I'm back baby | Critical Eyes Ep 54.5.5
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- čas přidán 11. 07. 2024
- 0:00:00 - starting soon
0:05:16 - Intro Yappin
0:22:31 - CR
0:24:14 - Character plotlines vs Party plotlines
0:57:30 - CR
0:59:30 - Keyleth revalations
1:12:37 - CR
1:19:52 - Small yap + break
1:27:15 - Making Umbrasyll interesting
1:43:34 - CR
1:44:55 - Glyph of warding
1:56:30 - CR
2:02:07 - Trivializing fights
2:17:31 - CR
2:24:32 - Transitioning from theater of the mind to a map
2:34:31 - CR
2:36:05 - Magic item overload
2:47:07 - CR
2:54:49 - The, uh, kiss, I guess
3:04:44 - Break
3:06:54 - CR
3:09:27 - I like Critical Eyes and KC :)
3:23:30 - CR
3:26:30 - Daggerheart ranges
3:32:49 - CR
3:35:05 - White room combat is okay maybe?
3:39:54 - CR (plus some short interjections about the combat)
4:02:05 - ABJURIST NOJA IS OBVIOUSLY A BLUE DRAGON THAT TOOK BRYMSCYTHES PLACE NO I'M NOT CRAZY YOU'RE CRAZY
4:15:06 - Single target combats
4:18:37- CR
4:28:00 - Break
4:31:42 - It was from 2022 o.O
4:34:39 - I call CONSPIRACY!
4:38:23 - CR
4:39:29 - This combat is... huh... + dogs
4:59:46 - CR + short interrupts
5:22:53 - Monster decisions
5:27:59 - CR
5:30:01 - internet makes me sad :( :( :(
5:34:11 - CR
5:38:52 - You've accepted the rule of cool, but it had... unintended consequences...
5:49:05 - CR (AND ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE, I DON'T SAY ANYTHING WEIRD HERE, DON'T BELIEVE THE HATERS)
5:53:44 - This combat is almost a rule of cool case study at this point
6:17:19 - CR
6:23:46 - Players feeling pressured to be creative
6:29:12 - CR
6:34:07 - Wrap-up and, I called it? I guess?
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I haven't started watching the VOD, but I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the effort that went into all the chapter breaks. *So* helpful!
Like others have said, the timestamps are a great addition! I was watching live for a bit but had to step away, and when I came back, the vod restarted from the beginning, so it was very nice to quickly find where I left off!
With A TON of benefit of hindsight, here's how I think Matt could have improved this combat (or at least made it cleaner).
1) Initiative. When Marisha said that the trench would actually be a tunnel with a thin dirt ceiling, my immediate thought was "then it's an action to break out". Everyone who wants to benefit from Umbrasyl being surprised would stay outside, having to hide.
2) The Herd of Storms. For the purpose of them restraining the dragon they'd be split up into groups. Let's say, 5 groups of 5. Then I'd just make 5 attack rolls, every one that hits would be 5 chains, and thus +5 to the grapple escape check DC. For damage, I'd roll once for all of the herd, the number of damage dice would be proportional to the number of members alive, on a miss they'd still deal half damage.
3) Dimension Door. I think it's okay that Scanlan and Vax ended up separated. Sam didn't roll high enough, but instead of saying "You fail" Matt went with "Yes, but". I think it's great.
With Vax being stuck between the dragon's inner membranes, he'd be Restrained and Blinded. Scanlan, being inside its stomach would be Blinded and subject to the underwater combat rules.
Also, Umbrasyl's insides having the same AC as his outsides makes no sense to me. They don't have scales, they can't dodge out of the way. The AC should have been 10.
4) The Rod. It only dealing 1 damage is fine as long as Umbrasyl doesn't try to overpower it. He noticed something tugging on his insides and stopped. When he tried to fly away it dealt a ton of damage, so it's all cool.
All that said, Matt did a great job, the players were all on the edges of their seats and so were the viewers. He had to make a lot of on-the-spot rulings, some of them were more questionable than others, but if I couldn't pause the episode to consider every one of them, I wouldn't have the time to notice.
I think pointy hat made a good guide to mysteries, only note is DO NOT MAKE THEM WITHOUT MORE THAN ONE SOLUTION
Something I would argue about the point of there are X episodes in the campaign is: the cast at that point in time don’t know that so in their heads a tpk is possible even if we see there are more episodes
I totally agree. That's why I'm saying that the future knowledge is a huge bias for me, it makes it harder for me to tell whether or not the cast considers a TPK to be a serious possibility. They don't have the future knowledge source as a bias, but I don't know exactly what sort of conversations they've had around TPKs as a possibility within the campaign. Sure, Matt scared them a bit at the beginning of this arc, but he's also been pushing them towards Westruun for a bit now. Their characters obviously take it seriously, but I can't really tell if that's just the characters or the players as well.
@@MegaphoneMan0 We’ve seen that even in the fight in Westruun that Matt would kill them so the players do take these fights seriously there have been mentions, like in the kevdak fight, of a group chat with hundreds of texts so for all intents and purposes I would think that the cast do concider the chance of a tpk to be a very real possibility if things go poorly so try to mitigate that risk as much as possible
I put on SGM's latest video (the unreasonable villains) in the morning, still half asleep, and got very startled when I heard your voice 😂😂
I feel like the ruling of putting them on two sides of the membrane was fine, the part that doesn't make sense that the ac was the same on the inside it should have been like 10 possibly even do more than that
Hot take explanation:
Rewarding Planning- Good! Fun!
Problem solving and improvising in combat- Good! Fun!
Potential problem: players planning a boss to perfection so that the boss fight is trivial makes them feel smart, but whacking a sack of hitpoints because the boss is completely controlled isn't dynamic and potentially can be a slog to run through.
My scenario is:
The players have planned perfectly, the plan goes off without a hitch, they have the boss locked down, the boss can do nothing and theyre just wailing on him with no signs of the situation changing. As stated, you want to reward their planning, but the combat itself is super dull and undynamic.
Option one: You let them carry on working through hp and finish off the boss, rewarding their planning but the combat is a slog.
Option two (hot take): In your head you write this combat off as a player win whenever the fight becomes a foregone conclusion. You decide they are guaranteed not to lose, thus still rewarding their perfect planning.
In action, at that point, you contrive a way for their plan to fall apart, and the Boss becomes free to act and do its cool shit. The fight now becomes dynamic, and ostensibly for the players has high stakes, tension, and the fun of improvisational thinking and tactical decisions of 5e combat. You play out the rest of the combat, and you end the combat at the most cinematic and cool moment for the players. Ideally the players realise none of what you're doing behind the curtain to make the fight more entertaining experientially. The players get both the reward for their good planning, and the fun of a dynamic and unpredictable fight.
I call it a hot take as there is a shitton of behind the curtain rule breaking and railroading involved in this. However if I as a player couldn't detect the contrievence and the fact I was guarenteed a win, I know I would have a lot more fun if the 'plan went wrong' at some stage. If the fun of combat is solving a puzzle put in front of you, too much planning so that you solve it before you do it can make playing it out almost feel performative.
I fucking love the chapters
(chapters) dunno the actual name for them
When it comes to your comment on learning more about murder mysteries, I’ve ran a few for my party so I have some unprofessional advice I can give that can at least help you think about it!
Often times when I’m crafting the mystery I tend to work from the inside out. I make the full solution as if it were all easily obtained, then place each piece of the solution in the location/people as I think it would be discovered. From there I think of ways to obscure or lean into certain clues.
When it comes to red herring type moments, I try to make it so if they party runs in one of those misdirections, they’ll always come out of it with more information than they left. When the culprit was a vampire, I had three different vampires. One of them was recently turned by the culprit, and was scared to speak about this fact and getting that information will add more suspicion in the right direction. The other vampire, while still shady, could speak on the history of the culprit and why they may be capable of evil.
I don’t know how helpful this advice is, but regardless I hope it’ll give you some ideas on what you could do! So glad you’re seeming to be back in the swing of things, I look forward for the next stream 😇
I had forgotten tiny vax 😂