Tag Archives: The Legend of Vox Machina

The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 5

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to be returning to the adventures of Vox Machina, as they attempt to flee the bowels of hell with a big nasty devil hot on their trail. Well, technically not the bowels of hell, since they’re actually pretty high in its layers – more like the esophagus of hell, I suppose? Regardless, in true devil’s bargain fashion, last episode’s daring feats of gambling by Pike were only enough to get them safely beyond Zerxus’ doors. For the rest of their journey, they’re now free game for Zerxus’ minions, who have been instructed that only Pike needs to return intact.

Meanwhile, my own party is making their escape from an equally oppressive pocket realm, as they charge forward towards the final battle against Strahd. Our DM has mercifully acknowledged our general frustration with Curse of Strahd’s limited venues for player expression and one-note tone, and thus we recently barreled through the last pre-climax hurdles at warp speed, gathering weapons, liberating allies, and hatching anti-Strahd schemes all in the course of one mammoth session. One of the most important skills you can develop as a DM is flexibility, and the understanding that you are collectively creating a living text – by fast-forwarding through material we clearly weren’t passionate about, they were able to create a version of Curse of Strahd that was actually paced such as to keep our interest.

As of now, we’re currently mid-battle with Strahd, with my peace cleric Tilly attempting to keep his attention off my friends by calling him things like Strahdy-wahdy and Strahdikins. Meanwhile, our noble bard Tulip keeps me alive, swashbuckling rogue Oberyn skewers him with the Sun Sword, and Uncle Fester-reminiscent wizard Dr. Bob does god knows what with his impressive magical faculties. I can vividly see the freeze frame of our ongoing battle in my head, and can’t wait to get back to the fight – but for now, we’ve got some hells to escape and a dragon to slay. Onward!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 4

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to dive back into the rambling adventures of Vox Machina, wherein our heroes have currently divided their forces between fighting a dragon and infiltrating hell itself. Not normally a time when I’d recommend splitting the party, but given their impressive history of dragon-slaying, I’d imagine… what’s this? They’ve fought this dragon twice already, and it kicked their asses even as a full party? Yeah, they’re fucked.

Fortunately, seeing how a group of players and their DM can collaborate in getting themselves un-fucked from some seemingly unwinnable scenario is one of DnD’s greatest pleasures. Readers of traditional fiction will generally look poorly upon entirely foreshadowing-free deus ex machina, but it’s not hard to weave some complicating variable into your prior narrative such that a group’s fortunes can change from desperate to triumphant at a moment’s notice. In contrast, DnD prioritizes player agency above all, which means a solution that doesn’t emerge from skillful application of their player abilities is always going to be less satisfying than a victory that feels “mechanically earned.”

This issue only becomes all the more prominent as a campaign rises in scale over time, presenting ever-more intractable opposition for its brave heroes. The easiest solution to this riddle comes in the form of providing your enemy an Achilles’ Heel, or, in game parlance, a giant glowing weak point. An enemy’s strength can be utterly overwhelming so long as its weakness is also apparent – that way, there’s no need to limit your conception of an enemy’s power relative to your party’s available strength. And depending on the style of your campaign, these weaknesses can range from something as tangible as the Vestiges to simple overconfidence, so long as you provide the players opportunities to exploit that confidence. Given we’re pitting Vox Machina’s craftiest members against the Chroma Conclave’s dimmest dragon, I imagine some trickery will be involved in the task ahead, and I’m eager to see how Mercer realizes this chapter’s oversized threats without outright killing the party. Let’s get to it!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 3

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am eager to return to the adventures of Vox Machina, who just recently found themselves hellbound in search of a plate armor vestige. Determined to avoid letting the relic fall into the Chroma Concord’s hands, J’Mon Sa Ord apparently tucked it away with an accommodating demon, who now holds it within the infernal City of Dis.

This seems about on-pace for their adventure so far, as we enter the third act of their overall journey. DnD’s leveling system naturally accommodates a certain scaling of challenges; characters between levels one and six generally confront local villains, seven through twelve constitute the “wandering age” of traveling do-gooders, and anything beyond that is the realm of seasoned heroes, characters who, like Vox Machina, are coming into their own as history-shaping figures. Among DnD’s many efforts to square mechanical and narrative drama, its leveling system is one of the most concrete and coherent, and smart DMs will scale the scope and threat of their stories accordingly.

Of course, things get a little wonkier even higher in the level scale, once you reach the mid-teens and beyond. At that point, things like physical environmental challenges and most mundane foes are simply no threat to a party of properly equipped heroes; they have scaled beyond the fundamentals of your average adventure, and most campaigns will accordingly retire them well before they hit twenty. This is the challenge I am currently facing, with my players demanding post-game content even after their victory over the forces of hell. I’ve been doing my best to accommodate these requests, and am currently in the process of weaving in an eldritch adversary that expresses itself largely within the most fraught landscapes of the world, be they magically corrupted cities, temples at the bottom of the ocean, or active volcanoes. It’s a tricky thing to balance pacing and tone at this scale, particularly since I’m now one among several writers, basically just handling the big plot-centric beats while my players take turns running side quests. But anyway, I’ve rambled enough about scaling – let’s go to hell!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 2

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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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The Legend of Vox Machina S3 – Episode 1

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am thrilled to announce we are returning to the adapted tabletop adventures of Vox Machina, that unruly band of heroes tasked with saving Tal’Dorei from the draconic Chroma Concave. Their escapades have proven both entertaining stories in their own right, and also persistent vehicles for discussion of tabletop gaming more generally. As someone who came late to tabletop gaming from a background in traditional fiction, I have a voracious appetite for any sort of lessons worth gleaning from the ramblings of Matt Mercer and his players, and have been impatiently awaiting this return to the field.

As for my own DnD adventures, it’s apparently been most of a goddamn year since we last checked in, so yes, I have news to report. The campaign I had at that point been running for around fourteen months came to an end in late winter, with my players battling an avatar of Asmodeus atop the high tower of the ninth circle of hell. It seemed an appropriately bombastic conclusion for my adventure, which followed the classic “the enemy you have been fighting was actually a pawn of the real threat” formula to swerve (with plentiful foreshadowing, mind you) from a pan-Dale civil war to a struggle to prevent hell’s emergence into the mortal realm. Old allies were recalled, grand foes were slain, and our sorcerer used grease to make the princess of hell fall on her ass at least three separate times.

Since then, we’ve begun a new campaign, with one of my campaign’s players DMing us through the on-book Curse of Strahd adventure. This has resulted in a chilling discovery: on-book DnD kinda sucks! It’s basically a sandbox designed for randomized NPC conversations and combat encounters, possessing none of the guided narrative focus and subsequent dramatic payoffs that is DnD as interpreted by groups like Critical Role. Fortunately, my group came prepared for just such a possibility, as this time we’re essentially creating our own wholly player-side character arcs, and doing our best to remain in-character all through our active sessions. I’ve been leading the charge with this, with my experience running a whole pile of NPCs making it easy to slip into the guise of Tilly the Goblin Cleric, who is a little intimidated by the gloomy world of Barovia, but doing her best to keep spirits high and limbs properly attached.

I’ve been further solidifying our player-side development through the creation of Tilly’s Reports, essentially formalized, in-character session notes that help to keep the party on the same general page dramatically. I’d be happy to share those and more news of our ongoing DnD trials later, but for now, it’s past time to get on with the adventures of Vox Machina. Onward!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S2 – Episode 12

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to dive back into the drama of Vox Machina, having last left the party in a moment of absolute crisis and defeat. Scanlan’s plan to leave an Immovable Rod (well, short sword, but same difference) inside a dragon has quasi-succeeded, while leaving plenty of room for an exciting followup question: how the fuck are he and Vax going to get out of this dragon’s stomach? And while they focus on avoiding digestion, their allies are presented with a different yet equally vexing challenge: how do you make a dragon fight you when it’d rather just fly away? Well, presumably it’s just going back to its lair, meaning our heroes will be facing off with both legendary and lair actions as they attempt to free their comrades from death by stomach acid.

I imagine Scanlan and Vax’s plan was a flourish of stupidity that even Mercer didn’t plan for, but I assume this battle is otherwise going pretty much how he predicted. The push and pull of player agency versus dramatic necessity expresses itself in some unique ways when it comes to major boss fights; you want your players to feel like they can gain a leg up on their opponents via clever strategizing, but also don’t want the fight to feel either formulaic or prematurely solved, necessitating a balance between controllable variables and chaotic in-fight twists. Mercer appears to have navigated this balance through the construction of a two-act fight: first this ambush, which the players largely engineered themselves, followed by a presumed lair fight finale focused more on his own scripted inventions.

Coincidentally enough, my own campaign is also currently transitioning between these moments, with the party’s planning of their allegedly final battle soon to give way to a bombastic scripted escalation. Our melee fighters are largely running on fumes and our sorcerer only has a single spell slot left, so I believe I’ve successfully calibrated the challenge towards a death-defying victory next session, and am eager to see how my players wriggle their way out of this one. I’ll get back to you on how that all plays out, but for now let’s enjoy the climax of Vox Machina’s second season!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S2 – Episode 11

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m thrilled to be diving back into the adventures of Vox Machina, who most recently joined Grog in clobbering the shit out of the Storm Herd, and bisecting his Vestige-clad mountain of an uncle in the process. The battle against Kevdak saw our heroes united for the first time in half a season, flexing their powers as Grog resolved both his lingering backstory and emotional journey. It was a fine demonstration of how DnD’s narrative and mechanical elements can be harnessed to work in service of the players’ character arcs – of course, such a collaboration requires a player who’s interested in portraying a character arc, which brings us to the current conundrum of our irreverent Scanlan.

Scanlan has time and again been offered a call to grow into a greater sense of responsibility as a character, and has time and again resisted the offer to be anything more than an irreverent prankster. That’s a fine approach to DnD in a campaign where the players are intended to be static reactors to external conflict, but Vox Machina’s campaign is clearly designed around the player avatars overcoming their fatal flaws, be they Percy’s obsession with revenge, Grog’s heedless pursuit of strength, or Vex’s lingering regrets regarding her father. While most of the players have taken to this process with enthusiasm, Scanlan has time and again turned away from the brightly lit signs stating “character growth this way,” prompting the eventual introduction of Kaylie as a daughter-shaped representation of the consequences of his actions.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to report that my own campaign is again chugging along, with my Cloud-based player having recently triumphed in the final battle against their Sephiroth-esque nemesis. Though my initial thinking ran along lines like “how can I integrate my players’ desires into the narrative I have planned,” the course of our campaign has revealed a pretty obvious truth: player desires will always inform the most passionate and effective collaboration, so they should be built as centrally into the campaign’s structure as possible. With our next session coming this very afternoon, my mind is abuzz with further plans for paying off my players’ desires, but this intro has already run too long as it is. For now, let’s dive back into the journeys of Vox Machina!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S2 – Episode 10

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Hello folks, and welcome the heck back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to be returning to The Legend of Vox Machina, as Grog and his companions square off for a battle that will surely kill them. Seriously, there’s like no way Grog can fight his uncle Kevdak – Kevdak’s wielding a legendary pair of knuckles, Grog already lost this fight back in the day, and he’s currently as taut and muscular as a strip of beef jerky. As such, I’m intrigued to see in what particular fashion Mercer “cheats” for this encounter, giving Grog some productive route forward while nonetheless making it seem like Grog himself earned this victory.

Skillfully laid deus ex machina is well and good in a traditional narrative, but relying on outside interference generally strips players of agency in a tabletop setting. I’m guessing Grog’s victory might serve as a payoff for his last-episode revelation (perhaps Pike will counter his “strength is looking after the little folk” with a “sometimes strength is looking after the big folk”), but I’m eager to find out how.

As for my own campaign, the bustle of moving furniture out of our old apartment and searching for a new one has made it difficult to schedule any new sessions, so I’ve instead been hard at work plotting out the last act of the campaign. This is of course an inherently fraught proposition, as player agency and a fully scripted narrative are naturally at odds, but we’ve fortunately journeyed far enough into the campaign that it’s essentially all payoff from here, meaning I can at least script the broad beats of the upcoming adventures. To be honest, it’s actually quite similar to a common strategy for writing novels: establish the big structural beats so you can be thinking long-term, but allow the characters to surprise you as you’re filling in the individual scenes and sections. This whole process has been so invigorating that I’ll likely start working on some original fiction again once this campaign wraps up, but for now, my mind is abuzz with final boss concepts worthy of the time my players have invested in this rambling tale. Now enough of that, let’s see what Vox Machina are up to!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S2 – Episode 9

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to dive back into the adventures of Vox Machina, who most recently secured a fresh vestige for Vex in their search for fantastical superweapons. The vestiges have so far proven a highly efficient binding agent for Vox Machina’s rambling journeys; not only do they give the group a Dragon Ball-style incentive to explore this world’s diverse landscapes, they also serve as a natural fusion of narrative drama and mechanical payoff, with each victory offering the tangible reward of a character-specific signature weapon in the wake of that character resolving some aspect of their emotional journey.

Last episode concluded one of those trials while setting the stage for another; Vex has now asserted her value outside of her father’s recognition, while Grog is on the way to answering the question “what does strength mean in the absence of physical power?” Mercer’s setup is so convenient that I’ll probably be stealing it for my next campaign (except maybe hunting down unique enemies instead of weapons?) – as for my current campaign, I’m happy to report that my Bridge Over the River Kwai mission went over fabulously. My players successfully infiltrated a city under occupation, met up with an old ally to discuss strategies (I basically stole the Inglorious Basterds bar scene for that), and then sabotaged a critical bridge while riding off into the sunset. It’s a little hard to schedule sessions with all of us scattered in temporary lodgings, but I’m determined to carry this campaign through to the end. In the meantime, let’s see what nonsense Grog and the gang are getting up to!

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The Legend of Vox Machina S2 – Episode 8

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I must confess I’m still a little shell shocked, as my apartment caught fire early yesterday morning, resulting in one of the most exhausting days of my life. Fortunately, I’ve still got a bed and I’ve still got my laptop, so goddamnit, the show must go on. Nonetheless, I’ve decided to at least treat myself to a comfort food project: a fresh episode of Vox Machina, wherein our heroes last found themselves stranded across multiple planes, the gnomes and Grog muddling through the mortal plane while our other heroes braved the Fey Realm.

With Grog having lost his strength and the twins nearing a transposed elven city, it’s clear we’re pushing forward on a variety of personal arcs in satisfyingly character-appropriate ways: Grog must learn how to define himself outside of his power, while Vex and Vax must grapple with whatever regrets still linger regarding their flight from home. As for my own campaign, things have been proceeding more or less smoothly through the second act finale of my overarching storyline.

With most of a year’s worth of sessions behind them, my players have now developed all sorts of bonds with the various NPCs of this world, facilitating sequences like an in-game wedding and a teleporter-facilitated pan-continent siege defense. It’s an odd thing to say, but it’s nice to have reached the point where killing off a particularly well-liked NPC prompts some legitimate fury and despair from my players. They care! They really care! Anyway, I’ll have more to say on that soon, but for now let’s get back into the drama of Vox Machina!

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