Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to The Legend of Vox Machina, and see how our heroes are fairing in their quest to regain the important magic doohickeys. From a point of initially, emphatically demonstrating that Vox Machina lack the strength to fight these dragons, Mercer has steadily guided the party from “we need to gather an army” (Whitestone) to “no army is willing to assist you” (Vasselheim) to “only the Vestiges of Divergence can stop these dragons” (Slayer’s Take). By splitting these directives among multiple characters and separating them by travel and trials, he’s effectively masked the inevitability of this quest, arriving at that sweet alchemy of the players collectively “choosing” to do the only thing you had written out for them anyway.

It’s a good thing I’m taking notes, as I’m at roughly the same point in my own players’ campaign. Just a few hours after I write this article, we’ll be conducting our second session since picking back up, wherein I plan to guide my party through a destroyed city and into a riff on Seven Samurai. I’m not sure my party’s feeling quite the same sense of urgency as Vox Machina, so I’m eager to see how Mercer maintains momentum and perspective as the gang wanders off on this new adventure. Let’s get to it!

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to reach the conclusion of Vox Machina’s first season, and perhaps even more eager to share my own campaign updates. After several sessions of going on various adventures in and around the city of Yhaunn, my party was invited to a royal ball at the castle, necessitating more prep work than I feel entirely comfortable acknowledging. I had to build out the relationships of the royal family, then sketch out roles and personalities for all of the city councilors, then sculpt the personalities of the two delegates from each of half a dozen different nearby regions, then figure out how to give this mass of new characters some narrative structure, lest my party be entirely lost in directionless decision paralysis.

And yet, it worked! It all worked! That session was one of our most successful so far, the party never seemed overwhelmed by the opportunities in front of them, and they even made some personal connections with several of the country’s attendant luminaries. Lightly guided by the attendees they’d met previously, my players made a successful dive into this campaign’s larger political reality, with Captain Chaos himself actually forging some of the strongest bonds with my new characters. It was a clear and profoundly encouraging demonstration of how much my group and I have grown into a functional campaign, with the story finally starting to feel like something they are truly interwoven with, as opposed to something that’s merely being forced upon them.

So yes, I am feeling pretty proud at the moment, and eager to make use of all these new connections the party has made. I might end up posting some design docs eventually if people are interested, but in the meantime, I’m also quite excited to see how Vox Machina’s first season comes to an end. We’re in full boss battle mode at the moment; Vex and Vax have reconciled, Cassandra has been rescued, and Keyleth… well, Keyleth’s in a bad spot, I admit. Having her leap in front of a blast meant for Vex was an exceedingly noble conclusion to their mini-arc, but also very stupid, given she’s now the group’s only healer. Please, druids and clerics, do not leap in front of your damage-dealers, that is partially what they are there for. Let’s see if Keyleth ever gets the chance to make use of that lesson, as we explore The Finale of Vox Machina!

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m eager to return to The Legend of Vox Machina, and perhaps glean another tip or two to carry back to my own tabletop misadventures. To be honest, things have actually been moving quite smoothly in my campaign; we reached my invented capital city a few sessions ago, and the players have since then been having a great time exploring this playground of bounties, quests, and colosseum challenges I’ve built for them. I’m too much of a narrative-minded guy and too poor at improvising to provide a truly open-ended sandbox, but I think we’ve hit a good compromise between freedom and guide rails, and my individual encounter design sensibilities are improving all the time.

As for the hapless members of Vox Machina, we last left off on a moment of shocking betrayal, as Cassandra sided with the Briarwoods over her long-lost brother. It seems beyond question that this is in some part a result of the Briarwoods’ foul sorceries, but it’s nonetheless a bold play by Mercer. Within the list of Possible Complications offered in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, “the party is betrayed by a former ally” is the only entry complimented by “(use this one sparingly)”, and for good reason – if the party begins to believe they can’t trust any of the characters around them, or that established characterization might be reversed at a whim, their investment in the world will drop precipitously. That’s obviously not going to be a problem with a committed group like this, but it’s an example of a conceit where exploiting it simply to increase dramatic volume might actually provoke the opposite effect. Player investment in non-player characters is hard-earned, so think twice before you betray that trust!

Alright, that’s more than enough narrative design preamble. Let’s get back to the action!

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I come to you one dungeon mastering session older and hopefully wiser, having tackled my campaign’s second session, and the first including our entire four member party. The dynamic was significantly more chaotic with four players, mainly because that fourth player is the embodiment of chaos itself, but I think I did pretty okay. Bounties were pursued, festivals were attended, and the whole gang found themselves embroiled in some kind of folk horror forest ritual situation. With me being me, I’m sure it’s no surprise that my first setpiece is drawing heavily from The Wicker Man and its spooky compatriots.

Our second session also provided plenty of trial-by-fire lessons for me, ranging from the diverse nature of player investment to the setting of expectations regarding player agency. Successful DMing requires paying close attention to player desires, and often coming to understand what they want better than they themselves do. In our last campaign, our DM attempted to ameliorate Captain Chaos with more mechanical tools, which only slowed down gameplay – in our campaign, I’ve instead been giving him greater range of creative self-expression, which has resulted in player satisfaction with no added complexity. On the other hand, my initial use of a heist quest to debut the game has set some perhaps untenable expectations regarding players’ ability to pre-scope any combat encounter, which may result in some inescapable friction down the line.

It’s all an impossibly complex network of mechanical, creative, and personal concerns, all of which only makes me more impressed by Mercer and crew’s ability to navigate this conceptual labyrinth. Last episode saw Percy assuming his destined mantle of Savior of Whitestone, only to immediately about-face back into his Dark Avenger persona. Such deliberately anti-party-unity behavior makes for great drama, but difficult campaign writing, making me further suspect that Mercer and Percy’s player essentially co-wrote this whole arc. The dungeon master’s guide suggests DMs create separate results for success, partial success, and failure in any event, but with all respect to the dungeon master’s guide, that’s fucking stupid and not at all the way stories work. Complex narratives require some degree of player predictability, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on how Mercer fixes the scales as we continue our journey. Let’s get back to Vox Machina!

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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!

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am ridiculously impatient to get back to Vox Machina, and see what our ramshackle adventuring party is up to. I doubt it’s been all that long on your end since our last Vox installment, but for me, I’ve been waiting three damn months to check in with this crew. Vox Machina is just too interesting of a concept, and so I got a little over-enthusiastic with my initial rampage of writeups, meaning it’s taken me months to justify throwing more Vox pieces on my buffer pile.

As it turns out though, this interminable wait has led to my return lining up with a particularly auspicious real-world counterpoint. Today is the day I’ll be starting my own D&D campaign, and finally taking over the DM reigns for something longer than a one-off adventure. At last, I’ll be able to shift from the theoretical criticism of “I’m pretty sure this is something our DM messed up” to the clarity of “this is something I definitely messed up,” and I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve spent the last few weeks pounding out thousands of words of backstory and worldbuilding, have developed roughly half a dozen quest lines for my players to enjoy, and have no doubt they will disregard all this work in favor of hanging out with a drunk gnoll named Sparky who I made up on the spot. That’s the fun of DMing, I am told, and I wouldn’t have it any other way – crafting a campaign for a group of unruly players is like trying to plot a novel while people throw dodgeballs at your head, and what activity isn’t improved by the threat of physical violence?

Anyway, my own collaborative adventures aside, I’m eager to see how Vox Machina are faring as well. I can’t imagine Percy is taking the apparent death of his sister gracefully, and presume we’re in for a fit of rage that even Grog might consider a little much. Let’s get to it!

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I am positively incensed, owing to my recent illness having stolen this week’s D&D session. We’d basically gone into hibernation mode over the winter, and had just started getting some momentum going, and then my body had the temerity to go and get sick on me! We’d just reached the ancient city! We were about to run through a miniboss rush! Who even knows when we’ll get the group together again to… aaARRGH!

Anyway. With my D&D opportunities in the outer world unjustly stolen from me, I’m planning to console myself with the continuing adventures of Vox Machina. When last we left off, the show had just announced a shocking yet inevitable reveal: Percy’s sister Cassandra is still alive, and actually working with the Blackbriars. Wha!? I know, I know, but don’t get too scandalized, since I’m pretty sure the reveal of the resistance’s mole will set her right back on the side of justice. As the tension continues to build, let’s see what awaits in a fresh episode of The Legend of Vox Machina!

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Grab your character sheets and pull up a chair, everyone! Today we’re returning to The Legend of Vox Machina, where the party most recently arrived at Percy’s ancestral home. There they were greeted with a ghoulish welcoming party: a line of corpses dressed up to resemble their own costumes. It’s clear that Vox Machina are not welcome in Whitestone, but as it turns out, party crashing is actually one of their specialties.

In terms of narrative/mechanical design, my most recent object of curiosity is the negotiation of the blank space that defines this party’s recent pre-history. Frequently, D&D parties assemble right at the beginning of a campaign, often bumping into each other at an inn and deciding to team up. That’s clearly not true of Vox Machina, who had apparently been traveling together for some time, but that “some time” feels oddly nebulous at this point. Dynamics like the growing affection between Vax and Keyleth, or Scanlan and Pike, feel divorced from any sense of communal pre-history, awkwardly highlighting the reality that this group was summoned into existence as a fully assembled unit. I’ll be interested to see if the show mitigates that by actually revealing how the party met, but there’s plenty of time for that; for now, we’ve clearly got more pressing concerns. Let’s face off with those nefarious Briarwoods, and get some goddamn loot!

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I thought we’d sidle back into The Legend of Vox Machina, wherein the party most recently set off for Percy’s ancestral home. Well, most of the party – Pike apparently broke her magical doohickey, and thus has to set off on a personal journey to “apologize to the Everlight.” This narrative development seems messy, but it’s precisely the kind of messy that embodies Vox Machina’s difficult negotiation between narrative and game, which in turn makes it of tremendous interest to me!

As I reflected in the last episode, the “primacy of the party” is one of the central tenets that defines D&D-format fiction, as it is the interplay of the party members that forms the backbone of any campaign. As such, any separation in the party must be undertaken for the most crucial of reasons, when the narrative absolutely demands it – and “my Everlight phone broke” certainly doesn’t qualify. Forcing a character to leave because an object that had been assigned no prior significance now needs attention is, quite frankly, hack storytelling – it’s the equivalent of a character exiting the narrative because they think they left the oven on, not because anything in their existing character or narrative demands it.

When I put together “breaking the party is a D&D cardinal sin” and “Pike’s reason for leaving is entirely disconnected from the ongoing narrative,” I arrive at just one reasonable conclusion: Pike’s actress was busy for a while, and had to step back from the game. This, too, is a natural quirk of D&D narrative design: sometimes the whole cast just can’t be there, and so your rogue or your druid will exist in a weird liminal space behind you, until the whole party can regather. It’s a very strange thing to see such a pragmatic design limitation translated into earnest narrative drama, but that’s precisely the sort of weird negotiation I like about this series. Let’s see what’s in store at Whitestone Manor!

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