When you ruin the DM's plans | Critical Role Highlight | Campaign 2, Episode 47

The way Taliesin got so red made me blush too ;) So adorable

I felt so sorry for Matt during this whole arc.
If you watch the whole thing in context, Travis just seemed put off with having to do all this ship stuff.
Matt created this incredible adventure revolving around his character, and Travis was just weird about it for multiple episodes.

This was supposed to lead to Keyleth's Mom possibly?!

I remember a reddit story of a DM who got his players stuck in a pit of lava and they must do something to subside it. Then the dwarf with high charisma intimidated the lava and the dwarf started to walk through or float through it no problem, because the lava is scared of him.

Me yesterday. Spent hours making this museum and a puzzle for them. They violenced their wat through the puzzle. Afterwards I was like 'you guys could've just shut them off, you know that right?' 'We could've WHAT'

so funny how since I started watching critical role, now my feed is 80% garbage parasite "creators" that just cut the campaigns up and repost them on their own channels like this one. really wish yt would have some button for hiding these copies. more interesting the source channel is, the worse it is as it drawn them like flies. I hope it pays well because this is basically digital litter.

"Yeah, ship's fucked".

As a DM you should always have a large office paper shredder next to you, and whenever the group wrecks or bypasses a significant part of the planned adventure, you casually drop an equivalent amount of waste paper into the shredder. Not the actual adventure prep pages, of course—you’re going to re-use those later—but the same amount of pages.

If the group manages to fill the shredder’s container completely during the campaign, the DM gets to have a bonus “imaginary scene” or “dream sequence” where they TPK the group.

From the perspective of someone who DMs, you can tell how excited Matt is to use his ship rules and how much time he spent crafting this. He really is hoping Taliesin rolls poorly and even stands up to see the dice himself, and then is disappointed after seeing them, but is still a good sport about it and allows it to happen. Good on him but I feel his pain lol

This is wholesome all around because a) he could’ve just said “nope, not high enough” but stuck to the rules, even though it meant his work was wasted, and b) they all felt guilty for his work being wasted.

It’s like “Oh, this could’ve been a bigger deal - never mind, let’s proceed!” 🥰

As a DM from experience, always reward the players for creative and clever solutions, never fiat or roll it back, this is their story and you are merely there to be the arbiter. That doesn't mean though you can't throw something later at them as revenge lol

If all the players want to fight I would've made up something like. "As you turn to shoot the capsized ship you see a flare shoot up into the sky as a second ship from seemingly out of nowhere comes from behind the island"

Fun fact, mechanically this trick wouldn’t work. 99% of ships are too large for this to work, at least going off of Ghosts of Saltmarsh ship rules a vessel’s size category is determined by its longest side, and the only Huge category ship is a rowboat. Every other one is a Gargantuan vessel, which is too big for Control Water to capsize.

I honestly feel bad for Matt here. All these special ship to ship mechanics..

I can’t wait to see this animated

Favorite story to tell:

D&D group with my best friend of about 15 years as the only other D&D veteran. Homebrew campaign, where the majority of the party got captured by slavers, save for the Ranger (best friend) and Rogue. Well, the slavers took the group to a colosseum to fight in the arena for their amusement. Well, since I try to be a merciful DM, I leveled the group up to level 5 so that the arena crew had a better chance at surviving the fights.

Well, turns out I gift-wrapped "Pass without Trace" for our Ranger. Who was squadded up with our Rogue. In approximately an hour, including the brief time focused on the others in the arena, they were scampering off into the countryside with an NPC in tow, and my 4-5 session Arena arc lay dead and gutted in their wake.

From that day onward, ANY time the ranger would try to suggest any sort of plan, I just stared daggers into him. I think one of my favorites was when the group threw me a major curveball and one of the players apologized for it. Without skipping a beat I went, "Eh, not the first time," and looked right at the Ranger. Whole table started laughing. Ah, I miss that campaign...

2000 feet = about 610 meters.

Cantrip for the win!

I always felt like Matt had an NPC he wanted them to meet.. this was him trying to get the party to go toward Vokodo I think.

Here’s the thing people forget about being a dm. Sure he prepared a bunch of stuff that didn’t get used…THIS TIME! He has naval combat prepared for whenever he needs it in the future. Let the players feel epic. Always have a few combat encounters prepared ahead of the players so if they cheese your encounter, you can continue on playing and they won’t feel bad about it. Now your bbeg will know the tricks of the party so won’t be so easily taken down.

Seems like a nightmare…

I literally planned to do something similar in a boss fight in our home campaign, with whirlpool… the DM luckily heard my plan, and happened to pause our game for a year and has now replanned the encounter so I don’t f*shit up instantly

Never noticed until this video, but did anyone else think that Sam sounds like Arcana from the original Yugioh Season 2? The fake master of the Dark Magician!

The boat equivalent of polymorph

Marisha crying over a fictional ship is honestly a mood

This video actually introduced me to DND so thanks so much for that.

Lol I feel this so hard.
Me DM: gets done filling accent ruins deep in a cave with treasure, a puzzle, background info on BBEG, and a captive NPC that has info for upcoming dungeon.

Wizard player after seeing 4 bug bears in a room supported by columns: I would like to cast fireball at the columns and cause the ceiling to crumble rolls percentile for success

I love how each second after ruining his ship battle he makes sure they know just how much was wasted XD

So I am going through C2 currently but I've not got that far... Did Matt ever get to use these rules again? Like did they come up later?

Imagine being one of those crew members watching your ship tip beneath you and you manage to escape the whirlpool as it sinks. And then they start shooting cannonballs at you

According to the DMG, a canon has a normal range of 600 ft.

I'm planing a coastal campaign where the pirates without magic have technological superiority. It makes sense for them to outrange magic users.

Did the NPCs chasing them just not realize that magic exists? 🤔

What was really cool was watching Taliesin's body language, he was closed off in the beginning possibly something troubling him then boom after the play his body language opens up and he is laughing his ass off. The power of dnd at its finest

well naval cannons in the 1800 hundreds were shooting around 2400 feet...

As a long time DM, I find this great. I tend to throw some wicked screwballs at my players, I would love for them to be creative more often.

Make it so.... Oh man Travis is a trekie and its cannon to me forever

Tbf tho if I were about to go to naval battle and I had a spell caster who could easily turn the tide (pun intended) it would be out of character for me not to yell at that guy to do something so in terms of roleplay this was a badass scene

Love Travis when he said if they can survive this barrage

Reminds me of the time I was DM and they threw another player into a dragon's butt and rolled a nat 20. I just gave them the dub cause I didn't know what to do with butt combat

I did something similar this weekend. We were riding a cart and got attacked by three swarms of vampire bats, so I cast a gust of wind spell and slammed all three swarms into a tree and killed them all instantly.

Shortest ranged cannons in history!

We did this in our current campaign. We accidentally killed a guy that was a plot point for my character's story arc, it was 100% an accident, the bard's shocking grasp was a bit too powerful, and our poor DM worked on the guy for 2 days. And he's not letting us live it down XD

I literally thought Matt was going to start crying at one point during this. You can tell he was really excited for all the mechanics he'd put together for this fight.

The great part is that now whenever a campaign goes to ship battles, the rules and stuff are finished and ready to be used.

I found it absolutely chaotically hilarious that throughout the campaign that “tea zen” Cad had some of the biggest “destroyer of campaigns” moments compared to everyone else

Way to go

A min/maxed character using Color Spray...

One of my players ruined a ton of early fights and I had to add arbitrary immunities in later fights.

MY favourite thing as a DM was my players completely ruining my comprehensively written story. we've had so many crazy fun adventures when I have to pull shit out of my ass to get them back on the general idea of the direction I wanted. Then I just gotta quickly reset the brain to do more massive on-the-fly rewrites twenty minutes after their plotline has been restored.