Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I come to you just two days after my last D&D update, with jubilant news regarding my campaign’s first session. After a somewhat halting start, the rest of my session went absolutely fabulously, as I steered my players through a multi-step heist mission. Having spent a year wishing our previous campaign had more complex battlefield dynamics, I was delighted to find that the party immediately latched onto my gestures in that direction. Rather than simply throwing players into rooms full of enemies, I let them plan their own route towards and through encounters, giving the team a far greater sense of ownership over their choices and results.

Our session also served as a nerve wracking reminder of just how tricky it is to ensure unpredictable players somehow receive a coherent and reasonably paced narrative experience. The party sailed right past the point where they were supposed to meet a key contact, forcing me to slot that character into a later encounter with as much grace as I could muster. And during the party’s first sneaking mission, properly seeding the quest’s final villain required our rogue to succeed on several stealth checks and then fail the final one – a non-inevitability that I quietly engineered through bisecting stealth checks into smaller and smaller sub-motions. Coherent, exciting narratives require a degree of coincidence and timing that is almost impossible to arrive at by chance, making me ever more impressed with how well Vox Machina manages it.

Because yes, it is indeed time for more Vox Machina. With my mind so overstuffed by D&D trivia, this seems like the perfect time to continue the assault on Whitestone, and perhaps learn a thing or two about managing my own party. The ultimate truth of D&D, something I’m begrudgingly coming to accept, is that any adventure will be what your players make of it – I can’t steer them entirely, I can only set the stage. As a refugee from the land of traditional fiction, this is all extremely stressful to me, but I can at least recognize and admire the clear synergy between Mercer and his players. Let’s see what trouble they get up to this time!

Episode 9

“The Tide of Bone.” Welp, that episode title is pretty self-explanatory. But here, too, it seems like preestablished battlefield dynamics will allow the players to express themselves more than in a generic encounter. They’re not just “fighting a bunch of zombies” – they’re fighting a bunch of zombies who are terrorizing the people of Whitestone, meaning the players are presented with choices ranging from “how do we use the geography of Whitestone to our advantage” to “how much should we prioritize rescuing civilians over fighting enemies.” Making players feel like they’re capable of meaningful decisions can require nothing more than allowing them to choose when and how combat actually begins – something this Whitestone arc has already repeatedly demonstrated, what with its numerous stealth missions and friction between Percy and the other party members’ priorities

It appears that we’re now learning how the Briarwoods received their demonic powers, as we open on a flashback that finds Sylas on the brink of death by illness, and Delilah with nowhere else to turn. I wonder how the actual campaign handled a flashback like this? None of Vox Machina were actually there, so this presumably was revealed in the form of a monologue by the villains

That’s actually a tricky thing about D&D campaigns. Sprawling high fantasy narratives generally lend themselves to omniscient narrators who can pull off perspective shifts like this, but D&D campaigns are naturally limited by character perspective, and telling your party “meanwhile, all of these things happened elsewhere and long ago” is not exactly a quick path to player investment. It’s actually one of the few ways D&D encourages the creation of better fiction – copious lore is tedious even to traditional readers, and keeping the drama grounded in the choices of the principle characters generally creates more satisfying stories

Delilah rushes to a run-down church deep in the forest, where a creepy glowing book is making raspy noises

So it appears Delilah is a warlock who made a pact with the “Whispered One,” and Sylas was turned into a vampire via that patron’s powers

Some nice tricks of focus as we return to the active party, using an approximation of limited focal depth to mask the CG of the background skeletons

Keyleth snags another “growing competency” beat by blasting some zombies off Vax. They’re doing a fine job of tending to this sub-thread within the context of Percy’s larger narrative. Some arcs require careful direct attention, and some just need to be gestured towards every five events or so

Another neat CG-masking trick, as we see obscured zombies pass by from inside a boarded-up doorway. I’m not asking productions to abandon CG entirely, just that they be properly embarrassed about it!

Archibald asks Percy about their next move, but Percy has no interest in being a leader. His arc here seems clear at this point: he sees his goal as simply the destruction of those who wronged him, but he must learn to look beyond his thirst for revenge and seek the creation of a new life and new Whitestone

Meanwhile, Vax and Keyleth continue their flirting up to and through the next zombie assault. Really not much a DM can do to either foster or dissuade player romance, and they probably shouldn’t try, either – asking players to play-act romance is a far step beyond asking them to play-act being a badass fantasy hero, and many players simply won’t be comfortable with that kind of simulated intimacy. Vox Machina can only manage it because its players are also actors, used to fully inhabiting the emotions of characters apart from themselves

I am indeed starting to appreciate how Mercer incorporates battlefield dynamics into encounters like this. The point of this battle isn’t to kill all the enemies, it’s to keep knocking them back until the group can find an escape route

Cassandra urges Percy to say something to the downhearted resistance members. A very neat piece of synergy between narrative and mechanical function here – Cassandra is narratively the only character Percy will fully listen to, and Mercer is here using her to push Percy towards his intended character arc, asking him to grow into the leader he needs to be

Meanwhile, Scanlan’s lost a chunk of his arm to zombies

The team runs afoul of one of Whitestone’s mega giants, which Percy dispatches in style with his own mega rifle. Those giants are another delightful example of battlefield dynamics in action; their patrol routes create shifting “no go” zones throughout the city, offering players an incentive to plan routes and use their skills to evade detection by unbeatable enemies

Of course, that invites the tricky issue of how to inform your party an enemy is unbeatable. As a largely combat-driven game, players generally assume combat is always a viable option. Convincing them otherwise requires some flavorful embellishments, lest you resort to the agency-robbing fail case of “you definitely shouldn’t fight this guy”

“My men would be honored to fight alongside a de Rolo, if you would only tell them.” Archibald continues with the pressure Cassandra first applied, urging Percy to assume his mantle. I assume Mercer and Percy’s actor discussed the pace of this character arc outside of the game table, as it requires a little too much precision of intent to really emerge naturally

Yeah, here we go: Archibald falls in battle, the perfect inspiring incident for Percy to start taking the fate of this town seriously

We then segue into a two-step payoff for Keyleth, as she first demonstrates new courage in stating that she can handle the next wave, and then is backed up by a nod from Vex, who has come to trust her abilities

As the party regroups under the dying central tree, Percy clearly realizes it’s now or never

And with one last push from Cassandra, he finally steps up and assumes his title

Again, all this requires a willing player. This campaign likely started with a Percy arc because Percy’s player was willing and eager to dive into his character’s backstory, and make playing out Percy’s emotions one of the central threads of the narrative. A different player might feel more comfortable with the degree of engagement and roleplay Keyleth’s been experiencing here, or even Grog

With no time to spare, Vax abruptly tells Keyleth he’s in love with her. Goddamnit, Vax

And Pike arrives in the nick of time, smiting the shit out of these zombies with her newly invigorated powers. “Help arrives in the nick of time” can sound a lot like “the DM robs the party of agency or consequences” in the context of D&D, but having that help be a long-absent member of the party really cleans that up!

Some delightful cuts of effects animation as Pike lights up these goddamn zombies

With the whole party at last reunited, they celebrate with some fun combo attacks. There’s no real on-book mechanism for combo attacks, but they’re such a satisfying way of demonstrating party synergy that it’s no surprise to see them here. I’m still currently tinkering with how my own party will get to do stuff like this

Pike somehow infuses the entire army’s weapons with holy magic, which I have to imagine is a neat perk of her body currently being ensconced in a holy temple

After sneaking into the castle, they find an imprisoned woman who offers to take them to the Briarwoods. Unfortunately, it appears she’s also on Percy’s list

And Done

And so the adventure roars towards its climax! This episode felt like a remarkably skillful navigation of a variety of impossible-to-balance challengers, with Mercer gracefully guiding his party through one near-death encounter after another. Deus ex machina is a tough trick to satisfyingly employ in a traditional narrative, much less one where player agency is king, but Pike ex machina served as a perfectly convincing alternative. Archibald and Cass were also both exploited to excellent narrative effect, and it’s intriguing to see how this narrative manages a sort of “A plot, B plot” balance between Percy and Keyleth. I’m still quite intimidated by all the challenges that maintaining a playable narrative represents, but each new episode of Vox Machina feels like another step towards mastery.

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