Critical Role thread?

Total TPK without it. Still had Prismatic Spray, another few legendary Dispel Magics and she'd have a full-effectiveness breath weapon. Hell, there was nothing stopping her from just turning invisible again.

If nothing else, this is evidence Matt doesn't hold back in combat, at least when the enemy has a reason to play smart. Opening up with a hundred damage to everyone in the party, followed by a Disintegrate at the healer.

this show is becoming more and more shit the longer it goes honestly

>want to start watching critical role
>80 episodes, I can do this
>each is 4+ hours long
fuck.

How much will I miss if I just start watching at the most recent?

>Right now he's the most interesting character on the squad anyways
yup, scanlan and grog are basically the only reason i still watch this show

The dragon was getting into position to fire off a Prismatic Spray on their backline when the Feeblemind hit. If she succeeded in casting it it was almost certainly going to be a TPK, especially after their main arcane spellcaster died after eating a Meteor Swarm to the face and then got smacked around like a rag doll.

The dragon had to blow its Legendary Resistances though to keep up the Greater Invisibility concentration, otherwise the dps folks were going to unload on her.

I'm pretty sure her CR was around 25 or 26, which for a party of mostly level 16 and 17s is pretty lethal.

The fact that the random level 7 ally got the killing blow is mind boggling, but made for a great roleplay moment.

I also feel that the Nat 20 to spot Allura and Kima wasn't enough, and that it had to be a DC 30 skill check, which Keyleth barely made, thanks to a high Wisdom modifier and being proficient in Perception.

Nothing of value. Except for those 4+ hours.

>If nothing else, this is evidence Matt doesn't hold back in combat
you know those moments are mega scripted right?

Start with episode 24 or 25, you skip most of the growing pains and the first arc for stream, and pick up at the beginning of the Briarwood arc, probably the best arc in the show up to this point in time.

your better off just picking a story arch and watching it. matt has been bringing back old characters recently though

he dragon arc is WAY too long imo. after the third 4 hour long fight i didnt really care much anymore

Start at the Briarwood Arc, around ep 22-24 or so. Orion Acaba leaves the show around then and things pick up immensely.

You won't miss much that way

Honestly probably the only episodes before the Briarwood arc that are worth watching are the big fight against the Beholder, and the Trial of the Take episodes.

Mary plays an awesome Tiefling Warlock, which makes up for Felicia's horrible Human Wizard (what makes it so bad is that Felicia is playing the character as someone that should be just utterly hated, and it's not hard to hate this character).

Will Friedle plays an awesome Human Cleric, who goes for the cliche 'special snowflake' (which is fine because this is his first character period) but then throws in about 10 tons of straight deadpan sarcasm. Wil Wheaton has normal Wheaton luck, but it's still mostly entertaining, even if he gets on your nerves sometimes.

I'm pretty sure the cast and Matt are sick of the dragon arc, and are going to be happy it's all over with when it's all said and done. There were some good moments along the way, but holy fuck does it drag a ton in the middle, when they are literally unable to get any downtime to work on side stuff or even do something as simple as brew a healing potion because of the ever present threat of dragons vaporizing the last city on the continent.

god i forgot wheaton was in this show, i fucking hate him. they guy is just such a faggot

Also is anyone else starting to get pissed about the shit ton of technical issues constantly?

luckily it was only like 2 or 3 episodes. I skipped them because I can't stand him or felicia

They've had to replace their tech crew two or three times since the show started, and basically every time they've done so it's been plagued by about 10-15 episodes of technical issues every now and again.

The latest issues are because they got rid of most of the old tech crew almost literally right when the holiday break occurred, because the parent company doesn't want to pay people the amount they actually deserve to be paid.

Why have they replaced it previously? Isn't the parent company just them?

nah they got bought by some company a while back, cant remember the name but im sure google will

They used to be a proprietary company owned by Felicia Day and a couple other people, before they sold it to Legendary (which was around the time the first tech team left to do their own RPG channel).

This more recent departure (I think) was because Legendary are cheap assholes and don't want to pay the staff enough money to do their job.

The "dragon threat" was never that bad. They weren't really on a time clock, and the dragons all kind of set up shop and sat around and waited for the party to come kill them.

It really didn't make any sense. Apparently, there are no standing armies ready to repel giant magical beasts, which is odd since it's a fuckin high magic world and the party is constantly encountering such threats.

I mean sure, the king dies, so naturally there's going to be panic and tumult, but the other cities really had NOTHING in their back pockets? Dragons attack the capital and everyone just says "fuck it, guess we worship dragons now lul".

I feel like the show is big enough now that Matt should at least be bouncing some ideas off of another guy or two just to avoid the plot holes. His world is only getting bigger and harder to manage

Most of Emon's standing army was in Singorn (the big elf city) for military drills when the dragons showed up, and instead of sticking around the Singorn high council bamfed the city and the army out to the Feywild to protect it's citizens because all the dragons were going to attack them (a tactic they've done before whenever similar things have happened).

I'm just nitpicking, but it still feels really flimsy to me.

it's of course never going to be perfect as magic and monsters tend to fuck up everything, but in my mind, the scale of things just doesn't match up.

>you know those moments are mega scripted right?
>He still thinks it's scripted
>He doesn't know about actors and improv

I think you mean
>he's never roleplayed before

Sam Riegel's twitter has me doubting

Matt has gone on record that the player has the ultimate say on whether the character even wants to come back at all. If Taliesin had said preemptively "No, Percy's tired and done" then no roll would have been high enough.

My headcanon is that "Draconia" was never powerful at all, and Tiberius was just the Dragonborn version of HFY threads, so even if matt had let him call the "army" in, it would have been like 20 guys with 3 horses.

If you can bare having to pay more attention to what's being said watching at 1.25 speed will shave 80 hours off the viewing time.

I started watching at Episode 68, the fight with Ripley. Any particularly good stuff I should go back and watch?

>Keyleth actually did something useful

One good deed does not absolve the other eighty-one episodes of shit.

>Will Friedle plays an awesome Human Cleric, who goes for the cliche 'special snowflake' (which is fine because this is his first character period) but then throws in about 10 tons of straight deadpan sarcasm.
My companion of melatonin-enriched descent. Kash is definitely great, for his first character I somehow don't even notice the snowflake status 99% of the time.

Sorry, i only watch Rocketbeans and their PnP

youtube.com/watch?v=X1aRZIqH68s

I'd go back and start watching around the time The Briarwoods come into the story, since that's also the introduction of Ripley as a character. I can't remember the episode, sadly, but by that point everyone's got a pretty good groove going, and Tiberius is gone.

I never liked Tiberius.

So, is he coming back or not? I feel like Sam had a much larger plan for this current story arc to just give in now. But I guess its up to how Kaylie reacts.

I'd love to see a lower leveled party made of all the side characters which affected the main party's character in some way. It would be fun to see that party join up with the main party for a battle.

It could be made up of:
The kid that Vax turned away because he wanted to be just like the heroes in the group he could be a warrior or a dex user. Scanlan's daughter as the bard or thief. The Half Orc that Grog fought at the Slayer's Take who was being taught by a monk. All they would need is a Healer and there's the start of a "They look like us when we started out" moment for the group.

>The kid that Vax turned away because he wanted to be just like the heroes in the group he could be a warrior or a dex user.
The kid came back, he was a mage who sided with the bad guys, they beat his ass and took him back to their base with them to put him back on the right track.

I'm only at Episode 40 so either I haven't gotten to it or I missed it. Well, maybe since he's a mage he could round out that party I mentioned as a ranged attacker.

Can you stop shilling this?

WRONG

It was all a ruse, Draconia stands

Oh, i posted the live stream. Sorry, here the VOD

youtube.com/watch?v=XbNDSRko5lE

Any advice to someone trying to make a critical role like youtube? I only have one session done so far but I don't know how to get anyone to watch it, I don't care about the monetization angle, I just want people to like it.
We don't move as fast as Matt and co so I edit all the filler out of the recordings so it's just pertinent action and dialogue, anything I can do beyond that?

Nothing of value.

The show is trash.

This.

Somebody on leddit made this slideshow if you want to pick up on a story arc, it tells you everything that happens in the arcs prior to the one you're starting on so that you're not completely lost. (Spoilers, obviously.)

docs.google.com/presentation/d/1V09wMmZAilcQDuWBKhjJF0bvf91xCJWMvG46Fg2LQKs/edit?usp=sharing

This, but with the exception of Raishon being a 10/10 villain.

Up until now, the only time I've felt like the party was in danger was when they decided to pick a fight in the middle of the City of Brass, and that was mainly because of the reinforcements that the guard called.

Even from her first encounter, Raishon was a dangerous villain because she was also a level 20 magic user, could be anyone anywhere because of her polymorph spell, knew of Whitestone despite the magical camouflage, and was actually smart compared to the other dragons who were basically just dragons. Even Thordak's main gimmick was that he was a bigger than normal dragon that glowed a bit.

Each time they fought her, I was convinced it was gonna be a TPK, the first time because they were retarded and fought her after all their casters were spent, but the second time after seeing her fight intelligently during the first fight with high level spells and tactics like dispelling Hero's Feast for her breath weapon.

My favorite part about Raishan as a villain is that everyone was absolutely convinced she was going to betray them. I mean, Diseased Deceiver, how much more obvious could it be.

Now, at the end of the arc, there's no evidence she's been anything but straightforward and honest with the party. They attacked her first, and she even gave several chances to just stick with their original agreement.

The plot twist was that there is no plot twist.

Mercer really pulled out all the stops with that green dragon. She was wrecking their faces both times, it was only that ridiculously lucky feeblemind after she burned through her resistances that saved them. If she'd lived another round the players would probably have been looking down the barrel of a prismatic spray and lost another two or three of their number. After that it's purely cleanup duty.

So, as far as villains go... The Conclave was pretty much shit. Absolutely none of them had any presence except Raishan. Didn't get all the excited for the battle with Thordak, just kinda happened. Hoping their next arc has a bad guy with some good build up. It was kinda silly having everyone freak out over Thordak and his cronies for them all to be beat up and killed so easily. Like, how the fuck do you make getting to the dragon as simple as going through some sewers and going past a few fire giants?

>Top Tier
Ripley and Kevdak
>High Tier
K'Varn, The Briarwoods and Raishan.
>Mid Tier
Hotis
>Low Tier
Thordak
>Shit Tier
Umbrasyl and Vorugal

>Like, how the fuck do you make getting to the dragon as simple as going through some sewers and going past a few fire giants?
Didn't they basically skip all the encounters they were supposed to have in the city by using the sewers?

except for that lovely stray chain lightning mid-Thordak battle

Yeah, which was pretty stupid. You're telling me somehow a super paranoid dragon wouldn't have secured his sewers with all the time he had there?

>Grog's reaction in the last episode
holy fuck can Travis get any better?

I mean, let's be honest: she was NOT a nice person. She told VM straight-up that she was an evil person with a specific goal in mind, and her prior history certainly backs it up, thanks to a couple History checks to learn about her and what she did to the Fire Ashari people.

And the goal she was going for was not a good-aligned thing. If she's digging around in old necromancer lairs then she's probably looking for ways to become a Dracolich. And being a mostly good-aligned party they were going to kill her eventually, they just needed a good reason to do so.

Thordak was great at the start. He was intimidating he was powerful a literal force of nature that completely changed the nature of the game. The problem is apart from that initial start he didn't do anything to directly effect the party, unlike Raishan who was a constant source of tension.