This video is sponsored by WorldAnvil. This is a topic that I’ve considered tackling
in the normal Critical Role Demystified series, like at some point I figured we would
get to a scene in a future episode that I could use as an example - but honestly,
I got a comment on one of my Demystified videos that made me want to just break this
off into its own video. The comment read: “Imagine getting paid MILLIONs of dollars to play
a game and not knowing the rules… couldn’t be me.” Now, I get comments like this all the time about
the cast members of Critical Role - usually one cast member in particular, but not always.
In this case, I think they were referencing a spell that Sam had misread. But this
comment, despite being super short, kind of touches on a bunch of aspects of this
topic that come up in other, similar comments, without getting into the more toxic aspects that
show up in some *other* comments, and so I kind of wanted to tackle this subject. Why doesn’t the
cast of Critical Role know the rules to D&D? And why have I never brought that up as a lesson we
can learn as players - aka, why don’t I think it’s a big deal whether the cast knows their
spells? That’s what we’re talking about today. I should clarify that this subject is especially
relevant to Campaign 1, which are the episodes we’re reviewing on this channel currently. But I’m
sure there are moments, even now in Campaign 3, nine years into the show, where the players
get rules wrong. And if that bothers you, then I’m thinking this video might for you. I also
want to clarify - I’m not making this video to “defend” Critical Role. As we’ll discuss shortly
- they’re doing just fine. They don’t need me to go to bat for them, and I’ve got a whole video
series where I try to make *genuine* critiques, to point out the things we can actually learn
from to improve our home games. But the reason I’m talking about this is because, when people
say things like this about Critical Role, it’s reasonable to assume they might believe
there are reasons why some players - even just a few very famous players - would have no excuse to
not know the rules. And I think that’s a problem. Now, the first thing I want to talk about is
the idea that the cast of Critical Role gets paid millions of dollars to play D&D.
Because I don’t think that’s true. Now, I’m not talking about how
*much* they’re making - like, they are making millions of dollars across all of
their platforms, that’s definitely true. I mean, I don’t think the cast is pocketing
millions of dollars individually, because they put the money into their projects -
like, they don’t take their games to Kickstarter, because they just generally use their profits
to pay for the next book or game they plan to publish. They also have a bunch of employees
with full-time salaries, and they probably provide health care as well, because this is the
United States of America, and health care is tied to employment because our leaders have tricked
us into thinking that it’s more important to be an individual and look after yourself then it is
to pay literally any amount of money to take care of the underserved in our community. So I don’t
think the cast are all individually millionaires, because they’ve got some serious expenses. But
also, as long as I keep hearing stories about how they treat their artists and collaborators
with respect, I kind of don’t care either way. I don’t think the relevant part of this
comment is how much the cast members get paid. What’s far more interesting is the question of
what they get paid *for.* This commenter points out that the players get paid to play a game.
And the implication there is that they’re being played to play the game *well*. But what that
means depends a lot on what you think of as the most important part of D&D. Like, there are some
episodes of Critical Role that have made me cry. These are characters I care about, and stories
I think are genuinely fantastic. And if that’s all being accomplished by some folks sitting down
to play a game, then I think that means they’re playing the game well. Are they always following
the rules? No, not always. Sometimes they know that, and sometimes they don’t. But I’ve watched
a lot of actual play shows, and if I’m completely honest? Actual play shows don’t succeed by the
strength of the game they’re playing. If you doubt that, just look at how many 5e actual plays
there are. Some of them have told epic, emotional stories. Some have been hilarious or frightening.
And some have just been a recording of some people playing D&D completely unspectacularly. They might
be having fun, but that’s no guarantee that the show will be exciting for an audience. If the
game was the reason a show succeeded or failed, trust me, there are a ton of 5e actual plays, you
would have heard about a lot more of them. So, I’m not convinced the cast of Critical Role is being
paid to play D&D according to the rules. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think 5e was a good system
for them to switch to for the livestream - it was a friendlier system for them to play on-steam then
their previous game, Pathfinder; it was easier for folks to jump on board with a show that was
streaming a relatively new game; it had extremely good SEO; and getting a bunch of comments about
how you’re playing the game wrong probably helps a lot with the YouTube algorithm. And yes, there
are definitely some people who watch them because they’re a D&D show. Maybe those audience members
are players or GMs looking for ideas for their 5e games, maybe they just watch Critical Role because
it’s how they engage with the D&D community, or maybe they just enjoy watching a game where
they, as an audience member, already know the system really well - and more on that later -
but regardless, I do think Critical Role will lose a couple people whenever they inevitably
switch to a game system besides 5th Edition, and not just because their audience really seems
to hate change. But I think, generally speaking, it doesn’t matter that much what system they’re
playing - because the audience is watching for *them*. If you like the cast and the GM, and
you like the format of the show, and you like the story they’re telling, then the game system
doesn’t really matter that much. I’m not always a huge fan of Critical Role’s one-shots - I think
some of them are amazing and others just don’t do that much for me - but that’s true regardless of
which system they’re playing, whether it’s 5e or another game - because what I enjoy about Critical
Role is usually when they tell a longer story, even if it’s just a couple of episodes like the
various Exandria Unlimited miniseries. You might watch Critical Role for other reasons, and yeah,
maybe for you it *is* because of the game they’re playing, more so than the other factors.
But that’s not true for everyone. That’s not why they get paid millions of dollars.
They got paid because people liked watching *them*. That’s literally it. Now, in fairness, the cast *is*
essentially promoting 5th Edition, and eventually they’d be sponsored by D&D Beyond and work with
Wizards of the Coast on creating tie-in material, so you might argue, well, shouldn’t they at
least try to play by the rules to appease their corporate masters? And we’ll talk later in this
video about why I don’t even think that’s true. Now, it’s definitely true that the cast does not
know the rules for 5e incredibly well, especially early in the show’s run. Now, sometimes they
*do* get the rules right… and most of the time, that doesn’t get commented upon, because it’s
not that noticeable that they’re playing by the rules. There’s the occasional moment where
a singular cast member busts out a rule and impresses everyone with their strategy, but
in every game session, players are playing by the rules in completely unremarkable ways. Other
times, they get stuff wrong. But there are a lot of reasons for that. And the most obvious reason,
especially in the Vox Machina campaign, is that they switched to this system partway through an
ongoing campaign. These players converted their characters from Pathfinder to D&D 5e when they
were around level 8, and that is a *huge* change, and it’s *very* late in the campaign to make that
switch. That’s after two years of play, and while they used to just play something like once a month
in their home games, that’s still a long time in that system. And we saw the cast struggle with
those changes a lot. Vex was so underpowered in the Vox Machina streamed campaign, and I imagine
a big reason for that was because the 5e Ranger in the Player’s Handbook is… kind of ass. It’s
actually *perfectly* designed for players who happen to know exactly what the designers expected
of them, and for a very specific type of campaign, but there’s hardly any onboarding to guide players
to that conclusion, no way to make sure the GM runs that kind of campaign to make that play
style shine, and certainly no way for Laura to get the same experience when she converted her
existing character for an ongoing campaign. The Beastmaster Ranger is especially rough in that
book - honestly, if the pitch for the upcoming revised D&D Edition was just, “We’re retooling the
Beastmaster Ranger so it doesn’t suck, and we’re changing very little else” I would buy that $60
rulebook in a heartbeat. And Laura wasn’t the only player who had to wrestle with new mechanics. Liam
had a hell of a time remembering how sneak attack worked, he *constantly* thought that getting
sneak attack meant rolling with advantage, when actually it’s the reverse, an attack rolled with
advantage qualifies for sneak attack. But, again, he got a level 8 character sheet in a brand new
system, that’s a lot of new features to keep track of. Matt, Taliesin and Marisha had also played a
lot of D&D and Pathfinder as adults, so sometimes they remember rules and mechanics from different
systems. There was a moment where Taliesin said, “Oh, yeah, you can use your action to perform a
bonus action task,” and Matt had to remind him, “No, not in this version of the system.” I
don’t know if that’s something from Pathfinder, but I know that was something in 4th Edition,
that is how bonus actions and actions worked with each other. And this wasn’t even in the
Vox Machina campaign - this was *much* later, I think it may have even been in Campaign 3, if
not late in Campaign 2. They’d been playing 5th Edition for, like, six years at that point, and
still, the rules for an old system came bubbling up to the surface of Taliesin’s brain. And that’s
completely normal. And during the Briarwood Arc, Keyleth cast Heat Metal on Vax’s daggers and
realized the spell worked differently in 5th Edition, so their old strategy to heat up
a weapon and have it do extra damage was not going to work anymore, because their familiar
tactics couldn’t be converted to the new system. That actually brings me to my next point - D&D
has some misleadingly-named spells. So, sometimes, a player will read a spell name, and think, “Oh,
I get it.” This is absolutely not unique to the players on Critical Role, I’ve seen it happen in
many, many different groups. For example, let’s look at the spell that this commenter was reacting
to. In episode 50, Scanlan cast Invisibility on himself and snuck into Westruun. Then he cast
another spell, and he discovered right then that Invisibility ends when you cast another spell.
Now, Sam understood how concentration worked, so he knew he couldn’t cast another *concentration*
spell while invisible. And besides that, he read the title “Invisibility,” and he read the
parameters for long it lasts, and he got the gist. He figured he had all the information he needed.
And so he missed the last line of the spell, because he hadn't needed to read this spell for a
long time - because he figured he understood it. Now, even without digging into the spells lots
of people get wrong even if they know the system pretty well, like Jump and Thunderwave that are
constantly confusing to even experienced players, there are still dozens of spells that new
players just misunderstand. I’ve run a lot of games for new players, and I see it
all the time. And these players don’t think they *don’t* understand the spell
- so they don’t think to investigate it further. It takes a while for them to train
themselves to look at the description every time they’re gonna cast it, even if the
title of the spell seems really clear. And there are some spells that are infamous for
tripping up players because they don’t work how they seem like they’d work. For example, did
you know the spell Find Traps doesn’t actually tell you where the traps are? Did you know
the spell Daylight doesn’t create sunlight? Why would you - it doesn’t say that anywhere
in the description. So even if somebody *does* take the time to read Daylight, or Jump, or
Thunderwave, the description omits important context that completely changes how
the spell functions in the game. And that’s another thing - not everyone
either reads their spells in advance, or re-reads their spells at the moment
they cast them. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think *not* reading your spells is a
virtue or anything. When Keyleth cast Wind Walk and didn’t realize that it wasn’t a good spell
for combat because the characters can’t attack, Matt said “read your spells” multiple times as
they were adjudicating the results of that spell, because yeah, there was some important information
in that spell that she missed. But it seems like the players can’t win with the audience. If
Marisha doesn’t read all of her spells before she selects them, and only reads them in the moment
when she’s actually getting ready to cast them, then the audience accuses her of not knowing her
spells. Now, when the stream began, Keyleth was 8th level. By my count, an 8th-level character,
an 8th-level druid has access to almost 80 spells, just from the Player’s Handbook and the Elemental
Evil Player’s Companion that were out at the time, not counting Keyleth’s cantrips, *or* the other
spells Keyleth would’ve gotten when she leveled up throughout the Kraghammer and Briarwood arcs.
So, yeah, she didn’t read all 80 spells before choosing them - she has to pick them each time
she takes a long rest, based on their level and *maybe* a quick scan of the description.
Meanwhile, someone like Sam might choose a spell when he levels up, and he’ll read how
it works in that moment, because he’s not a prepared caster so he can take the time to read
the spell before choosing it. And yet, he may not remember exactly how it works when it actually
comes time to cast it. And so, once again, he gets accused of not knowing his spells. And
again, this isn’t a situation unique to Critical Role - this happens at home games all the time.
Players might skim their spells, but they’ll miss some details. It does happen. Even in this moment
from Campaign 3, the players forgot how scrying works, despite the fact that they’ve used this
spell multiple times in every campaign so far. There are no spoilers in this clip, besides the
character stats in the corner so I’ll conceal those. I haven’t even seen the episode this clip
is from because I’m very behind on Critical Role, but this moment still made the rounds on social
media because it’s just wildly entertaining. SAM: Okay, okay. What are we rolling for? TRAVIS: Come on! Simul-Scry. SAM: I'm going, I'm just rolling
something. Natural 20. (cheering) TALIESIN: Hey! (laughter)
TRAVIS: They're going to freeze that bitch. ASHLEY: Wait, we're doing it at the same time? SAM: Yeah, simul-Scry.
ASHLEY: Like the same circle? LIAM: You got to get a 20. Don't fuck it up. ASHLEY: Well, okay.
LAURA: Get a 20. You can do it. TRAVIS: Don't pick one of those
little things. Get a real one. LIAM: Yeah, no teeth.
SAM: Whoa, that was crazy roll. LAURA: It counts. ASHLEY: I feel like it doesn't
count, but it's going to count. SAM: Guidance.
ASHLEY: Wait, what am I-- (laughter) LAURA: I'm sorry, Matthew. ASHLEY: Yeah?
MATT: No, that's okay. It's okay. TRAVIS: Matt's like, "It doesn't work." MARISHA: It doesn't, yeah. SAM: What is she adding? MATT: Nothing, you don't roll for Scry. (laughter) MARISHA: Yeah, that's what I was saying!
I don't think we roll. (laughter) MARISHA: They do. TRAVIS: Eight! Years! Eight years!
(laughter) TRAVIS: Eight years! TALIESIN: I enjoyed the walk. MARISHA: Matt was just letting it happen.
TALIESIN: I thought the walk was-- MATT: I just let it happen. ASHLEY: Just sitting there the whole time.
TRAVIS: Oh my god! LIAM: You just let us hang ourselves. MATT: Yeah! (laughter)
LAURA: Okay. TRAVIS: Eight years.
ASHLEY: All right, okay. MATT: That was for me. ASHLEY: We're just doing it. We just do it. TALIESIN: Left home and
walked right home. All right. Also, we’ve been talking about players “not
reading” spells, but when MegaphoneMan watched the infamous Wind Walk scene, one of his
chatters, Rainbow Dragon, made an excellent point. They said, if Marisha hadn’t read the
spell, she wouldn’t know how it worked at all, and she mostly did, with the exception of one
line in the description, and one note about the casting time. In other words, she *misread*
it. That’s different. “Read your spells” is too broad a critique, because sometimes, people
just misread things, and that has to be okay. And if the idea of a player getting their spell
wrong bothers you… okay, fine. Make it a bigger deal at your games, make sure your players
know you want them to have their spells ready. But along those lines… I don’t think Matt
has made it a priority for his players to read their spells. We can see this in
action by the behavior he challenges, and the behavior he enables. For example, whenever
the players are trying to recall knowledge about something that happened in the campaign, it
is *very* common for Matt to just sit back and wait for them to find a detail in their
own notes. *Sometimes* he will bail them out, especially if his players argue that their
characters would remember something better than the players would. But most of the time,
he waits to see what they remember, or what they wrote down. As a result, his cast has learned
to take really good notes, and they’ve learned to become better active listeners. And by this
point, if they miss a detail or forget to write something down, then they know what’s expected
of them, and they shouldn’t be surprised if Matt doesn’t bail them out by always telling them
something they feel like they would remember. On the other hand, almost every time a player
casts a spell, especially during combat, Matt will grab a Player’s Handbook and read
the spell. And quite frankly, if you want to teach your players to read their own spells…
this is not how you do it. I would instead recommend asking them to read you the spell the
first time they cast it, and 9 times out of 10, if there’s something they are at all
misunderstanding, they’ll read it and go, “Oh wait, this doesn’t work how I thought it
does.” But Matt doesn’t do that. Now, I assume the reason for that is because he doesn’t want
to slow down the show, especially during combat, and I can absolutely understand why - he’s trying
to keep the audience in mind. Fair enough. This may also have been a result of the problem player
he was dealing with in the early episodes of Vox Machina, so he developed the habit of checking
his players’ work himself by looking everything up on his side. But again, regardless of his
motivations, he’s still unconsciously teaching his players a lesson - they don’t actually *have*
to look up the spells. Because Matt will do it for them. If they misunderstood something, Matt will
catch it and correct them. Now, again, that’s not to say that every rules debate about the spells
means the cast member didn’t read the spell - as we talked about in another video, sometimes cast
members just don’t know how Matt is going to rule on a spell, and there’s not necessarily a way
for them to anticipate that. But on the occasions where they do actually get the spell wrong, Matt
will notice and deal with it, and they know that. But there are some times, especially
in the first few years of the show, where a player will cast a spell, and
they’ll misunderstand some key detail, and Matt… will hold them to it. Very occasionally
in the early campaigns, he might jump in and say, “Before you cast the spell, you should realize
it will lead to this result, are you sure you want to do that?” But other times, especially
during Campaign 1, he was a lot more strict. Scanlan casts Thunderwave while he’s invisible?
“Okay, you’re not invisible anymore.” Keyleth casts Wind Walk on the party? “Okay, they can’t
take actions besides dashing or spending a minute to revert back.” Whereas I would argue that
the player characters would be more familiar with their spells than their players are.
But that often wasn’t Matt’s approach. He instead often took a much more strict, “touch
move,” “play it where it lies,” approach. This means he was effectively punishing his
players for not reading their spells. “But Mike,” you might be saying, “You
just said Matt never enforced making his players read their spells! But if he was
punishing them for not reading their spells, then surely you’re wrong - that *was* his way
of enforcing them reading their spells!” Yes, that’s true. And it was a shitty way to handle
it. First of all, not everyone learns well from negative reinforcement. Second, as I’ve already
said, the characters in the world of the game would be more familiar with their spells than
the players are, so you can and probably should give them some grace. Third, Matt has since
confessed and confirmed that he was frequently too harsh with these rulings. At the time, he
felt the pressure from thousands of rules lawyers DMing him to try to make him be more strict
with his players, and he later regretted it, and started making an effort to be more reasonable
with his friends as they’re all learning to play a pretty complicated game. And fourth, and most
notably… whenever Matt punished a player for not knowing a rule, it changes the narrative around
Critical Role. Imagine two scenarios. In one, a player goes to do something just, like,
casting a spell, and Matt says, “Just to clarify, that’s not how it works,” and the player has a
chance to say, “Oh, I didn’t realize that, okay, let me amend my plan.” In the second scenario, a
player goes to do something like cast a spell, and Matt says, “Okay, this happens,” and the player
says, “Wait, I didn’t realize that would happen.” And Matt basically says, “Too bad, it happened
anyway, sucks to suck.” Now, maybe you’re the type of person who argues that there is a virtue
in holding players accountable for understanding what they’re going to do in the game before they
do something, because players should take the time and understand all of the rules to the game, and
we’ll talk a bit more about that in a little bit. But this isn’t a hypothetical. Scenario 2 happened
over and over again, and every time, it led to the same result. The player felt frustrated because
they wanted to do something cool, and now not only could they not do that cool thing, but things went
wrong somehow. The other players might also get some collateral punishment as these unexpected
consequences impacted the campaign, and so now they’re frustrated. And the audience basically
takes a cue from Matt, and argues, “Well, those players should have known better.” And then
they’ll feel like they can harass those players on social media - especially if it was one of the
female cast members. Matt’s “tough love” approach to resolving these rules almost universally led
to more toxicity in the Critter community. He wasn’t offering the players very much grace or
understanding, and unfortunately, the audience learned that they could do the same thing, they
could talk about how the players “screwed up.” There’s also another piece of context that we need
to address. Because early in Campaign 1, the cast would make suggestions for how they could use the
spells in non-standard ways. And Matt would often say, “Sure,” or he might say, “Make a roll to see
if that’s possible.” Now, this is something that MegaphoneMan has brought up multiple times in his
watchthrough of Critical Role, he’s watching the show for the very first time, and he’s essentially
arguing that, whenever Matt does that, it has a knock-on effect. The more you adjust the rules and
make them flexible and malleable, the harder it is for the players to predict how you’re gonna rule
in the future, and that makes it harder for them to interface with the game. And I think that’s
a valid issue, but for the purposes of today’s topic, there’s another side effect that we
should talk about. Namely, Matt set a precedent early on that spells and some other rules were
malleable. If a player had a cool idea, he’d be more willing to roll with it. Maybe he’d call for
a roll to see if they succeeded, but the option would still be on the table. But then, as the show
continued and Matt continued to feel the pressure from social media, he started being more strict
about running the game rules-as-written a lot more often. There were probably a lot of factors
to why this shift occurred. One was that he was just getting to know the system better, and so he
was starting to understand the purpose behind the design of specific rules. For example, when they
started the stream, Matt said the players could cast an action and bonus action spell on the same
turn. As the game continued, he realized this was too powerful, and walked it back, settling on a
compromise for the rest of Campaign 1 where they *could* still cast two leveled spells on the
same turn, but one of them couldn’t be higher than 2nd-level. This compromise seemed to be in
place to help smooth over the transition from Pathfinder. He also probably started feeling the
pressure to represent the game responsibly. Their goal was always to show how easy it was to play
the game, but they started to realize that people were also learning how to play from watching
them, so Matt probably wanted to make sure he was playing by the rules as often as possible.
Third, Matt was, as I said, getting accosted on Twitter for not knowing the rules, and that’s
not a fun feeling, so he started to work harder to enforce the rules-as-written. And fourth,
Matt was getting accused of fudging the rules to favor his players. So he started getting more
strict, probably in order to combat accusations of favoritism - especially toward Marisha, but we’ll
talk about that another day, that’s a whole other topic. However, it might seem like all of that
disproves my point. “Clearly, playing by the rules matters, because Matt was enforcing it.” Except,
as time went on, he started walking back a lot of his harsher tendencies. By the end of Campaign
2, they’d found a much better balance for playing the game the way they wanted to play, where Matt
*would* enforce the rules he cared about, but not be as strict with every rule if it wasn’t a big
deal to him. The fact that they were pre-recording their games probably helped with this as well - no
longer would they spend the time between each game session watching their DMs fill up with redundant
messages about their supposed “mistakes.” And speaking of the people who would DM Matt
and the players about the rules they got wrong, let’s revisit the argument that the players
should know these spells and rules just as well as the audience does. Because that actually
speaks to a pretty important distinction we need to make - the cast members aren’t necessarily
the same type of nerds as the audience. Now, I hope you understand that I’m not
saying being a nerd is a bad thing, or that being a nerd about Critical Role
is a bad thing. You might have noticed, that’s kind of my whole deal. Most people who
are nerds about Critical Role didn’t harass the cast members. I’m also not saying the
cast members aren’t nerds - they play D&D, they’re all big fans of video games, most of
them are big anime fans, a bunch of them read lots of cool indie comics during the 2010s, even
Sam Riegel used to be a *huge* comics collector when he was younger. And they do follow *some*
other actual play shows, like Matt and I think Marisha were both big fans of The Adventure Zone
during its first campaign. But that doesn’t make them the same type of nerd as the folks who would
watch four hours of Critical Role every week. Now, this is hardly a new phenomenon.
Actors often do not have the same level of encyclopedic knowledge about their
characters or their past projects as the people who watch their shows do, because
being an actor in a show doesn’t mean that you’re the same type of nerd as the people
who remember everything about that show. CHARLIE: Like, when you...
um, left your quarters for the last time? And you opened up your
safe? Um... what was the combination? (Audience laughter) It’s not an actor’s job to memorize
everything about their show. And while Critical Role isn’t a scripted
series, or “just a job,” they really are just playing the game every week
because they actually enjoy it… that doesn’t mean that they’re the same type
of player as an audience member might be. Someone who watches four hours of Critical Role
every week - and especially someone who publicly complains about the cast members getting the rules
wrong - is more likely to be the type of person who sits down and reviews the rules and spells for
D&D in their free time. But the cast of Critical Role doesn’t have free time. During the first
campaign, they were all working voice actors, and the only reason they *could* play their game
weekly instead of once a month like they used to, is because now it’s technically a job to show up
and play with their friends. In later campaigns, they’re also running Critical Role as a company,
and every member has other responsibilities. Plus, they have, like, lives and families and
other friends and other hobbies and stuff. And even if they had free time, there’s no
guarantee that learning the rules is how they’d spend it. Because they might not
be the same type of nerds as their fans. Not every D&D player is the type of person who
has the free time to sit down and read through the books. D&D books are pretty dry, they’re
reference books, they’re not really the type of thing most people read for fun. If you want
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use the promo code SUPERGEEK. Thank you so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Okay, we’ve talked a lot about some Critical
Role-specific reasons why the players on that show might not know every spell. But let’s
zoom out a little bit. Because, it turns out, there are some other factors besides the fact
that they’re playing D&D on-stream every week, or that they transitioned from Pathfinder halfway
through the campaign, or that Matt didn’t ask them to read their spells, but still punished them for
not doing so only after it was too late. In fact, I might argue that, in 5th Edition… the rules
don’t matter as much as they do in other systems. Now, that may seem like a strange
statement, because the general trend of game designing is moving more toward simpler,
more rules-light systems. That’s not universal, but we are seeing a lot of other
games that are in development, especially potential Dragon Killers trying to
replicate D&D’s core fantasy, and many of them are trying to strip down some of the complexity of
5e. But that was not necessarily the state of the industry when 5e was published. Sure, there
were absolutely a ton of rules-light games, like the Powered by the Apocalypse system, all
those games were doing extremely well. But if we compare 5e to its most popular predecessors
and competition - 2nd Edition, 3.5, Pathfinder, even other games at the time like Call of
Cthulhu and Edge of the Empire, 5th Edition had a very unique approach to their rules system.
The game was deliberately designed to be modular. The creators talked all the time about how Dungeon
Masters should feel empowered to swap rules out, drop the rules they don’t like, replace them with
other optional rules, or just do their own thing. And because of that design, there’s actually a lot
more flexibility within the rules of 5e than in a lot of other games. For example, let’s look at one
of the most common 5e house rules I’ve seen in the community - drinking a potion as a bonus action
instead of an action. If you wanted to make a change like that in, like, Pathfinder, there would
be huge ripple effects, because the action economy in Pathfinder is completely different. Swapping
out that rule would actually pretty drastically impact the tone of the game you’re playing in
Pathfinder, and it would have a knock-on effect that would impact the players’ expectations for
what’s reasonable to do on their turn. In 5e, it’s kind of not the end of the world to make
drinking a potion a bonus action, so a lot of people made that change in their games. That might
not be right for your games - maybe you like the more Dark Souls-style feel, where drinking a
potion takes an action because it’s more of a risk. But 5e doesn’t have such a specific tone
and approach, unlike something like Pathfinder, which is really trying to cultivate a more
crunchy experience. And while plenty of people have reasonably pointed to this as something
they do not like about 5e, in this case, its modularity is a feature, and not a bug. Because
if a GM wants to change the rules a little bit, or even just hand-wave away the ones they don’t
care about, they *can* do that, and it won’t break the game. Even the designers of 5th Edition don’t
play the rules precisely as-written when they run streamed games. Because when they’re in the
middle of the game, and something seems cool or interesting, even though it’s not according to
the rules… they can just do it, and it doesn’t break the game. This is the level of nuance that
some terminally online D&D fans seem to struggle with. They treat it as common wisdom that playing
strictly according to the rules is a good thing, is the *best* thing you can do. And that anyone
who deviates from the rules is therefore bad. A DM who doesn’t know the rules for improvised
damage, so they just come up with their own on the fly? That’s a bad DM. A player who gets a
couple of traits mixed up? That’s a bad player. And if that’s you… then I think you’re missing
the point. Even *if* 5e was as strict a game as the crunchier systems like Pathfinder, I
think that’s a very unhealthy attitude for what is essentially make-believe with math.
But especially because of how 5e is designed, I think it’s a really bad fit for the culture
this game is trying to promote. I’m not trying to argue that GMs should always ignore the rules,
because it *is* important to be as consistent in your rulings as you can, so you can build a
shared language with your players and they can make better choices in the moment… but it’s also
not the end of the world if you change things to better match the game you’re trying to run and
the story your players are excited to tell. Now, as I discussed in my most recent Critical
Role Demystified episode, there was a scene in the Vox Machina campaign where Vax and Scanlan used
Dimension Door to teleport inside of a dragon, which is against the rules of how Dimension
Door works. And I praised Matt for ignoring the restrictions on Dimension Door that would keep his
players from executing this ridiculous plan. Sure, mechanically, you can’t use Dimension Door to go
somewhere where another living creature already is, but this plan is amazing, it’s high-risk,
high-reward, it’s a plan where the players are willingly throwing themselves into a dangerous
situation, and it has internal logic to it, especially given how most of these players might
think about teleportation thanks to other fantasy and sci-fi stories they’re more familiar with.
I basically said, yeah, who gives a shit if it’s not how the rule works, it’s extremely cool
and extremely dramatic. But I got a comment that didn’t agree with me, and I’m going to
read that comment now, and then respond to it: “You use the rules to derive drama from
them, not fuck the rules so that you can have drama. If the rules don’t matter, then
they might as well just be doing improv.” Hey buddy, I’ve got bad news for you about
how similar our hobby is to doing improv. Well, okay, so that was my initial reaction.
But thinking about this a bit more, I wanted to understand where
this commenter was coming from. And I actually think this is probably a
reasonable piece of advice for some D&D games… but it’s a very poor critique
of Critical Role. Let me explain. From my perspective, the rules aren’t there
to provide drama - they’re there to provide consistency. You can absolutely throw out the
rules to get more drama. You should be very careful when doing so - after all, if you do that
every time, you erode the ability for your players to rely on the rules and predict your rulings, we
talked about that before. But I personally have no trouble saying, “Look, that’s not at all how
the rules work, but you know what? It’s awesome, so I’ll say it *is* possible, you’ll
have to roll, let’s see how it goes.” But I want to put myself into the mindset of
this commenter. To them, from what I understand, the rules exist to create drama. So, if Liam and
Sam are at the table, and they propose the plan, “We want to teleport into the dragon,” it sounds
like the commenter’s argument is that you should reply, “Well, that’s not how the spell works, so
you’ll need to find some other way to accomplish what you’re trying to do.” And then the goal
would be for the players to use their creativity and find an option that is still compatible within
the rules of the game. That’s what he means - I’m assuming - by the rules providing drama. For
example, maybe the players have to jump onto the dragon’s back and click the rod there, to try to
hold him down. Or, if they’re dead-set on getting the rod *into* the dragon, they could find… some
other way of getting it into the dragon’s belly. VEX: Where are they going? SCANLAN: Scanlan’s haaaaand! [screaming] [shlorp] [growls] Now, I don’t know this commenter from Adam,
I don’t know what kind of games they like to play. But this does seem to me like the mindset
of the folks who engage with this hobby more like a wargame. To those folks, I can see the
argument that the challenge is far more about how the players can overcome tasks within
the boundaries of the established rules. And if that’s your mentality, then yeah,
I guess the way Matt handles some of the rules and rulings on Critical Role might not
make a lot of sense to you. But that’s also why I feel like this is an especially poor
critique of Critical Role. Let me elaborate. There’s a tweet I saw at some point that I have
tried so hard to track down, if I’m able to, I’ll put it up here, I haven’t been able
to find it by the time I’m recording. If you know the tweet from my description of it,
then please leave it in the comments below. But basically, the tweet argues that, while it’s
perfectly reasonable for us as audience members to talk about what we’d like to see from a piece of
media, there is a line where our recommendations and ideas are just never gonna be what those
creators are gonna do, and it’s on us to realize when we’ve hit that point where we’re basically
trying to order a hot dog from a hardware store. And even though Critical Role was live-streamed
and the audience *could* theoretically interact with the players during and in between games,
I think that sentiment still applies here. For example, I talk a lot about the things that I
think Matt and the players could do differently. But I also run games that have a *lot* in common
with Matt’s style. I’m also approaching these episodes with the benefit of hindsight, so I know
where the tone of the show is ultimately going, and how the cast *will* eventually learn some
of these lessons, or how not having learned these lessons have had actual consequences in
future episodes. So I feel like I’m connecting with this show on its own terms. However,
I don’t usually make complaints about the type of characters the players rolled up, because
that’s not a reasonable thing to complain about, because they’re going to play the characters they
want to play, and they should be able to do so. If your argument is that Matt should never
fudge the rules to allow badass things to happen in his games… then, like, I’m sorry,
this hardware store does not sell hot dogs. That’s part of Matt’s style, and if that’s not
your thing, that’s totally fine. But asking Matt to run his games the way you’d run yours is a
level of fan entitlement that is just really unproductive for everyone involved. Now, I
don’t mean to put that on this commenter, I have no way of knowing if they’ve got
any sort of fan entitlement. That’s weird, the first part of their comment isn’t showing
up. Let’s see how they opened their remarks. “RIP this channel. Everytime a
YouTuber has a baby the channel dies.” Wow, okay, never mind, what an asshole.
What a bizarre way to respond when somebody announces that they had a baby. Like,
setting aside the fact that this is my job and I need to keep doing it to pay the
bills, and setting aside the fact that that comment was left on one of the longest
videos I’ve ever made on this channel, imagine the level of entitlement needed
to respond to the miracle of childbirth by complaining that you might get slightly less
free content. Like, I’m not trying to strawman the people who make these arguments, they just keep
being assholes, I don’t know what to tell you. Now, the argument from these sorts of pedants
always circle the idea that the *right* way to play the game is to play using all of the rules
precisely as-written. But here’s something that they don’t seem able to acknowledge… nobody
actually plays their games according to every rule. Even if you’re playing completely
rules-as-written, people still make mistakes. In my first session as the elf cleric Kamaria
Jericho - who you can actually see me recreating in my Baldur’s Gate III playthrough - but in
our home game, the first time I was in combat, I cast Sacred Flame on an enemy. So I rolled to
attack, and I missed. And then, when my turn next came around, I realized, “Oh, wait, this spell
requires a saving throw, not an attack roll.” Once I got Spiritual Weapon at higher levels,
it took me *months* before I realized that the spell does not require concentration. Hell,
I played an illusion wizard for three years, I got all the way up to level 20 and beyond, I
thought I knew the spell Seeming really well, but there are a bunch of times in my Critical
Role Demystified series where I pointed out how Matt was basically house-ruling something
about the spell - and it was only *really* recently that I realized, “Oh, wait, no, they’re
playing it rules-as-written, or at least that’s a perfectly reasonable way of reading of the rules…
based on a sentence I had just forgotten about.” Now, when we’re audience members for an online
game, we have the benefit of not having to make these choices in the moment. We have the advantage
of just sitting back and only having to think about the math and the rules. The players, on the
other hand, actually have to make decisions. They have to be in the moment, but they also have to
think about what they’re going to do next. And that changes your relationship with everything
that's happening at the table. They might not hear everything perfectly, because they’re
also thinking about what they want to do. But we have a much better chance of not mishearing or
misunderstanding things, because we're not in the same situation as them. It’s like the difference
between being in a conversation, and realizing you haven’t heard what someone has been saying
over the past 15 seconds or so because you’ve been thinking about how you’re gonna respond,
and watching a movie, where you don’t have to interact with them, you don’t have any obligation
to reply, so you can just passively sit back and judge the characters for not responding how you
*think* you would if you were there in the moment. Now, everything I’ve said so far, I feel
like is pretty uncontroversial. These are all ideas that I find to be pretty reasonable
counterpoints to the argument that it’s bad for the cast to get some things wrong now and
then. But now I’m gonna make an argument that I don’t know if anybody else is going to agree with,
but I actually feel very strongly about it. Because if your argument is that players *should* know
how to play D&D because they’re playing it on an actual play show and presenting the game for
an audience… I actually think you’re completely misunderstanding the value of an actual play
show. The point of playing these games online, aside from telling a compelling story, is to help
demonstrate just how easy it is to actually get into these games. Actual play shows do an amazing
job of reducing the barrier to entry for new players. And there is definitely a conversation
to be had about whether or not new players should learn the rules from actual play shows, especially
if they’re getting the rules wrong, and that’s a legitimate point. But if we can normalize the
conversations I proposed earlier, where Matt could just ask the players to read the spell out
loud, and talk through it with the player… then we could actually normalize the idea that players
and GMs don’t *have* to memorize the rules. Because I honestly believe that it’s a good thing
to have actual play shows where the players aren’t experts in the game they’re playing. It helps to
reduce the stigma that you have to memorize this game, and it normalizes making mistakes. That’s
another one of the many reasons I disliked Matt’s habit of punishing players for misreading spells
or misunderstanding their abilities: because it sends the message to new players watching
Critical Role that they can’t make mistakes, because the consequences could be disastrous.
And I think that is the absolute wrong lesson to send to an audience. We shouldn’t expect every
actual play player to always get the rules right, not just because it’s probably not why they sat
down to play the game, but I actually don’t think that’s as useful to the hobby as allowing
the players to sometimes get things wrong, and demonstrate that, yeah, it’s actually okay
to not have these 400-page rulebooks memorized. Now, do not get me wrong - if you do happen to
have an encyclopedic memory of these books, I’m happy for you. And if you and your fellow players
never get a rule wrong during your home games, that’s also awesome. But here’s the thing, and it
is kind of important… if Matt’s players get the rules wrong… who cares? It’s only Matt’s business
whether his players get the rules wrong or not. Now, I want to be clear - it’s okay if it
*bothers* you, that’s fine. We can't always control what gets under our skin or what rubs us
the wrong way. And I don’t personally think it’s the end of the world to leave a comment with the
correct rule, just to make sure the information is out there for people who are learning the
game, and just to get it out of your system. But, like… don’t harass people? Maybe even, don’t
trash-talk people? There’s a difference between critiquing and complaining, and “You got
the rules wrong” isn’t really a critique, it’s just a complaint. Not knowing the rules to
a game doesn’t actually make them worse people. *Knowing* all the rules to that same game doesn’t
make you a *better* person. Knowing the rules also doesn’t make you a better *player.* Sure, it
might make you a better player at *your* table, depending on what your table values. And I can see
the argument that not knowing the rules slows down the game, and that can be irritating. But, like,
Wil Wheaton and Will Friedle and Mary Elizabeth McGlynn didn’t know 5th Edition at all when they
first guest starred on Critical Role. Felicia Day seemed to have a better grasp of the system,
from my estimation, but it was still brand-new to the rest of those players. They got things
wrong or misunderstood stuff, they asked lots of clarifying questions, and that did slow
down play. They also were amazing players, they had well-developed characters, they did their
best to serve the story and not just themselves, they had an amazing time and they added to
the fun of the game. Not knowing the rules did not make them bad players, or reduce
the experience for the other players. But of course, you might be saying, “But
Mike, it’s one thing if they’re new players, but the cast that’s been playing the same game
for years should know all the rules!” And I just disagree. Characters change over time.
They get new spells. Every time that happens, they basically *are* new players
again. And it’s okay if they take a bit of time to figure out the
new rules for their character. Now, you can still say, “Well, I wouldn’t want to
play with players who seemed to make no effort to learn the rules.” That’s fine. There are plenty
of things the players on Critical Role do that I would definitely crack down on if they played at
my table. But Matt doesn’t, so we can assume and conclude that some of this behavior must not
bother him as much as it bothers you or me. I think some folks also see the players
making apparently no effort to learn the rules as a sign that the players don’t care
about the game. That they don’t *respect* the campaign. But they clearly do - they
are constantly emotionally affected by the events of the game, they think about the game
almost all of the time in between sessions, they’re *still* thinking about their characters
years after the campaigns are over. They made a TV show based off of their game. They are clearly
invested. But they’re putting their energy toward the parts that excite them the most - which is,
obviously, the roleplaying and the larger story. Also, just because someone can’t remember
something doesn’t mean they’re not making an effort to learn it. It just means they can’t
remember it, and that’s not the same thing, especially if you don’t learn things by reading
them, which is true for a lot of people. So, like, if you’re planning to argue that,
if somebody gets something wrong, that means they’re not trying, then that’s
really reductive in a way I think is harmful, if not actively ableist, so I strongly
suggest you reconsider that argument. Again, if you’re someone who knows the rules
really well, I get it if it bothers you. I definitely notice when people get rules wrong,
and I used to be the type of person who made it other peoples’ problems. I didn’t bother
celebrities online about it, but I did make it an issue at my own D&D games, and arguably
that’s worse. I wasn’t hiding behind anonymity, I was just being disruptive. But I’m not at that
point anymore, at least I try not to be. Nowadays, when I see something like the druid in the
D&D movie shifting directly from one form into another, or shifting into the owlbear, which
is a monstrosity and not a beast, I just think to myself, “Oh, that’s not how it works.” And then
I move on with my day. In the Critical Role Demystified video for episode 50, I did discuss
how Travis had misremembered his exhaustion and was rolling with disadvantage for no reason. But
that’s not the end of the world - and in fact, in hindsight, considering that I didn’t have
a lesson there, I think I lingered on it too much. Because I only try to talk about the
things that I think move the story forward, or that we can learn from. When a player just
gets a rule wrong? That doesn’t fall under either category, unless we can learn something
from how the cast handles it at their table. So, look, it’s fine to not love it when the cast
gets a rule wrong. But if your reaction involves leaving a nasty comment to trash-talk them, even
on someone else’s channel like mine, then I just don’t think that’s a good use of your time or
your energy. It also sends a signal to other players in this space that they would not be
allowed to make mistakes or get things wrong, and I think that’s a really harmful attitude
to put out there. So, in other words, SHATNER: Get a life, will you people?! (Audience cheering) Thank you so much for watching. I hope this
video was helpful, it’s definitely something I’m gonna be linking back to a couple of times
throughout my “Critical Role Demystified” series, especially when people get spicy in the comments.
If you liked this video, make sure to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, and ring the
bell so you can get notified whenever I drop a new video. I put out two videos a week most
of the time, so I do have lots of non-Critical Role videos that I’m really proud of, so if
you’re only here for the Critical Role content, I really hope you subscribe so you can check out
some of my other video. If you want to support the channel financially, please consider joining my Patreon
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up-to-date with my latest updates when I happen to send them out, I need to do that soon. Click here
to check out my latest video, it’s about whether or not players can “break” your games. I’m on a
roll, I’m tackling *all* of the ways people blame players for things I think are not actually a real
problem. Until next time, play fair and have fun! LIAM: Just so we're clear, everybody–
I'm going to switch back to Liam– This is a game! (laughter) This is a game. Which camera's on me?
This is a game!
