Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to get back to the island of Glintshore, as our friends in Vox Machina have found themselves in a serious pickle. Having tracked the nefarious inventor Anna Ripley back to her remote factory, the team were divided through carelessness, with Vex’s uncertainty regarding her relationship with Percy ultimately snowballing into him suffering a seemingly fatal injury.

As grim as the situation looks, I can’t imagine our boy is actually going to die. Character death in DnD is an extraordinarily harsh cost, forcing a player to give up all the investment they’ve placed in that character both emotionally and mechanically, and asking them to start over fresh in a way that somehow integrates with the other characters’ ongoing narratives. Maintaining the threat of death in any given encounter is “realistic,” but realism and narrative drama rarely get along – if the protagonist of a novel you’re reading got unceremoniously killed by falling rocks, you’d be rightfully upset at the lack of payoff for your investment in their journey.

There is an argument to be made that random, unlikely deaths can add a certain spice to your tabletop narrative; I can see that point, but I frankly couldn’t imagine valuing such unpredictability over a certain coherency of drama. And DnD itself seems to acknowledge this issue on the far end, by providing a variety of magical methods for overcoming character death, to the point where it can actually become difficult to ensure even NPCs remain dead and buried. Thus the on-book answer is “death is common but merely inconvenient,” whereas I much prefer “death is rare but permanent.” It’s a point of contention as unresolvable as the vast array of passions players can bring to the table, answerable only to a group that has collectively affirmed they’d like to play a roguelike, or a court intrigue simulator, or simply ride a rollercoaster and slay a dragon at the end. All of these tensions are what make DnD so mercurial and fascinating, so let’s go ahead and find out how our heroes deal with this latest catastrophe!

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m delighted to be returning to the Legend of Vox Machina, touching down in a moment of crisis and calamity for our poor adventurers. Having just secured a platemail vestige for Pike and beaten a dragon in the bargain, they returned to Whitestone to see it bathed in fire, the sky alive with Thordak’s nightmare brood. This attack marked the end of their alliance with the devious Raishan, and the beginning of a new quest: killing that asshole Anna Ripley.

So basically, it seems like we’ve surmounted the third act finale of Mercer’s overall campaign structure, in keeping with the villain-slaying standard of the Whitestone and Thunder Herd act finales. DnD is an eternal compromise between player agency and narrative necessity; stories aren’t structured arbitrarily, their rise and falls of drama are paced so as to cultivate reader interest, offer moments of release, and ultimately reward the reader for their investment. As such, while DnD campaigns are often more freewheeling than your average fantasy novel, a skillful DM will still infuse them with the structural momentum of a traditional narrative, drawing rising action together into cathartic peaks, and then humbling the party before starting that rise over again.

Incidentally, my party’s own ongoing campaign has just reached a similar point, having recently defeated the vampire Strahd with some kind of holy hand grenade. We’re actually in a much trickier spot, as the self-contained nature of the Curse of Strahd campaign means we’re now left with no dangling threads to pursue, and essentially have to reinvent a reason why we’re even traveling together. I’m doing my best to make some player-side sense of our ramblings, but have to admit I’m becoming increasingly nostalgic for my days of DM-side campaign control, as the richness of a player character is in large part a reflection of how meaningfully they can interact with the DM’s world. Let’s enjoy Mercer and Percy showing exactly how that’s done as we return to Vox Machina!

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we return to Vox Machina in a moment of unqualified triumph, as they have not only retrieved Pike’s spiffy new breastplate from the depths of hell, they’ve also managed to kill the ice dragon Vorugal in the bargain. The Chroma Conclave’s most relentless bulldog, and the destroyer of the party’s own delightful chateau, now lies buried among the frigid wastes of Tal’Dorei. It’s starting to seem like our team might actually pull this off!

Given that, I imagine Mercer has some terrible reckoning awaiting our heroes. DnD campaigns obviously shouldn’t feel hopeless, but they also shouldn’t feel effortless – ideally, the party should feel like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders, but that their best efforts might just come to some triumphant end. In practice, this tends to mean DnD drama follows a sort of roller coaster structure, building the party up just to send them plummeting down, often at moments aligned with some sort of narrative act change. My own prior campaign integrated such plummets at the conclusion of its first and second acts, letting each act finale serve several roles: offering a massive action payoff, reaffirming the party’s bonds with the world and characters, and putting the overall forces of good on the backfoot in order to give the party room to rise again.

So far, Vox Machina’s only such reckoning has been the arrival of the Chroma Conclave. Given their recent successes, I imagine we’re due for some manner of rude awakening, something to assure both party and audience that Thordak still has the upper hand. Mechanical and narrative design are in agreement on this one: challenges must feel challenging, drama must feel heart-pounding, and parties that are doing too well must be properly chastened. Let’s drop that other shoe, Mercer!

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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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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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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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