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Why Critical Role is so successful...
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<blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 8065057" data-attributes="member: 6801845"><p>I can't say that I'm a professional DM (and to be clear, that was not always Mercer's job) I do try to make my game personal and give plenty of opportunity for non-combat encounters and decisions. Someone who enjoys Critical Role is exactly the kind of person I want in my game as long as they accept that I am not going to run my game <em>exactly</em> like Matt. I like doing voices, but I'm not a professional voice actor. I will never have prepared battle maps as awesome as his. I do focus a bit more on combat than he does, but that's at least in part personal preference and the fact that my current group doesn't have a weekly session.</p><p></p><p>But when it comes to time to prepare ... I actually find that I need less time to prep most exploration than I do combat. For exploration and interaction I just have to figure out personalities, motivations and overall goals. It's stuff I do while I'm getting ready for bed or trying to fall asleep. Used to be stuff I'd do on my commute to work. I figure out possible NPC story lines, randomly generate a bunch of names and I'm off to the races.</p><p></p><p>Combat? I have to think about what monsters are appropriate, if I can set up interesting environments, how can I switch up the goals to be something other than "kill the monsters", at least now and then.</p><p></p><p>So I rely heavily on improv, on having relatively minimal preparation because the PCs probably aren't going to do what I expect anyway. I let player's imagination fill in a fair amount of detail and then build on that. At the end of sessions, if I'm not in the middle of a set piece I give the players options of what they want to do next so I can prep for it.</p><p></p><p>But exploration, discovery, social interaction and making decisions outside of combat are just as important if not more important than combat in my games.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Oofta, post: 8065057, member: 6801845"] I can't say that I'm a professional DM (and to be clear, that was not always Mercer's job) I do try to make my game personal and give plenty of opportunity for non-combat encounters and decisions. Someone who enjoys Critical Role is exactly the kind of person I want in my game as long as they accept that I am not going to run my game [I]exactly[/I] like Matt. I like doing voices, but I'm not a professional voice actor. I will never have prepared battle maps as awesome as his. I do focus a bit more on combat than he does, but that's at least in part personal preference and the fact that my current group doesn't have a weekly session. But when it comes to time to prepare ... I actually find that I need less time to prep most exploration than I do combat. For exploration and interaction I just have to figure out personalities, motivations and overall goals. It's stuff I do while I'm getting ready for bed or trying to fall asleep. Used to be stuff I'd do on my commute to work. I figure out possible NPC story lines, randomly generate a bunch of names and I'm off to the races. Combat? I have to think about what monsters are appropriate, if I can set up interesting environments, how can I switch up the goals to be something other than "kill the monsters", at least now and then. So I rely heavily on improv, on having relatively minimal preparation because the PCs probably aren't going to do what I expect anyway. I let player's imagination fill in a fair amount of detail and then build on that. At the end of sessions, if I'm not in the middle of a set piece I give the players options of what they want to do next so I can prep for it. But exploration, discovery, social interaction and making decisions outside of combat are just as important if not more important than combat in my games. [/QUOTE]
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