We’re flashing back to the pre-stream games of the Vox Machina campaign to see what we can learn about Matt Mercer’s style as a Dungeon Master for new players!
CW: Child endangerment, child death, animal death, cursing.
Chapters:
00:00 – Lesson: What Do Level 1 Adventures Need to Look Like?
03:59 – Lesson: A Level 2 Lich?!
06:08 – Lesson: One Quest Leads to Another…
07:55 – Lesson: Vox Machina Considers a Career in Politics…
12:43 – Lesson: The Conspiracy Revealed
17:40 – Lesson: A Slow Burn Subplot Becomes Plot
21:13 – Final Thoughts
22:43 – Outro
Carpet Throwback: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-M5NH9PGi4
Matt pitches the cast on streaming their game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D5RWAn2sIk
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Which story arc from the pre-stream game do you most wish we could see, either as a streamed game, in a comic book, or on the animated series?
I personally use D&D as a basis to build my own world and lore, and I take influences from multiple game systems or fantasy worlds, so I strongly I agree about your point on using non dnd things in dnd
I've had the dead fetal god monster thing as a low level encounter for a long time since before watching Critical Role back when Campaign 1 was coming out lol
And then I see their callback vid to the prestream adventure and I was like "God damn it!!"
Now whenever I do it there's a solid chance my players might think I just got it from Mercer.
Whats the video of Matt pitching the show ? I dont think i ever saw this one
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The SHITs! XD That is such a CR thing.
My last game was the AD&D 2E boxed set Dragon Mountain using the Pathfinder 1E rules. So what game was I playing? We just called it "D&D" too, even though it wasn't the current Dungeons and Dragons ruleset.
The way I had a physical reaction to the sound at the end of the video. Terrifying.
The comics technically did adapt the undead god arc… as one page at the start of Series 2. They just wanted to get it in there.
One thing I've always found fascinating about the pre-stream adventures is according to All Work No Play and a few other sources, Taliesin played a Silver Dragonborn Paladin in the first oneshot. I've always wondered who this character was, what happened to them, and if they're still canon. (Since Taliesin was one of the few there who had significant experience playing TTRPGS, he apparently acted as a sort of mentor character both in and out of universe)
According to a lot of interviews, Matt loves tinkering with the stats of iconic monsters. If he wants the players to encounter something cool early, like the Lich here or Brimscythe later on (who was apparently "somewhere between the young and adult stages" in terms of dragon stats), he'll lower their stats. If he wants an iconic monster to be more of a threat for a bigger, stronger party, he'll buff them. (The Chroma Conclave, especially Thordak and Raishan, were well above Ancient level)
Both Eskil Ryndarian and Grimthorne the fighting ring dwarf were apparently based on Matt's old Everquest characters.
The thing with "not throwing the players into fights they can't win" (yet) still applies on-stream. The Briarwoods fight in Episode 25 was potentially winnable, in fact the group nearly killed Sylas in that first encounter. (Although Matt had an easy out in case they did: he'd turn into mist and there was probably a coffin in the carriage to regenerate him, while Delilah could probably use some Vecna shenanigans to come back if she died there)
1:28 Just for clarrification here…
D&D 4E had an extremely streamlined character creation process…as has been noted by many, it was designed and inspired by the success of World of Warcraft and the like.
Pathfinder, was based on D&D 3.5, and while its character creation process has more in common with 5E then 4E, it has alot of floating numbers that new player(s) can struggle with, if they dont understand the system… I know, I started playing in a 3.5 game last year, and it took me a few months to master the system (the HeroForge system helps alot, btw); also, making 6-odd characters too. But thats a long story…
Suffice to say, for a one-shot, yes… 4E was probably Matt's better choice. But once level ups happened and what not, the system would quickly begin to show its fangs, and thats probably why he then switched the game to Pathfinder after they decided to turn this into a campaign.
4:29 …as explained, there isn't a real difference between Pathfinder and 3.5 D&D…
But, to just lump all TTRPG's together? As "D&D"?
Well, I unsubbed from Bob for that, so Im unsubbing from you…
22:25 why do i hear boss fight music? 🤔
It's so awesome that you mentioned Fantasy Age! I was not expecting that.
I have no problem crossing the streams in my own game. I've stolen so much content from everywhere I find interesting that I just made it a multiversal campaign where anything from anywhere can and probably will happen
I recently did something with "crossing games" like this. I constructed 5e stat blocks for Purple Dragons (in 5 different age stages) based upon several different ones I found online. They have not officially been in the game since 3e, so bringing them over requires some tweaks be made.
4:20 I still tell people I play DnD no matter what system I'm playing lol especially to the uninitiated (I'm really enjoying Exalted 3e rn but not many ppl know about that game)
I came into the CR fandom with the first episodes of the VM cartoon, and I still have to say, naming a bad guy General Krieg (Krieg means war in german) is so on the nose it's still one of the funniest things ever.
The dark horse comics actually do tell a story set in Stilben, but from what I remember, it was a bit different than the one mentioned in this recap.
I love how Matt is the master of a long game plot… as demonstrated even more with the C3 story arc pulling in elements from way back in C1
I don't have a problem taking ideas from other games (or anything else!) to put in my games. I do have an issue with repeating content.
Like I don't know that I can ever run Tomb of Annihilation again. Not because I didn't love that adventure, I like it a lot.
But it already happened in my world, and I have a lot of trouble investing in games I run not set in my world. (I have repeated content, but I always have a resistance to it, and it messes me up.) Also, the one thing that can mess with me taking ideas wholesale and sticking them in my game world, is that I also write novels in the same setting, and some of those I'd like to publish in some way, and it can become an issue when I have to go "Wait, did I come up with this, or did I rip this off to show it to my players?" It's actually to the good, because it means I have to really mess with the idea and put my stamp on it, and make it my own, but it can be tiresome to have some foundational thing that I reference all the time and remember that it's actually from some movie or whatever that I'd completely forgotten about.
I am also hugely in favour of throwing high powered enemies at low powered PC's (as long as you make sure to front load the level of danger, and really communicate that this could be an unwinnable fight).
In hearing that next CR Demystified involves the "most boring" D&D fight, I would love to hear your thoughts on how to live change combat to re-engage your players if you see that they're not having fun.
I realized recently that we haven't seen a FULL Critical Role campaign. We missed two years of Vox Machina, and Mighty Nein was ended early due to Covid.
My players are brand new to DnD, I gave them their first deadly encounter recently and rolls were not going well. Since they're new players I will give them a lot of grace so I made a point to tell them "Not every encounter needs to result in you killing the enemy" to try to move them away from the more video-gamey mindset of "If you get into a fight you have to win."
The idea that retreat is an option just didnt occur to them until I said that, they started to back away from the enemy slowly while still trying to fight them off, they managed to kill the little guys and get the 'boss' into its second phase (I gave him a potion that healed him and made him stronger) so if the dice had favoured them they would have been fine. The encounter ended with the enemy screaching at them from the mouth of his cave in fury. (He's gonna come back at some point to try to get revenge)
My party and my DM didn't like 4th edition at all so we continued 3.5 but we wanted to try 1st edition Pathfinder. We found out that they were pretty similar, so we combined them and just called it 3.75. We'd take gods, lore, monster, etc from both and just had a blast! Dnd and tabletop games are just fun so just do what makes sense for your group!
I still hope for "Jaw Jaw's bizzare adventure" oneshot one day.
Don't steal rules once OGL is officially replaced. Can come back to bite you.
To be fair when they first started there was very little difference between DnD 3.5 and Pathfinder…..maybe just one or two minor adjustments at the time.
Ah so the comics did skip over the undead god. Though they did adapt the adventure against the Myriad in some way. Framing it as the story where the group first came together.
It's incredibly important to always say that DMs can mix and match lore as they want. I love how WOTC are saying this more and writing it in their books
That incoming dragon music from the anime is just so perfectly tense and ominous. I love it
I don't have a resistance to taking ideas from one game and porting them into another, but using established settings that are more detailed than the fairly sketchy setting present in Wanderhome's Hæth setting, because of the similarly ridiculous notion of 'but what if I get it wrong?'
Within that context, I'll happily borrow and steal stuff from any source that takes my fancy (though also I'm not entirely sure a lot of stuff for your standard high fantasy campaigns would really make sense with the sort of games I tend to default to running so it tends to be non TTRPG media rather than other TTRPGs)
But for an example in an AP context of clear borrowing from different game systems – Oxventure set their Blades in the Dark campaign in the setting of their D&D campaign with a few hundred year time skip to explain… Well… Blades is a Victoriana ghost punk setting rather than a faux-renaissance era fantasy one (I think a lot of us were surprised when their Deadlands setting turned out to be a more normal Weird West setting of alternate universe cowboy era America instead of Geth after another time skip)