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CuwiKhons posted:In the livestream, it played out a bit differently (not a lot differently, it was still a one man rampage that was incredible to watch) because Scanlan put on a master class of using all his bard spells to the fullest - Dimension Door, Stinking Cloud, Polymorph, etc. But the plan had always been to burn the house down and once inside and alone and under attack, Sam very abruptly realized he didn't have any fire spells. So he was frantically digging through his item list for anything that might help (while being jeered at by the rest of the cast for not planning as well as he thought) and uncovered an old potion that he had to have written down years ago and totally forgot about, a potion of fire breathing. If anyone has it to hand, could someone post a link to the CR stream for that solo adventure? I've only started following CR in the past year or so, never watched the first campaign, but it's neat to go back and compare the show with the stream.
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Feb 13, 2022 19:53
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thanks!
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Feb 13, 2022 20:07
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Goddammit I'm sad now because you said "finale" but also excited for finale
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Feb 17, 2022 15:44
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Paracaidas posted:I'm possibly as excited for the reactions to the end of this season of you, Robobot, and the others ITT who aren't familiar with campaign one as I am to see it myself Because of similarities in how they're drawn, my wife and I both briefly thought that the big twist was going to be that the Briarwoods were, in fact, Lord and Lady De Rolo themselves come back as undead. I really enjoyed this season, not least because my own tabletop sessions have been largely defunct for the past six months or so and this show has really scratched that itch. I'm a huge fan of Stephen Root since his NewsRadio days and was amazed to realize he was Anders. A lot of this is making me want to go back to watch Campaign 1, but for now I still have a couple more episodes before I'm fully caught up on C3. I think overall my reaction is that this is the first legitimately artistically good adaptation of a D&D campaign that I've ever seen, and I've read a lot of books based on D&D campaigns. I think the difference between this and other "this is my campaign, enjoy" fantasy adaptations is an interesting puzzle to dissect precisely because so many adaptations are either failures or the kind of glaring cheap success you get by paying a quarter into a gumball machine. A few guesses as to why this adaptation works so well:
Overall I'm really looking forward to the next season and have found myself going back and watching bits and pieces of campaign one. My wife is a huge jurassic park fan (will sometimes just sing the theme to herself without even realizing she's doing it) so the Gunpowder Plot episode folks linked above where Scanlan went Triceratops and the whole cast started singing the theme is literally the only time I've seen her actively engaged and watching a Twitch stream recording of any kind. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Feb 19, 2022 |
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Feb 19, 2022 03:48
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Please do report in!
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Paracaidas posted:
Yeah, acceptance of failures and staying relatively true to the stream in spirit and not just detail was definitely a big part of it. I wonder if part of this was just that the streaming format meant they'd taken better notes than most people turning their D&D campaigns into stories. You tend not to remember the failure points but they definitely add necessary strength to the story. Creative control is an interesting puzzle. I did see in one of the streams that they talked about how their first drafts weren't workable and they had a lot of valuable help turning their scripts into viewable shows. So being willing to do second, third, etc drafts and being willing to cede creative control when they knew that was the right thing to do seems like it was part of it too. They didn't all try to draw their own characters and they brought in professional script writers as needed. Fereydun posted:i watched all of this and it was ok. it's kinda weird how mega cliche the cast feels but i guess somethin based off a dnd podcast is gonna be like that. On the other hand this is all true too. Like, the characters are a little deeper and more complicated than the five teenagers in the Dungeons and Dragons tv cartoon from the 1980s, but not THAT much more. They're mostly broad generic types; dumb barbarian, wise-cracking horny bard, naive and self-doubting elf druid, etc. (the most original is basically "hamlet, but with a gun"). On the one hand that gives the audience an easy introduction to the characters, though, so it's not all bad. It's very easy to feel like you know the people at the table because they're playing broad character types that you've probably played yourself or had someone else play across the table from you at some point in the past. Long and short of it I think is that their goal seems to have been communicating what a good D&D session feels like, more than telling a specific story or communicating a specific character. It doesn't have to be the most original thing in the world and it isn't trying to be; it's fun and it feels like friendship. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Feb 20, 2022 |
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Feb 20, 2022 15:43
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raises stakes but also breaks the generic "introduction->conflict->obstacle->solution->climax->
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Hulk Smash! posted:I just want this show to be successful enough that we eventually get a Legend of the Mighty Nein show. Weird thing for me is, I watched like. . . five or six episodes ? of Campaign 2. Long enough for them to pick their party name, anyway. And it just didn't grab me at all. Campaign 1, the little I've watched, had a sort of endearing raw charm, and campaign 3 seems firing on all cylinders, but my main takeaway from what I watched of 2 was "holy poo poo they're spending a lot of money on miniatures." I kinda enjoyed that they used a stand-in mini for The Nightmare King in C3, it was a little less overwhelming with the production values.
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Feb 20, 2022 17:22
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YggdrasilTM posted:I... still don't get it? Why? Remember when they cast Scarlett Johansen to play an Asian robot lady? End of the day there aren't as many roles for people or color as there are for white people, and even fewer for women or color. Plus if white people are doing brown characters there's the risk of it looking like blackface even when not intended that way. E.g., you can't watch the d&d episodes of Community now because Ken jeong did full body drow makeup and it looked bad. So it's a potential minefield and CR may be smart to avoid it by recasting.
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Feb 21, 2022 18:12
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getting deeper into watching campaign 2 how many of these intricate detailed battle maps does matt mercer make and then just never use because the party doesn't go into that particular swamp or whatever also was that echo knight guy supposed to be a major long term NPC he invented a whole class for and then the dude just dies in like one episode?
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Feb 25, 2022 02:19
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I put critical role on in the background when doing other things. It's good white noise content.
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May 28, 2022 22:01
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Froghammer posted:I wish they were playing Craven Edge subtler. Literally every person Grog has met this season has told him to throw the drat thing away. Oh I'm sure that will be fine (my wife turned to me and said "Can we just call that Mat's Dagger?") I missed first campaign CR but started watching C2 and then c3 during quarantine. Overall I like this show so far. I think my favorite part was, yeah, the moment when they're all freaking out back in their keep after the city is blown to smithereens. So far I feel like this season is clearly higher stakes but maybe a little less fun -- nothing so far like Scanlan's triceratopsian rampage -- but that's also how I feel about high level vs low level D&D, I've always preferred campaigns that top out around level 8-10.
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Jan 20, 2023 22:16
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Senjuro posted:. For example one of my favorite episodes of the campaign is when they spend the entire episode after the initial attack on Emon sitting in their keep completely shell shocked over what happened. In the show it wasn't even a minute. what episode is this?
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Jan 20, 2023 23:12
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AngryBooch posted:I guess the Legend of Vox Machina is doing very well because it sounds like they're going to be making two series semi-concurrently. For those unfamiliar, this is the 2nd campaign in the same world with all different characters: That's a surprise, you'd think they'd just do, like, more episodes of VM per season and stretch it out that way. ampaign 2 is weird for me. I've watched about a third of it I think? Some of the character work is great but the overarching plot feels less coherent than either C1 or what we have so far of c3. I think my biggest issue with actually watching live critical role is that every time they bust out some absurdly detailed mini I go "oh GODDAMMIT" and close my browser out of jealousy I could probably *live* in that airship "mini" they keep busting out
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Jan 25, 2023 21:10
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Loezi posted:I'm assuming you didn't watch the stream of Matt just literally moving boxes and boxes of minis into a new room for three hours a day or two ago. Heist movie where the plot is just raiding the Critical Role miniatures vault
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Jan 25, 2023 21:29
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victorious posted:What is Campaign 3 like? I watched the first few episodes but I just don't have time to keep up with it anymore. Overall it feels like the plotting is the best so far, the characters are a little weaker than c2, and the production values are so high it's downright offensive
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Jan 26, 2023 01:35
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Paracaidas posted:My guess is Campaign 2 was the only way they got CR to agree to the exclusivity. There's an additional wrinkle here too. Amazon has a deal with twitch; Prime subscribers get a free Twitch channel subscription. I'm sure both Prime and Twitch collect data on that, and I'm *certain* that a lot of people with Prime are using their one free subscription to watch Critical Role. Unlike other streaming services, Prime's goal isn't ratings, it's to encourage Prime subscription. Vox Machina / Critical Role probably has really strong metrics on that front, because they can see how many people watch VM then go cash in their free Twitch subscription. Alan Smithee posted:elaborate? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWHYmDFR84I&t=10088s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWZMRdLGBu0&t=8070s 
Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jan 26, 2023 |
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Jan 26, 2023 23:53
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CuwiKhons posted:Yeah in the original dungeon crawl, the main fight was against a Beholder and it was actually prior to them finding the armor. When the only thing they encountered last week was a bunch of off-brand Sahuagin, I assumed they'd just dropped the Beholder from the story because, well, copyright issues. Then that thing popped out of the necklace and I was like oh no, they just rearranged things and are giving Matt creative license to make whatever hosed up monsters he wants. I spent like fifteen minutes trying to figure out what the gently caress it was supposed to be and wondering if they'd included a False Hydra or something before I realized no, it's a Not-Copyright NotBeholder! The one thing I'm not liking with the writing is how they keep doing "And then the whole group perished except one last remaining Dude! Who then did the One Thing that let everyone win! And after that everyone was fine" thing. It makes it less of a teamwork story, plus while it adds tension to each episode it reduces it overall because, oh, the last one left's gonna fix everything again Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jan 29, 2023 |
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Jan 29, 2023 15:25
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Pattonesque posted:yeah I was reading some of the old recaps on the wiki and they were like "oh wow we've got 3,000 subscribers! special prize for No. 3100!" and then they uhhhh stop doing that in such small intervals pretty quickly The Pete Best of the digital era
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Feb 1, 2023 20:34
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ninjahedgehog posted:Personally I was completely unfamiliar with Critical Role before the Amazon show came out, but I've been having a good time watching the stream comparison clips and from there the highlights of the stream itself. It's good background noise while doing other things. It's not for active watching.
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Feb 13, 2023 17:26
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Detective Eyestorm posted:Keyleth has gotten two How Do You Wanna Do This moments, one per season. She gets some flashy stuff for trash mobs, but she only Saves The Episode With A Big Spell twice: the Season 2 episode explicitly about her character arc and backstory, and Sylas in Season 1 as the culmination of a multi-episode subplot about the Sun Tree. I think this is partly a feature of how the show has recalibrated a lot of group moments as "one character saves the team" moments so they all get spotlight character development. It works but it comes at the cost of showing them working ad a team.
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Feb 28, 2023 04:34
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