D&D General Critical Role Ending

[pemerton]

Because games like PbtA and Fate attempt to codify how players and GMs interact with the narrative space of te game by way of rules, those games therefore complicate improvisation. I am not saying they stop it or that those tools are good under the right circumstances or whatever,just that because they exist they must be considered.

D&D does not have such rules. Therefore, there is nothing to complicate that improvisation. I am not saying that is better or even good depending on the circumstances.

I personally have found that having to consider mechanics during scenes built primarily around narrative elements has the effect of pulling me out of the play in favor of the game. I prefer to just improvise my way through such scenes without having to consult any rules.

I don't really understand any of this.

I don't know what you mean by codifying how players and GMs interact with the narrative space of the game by way of rules. I mean, I can read the words, but in their natural language meaning D&D is full of such rules: eg a player says I sneak up behind the guard and knock her unconscious with my sap. That is an interaction with the "narrative space" of the game and it is chock-full of rules: rules for sneaking, rules for hitting people with saps, rules for damage, perhaps rules for condition infliction depending on further details (eg is the PC a battlemaster fighter spending superiority/manoeuvre dice?).

Or a player, whose PC is in despair, declares I raise my hands to the heavens and beseech the gods for aid! That is an interaction with the "narrative space" of the game is likewise is chock-full of rules: rules for being a cleric or other class with access to "divine" magic; the cleric class rules for divine intervention; perhaps the rules for skill checks in the domain of religious knowledge; perhaps the rules for skill checks in the domain of persuasion (is this an attempt to persuade a god?).

PbtA and Fate are such different mechanical systems that I don't know what you have in mind in lumping them together. I'll leave Fate to @Aldarc as I only know it a bit by reading Fate Core and have never played it. But Apocalypse World and Dungeon World certainly don't have any more rules to govern the above action declarations than D&D does!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Personally I think a big part of what makes streaming successful is its authenticity. I'm not looking for performative play when I sit down to watch a stream. I want something that feels like a real game.

It's possible that different people look for different things in a stream.

Personally, my favorite shows are right in that overlap of "know the rules" and "made by great performers." I would rather listen to Dimension 20 or Not Another D&D Podcast any day of the week than any of the other large number of shows I listen to. They're entertaining and actually make me a better player and DM.

Other shows, like The Adventure Zone, survive based on their performers for me. I find their understanding of the rules to be not great and their world-building, while I'm sure it's popular with a lot of people, is almost directly opposite of the style of world I enjoy. But the family's chemistry is fantastic, and I'd be happy to listen to Clint be bad at RPGs any day of the week.

I have dropped a fair number of shows with rock solid rules adherence and the like, because the performances were awful. I'm sure all involved are very nice people, but I have too many things in my streaming and podcast queues to spend time on shows I don't enjoy.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

No, the point is primarily for the main group of friends to hang out. They are grateful that turns out to be something they can monetize, but the main goal is to hang out and play their game with friends.

That may have once have been true, but once you have a corporation, a non-profit, employees, Kickstarter campaigns, I think this is no longer a bunch of friends getting together to play for fun. That's Joe Manginello's game, which is also full of professional entertainers whom I suspect could put on a heck of a good show as well, but for whom the play is the only thing.

Critical Role is a business. It's a business where they all happen to appear to be friends having a great time, but they didn't keep playing during the first part of the pandemic over Zoom or voicechat or the like because they wanted the show's quality to be consistent.

You know who kept on playing via streaming? Lots of folks who weren't monetizing their weekly D&D games.

This doesn't make this a criticism of Critical Role -- so that no one leaps in like a human shield to protect Matt Mercer -- but observations of their actual behavior.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

But Apocalypse World and Dungeon World certainly don't have any more rules to govern the above action declarations than D&D does!

I think what confuses people about PBtA is that GM moves are things that good GMs do naturally in almost every game anyway. Seeing them written out can make some people second guess their behavior, instead of viewing it as the author encouraging good GMing even for newcomers or less-than-supportive GMs.

I will admit I had to reread the Keepers section of Monster of the Week several times before the light bulb went on and I realized that I wasn't supposed to be more of a fan of the player characters than I already was, but that he was talking to GMs who wouldn't naturally be.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It’s also called pacing

I'm not sure hours of airtime spent on picking out servants who almost immediately become irrelevant is good pacing, so much as Matt, like a lot of GMs, saying "what the hell, let's see what happens here." He sometimes reins everyone in after a bit, sometimes he doesn't, just like a lot of us.

It's very clear that many of the players enjoy having their characters share their feelings and he gives them room to do that. Also, episodes are four hours, so he's got a lot more wiggle room than most DMs.

 

[Parmandur]

That may have once have been true, but once you have a corporation, a non-profit, employees, Kickstarter campaigns, I think this is no longer a bunch of friends getting together to play for fun. That's Joe Manginello's game, which is also full of professional entertainers whom I suspect could put on a heck of a good show as well, but for whom the play is the only thing.

Critical Role is a business. It's a business where they all happen to appear to be friends having a great time, but they didn't keep playing during the first part of the pandemic over Zoom or voicechat or the like because they wanted the show's quality to be consistent.

You know who kept on playing via streaming? Lots of folks who weren't monetizing their weekly D&D games.

This doesn't make this a criticism of Critical Role -- so that no one leaps in like a human shield to protect Matt Mercer -- but observations of their actual behavior.

One of those both/and situarions...but the play remains primary.

 

[pemerton]

I think what confuses people about PBtA is that GM moves are things that good GMs do naturally in almost every game anyway. Seeing them written out can make some people second guess their behavior, instead of viewing it as the author encouraging good GMing even for newcomers or less-than-supportive GMs.

I can see what you're saying here, and I think there's a degree of truth to it. But I also think that there is more to it than what you've said here.

For instance, one pair of principles in Apocalypse World is the following (AW pp 110-11):

Make your move, but misdirect. Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead. Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun” — this was the PC’s move — “but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you, and so correspondingly always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible.

Make your move, but never speak its name. Maybe your move is to separate them, but you should never just say that. Instead, say how Foster’s thugs drags one of them off, and Foster invites the other to eat lunch with her. Maybe your move is to announce future badness, but for god sake never say the words “future badness.” Instead, say how this morning, filthy, stinking black smoke is rising from somewhere in the car yard, and I wonder what’s brewing over there?

These two principles are cause and effect. The truth is that you’ve chosen a move and made it. Pretend, though, that there’s a fictional cause; pretend that it has a fictional effect. Together, the purpose of these two principles is to create an illusion for the players . . .​

Now there are limits on this. For instance, in the example of play on pp 152-58 we see examples of the MC (= GM) misdirecting and never speaking the name of the move made, but we also see the following (p 156):

"Let’s see … 4-harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?”
“1-armor.”
“Oh yes, your armored corset. Good! You take 3-harm.”​

That's coming pretty close to the GM announcing inflict harm as a move. But D&D requires much more of this sort of thing: for instance, the GM has to ask the player his/her AC, and possibly mention the attacker's to hit roll, and certainly has to announce damage results which then get applied to the hp tally. D&D makes it really quite hard to adhere to these principles in the context of combat resolution: the real-world reasons for doing various things are rubbed in our faces all the time, and it's hard to present them as having fictional causes and fictional effects.

I also think that D&D makes some other AW moves quite hard to put into effect, because of its tendency to granularity in action resolution. I'm thinking especially of separating them and taking away their stuff, but there are probably other examples too.

The flip-side is that AW is designed so that its mechanics permit a high degree of operationalisation of its principles, and of its GM-side moves. And a number of those features differentiate it from D&D and D&D-adjacent games.

I had to reread the Keepers section of Monster of the Week several times before the light bulb went on and I realized that I wasn't supposed to be more of a fan of the player characters than I already was, but that he was talking to GMs who wouldn't naturally be.

This quickly gets into thorny territory in the context of D&D play!

Here's an example, from AW (p 114) of what it means to be a fan of the player's characters:

The worst way there is to make a character’s life more interesting is to take away the things that made the character cool to begin with. The gunlugger’s guns, but also the gunlugger’s collection of ancient photographs — what makes the character match our expectations and also what makes the character rise above them. Don’t take those away.​

This thread has already had a discussion about taking away high-level D&D character's teleport and similar abilities. There's a long tradition of the treating the wizard's spellbook as a point of vulnerability.

More subtly, but something which for me as a RPGer is very important, is the way the structure of play encourages or suppresses the manifestation of core PC capabilities. For instance, in discussions of the 5e rest economy I've seen posters who say that a good feature of an unpredictable but predictably large-ish number encounters between rests is that it encourages players to conserve resources, which in turn helps manage nova-ing and related issues. But the result of this sort of incentive structure is that much of the time we don't see the PCs being what they're best at, at least not the PCs who are powered by limited resources.

So again in the context of D&D I think it can actually be quite challenging to operationalise the "be a fan" principle. Because once again the principle is sensitive to details of mechanical design.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So again in the context of D&D I think it can actually be quite challenging to operationalise the "be a fan" principle. Because once again the principle is sensitive to details of mechanical design.

I think it also is a matter of degrees. In my long-running Ptolus campaign, I have a player who, like a lot of player characters, did something that completely screwed up my plans for the campaign's near term. What I thought would be an agonizing choice that he would regret and carry with him instead turned into "OK, I'll leave the rest of the party and go to another city and join an order of knights."

(First off, yes, don't put choices in front of your players that you're not prepared for them to take. That one was definitely on me.)

But instead of agonizing and saying "oh, I'll show him for taking that exciting opportunity to become a Knight of the Dawn," I came up with a whole exciting parallel adventure series for him, culminating in him exposing infiltrators among the knights-aspirant who were hoping to assassinate the emperor, which he had to combat while underground in a ghoul warren beneath the capital city's necropolis.

He eventually got reintegrated in with the rest of the party after not becoming a knight -- what's the point of having a Lawful Good order of knights if some of them won't get stuck on all the pendantic details of knighthood, and the PC wasn't the horseman some of the other aspirants were -- but he also got a heroic arc of his own where he got to grapple with his faith and sense of duty (long-running themes for this paladin) and, when the campaign came to a climactic point, and an army of kobolds and an aspect of Tiamat were going to destroy the heroes' home barony, he was able to call on some of the greatest knights in the realm to help save the day.

The DM and my Grand Plan for the Campaign is not the most important thing in the campaign: It's that everyone have fun and the people who showed up to be kick-ass heroes get to be kick-ass heroes, even if that means I have to say "um, I need to take a break and figure out what the hell happens now that you've set fire to all my expectations here."

Yeah, in combat, this principle can mean something as simple as "don't nickel and dime the PCs to death when they want to do something cool that's more or less within the spirit of the rules," but I think it's mostly a general attitude that PBtA (and, frankly, lots of great books on GMing) endorses.

 

[Parmandur]

I can see what you're saying here, and I think there's a degree of truth to it. But I also think that there is more to it than what you've said here.

For instance, one pair of principles in Apocalypse World is the following (AW pp 110-11):

Make your move, but misdirect. Of course the real reason why you choose a move exists in the real world. Somebody has her character go someplace new, somebody misses a roll, somebody hits a roll that calls for you to answer, everybody’s looking to you to say something, so you choose a move to make. Real-world reasons. However, misdirect: pretend that you’re making your move for reasons entirely within the game’s fiction instead. Maybe your move is to separate them, for instance; never say “you missed your roll, so you two get separated.” Instead, maybe say “you try to grab his gun” — this was the PC’s move — “but he kicks you down. While they’re stomping on you, they drag Damson away.” The effect’s the same, they’re separated, but you’ve cannily misrepresented the cause. Make like it’s the game’s fiction that chooses your move for you, and so correspondingly always choose a move that the game’s fiction makes possible.​

​

Make your move, but never speak its name. Maybe your move is to separate them, but you should never just say that. Instead, say how Foster’s thugs drags one of them off, and Foster invites the other to eat lunch with her. Maybe your move is to announce future badness, but for god sake never say the words “future badness.” Instead, say how this morning, filthy, stinking black smoke is rising from somewhere in the car yard, and I wonder what’s brewing over there?​

​

These two principles are cause and effect. The truth is that you’ve chosen a move and made it. Pretend, though, that there’s a fictional cause; pretend that it has a fictional effect. Together, the purpose of these two principles is to create an illusion for the players . . .​

Now there are limits on this. For instance, in the example of play on pp 152-58 we see examples of the MC (= GM) misdirecting and never speaking the name of the move made, but we also see the following (p 156):

"Let’s see … 4-harm area messy, a grenade. You have armor?”​

“1-armor.”​

“Oh yes, your armored corset. Good! You take 3-harm.”​

That's coming pretty close to the GM announcing inflict harm as a move. But D&D requires much more of this sort of thing: for instance, the GM has to ask the player his/her AC, and possibly mention the attacker's to hit roll, and certainly has to announce damage results which then get applied to the hp tally. D&D makes it really quite hard to adhere to these principles in the context of combat resolution: the real-world reasons for doing various things are rubbed in our faces all the time, and it's hard to present them as having fictional causes and fictional effects.

I also think that D&D makes some other AW moves quite hard to put into effect, because of its tendency to granularity in action resolution. I'm thinking especially of separating them and taking away their stuff, but there are probably other examples too.

The flip-side is that AW is designed so that its mechanics permit a high degree of operationalisation of its principles, and of its GM-side moves. And a number of those features differentiate it from D&D and D&D-adjacent games.

This quickly gets into thorny territory in the context of D&D play!

Here's an example, from AW (p 114) of what it means to be a fan of the player's characters:

The worst way there is to make a character’s life more interesting is to take away the things that made the character cool to begin with. The gunlugger’s guns, but also the gunlugger’s collection of ancient photographs — what makes the character match our expectations and also what makes the character rise above them. Don’t take those away.​

This thread has already had a discussion about taking away high-level D&D character's teleport and similar abilities. There's a long tradition of the treating the wizard's spellbook as a point of vulnerability.

More subtly, but something which for me as a RPGer is very important, is the way the structure of play encourages or suppresses the manifestation of core PC capabilities. For instance, in discussions of the 5e rest economy I've seen posters who say that a good feature of an unpredictable but predictably large-ish number encounters between rests is that it encourages players to conserve resources, which in turn helps manage nova-ing and related issues. But the result of this sort of incentive structure is that much of the time we don't see the PCs being what they're best at, at least not the PCs who are powered by limited resources.

So again in the context of D&D I think it can actually be quite challenging to operationalise the "be a fan" principle. Because once again the principle is sensitive to details of mechanical design.

The point isn't to prevent PCs from using their coll abilities, but making the decision of when to unleash full power meaningful, and the overall structure ensures that moments to shine get distributedamong the party over time. And in the meantime, 5E characters do have abilities to contribute to narrative that are not resource based.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

To a lot of people, myself included, the decision of the Mighty Nein not to capture and turn in Essek was immoral, illegal and irresponsible. Veth nearly lost her husband because of the trickery - and easily could have seen her child killed. Yasha has every reason to hate mind games. Beau has every reason to hate people that abuse power. Caduceus is generally a moral person, although noncommittal. Jester, Fjord and Caleb are all well in character, however, to put a friendship above the impacts to so many people.

Had I been the DM, I would have been expecting that discussion to go very differently - and it seems like Matt did too.

That discussion very nearly did go very differently.

It seems like you are completely disregarding intentionality vs recklessness. Both create a war, and that is obviously evil, but the difference does inform the nature of the person and to what degree forgiveness is possible or appropriate.

Essek was willing to risk renewed war to get something he wanted. Pretty classic story, rings true of a lot of Cold War stories (real and fictional) that could have kicked off world war three had cooler heads not prevailed, etc. When his recklessness cause war to reignite, he felt trapped and jumped at the chance to help end the war.

Trent, OTOH, intentionally reignited a war, and seems to intend to do so again if it will get him more power and influence.

It’s completely believable and psychologically normal for a group of people to give a dear friend the benefit of the doubt, and see the fear and guilt much more viscerally than they see the sin.

And again, they very nearly threw him to the wolves. They went into the conversation ready to do that.

That they then later hang out with him and make jokes, after again reinforcing that he deserves his guilt and reminding him that he has a lot to atone for and may never actually atone, is...very human. This is how real people behave, IRL.

The action economy. The hit point and damage rules. The rules for magic-use, based around spell slots and class abilities. The rules for recovery via rest periods.

Maybe some others too, but those were the ones I thought of in the time it took me to type them up.

EDIT: I also noticed these posts upthread which identify more impediments (though I'm not saying that was what these posters were themselves doing):

How do any of those things impede improvisation? Some of them I would cite as directly responsible for more improvisation. Especially the magic system.

A lack of specifics can aid improv in some scenes, IME, but combat especially is a split between those who have an easier time with fewer mechanics vs those who use the mechanics as springboards for improv.