaying choice is justification for online abuse. But honestly this particular Vex moment definitely did rub me wrong, and the guest seemed like he was trying to be a good sport but was actually annoyed about it.
I have complicated feelings on the alignment shift but ultimately I think I like how Matt handled it. Less of a punishment and more of a reasonable consequence - do selfish things to the harm of others, move into an alignment that reflects your actions. In parenting terms (because I think about that a lot), a punishment is doing something to make the other person feel bad, but isn't related directly to the thing they did (you kicked the cat so no candy after dinner - unrelated punishment, teaches nothing). A natural consequence is something that happens without your interference (you refused to wear a coat so now you get to be cold - may teach something, but not always easily available or immediately understandable for every misdeed). And areasonable imposed consequence (which I think is mostly what Matt does here) might be, you colored on the wall so I'm going to put the markers where you can't reach them and you're going to help me wash the wall instead of going to the park. Washing the wall isn't fun, but it's also not an unreasonable outcome. Alignment, when used, seems largely to do with how the world interacts with a character (aka only a good-aligned character can attune to this item created by a lawful good deity, and it's the item/deity and not the character who judges the definition of "good"). In that sense, I totally get what Matt is doing. There are many moments in VM where he has to remind them that in game actions have in game consequences.
As an aside, I don't use alignment in my games much, but if I did, I might also have made a call like Matt's here. I've definitely had characters show up stating they're "lawful good" and then going around and doing war crimes with the justification of "this is within my character's personal code of ethics and they perceive the action as good and right" and i just roll my eyes behind the DM screen and then have the world interact with the character in question AS A DANGEROUS MURDERER because that's the reasonable outcome of their actions. 🤷♀️
I agree, but on the flip side, even with Alignment as a descriptor, an alignment change should never come as a surprise. In my opinion, Matt should have told Laura something like "Stealing a stranger's magic broom doesn't gel with a Neutral Good alignment; if Vex continues acting like this, we might need to move her to Chaotic Neutral." Or if the act is so egregious as to warrant immediate alignment change, "So, stealing a magic broom and lying about it is *really* not the way someone who's Neutral Good should act. If you do it, we'll have to shift your alignment to Chaotic Neutral. Do you still want to?"
'Cause from Laura's side of the table, she could very much have thought she was still acting in a Neutral Good manner. If Matt wasn't warning her that her alignment was in jeopardy, then it's not unfair for her to think she was doing fine, which makes the change feel a lot more like a punishment
@@Kafaldsbylur I'll agree that it probably might have been nice to have brought it up when he saw the pattern instead of surprising her with it. I think Matt frequently tends to be in the FAFO school of DMing and probably just saw this as a part of that. He probably assumed his player understood what the alignment descriptors meant... But yeah, communicating it might have been nice!
I do think we agree that the alignment change makes sense though! I can feel the DM frustration of watching a player who thinks of themself as a good and righteous hero constantly doing borderline evil things. 🥲 Boy have I been there.
@@KafaldsbylurI personally really disagree with this approach. It feels like babysitting and extremely condescending. It's like talking to a child when they're being naughty to other kids. "Now good little girls don't steal other kids candy do they?" If a character has to be reminded they aren't being good, they aren't a good character. That's fine, not all characters are good and if you know as a player that you like to do actions in game that aren't good don't play a good aligned character or modify your choices consciously to reflect your character decision. If you can't be consistent with that, I think an alignment change is warranted.
I've done it a bunch, and after the game my players thanked me. The pressure of being a good aligned character was wearing on their fun in the game. If I had taken this approach and scolded them every time they did something evil I would've made them hate their experience even more.
Hell I've done it the other way. "You're trying to play an evil character but you're doing objectively good things with no alterior motive... Are you sure you want to keep playing an evil character? It feels like you picked evil because they sometimes lie and want the creative freedom of a non-good alignment. We can change this to neutral if you'd like. Or would you rather have a character arc of self discovery so that change feels more natural?" Is almost word for word a conversation I've had with a player. And I was exactly right.
If I'd gone "if you keep doing these good actions, your alignment is gonna change to reflect that" then it does feel like a punishment. I'm threatening them with altering their character if they don't alter their behaviour. No, their behaviour alters their character I'm simply reflecting that. It's up to the players to decide how much they care about alignment and if they don't care until it's changed, well then that's all the more reason to pay attention to their role play. I can't dictate what they're allowed to have fun with, but I'm not going to just let them call objectively bad things good because that's what they wanted their character to be when they made them and I'm not scolding them every time they veer from that path. If it was important enough for my scolding to feel good and not annoying, they wouldn't need the scolding anyway because they'd be consciously thinking of the path.
@@bye1551 I agree with you. I think the fundamental consideration is "consequences versus punishment". Players, from the very first moment of D&D and unlike almost any other game, learn that their actions are consequential. If you steal and get caught, you can't just reload or say "well I guess I didn't do that then". Alignment changes are a form of a consequence of your decisions, at least when they are taken as a trend of behavior. Vex was frequently demonstrating greed on a personal level that rightfully would not align with a 'Good' character. Conversely, Matt did not change Pike's alignment after she slit the throat of a dying foe with her mace. He gave a solid in-character warning about the consequences of that action and it seemed Ashley internalized it, but did not punish her harshly with an immediate change to the alignment.
@@kasimmorathi exactly. As I said in the original comment, the player decides how much their alignment matters to them with their actions. They don't get to complain about it being unfair after I demonstrated the consequences for their choices because they never actually took it into consideration. If they actually cared about their alignment, I wouldn't be changing it because they'd be role playing effectively. It's only caring retroactively, which I'm personally really against. Ashley did care. She thought pike had good in character justifications for what she did, Matt pointed out how that's at odds with her alignment and Ashley cared enough to change her behaviour because she understood it's up to her to demonstrate how much alignment matters to her. Laura could have done that many times. Maybe Matt should've given a warning, but I genuinely don't think it's necessary considering the mountain of evils Vex was committing. She just didn't care about her alignment, and that's fine, but the upset after the consequence has been demonstrated just isn't it. But I'm literally judging a grown woman over a dumb make believe game she played half a decade ago by now so really it genuinely doesn't matter, I just think it's an important example for how alignment matters or it doesn't and it's fine if it doesn't just don't pretend it did all along when your actions show it didn't matter to you until I pointed out how little you cared
I understand what you’re saying about the alignment - but I far prefer Matt’s approach over the approach of “You can’t do that, it doesn’t match your alignment”
I mean if you lay out your character's morals you'd be hard pressed to explain why they would act contrary to that. Like would someone with a sense of justice steal a walking stick from a small child?
@@TrackerRooit's not exactly the same
On the alignment thing, what always bothered me was the jump. Like, why go from Neutral Good to Chaotic Neutral? Like, surely if a change was needed it should come in steps no? Why was she not made True Neutral or Chaotic Good?
Honestly, I kinda understand where Matt is coming from. if I had to guess, at that point of the story I would peg Vex as Chaotic Neutral as well, myself. But that is just one more reason for why he really should have had more of a talk with Laura about what being "Good" means" to both of them (and also why he thinks she is "Chaotic"). They were clearly just not on the same page on that regard.
Also, personally, the smaller increments of the step by step change to chaotic good first would have served as a good warning that these things can happen if you start playing your character out of alignment too much. It gives the player a chance to course correct if they want, before they lose the "Good" alignment which usually has more mechanical impact than the chaos/law spectrum
Yeah, gradual change should've been better
The fact that Percy kept his good aligned status while Vex did not remains one of the great puzzlers of the series to me
Whenever Percy does something questionable, it's always in service to a greater good. When Vex does, it's often for selfish reasons.
@@Heavensrun I dunno, they made it pretty apparent where his path was leading him. The List was never going to be empty.
@@ToaArcanoutside of that one specific (and very personal) set of circumstances, Percy tends to try and do what’s good for everyone else, almost to the point of self destruction. Vex was a repeated pattern of behaviour across many situations. And while I agree, Percy could have gone off the deep end, he never quite got there, as for much of the Briarwood arc he was fighting between personal revenge against justice for the dead and freeing those stuck under their thumb.
@@Heavensrun Hard disagree.
Taliesin has stated multiple times: Percy is not a good person. He's a deeply troubled man who thinks he's the smartest person in the room and knows best.
Percy did far worse things far more consistantly with nary a peep from Matt.
This isn't to say I dislike Percy; he's easily my favorite character. But the idea that he did terrible things for the greater good isn't born out.
That’s actually a fantastic point I had never considered. I agree with the shift to Vex’s alignment, but holding Percy to the same standard, he absolutely would have shifted at some points.
I really feel your argument about the alignment but I still agree with Matt that your choices should reflect on the alignment. cause characters are able to change and grow that way. They feel more human. You get more attached to it and make you think what my character is feeling about it.
I agree. This is speculation, but my guess would be that Laura needed this to sting. It is one of life's biggest personal questions: Am I a good person? Am I on the right path?
Matt has answered that question for her, but it is up to Vex (Laura) if she wants that to change. Clearly this does not sit well with Laura who has some thinking to do on her choices. I think it is a good teaching moment. Not a punishment.
Totally agree - a conversation about alignment is absolutely reasonable. But if at the end of it, the player and the DM don't agree about your new alignment, then the conversation was not long enough.
@@SupergeekMike our old DM had a point system for that. We started all as neutral and either got "good" points or "bad" points after three points in either direction you changed your alignment. I really liked that because you had room to grow with that.
The vex alignment issue is something i have so many disconnected thoughts about. Because on the one hand, i absolutely agree with Matt that alignment should reflect the actions of the player character whatever those were.
But i do also agree with you in that this was absolutely a breakdown of communication between Laura and Matt.
But I also think that the GM, providing they can explain it with a TREND of behavior from the player, has a right to change their players alignment, even if they dont like it.
I also think that he probably should have bumped her to Chaotic Good, avoiding the later mechanical issues and likely the feeling of punishment from being bumped from good to neutral
For initiative, if you use an online initiative tracker, you can just put the numbers in any order and then it will sort them for you. Super easy way to manage it
you can also write everybody's name and number on a post it note and then assort them on the dm screen in the right order
I legitimately thought the broom was a planned opportunity.
Vex has been loving flying the whole time. I didn't even think it was an issue xD
I don't get the controversy either, I thought Vex stealing the broom was just a funny moment and nothing more. It was honestly a highlight of the episode for me
@@troywithabrick1178 true! And the way he played it off reinforced me thinking it has a item plant that they were meant to take.
My rogue made a joke on day one about how she should never be trusted with the bag of holding because they'd probably steal something. It was a joke, and they didn't steal from the party... until someone handed her the bag of holding and she saw there was a gold bookend in it. So far, no one's noticed it's missing, and I plan to send it home to my much smarter but sickly little brother.
And if they find out, you can literally just say exactly what you warned them and come clean. It would definitely be funny that the one thing you took from the bag of holding was a gold bookend of all things
I really disagree on your view when it comes to aligment. Its not a punishment to change the aligment, aligments are nothing but story bait. Laura wanted to play good well then she actually has to roleplay good.
Yeah, I stopped using alignment because I've known a lot of players who pick "good" on their sheet but very much do not play good; but also get mad when you say they aren't.
Personally, I don't see it as a punishment, at least in modern d&d. When it was first a thing, alignment shifts gave penalties as long as it differed from your original alignment. I've actually assigned my own characters alignment shifts more often than the dm; usually by pointing out a trend in my character's behavior, explaining the character psychology behind it, and asking if I can change it.
I agree and disagree with you. Changing an alignment should not be a punishment, it should be a reflection of the characters choices. And, Matt is correct, Laura was not playing a Neutral Good character and her character was not making Neutral Good choices and so she should not have Neutral Good on her character sheet. You are correct.
The problem is how it was received. Laura saw it as a punishment rather than a consequence. Consequence has negative connotations, but it's literally just another word for result, albeit with more direct impact from a single source. Punishment is "what you have done (or things you have done) is 'wrong' and the course of retribution is varied and occasionally arbitrary." It was a necessary wake up call for Laura to PLAY Good if she wanted to SAY she was Good, but there needed to be a conversation. The way this was handled was a bit more "you ARE bad" rather than "you are DOING bad," a subtle but important distinction.
@@DisneyLover258Yeah, I had about the same thought. You could say it was a punishment in the sense that Laura viewed it as a punishment. You could also say it wasn’t a punishment because Matt didn’t view or intend it as one. I agree with Matt changing her alignment (her metagame-threatening the potion salesman was also distinctly not-good, if we’re keeping track), but I also agree that it could have been handled better.
@@DisneyLover258and punishments are tools the DM can use. Dealing damage to PCs from a trap is also a punishment as well because they didn't follow your playstyle of tapping things with a 10 foot pole.
Also changing alignment for all intents and purposes has no mechanical or even narrative consequences for Laura. It is purely a matter of perception and Matt telling her that he perceives a shift is a way of communicating to the player how they are being viewed by the inhabitants of the world.
If you want to be seen as a paragon of goodness, then you need to act like a paragon of goodness. Simple as. The PCs play the role in the story that they play.
The idea of ‘rewarding good behaviour’ in the context of morality shifts is a conflation of two meanings of the word good.
On the topic of alignment, I 100% disagree with you and agree with Matt Mercer. You don't get the benefits of a particular alignment if you aren't prepared to maintain that alignment. If a lawful good paladin thinks nothing of casually breaking the law or behaving with cruelty, then they're not being lawful good. If the player has an issue with the Dm changing their alignment to reflect their behavior because it robs them of some of their best abilities, then it's the player's fault, not the DM's. You want all the powers that come with being a symbol of purity and righteousness? Then you best be righteous and pure.
i think maybe you misunderdstand the relationship between GM's and players. The GM isn't a parent. They're a friend.
@@zippomage DMs are referees. They enforce the rules.
@@zippomage A GM is a story-teller, and it is perfectly valid for them to change the story or character sheet as fits the player's actions. If Luke Skywalker wants to murder a shop keep that refuses to give him a discount, he doesn't get to complain when he loses his best light side abilities, because that was a very Sith thing to do.
@@CaptNightflash I think the difference here though is that it doesn't seem like there was any discussion prior to this moment, outside of maybe session zero. Luke Skywalker had an entire upbringing where role models taught him right from wrong and the consequences thereof, and then teachers guiding him in the ways of the light side of the Force. Matt said he saw a pattern of selfish behavior leading up to this bigger action, but doesn't seem to have mentioned to Laura that her behavior was outside of her alignment until he finally decided to change it.
I think that's part of why Mike keeps saying in comments there should have been more discussion - before Matt finally decided to step in and change her alignment - and why it felt like a punishment. To Laura, there was no warning. It's like a parent telling a kid "you keep breaking your brother's toys so you can't play with them anymore" without ever having told the child "hey, it's not nice to break your brother's toys, if you keep doing that you're not going to be allowed to play with his things." Especially considering that other party members have gotten away with equally selfish and harmful things and not had alignment shifts made for them.
@@danitini14 I don't know what the other party members alignments are, but I would feel safe betting that most of them, except Pike, obviously, are some flavor of chaotic, and their actions are not out of character for them. Also, this stream picked up from their home game, which we didn't see, so we have no idea if Laura's character was meant to be super strict from her inception, or perhaps Matt did provide warnings back then which have since been forgotten. Maybe they talked about it off camera after the game ended for the night, or maybe not, we don't know. What we do know, for sure, is that Laura behaved in a way outside of her alignment and the universe (i.e. Matt) reacted accordingly. That is completely fair.
As someone who had their alignment reversed (chaotic good rogue to lawful evil rogue)... not due to actions but due to a bad (forced) pull from the deck of many things, it can come as a bit of a shocker... even a involved a bit of mourning about playing the character as I originally intended.
Our DM had put us into a situation that we were faced with the demon patron of one of our players. The player hadn't been upholding his end of the pact in the patron's eyes, and so the demon gave us the choice of some very dangerous task or giving him a number. My character said "seven" not knowing that it would mean drawing seven cards from the DoMT.
I actually got really lucky... six cards were good or at least non-harmful, but the seventh card was the fate card. I actually didn't find it until after the game ended. The DM let us take the cards with us, and when I got home I was checking out the artwork on the cards and noticed that I'd missed a card. The DM had told us not to look at the cards we picked until we went around the table and revealed them one by one. I'd been stacking my cards back under each other after I revealed them, and missed showing the fate card thinking that I'd revealed all my cards.
Anyway, I did some soul searching and had to decide whether or not I told the DM about the missed card. I didn't want to since I knew that it would mean switching how I played my character and I really liked my character being an honest and good-hearted rogue.
But in the end, honesty won out, and I confessed to the DM about the missed card.
It actually turned out to be a good thing. The other players in the campaign love her, and it even made sense for her character arc since one of the other cards that I pulled from the Deck righted something from her past, but in righting that wrong it also meant that she changed her childhood and background... instead of being raised in a poor, kind and loving adoptive family, she was raised by cold and power hungery nobels who saw love as a weakness to be exploited.
She isn't as much evil as she is calculating and cold. Emotion doesn't really factor into her choices... it's more, "How does doing this 'thing' benefit me? Does the result to me outweigh the cost/effort?"
As one of her first actions withe the new alignment, she walked away from a sick child being held captive by hags because she saw no benefit to herself in helping the child. That's when my fellow players saw just how much she changed. lol
Now, ultimately she did go back to speak with the child to get more information about the hags the party were about to fight, and ended up freeing the child. But she was also ready to kill the child if she thought it was tranforming into a hag as well.
So, all that is a long story about how alignment changes, even forced ones, can add an interesting character arc to play.
Vex always seemed to be more of neutrally aligned character... yes, she did good things, but she also did very selfish things (understandably due to her childhood) in equal measure. So, saying her character was "good" aligned was pushing it. The stealing of the flying broom was just a final step in Matt's eyes.
I never liked the character of Vex all that much, though I never hated Laura, and I remember being very angry with Vex's choice of stealing the broom.
It came on the heels of still being angry at her for her greed getting her killed in the Sunken Tomb, and causing Vax to enter into his deal with the Raven Queen. lol
Matt also "punished" Pike for her actions early on in the stream. I don't recall if it actually involved an alignment change, but it definately resulted in a strain in her relationship with her Goddess. Pike was able to make ammends and restore the balance after a time, much like Vex restoring her alignment.
Sooo, this is the first episode I watch on release date after binging the other demystified videos for the last two weeks. By far not as hard to catch up to critical role. Thanks Mike, thanks a lot. 🙌🏻
Very happy to have you!
Wait until the realization you hqve tonwaitb2 weeks for next one now.
Two videos I look forward to. One that comes out on Saturdays and this one every other Thursday.
Wait, 4 druids? That sounds so interesting! I'd love to hear more about the party composition and how it came about
“It’s a 10/10/30’ tidal wave, how much water could that be, 50 gallons?”
I think the tweeter was also wrong, I make it 22,000gal
@@stevecarter8810 that was my calc as well. Hilarious how off both Matt’s initial estimation AND the correction were 🤣
As many gallons as one Banana costs
Love the initiative-list! Especially for a bigger group and with a more complex combat.
I think the problem with the way of dealing with alignment in this way is that Matt changing Vex's alignment is a meta-commentary on her character, not an in-world one. It's not that Vex did something wrong and then had some real-world consequence for it, and then subsequently changed her behaviour to going forward; it's that Matt made a meta change to Laura's character, and Laura didn't like it, so she decided to play Vex differently to try to get her alignment back. This is where I think comparisons to, say, Percy, are faulty, because on the one hand, yes, Percy's alignment didn't change despite doing some really awful things, but on the other hand, Percy experienced some very serious in-world consequences for his decisions. It wasn't necessary for him to be 'punished by the gods' with an alignment change; Percy got to see where the destructive path he was following would lead first hand.
Contrast to, instead of changing her alignment, Matt had made it that Chris' character figures out that Vex stole the broom, becomes angry and takes revenge on the party in some way later in the story. Now you have an in-universe consequence for Vex, and have a legitimate reason for her to want to change her behaviour.
I believe the most problematic thing about alignment in D&D is how people insist in thinking of it as a roleplay tool... when it is actually a game mechanics.
Simply put, it is, mechanically speaking, to have laser guided weapons.
Considering the typical Good party of PCs, versus the typical Evil opponents, alignment is more than just a suggestion of how to behave or a gauge or how moral or ethical someone is; it is LITERALLY a weapon, because when you summon a Holy Hand Grenade and explode, blind, or banish a bunch of enemies around your unscathed friends, it is no different than casting a Fireball in a group of enemies among your party that is immune to fire damage.
Powerful relics and artefacts are aligned based, which means that Good/Evil, Law/Chaos translate not only in good fun and roleplay, but in actual power. Not only points of view, but actual cosmic forces that interact and influence the world just like gravity or termodynamics, and a PCs control or resistance to those forces must be taken into account.
So it becomes quite complicated to consider that alignment doesn't or shouldn't have an impact on the table other than roleplaying, because its presence is there and has to be accounted for in encounter balances as well. So yes, it does come to a certain level of punishment, specially for aligned based characters like Clerics and Paladins. Which is why the point of communication of expectations Mike brings here is VITAL. Excellent call.
Seems like Vex was more of a Chaotic Good character. I do think the DM may adjust players alignment if their actions are outside of the box. It is basically the world reacting to their actions.
I definitely agree she feels like a fairly chaotic character. She follows rules sure, but only as far as they are useful. She’s happy doing any dirty trick if it’s a better option such as lying, threatening, stealing and so on, often being the first to suggest such tactics (not knocking her, I’m partial to a reasonable chaotic character). And in my mind she falls almost between neutral and good. She does care about the outcomes, wanting to help innocents and such, but also shows a good amount of self interest and even greed. But that’s just my take
I appreciate, while also finding tiresome, the disclaimer at the top about Hardwick. (Tiresome, only because it feels like this unfortunate topic comes up fairly often, and I just find it a little exhausting at this point, while recognizing that it's a sensible thing to do.) It's always a tough thing to handle, and I think you handled it well.
I liked Hardwick, I found that whole situation really tough to deal with, because I don't know what happened, I just know what she said, and what he said in response, and then I found myself less interested in spending my time with his work because it all felt messed up and unpleasant. But I can't deny I enjoyed a lot of his content, and I'm pretty against just erasing people from history because we find them questionable (it's just a bad way to think about history, even if it makes us feel better). So I'm glad you didn't gloss over his involvement, but also glad you didn't ignore the unpleasantness either.
The thing that always bothered me about Matt changing Vex's alignment is that he never changed Percy's alignment. Like Percy has done worse things than stealing a broom. Even other members of the cast called this out, I remember specifically Liam called it out in one of the Q&A's and I don't remember Matt ever actually explaining why he felt Percy's alignment shouldn't change.
To my knowledge all Matt ever said on the matter was “there’s a difference between doing occasional bad things and being a bad person regularly” or something to that effect. Immediately after, some people said that Percy DID do bad things regularly, but that part of the conversation quickly fizzled out iirc.
As sucky as it might sound, Matt may have subconsciously been a tad bit more lenient with Percy since a large part of the campaign revolved around his backstory, and because the Briarwood saga was probably made with the idea that Percy would be fighting off corrupt tendencies during it. Granted, that’s purely a guess. I could be totally wrong.
Maybe it could've been because people threw so much fuss about the theft? AFAIK people were mostly stoked for No Mercy Percy.
Personally, I use changes to alignment, because I just don't think it should be how the character percieves themself, but how the world percieves them. And as a DM, I'm the world. If I have some "chaotic neutral" character being consistently problematic in a harmful way, I'm sure as hell gonna change his alignment to evil. If you're consistent about this, then it's a game feature. But if you're not, it can cause huge issues.
@@doctordee6321 I believe he said there's a difference between thinking/planning bad things and actually doing them.
Which is a baffling retort when it comes to Percy. Percy DID do terrible shit. And if given the opportunity, he'd have done MORE terrible shit.
I like to think that if the Briarwoods arc had ended any differently, and Percy hadn't rebelled against Orthax in the end, his alignment would've changed. I agree that Matt's justification didn't make sense (I believe the exact wording was "you can have fucked up thoughts and not act on them", but the other PLAYERS instantly called out that Percy very much DID act on them), but I wonder if it would've been handled like this.
@ jakubguziur7522 on the note of chaotic neutral, what do you think qualifies as that alignment? I’m currently playing with someone who I think does an amazing job because he looks out for himself but doesn’t randomly murder. Like, he acts completely on a whim, but he never does so maliciously. We’ve even gained two valuable allies because we saw people we thought were dangerous and he just went up and casually started a conversation. I’m curious what others think chaotic neutral means.
I’ve played Chaotic Evil characters before.
I once was referred to as Chaotic Splendid once.
I have manipulated NPC’s to aid the party (& myself).
If my party wins, they know my machinations were to the party’s advantage.
Selfishness is Evil, but not always harmful to role play.
I have an idea for a new video series: controversial dnd moments and what we can learn from them (expanding into d20, dice camera action, that infamous Adam koebel moment etc)
I really enjoy how plainly you lay out optional directions players and DMs can take when faced with similar issues. It seems like one big piece of advice you give regularly centers around consent.
I love this- and you may have a video talking about this. But I would love a video specifically talking about agreements and consent in the context of playing DnD. When should you seek to obtain OOC buy in ahead of time, vs when should you let it ride and play it out IC? As a DM, what is your role in mediating character interaction and collaboration both in and out of game? I would love an exploration into this from your experience and perspective.
Big agree!
If i was Matt, i would have approached Laura and asked her to pick between some of the Neutral alignments. That way there still a consequence, but it atleast gives the player some agency.
A discussion should be had, but ultimately I agree with Matt's decision: You don't get to choose your alignment, you choose your actions and THEY define it.
My initiative tracking system is similar to your paper form method. I have a 3/8" dowel with evenly spaced marks up to 30. This dowel is attached to my DM screen like a flagpole. I have clothespins with my PC's names written on them. When I call for initiative, i just go around the table from left to right and clip names to the dowel at the appropriate value. For enemies, I have more clothespins with letters that correspond to an enemy list behind the screen.
The added benefit of this system is that the players can easily see who is next without constant reminders of who is next in line.
I never really saw a large problem with Vex stealing the broom, largely because it was just a one-off guest and he was already playing such an obviously joke character. The alignment change alos didn't bother me because it didn't seem like a punishment, more as a natural change because Vex clearly wasn't being roleplayed as good, or at least as good as expected.
Also, Gern being a joke character in such a serious episode also never bothered me, although if I went back to the episode I could see how it may. The entire episode just seemed t me like they were having a good time.
Thank you for explaining what you do with initiative. I recall you complaining about Matt's method earlier, and I'm glad to see you elaborate on it.
That being said, I think I prefer Matt’s method. It just seems wasteful to print out an entire sheet just because my players *might* not be listening during initiative collection, when I could just use Matt's method instead and fit my turn order in the margin of my notebook (right next to the HP totals of my monsters).
Fair enough! :)
To throw my hat in the initiative thing, back in college we always played in classrooms, with whiteboards, which meant I could just go around the table and have everyone say their number, then I could just sort it once everything was up on the board, which is extra easy because players are really eager to help with basic stuff when its on a whiteboard apparently. Including when you track damage dealt to enemies on the board and you have someone who can do addition in their head very quickly. When I get back into in person games, a small whiteboard to write on is definitely going to be part of my kit. Write them down, let your players sort them.
I frequently find myself missing playing in classrooms and drawing simple drawings on the board so the players can better understand what's going on! (I will forever cherish the time the DM said "brassieres of fire" and had to draw them for the party to go "OH! Braziers!" and that day the DM learned it was pronounced bray-jzhers 😂)
For initiative I use a set of magnets with the character names on it. Super easy to move around as players roll. I'll be enhancing it with the number list like your sheet has.
Thanks
Regarding initiative: I make laminated initiative cards. Every player gets a card, writes their initiative on the card, and gives them to the DM. You can clean off the cards to re-use them when you're done.
As an Irishman I can say the accent is almost perfect, it's sounds quite good at moments
Same and same. When I first heard the episode I was very surprised when I heard him speaking in his natural accent.
(There are some tells if you listen out for them-to my ear he never quite nails the T sound. He knows what he’s going for but always falls a bit too hard or a bit too soft.)
Also Irish! Though I'm from Antrim so my accent is pretty different - but I think he sounds great! I cringed a bit every time Mike called it goofy XD
Yeah, he sounded very close to Graham Norton I wondered whether he'd modelled his voice after him
For those wondering when she whispers her complaint to Liam, ep 58, 1 hour 12 minutes 30 seconds ish.
For Intiative, I like to use Google Sheets or Exel. I have my players' names in column B, and in column A I can imput their number. Then I sort fron Z-A in column A, and I have everything in the correct order! It isn't perfect, but it saves a bit of time. I might shift over to the MCDM RPG method in the future, just having having the players pick who goes when and alternating between them and the monsters. Just thought I would share!
my thoughts on the alignment change
the punishment argument is weird cause there are things that are predicated on being a specific alignment, so being one alignment vs the other can be what someone wants, so changing someone's alignment could be construed as a punishment.. but that's kind of the point right, the character was selfish and acted purely out of their own intentions multiple times until now and stealing from another player just cause she wanted their item (when it was apparent these items exist in the world cause he had one) should not be something the character can just do without any consequences. Just cause something is a punishment for bad behavior does not mean the punishment is bad, or unwarranted. Otherwise alignment has no meaning in a game if you can do whatever you want without any issues.
You mentioned she was excited to be back to her original alignment 30 episodes later, when it took her 46 episodes of poor behavior to have it changed initially. Good, she should be excited. it should feel like she needs to earn that alignment back over time, since it took 46 episodes to loose it. if your not going to care about alignment in a game then there is no point in even having it, and actions done should be counted against the alignment.
Like in older editions if your a paladin and lawful good, and commit a brutally evil act for w/e reason the god just says "nope no spells for you" and "punishes" the paladin for acting against their alignment, and then they need to essentially earn their forgiveness back over time (if ever)
and the other side of this is the players perception of what their alignment means to them, because you can always justify any action if you just say "my character does not think its against his alignment" so that paladin who brutally murdered a homeless person can say "well he was homeless and going to die slowly, so i just ended it quickly for him as an act of mercy" even though that's not a good action if you give 100% of the agency of alignment to the players it becomes meaningless, there needs to be a line in the sand, and at the end of the day the DM is that line in the sand, if you don't want the DM to be able to change alignment then alignment in the game, then alignment does not mean anything to you anyway, since you would just argue your way out of any "wrong doings" anyway.
having alignment be determined by the DM based on actions in my opinion is the only real way alignments work, cause like i said people will just argue away any thing they do that breaks alignment if they think it would shift their alignment to one they dont want it to go to.
morality is tricky cause there are times when you can argue and it makes sense, like someone stealing food because if they don't they will die of hunger, not an evil act and everyone can kind of agree to that, but stealing something just cause you want it, is still not an "evil" act but its still a dick move, but arguing that stealing something from someone while maintain your "good" just cause you wanted it is a harder sell (unless again you allow the player 100% agency of their own alignment without any consequences to actions.
Agree - What the word "punishment" is being used to describe here is better called "consequences". If you undertake evil actions too frequently, you lose your "good" tag. You may regret that, you may seek to rectify things, you may rejoice at your redemption - these are the point.
Without consequences, there are no stakes. Without the failure and fall being meaningful, there is no worthwhile redemption.
@@PVS3 yeah like if i go around smashing things around the town just cause i want to, i cant really keep calling myself neutral good when im obviously doing things purely out of my own interest or desires. I can just say "well my character things society is to rigid and a little mess here and their is healthy for a town to grow... its what my character thinks, and in a warped way makes sense to him, so no consequences leading to an irrelevant "good" tag on my character so who cares.
Spoilers for campaign 2 in this
When fjord told ukatoaa to fuck off his "punishment" was loosing his spells for a while, this was a consequence to his action of rejecting his patron, and he rejoiced when he got his spells back, the fall meant something and when he corrected things he was elated to have his stuff back
@@maxthompson1997 Exactly. If I can't lose the "Good" sticker by doing bad things, then it has no significant meaning. It *should* be upsetting to the player when their bad actions come back on them, that's what drives the drama of a good character arc.
Mike I really gotta disagree with you about Laura’s alignment change. Yes it sucks whenever the DM has to make a decision about your character, but let’s remember something you often say about Matt Mercer. Matt is a DM who very much strives to honor his player’s choices in game. Matt definitely created Taldorei as a world where the player’s choices matter and I would argue that allowing Vex to exhibit a string of highly selfish behavior without her alignment changing robs her of more agency than changing it. After all if you can do things like that and still remain Neutral Good the implication is your choices about how your character interacts with the world don’t matter.
If a DM and a player discuss the player’s alignment, and the conversation ends with the player not on the same page about whether or not they should have that specific alignment, the conversation was not long enough.
@@SupergeekMike Not necessarily. Some players are just never going to agree. But the DM is the one that has the omnipotent view of the world and the morality of the world. Ultimately, they are the ones that decide where actions fall on the alignment chart. Ideally, they would explain their view to the player, have an honest discussion about it, and come to a mutual understanding, but that won't always be the case. If a player is convinced their Lawful Good character remains Lawful Good despite torturing bad guys for information because it is all for the greater good of the world, despite what the DM says, then tough luck for the player, but their alignment just became Evil.
@@BearTheGrudge Laura had never encountered any mechanics that involved alignment, so "interacting with the game in ways that offer her mechanical benefits therein" had nothing to do with it. She just did not think of her character as chaotic neutral. I think it's pretty reductive to assume every choice she made and every opinion she had must have been motivated by a desire to be more powerful, when that wasn't always the case.
Imho created works and achievements should not be deleted (or canceled) if the creator is deemed undesirable later.
Everybody makes mistakes and many do something bad once in a while. And mistakes and bad urges are best prevented in the future if they are remembered to be learned from. By removing the good works/deeds of that person, we 1) punish everyone by not being able to enjoy what was done/created. 2)prevent people to learn from past mistakes and behaviours.
I've always felt Matt's initiative range strategy plays somewhat like a card game called The Mind hahahahaha
I've used Matts initiative tracking for sixish years and haven't had a problem. But every works table is different
That initiative tracker is brilliant! Using this in future for sure!!
22:05 Sometimes when players get creative you just have to take it on the Djinn!
😝🤣
*Djinn and Efreet are different but the pun is too good to pass up.
You were really thinking on y'efreet with that one
I personally love Vex’s selfishness, it’s an appropriate flaw given her upbringing and it prevents her from being too perfect. It’s also obviously not a Laura thing, Jester is blasé about money most of the time and freely shares, and Imogen is sometimes selfish but once again, it’s for character-relevant reasons.
I’ve always seen alignment as descriptive and not prescriptive. I had a neutral good wizard who after a couple sessions shifted to chaotic good as I got comfortable playing as him and figured out his personality and motivations through RP. Vex’s alignment shift isn’t a punishment, it’s just a reflection of her choices- and as she grows as a character and gets over some of her insecurities around wealth and status, her alignment shifts back to good to show the change in the choices she makes
to be honest after that happened and not being familiar with D&D to that extent, i kinda hoped it would have been just a broom that was flying because of the owner enchanting it
I use the range initiative style just to help organize the talk, and then write them in order. It isn't perfect, but it has helped me out a lot
I honestly don’t even play with alignment at all. I have a vague idea on my character’s morality and where they are coming from in their priorities and reasonings, but I still don’t really ascribe to alignments. Large part of this is due to the wide or narrow range other people perceive alignments and how these don’t always overlap for everyone’s understanding of the alignments. Not a bad thing! But I’d rather explain the complexity of my characters than throw it into a vague box.
For example, I have a healer character, a ranger. They have a weapon and do head into danger and have taken down enemies assassin style (silent one shots and then pulling the body in and tucking it away). Yet, they also ran over to a dying guard, got a spear to the back by the enemy for the audacity of disguising themselves as one of them, and prioritized healing the guard so he didn’t bleed out. When asked why, I mentioned that, while my character will take out others, one of their main creeds is to preserve life where they can afford to. They do this from a place of protectiveness though, not necessarily as holy mission or the like. This means they will be sneaky and stealthy and even dip into being shady. But over all, their mind is on leaning the balance towards life and agency of people. This also means they lean towards a more rebellious vibed faction when presented, so long as it is for the people and community. Their priority is the preservation of their loved ones. In fact, this character is searching for a kidnapped childhood friend and has already intimidated many a captured enemy already to get information. Also they have swiped a few valuables when the party was broke to tide us over, but also been known to return looted items to the town where the bandits may have stolen it from. For all this, they are still considered the kind and generous healer of the group who will largely promote "good" aligned courses of action. So for alignment? I consider this roughly neutral good. I still know my character enough that, under the right circumstances, they will lean "lawful" or "evil" in their actions but it all depends on context for me. Anyway, my point is, that alignment is too subjective for me, so I don't lean into it. I feel it also restricts "evil" aligned players and makes it more difficult on a meta level for us players to have our characters get along and stay together as a party. I also feel it pushes people to lean too far into tropes and use that as a crutch rather than flesh out their character's organically. But thats me. I prefer a roleplay/storytelling style of dnd so it works in those types of campaigns. I can see how this alignment thing might be a better fit for a different style than my preference.
Thanks for sharing your initiative order sheet! I agree: For me, this would be so much quicker and easier to get everyone’s order.
17:15 Sticky tabs work great for initiative, and you can even color code them. Just write name and number, and then you can sticky them in order
I have seen four times in games that I have been participating in where a player stole from another player. I have never seen a campaign survive it.
My group uses the number range system, but with one added tool: The Whiteboard. Each party member's name is on a magnet for ease of reuse and one of the players writes down every item on the list for easy tracking both for the DM and the players. This also makes it clear who is next and lets the players manage turn order a bit if the DM gets distracted for some reason. If the DM has any secret characters or initiatives, they track that behind the screen and insert them as needed. The whiteboard has plenty of other great uses, large scale maps, group notes, day counts, setting tone.
For in-person play I always have a notebook page with the numbers 30-1 down the side, just like your doc. Simple to set up and use, can erase the vales between encounters, and use the rest of the page to track hit points and statuses
For initiative, what we would do in the table I used to play at was we each had an index card with the character's name, the player's name and certain relevant stats, like passive perception and passive insight. We'd also put any special senses (darkvision, etc) or relevant other stuff, like the Observant feat's ability to read lips. The DM would hand out those cards to us at the beginning of each game and we'd record our initiative on there. Monsters and lair actions would also have their own cards. Old initiative numbers would get crossed out neatly so the DM didn't get confused and once it didn't have enough space to be effective anymore, the player would make a new card.
The weird thing is, and slight spoilers for the next episode
When Vex is with Scanlan trying to get the broom to work, and Scanlan is like "wait, you stole it from a candlemaker who was just trying to help us?" Vex (and I'd hope Laura recognized it too) kept saying "I know, I know, I'm a terrible person! But I really wanted it because I just wanted to fly"
Call it a head scratcher after a scene where you repeatedly called yourself a bad person and voiced that it was a selfish reason for taking it that you don't agree that your character is no longer 'good'
the way i used to do initiative before the computer started to do it for me, is i would write out all the players initials as well as the monster initials or some other shorthand for them the go down the list and ask for their rolls. and id have them add their actual dex stat to help avoid overlap. then i'd just list out their initials in initiative order. and every time their turn was done, i would put a tally mark behind their initials. it also helped me keep track of how many rounds of combat happened.
i also mathed out the amount of gallons in the tidal wave a few years back, and it was.... alot. roughly around 22441 gallons of water... a little bit more than 50...
I think there's 100's of ways to organically introduce a guest PC to a group that one could find on the internet, but I believe it much more difficult to find a way to organically have them leave right at or near the end of a session, especially if you have a group such as Vox Machina where they could either be in a "stab, stab, kill, destroy" mood and plow through prepared content, or a "lets sit and have a narrative moment for an hour" mood. I don't envy Matt's position of having to plan around that for each session.
The last thing you want is to have a guest come in and play, and have to call time on the session when they won't be able to make it back, or to set up some end goal for them that gets accomplished much faster than you expected, and there's still 2 hours of playtime that they either trail along the party and just say "bye" at the end, or awkwardly sit there with the game going on around them since their character walked away into the sunset.
For initiative: instead of having to write down names (takes too long) just have the names on the sheet already. When the players call out their initiative, they say [name, number] where name is their character name and number is what they rolled. Then I only have to write down their number beside their name. They don't have to be in order from top to bottom.
We roll for initiative every round, so I just make a crude grid by drawing a line between each column. This also allows me to track round numbers easily, which can help with stuff that lasts for x rounds.
One thing my DM's do for initative is write our character names onto small specialized magnets or tiles on a digital graph. then they just move those tiles around based on who goes first. Kawa goes before Kenneth? Okay, we'll move her tile above his. Bracken goes after Kawa but before Kenneth? Okay, we move Kawa up and slide Bracken in the middle. Zama delays her action to go after Bracken? Okay, we push her tile to be after Bracken as well.
This way it's more fluid and flexible, and you don't need to write down any specific numbers, you just measure who goes before who by arranging them vertically in a column, and having some method of determining who's term you're on. be that by moving a tile to the side briefly, or having a separate tile that points at the tile of whoever's turn it is.
love your content man keep up the great work hope you're feeling better
I agree that alignment should be based on your actions and can change any moment but this should be said in a session zero
For your point on how Matt rules failures, I usually try to avoid this for certain checks, basically if I feel like the player's character wouldn't commonly fail this task (based on the fanatasy of the character) I'll describe as bad luck but if it's something I don't feel the character is usually reliable at I'll rule it as a failure similar to how Matt would (i.e. the heavy armour cleric crit fails the stealth check because their armour clinked off something, whereas the rogues crit fail would be more like a dagger falls loose from their bag or something)
my initiative method is a double-sided magnetic whiteboard and small whiteboard magnets. All the players get two magnets and they write their initiative on it after they roll. Then we just...put them in order on the board, I have a side and they have a side. They add the spare magnets on their side as they learn the badguys initiative and they can write other things like spell durations because its a white board, and I track enemy health on my side.
20:10 We just had a moment like that happen recently at our table with me and my friends. We were facing off against a long-running enemy from multiple campaigns and climbing a tower of undead shades based on previous NPC allies from the last campaign. We get to a druid we had worked with on many times and we roll initiative. I play a Triton Swashbuckler. First couple rounds of combat we fight her and her sentient weapon that we must destroy to weaken the BBEG. As the weapon is about to be destroyed, she wild shapes into a fire elemental and looms over our team. My turn comes up and I use wall of water and make its ring form around the enemy. My goal was to slow it down; my DM asks what Matt asked. Being a SPED math teacher, I found the formula for converting cubic feet to gallons and learned I did 1496 cold damage to her. DM had to take a 10 minute break because I obliterated another boss with a bs tactic that I didn't mean to!
I love D&D sometimes!
A thought about the moment where Vex attempted to hide, but didn’t have enough levels in rogue to do so - I remember hearing from somewhere that Laura had originally wanted to play a rogue character, but decided she would let Liam play the class instead and settled on ranger. Matt allowing the bonus action stealth roll, although against RaW, feels like the way to go to let her actually play out the character she really wanted from the beginning.
I don’t recall where I heard that bit about Laura wanting to be a rogue but giving it up for Liam, but I also remember hearing the same thing happened with her wanting Jester to be a warlock but letting Travis play the part instead. I appreciate her looking out for the fun of the other players.
I can't wait until you get to the episode where Sam stole from the party and fans lost their collective minds even worse than they did with Laura...oh, wait, they didn't, they were completely fine with it.
Never mind... 😉
If we’re talking alignment shifts, Scanlan using Modify Memory to force Jarret into being his drug dealer is one of the most fucked up nonviolent things I can think of a party member ever doing. EDIT: and now that I think about it, he also once fried two civilians to hit a boss with a Lightning Bolt. He had the option to hit Vax instead (who would have almost certainly passed the save and taken no damage), and of course didn’t have to use the spell in the first place, but he actively chose to kill two innocents in that moment.
@@ColonelMustache I like to think that Scanlan lost his Good alignment at some point during that downward spiral, although that'd be going against Matt. Heck, I feel Scanlan should've been Chaotic Neutral from the start, or at least until he met Kaylie and re-evaluated his life choices, but that's the alignment minefield for you. Few people agree on what a character qualifies as.
Scanlan’s modify memory is easily the most evil deliberate act any CR character has done during a campaign. The only thing that comes close is Chetney and the shopkeep in C3. And Scanlan essentially has zero consequences for it.
Honestly as entertaining as Sam as a person is, Scanlan was a horrible character that did awful and creepy things throughout the campaign. But Scanlan rarely if ever gets any ire from the audience.
His antics in C2 were even worse, literally putting the party at risk on more than one occasion. If Laura or Marisha’s characters had done anything similar to some of what he does you can bet the comments would have been vicious about them.
@@troikas3353 "If Laura or Marisha’s characters had done anything similar to some of what he does you can bet the comments would have been vicious about them."
Not only would they be playing the game "wrong", they'd be "stealing the spotlight" too. ;)
I have a rule in my games that there is no rolling dice or doing something detrimental against another PC, unless both PLAYERS are on board with it. To me, if Laura had asked Chris (not as PCs, but as players) and then done it if he agreed, I would have had no problem.
As far as initiative systems go, before I started using apps (like DND Beyond or Roll20), I used to use Index cards... each card would have a PC's name on it, or Monster-1, Monster-2, Monster-3, or NPC-1, etc. and then one more card that reads "END OF ROUND." When they roll initiative, I go through the stack, write down the numbers and shuffle the cards accordingly. Then during combat, it's a breeze to just go through your stack of cards, one by one, moving each card to the back of the pile after that person or group of monsters takes it's turn.
It's a great system, because once you've created the cards, it takes almost no time to put them in order when combat starts, and as combat progresses, no one ever gets missed. No one. It's the only foolproof system I've ever used.
I probably said this last time you talked about Matt's initiative system, but THANK YOU!!!! Its SO BAD! I tried it when I first started running D&D and IMMEDIATELY was like "Why the fuck am I doing this? I'm already confused!" After that I would just take a sheet of notebook paper out before the game started, and numbered it from 1 to 30 from the bottom to the top, and from there just call on each player one at a time, and you'll never miss a number!
Like, I really want to know what in Matt's tabletop career made him start using his system, cuz like it happened for a *reason*, right? And I'm fascinated.
For my party's initiative, we each have a clothes pin with our name written on it, then there are additional clothes pins with numbers to represent baddies and also a lair clothes pin only used when applicable. We do Matt's initiative range system to call out initives in general order, and the DM just pops the clothes pins on top of the DM screen in the right order, so it's easy enough to swap someone if they missed a range or have to roll again pt something. It works well enough for us.
16:03 #irlproblems This doesn't happen in digital bc turn order is sorted automatically, or if you use a text editor, you can easily insert lines between given init order
That list thing is a good idea. I'm gonna use that, thanks!
I’m so used to Mike going into these careful, articulate discourses about D&D issues that his response to the “stealing from another player is CRAZY” hubbub being “are you high?” cracked me up more than any other joke on this show.
Can't wait to see the blue dragonborn in the animated series
When it comes to initiative I do both. I have some paperwork that’s kinda numbered the same way, but I ask out in sections of 5. That way, only a couple of people at a time will speak up, and very rarely do I get more than 3 in the same block of 5. Idk, I think it works really well with my large party of 7
In my current campaign first session, another player tried to steal a locket that's important to my character. I noticed in character and stopped it, but it would've really upset me if it had succeeded...
Personal or Unique items should be off-limits from theft, unless it's for a very big narrative reason.
I play online so initiative tracking is simple, and built in to the vtt i use, so players can add their own or others to the list, and i often default to asking one player to say the nrs
I'm catching up fairly well with VM, and the episode after Hardwick joined, is when it started to sink in. I was not a fan of all the interactions Vex (and to a degree the party) has been acting on or justifying why they did things. Like it was all very selfish means to get results immediately. Sam in the following episode I think did well by laying into her about the ordeal on a moral standpoint, but kind of backtracked by superficially stating "you hurt one person, so we'll have to help someone to balance it out, karma." Vex agrees and Scanlan quickly adds "for a person of MY choosing" knowing she might try to easy mark the task to absolve herself quickly.
It's not my personal choice to upset other players or intentionally pvp characters, but it should be a discussion at some point if these issues arise. Lingering resentment for a minor thing isn't fun for a parties morality in the longterm.
Regarding how Matt handles failures/successes, there's definitely a shift in approach after Campaign 1, where he introduces the "which brings you to a total of?" principle. I.e a Nat 20 won't automatically make your character good at something they're bad at (e.g Grog on Intelligence). Regarding low rolls not being a character's fault, I often find it's best if it's left up to the PLAYER to roleplay hilarious failure if they want to. There's many times when the cast of Critical Role do this, though it's tricky to encourage this as more metagame-y players might not want to make their character fail.
I love the Gern lore drop because, like you said, it's played as a joke in the moment. But coming back to the episode after later developments and I realized what seemed like a non-sequitur at the time was actually foreshadowing major things about Draconia. The whole tails vs no tails thing was interesting to speculate about because Matt... probably intended it as an arc for Tiberius, but obviously that can't happen now. So we'll see what he and VM do with it later.
I don't use Alignment often but I expect the players to have some idea of what their characters' Alignments are. Mostly because that helps set up conflict if an opposing magical item is found; such as the time the NG Ranger ended up with a LE Githyanki's silver sword. Unless a cursed item is involved, PCs' Alignments are usually left alone. Although many years ago we had a group of CN/CG PCs who spent so much time planning that I jokingly threatened to change them all to LN.
In both Taliesin's and Laura's cases, there would've been warnings IF I picked up on it. The proscriptive and punishing Alignment rules of yesteryear have never been used in my games.
For some time now, my Initiative rules have been basically d12+Proficiency Die and rolled each round. If a PC has a bonus from a class feature, that's added as well. The characters are written on a small whiteboard (roughly the size of a laptop) in alphabetical order and I record the numbers against each. Then it's a matter of erasing the numbers as we go.
when you talked about this episode, the joke character and keyleth’s moment i thought it would be a slack, but i kinda saw that marisha was all on it, she enjoyed every joke, it made me
more secure about the episode and a good moment in a moment when even vax wasn’t all himself
I'm 'relatively' new watcher of Cr, only at episode 68 for the first time. but im an old D&D'player.
Now I adore Laura and i generally really like Vex. Except for her selfish greed.
imo stealing within the party8including guest stars) is only okay if your charecter is of an alignment that would justify said stealing: ie. if you are playing evil you can steal what ever from what ever, why would you care?
But if you are claiming a good alignment you can only justify that by stealing items that can be used to harm innocents from evil charecters.
Vex stole from a freindly good/neutral charecter that was helping them, she stole 100% for Her own selfish greed. A charecter of a good alignment would Not do that. So Laura isnt being punished by her alignment shifting, Shes the one who actively shifted it Matt is simply telling her he's seen it.
But honestly its been comming a long time, the whole groupe but especially Vex will happily blackmail and threaten innocent shopkeepers to get their way even forcing them under what would be 'at cost price'. When it comes to money and getting stuff they are all way closer to evil than good alignment. Vex is the worst though.
So while I do not agree with Vex's action here, it was 100% in alignment with how she's acted all campain.
Alignment is just a reductive descriptor of actions, not a concrete determiner of them. A truly terrible person may never have stolen anything in their life, a good person may have. Alignment is just a set of training wheels to use at the start if a player has trouble getting into their characters pov. Using it for anything more than that is unneccisary and arguably actively harmful to organic development.
oh you absolutely do not have to use alignments in your games and they can be fine. BUT if you do chose to use it then you have to accept the consequenses of your actions on your alignemts.
Such as cheeks on charecter: are they a good trustworthy person or not?
vex is actually an extremely untrustworthy person lying and scheeming all the time, and mostely for her own sole benifit. but that doesnt make her evil, just not in any way cabable of claiming a 'good' title either.@@troikas3353
@@troikas3353disagree, the organic development happened right here with VM. Having a lawful alignment didn't prevent reprehensible behaviour, so the adjustment made sense, especially because now artifacts that have alignment-specific behaviour will work correctly. Vex should not be able to claim the immunity of a lawful alignment while stealing and extorting her way around exandria
Make a spreadsheet, list all characters and players, ask the players their initiative numbers and apply numbers for all others in the encounter. Sort column.
17:03 I use this method now but it’s coupled with the index cards on my DM screen. I have sticky notes with enemies that I put up in between as a clear visual for me.
I love your content, even when I disagree with some of your takes this episode. I can see your points of view and you construct such wonderful talking points. Excited for more and more episodes.
I very much agree that it's nice when the players put in some work to explain why they're hanging out together. It makes a DMs life so much easier.
The "Broomgate" thing is one of the rare times where I'll side against Laura, my usual fave player (although I'm not justifying some of the weird stuff the fans got up to when complaining about her). In my experience PVP theft is often a warning sign that something is about to go toxic or that one player is only thinking of their own fun rather than the group's enjoyment as a whole. Your policy on the matter sounds like a good solution.
When I'm playing a bard, I will pick out instrumental songs that fit the narrative and play them quietly (playing pathfinder which is based on 3.5 rules) both for ambiance and as a subtle reminder that you have the bonus' from my bardic song.
Keeping it instrumental keeps it from being too distracting, though I did get a laugh out of everyone when I started playing the Jurassic Park theme in violin while we were fighting a t-rex skeleton.
Great episode Mike. A couple things, shame on the community for hating on Laura. So what if she stole a broom,. second, I agree with Matts way of handling alignment. We all like to think we are one way, but our alignment isn't how we see ourselves it's how the world sees us. It would make sense for Lauras actions to hurt her alignment. Plus, when she finally gets back to good it makes for a better moment. If he hadn't changed it she just would have went about doing bad things. Great episode though.
i love the episode as always, i hope some time we get one of these for EXU Calamity, or any of the shorter games could be interesting to help new gms structure a one shot
mostly i just really like calamity
I really do not run alignment as something mechanical in the slightest, and I think the issue here is kinda that for those DMs who still do, like all other variable rules and lore that is unique to someone's games or setting, the DM is the one dealing with alignment. Just like if someone wrote on their sheet that they speak elvish, and the DM goes "actually in my setting there isn't an elvish language, so let's change it to something else" I see a DM telling you your alignment has changed the same way.
As much as some people would like to act like it is, alignment is not nearly enough of an airtight system where every character is easily divided into the grid, and people are gonna disagree about that all the time, so again, while my and many other DM's solution is just not to use it, if it is being used, their needs to be an understanding of what sorts of character and actions fall on the chart. While this can probably be done more smoothly by having a group discussion and ironing out a sort of compromise between everyone's beliefs, if you don't think to do that ahead of time then the default answer is the same as for every other ruling, whatever the DM thinks is right.
Laura's honestly one of my favorite players, but this is one case where I just think I'm too different from someone to understand their feelings. This isn't an indictment of her as a player, I'm just saying people are super different and I wouldn't be surprised if Matt straight up didn't understand why someone would be upset by something like that, because I feel like if I was in his place I definitely wouldn't be.
I get that you intended the disclaimer section as just that: a disclaimer. However, the way you put it really made it sound like a “He definitely did some bad stuff but this isn’t the time or place to go over that” kind of thing. It was only after reading some other comments and doing my own research that i found out the situation is, at most, uncertain, and that chris was pretty much completely reinstated after the companies he was involved with investigated the accusations. I know you meant well, but if you’re going to be really vague about a serious topic like this, its probably best to just not touch on it.
Don't you ever think that when they're telling their initiative order that it's for the people that are listening sometimes it's nice to see somebody yell out their natural 20 or something else
if you go around the table and ask for everyone's initiative in turn, they will still get to proudly proclaim their nat 20 - plus bonuses- and it's still a cool feeling.
Laura hate? She is my favorite player haha.
And I think Marisha gets a bad wrap. Keylith is kinda clueless about the world. Marisha embraces that.
I'm gonna throw my hat in and say that yes, Laura absolutely had the alignment shift coming. She didn't LIKE it, but you've pointed out multiple times that Matt wants Exandria to be a real, living world, and there are consequences to what happens. Tiberius buzzsawing the old woman in episode 25 is one of the big ones, but this is another one. Truth be told, Vex's actions and Laura's attitude for the post-Briarwood stretch nearly made me gave up on the show a few times; basically the entire stretch, Vex enabled several plans centered entirely on "greed" - wanting to go fetch the treasure out of the well during the episode with Garthok, being a large part of the reason the purple worms showed up under Krieg's house because she wanted to loot the treasure still there, arguably the interactions with the peddler who fleeced Grog in Vasselheim, and even farther back with conning the dwarves in Kraghammer out of MORE money by pretending that half the party died when they went to get their 25,000 gold reward. She's pissed as hell that she loses a haggling session for the first time ever in the campaign to buy that book in Vasselheim. Even, to a *small* extent, opening Purvan's coffin, though yes that was mostly Percy and/or bad communication and she absolutely did not deserve to die - but she still immediately dropped helping her brother out of the hole he fell in to go over there when it was called out that they were looting the coffin when it wouldn't even take another minute to get him out. It's a repeated pattern of greed, and if you watch some of the other non-CR stuff the cast was involved in on G&S around that time, it's *very* clear that this is a thing with *Laura* and not just Vex. Someone mentions on an early Talks Machina that she loves to go thrifting and is an absolute nightmare about haggling for discounts, much as Vex is in game, and in the "escape room" show with Janet Varney hosting Laura repeatedly yanks stuff other people find out of their hands so she can inspect or just have them. Janet even gives her a nickname for it, something like "Grabby McGrabhands," and Laura admits it herself in one of the post-game talk-to-the camera bits.
Now, obviously none of this is evil. Bumping to evil would be completely wrong, but "Neutral" fills in for a lot of stuff, and Vex has repeatedly demonstrated a "get mine" attitude that she acts on whenever she reasonably finds it possible to do. Laura has also talked about how post-death Vex kind of felt like she could get away with basically anything because she's already survived (for a given value of the word) the worst that could happen, so she was free to follow her impulses. And, frankly, some of her impulses were bad. Vex/Vox Machina being so powerful in Exandria and this being just a game means she can Do More, whereas in reality I'm sure she's lost several haggling sessions, and she just doesn't have as much power to exploit. To me, this felt like Matt remembering all the things she's been doing for awhile and pulling another "reminder" that she's not invincible just because she's high level. It didn't nerf her skills, just locked her out of a few things that only that alignment can provide, and as far as I can remember she wasn't using any of those anyway.
Was it worth having a conversation with her over this after the game? I'm on the fence, because she definitely would have rejected the change, and frankly Matt had more than enough reason to put it through. I can see the value in the conversation, and he could have maybe explained to her why it was happening rather than just break it on her. At the very least, he could have talked to her about his reasoning in doing so, but I'm also pretty sure he *did* , though quite possibly after he'd already made the decision. She didn't like it, and this is "actions, meet consequences" territory here. She does start calming down after this, though, and seems to at least accept that there *was* a lesson to learn from it, even if she doesn't like it. We also start learning more about why she is this way as the twins' backstory gets discussed more, and Laura seems to keep the "impulse" actions to fun tricks in combat or stuff that will actually be helpful to the party/harmful to the enemy. Mostly I feel like Vex was somewhat unsettled, not just because of the death but because of several other things like everything happening with Vax, and she needed to find a new center to herself, which she absolutely does and it is wonderful character growth to see in action. The alignment change holds up a mirror to what she's becoming and helps her realize that it isn't *quite* what she wants to be. Notably, she never *loses* these qualities, but they are tuned back into strengths and benefits for the world at large rather than just for her own benefit or the benefit of people she personally likes.
At this point in the campaign, I had your same concerns and I had Vex ranked as my least favorite character. To me it's a matter of table disruption and table respect.
You can point to other characters who had "annoying" aspects, such as Scanlan's frequent jokes and Keyleth's preachy morals. But (YMMV) I felt like Sam had a good handle on when not to ruin a mood with jokes, and Marisha picked her battles to only put her foot down when an action was really going to grate against her character's morals. Maybe that wasn't enough restraint for some viewers, but I at least felt like an effort was being made.
By contrast, I didn't feel like Vex had that same restraint. Every opportunity to haggle was taken, which is only a problem because it means that the scene is paused until Vex is satisfied and the other players (often) cannot participate. Players and viewers were frustrated when Tiberius tried to buy every mirror in town, and I felt similarly when Vex was haggling a 30g book by herself.
I haven't finished S1, I don't hate Vex, I don't hate Laura. It's just a recurring point of frustration that tempts me to fast-forward through scenes.
@@pavfeira Yeah, I never hated her, but it was definitely frustrating to watch - admittedly partially because I'm in customer service, and this type of customer is an absolute *nightmare* to deal with. I can't even count the number of times people have gone some variation of "I don't want it to be that expensive," and, well, tough crap. You want stuff, you pay for it. Matt even calls out the party very early on when they're all bitching about the price/scarcity of healing potions (I think in Kraghammer). It does feel like this is one of the ...I guess "blind spots" of the cast, that in this world, basically everything they want to buy is made by hand (or magic) and so they're not used to having to pay by-hand prices for everything, and it just comes out the worst in Vex. They do get better about it over time, but it's pretty disconnected early in Vox Machina - they still haggle later on and in future campaigns, but it's at a more reasonable level.
The post-Briarwood and first few Chroma Conclave episodes feel, to me, like a very long set of transition episodes. The group has just conquered their first big, *significant* personal battle against Percy's deadly enemies and there's five-six episodes of them just... doing things. Things that are important and will be more important later, but no quests, no crusades, no absolute, direct goal, and in a way I feel like that allowed some things to show that otherwise wouldn't have gotten much focus. In a way it's great for character exploration, but it did also feel like a holding pattern, like a time for, in a way, no consequences. Sure they got in some fights, but nothing completely awful. And the first few Conclave episodes is them settling into this new norm, with the big wrench of the Sunken Temple thrown in at the end. 46-48 feels like the last of the transition episodes to me, where after that everything is more focused. Even though there's a whole bunch of mini arcs in the larger arc, they last long enough to give them good exploration time, mostly have personal connections, and there's a real reward at the end of each. It feels like everyone's characters really *solidify* in the post-48 stretch, in wonderful ways. It's been said pretty often that VM is a group of cliches and stereotypes, and there is some truth to that statement because everyone just created characters for a one-shot that grew, but what they do when they outgrow those starting origins is magnificent.
My feeling, and I feel very strongly, is this: If a DM and a player discuss the player’s alignment, and the conversation ends with the player not on the same page about whether or not they should have that specific alignment, then that conversation was not long enough. The DM has not accurately expressed that this reflects a pattern of behavior, or that this is meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, or that alignment is a holdover from another edition that he doesn’t think is sacred, or whatever other reasoning he needs to share to get someone on the same page before something about their character is fundamentally changed.
This also isn’t something that Laura would have known was possible to change. There’s a moment in C2 where Matt changes something pretty dramatic about Travis’ character (which also divided the internet, but we’ll get there another day), but the difference is that (A) the mechanic was an in-world thing, much more tangible than alignment, so the idea that external forces could change it is something the players are more amenable to already, and (B) Travis ABSOLUTELY knew there would be consequences to his Great Big Decision. When Laura didn’t have that context, then yeah, I feel really icky about this being a “punishment” that changes something so drastic (to her) about her character.
All of your observations are completely valid - I’ve had my own frustrations with many of these, and while I don’t often discuss them in the videos because not all of them are moments we can learn from (plenty of people play the game in a different way from me), some of them still bother me on rewatch. But I still don’t think it’s reasonable for Matt to unilaterally change something as profoundly tied to a character’s personality as alignment is in C1.
(And yes, as many pointed out, this is an issue with alignment being both a personality trait and also something that has in-game consequences, which is why Matt seems to stop using alignment entirely starting with C2.)
How many gallons of water *are* in a tidal wave? 🤔 There are 7.48052 (US) gallons of water in a cubic foot. At max size, a tidal wave is 3000 cubic feet. Max, a tidal wave spell unleashes 22,441.56 gallons (US). So, even the tweeted correction is wrong.
😮😮😮
225 gallons would be approximately correct for a 30 cubic foot tidal wave. If it was specified that the wave was 30' long, 1' tall and 1' wide, the number of gallons would be 1% of the max size, or 224.4156 (US) gallons. But, Matt says aloud that it's 10' tall and 10' wide, to which Marisha adds the 30' long (which is what the spell description also says). As a result, the calculated total is off by a factor of 100.
I did my math wrong by a factor of 10 and got 300 cubic feet. Which is still like, a tanker truck's worth, at 2244 gallons
Funny enough, I love Matt's initiative process
Yess, perfect timing for my commute home!