Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’re embarking on a new adventure, as we check out the first episode of The Mighty Nein. This animated series is adapted from the second campaign of the folks at Critical Role, following the tremendous success and numerous seasons of their prior The Legend of Vox Machina. Dungeons & Dragons has only continued to expand its cultural footprint since that first campaign, and that extends to my own tabletop; I began writing up Vox Machina back during my own first campaign as a player, and have since then consumed all three seasons of Critical Role’s original broadcasts, watched most of Dimension 20’s intrepid heroes campaigns, and run a multi-year campaign of my own, guiding my players from a lonesome roadside tavern to the throne of Asmodeus, Lord of the Nine Hells.
As one would imagine, my perspective on D&D and its various permutations has changed (I can’t grant myself “matured”) significantly in that time. I’ve come to accept, as I believe most dungeon masters must, that D&D itself is a flawed and limited system, a mechanism for illustrating combat that does a mediocre job of even that, and which can only gesture towards mechanizing any other form of character behavior. And yet, that’s also sort of what I love about it; I don’t want things like conversation to be mechanized, and I embrace the great DM strain involved in genuinely making choices in the moment, perceiving your players’ intent and conjuring an outcome that rewards both their aspirations and the fickle fortunes of the dice. Catching up on Dimension 20 has only solidified my faith and understanding of this style of D&D – Brennan Lee Mulligan frequently makes decisions that would incense any rule-focused audience, because he is not playing a game according to a static rule set, he is attempting to conjure a rewarding, dramatic collective experience.
(Quick warning – from here on out, I’ll be including some vague, sort of purpose-of-narrative spoilers for the overall Mighty Nein campaign. Consider yourselves warned!)
Given that education, I’m coming to The Mighty Nein’s animated adaptations with a fair few preconceptions relative to my first brushes with Vox Machina. I’ve watched through The Mighty Nein’s original tabletop journey, and on the whole consider it a charming character journey populated with Critical Role’s by-far best cast of player characters, but also a fundamental narrative failure. I can see why it probably failed; after assigning the party such a straightforward narrative as “collect the Dragon Balls and defeat the Chroma Conclave” in their first campaign, Matt Mercer likely wanted to give his players more agency to choose their own destiny, and thus engaged in much less DM-side railroading to ensure a specific outcome. Unfortunately, he combined this with a general narrative background that demanded specific sequences of player engagement, and his players simply… chose not to engage with such things. To put it bluntly, they fled narrative consequence until the campaign’s main plot had ended, at which point Mercer stapled on an epilogue just to give them a climactic foe to face.
Obviously Matt Mercer is a far more practiced, expressive, and generally accomplished DM than myself, but it does feel like as Critical Role has continued, his simultaneous desire for grand narratives and absolute player agency has increasingly undercut the drama of his campaigns. He is a tremendous distance down the “agency versus narrative” line from someone like Mulligan, who plots out his players’ campaigns so precisely that D20 can commission custom sets for each fight the party is inevitably bound to encounter. And while I can’t say either of their methods are “more correct” (plenty of people like total sandbox campaigns, and that’s fine!), I can say that if you’re attempting to tell a grand fantasy narrative via tabletop roleplaying, you absolutely need a robust series of Session Zeroes, wherein you and your players collectively affirm the campaign’s tone, themes, narrative structure, and integration of individual player narratives. Good stories simply do not happen accidentally; they must be cultivated from the start, fitted with the struts and scaffolding necessary to let them flourish.
Given all that, this animated adaptation of The Mighty Nein presents a unique opportunity: to restructure the events of the original campaign such that they do make dramatic sense, with the characters actually latching onto narrative hooks rather than fleeing from them, and their journeys proceeding coherently from their dramatic origins. The adventure that The Mighty Nein could be is easily the best story Critical Role has told; as I said, the cast is far and away their best, with a strong balance of distinctive, complex individuals with meaningful ties to their world. I don’t know how complete or effective such a revision might be; some of the worst choices made in this campaign are also among the most consequential and inescapable. But I genuinely do love The Mighty Nein as characters, and am eager to see if this team’s own post-campaign reflections match my own rigorous critiques. Let’s find out!