Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m feeling a hankering for the kind of adventure only adaptations of tabletop live-play series can provide, and am thus exceedingly fortunate to be facing a fresh episode of The Mighty Nein, Amazon’s lush reimagining of Critical Role’s second extended campaign. The show has so far proven a marvelous take on its source material, polishing and rearranging and generally doing everything it can to transform a campaign marked by frequent narrative digressions into a coherent, propulsive drama. It feels like we’re receiving the best of both worlds here; The Mighty Nein at the table was a group of charming individual characters with no narrative binding them together, but the team’s thoughtful revisions are so far providing their heroes an actual journey worth undertaking.
Our last episode saw the team actually strike out on their first collective adventure, with decidedly mixed results. However, while they failed to actually save the young Tohya, that failure itself served as a powerful binding agent, helping our unlikely companions discover a variety of parallels across their histories and philosophies. Failure is a crucial tool in tabletop games; victory is gratifying, but it rarely necessitates self-reflection, while failure forces players and their characters to confront the ways they are still works in progress, and consider the methods by which they might grow as both individuals and a collective. And with a volstrucker currently charging right at them, it seems like our players might soon get even more opportunities to sample the benefits of harsh, embarrassing failure. Let’s get to it!