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loquaciousquark · 2 years

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Game Masters of Exandria: Round Table

Good evening, good evening, good evening! Welcome to a special CR episode with our fabulous DMs of the CR Expanded Universe: Matt Mercer, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and Aabria Iyengar. Matt opens us up! Don’t forget that the Tal’Dorei campaign guide is out now. He’s so excited for more people to play in this world and expand it at their own tables.

Session Zero: very important, even with people you gel with and know well. It’s important to make lines and veils explicit. Aabria likes to have a tone check-in so everyone has a chance to give input. “It’s an amuse-bouche before you start the story.” Brennan sidebars all of us by just being so excited Matt opened up this sandbox for all of us to play with. Matt, cheerfully: “It was all an accident. It just kept growing like The Blob.” Brennan likens this to James Lipton meeting God at the pearly gates and discovering God has no idea what’s going on. Back on topic, Brennan quotes Voltaire: “I apologize for not having time to write you a short letter so I wrote you a long one.” Prepping for a confined campaign is very different than prepping for an open-world game.

Brennan tangents into a discussion of railroading vs. player agency; when you have a short campaign like this where a story has to hit certain beats, the railroading shouldn’t ever come from the DM. Instead, it should come from the players knowing their characters really, really well, which is all established in session zero. If you can establish really strong player backgrounds and motivations before the campaign begins, the plot can be wholly driven by them/their choices and still achieve the beats needed without ever taking away from player agency. “The rails are gonna be who you tell me you are.” The rails for short campaigns should be designed by the player, not the DM.

Aabria praises Brennan’s character creation style; she went into creation with him with half a thought and came out knowing everything about Llaerryn, and also knowing Brennan completely understood her too.

Brennan has a 13-year-old home game that had no session zero; he talks about how that had no creation session because he knew that game had time to expand and grow with the characters & the players would be okay.

Matt likes having everyone create characters together, or at least a session zero shortly after: this is how relationships started with Vex and Vax, Caleb and Nott, etc. Brennan thinks it’s critical to allow unfilmed sessions as well so the players can find their voices. Matt also likes to make sure people will be comfortable with their characters in the long run, not just the short run. He hates the idea that anyone is ever “locked in” to something they don’t want to play.

Sometimes, like for oneshots/charity games, you can’t have the session zero; in this case Matt likes to email the players just some brief back-and-forths to nail down one or two elements. “Who else in the party owes you a favor and why? What’s one regret from your childhood?”

Brennan tells us the GM is like a one-person Greek chorus. “When you are baking, you find out what you forgot to put in in the oven.” Backstory is meant to give you a trajectory; it’s not where you come from, it’s where you’re going. Backstory has to be a connection to the world; if you just show up with gear and no desires, no goals, “that’s just enlightenment, buddy, I don’t know what to tell you!”

Matt likes one-two page backstories; the more complicated it gets, the harder it is to incorporate things, but he’s also had a player whose whole character was a monk wandering in search of power, and he made that work too.

Backstory should be an invitation, NOT an expectation. Players should anticipate that not all backstory elements may come into play, but the GM should also communicate if they realize they may not be able to use the backstory at all. Players don’t want to wait for three years only to never get into their backstory, but also do have a responsibility to make sure it can be integrated into the world. Communication is key in both directions!

Brennan loves backstory in order to incorporate plot hooks he knows they’ll say “yes” to. If he has a party with no clerics, he knows he doesn’t have to work so much on the pantheon. I identify with this laziness.

Matt made his own settings at first because he was too scared to ruin or incorrectly run an established setting. Brennan enjoys making up canon in established settings, which makes Matt hilariously nervous. Matt: “For most of you, this won’t be livestreamed, so you can fuck it up as much as you want!” Brennan: “Dani Carr, in the corner, with a blowgun.” Aabria advocates taking a break and looking something up for something super critical that you can’t improv. Players always go off the rails; give yourself leeway when DMing for that. Matt also suggests telling players familiar with a setting ahead of time that “this is YOUR version of the world; some things might be the same, different, or conflict with canon, and that’s intended.”

Niirdal-Poc was super fun for Aabria to create. Creating something new in an established world, especially for someone not in love with high fantasy, gave her an amazing chance to pick out the themes she valued. This city was her love letter to the potential of power, whether it’s nature, divine, or wizardly. She ugly-cried when she saw the first map including it.

Brennan was incredibly relieved to get the Age of Arcanum over Aabria’s Kymal, because he was able to use the full weight of the established canon to build the world in retrospect. He especially loved the Aeor arc from C2, so this tied in beautifully with that.

“Fantasy is bad with time!” In Middle Earth, the best sword ever made was made 10,000 years ago; so are blacksmiths today emotionally distraught that they can’t get better? He much prefers Matt’s insistence on a calendar and growth and holidays and such to make it more grounded.

Brennan, on Aeor: “Yes, we have this lapsarian, Edenic thing necessary for the fantasy of populating a world with tons of dungeons and magical items because you need an ancient history for them to have come from,” but Calamity allows a grounding of that history’s existence without undermining the deeply tragic fall of the Age of Arcanum. He loved leaning into the differences between the ancient & modern worlds: Avalir had more technological advancements, Byzantine bureaucracies, etc., and he loved exploring the evolutionary paths of how to feed that into the modern world & Aeor's ruins. It let him fuck shit up without ruining the canon.

(Lapsarian: one who believes mankind has fallen from a higher state)

(Edenic: in the manner of Eden)

(Brennan also talks SO FAST y’all, criminy, and so many of his sentences are abandoned half-thoughts)

Aabria loves that he explained the Shattered Teeth. Matt jumps in here talking about how much he absolutely loves worldbuilding and collaborating on these pieces because it’s so much more freeing than coming up all of it in his brain by himself in his room.

He and Brennan spent an hour once discussing the cosmology and pantheon of Exandria while Marisha was at the vet with Omar (their corgi), including how gods relate to mortality. “I don’t get to have that conversation with just anyone!”

Brennan panicked when Sam & Luis went after Purvan in the show. He meant it to just be a cameo, but they expanded it past his plans. “Don’t make me explain this! This is a part I can really fuck up!”

Both Aabria & Brennan were so worried about breaking canon, but Matt loves that their choices instead clarified and enhanced canon, giving him things to build off of in future: “That’s much cooler than I was anticipating!” They expanded his world rather than breaking it.

“If you’re doing this at home, you can do whatever the fuck you want. Stop the Calamity!” Aabria: “If you see a tree and you don’t know what it’s doing, maybe just leave it alone.”

Aabria: “Every wizard is a yuppie. They wear their shoes to bed.”

What are Aabria & Brennan most proud of contributing to the world? Aabria: being light and irreverent about tragedies like the Chroma Conclave (Chroma spa cave), showing that nature heals and the past is not sacred. Matt loves having Taste of Tal’Dorei as Exandria’s own Casa Bonita. Matt loves finding humor in the darkness of humanity. Brennan: Humorlessness does not occur in nature. “Death is not a punchline, but it is a perfect setup.” He and his wife Izzy loved Everything Everywhere All at Once for the same reason (amazing movie!).

Brennan is most proud of how easily the Calamity crew handled the massive lore dumps he threw at them. Aabria had to learn 40 spell engines as part of her background. Brennan laughs about having texted Matt, “My job today is I’ve come up with 30 fake wizards.” Aabria felt really bad about how Llaerryn treated Madara, ha!

Brennan liked establishing that Vespin wasn’t a nihilist, he was hubristic. Vespin didn’t set out to release the Betrayers, he set out to achieve ambitions, which tied into the pattern of hubris evident in the Ring of Brass. Brennan loved painting the entire Age with this brush, showing that it wasn’t a coincidence, it was a trend over the entire age.

Matt loved how vibrantly Aabria brought Byroden to life--it’s better than he would have done himself. It completely changed his perspective on the city. Aabria shouts out Aimee regarding their conversations about Laredo, TX, and talks about how they wanted to find common threads that would reflect Vex & Vax as well as contrasting against Syngorn, which we saw more clearly in C1.

Brennan asks Matt about the misty history of Exandria. “It’s a little bit of the Matryoshka doll of the genesis” since C1 started in medias res. Aabria: “Who were you when you built this?” Matt: “Younger.”

It started as a city, Stilben only, for a home game for his VA friends. It was a oneshot without a country/continent name intended to be played for six hours on a weekend. Session two he built Westruun; when they got to session 3, he began building Tal’Dorei in Photoshop. He still has the old files of the early country.

He developed the name of the continent Exandria as the players expanded into neighboring countries. It was laying down the tracks right in front of the train, just developing things as needed. He notes that a lot of modern high fantasy is beautifully developed in aesthetic, but breaks down as soon as you try to dive into it. Brennan points out long-lived races with 150-year generations could theoretically date descendants without realizing.

The Calamity came out of Matt’s realization that there needed to be a recent historical event to reset the world. The Divergence was his attempt to rationalize the existence of all-powerful, all-knowing gods walking the planes and guiding the threads of fate, but then leaving great world-shaking danger to a handful of PCs. He wanted to come up with a reason the gods were removed from the world so that the players had to solve the problems themselves.

Brennan loves the idea of visiting the oldest part of a homebrewed world. If he were in Exandria, he’d want to go to Stilben. Oh my gosh, me too.

The Kryn dynasty was partly born out of a book Matt read about the idea of past lives.

There has never been a moment where Matt felt Exandria to be whole/finished. The pressure of having wikis listing out every contradiction he’s ever said does mean there’s a running list of things he needs to correct/address in future, which is its own kind of stress.

Brennan HILARIOUSLY calls out Matt for saying Tal’Dorei isn’t finished while the campaign guide is sitting right on the table in front of them. “This is not done? I’m just gonna go home. Not DONE? I got three months between seasons, okay. Welcome to Biggityburg, here we go. New city, new season. You wackity-schmackity doo, 10 episodes. Help me!”

Brennan points out that a ton of worldbuilding comes from improv in the moment passed off as fact. The players love it when they get the sense that you would pass out before running out of things to tell them about the world.

Brennan made his villains hot because Aabria made a hot spider queen. Matt laughingly says that he doesn’t make hot villains, he makes villains and the internet decides they’re hot.

Matt loves playing with new players and very experienced players; there’s a cycle. “When you first begin, you don’t know a lot of the boundaries. When you’re new to it, you make wider swings, bigger choices, you’re a kid learning how to walk for the first time and bumping into the furniture. Then you start coloring inside the lines because you’ve learned the rules, and then as you get more experienced you cycle back again” to breaking the rules with youthful abandon.

Brennan loves that the game MASTER is actually in a position of service. You’re making dinner for everybody. He praises Aabria for reading her players extremely well and giving them what they want.

Aabria asks about encounter map development. Matt prefers theater of the mind for smaller groups unless they prefer minis. However, with more players, the minis/maps help out a lot. He has been collecting minis for many years.

Brennan extols the virtues of Rick Perry, the production designer for Dimension 20, his D&D show. D20 has a lot of culture mashups (Candy Land Game of Thrones, high school for heroes, etc.), but those beautiful set pieces are often only used once. In his home games he uses lots of dry erase boards, Blu-Tack, and Othello pieces, which can be flipped over and written on the bottom of to track HP directly on the piece. He does prefer maps because he likes tactical play. For theater of the mind, he recommends checking in with the players a lot, because certain classes can get short shrift without clear/tangible tactical advantage (rogues, AoE spells, etc.). Maps with created elements also can lead to grist for player creativity--Reyka in the Bloodkeep series on Dropout was inspired by decorative chains that she used to tactically balloon her way out of a tight spot.

Matt also likes grids and hex maps for simple alignment without requiring a ton of prep. He recommends considering the terrain, enemy advantages and disadvantages, and a few interesting elements (like the chains) just to see what the players can do. He cites Orym’s messing with the augur machine which he’d intended to just be part of the scenery and using it to trap the Shape Mother.

Brennan: if you’re doing theater of the mind, don’t just breeze past environment or mood because that can open doors for the players. In the reverse, Matt points out that going hard into maps/minis can artificially limit what the players may think is useful unless they are experienced enough to ask questions about things in the room that might not be represented by the minis/maps.

Aabria’s prep time is roughly equivalent to the run time of the game she’s planning, just so she feels comfortable improvising. Brennan laughs that one time Izzy found him in the kitchen in the dark holding a container of half-and-half because he was so deep in thought about D&D. Matt will often start thinking about an NPC and embodying the physicality/voice in practice, and Marisha will call him out for talking to himself.

Brennan: “If you’re a dungeon master and you need some voices time, just don’t do it in the bathroom because other people in the apartment need sometimes to get in there, and if you’re in there doing voices time, they might remind you that that’s not the best place for that, and they might be brusque even though it’s kinda quiet and meditative in there.”

Matt has dozens of voice memos on his phone with various NPC voices he’s experimenting with.

Matt obsessively closes every tab in his office every time Marisha comes in in order to hoard his secrets.

Brennan: a home game should never have rails. D&D shows, however, have tentpoles; Rick Perry has to have guidelines for sets to create, so that’s different. He has to have character designs eight weeks before the first episode airs.

Brennan on rails, again: A player is looking for full immersion. Players aren’t generally trying to be storytellers themselves; they’re trying to inhabit a character who doesn’t know they’re in a story and is just trying to achieve a goal. However, the PLAYER wants the arc, so the player and character are at artistic odds. Characters are like water: they are running downhill seeking the path of least resistance. The players, however, don’t want the straight line. The DM’s job is to be the irrigator shaping the river running downhill; at the end of the story, the character ran in the straightest line possible to it, but the DM shaped the channel into something aesthetically pleasing in the process. The DM’s job is to recognize that the player’s & character’s goals may be disparate, and shaping the story to please both.

Matt adds that character story beat prep should be modular so that you can implement pieces that are important when it’s the best time for the story. Don’t lock critical information behind die rolls; don’t tie one piece of critical information behind one single NPC that they might never encounter. There should be many ways to achieve goals. Aabria likes the three-act structure because most people are familiar with that for movies, and good players who are also storytellers are great about lining up their shot in order to serve the plot. Having players recognizing the structure of the form is like having flowers turning towards the sun.

Brennan doesn’t remember a PC doing something that made a weight lift off his back in 24 years of DMing more than Llaerryn blighting the tree. It was such a perfect moment of a player serving the greater story. Aabria also using the bow as the last piece of her machine was a perfect way for Brennan to implement endgame steps, and he credits her for knowing how to help resolve the notes of the story. She was generously giving him the tools she knew he needed in service of the story.

Brennan talks about the first time Aabria DMed for him and mentioned, “And here’s what you don’t see,” and describes his own head popping off in the realization that you can do that?? He stole that immediately and has used it in his games ever since.

Matt talks about being very limited in his own style because prior to CR, so much of DMing was learned in a vacuum or in a limited friend group. He loves watching other live plays and seeing what other people are doing in completely different worlds. That excites him more than anything.

Favorite GM snacks? Brennan immediately addresses the camera in a classic Brennan rant. I’m so happy. “Let me be clear. This was put into this fucking questionnaire to come for me. If you’re at home and you’re afraid to tell your gaming group that you’re a snacker, I’ve got your back, okay? Because it’s okay to fucking snack. Some of us sweat from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to sleep. Some of our bodies are betraying us constantly. Would I have chosen this paper-white, fur-covered, constantly sweating body? No! I wouldn’t have! Does it require constant almonds? Yes! Almonds all the time, okay? And I’m not going to apologize to these two elevated beings, these two hovering pre-Skeksis pre-mystic light beings from The Dark Crystal--some of us are pod people, okay? I’m a little podling, and I need to snack. If I could have another mouth in my back--the biggest obstacle in my GMing, okay, is that the same place I talk from is where food needs to go! And I’m not sorry! I like to snack! And to answer your question, almonds.”

Aabria says Calamity was the least she’d seen him snack, which is how she knew he was nervous.

Brennan laughs that he hit the five-hour mark and his body immediately demanded a caffeine shot. As scary as the villains were, nothing scared Aabria more than Brennan saying, “We’re off keto.”

Aabria lusted after Brennan’s Funyuns, but couldn’t stand the idea of trying to have a romantic moment with Quay with onion breath.

Matt saw an internet comment about his eating early in the stream and stopped eating on stream after. :( However, he does find himself strongly in the moment DMing and loses his appetite anyway.

Brennan tells a hilarious story of getting in a car accident with some friends and eating a pizza and a half by himself out of anxiety afterwards. I have never identified with him more than in this moment.

And that’s it! What an awesome, meaty episode. Is it Thursday yet?

#talks machina #critical role #critical role spoilers #talks machina spoilers #long post for ts #very long post for ts #exu calamity

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criticalrolo · 1 year

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🔥 less of a hot take and more of a genuine question lol you’ve talked about railroading a bit in these asks and I’m curious about your opinion on riding the line between being too controlling as a DM vs giving players the freedom to do literally whatever they want 😂 what side do you err to?

I’ve DMed both styles, and since my normal group is huge (7 players minimum!) railroading worked out well for some people and was a nightmare for others. I’m personally a player who loves having more explicit narrative agency at the table, but I totally understand that other people like having something much more concrete laid out for them!! I’ve DMed for both and as per usual, it’s all a balancing game in the end. With an exceptionally Big group or a Small group (basically 3 players or 7 players) I’ve found that more explicit Railroad Tracks work better to keep the game going, but a group of 5 is ideal for sandboxing.

When I’m a player I haaaate feeling like the things I don’t do matter and the DM will force me into a situation no matter how cleverly I play my wizard etc, but as a person who is a DM at heart I ABSOLUTELY sympathize with how frustrating it is when a player goes off the rails. My general advice: have bullet points in mind for your session, but be a good enough Improv actor to eventually circle things back to your main plot / be ready to make changes if your players are smart and invested in your world

#how many times can I say ‘don’t write a plot. host a party’ before people tell me to shut the fuck up #I am being annoying about it LOL rip

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crabs-in-a-trench-coat · 11 months

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Still need to learn about Pathfinder and Scion but in general I started working on a new fantasy setting for my players taking the Sandbox approach of in character creation explaining to them each region's environment, culture, important historic events

Then letting them decide who they want to be and what they want to do

Like the Hobbit "Sandbox vs Railroad" video where the DM didn't expect the players to hear about Smaug and decide "Hey let's be the Dwarven heirs and take back our kingdom!" And they remembered it as an awesome time

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jeffs-gamebox · 8 months

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Railroading vs Sandboxing.

Providing some context for an upcoming article revolving around DM as storyteller in Dungeons & Dragons.

Is it “Railroading?” About a month ago, I had a discussion with someone about using a more open-ended story structure when writing RPG adventures. We came to the consensus, as many have in the past, that it’s probably better to treat one shot adventures (modules) as a closed structure like a play or a novel. Now, that’s okay for published works. But what about other events? I used to run…

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#dnd #rpgblog #rpgblogger #rpgwriter #ttrpgadventure #TTRPGblog #TTRPGblogger #ttrpgcampaign #ttrpgdesign #ttrpgestablishedgroups #ttrpggamerlogic #ttrpgwriter

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luckthebard · 3 years

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I have some thoughts on railroaded vs sandbox campaigns.

"Railroaded" often has a negative connotation, but it isn't inherently a bad thing. In fact, most streamed D&D/TTRPG shows have railroaded campaigns. The Adventure Zone and Dimension 20 are two big examples of this. There's an endpoint to the story the DM has planned in advance and is trying to get to. Some deviation for character beats can happen on the tracks, but everyone is playing along with a story that has clear beats and a traditional structure. Even Campaign 1 of Critical Role, I would argue, was much closer to being a railroad campaign than a sandbox. There was one large crisis or plot to address at a time, giving the characters clear direction and a wrapped-up ending.

With a "Sandbox" campaign, though, the narrative of the world isn't structured as clearly, and the real narrative is centered on the characters' journeys. The world lives and moves apart from the characters' actions upon it. Characters will be presented with multiple directions in which to act, each viable, and the road not taken will go on without them. The world, likewise, will have big problems and mysteries that may not ever be addressed by the characters. Critical Role Campaign 2 is much closer to being a sandbox campaign.

This distinction seems to be at the heart of some of the disparity between reactions to the end of Campaign 2. (And, frankly, reactions during the entirety of the campaign along the lines of "the characters are ignoring [x plotline], clearly intended to be the main plot, why is this story so fractured and meandering?") Questions of: "What about Molaesmyr? What about Ruidus the mysterious second moon? If those were brought up, why won't they be addressed in the campaign?" - I think these questions come from expectations drawn from watching railroaded campaigns, where anything brought up must be significant, vs. sandbox campaigns, where these sort of details could be explored, but also just exist as world-building depth and flavor.

(As an aside, this also reminds me of how frustrated I've seen some people get when Matt has responded to fan questions about the "real answers" to some of these hooks he brought up either in the campaign or in the Explorer's Guide with "create your own answer for your table!" - he's inviting people to join in on creating the world, but people get frustrated there's not a "canon" answer.)

So as a sandbox campaign, yes, this final arc vs Lucien is the climax of the campaign, because it's the emotional climax of these characters together. The world continues on after and around them, and some of them will have things to act on and take care of when Cognouza is defeated. But the story of the Mighty Nein together has drawn to its own internal conclusion. Their friendship is secure and unbreakable and they saved Exandria (hopefully - big battle tonight!), even if no one else knows it.

And that emotional story of their care for each other leaves a conclusion where, for example, Beau and Caleb can be secure in knowing they'll help each other spend potentially years fighting corruption in their country. Where Fjord can be sure he'll have backup as he continues to evade U'kotoa's forces and keep the cloven crystal hidden and the serpent locked away. Where Caduceus and Veth can feel safe returning home and know they'll have allies to call on in an emergency. Where Yasha can finally be at peace to process and grieve with support. Where Jester knows she's not alone anymore. We don't necessarily need to see these things to know they'll happen, because as a sandbox campaign, the world will continue on with or without our heroes directly acting. The story was them, and what they chose to do -- and that could have led any number of directions, but it took us here.

"Is this what Matt was planning the whole time?" is, imo, the wrong question, because this campaign was never on rails. Sandbox campaigns are more likely to set things up and not address them directly, with big battles or direct confrontations. And I'm not saying it's bad to prefer railroad story structure, but I think understanding the structural differences might help some people pinpoint the source of their feelings on the narrative structure of this very, very different streamed D&D campaign.

#critical role #meta #end of the campaign musings #end of the campaign #d&d campaign style discussions #long post #apologies for the super long post I couldn't think of where to make a read more cut

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sunstarelanor · 3 years

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Something that’s been stewing in the back of my brain since the campaign two finale is how, by having Trent attack the nein instead of them continuing the campaign by doing a whole taking down the assembly arch, Matt undermined any sense of reality to the idea Trent planted about Caleb’s actions being a result of Trent’s desires.

I know that there’s a lot of talk out there about sandbox vs railroad campaigns from people who know way more about actual play/rpgs/DnD than I do, but like that final encounter being railroaded more than the rest of the campaign seems so appropriate because it really highlights, through the gameplay style in contrast to most of the rest of the campaign, that Trent is actively trying to get in the way and make himself relevant to Caleb and the Nein. And i really really like that.

#crit role #cr2 #i know we're all excited about cr3 and tlovm rn bUT have some campaign 2 meta lmao #insert essek likes soup joke here #bc stewing in my brain #im in jsut the right mood to post this but without the energy i need to create a joke about stew #critical role #caleb widogast #trent ikithon #the mighty nein #50 notes

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americankimchi · 3 years

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i feel the same way about cr2, i think vm had a more structured plot while tm9 were reluctant to commit to the narrative, especially in the earlier episodes

vm had ur more classical hero roles than tm9 did which meant that they had an easier time structuring stories and villains around that. it also had very clear cut arcs that cr2 just didn't have. like i can say underdark -> slayer's take mini arc -> whitestone (arguably the most story heavy and the introduction of cr into more Narrative heavy and less Game heavy playstyles) -> chroma conclave (which in itself contained multiple splinter arcs that all wove seamlessly back into the narrative like the feywild arc, the rakshasa subplot, THE CLIMAX OF THE GROG ARC AKA MF KILL BOX) -> etc but if you asked me to name cr2's arcs like.... they had the avantika arc....... and travelercon??? i guess

cr2 had more "grey morality" in the party which can work great in stories!! could've been an exploration of what it means to be a 'hero' vs. random guys thrust into the world stage and told to Make A Choice that affects the fate of [x]. but that only works if the characters lean hard one way or another and cr2 made it so the party literally made it their Mission to Avoid Plots that didn't physically haul them into it by the collar. (gestures wildly at caleb "i evade harder than endgame vax" widogast.)

this is more the party's fault than matt's but i feel like he went too hard on the sandbox aspect of dnd in the early arcs and that weakened the overall narrative enough where everything had a harder time sticking since he let the party take the reins. i don't like railroading either but some level of that is needed for the party to like. Do anything. e.g.: that whole bit with the betrayer king that literally could've turned into being like cr2's vecna but ended around.... what episode 89ish? and was pretty much used as an in game reason for yasha's absence instead of the potential world-ending catastrophe it could've been.

aaaaaaaanyways. cr2 was just a disappointment is all. the stakes were so nonexistent not only bc of the team comp but also because of the team's choices too so like eeehhhhhh

#cr critical #there was a potential bounty hunt they could've done WAYY early on #also cad being a grave cleric neatly cut off like 80% of any possible tension during combat #like when was the last time you were actually worried someone would stay permadead lol #god a permadeath would've injected so much juice into this campaign #as i understand not even molly stayed dead bc i think tm9 brought him out of lucien's consciousness or smth? idk #there were no staaaaakkkkkkeeeeeeeeesssssss #i hope cr3's better. honestly idk if i'll even watch cr3 since cr2 was such a massive disappointment but i'll peep in at the start #out of curiosity if nothing else

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tabletroop · 3 years

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A vote was taken, and tonight we will be having a Fireside chat on D&D campaign stories. Sandbox VS Railroad. Tune in on twitch! Link in the bio #twitch #dungeonsanddragons #fireside #dungeonmaster #tabletopgamers https://www.instagram.com/p/CNSotiDn5Og/?igshid=1auor1ywlvx66

#twitch #dungeonsanddragons #fireside #dungeonmaster #tabletopgamers

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utilitycaster · 3 years

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I'm still thinking about railroaded vs. sandbox and how this impacts things like tone and comedic levels specifically, and in the end it's all a spectrum and dependent on the table but I do think it's worth pointing out even a fairly railroaded game has plenty of room for not only shenanigans but incredible, game-changing decisions - but they happen in tandem with the plot, as character choices, and ultimately do not shift the plot.

Critical Role Campaign 1 is I think much more on rails than people acknowledge. Which isn't bad; for much of the cast it was their first time playing D&D, and it's everyone's first time doing actual play and quite honestly doing a true sandbox like Campaign 2 is extremely difficult. When I specifically criticize things for being on rails it's when the DM has to actively force people into the plot vs. making the plot seem like the most attractive option and I don't feel that was ever the case here.

This doesn't mean there isn't room for both immensely creative ways of dealing with obstacles in Campaign 1 (teleporting into a dragon, making a deal with Artagan to get a long rest in the Feywild) nor major character moments (notably Vax's deal with the Raven Queen), but avoiding any core arc would have probably seemed like either a huge betrayal of the character, or a D&D party actively saying "no, we are not going to deal with the huge threat that only we can solve, actually", and any freedom of the plot was mostly decisions not to pursue every single fetch quest, or the exact order in which personal business was carried out in the interlude between the Conclave and Vecna; the actual arcs were pretty unavoidable.

But that doesn't mean tons of unexpected things didn't happen, and in general railroad vs. sandbox is not actually analogous to order vs. chaos; how the DM approaches plot is purely structural, and things like tone and intent and how the party chooses to achieve their goals are determined by other factors.

#i will admit. this is also inspired a bit by a current weird spate of like...#putting VM and Campaign 1 on a pedestal #and it is very good! I loved it when I watched it! but there are things that make me go really?#and I think they come from a place of disappointment with things in C2 #some of which are valid and some less so #(or rather. you can feel however you want and that's valid but I think some reasons are not actually worth entertaining)#or sentimentality that is not accessible to newer fans #rather than like. the actual craft and structure.#i also feel like people forget that railroading can be for lack of a better extended metaphor...knowing where the train wants to go #critical role

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acommonrose · 5 years

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The Road Trip

So since apparently people like me weighing in on controversial DM advice, I thought I’d weigh in on something I see discussed a lot: railroading. While there’s a lot of argument about what actually constitutes railroading, there’s a general consensus that strict railroading where the DM never gives the players any meaningful choices is bad. There’s also a pretty clear consensus that while sandbox games can be very cool with the right DM and players, they’re definitely not for everyone. This means that a little bit of railroading is inevitable in most games--and this can be a good thing in that it provides structure and focus and, in moderation, can make the players more engaged, not less.

Given the difficulty of this balance, I see people trying to come up with train-related metaphors for what you should do, often something along the lines of “you can railroad the players if they chose which train to board”. I’d like to push back against this metaphor, because I think, in its most direct interpretation, it’s bad for both players and DMs. Giving players choices of which railroad-y plot to take can be more work for the DM (planning out two or three plots instead of one), and since the players aren’t really making meaningful choices after the initial one, it’s not necessarily more engaging than having them in a railroad-y plot in the first place. While I’m sure there’s more positive ways to apply this advice, I’d like to offer an alternative metaphor. A good non-sandbox D&D game is like being on a long road trip.

On a road trip, you have a starting point and a likely endpoint. You probably even know which roads you’re likely to take and which places you’re likely to stop in along the way, though some of these may change along the way as the trip progresses. This is not a sandbox--players can’t drive off the existing roads, and if they get too lost, they may hit a dead end. But it’s also not any sort of railroad. Players stay in the driver’s seat. They can control where they’re going, whether it means taking a scenic route instead of the main highway, switching to a different route entirely for a time, or just pulling over to go see the world’s biggest ball of twine (or, in D&D terms, ignoring that big obvious plot hook to go talk to Scam Likely the gnome). They may get bored of the twine very quickly and go back to the main road, they may spend a few hours messing around before returning to the main road, or they may see another road that they’d rather take just past that ball of twine. All of these are valid choices, but it’s important that they have the choice to pull over at all and that, once they do, they’re not immediately forced back onto the main road.

And to be clear, this is not me saying that all railroading is bad. There’s times that your players will be in a situation where they really only have one path they can follow. Think of it as being on a long stretch of highway. The players can change lanes or switch what music is playing in the car or even pull over to a rest stop for a few minutes, but ultimately, to reach any real decision point, they’re going to have to keep following the same road for a while. There’s also scenarios where there are two or three possible options for the players, each of which is pretty structured, and the only reasonable options are to take one of those. Both these scenarios are fine, as long as they don’t make up the entire game. Longer roads and more structured plots are important in progressing the game forward, but occasional detours can be just as memorable.

Sometimes I think that a lot of the “railroading bad” vs. “railroading good, actually” arguments come from the fact that we don’t have much of a model for what a game looks like if you’re not railroading but not running a sandbox game, and this can lead DMs to worry that they’re railroading just because their players are following a structured plot. If the players are enjoying the plot, it’s a good thing. Sometimes on a road trip, you’re not taking detours or going to roadside attractions because you don’t feel like you need to. You’re zipping down the highway with your friends, jamming out to a cool road trip playlist, excited to reach your destination. It only becomes a problem when your players feel like they’re stuck on the road. In that case, you don’t necessarily need to give them a choice of two roads. Instead, throw in a few side roads or alternate paths that take them slightly away from the main road but lead them back to the same place eventually. Sometimes what the players need is to go talk to Scam Likely and see where that leads.

#dungeons and dragons #dm advice #d&d tag #well hopefully someone finds this useful?

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rafawriter · 5 years

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aetherspoon · 6 years

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The Dining Campaign, Act 1 Structure / DM Notes

I had decided to plan this campaign in terms of Acts.

Act 1 was, effectively, the party getting to know each other, starting to explore a new land, finding a new home, and convincing others that this is the Best Place. It took 15 adventures, ending three weeks ago as of when I’m posting this write-up. Below the cut is my general planning notes and so on, a sort-of behind-the-curtain approach. No worries about spoilers now, since the act is finished and I’m only talking about things that have been revealed.

I planned on 6-8 adventures, for reference. There’s been a lot of challenges with this campaign, and I wanted to talk about them. The issues (and some solutions) are in the next post.

Act 1 Structure

Basically, my general outline looked like this:

Introductions -> Exploration -> Players get bored and return to typical adventuring -> I plan out the rest then.

I seriously doubted that my players would enjoy exploring what is basically a new world. My whole initial plan was that I’d do the prep work for that new world, but also have a bunch of things in there in case the players had an Ooo Shiny moment. That... happened, but not in the way I was expecting. That’s good - I think 5 of the 6 players are really enjoying this exploration-focused campaign, and the sixth is still fine with it.

Once it became clear that they wanted to play in my sandbox, my outline changed to this:

Introductions -> Exploration -> Conflict -> Planning -> Return -> Conflict -> Vote.

That’s at least close to how things ended up. In reality, it looked like this:

Introductions -> Exploration -> Exploration -> Return -> Conflict/Planning -> Vote

Rails

Let’s talk about that dreadful DM trick of putting people on rails. I... really don’t do that. I put in some guidelines that I recommend you don’t cross, but that’s about it. What I mean is that my adventure planning doesn’t go “all right, they will do X, then they will do Y, then Z happens, then...”

It goes like this, and this is a summarized snippet from my actual prep:

Players have said that they want to continue on to another potential city site, Site C.

Site C has a lot of personal hazards involved - remnants of an old demonic biomunitions factory, leftover mimics all over the place, and a few other things they didn’t actually find.

Threats to them directly are minimal - they’ll generally succeed as long as they don’t fiddle with things.

When they fiddle:

Weaponized Coconuts act like a very strong cannon blast. Can potentially KO (but not kill) the weakest party member.

Mimics will eat them alive if they get the drop.

They won’t send the mage to open a door like that, so that should be fine.

There is an underground Thieves’ Den that has some useful things in it. They won’t find it without thoroughly investigating.

Gateway to Lem. If they do investigate enough, they’re almost certainly going to stumble over it. Lem’s been waiting for a while, after all. See NPC page for Lem.

If they leave early / conflicts nearby:

Nearby forest has spiders and a Nightmare in it. They already know about the spiders and will probably figure out the Nightmare.

Mountains to the east make it unlikely they’ll want to travel that way. If they do, <spoilers here>.

They can continue on to Site D. See notes for Site D.

If they dawdle too long:

Rain will occur in two more days. While no longer EvilRain, it still poses a threat to the party by virtue of it being a mini-monsoon.

Creatures will escape the worst areas, going through Site C, so they’ll probably start getting into conflicts here.

See what I mean? The players are the ones who told me what they were going to do (at the end of the previous adventure) and all I’m doing is working around them planning-wise. They’re free to leave at any time and I’ll adapt, but there are some geographic clues in that this is the region they want to be in. It isn’t Railroading as I have no idea what they’re going to do (although I’m pretty good at predicting it), but it isn’t a complete free-form game either; I know they’re not going to want to spend the time going through mountains, so that’s effectively a barrier to them for the time being.

This is one of the areas of GMing that I’ve been praised on, and I’ve generally followed a similar pattern with respect to rails vs. sandbox ever since. This particular game is a bit more sandboxy than my normal, but that’s part of the premise.

Conflicts

I’m... not so great with D&D combat. In fact, due to time issues (see my next post), I’m not so great at combats as a whole. My games usually average a combat every other adventure, and this one had six combats in fifteen adventures. However, that’s not the only type of conflict.

As the PCs already know, there are eight groups of people investigating Dis. Each group of people are separated out a bit... except for one pair. The PCs are one member of that pair, and there is another group that they were pretty much inevitably going to encounter.

They weren’t going to be hostile, but potentially unintelligible and were probably going to cause some problems if they weren’t addressed early enough. What I didn’t know was how they were going to resolve it - after all, this was like the third adventure or something.

The conflict mentioned is that a parade of Water Elementals were going through the river right next to the party as one of the “events” that was going to happen within the first few days the PCs were on Dis. I rolled to see which day it would happen, and it happened on day one or two (I can’t remember which now). No one in the party knew Aquan, but someone did know Tongues... on both sides of the groups, as it turned out. They ended up initiating conversation and talking with a random water elemental, who eventually directed them to their so-called leader, a djinn of some variety.

The party was quite diplomatic (not too surprising in hindsight) and the two groups are generally on friendly terms with each other. Without that first encounter though, they were going to be royal pains in the neck of the party throughout the first act (and likely beyond). Basically, my players are really good at avoiding conflict when feasible, and I always like to make multiple options on how to resolve something possible.

The other major conflict that I knew was going to happen was back in the city. As the PCs are now aware, there is something fishy going on in the City-State, and at least some of that fishiness has to do with Necromancy. There were several potential events that the players would end up seeing throughout the city when they returned, and they hit the nasty one right off the bat.

There is also the whole Bertrum thing (that I knew was going to be an end-of-act boss, unless if they abandoned the whole Homestead plot entirely). I figured that one would end in combat, although I was surprised that they didn’t pick up on the hints a bit earlier.

All other conflicts that they were working through? Yeah, those were all improvised or just “hazards” planned, like the above. These three were the only ones that were planned from the beginning and everything else was going to be based on how the PCs did things. They... wanted to explore. So I let them explore.

Exploration / World Building

Oh boy did they explore. They actually explored pretty much the entire region I had expected them to explore throughout acts one and two, which is a majority of the reason why it took longer than I expected. They found two very powerful entities that they’re seemingly on friendly terms with, they’ve discovered the prior mentioned water elementals, they’ve looked at all of the potential city sites I had spotted out ahead of time in their little region of Dis... really, they hit all of the high points (and several of the detailed points). A lot of this I prepped well in advance; I had the regional map completed by the end of the third adventure and I have a less-specific world map completed by the fourth.

I enjoy world building, and I got the distinct idea that the players enjoyed it as well.

One thing I’m a bit disappointed in is the general lack of wonder as how weird Dis really is to them. Mion (the world that everyone in the party came from) exists on the inside of a cube world. The stars and planets seen from Mion are rips in space that allow them to see outside of the cube, and the sun is a giant heat source that sinks into the waters to the east and west on a daily basis. Dis, on the other hand, is a much more realistic world - round world, orbits a star, etc. Problem being, that’s what is “normal” to the players, so I think that fell a bit flat. My fault.

Progression / Rewards

This campaign is a bit lighter than normal in terms of rewards. Mostly because they were out in the middle of nowhere and the rewards were things they’d find. No one was paying them (yet) to do this, they weren’t taking loot off of dead monsters, they were explorers.

On the other hand, I sped up XP growth a bit. I don’t think the players noticed, given how at least one of them was complaining about how slow they were leveling, but that’s because I wasn’t exactly giving it to them easy. Things hit hard and fast because I didn’t have enough combats to justify a more traditional D&D grind. The party went from level 4 at the start of the act to level 8 by the end.

Also, in case if anyone is curious: I like starting PCs out at level 4. They’re still low enough level to have fun with, but they’re getting abilities that make them a bit more unique compared to each other. I mean, there are two monks in the party with almost-identical stats (swapping Charisma and Intelligence, basically); without having some of their monk path abilities, they’d be completely identical mechanically.

Beyond Act 1

At the moment, they’re in Intermission adventures. Basically, I gave the PCs some downtime for what they want to do, and they wanted to go start a sidequest they received from Lem a while ago. So, I did some planning and prep (for once, this sidequest is around 80% Prep / 20% Improv) and set them out on it. It’ll give me more time to set up Act 2.

Act 2 will start when the PCs return to Dis with their colonists and start making the town. It’ll have a lot more time skips, as I don’t think the players are all that interested in mundane day-to-day life stuff. Act 2 will probably have less exploration (although still the dominant factor in the adventures, most likely) and more political intrigue.

#The Dining Campaign #Dungeons and Dragons #dungeon master #DM Notes #Action Report #Mion Campaign Setting

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