The Legend of Vox Machina

i THINK part of pike's narrative early on was because their home game was pathfinder. same story, just pathfinder rules. when they swtched to streaming they had JUST switched to 5e dnd rules because pathfinder rules are really chunky with modifiers. a typical pathfinder attack role is basically d20 +3 -2 -1 +2 +3 -2 and those modifiers might change every attack depending on who you are attacking, where they are standing, where you are standing, how many times you're attacking in a single round, etc.

so pike's diety is Sarenrae, which is a pathfinder diety, but doesn't exist in dnd. i THINK matt was trying to demonstrate a weakening link, sort of as a story beat but ashley never picked up on that because she never picks up on ANY of the story beats that matt gives her. but like, her symbol broke so it messed up her connection to Sarenrae, whereas matt was pulling a thor ragnarok when thor's hammer breaks and has to figure out that the hammer was just a focus for his power, not the source of it. but again, ashley never really picked up on that at all.

Yeah I love Ashley, but she is not the brightest of the bunch. That being said her character in Campaign 3, Fearne, is much better than her previous characters.
As for the show, they have 12 episodes for this 1st season it appears, so if they have the Briarwoods be the main villain for the rest of the season that seems fine to me.

Regarding Pike, in some of the first live episodes they were exploring a dungeon and Pike showed a strange interested in some torture implements. Later they had an unconscious guard and she slit it's throat to stop it following them. She and the party all seemed shocked by this action. When they left the dungeon Matt described her finding a crack in her holy symbol. Later she described spending time in the temple praying and doing good deeds to try and repair her link to her god.

Grabbit Allworth said:

That said, I wasn't the least bit surprised that 6 minutes in to the first episode they introduced the pink-haired, non-binary, bearded tranny barkeep. /eyeroll.

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That character was made up from surveying the Kickstarter backers, the CR team had nothing to do with it, other than making a crowdsourced character a stretch goal. Also (this isn't mentioned in the show), not sure it's technically a tranny, their race is Changeling, who I imagine have no gender, since they can swap at will.

BoozeCube said:

Netflix and Amazon shows that don't release all content for me to binge watch in a day are aids.

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Netflix is the only one that drops full seasons. Everyone else is weekly like assholes to keep us subbed.

I do see value in having staggered release as they allow people a chance to chat about the content part way through a story. Nothing was quite so maddening as watching a cool episode of a series and not having anyone to talk to about it because everyone else had either watched none or all of it.

WHILE i agree dropping all at once is great,

one thing to remember is..Word of Mouth.

drop at once hype before release then....a bit a week or 2 after the WoM gets passed along as people go, did you see X on netflix, it is great you should watch it. then nada as the masses move on to the next big thing

limited release = people talk about the episode from this past week, then NEXT week they talk about that episode, then etc
allowing for a more organic gain of followers as more people hear about the show as time goes on. so that above WoM example is, did you watch X that just came out on amazon video? ...next week, then next week, etc. and people like to TALK about episodes during the week to anticipate the next episode, that builds a fanbase.

Next 3 are up on Prime.

I was expecting one episode per week...that's a nice surprise.

Djay said:

I was expecting one episode per week...that's a nice surprise.

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Nope, 3 each week. It's a 4 week run.

These episodes flow together much better. The only criticism I have is that you can almost physically feel them rushing the story. Still really good overall, the story beats just have zero time to breath.

last week on their watch party (it's on youtube now, don't bother it's mostly boring) i think matt or travis said the entire briarwood arc was 40+ hours streaming, and they needed to bring that down to like 5 hours. it is, and always will be the problem with this show specifically. they have SOOOOO much content that no matter what they do, it will always feel rushed. if you give moments time to breath, it's at the expense of someone's favorite moment.

j00t said:

last week on their watch party (it's on youtube now, don't bother it's mostly boring) i think matt or travis said the entire briarwood arc was 40+ hours streaming, and they needed to bring that down to like 5 hours. it is, and always will be the problem with this show specifically. they have SOOOOO much content that no matter what they do, it will always feel rushed. if you give moments time to breath, it's at the expense of someone's favorite moment.

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Yeah, I watched that live as well. And I get the problem. It's still a problem though when you can sense just how badly they had to rush every story beat just to get them all in. Taking it from 40+ hours to 5 was always going to be rough and could have been FAR better for everyone if they spread the Briarwoods out to be both initial seasons. But I understand them not having any guarantees beyond the first season when they were first writting the stories. Even though now Amazon has guaranteed a 2nd season, it's too late to extend the story arc out that far.

Still a great show. I'm still enjoying it. But the pacing is borderline Saturday Morning Kids Show levels of speed.

Im not a big cartoon person or ever got into Critical Role but I decided to check this out and have been thoroughly enjoying it.

Kaines said:

Yeah, I watched that live as well. And I get the problem. It's still a problem though when you can sense just how badly they had to rush every story beat just to get them all in. Taking it from 40+ hours to 5 was always going to be rough and could have been FAR better for everyone if they spread the Briarwoods out to be both initial seasons. But I understand them not having any guarantees beyond the first season when they were first writting the stories. Even though now Amazon has guaranteed a 2nd season, it's too late to extend the story arc out that far.

Still a great show. I'm still enjoying it. But the pacing is borderline Saturday Morning Kids Show levels of speed.

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well, the hope is that the show does well despite this and allows for more/longer seasons so that they can take their time a little more, as well as open the door for more shows like this

I havn't seen this yet, but I think I'm going to have to after watching this:


Shh, shh, quiet, quiet, go to sleep... /PTSDeyes

Grez said:

I havn't seen this yet, but I think I'm going to have to after watching this:


Shh, shh, quiet, quiet, go to sleep... /PTSDeyes

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This was a great scene to do callbacks to things that happened at the table, but before the events of the show.