Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m happy to announce we’re diving back into The Legend of Vox Machina, and continuing our thorough investigation of tabletop gaming’s intersection of narrative and game design, as well as how all that nonsense might be translated back to a linear adapted narrative. It’s a heady stew of variables, and involves basically everything I’m passionate about – storytelling, mechanical design, constructing durable characters, roleplay and performance, and so on. The beauty of DnD is that it can be whatever you choose to bring to it; the stories you build are limited only by your imagination and mechanical ingenuity, as you seek to collectively build a fantasy where you are both authors and audience.

Our last episode pushed the story forward significantly, using the party’s aborted dragon assault to steer them towards a new quest and new ally. Failure can be an excellent teacher, particularly when you don’t want to outright force your party into some course of action; they can always try to attack the final boss at level one, but no one should feel surprised or railroaded when the obvious happens. In fact, that assumption of initial failure is basically the core mechanic of Curse of Strahd, where my current party is in the process of collecting their own quasi-Vestiges in order to be strong enough to fight the vampire Strahd.

“Collect the sacred stones/weapons” is, admittedly, a pretty simplistic and gamified style of fantasy adventure. And when combined with Strahd’s one-note NPCs, our quest leaves little room for character development within the confines of the overt narrative. As I mentioned last time, worlds that adhere to DnD’s traditional moral alignment system are inherently averse to moral complexity or character growth – they frame morality as intrinsic, not something you develop, and there’s not much room for meaningful storytelling there.

As such, we’ve been largely avoiding conversation with NPCs, and instead have been building narratives of personal growth between our party members, through things like letting our noble-hating pirate and foppish son of privilege come to respect each other, all while my put-upon goblin Tilly does her best to keep the peace. It’s been an interesting exercise in carving out dramatic agency within the space directly afforded to players, though at this point, we’re all quite eager to get to something more specifically molded towards our journeys – like, say, how Percy’s lingering insecurities are reflected through the actual character of Anna Ripley! Great transition me, let’s go with that. Onward to the episode!

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