Critical Role - Tabletop RPGs is serious business, man.

[UnKillFill]

You absolutely cannot allow characters on the stream to die. It doesn't matter if the fans complain or not, the entire point of the stream is to get people invested in the characters. If they don't complain they'll still stop watching the stream.

Taking months or years of work and throwing it into the garbage because the dice went wrong or because the players did something stupid would be self-destructive.

Roleplaying is at best the secondary purpose of the stream. Its primary purpose is entertainment. The only time you can permanently remove a character is when it doesn't serve the purpose of entertainment. Like Tiberius in campaign 1 whose player did not realize he needed to be an entertainer first and a roleplayer second, and like Molly in S2 who Talesin just could not get working.

This does make combats on Critical Role pointless and very boring. However the real solution to that would be to have a failure state other than player character death. Dnd is't the best system for that but you probably could sling something together. It would help if Resurrection was easier, not harder. Clearly though it is not a critical flaw as they still rake in large amounts of cash. If they started regularly murdering characters they wouldn't.

I'm gonna give CR at least some credit... I don't actually think that the faggot Taliesin's character was planned to die in C2. He was literally playing Mercer's home brewed pet class at the time, which I believe they later sold in a book. If anything, you'd think they would have tried to make Molly look super op to sell that book, and yeah Molly sucked.
And no, I don't think bringing him back as the BBEG counts. That was pure fan service, and ended up literally being a completely different character by the end.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

You absolutely cannot allow characters on the stream to die. It doesn't matter if the fans complain or not, the entire point of the stream is to get people invested in the characters. If they don't complain they'll still stop watching the stream.

Taking months or years of work and throwing it into the garbage because the dice went wrong or because the players did something stupid would be self-destructive.

Roleplaying is at best the secondary purpose of the stream. Its primary purpose is entertainment. The only time you can permanently remove a character is when it doesn't serve the purpose of entertainment. Like Tiberius in campaign 1 whose player did not realize he needed to be an entertainer first and a roleplayer second, and like Molly in S2 who Talesin just could not get working.

This does make combats on Critical Role pointless and very boring. However the real solution to that would be to have a failure state other than player character death. Dnd is't the best system for that but you probably could sling something together. It would help if Resurrection was easier, not harder. Clearly though it is not a critical flaw as they still rake in large amounts of cash. If they started regularly murdering characters they wouldn't.

You'd think that all the characters being the same roguish quippers (at least from what I understood) would make it so fans would like the variety, but never doubt the ability of people on the internet to be over-empathic to fiction and no empathy for real people.

Anyways, the classic failure state is having NPCs to babysit so doing stupid shit will get them killed instead of the player.

 

[WhatIsThePunchline]

I'm gonna give CR at least some credit... I don't actually think that the faggot Taliesin's character was planned to die in C2. He was literally playing Mercer's home brewed pet class at the time, which I believe they later sold in a book. If anything, you'd think they would have tried to make Molly look super op to sell that book, and yeah Molly sucked.
And no, I don't think bringing him back as the BBEG counts. That was pure fan service, and ended up literally being a completely different character by the end.

I'm doubtful but I haven't seen that far so I don't know.

You'd think that all the characters being the same roguish quippers (at least from what I understood) would make it so fans would like the variety, but never doubt the ability of people on the internet to be over-empathic to fiction and no empathy for real people.

Anyways, the classic failure state is having NPCs to babysit so doing stupid shit will get them killed instead of the player.

That's not it.

Engagement requires time. It takes time to establish a character, introduce related plot threads for him, develop those threads over time, then the player needs more time to engage with those threads and the character needs time to attain character development as well. Permanently removing that character from the overarching story at random means you are taking all that time to build up the story structures you are using to entertain people - the structures you are using to make money, and throwing them away.

There are probably ways you can construct a rpg stream so that you can have plenty of characters death and it'd still work but it'd something you'd have to think about very hard before hand. I'm not sure how to do it.

But really, you can just run an rpg campaign without pc death on the table and it can still be tense and risky.

• As you said you can have npc companions that can risk their life in the pcs stead.
• You can tie fights more to an immediate overarching plot, thus meaning that if you loose a battle you loose a part of the larger fight. Example 'The realm has been invaded, you're an important part of the military defense'
• You can give players to many things to do with to little time, meaning it becomes much more important to succeed with each individual fight. Example: 'There's an invasion, here are five locations that are all in critical need of assistance you can do them one at a time... what order do you do them?'
• You can allow for immense amounts of collateral, using the location the pcs fight in much as you'd use an npc.
• You can focus more on other types of conflict instead of just combat. Like investigation and mystery and such. Dnd is bad for this though because dnd is mostly built for combat and looting shit.

Anyway - When critical roll has to pick between doing better roleplay or doing better entertainment they seem pretty comfortable picking the latter which is probably part of their success.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Engagement requires time. It takes time to establish a character, introduce related plot threads for him, develop those threads over time, then the player needs more time to engage with those threads and the character needs time to attain character development as well. Permanently removing that character from the overarching story at random means you are taking all that time to build up the story structures you are using to entertain people - the structures you are using to make money, and throwing them away.

I've had characters in fiction be engaging from 5 minutes of dialogue. And on the other hand a sudden death in a story can make the other characters far more engaging for having experienced a death of a close friend and reacting to it. From watching TFS clone of Critical Role the argument about character development and plot arc is ridiculous since those are 95% of the time forgotten in favour of the current murder hobo-ing going on.

Having the main characters be invincible is the opposite of engagement. Those characters risk nothing and will only advance at the behest of the DM drip feeding them their pre-decided route.

In the end it's just a hugbox to listen to weekly with the same amount of depth as a Saturday morning cartoon.

 

[WhatIsThePunchline]

I've had characters in fiction be engaging from 5 minutes of dialogue. And on the other hand a sudden death in a story can make the other characters far more engaging for having experienced a death of a close friend and reacting to it. From watching TFS clone of Critical Role the argument about character development and plot arc is ridiculous since those are 95% of the time forgotten in favour of the current murder hobo-ing going on.

Having the main characters be invincible is the opposite of engagement. Those characters risk nothing and will only advance at the behest of the DM drip feeding them their pre-decided route.

In the end it's just a hugbox to listen to weekly with the same amount of depth as a Saturday morning cartoon.

That's nice for you, but you're not going to spend millions upon millions of dollars on that character.

And character deaths in storytelling can be just as cheap a gimmick as having them be 'invincible' there's a huge area between those two extremes.

I'll repeat: Franchises do not function by throwing away what they rely on to make money. Critical Role is a business before they are a roleplaying campaign and them electing to not kill of the characters they earn money from is completely the right decision. It has nothing to do with the personality of their fans and everything to do with the medium which ultimately pays their bills.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

That's nice for you, but you're not going to spend millions upon millions of dollars on that character.

And character deaths in storytelling can be just as cheap a gimmick as having them be 'invincible' there's a huge area between those two extremes.

I'll repeat: Franchises do not function by throwing away what they rely on to make money. Critical Role is a business before they are a roleplaying campaign and them electing to not kill of the characters they earn money from is completely the right decision. It has nothing to do with the personality of their fans and everything to do with the medium which ultimately pays their bills.

Wouldn't it be more economic to have more characters to sell Funko pops of? You can always cheat and bring back the popular ones anyways.

And because the character death is dynamic it's never overused as long as the DM isn't outright gunning for mass carnage.

What Critical Role relies on is a heavily romanticised idea of end and the production level to support it. The characters don't matter for the show (far moreso the talent). But the idea that they are invincible does, since normies love the idea of a dnd session when they play out their Marvel hero role. And this romanticised product is Why CR is disastrous for Tabletop games.

 

[WhatIsThePunchline]

Wouldn't it be more economic to have more characters to sell Funko pops of? You can always cheat and bring back the popular ones anyways.

Don't be glib. They're not selling funko pops, they're selling a stream. Merchandise is only possible if people give a damn about the franchise, that is give a damn about the stream. So no it wouldn't be.

And because the character death is dynamic it's never overused as long as the DM isn't outright gunning for mass carnage.

What Critical Role relies on is a heavily romanticised idea of end and the production level to support it. The characters don't matter for the show (far moreso the talent). But the idea that they are invincible does, since normies love the idea of a dnd session when they play out their Marvel hero role. And this romanticised product is Why CR is disastrous for Tabletop games.

The characters are the entire point. It's a roleplaying stream. It's about the characters.

Marvel by the way is one of the most successful franchises in all of history. It's not the best to compare CR to something that has raked in oceans of money if you want to seethe about them.

Yeah people look down on capeshit. I haven't watched it since infinity wars myself.

But if you are trying to make money going for 'stuff that normies like' is a good choice.

 

[Dr. Pasquale]

Well, the dude is a very vocal male feminist, and we all know the cliche about people like that by now.

Also, did you actually watch all of those EXU episodes? I have heard incredible things about how Aabria She-Boon DMs. Any opinions you wanna share with the group?

ExU 1 is a complete trashfire that was made retroactively enjoyable because of the memes and the fact that even the critrole community of twitterfolk didnt like what they saw. ExU 2 was just straight up unwatchable. Even the shitposting threads were dead.

Aabria learned nothing after almost killing the show's twitch subscriptions and still sucks ass at DMing. She has never even glanced at the 5e rulebook and still the bitch insisted on running a heist two-shot. It was so awkward to watch the table stumbling around while she tried to fail them forward and she was still doing the same old shit like asking for random saving throws, making every NPC the same bitchy person and telling people how their own characters are feeling in any specific moment.

Making it a week break instead of several months and 2 sessions instead of 8 didnt seem to help the views neither. Usually they have around 25-35k people watching on YT but the ExU2 finally was sitting at 5k most of the time. If we werent living in clown world she would have been long gone by now.

 

[Pargon]

ExU 1 is a complete trashfire that was made retroactively enjoyable because of the memes and the fact that even the critrole community of twitterfolk didnt like what they saw. ExU 2 was just straight up unwatchable. Even the shitposting threads were dead.

Aabria learned nothing after almost killing the show's twitch subscriptions and still sucks ass at DMing. She has never even glanced at the 5e rulebook and still the bitch insisted on running a heist two-shot. It was so awkward to watch the table stumbling around while she tried to fail them forward and she was still doing the same old shit like asking for random saving throws, making every NPC the same bitchy person and telling people how their own characters are feeling in any specific moment.

Making it a week break instead of several months and 2 sessions instead of 8 didnt seem to help the views neither. Usually they have around 25-35k people watching on YT but the ExU2 finally was sitting at 5k most of the time. If we werent living in clown world she would have been long gone by now.

Speaking as a longtime viewer (early C1) who has a professional relationship with someone who got into it on account of the cartoon, it really seems like viewers develop favorite characters/players and will check the fuck out if they’re not at the table. Said newbie viewer really liked Pike’s character and how Ashley played her, finished the cartoon and started C1 and texted me asking where she was. After I told them Ashley wasn’t consistently on the show until like the back half of C2 they skipped the right to C3. I know they needed to fill the gap but I haven’t heard many people going nuts for Opal or Mohragan (or whatever the fuck her name was).

Fuck me, I don’t even know what sort of person Lindbeck’s character was supposed to be. It’s like that part in the Plinkett Phantom Menace really view. “Describe the following character in Critical Role without mentioning what they looked like, what clothes they wore, or what the role in the story they play. Describe this character like you ain’t ever seen Critical Role.”

She’s uhhhh…well she’s a bartender and she steals stuff. She can make herself look like she’s wearing whatever she wants. She’s, um, sorta snarky I guess?

 

[Random Internet Person]

 

[jorgoth]

Now that I think of it it's really fucking ironic that woke geeks love steampunk so much while talking about how much they hate white supremacists.

Steampunk is basically "What if Victorian England, like, never ended?" when Victorian England was basically the height of actual white supremacy, basically the peak of colonialism before its collapse in the World Wars and the resulting rise of China and Russia.

 

[Random Internet Person]

Now that I think of it it's really fucking ironic that woke geeks love steampunk so much while talking about how much they hate white supremacists.

Steampunk is basically "What if Victorian England, like, never ended?" when Victorian England was basically the height of actual white supremacy, basically the peak of colonialism before its collapse in the World Wars and the resulting rise of China and Russia.

I think it has something to do with some stories of women being in a place to go against gender norms, like Anne Lister. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Lister

Also, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure had its first part in Victorian England. And everyone loves JoJo.

Nails painted black? Really, Matt?

 

[jorgoth]

Yeah, from what I've seen, either your DM is some boring ex-military guy making stories about space marines shooting demons, or he's a decent writer but he paints his nails black and dresses like an old lesbian.

 

[Chilson]

Yeah, from what I've seen, either your DM is some boring ex-military guy making stories about space marines shooting demons, or he's a decent writer but he paints his nails black and dresses like an old lesbian.

The ex-military guys are the fucking best DM's and black fingernail painting fags are boring pretentious blowhards trying to be Joss Whedon.

What the fuck are you smoking???

 

[jorgoth]

The ex-military guys are the fucking best DM's and black fingernail painting fags are boring pretentious blowhards trying to be Joss Whedon.

What the fuck are you smoking???

Just recent experience, I went to Palladium Open House and the games were kind of dull. They pretty much all ended up with a bunch of dudes in power armor gunning down a horde of underpowered demons.

 

[Random Internet Person]

Yeah, from what I've seen, either your DM is some boring ex-military guy making stories about space marines shooting demons,

So…WarHammer?

 

[jorgoth]

So…WarHammer?

Hahaha sure, but less political intrigue, tragedy, religion, and self-doubt.

 

[Andthensomeguy]

Yeah, from what I've seen, either your DM is some boring ex-military guy making stories about space marines shooting demons, or he's a decent writer but he paints his nails black and dresses like an old lesbian.

You forgot the standard nerdy guy with the failed ambitions of being a writer, the old dude who's been doing this since Chainmail came out, and the surprisingly normal guy who just likes TTRPG's for some reason.

I will agree that I've been seeing a bit more prevalence with those two though, probably due to TTRPG's becoming more mainstream ala the topic of the thread.

But yeah, guys shouldn't paint their nails black unless they can genuinely pull of the goth aesthetic (and under 25), going to a Halloween party, or just got done painting something. There are somethings you should't sacrifice style for the sake of expression.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Now that I think of it it's really fucking ironic that woke geeks love steampunk so much while talking about how much they hate white supremacists.

Steampunk is basically "What if Victorian England, like, never ended?" when Victorian England was basically the height of actual white supremacy, basically the peak of colonialism before its collapse in the World Wars and the resulting rise of China and Russia.

The aesthetic is nice. But those days it's basically a nigress in admiral uniform for maximum SLAY QUEEN points.

 

[Mega Black]

I'm gonna give CR at least some credit... I don't actually think that the faggot Taliesin's character was planned to die in C2. He was literally playing Mercer's home brewed pet class at the time, which I believe they later sold in a book. If anything, you'd think they would have tried to make Molly look super op to sell that book, and yeah Molly sucked.

I go back and forth on whether or not the death was intentional on Taliesin's part. On the one hand he's admitted that the character didn't work very well, he's kind of a melty face retard in general anyway so him suiciding on accident isn't too far-fetched but having him run straight into a pack of bandits was pretty much guaranteed death and I feel like Tal knew it was coming.

But, the backlash from it was when I noticed a distinct difference in the way combat was handled from then on. It was never good, but there was still a thin veneer of death and Matt seemed willing to let the cast make their own bed and sleep in it if they made dumb enough decisions. After this the kids gloves went on, suddenly nobody was in any danger at any point and no situation was unwinnable. He indulges the party a lot more and allows their retardation to play out without any serious consequences.

But really, you can just run an rpg campaign without pc death on the table and it can still be tense and risky.

I played a short campaign like this once and I really liked it actually. Our characters were trapped in a sort of limbo dimension where death wasn't permanent, but came at a cost to our overarching goal. Every time we died, the bad guy's macguffin got bigger and the endgame got tougher. I'm sure a lot of it was smoke and mirrors, but adding something like that to the table for CR -- where the characters are the brand and you can't consistently throw them out to add some danger to the mix -- would be a good idea. Hell, just any kind of personal consequence would be a little bit better than the way they do it now, where it's a 6+ hour combat against one large enemy the whole group can gang up on while they overact about how totally dangerous the battle is whenever they lose 5 hit points.

Steampunk is basically "What if Victorian England, like, never ended?" when Victorian England was basically the height of actual white supremacy, basically the peak of colonialism before its collapse in the World Wars and the resulting rise of China and Russia.

Time was you could enjoy exploring fictional settings and genres without explicitly endorsing every kind of negative element that setting would establish for the fake world in which it took place. Since we live in the age of inclusion = endorsement you can't have that anymore.

The real reason you should hate Steampunk is because it's dumb as shit. Don't put gears on my hat you fucking queers. What purpose is a steampowered hat? Fuck you.

You forgot the standard nerdy guy with the failed ambitions of being a writer,

I would prefer you not call me out like this ever again, thanks.