|
About 50 episodes into Critical Role. At the risk of being a hater, does Marisha ever stop yelling and trying to jump into the spotlight or should I give up now E. Worst possible page snipe, content: 4th session of new Roll20 group today, it's fun. I think the DM is rummaging around in some official content and reskinning it for the adventure but that's absolutely fine. Do you think it's appropriate to ask him to turn up the heat a little? So far it feels like we've walked through every encounter without taking a bit
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 10:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 00:10 |
|
|
Marisha doesn't really "yell" or jump into poo poo any more than like Sam or Liam do.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 13:04
|
|
|
Mazed posted:Picked an oddly fortuitous time to check out this thread, as I'm getting back into the D&D, preparing to run something, and Curse of Strahd is foremost. It's either that or an old Planescape module (Doors to the Unknown) with stats pulled from 5e sources. pog boyfriend posted:here are some tips for running i have come up with good luck op
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 13:08
|
|
|
I can't watch Critical Role because they are always eating food on stream which triggers the gently caress out of me Sucks because Matt Mercer has an encyclopedic knowledge of DnD and seems really fun
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 14:16
|
|
|
Enjoy posted:I can't watch Critical Role because they are always eating food on stream which triggers the gently caress out of me The animated series is dropping on amazon prime soon if you just want to get caught up on the story, I assume that'll ameliorate those problems (wonder how they'll handle stuff like dice rolls etc)
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 14:41
|
|
|
change my name posted:The animated series is dropping on amazon prime soon if you just want to get caught up on the story, I assume that'll ameliorate those problems (wonder how they'll handle stuff like dice rolls etc) It's just a retelling of other adventures - I think the first two episodes will be like "origins" comic, introducing you to these characters. The rest of Season 1 is the Briarwood arc from Campaign 1. No idea what Season 2 will be, I think.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 14:48
|
|
|
Enjoy posted:I can't watch Critical Role because they are always eating food on stream which triggers the gently caress out of me They stop doing that at some point early on. The early episodes were treated more like how they did their home game, but the show gets more polished as things go on. They don't do it at all in the second campaign, and at all in the major part of the first campaign, although I can't tell you the last episode they do it and don't care enough to look it up.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 14:48
|
|
|
Stabbey_the_Clown posted:They stop doing that at some point early on. The early episodes were treated more like how they did their home game, but the show gets more polished as things go on. They don't do it at all in the second campaign, and at all in the major part of the first campaign, although I can't tell you the last episode they do it and don't care enough to look it up. There's still some moments where they eat even at the end of campaign 2 but it becomes more rare and just like sneaking a pretzel or something while something else is going on instead of trying to have a conversation with a mouthful of noodles.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 15:00
|
|
|
Is there a good suggested start point for listening to CR? I tried once from the beginning, and the lack of context mixed with the enormous cast of characters made it really hard for me to get invested in (or follow, even). Should I just start with Campaign 2?
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 17:05
|
|
|
The general consensus in the CR thread is that it starts getting much more interesting with the second arc of the first campaign. The second arc technically starts in Episode 24, but most people recommend jumping in at Episode 28 for the first campaign, since that's the first episode after a troubled cast member's last appearance. For the second campaign, the recommended jumping in point is Episode 1, as by that time they'd built up enough experience and comfort to make a much more polished product with more complicated characters, and stuff from the early episodes does remain relevant even at the end.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 17:22
|
|
|
If you can't get into CR for one reason or another (like me) there is a thousand more Actual Play shows for D&D alone and bunch more for other systems, and you might enjoy one of the others more. There's even one with Jeff Goldblum as a player, somehow! Personally, I'd recommend checking out Dimension 20. The DM is a professional improviser who is Whose Line-level good, and the rest of the cast are comedians, and each season is a very tight, hilarious piece of entertainment. Mercer is actually a player in one of the seasons, basically playing a Nazgul in a party of LOTR-inspired baddies. Other D&D shows I've heard good things about it but haven't had time to check out (there's too gosh darn many of them), include Not Another D&D Podcast, Dungeons & Daddies, Rude Tales of Magic and Late to the Party.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 17:47
|
|
|
I recommend Not Another DnD podcast for people looking for a decent first DnD podcast. Each episode is about an hour long, there are only 3 PCs, and it is edited so you don't have to worry about being bored while everyone does math or argues about rules.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 18:45
|
|
|
OtspIII posted:Is there a good suggested start point for listening to CR? I tried once from the beginning, and the lack of context mixed with the enormous cast of characters made it really hard for me to get invested in (or follow, even). Should I just start with Campaign 2? I watched bits of C1 and kept bouncing off. Started with C2 Episode 1 and watched the whole thing. So I'd start with C2 and then backfill if you find it interesting. You'll miss a few references and world elements initially, but nothing critical.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 18:53
|
|
|
Oh yeah, I actually tried CR first, bounced off of it hard and renounced D&D podcasts, then eventually got convinced to try Adventure Zone and got hooked on it and a few others. I figure it's time to give CR another shotRC Cola posted:I recommend Not Another DnD podcast for people looking for a decent first DnD podcast. The name is pretty funny, since I think Not Another DnD podcast is probably the most DnDish podcast I've listened to (in a good way). I did really enjoy the way all the players just spouted mounds of absurd improv backstory jokes over the first few arcs and the GM then took all their goofs and managed to tie it into a coherent setting NADD is actually pretty directly the inspiration for Goblin Bet -- there's a bit in the first campaign where they go to a casino and bet on fights between CR 1/8 monsters for a while. I was trying to learn ReactJS at the time and realized that I could automate that pretty easily, and about a week later I had my first draft up and running
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 19:18
|
|
|
OtspIII posted:Oh yeah, I actually tried CR first, bounced off of it hard and renounced D&D podcasts, then eventually got convinced to try Adventure Zone and got hooked on it and a few others. I figure it's time to give CR another shot I like Critical Role in theory, but sometimes it's too close to Miniatures Porn for my taste: everything's glossy and professional and dialed up to 11, but that personal touch seems missing. I'm kinda hoping to just watch Campaign 3 fresh whenever it starts rather than trying to make up too many years of lost ground getting into the older campaigns.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 19:42
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:I like Critical Role in theory, but sometimes it's too close to Miniatures Porn for my taste: everything's glossy and professional and dialed up to 11, but that personal touch seems missing. I'm kinda hoping to just watch Campaign 3 fresh whenever it starts rather than trying to make up too many years of lost ground getting into the older campaigns. They just started an 8 part "miniseries". With a different group, and with Matt as a player and not the DM. I haven't watched the first episode so have no idea how it is, though.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 19:54
|
|
|
Megazver posted:If you can't get into CR for one reason or another (like me) there is a thousand more Actual Play shows for D&D alone and bunch more for other systems, and you might enjoy one of the others more. There's even one with Jeff Goldblum as a player, somehow! Just to show you how good the dm is at improvising, this epic meltdown was done entirely off the cuff: (just to provide some background, the gimmick of this game show is that the rules of the game change every episode, and the rules aren't explained to contestants. The game is "yes or no" where the players are asked "yes or no?" and awarded points on their responses. Then this happened.) https://youtu.be/88et7YlmzTs
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 20:22
|
|
|
Drewjitsu posted:Just to show you how good the dm is at improvising, this epic meltdown was done entirely off the cuff: Yeah, that was amazing. Also their first sound impressions episode is up on Youtube for free and it's fantastic, watch it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 20:36
|
|
|
I didn't start watching Critical Role until episode 100 of season 2 (which also happened to be the unpopular Rumblecusp arc...). I knew I'd never catch up on everything that came before and just make extensive use of the wiki. I still ended up getting pretty invested, though I mostly listened while driving or watching while doing other stuff like painting minis. I'm using the setting for my own personal campaigns at the moment because the world is effectively a successor to the Dawn War setting from 4E with a nearly identical pantheon and origin story for the world. I end up using a lot of 4E lore material to fill in gaps from the official material on Exandria.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 20:46
|
|
|
pog boyfriend posted:good luck op Thanks, this is actually super helpful. The first couple years worth of D&D I ran this group through was a Tales from the Yawning Portal mashup with Eberron as the setting. Throughout, it seemed like they had more fun with convoluted, frequently goofy roleplay scenarios than actually getting into fights. Half the time it felt like they wanted to argue with monsters more than actually battle them (or flirt with them, in the case of the aggressively pansexual orc barbarian dude with a physique straight out of JoJo.) That's why I think they'll have fun in a horror sandbox, with Strahd as a recurring nuisance who is simultaneously threatening and incredibly petty. I am not ruling out copious sexual tension, because I just know they're gonna go there. I'm considering that we start off with the House of Lament mini-quest in the Ravenloft book.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 21:09
|
|
|
I've run Strahd's castle as a Halloween one-shot but not the full campaign. I want to run it in full, but I don't find Death House quite to my liking in terms of the more heroic "Castlevania" tone I'd want. I was either going to start at level 3 or do levels 1-3 in the home plane investigating spooky happenings in a place where Barovia is spilling over across planes before getting taken away. My lore for the latter was that the players would be from the plane Barovia originally came from, where Strahd and his domain are just a distant bad memory. The landscape of Barovia and the ruins of his castle would still exist as an echo-like remnant, but is shunned because of its dark history and the fact that people who go there seem to go missing. The players will find clues that lead them to the cursed place, and when they approach it they will be swept away into Strahd's version of Barovia.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 21:27
|
|
|
BattleMaster posted:I've run Strahd's castle as a Halloween one-shot but not the full campaign. I saw a one-shot with a fun premise on Youtube some time ago: Curse of Strahd, but the players start at level 20 and the content is not adjusted in any way. The video itself is a bit meh, tbh, but I'd like to run this one day and see how ridiculous it gets.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 22:29
|
|
|
Shelvocke posted:About 50 episodes into Critical Role. At the risk of being a hater, does Marisha ever stop yelling and trying to jump into the spotlight or should I give up now So the big thing to realize as quickly as possible is that it's not Marisha jumping in, it's KEYLETH. Like her character is just a huge jumble of insecurity and stress and she's roleplaying that (well, I might add). She herself does do some dice panic math stuff, but once you realize that's her in character it comes off a lot more likeable. I had the same feeling through a chunk of the first season, too. Honestly my biggest thing with CR is that I wish they'd edit the podcast just getting dice rolls and math out of the way. It's something that NADDPOD has absolutely spoiled me on. A new spell is usually explained once and then you don't hear it again for the rest of the podcast. All instances of "wait, what does my xx do, or hold on can I ___?" Are edited out, as well as dice rolls past the final total so you're not listening to 20-30 minutes of combat and 10-15 of it is adding dice and remembering what to add.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 16:11
|
|
|
Saxophone posted:
without all that is it even D&D any more?
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 17:15
|
|
|
Drewjitsu posted:Just to show you how good the dm is at improvising, this epic meltdown was done entirely off the cuff: They just started a mini-campaign on the Kids on Brooms system with Brennan as a player, where his PC is the saddest sack of poo poo teenager to ever exist. "Oh i got my phone at the gas station... it doesnt have a screen. I only have three numbers programmed. 911, National Poison Hotline, and Animal Control"
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 18:55
|
|
|
First of the free MTG tie-in adventurers is out, it's a level 6-8 one-shot about chasing down Red Wizards: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-story/scarlet-flames-2021-06-30
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 21:28
|
|
|
Curse of Strahd can be fun if you don't treat it like D&D. It's still very much an "adventures go around, kill monsters, get treasure" deal, but the setting of Barovia lacks a lot of typical D&D fantasy tropes. Magic items in general are rare, it's incredibly humanocentric, dungeons in the "underground/ruined complex" style are few and far between, and there aren't a lot of high fantasy style things like priests and temples to different deities with active religions, guilds of thieves and wizards doing thief and wizardy stuff, and the bulk of non-monstrous people PCs interact with are ordinary commoners and villagers trying to get by in a hostile world. It takes a different mindset to play beyond just the 'D&D but spooky' tropes. Dark fantasy can be done well in 5th Edition, but Curse of Strahd (and by wide extension Ravenloft in general) is defined by what it doesn't have as much as what it does have in contrast to standard D&D.
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2021 07:11
|
|
|
I was looking at Warhammer Fantasy RP and noticed the small number of playable races, which makes sense given the setting and general vibe. But it got me wondering: Is the idea of the colorful motley of exotic player races comparatively new to D&D? Like not just "did other editions have a lot of races," but for example, was it common for a party to be like a rainbow of exotic hybrids like you might see today, or was it kind of an expectation that groups would keep to the Tolkien type races with rare exceptions? Just curious about it in terms of if and how much the culture around D&D has changed over time.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 07:05
|
|
|
Nehru the Damaja posted:I was looking at Warhammer Fantasy RP and noticed the small number of playable races, which makes sense given the setting and general vibe. But it got me wondering: Is the idea of the colorful motley of exotic player races comparatively new to D&D? Like not just "did other editions have a lot of races," but for example, was it common for a party to be like a rainbow of exotic hybrids like you might see today, or was it kind of an expectation that groups would keep to the Tolkien type races with rare exceptions? Just curious about it in terms of if and how much the culture around D&D has changed over time. Certainly in 3rd edition and earlier, all my groups were over 50% human. It was definitely more the norm to be human in the days when being something else meant having a level cap. Can’t say for certain when that changed, maybe by 3rd edition my group was already the rarity.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 11:11
|
|
|
Reveilled posted:Certainly in 3rd edition and earlier, all my groups were over 50% human. It was definitely more the norm to be human in the days when being something else meant having a level cap. Can’t say for certain when that changed, maybe by 3rd edition my group was already the rarity. My old high school Dark Sun group was fairly mixed but Dark Sun had a different level cap table -- everyone could be uncapped Psionicist and most races had at least *something* they weren't capped in. I think the bigger change though is just over time more and more rules have come out for playable [x]. Back in the day if you wanted a playable aarakocra or minotaur or centaur or robot or whatever you had to homebrew the rules for it. Now there are forty-odd different race templates baked into D&D beyond. And you don't have to hope Waldenbooks has the sourcebook you want, either, you can just order it online. It really can't be overstated how much the internet has changed gaming. I had to carve my own miniatures out of erasers! Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Jul 3, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 14:11
|
|
|
Well there was The Complete Humanoid Handbook which was racial rules for just about every humanoid in the monster manual, but like you said, you had to hope it was in stock at the local Waldens. One of the first things I did when I get the internet in '95 was print put a bunch of 'The Complete Netbook of X'. Was pretty wild to go into a Waldens in the early 2000s and find someone did the same with the sex book and sold it to a publisher.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 14:39
|
|
|
Nehru the Damaja posted:I was looking at Warhammer Fantasy RP and noticed the small number of playable races, which makes sense given the setting and general vibe. But it got me wondering: Is the idea of the colorful motley of exotic player races comparatively new to D&D? Like not just "did other editions have a lot of races," but for example, was it common for a party to be like a rainbow of exotic hybrids like you might see today, or was it kind of an expectation that groups would keep to the Tolkien type races with rare exceptions? Just curious about it in terms of if and how much the culture around D&D has changed over time. Before 3rd edition I always played a human, the other races didn't seem to have any advantage that was worth a level cap. Of course I never reached the level cap once!
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 14:53
|
|
|
I always let my 2E players ignore the level caps 😂 Probably in the vain hope that they would let me do the same when they ran.... Never did, those ungrateful bastards.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 15:11
|
|
|
One of Gygax's home games included a Balrog and a Dracula so I mean like, the notion of "homogenous adventuring party" was not the primordial ooze from which modern gaming crawled. I remember people complaining about 'snowflakes' as far back as 2e. Somewhere between 1e and 2e was some kind of backlash where lots of groggy DMs started pining for a more grounded experience and I'm not sure what media enabled it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 15:44
|
|
|
I do think it’s certainly become much more of a thing recently in 5e than it has ever been in the past; I think the biggest thing that has changed has been the move, first away from racial stat penalties and towards more homogenous stat lines in 5e (3e monstrous races had a tendency towards big bonus/big penalty design that was min-maxy in a way that even power gamers often found more trouble than it was worth - especially alongside how good that free feat always ended up being for humans anyway), and then to an even larger degree in the last two years as they’ve slowly moved towards the whole Tashas model of devaluing “race” as a gameplay element with things like customized origin/custom lineage
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 17:45
|
|
|
From my 2e experience, Humans, Dwarves, and Elves were all very popular.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 17:52
|
|
|
In 4e you could have given every race two floating +2s, and they would still have been pretty distinct just from their racial abilities and feat support. I haven't experienced anything that different in 5e on that front. The elves are magical, the halflings are lucky, and the dragonborn show off their elemental affinities before it ever matters what their highest ability score is.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 17:57
|
|
|
Oh absolutely the move away from racial stats has been a huge boon for character diversity. I just find a lot of people assume that the game has grown linearly more mixed with time and that isn't really true, it has waxed and waned a couple times.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2021 23:18
|
|
|
Going to be interesting to see what new meta emerges. We are already seeing weird consequences like a big boost in the popularity of mountain dwarf casters because of medium armor proficiency.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2021 00:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 5, 2024 00:10 |
|
|
Mendrian posted:One of Gygax's home games included a Balrog and a Dracula so I mean like, the notion of "homogenous adventuring party" was not the primordial ooze from which modern gaming crawled. I legit think it was the early internet that drove it. I remember running into it in chatrooms for other games and the logic for it, such as there was, went in two directions. First, your character was expected to have a backstory that fit in with the world. Having a party made up of nothing but the rarest races was a logical impossibility, as seeing just one member of any of those races was a once in a lifetime kind of thing, and suddenly a party of 4 of them rolls up to the bar. At a minimum, it's gonna be a circus as the whole town turns out. Second, there's a certain kind of player that I'd bet we all have experience with from the bad old days who absolutely needs to play the oddest most special and uniquest character ever. If you're the scion of minor nobility, they're a full on prince. If you're from a race that only infrequently visits human settlements, they're the only good character from a race of completely evil characters. Going with more "grounded" or "down to earth" character concepts was a way to signal that you are not that kind of player. I feel compelled to say that both reasons are boring and bullshit, but that was at least the received wisdom I got back in the day about odd characters.
|
|
#
?
Jul 4, 2021 01:19
|
|
